Wanderings #1

One of the blissful things in writing new scripts or disappearing into the dissection and resection of old ones are the places you end up trawling and looking for new ways of thinking. Films, records, photo collections, long lazy walks, dumb drunken nights, new sensations. It's the good stuff of writing.

I'm working on a 'financing' draft of a script that has, at it's heart, the intoxication of the senses; heat, drunkenness, desire, jealousy, grief, love. But it is also about wanderers, young characters drifting over the surface of the world as they travel from place to place. So, I've been listening to records that evoke the wandering spirit or the visceral quality of sweat and light and life, reading excerpts of journals and old classics by Barry Lopez, Kerouac, Geoff Dyer and other wanderers; and, of course, trawling through films that evoke the visceral wandering and immersion of getting lost in place - both viewed new and rewatched oldies and goldies - as diverse as Madame Satã by Karim Aïnouz, Lower City by Sergio Machado, Vertical Ray of the Sun by Tran Anh Hung, My Marlon and Brando by Huseyin Karabey, Chungking Express by Wong Kar Wai, Motorcycle Diaries by Walter Salles, Y Tu Mama Tambien by Alfonso Cuaron, Badlands by Terrence Malick and Millenium Mambo by Hou Hsiao Hsien. Something about youth and idealism and loss and desire and rage and wandering keeps them all lingering inside.

I've also been looking through the well thumbed photography of Alex Webb and Raghubir Singh and David Alan Harvey, the three masters of sweat and light, and been looking and discovering new photographers. Two whose works I've been digging on in this weird time stooped over the keyboard are Colombian American photographer Juan Arredondo and Mexican photographer, Eva Villaseñor.

This work below by Juan Arredondo is from his series Barrio Triste, focusing on a small lost neighbourhood in Medellin that has not quite been dragged into the recovery much of the remaining city is experiencing. It is the same neighbourhood, as far as I understand, that a lot of the kids in the Colombian classic La Vendedora de Rosas came from... and there is a similar grinding beauty to the photographs.

Beneath, are the works of Eva Villaseñor whose images were introduced to me by another photographer film compañero Jensen Cope. Like Arredondo's work above, there is something of the lightness and way of seeing, a whimsy and sexiness, that keeps me agile when I'm dribbling over the keyboard trying to find some semblance of life in words and ideas.

Waiting Days #1

A confession. I have a case of nerves. In the coming days, I'll be finding out about the future of a couple of projects I have been working on for much longer than is healthy. So, this week has a Looney Tunes anvil hanging over it and I'm feeling the acute pangs of the waiting game.

But...

After a sordid weekend of too much revelry, I spent last night watching one of my favourite films, Alfonso Cuarón's 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' and had my love for it completely reinvigorated by it's melancholy, messy humour and desire. I then fell into an exhausted stupor and dreamt all night that I was taking photographs in a strange, mist-soaked coastal village full of people with warm but incredibly odd faces; bulging eyes, angular cheek bones, jutting adam's apples. As I printed the photos of faces, mist, and craggy coastlines, I kept making mistakes with paper and chemicals but each accident made the photograph something quite beautiful. Then, as the dream dissipated, the first thing I thought of when I woke up, bleary-eyed, was, inexplicably, Frida Kahlo. What a fucking great way to start the week. Humble thanks.

“no moon, sun, diamond, hands —
fingertip, dot, ray, gauze, sea.
pine green, pink glass, eye,
mine, eraser, mud, mother, I am coming.”