Copenhagen.

If you were ever one of those people who talked about Europeans as being less violent than Americans, I hope the recent footage from the protests in Copenhagen are a sobering reminder that power is power and that humans everywhere–even in lovely socialist countries with universal health care–can all be driven to violence.

Not sure what the debate is and why so many eyes are on Copenhagen? This video is a great primer on the issues.

The Grant Decline

Any artist who has mixed money with their craft has had this experience: the grant decline letter.

2009 has been good to me in terms of grant funding so far. So I thought I’d be more crushed when I recieved the decline letter yesterday from the Leeway Foundation for their Lifetime Transformation Award–their largest grant.

But I wasn’t crushed. I didn’t get insecure about whether my art was good enough, because I felt honored that I had even made it to the final round.

And of course, the people I do know on that list are AMAZING artists. (Like, this film by Heidi Saman–you should see it if it comes to your town.)

Mostly, I just paniced and realized I needed a plan. I hadn’t realized how many things in my brain I was pushing aside with the line “I’ll just wait until I get the chunk of money.”

My soundbites for how to carry on after a grant decline letter:

• Always have a plan B. Do not sabatoge yourself into a mindset that your creative work is only possible with money, therefore no grant=no art. If you do, you are leaving it to the people who control the money in the art world to decide what gets made. And, well, we know where that will get us.
• Think social capital, not just financial capital. What are other ways you can get access to the resources you need? Example: last night I posted that I needed a 16mm projector. A few hours later I had been offered two working projectors that were abandoned from someone’s old workplace.
• Remember it’s about process, not product. A painter friend, B. Aufdenberg, said something to me years ago that stuck with me: “You don’t eat to shit. Your art is not about the product it produces.” Word.

Onward and backward

This week is all about archival research.

I’m preparing for a field trip in two weeks to the National Motion Picture Archives where I’m going to review old newsreels of Norman Schwartzkopf, Sr. in Iran in the 1950s as well as Jr. in the 1990s.

I’m also coordinating with the University of Florida library archives to get high resolution copies of news articles about my Schwarzkopf encounter on thier campus over ten years ago.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow

Tonight I am going to see A Sunny Day in Glasgow, a sibling band of warped but fluffy electronic sounds placed over ethereal voices. Some people describe it as ambient pop, some as shoegazer. I’m not really electronic enough to know what to call it.

Not for everyone’s taste, but tasty for those who enjoy these kinds of sounds.

Monday Mentions

TODAY’S MENTIONS:
Boston’s Distro-y
Philadelphia’s Punk Rock Flea Market

This weekend I was in Boston and went to this great art fair–Mass Market– that reminded me a lot of Philly’s Punk Rock Flea Market coming up this Saturday.

Even if the buy local angle  isn’t your thing [insert ideological assertions about the importance of local economies here], it’s at least worth checking out for finding one-of-a-kind items from all the crafty smarties out there.

My favorite find from Mass Market was this bird in a cage t-shirt from Distro-y. These artists have some great work–and this particular shirt’s 37% off its original price right now.

Just don’t ever wear it anywhere you might ever run into me.

The RED Camera vs. Hermione Granger: or, How I’m Learning To Learn

Tomorrow I am volunteering on a friend’s film set as they test out the newish RED camera.

If you’re not familiar with the RED, it is part of a growing trend in the digital filmmaking world toward tapeless recording.

I haven’t been on a set in several years since I stopped taking classes for my MFA and focused on my own thesis–a personal documentary that I mostly shot alone on a Bolex 16mm camera.

As I get older, I’m trying to bring more of my habit patterns to a more balanced state. I think undoing habits completely is unrealistic. But reducing the extremeness of the spectrum is not.

My Filmic Extremes

I’m a little like Hermione Granger in Harry Potter. I admit.

I’m not proud of it. And I’m just learning to understand the nature of this habit pattern I’ve developed over the years–so it’s still lingering rather strongly in my character.

I tend to occupy two extremes: either, I have to feel like I have to feel like I have a leg up on everyone else I’m in a room with and already know the task/skill/content on hand or I completely shut down, tell myself I can’t do something and am inept and then don’t even try to learn and give up.

I’d like to learn to be okay with being 75% good at something. To be at the average skill level at something. And to not give it up.

Sadly, this habit results in me doing these I receive attention and praise for, rather than listening to an inner desire about what I’d secretly like to learn.

I got praise for personal documentary work, so I stayed there. Externally, that’s my niche. I just got a grant a few months ago from Chicken & Egg Pictures and Rooftop Films to continue with another personal documentary. Inside, I’d like to write and direct a fictional feature length film within the next 5 years.

To get there, I need to practice being okay with not knowing how to do things right away on my own. And more importantly, to be able to embrace other people as teachers to help teach me.

I need to break this mythology I have that I only learn to do things on my own.

So even though it’s a little terrifying and goes against my functioning for the last 30 something years, I’m going to spend my Sunday crewing on this shoot, rusty after years of not setting up lighting for narratives, and with a camera I know zero about with a bunch of brilliant Temple U MFA students.

And, I’m not going to shut down and tell myself I can’t do this, and instead be grateful that I have the opportunity to learn from so many great teachers.

I am going to try to post about the RED on my twitter feed tomorrow–so you can follow along with my adventure there.

Elizabeth Gilbert on Creativity and “Genius”

I have some issue with Elizabeth Glibert/general western romanticization of India and the general trope of white people/westerners having to travel eastward to have a “spiritual” awakening.

(I mean really, if you want to see poverty and have a revelation about materialism and overconsumption and what’s meaningful you can go down the street and save the money on that ticket to India. What is it about economic inequality in the US that doesn’t allow that romanticized awakening for these kind of people?)

That aside, I found this talk by her interesting as a critique of the notion of “genius” and an interesting take on the creative process and how important it is to do your part to “show up” and then let go.

 

It’s Not About Size: Austin, TX and its Film Venues

The other week I took my first real vacation (read: not for family, sweetie’s family, graduations/weddings/babies) in years.

I wanted to go somewhere I’d never been before, lounge all day, watch lots of independent films (and not feel obligated to call anyone–much love to the folks I know in Austin that I didn’t reach out to <3 ).

So, I picked Austin, TX.

Austin is usually best known for its alt-country music scene, but in recent years it there’s been some effort to rebrand it as a indpendent film haven as well. And it shows.

It was amazing to see that such a small town could sustain so many indpendent film venues as viable businesses and made me frustrated, once again, about Philadelphia and why people here act like there can only be one independent film screening in this city per night.

Here’s a couple:

The Hideout:

Coffee shop in the front, complete with bizarre open mic nights and spinach stuffed croissants, and film theater in the room in the back. The room was maybe 900 square feet and had risers built in to seat about 70 people in averagely comfortable padded theater seats. Saw some great shorts there as part of the Austin Film Festival.

One line up had me cackling in laughter more than any shorts program I’d ever seen and inspired me to want to program more humourous material–shorts filmmakers are often so serious. . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alamo Draft House

Draft beer and films? Why was this the first time I ever heard of this combo? It seems like an incredibly lucrative business idea. Brilliant, in fact.

The seats are set up in rows and you write down your food and drink orders and the server comes by and swoops it up–and you can order up until the last 30 minutes of the film program.

Curating as Activism

Here’s a little video (3min) a fellow Termite TV Collective Member Deb Rudman did on me and the Flickering Light about curating as a form of activism.

Another Arguement Against Film School?

This week I went to a screening of Slingshot HipHop at the International House that was part of this great new series called Planet Rock .

Now available on dvd!

The film is very strong in its production quality, use of animation and graphics as transitions, and its narrative focus on a few different artists and following their stories as we become familiar with their music.

It does what my favorite type of documentaries do well–focus on personal stories as a reflection of a larger system of policies and opinions. It humanizes a situation in which people are so often faceless and dehumanized–which in my perspective on social change is the key to shifting power imbalances and oppression.

If you are looking for a primer on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the history of that region, or context for the Intifada(s), however, this is not going to provide you too much of that. Which is totally fine. Its strength is that it pulls people in through their interest in hiphop and then pushes them to want to learn more about the situation and people there.

The filmmaker, Jackie Reem Salloum, was at the screening. From her comments after the screening and the brief exchange I had with her, I couldn’t help but revisit a conclusion I’d been tossing around in my head the past year or so: is film school actually the best route for becoming a documentary filmmaker?

Jackie is the third documentary filmmaker I’ve met in the past few years with no formal academic film training who said something along the lines of “If I had known it would take me 4-7years and $200,000 to make this film, I might have never done it.”

The potential problem with film school is that you learn about every aspect of producing a feature length documentary film beforehand.

And it’s daunting.

It’s hard to wrap your mind around how you’re going to spend the next 4-7 years (average length to make a feature length doc) fitting this project into your life.

And figuring out the money and resources is enough to make you give up completely.

Abeer, from Lyd (still from Slingshot HipHop)

I admire people like Jackie who had no idea what was ahead of them and as she said just thought, I’m going to Palestine to visit my family, I should bring a camera with me and make a little film.

And she made it work.

I remember a year or so ago when she found out that she got into Sundance and there was a mass grassroots fundraising effort from friends and supporters to raise money to finish the editing and sound mix in time and lay down a master cut. It was amazing to witness.

So if you asked me if you should go to filmschool, my answer would still be I’m not sure.

Approaching Job Searching Like Fundraising

Several of my friends have marveled recently at how lucky I am to have gotten so many jobs in a recession time. And not just any crap jobs, but really interesting ones that also allow me the flexibility I need.

I’ve been marveling at it everyday myself.

It occurred to me though that given my background and experience as a fundraiser, it kind of makes sense that I was able to hustle income for myself so readily. I realize that the same basic premises and approach applies to both job searching and grassroots fundraising.

Me collecting money from people while Papo makes a pitch when I was Development Manger at Bread & Roses Community Fund.

I think getting a job is some percentage based on your skill and experience, but also based on who you know and pure luck of good timing. I’m not sure what exactly I think the split is, but I think your skill is actually by farthest the least. Significantly.

Almost every job I’ve had in my life has drawn on social capital. The only exception is when I was “Bottom Bun Girl” (yes, that was my official station title) at Checkers pushing meat patties with one circle of mustard and two circles of ketchup up the counter to “Top Bun” for $4.25/hr.

Your social capital is by far the most important resource you have and will always lead to your financial capital.

And it doesn’t have to be friends or classmates or colleagues.

Of course, if you’re hanging out with people who have more financial resources your chances increase. That’s how class operates to keep people stuck in this country. So I recognize that what I’m saying here assumes at least a middle class context.

When I was 19 I was office manager at a women’s health clinic because I had done a condom distribution at my high school and gotten in trouble for it and called in the help of the local chapter of NOW and met all sorts of women’s health folks in the area. And, my mom knew the RN’s husband. That was a huge upgrade from Bottom Bun.

Once, in my more transient days, I moved to Colorado for 5 months. I ran into this guy who I recognized from the small southern town I grew up in–Biker Dave. He used to cook at a restaurant I often went to with my mom. I said hi to him and chatted and told him I had just come to town and was looking for a job. A couple of weeks later I was liquifying hundreds of pounds of chickpeas in an industrial kitchen with him while he blasted Michael Franti and we made thousands of containers of hummus.

Another time, I got a job at a daycare center because I had gone there as a kid.

And even now, one of my current part time jobs I got because I was doing petcare for someone in my neighborhood who I had met originally at dinner parties at my ex’s house and it turned out his company was hiring. My other two jobs are because I sent an email to any person involved in film and media making in the Philadelphia area that I’d ever met and said I was looking for a job in the field.

As a grassroots fundraiser, you are always strategizing ways to bring people in as a donor at whatever level you can and then draw on their social networks to expand your reach. As social change fundraising guru Kim Klein says, you already know everyone you need to know to raise the money you need.

Kim Klein, grassroots fundraising guru

This summer I took every childcare and petcare gig that came my way. In past transition periods I’ve done the same. Hustled in whatever way I can and then trusted that it was increasing my reach and would eventually pay off more.

And, I market myself. Like here, right now.

People have to know you exist and that you’re up to good things. Promoting yourself can feel scary, uncomfortable, maybe even selfish and gross to some. But at some point I realized that being broke and alone was even scarier. And being chained to a desk all day was potentially frightening for me too.

Like my “guru” says to grassroots fundraisers in her trainings: the fear of your community organizing work not happening has to be greater than your fear of asking people for money. Which is scarier to you?

The rest was all pure luck and good timing.

Here’s to wishing the best of luck for the rest of you in your job search! Go hustle!