A Touch of Sadness in Her Fingers

Holy hell. I love this song so much. It's the most fragile, epic, powerful and tragic thing. I play it several times a week and never tire of it. I'd write a film about it if I could. I listen to the original Highwaymen version, then the Cat Power version, repeat, repeat, ad infinitum. And, more than anything, I cherish the "with just a touch of sadness in her/his fingers" as one of the greatest song lines ever.

On Reflection #1

It's the end of week one of the official pre-production of Galore.

Here's what happened, in a nutshell.

People were hired.

Locations were scouted.

I saw some spiders:

And visited one of our locations to discover that every room was full of books.

I cast some of the roles and agonised over some others.

I showed films to the cinematographer and images to the production designer.

I visited, while location scouting, the childhood home I lived in with my Dad after my folks split and discovered that the tiny place seems even tinier and is now the home of a whole bunch of migrant workers.

I took a bunch of photos in some of our other locations and tried to imagine shots, scenes and sequences.

I spent a lot of time thinking about bushfires and fistfights and fireworks. 

I ate out almost every night and spent a ridiculous amount of money on cabs while rushing from place to place and meeting to meeting. 

I watched films by Lucrecia Martel, Alma Har'el and Nikola Lezaic for inspiration. 

I terrified myself before bed every night by reading Misha Glenny's McMafia, and then tried to console myself by reading Junot Diaz' beautiful new short story collection This is How You Lose Her ("the half life of love is forever").

I scraped in some time to finish an episode of a TV series I've been writing. 

And I freaked out about my bank balance. 

Then I watched the AFL grand final, got stupidly, breathlessly drunk and tried to dance salsa until dawn.

So, all in all, a successful start to pre production. On to week 2.

Acceleration

Milan Kundera, on the strange nostalgia and longing in the works of Philip Roth and the strange necessity for novelists in general to make the past their familiar landscape:

“The acceleration of history has profoundly transformed individual lives that, in centuries past, used to proceed from birth to death within a single historical period; today a life straddles two such periods, sometimes more.  Whereas history used to advance far more slowly than human life, nowadays it is history that moves fast, it tears ahead, it slips from a man’s grasp, and the continuity, the identity, of a life is in danger of cracking apart.  So the novelist feeds the need to keep within reach, alongside our own way of life, the memory of the bashful and the half forgotten one our predecessors lived.” 

Lightness #1

Dimitri Karakostas is a pretty damned sweet discovery for me. I have a huge weakness for those photographers - of which there are many - whose work is of the candid, 'snapper' sensibility where the images feel like loosened, stolen impulses from life. We don't know how much is constructed, how much is a genuine captured moment - but what exists in the frame is a moment of energy or intimacy that no other art can capture. There are lots of imitators whose work echoes that of artists like Ed Templeton who seem to have carved the path through this world - all pashes and skateboards and parties and moments of self captured eroticism and intimacy; and there are thousands of blogs of photographers chronicling their lives in this way. It can get overwhelming. But the beautiful thing is that when it works, and the eye and the sensibility is genuine, it commands your eye and your heart and you get that quickening of the pulse that is unavoidable given the energy that spills from the image. Karakostas is one of those where, for me, the intimacy and lightness just works. Don't ask me why. But it does.

For more images like those in this fucking sublime collection below, check out his website - http://tobehonestiexpectedmore.com/