Director: Joey Garfield
I wanted to end this list with a burst of pure unadulterated joy. Bill Shannon has a degenerative hip condition that means his legs can't fully support his weight, so he's devised another method of getting around. You'll just have to watch.
And that is well and truly it for 2007. I know this first month of 2008 has kind of universally sucked, but I truly believe there are good things yet ahead. I think the universe is just waiting for the Year of the Rat...
-£21m grant for Mary Rose
Director: Dougal Wilson
Sparkly tights + blue eyeshadow + midnight bike riding = love. I can see the edits and I don't even care.
After the movies I'm going to head back to the East Bay to check out The Trappist, a new Belgian and specialty beer bar in downtown Oakland. Drinking beer definitely counts as culture, especially if it's worldly beer. I should be there around 5:30 if you'd like to meet up, or just text me. Maybe dinner at Ichiro after?
New Astrarium: World Clique. Please enjoy!
Chino Otsuka, poem and treated photograph (the artist with her younger self) Paris, France 1982 + 2005 (Japan)
Director: Morocco Vaughn
I'd like to think I looked this cool when I danced the Cabbage Patch to Push It back in junior high, but I really didn't. This video also reminds me that I really need to get back to Chicago this year.
There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character. I can tell it from the number of apprentice novels I read that begin with descriptions of photographs. You know the style: "My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. She looks absolutely miserable. My father, however, is in his element, irrepressible as ever, and has on his head that grey velvet trilby from Prague I remember so well from my childhood." The unpractised novelist cleaves to the static, because it is much easier to describe than the mobile: it is getting these people out of the aspic of arrest and mobilised in a scene that is hard.
Director: Smileypen
I've got a particularly bad case of the Sunday Night Blues tonight, but then I watch this video and my heart bursts with joy. Next time I'm anywhere near Balboa Park in San Diego I'm totally seeking these kids out.