paul diddy 3.0

Check Paul Tyree-Francis' new and improved website.

reblog

I've been enjoying my old friend from NY's sporadic postings about the economic crisis

From Uberdionysus

I'm hearing a lot of talk about the “personal responsibility” of the individual home owners, and about their responsibility in this financial crisis. It's a bullshit talking point and I think it's mainly a way to deflect responsibility from the real culprits of this crisis. Let's break down the truth behind personal responsibility and the current housing mess:

First: the majority of the people who are in trouble did everything right. They're still fucked. Let's call them The Fucked Majority. continue reading

motivation: familial update

Melissa and I chose this intimate East German familial scene as our inspirational focus point for German language study. I'm meeting her today for a study session in Mitte, so I thought I'd take another look at our motivational assemblage. I'm so in love with it that it's now my inspirational focus point for moving, finishing my article that was due yesterday, learning web design, opening a business, and wanting a hair cut. Heart shaped meat is so versatile.

Notorious

My review of George Tillman's biopic of Biggie Smalls was published in issue 171 of Dazed and Confused, available on most newstands.

Christopher Wallace balled hard. Better known as Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G., Wallace’s pop-gangster storytelling and exceptional lyrical prowess almost single handedly galvanized the East Coast hip-hop scene during a time that the genre was largely dominated by West Coast artists. By the time he died at the age of twenty-four, the father of two and award winning rapper had two platinum albums (His second album, Life After Death, debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts fifteen days after his murder).

Notorious follows Wallace from his humble beginnings as a teenage drug dealer through his meteoric rise to fame and untimely death. George Tillman’s (Soul Food/Barbershop) biopic attempts to expose the man behind the legend, subjecting the rapper’s woefully brief life to a literary treatment that largely fails; A deeper understanding of the artist’s life and times can be gleaned from his Wikipedia page. Still, we go to most big budget films to be entertained and Tillman and his cast don’t let us down. Melodrama and humor coalesce to paint Biggie’s story in broad strokes, dutifully chronicling the rise of Bad Boy Records, his troubled relationships with Faith Evans and Lil’ Kim, and of course, his falling out with Tupac Shakur and the ensuing East Coast-West Coast feud that ultimately cost him his life.

Tillman fleshes out his cast of seasoned professionals with a few young upstarts and the . rookies steal the show. Although the excessive joviality he brings to the role borders on Big-lite, first time actor and rapper Jamal Woolard (known on the mix tape circuit as Gravy), captures Biggie’s swagger and charm. Naturi Naughton imbues Lil’ Kim with a tantalizing mix of fire and vulnerability, outshining Puffy (Derek Luke) and every dude in the entourage.

Notorious isn’t ground breaking, but it’s fun—a bubble-gum guilty pleasure full of wise-cracks, spot-on period mise-en-scene and (best of all), lots and lots of music.

Narrowcast

originally published in the January issue of The Magazine

Narrowcast: Reframing Global Video 1968/2008
LACE
6522 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles
(323) 957-1777
www.artleak.org

By Jesi Khadivi

In a recent episode of Planet in Peril on CNN, correspondent Lisa Ling met with the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger River Delta, also known as MEND, on the banks of a remote shore on the delta. Adrenalin was high and gun-fire filled the air as Ling gave a straight forward analysis of a region whose ecosystem had been virtually decimated by big oil companies.

Artist Mark Boulos also explores the indignity suffered by Nigerians in the hands of companies like Shell oil. His two-channel video, All That is Solid Melts into Air, which posits footage of Nigerian rebels preparing for battle against the frenzied activity of the Chicago Stock Exchange trading floor, offers more nuanced insight into dispossession and power than the Planet in Peril team could dream of. All That is Solid…, which derives its title from Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, beautifully encapsulates the radical potential of video art, as well as its capacity for non-linear story telling.

Narrowcast revisits LACE’s seminal 1986 exhibition, Resolution: A Critique of Video Art. It is less a critique and more a celebration of video’s possibilities and the evolution of the form, especially as a political tool. In Political Advertisement I (1952-1984) Antonio Muntades and Marshall Reese show political ads transform from direct address to feel good sloganeering, and finally, to outright manipulation and scare tactics. Natalie Bookchin’s video Trip, comprised entirely of found footage from YouTube, explores international borderlands and the binaries that blossom there. Shot primarily on low grade consumer video devices like phones and cameras, Bookchin’s video consists of home made road movies from over seventy countries. Artur Zmijewski’s Game of Tag takes on a heightened significance when it is revealed at the end of the video that the naked game of tag is being played in the gas chamber of a former concentration camp.

In All That is Solid Melts into Air, a Nigerian militia member sternly advised Mark Boulos, “Make them remember us.” Though typically a concern associated with documentary film making, all the artists in Narrowcast engage with issues of memory and representation that are subtle, incisive and fresh, whether the film was made in 1986 or 2008.

Hildegard Knef

family update: to rent, or...

After a bout of unfruitful house hunting, P and I finally may have found an apartment that we love. It's expensive by boho Berlin standards, but a deal when compared to major American cities. Including heat and hot water it's $400 cheaper than our old place in Los Angeles, still...do we hold out for something cheaper or go for this?

wear your love like heaven

Much to my surprise, the proposal I wrote for 33 1/3's open call about Donovan's Gift From a Flower to a Garden made their short list. Not the shortest shortlist in the world, but I'm happy to have survived the first cut. Out of over 500 applicants about 20 book deals will be offered. Check out the series.

i love la

Ironically, the first day that I see the sun shine in Berlin is the day that I miss Los Angeles the most and imagine myself back there living in one of these.

we've heard of snakes on a plane..

but hostel on a plane??????

aber hallo: initial impressions of germany take two

1) it's fucking cold. really cold. and it snowed this morning. i hate snow.

2) it feels completely normal to be back and we've slid right back into hanging out with friends and enjoying german beer.

3) international journalists throw professionalism out the window at the sight of demi moore. ashton kutcher was a hot topic at today's berlinale press conference.

today's strange sightng: an old(ish) man wearing dirty shoes and no socks waiting for the bus at potsdamer platz wearing a broken handcuff. escapee?

berlinale updates to follow.

Art Week

My review of Kiersten Puusemp's exhibition, Whole Wide World, was published in the February 2009 issue of Art Week. Pick a copy up at LA newstands.

Lat den ratte komma in

Orginally published in Dazed and Confused, issue #130

Text Jesi Khadivi

“Are you old?” a young, cherubic-faced Swede asks his new dark, androgynous friend. “I’m twelve,” the child responds, “but I’ve been twelve for a long time.” Meet Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and Eli (Lina Leandersson), two pre-teens living in the anonymous block suburbs of Stockholm in the early 1980s, a far cry from the drafty Transylvanian castles of vampire lore. Despite this, Let The Right One In, a minimal Swedish film about a twelve year old vampire and her budding relationship with her neighbor, Oskar, is one of the most outstanding experimentations with the genre in years. Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of the best selling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist is light on the gore and heavy on the pathos. Oskar, a pale and friendless young boy, is repeatedly tortured at school. When a gaunt child and her much older caretaker move in next door around the same time that grizzly murders start happening in the neighborhood, Oskar forges a friendship with her over a shared Rubik’s cube. Already a bit of a gore fiend, Oskar soon discovers that his girl-next-door is actually a vampire and not even a girl, forcing him to choose between his nascent sense of morality and love for his only friend.

Working with a cast of stellar, largely unknown actors, Alfredson drains the bravado out of an essentially hyperbolic genre to create a film of unparalleled restraint and tenderness. Vital back stories in the novel, Oskar’s father’s alcoholism and the troubled relationship between Eli and her caretaker Hakan, are only wordlessly alluded to in the film, but the adaptation isn’t slighted at all by their absence. Far from it. The reliance of Let the Right One In on the suggestiveness of rich, visual storytelling lends the film an ambiguity that accounts for much of its charm. Alfredson depicts a world of losers: a lonely boy, a shrill single mother ashamed of her broken home, a gaggle of drunks, a grubby vampirette and the broken old man who takes care of her until his untimely death. Let the Right One In is a horror flick without a clearly delineated evil, other than repression and provincialism--byproducts of Blackeberg’s brutal landscape. Aggressors and victims alike are depicted as every day folk just trying to get by. Those looking for blood in the film will find it, but the gore factor is so subdued that it appears fantastical rather than gruesome. The trauma and violence of adolescence—the sensuality of bullying, the shame of being monstrous, and first pangs of sexual desire—are treated more in depth than any nocturnal blood letting. With a keen eye for nuance and elegiac pacing, Alfredson deftly probes his characters’ capacity to love and feel pain through intimate, revealing moments. The solemn hug a bloody-mouthed Eli gives Oskar after he watches her kill a man beautifully encapsulates the limitations of Eli and Oskar’s fragile relationship. Adolescence is depicted as a long Scandinavian winter, steeped in darkness and ice. While Oskar will eventually make it to Spring if he chooses to, Eli will continue to inhabit the dark, cold night.

new issue of soma

My article about Waltz with Bashir was just published in SOMA. Check it out online here. I will upload the full text for SOMA and Dazed and Confused as soon as I get a chance.