Workshops-Lectures-Screenings LIST Number Five #102 - 137
Gerry Fialka is available for bookings as a Guest Lecturer at universities, art museums, libraries, salons, etc. Besides the many listed lectures, he can also create customized workshops.
Gerry Fialka
pfsuzy@aol.com 310-306-7330
Bio - https://www.laughtears.com/bio.html
https://www.laughtears.com/
http://venicewake.org/
What the programmers and participants are saying about Gerry Fialka
More Info- https://laughtears.com/workshops_summary.html
Jan, 2014
List One https://www.laughtears.com/workshops.html (Pixelvision, Documentary, Experimental Film & more) 1-17
List Two https://www.laughtears.com/workshops2.html (James Joyce, Screenwriting & more) 18-34
List Three https://www.laughtears.com/workshops3.html (McLuhan, Beckett, Bunuel & more) 35-40
List Four https://www.laughtears.com/workshops4.html 41- 101
"Gerry Fialka is a meteor shower in the contemporary media arts discourse. I am SO happy that he writes for OtherZine. He's blowing my mind." - Craig Baldwin, who published eight Fialka essays in his online film magazine OtherZine (2009-2013). The Fialka essay Nothing & Stay Out (on Rodney Ascher's Kubrick documentary Room 237) - http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/archives/index.php?issueid=29&article_id=172 - is included on the trailer for that film, released on DVD 9-24-13. Baldwin has programmed Fialka's PXL THIS Film Festival at his acclaimed OtherCinema 12 times since 1999.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=fialka
102- INTERVIEWS AS INNER VIEWS - Gerry Fialka examines compelling thoughts from a multitude of interviews with experimental filmmakers. They address the metaphysics of their callings and the nitty-gritty of their crafts. They probe what happens to the audiences at screenings like the Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF) and Experiments in Cinema (EIC). Fialka delves deep with highlights from David Gatten, John Smith, Bill Morrison, Chick Strand, Frank Mouris, Morgan Fisher, Owen Land, Craig Baldwin (8 times), Peter Rose (2 times), Fred Worden (2 times), Lynne Sachs, Pip Chorodov, P. Adam Sitney, Tom Gunning, Scott Stark, Ben Russell (2 times), George Manupelli (3 times), Pat Oleszko and many more. In 2012-3, GF has interviewed LARRY GOTTHEIM, PHIL SOLOMON, GENE YOUNGBLOOD, LEIGHTON PIERCE, TIFFANY SHLAIN, JAMES HARRIS (Kubrick partner), HASKELL WEXLER and ALEX MACKENZIE.
Fialka interrelates artistic virtuosity with history. This interactive discussion delves deep into experimental filmmakers' inner workings and transformative longevity. How do these filmmakers transcend the unified theories of avant-garde film? How and why do experimenters change cinema's democratizing and unifying power?
Accolades:
"Gerry Fialka asks unexpected Questions about important Ideas, eliciting Answers that can surprise even those doing the answering. My Interview with him taught me something about myself; it was a Gift." - David Gatten
"Fialka's was the funnest interview I have ever had. He has developed a very wise way of triggering thoughts in the interviewee--or at least in me. He didn't ask any of the questions I always hate to be asked. It was good talking with him" - Leighton Pierce
"I thank Gerry Fialka so much. I really enjoyed his interview with me, especially his unjaded joie de vivre, hearty laugh, and endless pursuit of knowledge sparked by social curiosity." - Phil Solomon.
"Fialka is a damn good interviewer. His questions are sometimes so precise that it tickles and sometimes so grand and thought provoking that one feels on the edge of a new spiritual awareness." - Lynne Sachs
"Gerry Fialka is a master interviewer. Working out of his natural sympathies and his erudition, Gerry cannily and cheerfully guides his interviewees along a path of Socratic inquiry that goes far deeper than the average Q & A and possibly deeper than the interviewee thought himself/herself capable of going. With Gerry at the helm, the journey really is about the destination and not just the journeying." - Fred Worden
"Fialka's interview had me buzzing inside with thoughts and memories that his engaging questions set in motion. Super stimulation." - Larry Gottheim
"Fialka's was the most intelligent interview I was ever involved with" - Filmmaker/author Jay Weidner, who is featured in the Sundance hit Room 237 about Stanley Kubrick
Fialka explores AAFF subjects like the ONCE Group roots, creative motivations, philosophies, innovations, live performance art & music, lobby art, the early Old A&D location, Michigan Theater location, and much more. Maybe he'll even question the Blade Runner exchange - Leon: "Do you make up these questions, Mr. Holden? Or do they write 'em down for you?" Holden: "The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping."
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103 - EXPERIMENTAL FILM & MAINSTREAM CULTURE - CROSSOVERS & CONTRADICTIONS - Fialka's workshop interconnects avant-garde filmmaking and pop-socio-political culture. “There is a pattern to American life that what is avant-garde becomes commonplace. The mass market eventually assimilates that which is innovative or revolutionary.” - Al Goldstein. Delve deep into:
* Ernie Gehr's student Laura Poitras and former NSA analyst/ "man without a country" Edward Snowden (NSA= Never Say Anything)
* The hypnotic obsessive fascination of experimental film and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
* Phil Solomon & Stan Brakhage and The Book of Mormon's Matt Stone & Trey Parker
* Bryan Konefsky's student Steve-O Glover of Jackass and Buster Keaton, Chris Burden & Alan Funt's Candid Camera
* Bruce Conner and MTV (Devo, Captain Beefheart, Zappa)
* Lewis Klahr and tv commercials
* Jordan Belson & Oscar winner/AAFF vet John Nelson and Kubrick's 2001
* Nathaniel Dorsky and American Beauty
* Joshua Oppenheimer and McLuhan-James Joyce-Don Theall-Dušan Makavejev
* George Landow and home movies
* Bill Brown and semiotics & Ufology
* Todd Haynes and semiotics & Lucille Ball, Diana Ross, Joni Mitchell
* Ben Russell and psychedelic ethnography & black metal
* John Smith's The Girl Chewing Gum and François Truffaut's Day For Night
* Martin Arnold and Judy Garland
* Frank Film & Stan Vanderbeek and Monty Python & Rhoda TV show
* Bryan Boyce and Robert DeNiro
* Arthur Lipsett and George Lucas & Kubrick
* Phil Solomon & Stan Brakhage and Oscar nominee Derek Cianfrance
* Bunuel's Land Without Bread and Jason Reitman's Live Read series
* Brakhage and Jack Nicholson & Buck Henry
* Don Yannacito's lecture on Brakhage and Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)
* Curtis Harrington and Edgar Allen Poe
* Steve McQueen's video art and his feature filmmaking
Connect the dots. The list is endless. Mine the history. Speak volumes and create new connections. How do they feed off each other? Examine the motives and consequences of narrative and non-narrative. Explore experimental film's endearing relevance to our lives. Inventory the hidden effects of avant-garde film and culture via sense-ratio-shifting, post-narrative, assimilation, systems thinking, neuroaesthetics, integral awareness and metacinematic conventions. Giordano Bruno said, “To think is to speculate with images.”
Review McLuhan's percepts: "All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." "World War Three will be a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation."
Rimbaud wrote "A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses." This inspired Jonas Mekas to write, “Every breaking away from the conventional, dead, official cinema is a healthy sign. We need less perfect but more free films. If only our young filmmakers would really break loose, completely loose, out of themselves, wildly, anarchically! There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.” - Call For A Derangement Of Cinematic Senses, Village Voice 2-4-59.
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104- PG&E - (Phil, Gerry & Electricity) Phil Solomon and Gerry Fialka probe electricity as one of the hidden grounds of experimental filmmaking and modern art. This "e" may also stand for echo, emergence, empathy, extension, evolution and exploration. Delve deep into the motives and consequences of the avant-garde creative process via discussion as explosive rock'n'roll and free jazz. Imagine a Brian Wilson mash-up with Frank Zappa, Thomas Pynchon converging with James Joyce, and Stan Brakhage meshing with Marshall McLuhan. Correlate the light and space of James Turrell's naked-eye observations with the light and space of film.
Inventory the hidden psychic effects of cinema. What is electricity about, and what is it REALLY about? This interactive workshop (actually a laugh-out-loud media yoga session with rigorous intelligent exercises) enables participants to meta-analyze the dualities of form and content. Embrace contradictions. Examine electronic interdependence, all-at-onceness, effects preceding causes, sense-ratio-shifting, metaphor and abstraction. Discern patterns that emerge in perceiving perception itself !
This workshop evokes what Robert Irwin, James Turrell & Ed Wortz wrote in A Report on the Art and Technology Program for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971: "Allowing people to perceive their perceptions – making them aware of their perceptions. We’ve decided to investigate this and to make people conscious of their consciousness. …If we define art as part of the realm of experience, we can assume that after a viewer looks at a piece, he 'leaves' with the art, because the 'art' has been experienced. We are dealing with the limits of the experience – not, for instance, with the limits of painting. We have chosen that experience out of the realm of experience to be defined as 'art' because having that label it is given special attention. Perhaps this is all 'Art' means – this Frame of Mind. …The object of art may be to seek the elimination of the necessity of it. …The experience is the 'thing', experiencing is the 'object'. …All art is experience, yet not all experience is art. The artist chooses from experience that which he defines as art, possibly because it has not yet been experienced enough, or because it needs to be experienced more. …All art-world distinctions are meaningless."
"You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself." - Samuel Beckett on Finnegans Wake.
When Phil Solomon was a projectionist in Boston years ago, he would read the Wake out loud. Sometimes, in frustration, he would throw the book against the wall, evoking the Wakes theme of redemption (rise and fall) since he'd pick it back up and continue reading.
"Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior." - McLuhan, who updated "the medium is the message" to "user-as-content" mid career. McLuhan was asked, "Will there ever be silence?" and he said: "Objects are unobservable, only relationships among objects are observable."
We'll explore what Solomon calls "reverse archaeology." The conscious, subconscious and unconscious intentions in the artist's creative process will be discussed, especially attentive to American "visionary" writer and artist Henry Darger.
"Electricity offers a means of getting in touch with every facet of being at once, like the brain itself. Electricity is only incidentally visual and auditory; it is primarily tactile...The TV image requires each instant that we 'close' the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object." - McLuhan
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105 - The Hows & Whys of Correctly Misreading Mike Kelley As Menippean Meme - Art Historian-performance artist Fialka delves deep into the many layers of Kelly's art, which involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, noise music, performance, film and video. Writing in The New York Times, in 2012, Holland Cotter described Kelley as, "one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion." Fialka probes the interconnections of Kelley with Marcel Duchamp, Donkey basketball, James Joyce, McLuhan, Menippean Satire, Sun Ra, James Brown and more. Examine misreading Kelley as "the artist as nihilistic Bad Boy, unrestrained Monster from the Id, intent on nothing but disturbing the peace" - Steven Stern catalogue essay for Kelley's Hermaphrodite Drawings, Gagosian Gallery, 2007. As Joyce created language about language, Kelley created art about art. Their profound meditations on the role of language and art rendered propositions that could be considered true, in a permanent stable sense with underlying irony. They did not really trust language and art to present these truths. Their work is ABOUT its own attempt to present the truth in a form that reaches beyond any sort of relativity. Sometimes the effort to say the most simple thing does indeed require the most complex means (memes). There is really no ending to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, just as there is no ending to exploring and rediscovering Kelley's meme anew. More: http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/?issueid=28&article_id=165 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6D6lmIMyyc
106- THE HISTORY OF LIVE CINEMA via OUR EYE AYE (R.I.A.= Resonant Interval Algorythmns) – Examine and expand the history of live cinema (aka projection performance, expanded cinema) via Leslie Raymond and Jason Jay Stevens research-.http://livecinema.wikidot.com/start. Social engineers Will Erokan & Gerry Fialka's post-hypnotic triggering and hyper-maximum multi-media "live cinema" reinvents McLuhan's Menippean satirized Gesamtkunstwerk and breaks the Finnegans Wake code: "what can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved fore." Turn your eyes into ears. With poets, dancers & live music. Includes screening of the film: OUR EYE AYE (RIA= Resonant Interval Algorythmns) (2012, 3 minutes) - Erokan & Fialka probe the filmed close-up on the human eye, as seen in Un Chien Andalou, Man With The Movie Camera, Frank Zappa's 200 Motels, and Blade Runner. Delve deep into the reel motives and consequences of the Ludovico treatment from A Clockwork Orange, which originated in the novel by Anthony Burgess, who was directly influenced by James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The Wake turns the eye into an ear via Finneganese (language about language): "Television kills telephony in Brothers’ broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen." and "what can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved fore." Experience the Erokan-Fialka "live cinema" immersion into post-hypnotic hyper-maximum stimulation. Peter Greenaway presaged the complex clairvoyance of Erokan's birth on September 30, 1983 by declaring "Cinema's death date was 31 September 1983, when the remote-control zapper was introduced to the living room, because now cinema has to be interactive, multi-media art." The retrocausality of this non-existent date renders an effects-precede-causes half- truth. "There is a lot of truth in a half-truth" - McLuhan. https://laughtears.com/iwantmyRIA.html and https://laughtears.com/RIA.html
107- HOT DOCS AS SUBVERSIVE ART - Fialka probes documentary innovators, including Joshua Oppenheimer, Rodney Ascher, Lucy Walker, Penny Lane, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Barbara Kopple, Aron Ranen, Ondi Timoner, Alex Gibney and more. Why is there such a rise in documentary popularity? How and why are new documentaries generating and reinforcing mistrust in mainstream media? Do they more activate or pacify the audience? Delve deep into Direct Cinema (Mayles, Leacock, Pennabaker, Wiseman) and Cinema Verite (Vertov, Rouch) by interconnecting the similarities and differences. Sociologist Edgar Morin coined the term "direct cinema" in 1960, and in discussing the difference between direct cinema and cinema verite, wrote, "There are two ways to conceive direct cinema: the first is to pretend that you can present reality to be seen; the second is to pose the problem of reality. In the same way, there are two ways to conceive cinema verite. The first is to pretend that you brought truth. The second is to pose the problem of truth." Investigate how direct cinema and cinema verite reveal underlying truths, ambiguity, mystery and the complexity of the characters. "Chris Marker was quick to rephrase as 'ciné, ma vérité' (cinema, my truth) Rouch and Morin’s quasi-scientific-sounding translation of Dziga Vertov’s kino-pravda, signaling that he had no intention of abandoning personal expression as a means of engaging with the world." - Catherine Lupton. Analyze fly-on-the-wall and fly-in-the-soup approaches.
108 - LET ME BE LOS ANGELES - Gerry Fialka presents an interactive workshop probing art and spirit. Delve deep into the interconnections of place, the creative process and the non-physical. LA's Besant Lodge (the first movie theater in LA, and home of the Theosophy Society) nurtured modern thinkers: Manly P. Hall, Korla Pandit, Orson Welles, Aldous Huxley, John Cage and more. Survey their epiphanized percepts along with Marcel Duchamp, Ornette Coleman, Luis Bunuel, Lord Buckley, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart (his wife worked with Hall), Man Ray, Simon Rodia, Ernie Kovacs, Rod Serling, and James Joyce, who wrote, "And let me be Los Angeles" in Finnegans Wake (1939, page 154). In the spirit of the infamous salons of Ed Ricketts and Lionel Ziprin, participants will uncover the hidden psychic effects of what humans invent, and how to cope with them. What is the function of art, music and poetry? "Artists are engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because they are the only people who live in the present." - Wyndham Lewis. Lionel Rolfe wrote: "In literature, 1939 was a great year for the Los Angeles basin. There was a strange and volatile mix of bohemianism and the apocalyptical brewing. This was the year Aldous Huxley published After Many A Summer Dies the Swan, Thomas Mann was laboring away on Doctor Faustus while living in the Palisades. Malcolm Lowry began seriously writing Under the Volcano which was about the Day of the Dead in 1939 in Los Angeles. It wasn't published until 1947. He writes about a Cabalistic descent into the maelstrom that was World War II. Day of the Locust was written in 1935 on a hot summer day filled with fire, the Depression, and assorted gloom and doom, leading the way from the essential hopefulness of bohemia, despite all their hedonism and what not. The book paved the way for Joseph Heller's Catch 22 in the '50s. 1939 also saw Grapes of Wrath, Day of the Locust and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep." Finnegans Wake was published in 1939, which was also a great year for related films - The Rules of the Game, Gone With The Wind and Wizard of Oz (Us).
109- METAPHOR AS MEMORY - Gerry Fialka probes McLuhan and Chris Marker, who said "I remember the images I filmed. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory - the act of remembering is not the opposite of forgetting." "All active media are metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms...what is a meta phor?" - McLuhan. "Remember to forget" - James Joyce. "I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago." - Chris Marker. Investigate Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, and the film Remembrance of Things to Come by Yannick Bellon & Chris Marker.
110- SHOP WORKERS DREAMS - Gerry Fialka's performance-art interactive-dialogue probing the dreams of factory workers. He will talk with Flint, Michigan (or any industrial town) factory workers who convey dreams and memories. Discussions examine their meta-cognitive hidden meanings, and interconnect them with transformations of the city as classroom. Delve deep into the community's identity, dignity and relationship with the hidden environments created by auto factories via Marshall McLuhan's Tetrad, James Joyce's neuroscience, Ralph Nader's press conferences, Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, Richard Feldman & Michael Betzold's book End Of The Line - Autoworkers & The American Dream, Rebecca Solnit's Harpers article Detroit Arcadia - Exploring the Post-American Landscape and Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech.
Fialka relates Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the Ojibwa tribe, original Flint settlers, who would go from tent to tent looking for others to ask them questions concerning their dreams from the night before in effort to recall them. When the right question was asked, that person would be a co-creator of the dream, the co-dreamer. We'll connect the communal collectivity of all attendees. Artists live in the present and write a detailed history of the future. Finding epiphanies in the everydayness of dreams, we will use the creative powers all people use while they sleep, to create and investigate while awake. See anew in balancing all the senses. GF facilitates the people's voices, intuitions, perceptions, unexplored responses and poetic reactions. These media yoga sessions massage the blue collar backbone of our nation.
"I am very impressed by Gerry Fialka's energy in bringing together groups of people to think about ideas. That is very much in the McLuhan spirit to create and foster interdisciplinary, living, educational projects in which people can talk about ideas. He creates forums that bring together a plurality of critical perspectives into one multivalent conversation. " – Janine Marchessault, author of Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media and co-editor of Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema.
"The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel." - G. K. Chesterton
Shop Workers Dreams evokes the social sculpture of Joseph Beuys, who wrote: “Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”
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111- TWO DIDACTIC - Fialka explores the interconnections of Gertrude Stein and experimental film. The "two" probes the duality as the word "didactic" is rooted in "apt at teaching...wisdom, to teach, learn." Author Susan McCabe: "I contend that avant-garde cinema newly illuminates her (Stein's) strategies of representation and embodiment; the adjacency of Man Ray's article to 'Mrs. Emerson' foregrounds the complicity of the apparently distinct aesthetic discourses of modern poetry and cinema. Film embodies Stein's notion of 'a groping for a continuous present' and 'an inevitable beginning of beginning again and again and again,' what she earlier designates as 'all living as repeating.' Maya Deren refers to this kind of film measure as a 'telescoping of time,' 'a continuous act of recognition,' that becomes 'like a strip of memory unrolling beneath the images of the film itself, to form the invisible underlayer of an implicit double exposure.'" Reference book: Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers & The Heritage of Emerson by P. A. Sitney.
112 - iM (Matching & Making Millennials Menippean Mashups & Mathematics) - Performance artist/Wikipediarian Gerry Fialka explores the hows and whys of the new generation's math and neuroscience by hoicking up the update of Arthur C. Clarke's famous dictum that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to "any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from its nature" - Warren Ellis. Bruce Sterling observes "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from its garbage." Marshall McLuhan's percepts on "new nature" merge with Retrocasusality and Precognition to being rooted in Edgar Allen Poe's "reasoning backwards" or "effects precede causes." Do the Millennials really care about privacy? Robert Dobbs reinvents Andy Warhol to “in the future, everyone will have privacy for 15 minutes.” Banksy rewords Warhol to "in the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes." Fialka updates Warhol to “in the future, everyone will have identity for 15 minutes.” Words evoke more than their meaning. Is the iM or ME or Mi (Millennials) generation the Meme generation? Recalculate the Millennials math and probe their "hows, whys, whens, whats, whos, wheres" of exponential technologies, media archeology, attachment parenting, Narcissus narcosis, social media, crowd-sourced finance, brand integration, the post-emotional mind, indigo children, Nietzsche's Übermensch and autism in the post-literate electronic environment. Delve deep into framing and understanding the relationships between baby boomers, gen X, gen Y, gen Z, Millennials and generation AO (always on). https://www.laughtears.com/ and http://venicewake.org/
113 - GENUINE FAKE FILMS by GERRY FIALKA https://www.laughtears.com/Genuine_Fake.html The Jan 17, 2013 world premiere of this program at David James' renown USC series Cinematheque 108 was received with raves and controversy. "Genuine Fake Films by Gerry Fialka is a brilliant show. Truly exciting and memorable. " - David E. James, Experimental film scholar & USC Professor of Critical Studies. The LA WEEKLY - Jan 11, 2013 PICK OF THE WEEK: "As this modern digital Dark Age of technological advances threatens to drive physical film stock itself -- the very stuff from which dreams are made -- into extinction, this evening of Genuine Fake Films by Gerry Fialka couldn't come at a more propitious moment. One of Los Angeles' great celluloid underworld overlords, relentless cultural provocateur and filmmaker Fialka has been successfully bedeviling our popular consciousness since the late 20th century. A recognized artistic force since his early 1970s breakout as head shot-caller at the notorious Ann Arbor Film Co-op and renowned as the veteran curator of PXL THIS, Hollywood's second oldest film festival, any presentation of Fialka's work is guaranteed to rate as a mind-bending affair. Framed as an evening of "short films and interactive discussion," featured titles include 2009's Eye Am Not a Robot; 2008's All Advertising Advertises Advertising; and Double Duty Interrobang, Fialka's 2003 Pixelvision (read: Fischer Price toy video camera) eyebrow raiser. It's a veritable stampede of visual strangeness, theoretical acrobatics and sociocultural redefinition, all delivered through the singular prism of Fialka's self-defined prime directive: "exploration of the hidden psychic effects of human inventions." Topped off by a climactic Q&A between Fialka and moderator David James, the noted School of Cinematic Arts prof, this one is sure to set your cerebellum a-rattle." -Jonny Whiteside LA Weekly. Fialka's USC Talk: part one- http://vimeo.com/58667202 and part two- http://vimeo.com/60713086
Fialka Films include;
OUR EYE AYE (RIA= Resonant Interval Algorythmns) (2013, 5 minutes) - Will Erokan & Gerry Fialka's exploration combines film detritus and sonic sleep extensions to probe the phantasmagorical rebirth of "live cinema." http://youtu.be/g5XWFxnlYNk WARNING - STROBE EFFECTS (For best results, please play loud with headphones) Canyon Cinema Magazine article - https://laughtears.com/iwantmyRIA.html and https://laughtears.com/RIA.html
EYE AM NOT A ROBOT (2009, 14 minutes) - Mark X Farina & Gerry Fialka's scintillating film probes the percept of technology "being alive" by evoking early Russian film and Constructivism. Cultural icons from James Joyce to Robby the Robot to Marilyn Monroe are your humanoid guides through new art technologies. http://vimeo.com/59500786
I THINK I'M IN SOMETHING (2012, 8 minutes) Gerry Fialka and Clifford Novey’s Pixelvision short hybridizes beautiful dancers, psychedelic guitar and jazz to the randomness of tube clown movements. "Mesmerizing to experience" - author Beverly Gray. http://youtu.be/GZaEpo_uScY
SOLOMON TURNER IN UTOPIA (2007, 9 minutes) captures Venice Boardwalk performer "The Snakeman" rapping transcendental righteousness . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqAK_DMzZOc&list=PLF87F977C76C1893A&index=8
ALL ADVERTISING ADVERTISES ADVERTISING (2008, 14 minutes) Farina & Fialka's vibrant film uncovers the hidden effects of advertisers as psychoanalysts and prophets in the science of the imaginary - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShuM7vh011w
ALFRED SHOOTS ADOLPH (2000, 8 minutes) is "a single take portrait of a Jew who faced Hitler as a teenager and with only a Leica, is strangely powerful." - Holly Willis, editor, RES Magazine (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMh1uojw_4M
DOUBLE-DUTY INTERROBANG (2003, 10 minutes) Fialka's pixelvision (Fischer Price toy video camera) short hoicks the "open past" while double delving into Giordano Bruno’s theory that everything in nature is realized through interaction with its opposite and Marshall McLuhan’s percept that "objects are unobservable, only relationships among objects are observable" simultaneously probing the option of "see-say" in moving pictures. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn1o829Sy2w
JAM Z JAMMERZ: SEE, REAPPEAR & BREATHE (2007, 14 minutes) - As agitprop archaeologists, Mark X Farina & Gerry Fialka's provocative film probes how the 50's music/comedy icons John Cage (noise as music, side effects in silence), Korla Pandit (the Hammond Organ as drum, fake identity), Lenny Bruce (speech as jazz, grievance), Ernie Kovacs (visual effects as Surrealism, Mennipean tactic of the "fourth wall") and Lord Buckley (narrative as living organism, elevation not put-down) laid the groundwork for contemporary culture jammers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZINaKAfJwhs
TV AIN’T NO TACTILE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7FArhDzfns
A PRACTICAL MYSTIC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJyAgwiGlK4
THE GENUINE FAKE FAKE FAKE (FAKE) FILM FESTIVAL trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuWGzxWRjrc
(and more Fialka Pixelvision films at http://willerokan.com/pxlthis.html)
114- HIPPIE YIPPIE YUPPIE - Fialka's interactive workshop explores the hidden effects of counter cultures. He examines the revealing 105 minute CBC interview with Joni Mitchell, who talks about "Hippie, yippie, yuppie." Interconnect Joni's thoughts with Marshall McLuhan's axiom "Understanding is not having a point of view" and Bob Goldthwait's quip "You are what you hate." Get knee deep in the swamp muck of Counter Culture Correctness, its opposites and every little thing in between. Can you drink a case of me and still be on your feet asking "Where's that art?" "I'm fluid. Everything I am I'm not, kind of. And that's the way it is with all people if they really observe themselves." - Joni Mitchell. Ponder one of Joni's favorite filmmakers, Tarkovsky, who said: “Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion, actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible, when he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant, but when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.” - Prayer from Stalker (Andre Tarkovsky's 1979 film). http://youtu.be/pEJuiZN3jI8 & http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2013/06/11/joni-mitchell-portrait-of-an-artist/ & http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/among-the-canvases-behind-the-scenes-at-joni-mitchell-s-home-1.1358489
115 - THOMAS PYNCHON AS CODEBREAKER - Fialka probes The Codebreakers-The Story of Secret Writing, David Kahn's 1967 book that comprehensively chronicles the history of cryptography from ancient Egypt to the 1960's. Examine Thomas Pynchon, who wrote "Come-on! Start-the-show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out ... The last image was too immediate for any eye to register ... And in the darkening and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see ... it is now a close up of the face, a face we all know." Fialka interconnects experimental film, art and literature with James Joyce, McLuhan and Pynchon. Delve deep into the "android meme," the enigma machine, Mae Brussell and more. In cryptography, "Fialka (M-125)" is the name of a Cold War-era Soviet cipher machine. Imagine "Professor" Irwin Corey as a sailor juggling three books: Walter Bowart's Operation Mind Control, Robert Dobbs's Phatic Communication with Bob Dobbs, and Robert Guffey's Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form. Pynchon's 2013 book Bleeding Edge is a "story told from the perspective of a fraud investigator looking into the tech world of programming and the finances. Number theory portrays information in typical Pynchonian effect (conspiratoid paranoiahead and otherwise!)" - Dane Benko. “Art is confession; art is the secret told. But art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.” - Thorton Wilder. “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light” - Thelonious Monk, worshipped by Pynchon. http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_music_cassiber.html.
116 - WILL THERE EVER BE SILENCE? - Fialka probes film, sound and music by interconnecting John Cage, McLuhan, James Joyce's neuroscience via new questions like "How the brain infuses noise with meaning, how the ears perceive physical space, how natural and electronic sounds mingle, and how musicians and artists have wrestled these phenomena in the past" - Justin Davidson. Explore Helfenstein & Rinder's questions: "What is silence? Why does it have such a grip on the imagination? And why do we automatically connect it to important parts of the world such as melancholy, memory, solitude, contemplation, and mourning?" Thelonius Monk righteously proclaimed, "The loudest noise in the world is silence." See GF's article Will There Ever Be Silence? at Laughtears.com
117- EXISTENTIAL JOURNALISM - Fialka probes philosophy and cinema with Reynaldo Wolf, who fused The Palm Beach Story (by Preston Sturges), Putney Swope (by Robert Downey Sr), Finnegans Wake (by James Joyce) and The Metamorphosis (by Franz Kafka) in his "lost" feature film, Channel Zero. "A true work of farcical genius" - Venice Film Festival. The sets were designed by Wolf's wife, the legendary Cricket Rowland, who worked with Tim Burton, Oliver Stone and William Friedkin. Channel Zero is the story of a man struck with "mediaphyillia autisticus." He is trapped, like his creator Rey Wolf, in today's media dungeon. We also examine: the Pixelvision short Dogman (Rey Wolf survives getting licked by literature), and the Rey Wolf interview- https://archive.org/details/04052013ReyWolf
118 - THE ARTIST AS ART STUDIO - Fialka explores the artist's studio, delving deep into the spaces of Constantin Brâncuși, Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Giacometti, and Frida Kahlo, whose mother had a special easel made for her so she could paint in bed. Examine the influence of the workroom, especially Francis Bacon's tiny London studio, which was subjected to critical analysis in an article by Aida Edemariam. She claims Bacon's nanny frequently locked the young screaming Francis in a cupboard for hours. This formed the basis of his preference for working in cramped conditions and his unwillingness to work in a larger space. The article states: "That cupboard", Bacon apparently said years later, "was the making of me". If Sun Ra says, "Space is the place," these artists may be saying "This space is the place." How and why do artists invest their personalities, experimentation and methods in their working environments? Other settings will be explored, including Warhol's The Factory.
119 - GF AS WIKIPEDIARIAN - Gerry Fialka's performance art piece. He is known by many names since he wears many hats. He is one of the first artists to use Wikipedia as an art medium. Fialka's motive evokes Harold Rosenberg on Duchamp: "His pseudonyms (Selavy, Mutt), like those of Kierkegaard, were intended not to conceal identity but to advertise that for certain works one had to invent authors of a certain kind." From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Gerry Fialka may refer to:
Gerald Joseph Fialka,
Geritol Fialkaseltzer,
Gman,
Germy Folkways,
Herald Fedaldo.
120 - CULTURE IS OUR BUSINESS - Fialka probes the McLuhan maxim, "art is anything you can get away with." Delve deep into performance art and the motives of Marina Abramovic: "My work is about culture. It's about changing the consciousness of human beings." Her Marina Abromovic Institute is "about immaterial work, a collaboration between art, science, spirituality and technology." She uses Ayurvedic, shamanistic, Buddhist, Gurdjieffian and other holistic practices. Fialka explores the reactions from her critics, who claim she is betraying the true nature of performance art. Lindsay Zoladz wrote, "The video in Infinite Jest that entertains you to death has finally come." Reperformance is challenged. Judith Thurman wrote, "One party holds that the integrity of time-based art is inseparable from its transience, and that no performance can or should be resurrected. In an app-happy age, this radical embrace of loss has its nobility." Warhol tried to create Duchampian anti-art and NOT have it become an aesthetic. His attempt to make comfort food (Campbell soup) anti-art, probably caused his flip into being a celebrity as performance art. When Duchamp's ready-mades became an aesthetic, he "quit" art, though secretly he making one piece of art after "quitting." What are the contradictions and new questions in examining culture, small "a" art and capitol "A" art? “Art is confession; art is the secret told. But art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.” - Thornton Wilder.
121 - EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG - Fialka explores Music For Nimrods (aka "America's Only Rock and Roll Radio Show") with Reverend Dan. Fialka interconnects the art of the Radio DJ with live readings of Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs with Firesign Theater, who proclaimed "Everything you know is wrong." Examine the text from Zappa's Ruben & The Jets print ad: "A new wave of glandular entertainment," and "Ruben & the Jets will get you back out in the parking lot where you belong." Delve deep into the relationships of literature, music and hoodlum culture. http://www.musicfornimrods.net/
122 - McLUHAN AS THE WAKE - 75 IS THE NEW 50 - Fialka explores McLuhan as Finnegans Wake. In 2014, book readers across the world celebrate the publications of two books: James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (75th year) and Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (50th year). Fialka interconnects them.
123- SAGE SALONS - Fialka delves deep into the salon as safeplace-refuge for discussion. Ed Ricketts gathered Krishnamurti, Joseph Campbell, John Cage, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck to examine Finnegans Wake. Lionel Ziprin brought together Bruce Conner, Jordan Belson, Bob Dylan, Thelonious Monk, Robert Frank, and Harry Smith to discuss the Kabbalah and Kiowa peyote rituals. Participants review these experiences, and re-invent them. Also, Fialka will review other gatherings like: NY delis were the homes for longstanding creative friendships with screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, choreographer Bob Fosse, playwright Herb Gardner and novelist & screenwriter Noel Behn. Black Mountain College was the gathering place for Stan VanDerBeek, Albert Einstein, Bucky Fuller, John Cage, Josef Albers, William Carlos Williams and more.
124 - MARCUSE AS SUBVERSIVE ART - Fialka's interactive discussion explores Herbert Marcuse's - “The radical qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image and of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behavior while preserving its overwhelming presence. Thereby art creates the realm in which the subversion of experience proper to art becomes possible: the world formed by art is recognized as a reality which is suppressed and distorted in the given reality.” Nuff said? No ! Review more art manifestos, like Claes Oldenberg's "I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all."
125 - OUT GUITAR - ASK THE AGES - Fialka explores "out" guitarists: Jimi Hendrix, Sonny Sharrock, Pete Cosey, Frank Zappa, Derek Bailey, Fred Frith, James Blood Ulmer, Eugene Chadbourne, Rod Poole, Elliot Ingber, Marc Ribot, Henry Kaiser and more. Fialka interconnects ego-less creativity and the freedom of expression via Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, who wrote "ask the ages," which also is the title to Sonny Sharrock's 1991 release. When asked what he thinks of Sonny, Nels Cline said, "I want to like him alot more that I do." Examine Edward LaGrossa's three T's of guitar playing: technique, theory and taste (and maybe add the 4th "tone") "Of the electric guitar's few proponents in avant-garde jazz, Sonny Sharrock is easily the most influential; he was one of the earliest guitarists to even attempt free playing, along with Derek Bailey and Sonny Greenwich. Sharrock's visceral aggression and monolithic sheets of noise were influenced by the screaming overtones of saxophonists like Coltrane, Sanders, and Ayler, and his experiments with distortion and feedback predated even Jimi Hendrix. Naturally, he provoked much hostility among traditionalists, but once his innovations were assimilated, he enjoyed wide renown in avant-garde circles."-Steve Huey, All Music Guide.
126 - THE ESSENTIALITY OF EXPERTISE - Fialka delves deep into the human need to validate thinking by proving one's expertise. This knowledge can lead to authoritarian feelings. How and why do we process this phenomenon? What are the services and disservices of data mining and knowledge management? "It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior." - McLuhan. Examine the maxim "ignorance is bliss." What is the difference between ignorance and apathy? "I don't know and I don't care." Bob Dylan learned from the Bible that one should not tell anyone everything one knows. Fialka probes the films of Errol Morris. Examine the Donald Rumsfeld maxim: "There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know." Fialka will explore the motives and consequences of Morris's films, including Vernon. Florida, the 1981 documentary film which profiles various eccentric residents of the Southern town who cut off their own limbs as a way to collect insurance money. How and why does this topic get hi-jacked by their own knowledge of the arcane?
127- THE OSCAR WILDE GAME - Fialka and participants flip aphorisms to discover new epiphanies. Oscar Wilde flipped "Drink is the curse of the working classes" into "Work is the curse of the drinking class." McLuhan's "Invention is the mother of necessities" is the flip of Plato's “Necessity is the mother of invention.” "The images of the consequences are the consequences of the images." - McLuhan. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa." - Donald Rumsfeld. McLuhan quotes Francis Bacon on the desirability of teaching “broken knowledge” because: “… aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total”do not. "Brother, can you paradigm?" - George Clinton.
128 - CULTURE INTERCOMS - We will survey one or more of those thinkers who are the early radar systems and rear-view mirrors detecting how major transformations in technology affect us. This workshop shakes people out of their regular agendas and reality tunnels. It promotes mapmakers who search for new lands and new data. Participants will seek meticulous understanding of everything we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell, passionately needling the somnambulists, and proving that learning can and must be fun. People under the scope include: Bruce Conner, Christian Marclay, Rachel Carson, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Korla Pandit, Orson Welles, Aldous Huxley, Sonia Sanchez, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Flannery O'Connor, Ornette Coleman, Zora Neale Hurston, Luis Bunuel, Lord Buckley, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Carla Bley, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Simon Rodia, Ernie Kovacs, Rod Serling, Dušan Makavejev, Chris Burden, Nikki Giovanni, Alan Watts, Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce. "Poets and artists live on frontiers. They have no feedback, only feedforward. They have no identities. They are probes." - McLuhan
129 - ART IS ANYTHING YOU CAN GET ANYWAY WITH - Fialka explores how we explain the task of the artist. "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now"- Samuel Beckett. "The task of art", McLuhan says, echoing Harold Innis, "is to correct the bias of technological media." McLuhan says: "Art as an anti-environment is an indispensable means of perception, for environments, as such, are imperceptible. Their power to impose their ground rules on our perceptual life is so complete that there is no scope for dialogue or interface. Hence the need for art or anti-environments." "The task of the artist is to make do without making investments. To act is to manage with nothing." -Mark Hutchison. Robert Smithson suggests that it is the task of the artist to reconstruct our “inability to see.” Cezanne wanted to grasp “nature in its origin”; the task of the artist is “to lend duration to genesis [origin].” Walter Benjamin demanded of “art a task far more difficult, that is, to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity's self-preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them." “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” - Frank Zappa. "The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.” - Lucian Freud. “The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?” - Bob Dylan. Warhol said, "Art is what you can get away with."
130 - CONSPIRACY THEORY AS LITERATURE CRITICISM - "Why must we continue to mow down the Kennedys in order to illustrate that the hot politics of the old machines won't work on the cool and involving TV medium,?" - Marshall McLuhan in the 1969 book The Interior Landscape - The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962 (edited by Eugene McNamara, the Dad of my friend Chris McNamara, who is a great experimental filmmaker). "A fact is not a truth until you love it," - Shelby Foote. "If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth." - Joseph Goebbels. "I am for anyone who seeks the truth, but I part ways with them when they claimed they found it." - Bunuel. 11-22 = "One plus one equals eleven, two plus two is twenty-two" - Frank Zappa.
131 – RAPID FILM EDITING AS MULTI-TASKING - Fialka explores fast paced film editing. "It is interesting to note that Abel Gance was applying this deliberate, theoretical and analytical approach to his editing in La Roue in 1923. This is two years before Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), which is regularly credited with being the pioneering example of film editing. It would be interesting to hear Gance’s comments on current films that use a very fast, fragmented editing style. But an important difference is that Gance did not apply a style of short, quick cuts for the entire film, only when he felt the story justified it. For example, at one point in La Roue, Sisif retells the story of the train crash from which he plucked Norma. Here some scenes are little more than flashes. But other shots in the film are long, slow, meditative." - Peter Hourigan http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/49/abel-gance-jaccuse-la-roue/ When Fialka asked Michael Apted years ago why rock video makers feel so obliged to edit fast, Apted said, "Because we have learned to take in information faster." Martin Scorsese also said that he edited his films faster because of MTV. Can we indeed learn to take in info faster? Inventory the services and disservices of multi-tasking? Per McLuhan's "extensions" probing (every human invention extends some human sensorium), it may be said that film editing extends blinking. Fialka examines the film editing ideas of Lev Kuleshov, Edward Dmytyk, and Walter Murch.
132 – ESP AS ART - ART AS SHIT - "ESP is old hat when effects precede causes" - McLuhan - Take Today: The Executive As Dropout 1972. "In 1914, Duchamp wrote his famous ‘formula’ for Art: 'Arrhe est ‘a art que merdre est a merde: arrhe = merde, art = merde.' An English translation might read: ‘Deposit is to art as shitte is to shit.’" - William Anastasi.http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/anastasi/anastasi1.html
133 - PSYBERNETIC DREAMING with RIA LIVE CINEMA (RIAPD) - Social engineers Will Erokan & Gerry Fialka's post-hypnotic triggering and hyper-maximum multi-media "live cinema" event reinvents McLuhan's Menippean satirized Gesamtkunstwerk and breaks the Finnegans Wake code: "what can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved fore." Turn your eyes into ears. Poets, dancers & live music conjure the hidden psychic effects of "mediaphyillia autisticus." "It is based upon individual thinking, scientific know-how, quick exchange of facts, high-tech ingenuity, and practical, front-line creativity." "We call the free-agent who thinks for him/herself 'cybernetic' from the Greek word for pilot. The word 'psychedelic' means ecstatic or mind-opening. 'Psybernetic' refers to psychedelic experience expressed in electronic form." RIA is "composed of quick-thinking, open-minded, change-oriented, innovative individuals who are adept in communicating via the new cyber-electronic technologies." These quotes inspired by Timothy Leary. This media yoga session enables participants to meta-analyze the dualities of form and content. Embrace contradictions. Examine electronic interdependence, all-at-onceness, effects preceding causes, sense-ratio-shifting, metaphor and abstraction. Discern patterns that emerge in perceiving perception itself ! Percept plunder for the recent future. The Ecstatic Beats of the 1950s, the Blissed Out Students of the 1960s, the Anarchist Yippies of the 1970s, the Cyberpunks of the 1980s, and the Hackers & Ravers of the 1990s, the Post Information Hipsters & ParaMediaEcologists of the 2000s, and the Occupiers & Millennial Matrix Dot Commies of the 2010s continue to fabricate the Cyber Culture. https://laughtears.com/iwantmyRIA.html
134 - Fialka Funny Farm - Gerry Fialka probes the motives and consequences of his various music ensembles. Since experiencing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, his self taught non-talents have nurtured the freedom to express himself musically, or as Frank Zappa said on The Steve Allen Show, "refrain from making any musical tones." His influences may include: James Brown, Sly Stone, Parliament-Funkadelic, The Meters, The Shaggs, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and many more. With rare audio and video recordings, and live performance, Fialka surveys his own groups: BSP (Black Shoe Polish), DGU (Dirty, Gross and Ugly), O Squared (Ornette's Orgasm), Puke & Liar, The Rondo Hatton Experience, The Great Society, Vaguely, Super Nova Nudge, Rag'n'Bones, Wrasslin' Poodles, and The Cardboards.
More details of the following are available upon request:
135- Stanley Kubrick & James Joyce: Epiphanized Percepts
136 - Manny Farber & James Agee - Beyond Film Critics
137 - The Human Microphone As Subversive Social Media
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Gerry Fialka's motives may include:
* to find epiphanies in everydayness,
* to satirize information overload,
* to invent new questions and new metaphors: "Brother, can you paradigm?"
* to uncover the hidden psychic effects of our inventions so we can cope with these effects.
* to reinvent James Joyce's "laughtears" and "feelful thinkamalinks."
* to make people freer as Vito Acconci articulated in Financial Times 11-17-12.
* to struggle with "don't tell anyone everything you know" - something Bob Dylan learned from the Bible.
* to elevate viewers' spirits and give them courage - Marina Abramovic.
* to re-imagine "ESP is old hat when effects precede causes" - McLuhan - Take Today: The Executive As Dropout 1972.
* to contradict myself as not to conform to my own ideas - Duchamp.
* to question questions like John Cage: "that's a very good question, I would not like to ruin it with an answer."
* to nurture Robert Frost, who wrote "the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other." When he was asked to explain one of his poems, he responded, "You mean, you want me to say it worse?"
* to probe sense-ratio-shifting, effects-precede-causes (reasoning backwards) and the non-physical.
* to examine Bucky Fuller's "I seem to be a verb," "less is more" and "there's no passengers, we are all crew."
* Is the mystery of art, technology, and new media to more activate or more pacify? - discussed by poet W. H. Auden, who said "Poetry makes nothing happen")
* to propagate connectedness and commonalities.
* to rethink polyphonic, immersive and critical discourse.
* to play around like Bob Fosse, as detailed in the book Fosse by Sam Wasson, who wrote that Fosse's dancers seemed "as if they were playing at dancing more than actually dancing."
*to play at playing, much like Jimi Hendrix, who said " You've got to have a purpose in life. But I'm not here to talk, I'm here to play."
*to struggle with the paradox - "the worst things in life are free" - bumper sticker, and "Freedom means everything free" - Emmett Grogan.
* to transcend to a higher consciousness and achieve full human potential - George Gurdjieff.
* to do nothing effectively.
* to stare at the clouds, which my parents Dolores and Albert Fialka encourage, again much like Hendrix said, "You never know what shape clouds are going to be before you see them."
GERRY FIALKA's articles-
Fall 2013 - Artist as Trickster http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/may-attract-other-coyotes-or-putting-on-put-ons-the-artist-as-trickster/
Spring 2013 - Nothing & Stay Out (on Rodney Ascher's Kubrick documentary Room 237 & more) - http://othercinema.com/otherzine/archives/index.php?issueid=29&article_id=172
Fall 2012 - Mike Kelley And Meme http://othercinema.com/otherzine/archives/index.php?issueid=28&article_id=165
Spring 2012 - Occupy Awake: Conscious Mapmakers On World Wide Watch http://othercinema.com/otherzine/archives/index.php?issueid=27&article_id=148
Fall 2011 - McLuhan's City As Classroom Flips Into All-At-Onceness As Classroom
http://othercinema.com/otherzine/archives/index.php?issueid=26&article_id=135
Spring 2011 - McLuhan & WikiLeaks: 'Hoedown' and 'Hendiadys'
http://othercinema.com/otherzine/archives/index.php?issueid=25&article_id=123
Spring 2010 - Looking Glass - Review of Millennium Film Journal #51 http://othercinema.com/otherzine/archives/index.php?issueid=23&article_id=99
Spring 2009 - Dream Awake -HOW JOYCE INVENTED OTHER CINEMA & DISGUISED IT AS A BOOKhttp://othercinema.com/otherzine/archives/index.php?issueid=21&article_id=85
CANYON CINEMA MAGAZINE Fall 2013 - I WANT MY RIA https://laughtears.com/iwantmyRIA.html
Thank you,
Gerry Fialka
pfsuzy@aol.com 310-306-7330