Causes That Can’t Wait, Kony 2012
KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.
Jason Russel is an activist that has taken film and narrative to new heights to raise awareness of a long hidden conflict in central Uganda. The West has seen glimpses of social, political and economic violent crimes prevalent in the African continent through Hollywood dramatizations like Blood Diamond and documentaries like Ghosts of Rwanda, but what started out as Russel’s campaign against injustice and violence has become the global communities’ campaign.
The Kony 2012 movement wants the world to know Joseph Kony. For twenty years, he remained largely nameless, just a blurb on on the back pages of mainstream media. During that time he has tortured, maimed and killed thousands of his own people. In your own way you can participate in the effort to stop more lives from being hurt. Follow the link to find out how to help Russel spread the word about what’s happened to the families and children of central Uganda and what’s bound to happen to more without intervention.
Last Reel, Times Cinema
A buzz always hits the entertainment world around this time of year, the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Science rolls out the Red Carpet for the A-listers to shimmer, pop culture mavens to swoon, and buffs to admire from afar. This year a solemn hum vibrates the Milwaukee art news, as the Times Cinema, an independent cinema that made a tradition out of bringing a piece of Oscar magic to the area, prepares to transition into a new phase of its movie house life span.
The Times, and its sister cinema the Rosebud, continue their tradition of screening Academy nominated films in the weeks leading up to Oscar night. Tonight, as in years past, you can also watch the Academy Awards on the big screen at the Rosebud Cinema, possibly for the last time ever.
The Times will screen the Oscar nominated Animated Short Films at 4:30p today as well. Local Trolley checked them out yesterday and they were surprisingly gripping and thoughtful with short features that deviated from the Pixar-style films, and some that were equally entertaining done in the modern vein.
The Short of It
Wild Life in particular stands-out among the nominees, produced by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby. For some reason Canadians have an amazing knack for adult oriented cartoons. The short story is told by a simplistic almost Impressionist form of animated illustration that strings together several accounts from towns people of an well to do Englishman settling in Canada for a chic cowboy adventure, set in contrast to the narration provided through the Englishman’s letters home. The Englishman’s life is subtly mirrored by a parable of the mysterious celestial Comet, and by the end of the short, likewise demystified.
The other Animated Short nominees the Times will show in about thirty minutes from now are Dimanche/Sunday, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, La Luna, and A Morning Stroll.
The Times Cinema is located on 59th and Vliet, and the Rosebud Theatre is located on 68th and North Avenue.
Frankie Latina, Modus Operandi
Not many Milwaukee-based film efforts have maneuvered to that corner seat at the bar ready to be dubbed instant cult-classic, the way Frankie Latina slid his production Modus Operandi on to the screen in 2009. Although for many different reasons, pretty much the only other film (documentary) of like birthplace I can think of doing this was American Movie (1999 according to IMBD, but I’m certain it was out before that locally). Just so happened that Frankie actually cast Riverwest’s Emperor Mark Borchardt in Modus Operandi and landed perpetual film villain Danny Trejo as well.
This past weekend, Frankie Latina hosted a one night only gallery showing of Modus Operandi inspired art including the master painting of the movie poster and portions of his photo journal from travels in South America. Intentionally a crude mock up of the simplistic grind-house action genre invented by Russ Meyers in the 1960′s perfected in the 1970′s, until Motus Operandi the genre in it’s purest form had been mostly lost to the world.
Dare I say some self-indulgently nibbled on it, namely and most infamously a winy movie-store clerk turned cult-puba named Quentin Tarantino with Pulp Fiction and more explicitly in Jackie Brown. On the other side of the hive-five, when Frankie went back in time to revive his version, he skipped the nylon era of the 1980′s, and dressed his piece in torn fishnets, trashy and hot, unapologetically and exceedingly melodramatic.
Rumor had it that Frankie nearly scored Pam Grier to co-star another flick called Skinny Dip that was in the works this past summer. Hopefully, Frankie will muster another effort on par with Modus Operandi in the future, even if not, if nothing else it was surely a wonder.
Oriental Theater, Almodovar, The Skin I Live In
At the Oriental Theater on Farwell Avenue, filmmaker Pedro Almodovar took refuge in his versatility to deliver a vexing psychological thriller with recently released The Skin I Live In. Taking Antonio Banderas out of his cartoonish American film typecast, Almodovar spins a convoluted tale oriented around the tightly wound life of renown surgeon Dr. Robert Ledgard (Banderas).
Tinkering with biogenesis Dr. Ledgard begins receiving attention from the Spanish scientific community for breakthroughs in medicine that enhance human genetics, even in mature adults. From the surface, Ledgard hides his source of passion for his research. The veil of scientific integrity, and an impeccable BMW and severely opulent mansion, make Ledgard appear to be another detached brainiac savant enjoying his intellectual superiority by methodically solving the the world’s problems in his spare time as a favor to humanity.
As the complete picture of Legard’s life unfolds, circumstances of several traumatic life events erode the illusion of Legard’s power and control over his own life, and his altruistic calling. Quietly, fanatical emotion sweeps Legard to a line drawn in the sand by reason, and it’s hard to tell whether he knows he’s standing on the beach. A wife, a daughter, a childhood nanny and a female house-guest of considerable mystery ensure that Legard never knows where he stands, no matter how hard he tries to dictate his own footsteps.
Spanning the Spectrum
Stylistically, Almodovar accents the screenplay with ample allusion, literary parallels, and foreshadowing with his cinematography alone. As the characters’ M.O.’s collide, Almodovar also calls to question our sense of morality, as several difficult themes including sexual abuse, chauvinism, marital fidelity and retribution gird and create tension in the script’s plot.
The Skin I Live In touches on golden age horror and film noir genres, quickly going from believable to I-can’t-believe-I-just-saw-that absurdity that makes fun of itself with a straight face. The non-chronological storyline adds further intrigue to the film’s characters.
The Verdict
Receiving mixed reviews from the film world, this film does two things well, keep you guessing and skin crawling with sufficient morbidity, but without the use of gore. The film is Spanish language with English subtitles and co-stars Spanish starlet Elena Anaya who brings considerable depth to the film as she burns through a gamut of emotions as Legard’s primary subject Vera (the mysterious house-guest).
You can go see for yourself or get a pretty detailed description from the Shepherd Express, and here’s apparently a review from Cannes that thought the film was terrible. If you do go to the show, get there early and be entertained by the Kimball Organ that is still warming up the shows at The Oriental courtesy of the Dairyland Theater Organ Society
Dwelling on Cities, Gary Hustwit, Urbanized
Riding down Devon Street, on the way to Wrigleyville’s celebrated Music Box Theater, mothers wrapped in saris guide their children along by the hand. Cabs lurch from cross-streets attempting to join the main traffic line heading uptown. The sun slings low in the West beaming off building facades, some outfitted from the 1970′s with large, conventional, yellow-tinted lightbulbs wrapping marquees advertising Punjabi cuisine.
Feet have no fear of the sidewalks, neither people’s hindquarters of public benches. Faces greet known neighbors, and peer curiously at strangers. Bodies enter grocery stores and exit Bollywood movie variety shops. Arms carry gifts of jewelry and clothing from South Asian themed boutiques. Heading South on Clarke Street, the drive turns through a completely new global community. These way markers display the contours of City life.
Design By Design
An Urban Planner’s delight, Gary Hustwit takes his previous glances at how design influences us, in Helvetica and Objectified, and magnifies them to City scale in his latest work Urbanized. Never looking to impose definitions on his audience, Hustwit lets decision-makers, and descion-shapers, discuss the finer points of city design imperatives from perspectives in their corner of the globe.
Since cities rise and fall around economic and social activity, the forces guiding both pull tight the philosophical threads along the continuum of urban design practice. Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses and Oscar Niemeyer place major landmarks on the dialog. Hustwit then captures reverberations of these themes within contemporary echoes of the activist, developer and high modernists.
Urban champions, like Bogota’s former Mayor Enrique Penalosa, enrich the discussion of cities further and, more importantly, highlight practical quality of life considerations that make America’s civic values and local politics look ridiculous in comparison. Milwaukee, although not featured in Urbanized, benefited greatly from Mayor John Norquist’s experiments with New Urbanism, giving sweet kool-aid from which future domestic urban champions could develop their own flavors.
Providing more than a primer on Urban Planning, Urbanized also logs Hustwit’s travels during production of his previous two films. The cinematography energizes wanderlust as Hustwit wisks from Brighton, UK to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil (I bet you can’t guess which is older) and a bunch of famous and not so famous stops in-between.
Urbanized screened in Chicago last weekend, stopping next in London on October 21st.
Related Post
John Norquist Milwaukee Tour – Congress for New Urbanism, Jeramey Jannene, Urban Milwaukee
Seize the Moment, The Brass Rooster
Milwaukee has a knack for growing inspired efforts. The Brass Rooster leaped out of no where this past Spring, to become a prime example of resurgent artisan crafts fusing with entrepreneurial pursuits. At The Brass Rooster hats are not just sold, but blocked, shaped, and re-banded. Crafting dreams happens the same way, if you want them to come true.
Milliners by trade, wait… that’s right milliners. Most occupations have an obscure species name and milliner fills that vocabulary niche for the venerable hat-maker. The Brass Rooster’s proprietors team-up as two of Milwaukee’s most stylish artisans. Their vision of a vintage accessory shop geared toward men, defies fashion limitations set by uni-fit retail brands and the pervasive Euro-aesthetic seeping back into American menswear clothing pallets. Even so, The Brass Rooster still seduces pop-styles readily.
We Did it Anyway, Karen Erbach
Chances Down
The good folks at The Brass Rooster must have known something everyone else didn’t, or just relied on a personal philosophy allowing for passion’s precedence over fear of failure. Journeywoman writer and filmmaker Karen Erbach recently captured a snapshot of The Brass Rooster’s story for a video competition, sponsored by Chevrolet, that lead up to the New Horizons International Film Festival. Aptly named We Did it Anyway, Erbach succinctly profiles the shop from firmament to foundation.
On August 3, The Brass Rooster announced a new selection of hats. To take a look at the latest visit 2479 S. Kinnickinnic Avenue.
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Retrospective: Levine and Heimerl, Handmade Nation
I really enjoyed the film Handmade Nation, the work of Milwaukee documentarians. The review I authored entitled Manifest Dexterity originally posted February 8, 2009 on Sane Artworks Blog.
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Manifest Dexterity
Wanna stick it to the “the man”? What if I told you that you could do it in the comfort of your own home, on a park lawn, by yourself or with a crew of friends. What if I told you that you could and only reap the rewards of soul-inspiring fulfillment and not the affection of INTERPOL. Sounding unreasonable? The United States premiere of the film Handmade Nation made believers out of a capacity crowd at the Oriental Theatre in Milwaukee.
Judging from the flock of movie-goers you would have thought the Dali Lama was in town. With the theatre’s Buddha statues mounted on the balconies presiding, Handmade Nation written and directed by Faythe Levine and Courtney Heimerl took us on an easy ride through the winding open road of ‘crafting’. HMN covers 19,000 miles worth of perspectives, traveling cross-country to interview crafters in all four corners of the continental US.
If your senses are easily overloaded this is not the film to see. HMN begins with a sentient needle scurrying across the screen, with beady friends and inky playmates, adding to the ever-morphing patchwork quilt and screen-printed background. They say you cant judge a book by its cover, but opening sequences definitely set the tone for great films in the 21st century and HMN‘s doesn’t disappoint.
Know Thyself
What is crafting anyway? Any person engaging in this activity will be reluctant to tell you with any certainty; that would ruin the fun. In different pockets of the US, HMN documentarians asked partakers of the tactile fellowship their thoughts on crafting. Harvesting various answers, a few common threads still ran threw the craft-persons’ responses each unique in the coloring and texture describing their ethics in relation to their preferred craft.
Without prompting, it became apparent that to a crafter our consumer culture is a bother and a bore. Consumerism is impersonal, mass produced, ruthless in its hoarding of resources, and most tragically mind-numbing. Fed up with corporate sales associates ringing-up cloned scarfs and greeting cards incubated on computer screens, the keepers of the crafting code urge you to stop and think before you brandish your magnetized plastic filled with money credits.
Here a distinction must be made. We’re not talking about the crafting that will take you to Michael’s after watching a couple of Martha Stewart episodes and cause you to break out the bedazzle gun. As HMN plays on, it’s clear that transforming reality, by taking a stand against idle fingers and the capitalist big-box, requires commitment to an ethic.
On the most fundamental level the crafter, born through a series of realizations, possesses an intriguing awareness of the relationship between using your hands to interact with the materials around you and the sensation of connectedness to your habitat. This process departs from the traditional artist, likely more concerned with conveying an idea, evoking irony, or a portraying a particular aesthetic. Seeking confirmation of life’s presence, the stimulation of senses provide crafters a motivating catalyst to create. The crafter removes the isolation of modern life by making things and sharing them.
The crafter locates self by eliminating the mysterious origin of objects both novel and utilitarian. Craft-culture rejects all-things paternal and challenges us to not hinder our personal maturation by standing in-line for things we want or need all the time. According to a certain social theorist, people are cooler in uptown Manhattan anyway.
Conservation Bandits
The need to conserve by recreating with the previously used is a renewable theme throughout the film. Rather than staging a workers rally, one with busy hands admits that she buys only pre-owned fabric to make her garments. Before tailoring a class piece of formal wear, another crafter contemplates the implications of cutting into a 50 year-old piece of fabric commenting, “what gives me the right to cut into this fabric?” Doing more than ‘tree-hugging’, a dedicated crafter uses recycled paper as the medium of choice for post cards and such, decreasing demand for felled trees. The principle is one less fiber purchased retail is one less environmentally inconsiderate product that needs to be re-stocked on the shelf.
It’s not coincidental that ‘Do-it-Yourself’ has an activist application. Conservation is kind of like the crafters’ Swiss army knife; it’s a versatile instrument of change. Endearingly, crafters are willing to engage social problems on a level that departs from an annoying issue-mongers’ tendency for screaming, guilt-tripping and proselytizing. Maybe we don’t need another hero, we just need a bunch of tiny creative moments to make change.
The limits of conservation extend beyond physical materials to preservation of ancient methods. In one scene, a young woman teetering light-reflecting safety goggles from her nose, donning a tattered long sleeve sweater with strings dangling from the wrist and a payload of necklaces B.A. Baracas-style, ignites a blue-flamed torch a foot from her face that looks like it could melt a diamond. We soon learn that Tracy Bull of Happy Owl Glassworks is nonchalantly risking her eyebrows to preserve a 2,000 year-old glass-beading technique. Now that is hardcore.
Minute sized paper cutouts of cultural symbols and fauna are carefully whittled with an Xacto blade at the fingertips of Nikki McClure, her works are anthropological manuscripts translating bygone creative eras practiced by Chinese, African, and Middle Eastern cultures, connecting us to what our human ancestors were doing with their energy.
Expressing conservation comes not only with their chosen mediums and techniques, but also with diet. Working from the inside out, for some, tuning-in to the craft wavelength requires the compassion for all living beings expressed through vegan practices. That’s how one participant entered the craft chamber, “just getting together with friends to craft and enjoy good food.” That’s the beauty of it. It’s just that simple.
Causing a Commotion
If human interaction and conservation are not motivation enough, crafting also appeals to the inner renegade rebel in all of us. It was hippy-ness and punk rock for the younger Baby Boomers and grunge for the Gen X-ers. Now since both are well into their thirties, forties and fifties, according to the fist law of thermodynamics, that rebellious energy has to go somewhere, but where? (I’m a young Gen X-er pardon my sarcasm, it is well intended). The recent generations are not immune.
Some of my favorite parts of HMN depict deviant behavior that is decidedly anti-establishment. The proprietor of Anti – Factory stages a public contest to see who could knit the best bootleg of the Burberry pattern. Receiving many demonstrations she is able to construct hand bags that soon become popular. Take that posh name brand!
A posse of Texas knitters take the proverbial cake. With nicknames like Notorious N.I.T and J – Nitty, the group Nitta’ takes crafting guerrilla. When night falls they pile into a compact economy car. Timing the precise opportunity-maximizing-moment they jump out, to stealth-bomb-knit a Technicolor muffler onto a street sign post and vanish into the night. Cleverly mocking municipal bureaucrats and graffiti artists simultaneously with a stab of the knitting needle, the least crafting can do for you is provide some amusement.
Handmade Nation (2009) Trailer, Levine and Heimerl
Thumping Pareto
There is a parallel story to this motion-picture look into an American subculture that adds instead of takes away from our collective wellbeing. One of the film’s makers, Levine, also runs a local Milwaukee outlet called Paper Boat Boutique and Gallery (kind of defunct now), which as recently as January 30th was set to close, nearly unfathomable given the talent and drive of Levine. However, crafting economics defy the conventional wisdom of enterprise enough for an imminent shutdown to make sense.
Presenting an alternative model for business proves a little trickier than selecting the perfect place for a new hem. Shamelessly labor and input intensive, craft-based shops snub the profit-maximizing formula in favor of unconventional antics. If you see a six-foot-tall canvas cuboid resembling a vending machine inching toward you, wildly painted with small pictures on the front and a slot for stuffing in dollar bills, you might think you are on Japanese television, but know that a starving crafter just wants to make ends meet with some of his prints.
Efforts of magnitude replace economies of scale and sweat-equity won’t cut it. Evidenced by a vendor’s ordeal, who while embellishing one of her craft fair displays accidentally staples her index finger, badly, you have to be willing to sign your check in blood. Ensuing film frames capture a friendly neighbor arriving, without cue, to lend some clot-aiding pressure and moral support. The HMN viewer then understands that ink runs thicker than water.
The mend of the crafting community weaves together a closely packed network of individuals devoted to a common bond. HMN confirms that interaction with objects is secondary to the magic that happens when humans decide to appreciate what they agree on. The turnout to last Thursday’s premiere gives an unequivocal testament to this fact. Levine and Heimerl have clearly dedicated their energies to the most deserving places. Smacking the smiles off the big yellow circle-faced end-caps that dominate our consumption habits, Levine’s film makes a strong case for the premium warranted for crafter-made items.
Crafters are giving much of themselves physically and emotionally to carry alternatives to commercial-merchandise. A splurge in Handmade Nation is a tithe that sustains the availability of choices that American’s crave. Their take is not so much gratitude, as just desserts. It’s the only way they can stay afloat. A good amount of the film’s craft fair footage takes place outside. That means you have plenty of time to plan an outing to a craft fair.
Riders of the Storm
Having a group ‘collective unconscious’ definitely does not preclude self-consciousness. Ironically, in the heat of the struggle to remain Indie and commercial-free, the Handmade Nation is aware that their experiment with creativity could turn on the doctor. There is a dark-side. Will the evil empire cunningly find a way to capture one of the last remaining reaches of uncharted market segments? High-end designers and retail executives need to stand down and mind their demographics. Although the odds are stacked against them, the craft guild and its admirers are a fortuitous bunch. It’s up to free thinkers to bestow the social and economic capital that can keep the penny hoarders at bay.
Upcoming screenings of Handmade Nation include stops in New York’s Museum of Art and Design next week, and venues in Toronto, Canada, Barcelona, Spain, Melbourne, Australia, returning to the area at Madison’s Wisconsin Film Festival April 2 – 5, 2009 details TBA. Handmade Nation is also in print! Check here for the latest HMN news.
