Acquired transmutations: a subsequent mission statement in four parts

(This message is a precursor for future engagements)

1. As the primary mission statement of this blog -- to which we are merely an invited guest -- proposes, our purpose here leads towards expansive possibilities: analytical, critical, personal, political. We not only welcome but desire and yearn for inter-personal connectivity and the transcendence of disciplinary and discursive barriers.

2. We were invited here to begin a series of explorations into a subject, or subjects, that may not have immediate relevance to the original purposes of this blog. We approach this issue not as a dilemma but as a precursory avenue towards a project of radical juxtapositions.

3. Potentially these juxtapositions will eventually metamorphose into an organized dissertation. For the time being and the medium at hand, the postings we set forth will appear as unorganized thoughts, reactions and experimentations. They will take whatever form necessary for the subject in question as well as the preservation of the author's sanity and personal comfort. We specialize in the appropriation of abject theory, queer theory, gender studies, and post-humanism. These will never be discussed as mutually exclusive subjects or events.

4. By participating in a decidedly public forum such as this, we acknowledge that this participation constitutes an invitation in addition to the leasing of control (as is the danger of publishing the written word) over our claims. Stay as long as you like: feel free to touch anything on display; taste it if you are so inclined. But when you leave, be sure to only take your own body with you...

#9

These are instructions for a hypothetical film; we also suggest you consider them as guidelines for a game about memory.

Our Volunteer

Selection of our volunteer will be carried out through an informal process, launched through ads placed on laundromat bulletin boards and online hiring sites. Small financial reward will be given to the person eventually accepted. The only requirements to apply as a volunteer are that the person must be willing to cede individual rights to any thought and information given while being recorded by our cameras (this being spelled out in a straight forward legal contract). The second requirement is that the volunteer must be over twenty years of age; anything after that is up to the discretion of those employees we place in charge of "casting."

Her Job

Our volunteer will be placed in a simple office, where she will give a simple presentation to a camera and a microphone (there will be exactly 12 hours for our volunteer to present her thoughts). The volunteer will be re2quiredto give a description, as thorough and accurate as possible, of a place, one that she has not visited for a period of at least one decade. She will be allowed to use or create visual aids in this presentation, with the specific understanding that no direct photographic representation of the place in question is to be allowed during the presentation, or even within the preparation for the presentation itself.

Our Next Steps

The recorded testimony from our volunteer will be given to two separate groups of participants, a documentary crew and a set of theatrical set-builders. Each will set out on the same task -- to recreate the location described by our volunteer (they will be working directly from the un-edited presentation of our volunteer as directed towards the camera and microphone set in the room with her). The documentary crew must travel to the location described; what ever changes have occurred in that location since our volunteer was last able to make observations must be dealt with according to the discretion of the crew. The group of set builders will try to match the description as best they can, avoiding unnecessary interpretation whenever possible; in this assignment they are to base their design and construction of the space with the goal of being as literal as possible regarding the words spoken by our volunteer.

(A SIDE NOTE)

While the direct goal of each team is to achieve a very specific piece of documentation -- for the documentary team an edited representation (on film) of the remembered site as it now stands, for the set builders constructed indoor set based on the volunteer's presentation -- there will be additional documentation of their moment to moment progress. This footage is to be considered something of a byproduct of the way the game is played -- a necessary step in "understanding" the process as it plays out, but not a specific end in and of itself.

Further Actions Within the Performance

The completed set, once fully documented, will be further outfitted with a large screen, onto which the footage shot and edited by the documentary crew is to be projected, in a continuously repeated loop. Then the volunteer will be invited to attend the results of our work, the documentation of which will constitute the real ends of the project.

(NOTE)

The dismantling of the completed stage will be documented and added to the archive as stands.

Presentation of the Game Results

While the filmed documentation of 3 major steps in this process will be considered the primary focus of any finished presentation of this activity (the steps are as follows -- 1)the initial presentation of the volunteer to the cameras, 2) documentation of the finished products crafted by the two teams working from the material generated in the first step, and 3) the final "presentation," in which our volunteer witnesses the direct results of the past step). While this film once pieced together, will be considered the definitive document of our procedures, we will nonetheless allow for use of the separate, documented aspects of the performance. We can easily imagine, for example, a complete installation regarding the complete procedures as unfolded start to finish, involving both the physical byproducts and the presentations of the full range of photographic documentation. The interested observer will no doubt imagine other presentational possibilities, which they will urged to create themselves.

#8

This film is designed as a game about memory; we will use it's working title from the song which will figure prominently in the procedure, "The Last Time I Saw Paris." The game will be played as follows.

1. The game is to start, for all intents and purposes, with the selection of two children, one male and one female -- "A" and "E," as we will refer to them throughout the procedure -- drawn from a selection of applicants volunteered by their parents. It is here that we should note the extreme care that must be taken by any legal department brave enough to assume responsibility for this game. There is no criteria, specifically, needed for these children, other than their genders, the need for them to speak the same language, and that their age must be between ten and eleven years. While the "casting process" may be filmed to ensure absolute transparency in the project, there is no need to make it a focal point of the game as recorded.

2. The chilrdren are to be introduced to each other only by first initials, and will not be given a chance to engage in "samll talk" and proper introductions. Instead, in this small room, they will be seated next to each other on a small couch and asked to listen to the once well known jazz standard "The Last Time We Saw Paris" in it's entirety. They will be equipped with a full lyrics sheet, in case their comprehension of the material is called into question. Along with the lyrics, they willbe giben the following set of instructional material.


1st Set of Instructions to be Given Children "A" and "E"

• "After hearing the music you willbe given a full 3 minutes of time to be used in contemplation. Use this opportunity to build, in your mind, a series of images and associations based on the music. You will not be given the option of writing these thoughts down. You will be asked to call upon these thoughts in the future.
• The person sitting next to you will be considered your partner for hte remainder of the exercise. Once the 3 minutes provided have ended you will be asked to turn to your partner and proceed in the course of a dialogue. Through the course of this dialogue, in which you will draw upon your associations from the minutes prior, you will work to create a narrative in which you both have been married for 30 years. In this dialogue you must discuss, to the benefit of the camera, what importance this song has had through your long years of marriage, and why; be descriptive, and make sure to use detai. Each and every word you say will be filmed and archived. "

It is essential that subjects "A" and "E" understand the instructions as presented, since the rest of the game will rely on the material they have generated during the filmed recording of this, the second portion.

3. The dialogue written by the two children will be given to two adults, professional actors (as it were), who will act out the situations and descriptions found in the dialogue generated by the children. This activity will be filmed, edited, and scored, as if it were a romantic drama in a Hollywood mode. Whatever time and effort must be expended in this step may as well be taken; the next step of the game will not take place until 30 years have come and gone.

4. In order to take the next step, we will wait a full 30 years, so that the two subjects ("A" and "E") have grown to the point where they are the same age as the fictional characters described by their dialogue in section 2.B. They will be contacted; te present circumstances will be documented carefully.

5. Gathered together in front of our cameras, in a room reconstructed to look exactly like the room we first filmed them in, "A" and "E" will be shown the film that was finished in segment 3. They will be asked to create another dialogue, using exactly the same instructions given to them as children; the song "The Last Time We Saw Paris" will naturally have been featured heavily in the film shown to the two participants, who we can no longer refer to as children after all.

6. The game will only be completed once the film has been edited and screened for those who have significantly participated in the game itself. The finished film that will be considered no more than a necessary byproduct of the game will be made available to the general public; the film, we restate, is a byproduct of the game, not the ultimate aim at all. The true end of the game is the screening of the edited film, shown only to those who had participated; within a closed room, a screening of which there is to be no official record made at all.

"Worldly Desires"

Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2005)

In the Distant Hills
man and beast gather
to celebrate their ancient desires
embedded in the roots of every tree

Dedicated to "Memories of the Jungle", Weerasethakul's 2005 short was released as something of a companion piece to Syndromes and a Century , his feature film of the same year.

What happens in the film, as it stands, is fairly easy to describe. A film crew works in the jungle to shoot a film that may be called "Bloody Red Night" (this is mentioned in the credits, never onscreen) by Pimpaka Towira, an interesting filmmaker in her own right. This film, so far as we can see, involves a couple stumbling through the jungle, looking for a legendary tree that attracts lovers, and may grow above a buried treasure. At night, the same film crew works on what looks to be a music video, where a woman in a white dress dances (poorly) and sings a pop song about meeting a special person, just like her mother and her father.

The scenes of the film crew pass by at a remove; like any film set, there mostly seems to be a lot of waiting around. What we see of "Bloody Red Night" suggests that it's a melodrama, perhaps not a particularly great one. The scenes of dancing in the night time are shot at an even further remove, usually in one or two distant masters, lit only by ambient light and the giant lights of the film crew, usually clearly visible as framed. By the end of the film we realize we have started to see through the lens of the digital camera, as the crew films secondary landscape shots, talking amiably off screen about Brad Pitt being single, and whether "Keanu" looks Chinese.

The narrative of this film, while being very clear -- even Weerasethakul's most oblique film, Mysterious Object at Noon uses a simple folk tale as the basis for its increasingly strange variations -- is so flat, so seemingly removed of conflict, any reading of the film based on the narrative alone is going to regard the work as more or less inscrutable, as the film maker's work often is. We would argue that this is not the case at all.

It would seem very simple, in fact, to use the central juxtapositions -- between the film crew laboring in the daylight, the couple acting out melodrama in front of the camera, and the acting as the embodiment of the sentiments expressed in the pop song we hear several times on the soundtrack -- as the basis for the discussion. One could also argue that these juxtapositions are rendered further into the distance by the visual style of the film, which consistently positions the human figures as small, nearly insignificant objects in the frame, and a structure which places a long series of landscape shots at the very end of the picture.

Within the basic structure of the film, we could also point to several moments to which our attention is directed very specifically by editing choices. The moment, for example, where we see, through the live camera feed (almost black and white, with poorer reproductive quality than the rest of the film, and a box showing aspect ratio clearly visible within the frame), that the main couple of "Bloody Red Night" are initiating sex, the camera slowly panning away from the act, settling on the plants of the jungle beside them, just before cutting to several landscape shots, devoid of human figures. Or the only time that the pop song from the night time dance scenes plays over daylight footage, where a truck drives across a road, blowing great clouds of smoke behind it, which drifts across the jungle and the empty film sets, until we settle on a man in a green hoodie dancing alone on an otherwise deserted roadway. Both of these sequences set up a dialogue that can be easily attributed as the main "argument" of the entire film -- the first, for example, could suggest that any shot of nature is a cut away for some other base form of desire, a re-contextualization that could easily spread to every other shot in the film, including the landscapes with which it ends; the latter could suggest a melancholy impermanence of all things, the smoke that drifts through the frame and the landscape roughly equivalent to the human figures who are gone just as soon.

Either of these "readings" sampled above are valid, in their way, but they also have the effect of reducing a film to a convenient description, while the actual effect of watching the film seems almost irreducible.

Rather, we would suggest a different form of critical analysis for this project.

Who ever wishes to critically discuss this film themselves ought to take a trip to the jungles of Thailand, recruit Pimpaka Towira (or a surrogate, preferably chosen by Towira herself) to shoot a narrative about two lovers searching for a legendary tree, record a music video at night for the same pop song, and use this footage to edit together a forty minute short film -- allowing that all editing choices and variations on the basic form will be at the discretion of the critic/director. Projected side by side, these films will, through similarity and difference, constitute something of a dialectical argument, not altogether unlike those already at work in "Worldly Desires" itself.

If any patrons of the arts wish to take part in this project, we would be honored to accept, could set to work immediately.

#7

This film, a work of narrative fiction, may be constructed based on this very simple formula.

FIRST

Two strangers, kept absolutely separate until the start of filming, will be seated at opposite ends of a long rectangular table. This room will be painted in a vibrant shade of blue, and thus will be referred to from here on as "the blue room." The actors seated in this room will be referred to as "W" and "X."

SECOND

In a second area, separated from the first by thick, sound proof walls, having been painted a vibrant shade of red (therefore referred to from here on as "the red room"), will be seated two additional actors. These we will call "Y" and "Z."

THIRD

X and W will be given ear pieces, wired to receive sound recorded through mouth pieces given to Y and Z. The only directions given to W and X are that they must act out, to the letter, the actions described by Y and Z (Y's mouth piece is hooked up to W's earpiece; Z is hooked up to X). These interactions, directed by the words spiken in the other room, will be recorded by cameras.

FOURTH

Y and Z, in the red room, are only allowed to communicate to each other based on "commands" written on small notepads. The messages written by Y, slid across the table and read by Z, will be spoken and heard by X, who will act them out; in the same way, messages drafted by Z, passed on to Y, will be read aloud into the ears of. All interactions taking place in this room will also be recorded.

FIFTH

The actions in both rooms will be acted out at the same time, recorded simultaneously by 6 different cameras, three in each room. One camera exclusively recording each actor, and one additional camera in each room, focused on the room so that we see the full length of the tables, and each actor in profile.

SIXTH

All actions recorded will be placed on-screen in a split-screen format. These will unfold in "real-time;" the editors will be allowed to make cuts at their discretion, although each cut must be accompanied by an immediately visible disruption, signaling to the audience that a cut has been made.

SEVENTH

The most discretion will be given to the cutting of the soundtrack; the sound mixer will be allowed to isolate and balance the different sound elements as she sees fit.

EIGTH

Music may be added, at the discretion of the film makers. We suggest the music be recorded simultaneously with the recording of the performers.

#6

Notes for a documentary film, to be shot according to the traditions of direct cinema.

An American suburb, of modest population and income, will be chosen as the destination for a documentary film crew. This crew will be assigned the task of, simply put, documenting the day to day life of the town as well as possible. They will work towards this goal with one important complication --that every choice made towards documenting the life of the town be made with one over-riding ideological supposition.

The specific nature of this supposition is in and of itself arbitrary, other than that it may not be a commonly held belief by any identifiable group or belief system.

Such as the belief that the colors "blue" and "red" are engaged in a violent metaphysical struggle. Although we may assume -- though no more than assume -- that the degree of antagonism between these colors will vary in direct proportion to the level of chromatic intensity - a fire engine, for example, would be considered as "highly aggressive," as would a house fire. Something like, wouldn't you say, the blue of a body of standing water, would be far more ambiguous in its intentions. The color of a cloudless sky, on a sunny day, would hang over everything, would be nearly inescapable. As the film crew will only be observers to the actions of vast, foreign bodies, there will be no way of knowing what these 'actions' mean; there will be no resorting to the voices of experts, to re-enactments and analysis. Needless to say, it would be very important to shoot this on a color stock which does not give any particular advantage in registering either color.

The variation of this procedure most worth noting is this -- that the camera crew not be given the information as to the ideological aims of the film makers; these aims will be applied after the filming, by the editorial staff. In fact, multiple editorial staffs could work on the same footage, in different offices, each attempting to express an entirely different set of assumptions.

"Forever and Always"

dir. George Kuchar 1978







A neglected wife brings her children to a San Francisco Children's Festival while her husband carries out an affair while on a "photo trip." Leaving the festival she and her children are run over by an Oldsmobile, driven by the female doll her husband so loving strokes in the opening scenes.

Apparently this film was instigated when the Children's Festival approached Kuchar; we end up with this typical piece of self-lacerating melodrama instead. There is a very strange quality to the films Kuchar was making in the 1970s; it's almost like the free-associative elements are working at the service of some kind of hidden equation. Like Kuchar has some strange internal calculus in which all he needed to do was enter the words "children's festival" and the rest -- the pop songs, the sequences of objects in close-up, the wall paper patterns -- just slides inexorably into place, like a nightclub piano players hands, sliding along the chords that are by now second nature.

#5

A 100 mile radius will be drawn in the heart of an American city. From within this radius three volunteers will be recruited, given a budget of $50,000 and the following instructions-

Each volunteer must, within a fortnight of their recruitment, select and hire a personal surrogate. This surrogate will be paid, trained, and scripted by the volunteer who hired them with the specific instruction that, by the end of the training period, the surrogate must be ready to fulfill and represent their director personally, professionally, aesthetically, and symbolically.

No further clarifications regarding the surrogates, the volunteers, and whit is expected of them during the course of the experiment will be given -- if such a request is made, the only response will be read from a fortune cookie purchased at a Chinese take-out restaurant found at the exact center of the 100 mile radius our volunteers live within.

This procedure will run for the course of two full years, being monitored throughout by "editors," who will make sure the parties involved are properly fulfilling their obligations. The only filmed documentation will be a series of interviews and staged re-enactments occurring directly after the procedure has run its course.

#4

The first thing we do is build a city.; A sale city, inside a a white room; designs will be commissioned from a large cross-section of architectural institutes. All designs will be given consideration, though special consideration will be given those referencing architectural designs of the Bauhaus institute in the 1930s.

The Main requirements for the designs are these -- that the city fits inside the white room, and that every structure is built entirely from (white) sugar.

Once the city has been constructed, the room will be outfitted with security cameras throughout, wired to closed-circuit monitors (and stored in a consistently updated database). The cameras will be positioned throughout the room so that every single inch of space (both indoor and outdoor) can be placed within constant surveillance, excepting several square inches, chosen randomly.

The city, once built, will be filled with two separate populations- the first, a colony of 1,000 meal worms, placed on top of the sugar. The second, a population of 100 guinea pigs (the scale of the city will in fact be chosen with the guinea pig population in mind) will be placed in "housing complexes," in male and female pairs.
It is worth noting at this point that meal worms are very likely to eat the sugar; the guinea pigs are very likely to eat the meal worms.


The two populations will be given names and numbers -- each drawn from European history. The actions of these populations will be monitored and logged, displayed in two different fashions- as an unedited "live" feed that can be accessed by any interested party (both through site specific monitoring and streaming video online), although the location itself cannot be accessed during the time frame in which the narrative is still developing, by anyone other than select members of the film crew.

The second method, completed after the filming is declared "over," will be undertaken by a trained editor, using the footage stored on the databases; this footage is to be edited into narrative form, preferably using the advice of Story author and noted lecturer Robert Mckee.

After the edited film has been released to an enthusiastic population, the site of filming will be made open to the public.

Images From "Ombres Chinoises"/"Chinese Shadows"

Dir. Raoul Ruiz (1982)

Based on

#3

We suggest you consider this as a loose procedure for a film involving miniatures, or as simple rules for a game about suspicion.

Two separate committees will form to work on a carefully crafted miniature set, a scale model (something like 1:15) of a five mile radius, taken from within the limits of a small American town. The role of the first committee is, simply put, to recreate the area in question in as exacting a sense of detail as is possible with currently available technology. All necessary reference data should be collected on a warm Spring day, only slightly cloudy; if this miniature town is to stand in relative perpetuity, it should stand as such on a day more temperate than not.

The second committee has a simple job; for every hundred scale feet of the original version of the town, they must enact a specific act of disruption on the model version. This disruption may be as large (painting a house a completely different color, for example) or small (placing a tiny pile of leaves inside a tiny gutter) as the second committee so desires.

Each committee will have as long as necessary to complete their tasks. There will be no communication between the two committees. The first committee, in fact, will be completely unaware as to the existence of the second committee.

Side Note

The exercises of these workers, from the collection of the reference data to the efforts of the committees in creating the model (and the disruption of said model) will be documented on film and placed in an archive. It is not the end to the project; it is to be understood more as a byproduct, like the halftime show of an American football game.

End Side Note

A tiny, remote controlled vehicle will be outfitted with cameras and lenses designed so that the miniature village, seen through those lenses, appears indistinguishable from the 1:1 scaled town it was built from.

A volunteer, a resident of the original town (for an amount of time not less than a decade), who had been in that five mile radius on the day that the reference data was originally taken, will be brought to a small room. In this room, bare save for the necessary controls, his vision will be restricted to the camera feed of the remote controlled vehicle as it rolls through the scale model of the town he has lived in for so long.

This is the portion of the procedure which will create the "end product" of this project as a whole - the audio and video feeds taken when this man looks at this miniature town through miniature lenses . His objective is as such -- he must single out every single element in the miniature that differs form his memory of the town as it was on the day the reference data was taken. He will have no longer than two hours and fifteen minutes to make his complete circuit through the town.

Points will be rewarded to the first committee every time the volunteer identifies a discrepancy caused by the other team; points will be awarded the second committee every time he notices a discrepancy not actually of their making.

At no point will any party - the first committee, second committee, volunteer -- have any knowledge of the work being done by the other parties, apart from the bare minimum required to complete the tasks they have been assigned.

The Right Way

Der Rechte Weg/The Right Way 1983
Dir. Peter Fischli and David Weiss

Best known for their chain reaction sculpture film "The Way Things Go" , we must admit to greatly preferring another facet of the film career of art stars Peter Fischli and David Weiss -- namely that in which, over the course of two films, this and the inferior "Point of Least Resistance," they follow two men dressed as a Bear and a Rat through vaguely allegorical narratives.



A man in a bear costume wanders through the wilderness; he claims he can call down lighting and thunder. He meets a rat, who lives with his goat and claims he can speak to roots. They visit a cave, which the rat calls a giant root, and in which there may be the eggs of unborn animals. They agree it's a forbidden place.



Soon they are swept away, over a water fall, and lost in the wilderness.



They quarrel; have a falling out. They make friends with a pig and butcher it; the rat vomits violently after. There are strains of mordant humor; they save a turtle which has fallen on it's back, congratulating themselves for their kindness. Soon they pass a bleached skull; "we're too late for that one," they say.

Eventually the film reaches a kind of close, and the two animals discover music , together.



Questions of partnership and the creative act run through the whole work; the sense of counterpoint between the landscapes and the human/inhuman figures is the most overwhelming aspect. We admire this film for many reasons, but most specifically, we admire that it picks such a clear, transparent premise, and sticks with it through a series of variations, always trusting the native sense of fascination within that choice. An hour of a bear and a rat walking through the wilderness may sound long, and the film may seem long at times; its strength may be found in the fact that, if we were told that the film nonetheless repeated itself in one thousand and one installments of similar material, we would not be surprised in the slightest.

#2

One video camera will be placed along a stretch of rail-road tracks in the Atlantic North east. The camera will be set to record all the activity which happens within a period of around two hours, or whatever is the standard length for a feature film in the year of filming.

The image of the railroad tracks will be displayed onscreen, cropped to something near the classic "Cinemascope" ration -- 2.55:1 . above the image we will display the train schedule pertinent to that day, hour, and train line. A ranking employee of the railroad company will present moment to moment commentary -- confined to a small, boxed "talking head" screen of his own -- on the likeliness of the trains exactly meeting the schedule, and whatever information he considers necessary to understand their success or failure to do so.

Further commentary - recorded in real time via live feeds - will be deployed by the following "talking heads" --

-A current Senator for the state where this stretch of railway is located
-An expert in the history of American transportation technology and its effects (social, political, and economic) on the American landscape
-A contemporary American artist who works primarily in a train based medium
-An expert on the rise of Fascism in the 1930s

The finished film, released exactly as recorded save for an added score (second option -- if feasible, the score may be recorded live, improvised by musicians given access to the same live feed), will be released to a select few theaters under the title "Who Will Make the Trains Run on Time?" The distribution, however, will be aimed primarily at business class airline flights of certain length, and any businessmen who, as they grow nearer and nearer to old age, pine for what they have come to consider an earlier, more idyllic way of life.

Notes Towards a Possible Film (#1)

We send a small team of location scouts to a Northern American city, preferably one operating at the height of population capacity. These scouts will research and select one apartment building in this city. Tenants will be sorted through a thorough interview process, which ends only when two willing persons are selected, and referred to from here on as the protagonists. Their identity will be revealed to no one; not the other tenants, not the crew, not the producers. They will be issued directions, as follows.

First.

Under no circumstances may they admit their involvement with the film; such admission would be considered "breaking character."

Second.

They have one, and only one "goal" -- to identify the other (second) protagonist. Once located, they will announce their victory by physically assaulting the suspected other. If wrong, their mistaken assault on the innocent tenant will be dealt with according to the wishes of the victim, and the "letter of the law;" the involvement of the film's producers will be denied.

A film crew, working with a single (video) camera and sound equipment, will be released into the hallways of the apartment building. Under no circumstances must the camera crew leave the hallways or enter the apartments; under no circumstances must they reveal the details of their assignment to the tenants -- proper cover story will be provided. The camera crew will try, to the best of their ability, to follow significant moments in the ongoing conflict narrative; if the narrative is concluded without their knowledge, they will be pulled back in. Remember, the crew will not be given any information as to the identity of the protagonists.

There will be multiple shifts of crew members; they will eat, sleep, use the restroom, etc. in designated trailers set up several hundred feet away from the apartment complex. The narrative will last for as long as the conflict takes to find resolution, or until funding is revoked.

Once filming is complete, the footage will be logged by disinterested interns, edited by a pay-rolled employee and her assistants, narrated by the cheapest Hollywood actor who has enough name recognition to appease the sponsors.

Mission Statement

The goal of this blog is and will be, simply enough, to put forth a series of suggestions. These suggestions will be open, in as much as you are free to act upon them if you see fit. They are directed specifically towards those who work in film and media. Occasionally we will offer a few words on historical precedents for the sensibility we believe our suggestions lead towards. Your throat is your own, and we will not force.