Gerry's MICHIGAN EVENTS 2020 and Program notes
PLEASE JOIN IN
Thanks!
Gerry Fialka
The phone number 310-306-7330 is a landline, sorry no text.
*** Friday March 20 at 7pm Laughtears Salon (rsvp pfsuzy@aol.com for location in Fenton, MI) discussion on culture, music, film, & literature, free
*** Saturday, March 21 from 3 to 6pm -
FILM CAN'T KILL YOU BUT WHY TAKE A CHANCE - Gerry Fialka's (in person) fun interactive salon with fiery discussion explore cinema's hidden psychic effects. Is experimental film dead or does it just smell funny? at The Pickle Fort, 1141 Hermitage SE, Grand Rapids MI 49506, free admission, 616-752-8381 Please note: Participants will melodize a clarion chorus in satirizing the program notes (listed below).
*** Sun March 22 - I recommend the Dweezil Zappa concert 7pm at Royal Oak Theater
*** Monday, March 23 at 7pm at Bill Meyer's 3016 Trowbridge, Hamtramck, MI 48212, free admission, 313-657-8493
FILM AS PLACE - Expanding Carl Andre's "Sculpture as Place," join in this interactive workshop & film screening on Detroit, and political activism with Nicole MacDonald http://www.ncolemacdonald.com/ and Gerry Fialka https://laughtears.com/ (both in person). Featuring City Without a Past (28 minutes) Nicole MacDonald's engaging film documents one resident's view of the city of Detroit during the past four years, chronicling fires and high-rise demolitions, artist's exploits, run-ins with the law, conversations with friends and strangers. The different views attempt to portray the city from the ground up -- minus the usual hype about Detroit's new 'renaissance', or seeming romance of the city's near-fatal apocalypse. PLUS: Bunuel's Land Without Bread, Vertov's Man With The Movie Camera and more political films.
***3-24 to 29 Ann Arbor Film Festival - Gerry's fun 7 minute presentation on Wed 3-25 at Film Art Forum from 3 to 5pm Please note: Participants will melodize a clarion chorus in satirizing the program notes (listed below).
***Monday, March 30 at 7pm Laughtears Salon (rsvp pfsuzy@aol.com for location in Ann Arbor, MI) discussion on culture, music, film, politics & literature.
***Tuesday, March 31 Saginaw film workshop for Mike Mosher SVSU class
I hope to see you.
Thanks,
Gerry Fialka 310 306 7330
Program notes -
"If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?" - Marshall McLuhan
"Today we must all be aware that protocol takes precedence over procedure." - Professor Irwin Corey
"What is clear and concise can't deal with reality, for to be real is to be surrounded by mystery" - James Joyce
Is the mystery of art that we do not know if it activates or pacifies us?
"Whether for good or bad, Godzilla decided the course of my life" - Ishiro Honda, Japanese film director
"I think movies are against nature. It's the most perverted art form. It's trying to replicate life. Which is fucked up - so powerful." -Josh Safdie Is that anthropomorphizing an invention? Him and his brother Benny also talk about the "the true colors of society" and "deep untrust how life is presented" and how you can usurp them with art in weird way.
Narrative is born among the "animal necessities of the spirit" because we are "waiting to die." - Hollis Frampton.
"Artists are engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because they are the only people who live in the present." - Wyndham Lewis.
"Joyce uses the pun as a way of seeing the paradoxical exuberance of being through language." - McLuhan
"Every film is narrative simply by virtue of the fact that one frame must follow another in time. Our minds are such that we are obliged to make a story out of everything we experience, obliged to frame things to make them comprehensible. We constantly tell ourselves stories that allegedly interpret the play of light and shadow in the screen of the mind. Story is absolute basic essential of waking, we dream that we are awake, imagining past and future, telling ourselves elaborate stories about both. We invented cinema deliberately as a devise to allow us to dream while waking, and to give us access to areas of the mind that were previously only available in sleep. " - Andrew Noren in PA Sitney's Eyes Upside Down.
"Don't bother to look. I've composed all this already." - Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter, who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria
"Wagner's music is better that it sounds." - Mark Twain
"What he has to teach is that just as there is no way to arrive at art, there is also no way not to. "-Morton Feldman on John Cage
“I don’t like to vocalize my thoughts. Words are stupid.” - Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), the protagonist of Richard Linklater's Boyhood
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. " - Albert Einstein
"One of the things I like about jazz, kid, is I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you?" ~ Bix Beiderbecke
"This concern which interests us more than anything else: the blurring of the distinction between art and life." – Marcel Duchamp
"Less is more...but it's not enough" - Robert Huot's Billboard for Former Formalists,
"Less is more" is often misattributed to Bucky Fuller or to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It was actually used much earlier in Robert Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" - 1855.
"Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal. Nature is never finished. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art. Museums and parks are graveyards above ground." - Robert Smithson
"If we were to protect all ravens against storms and avalanches, we could never be able to admire the beauty of their scarred surfaces." - Elizabeth Kubler-Nilaya
Walter Benjamin recommended "mastery, not of nature itself, but of the relationship between nature and humanity." He was a major influence on John Berger's Ways of Seeing (watch it on youtube- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NWXtTK_Jbo)
Raushenberg's work could help people cope with information overload. "His art encouraged the city dwellers rapid scan rather than the art audience's stare."...approximately what author Brian O'Doherty wrote in his 1973 book American Masters
What was important to Jasper Johns was much like "Cage's aim to disclose the familiar world to see what in nature there is to see - and how it is perceived, that is, to investigate and reveal the equivocal nature of vision, and to instruct viewers on how to cope with it." - Irving Sandler, author of The New York School
"I want to change my way of seeing, NOT my way of feeling. I was perfectly happy about my feelings." - John Cage
"If Cage selects the materials he will use, and makes all the decisions necessary to set up the mechanism of chance, is the result really controlled by chance at all? - Virgil Thomson
"Subtlety chases the obvious up a never-ending spiral and never quite catches it" - Rex Stout
"If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple." - James Joyce
'Each generation writes its biography in the buildings it creates' - Lewis Mumford
"The bourgeoisie creates a world after its own image." - Marx and Engels
“What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.” - John Cage
"Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live! What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity " - Nietzsche
"To walk on not wondering am I right or doing something wrong." - Meister Eckhart
"The commonest mistake in history is underestimating your opponent. It happens at the poker table all the time." -
General David Shoup, President Kennedy's adviser during Cuban Missile crisis
"Is history written with gentleness? Do you honour gentleness when you’re a dragon?......What can these be but the playthings of a mad God who made us to build them for him?" - Chris Marker's film Level Five http://chrismarker.org/chris-marker/level-five-transcript-beta/
"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable" - Banksy
“The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.” - Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
"Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the mind while awake?" - Leonardo da Vinci
"I would like to think that the sounds people do hear in a concert could make them more aware of the sounds they hear in the street, or out in the country, or anywhere they may be...I prefer laughter to tears." - John Cage
Revitalize Mad's Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions:
What is your name?
Where were you born?
What town do you live in?
If you were an experimental film, what subject matter would you be?
What is your favorite experimental film?
Who is your favorite avant-garde filmmaker?
Who is over-rated in experimental film?
Can art-making be egoless?
Is perception reality?
What is more important: conviction or compromise?
Is ambition based more on fear or joy?