Made Up In Blue

Today I acquired an original copy of one of my favorite pieces of music, the Made Up In Blue EP by The Bats.

Good Things

Another month and lo and behold another string of rejections. Though I’m doing my best to remain optimistic, I’m resigned to the fact that Robert on his Lunch Break won’t play in any festivals of note at any point in the foreseeable future.

But instead of succumbing to apathy, I’ve grown restless, so I’ve decided to bite the bullet and arrange my own screening…

On the night of Friday, August 13th, at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, Robert on his Lunch Break will be shown along with three other films of mine (Ped; the always-good-for-a-laugh Self-important Empirical Film #3, with Voice-over; and the short, kinetic concert film Fugazi’s Last Stop in Wisconsin).

This will be my first official solo show.

Here is the poster I made last night:

It’s not going to win any awards, but it gets the job done. What I like most about this poster is that it eschews the use of one dominant, central image in favor of showing the film’s four main characters, each relegated to his or her own aesthetic reality–the poster, like the film itself, conveys the chasms between different subjectivities.

Quotes I Like (3)

In his excellent book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, painter Wassily Kandinsky wrote:

…when outer supports threaten to fall, man withdraws his gaze from externals and turns it inwards. Literature, music and art are the most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt. They reflect the dark picture of the present time and show the importance of what was at first only a little point of light noticed by the few.

Nicole Stéphane

Last weekend I hung out with my buddy Will and borrowed from him the Criterion DVD of Les Enfants Terribles, the notorious collaboration between Jean Cocteau and Jean-Pierre Melville. Cocteau’s legacy is larger than life, and for a while now Melville has been one of my favorite directors, so it was nice to be able to finally see this.

A lot could be said about Les Enfants Terribles–it’s a good movie–but when I watched it the other night what stood out more than anything else was Nicole Stéphane: her performance as the bratty, comically overzealous sister was extraordinary. Stéphane’s over-the-top acting took me by surprise, though, because in Melville’s previous feature, Le Silence de la Mer, she played a character who was stone-faced and taciturn–seeing her in Les Enfants Terribles was like watching a completely different person.