Month: November 2011

Flash mob Mumbai

If you’ve stopped by my corner of the internet over the years, you know I love flash mobs. This one is particularly great. I love the song, I love the dance, and I love that a group of people in Mumbai chose this way to honor those who died November 26, 2008 in terror attacks in the city.

The best way to celebrate the lives of others is to remember them in our moments of joy.


 
Enjoy your day. Dance if you have the chance.

Thankful

I am so very thankful for my life. And yours too, all of you who join me in these conversations. Today I am so full of joy and wonder that I simply cannot find the words. But I hope you have these moments too, when everything you are, all your experience, all the people who have ever touched you for better or worse, all the beauty of the world and the creatures in it, all of us living our lives — when it all rushes into you for an instant and there you go, the joy and the wonder of it all.

Thankful, me, for all of it.

Look up

I grew up in Florida, where the land is flat and the water is wide, and the sky is a great bowl of possibility arching overhead.

The possibility of weather passing through on its way to somewhere else; the possibility of going with it.

The possibility of lightning, how it speaks of power and passion and lets us see spontaneity writ large.

The hurricane that so easily persuades the stupid that death won’t spoil their party.

The blue of summer so hard it stings the eye, that makes us want to put our hands in it up to the wrists because it’s summer, summer!

The blue of winter that feels too high to touch, that teaches us in the most literal way why cold is a metaphor for distant. And that distance is what moves us to reach higher.

They say that everything we’ve ever seen stays with us. Stays in us. I hope that’s true. I enjoy thinking that I am full of sky.

Hdr skies from Tanguy Louvigny on Vimeo.

Enjoy your day. Look up!

Shame on them

On Friday, a campus police officer at UC Davis decided that the only rational way to respond to a group of students sitting in silence on the sidewalk with arms linked was to pepper-spray them directly in their faces. You can find updates on the story here.

It’s fucking horrible to watch. But please do. Because after the officer dehumanizes himself by inflicting unnecessary pain, and by appearing to enjoy it just a leetle too much, the protesters rehumanize the event by ultimately forcing the police to leave.

The beginning of this video terrified me. The ending astonished me: the protesters giving the police permission to go. Watch it happen. Watch the consequences, and the power, of speaking your mind.

 
May no one harm you today, and may you do no harm.

A girl is the hero

I know it seems to be all about the movies here in my little corner of the internet right now. So mote it be. I’m writing movies, and that means paying attention to all kinds of visual storytelling.

Brave has been on my radar for a while, and now there’s a full trailer available. I’m looking forward to it for several reasons. A girl is the hero! She has adventures. She’s good at riding and shooting. And she is brave. Oh my goodness, the power of that alone to make me want to see this.

But there’s also the power behind that power: Pixar, who are some of the best visual storytellers around — and both of those components are important. Movies are visual, which may seem like a d’oh statement until you’ve seen a film where everyone tells everyone everything, unless it’s My Dinner with Andre in which case it’s good. But for the most part, storytelling through dialogue is boring; and there is so much in good movie storytelling that happens between the words, in the silences, in the perspective of the camera and the small behaviors of the actors, in the fast cuts or the long slow moves. Remember the single shot in Hitchcock’s Frenzy that tracks out of the flat as the murder begins and backs away down the hall, down the stairs, out the door onto the street where people are going on about their daily lives… We could imagine it all in that single deliberate move, the fear and the pain and the lonely death. That’s the power of movies.

But there has to be a damn good story to tell, and that’s the other place where Pixar shines. They work hard to make the story right. I admire their process and philosophy enormously.

So I have high hopes for Brave. And high expectations. It’s Pixar’s first movie about a girl: we’ll see if they know how to tell a story about a brave human being with astonishing red hair.
 

 
Enjoy your day. Be brave.

Cityscapes

Meduzarts Subaru Ep3 By INetGrafx

Here are 45 beautiful cities of the future from a variety of artists. I could get lost in them: so much world-building, so many stories implied, so much evocative detail. The imagination, the focus, the discipline to create such specificity…. wow. So much that I admire in people has to do with this combination of imagination and willingness to do the work necessary to realize the vision well.

Dreams and work, friends. We need both.

Enjoy your day.

That Kelley, he’s so excited

If you use Chrome browser, have I got a thing for you. If you don’t use Chrome, do yourself a favor and install it even temporarily for the pure pleasure of Jailbreak the Patriarchy, a fabulous extension by Danielle Sucher.

Go, go, go. Go read the examples and see if/when your head turns inside out. Then install Jailbreak and go play. The Internet is full of words and those words are full of gender assumptions, precious, yes they are. Go see for yourself.

Danielle Sucher, my brother, if you are ever in Seattle, I would love to provide you the beverage of your choice.

Enjoy your genderfuck day.