While Seated [023]
I “wow”ed aloud while watching “Further Beyond” from Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor. It’s the kind of film you didn’t know you needed to see (I didn’t know I needed to see).
It’s the kind of film that’s inspiring me to keep pressing ahead with my own work. It’s brilliant and odd and difficult yet accessible and beautiful and quiet and strange.
It’s the kind of artwork where you admire the bolts of how it’s put together, rather than the overall thing itself. The seams and welds and stitching were inventive and extraordinary. Maybe the overall will sink-in, over time, but I’m still in awe of the film’s manufacturing.
Guess I’m partial to essay films about their own making. There are parts of “Further Beyond” that seemed like the cinematic equivalent of Geoff Dyer’s biography of D.H. Lawrence. Dyer’s “sober study” vs. Further Beyond’s “biopic in process”.
Great brain food; a very worthwhile watch.
Because you never heard the story about astronaut Charlie Duke leaving a family photo on the surface of the moon, you never delved into exactly how the cross-hatching on the moon photographs was created, and what purpose the cross-hatching may have served.
Which led you to this “mistake” photo, which clearly shows all the cross-hatching, created by something called a Reseau Plate inside the NASA Hasselblads, which was there to measure accurate distances between objects, depending on which lens was being used. Cool.
20161215 — Hard to believe we live in a world where a guy like Rakeem Jones attends a Trump rally (back in March, at the Crown Coliseum in Fayetteville, NC) and after causing an anti-Trump ruckus, is escorted by police out of the stadium, but he gets (surprise!) sucker-punched by a Trumper as he’s on his way out.
You know this already. You’ve seen it.
Hard to believe that the cops would pounce on Rakeem instead of his assailant, John, and would turn Rakeem into the criminal (earning five of them administrative leave) while John freely walked away, after giving a celebratory interview to local news, natch.
It’s so #oldsouth it’s chilling.
Just look at Rakeem’s face. He’s been punched by a bystander and thrown to the grown by ignorant cops. But you knew all that. You knew it’s factual to say that the cops are ignorant about a situation for which they should have no ignorance. Rakeem’s assailant walked away from the rally and had to be charged the next day.
It’s also hard to believe that Rakeem and his assailant, John, would appear together in court, months later, and that this moment (below) would happen, and be photographed, and that Rakeem would say he was glad to shake John’s hand, and while John didn’t say he was glad to shake Rakeem’s hand, he said, “you and me gotta heal this country” and he was probably glad about receiving probation and that he was only charged and fined for a misdemeanor.
These are hard to believe times.
One of the best reading experiences of this year, this morning; these two self-published books from my friend Jason Francisco. I wish they were in your hands, too.
