Flying Blind next Thursday

[Floating Cinemas]

A panel presentation on the cultural and artistic impact of new media technologies.

Panel:
- Writer Jack Ross will draw on his web-based projects including the REM trilogy.
- Filmmaker Gabriel White will discuss the question of a "minor" cinema.
- Filmmaker David Blyth will discuss the internet and desire though his recent film Transfigured Nights.
- Film Archive curator Amelia Harris will examine the similar presence of amateurism in early cinema and contemporary media.

When: Thursday Dec 3
7.30 pm

Where: Auckland Film Archive
Level 1, 300 K Rd
Koha entry
complimentary beer!

*

[postscript: 4/12/09]

Well, the event went off very well, I thought.

You can read more about the details of my presentation here, and no doubt there'll be further follow-ups on the Floating Cinemas website and blog.

[Photograph by Mary Paul (4/9/09)]

The EMO Interview

[Jack Ross: "Hotel, Frankfurt" (2005)]

Well, you'll recall about a month ago I put up a post with links to my interview with Gabriel White about his film Tongdo Fantasia and his interview with me about the REM trilogy.

Well, since then there have been two further developments. John Radford has done an interview with Gabriel about his film Aucklantis, and Gabriel has posted a second and final part of the interview with me (we only managed to get through two volumes of the trilogy in the first conversation).

So here goes:

The REM trilogy interview part two, focusing on the final volume EMO. (Sunday, December 21, 2008). Gabriel White – The World Blank and Other Projects. 8 video clips:

• [1/8] What is ‘Emo’?
• [2/8] 3’s / Eva Ave / Althusser.
• [3/8] Eva Braun’s Diary / vivisection / cloning.
• [4/8] Story frames – The Arabian Nights / Moons of Mars / characters / genre fictions / Bataille.
• [5/8] Movements and motivations – Perec / patterns / surrealism / settings.
• [6/8] Settings / images, words and sounds.
• [7/8] The blind creator / textual processes – the internet.
• [8/8] Ovid in Otherworld / the nurse / Ovid / otherness.

[Ivan Corsa: Lafayette Street Girl (2005)]

Come on, you know you're dying to have a listen! Who knows, it might change your life ...

Anyway, there it all is. The only thing is that you'll probably have to download the latest version of Quicktime in order to see and hear us properly. Free, though, and the gateway to lots of other exciting stuff on Gabriel's website.

Frost / Nixon or Ross / White?

[Alas Smith & Jones]

Yes, well, maybe it is a bit vainglorious to compare me and Gabriel White filming some conversations in his living room in Freemans Bay with that epoch-making set of confrontations between David Frost at the apex of his (bizarre) media career and gloomy, half-mad, exiled ex-US President Richard Nixon. I shouldn't think Ron Howard will be rushing to acquire the rights for another Hollywood blockbuster, though of course you never know ...

Perhaps a more appropriate model would be Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones's incarnations as "Scratch 'n' Sniff", those two bozos who used to conduct pretentiously inane dialogues in Alas Smith & Jones in the 80s and 90s. As Wikipedia so trenchantly puts it: "Smith was the idiot who knew everything, Jones the idiot who knew nothing."

Be that as it may, we remain undaunted. Gabriel has spent a lot of time over the years reading and annotating his copies of my REM trilogy: Nights with Giordano Bruno (Bumper Books, 2000), The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Titus, 2006) and EMO (Titus, 2008), and he had quite a lot of questions to ask me about them. What harm, we thought, in sharing the results with an online audience?

Turnabout is fair play, though. Regular readers of this blog can hardly claim not to have noticed my admiration for Gabriel's films Aucklantis (2006) (reviewed here) and Tongdo Fantasia (2008) (launched earlier this year at OUi boutique in K Rd).

So we decided to do a double interview: I would quiz him on the inspirations and influences behind his Tongdo Fantasia, and then he would ask me questions about the REM novels.

For my money, that's better than either Frost / Nixon or Smith & Jones. I mean, didn't you ever long to see Nixon asking Frost some tough questions about just who precisely he thought he was to be so up on his high horse? And why didn't Smith ever swap places with Jones? That's what I want to know. With us, on the other hand, you get to see us on opposite sides of the table - in itself well worth the price of admission, I'd have thought ...

But seriously, folks, here's a breakdown of both interviews, now up for viewing on Gabriel's website (the clips take a little while to download, but at least that gives you time to mull over the info contained in each). They've also been indexed with themes and topics for your viewing convenience:

Jack Ross interviews Gabriel White on Tongdo Fantasia. (Sunday, November 30, 2008). Gabriel White – artist website. 5 video clips:

• [1/5] Buddhism / the ‘pedestrian filmmaker.’
• [2/5] The 3-fold approach / photographs / editing.
• [3/5] Themes – natural and unnatural.
• [4/5] The verbal approach / cinematic landscape.
• [5/5] Bashō’s travel diaries.

[Matsuo Bashō]

Gabriel White interviews Jack Ross on his REM trilogy. (Sunday, November 30, 2008). Gabriel White – artist website. 9 video clips:

• [1/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy.
• [2/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy.
• [3/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy / Nights with Giordano Bruno – layout.
• [4/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy – the fictional creator/s.
• [5/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy / Nights with Giordano Bruno / psychoanalysis.
• [6/9] Nights with Giordano Bruno – Lullism / the Magus / Bruno’s Cena de le ceneri.
• [7/9] Apuleius – influence on Bruno and Jack Ross.
• [8/9] The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis – amnesia / narrative approach / Atlantis.
• [9/9] The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis – two ways of approaching amnesia: cuttings and automatic writing.

[Apuleius: The Golden Ass (as illustrated by Milo Manara)]

Depending on the response to these, there may well be more to come. We didn't have enough time to talk about either Gabriel's Aucklantis or my novel EMO, but there are number of interesting points still to be thrashed out about both, I'd have thought.

Watch this space ...


[Postscript - 10th December]:

There's now a new interview up on Gabriel's site:

John Radford interviews Gabriel White on Aucklantis. (Sunday, December 7, 2008). Gabriel White – artist website. 5 video clips:

John Radford: "It's like a child's view, or someone from another reality arriving here and looking at this thing which we call a city and the way this thing works and making assumptions ... that are very reasonable assumptions to make ..."

• [1/5] Sleepyhead / stream-of-consciousness city / wandering rocks / the epic.
• [2/5] Mayoral Drive / Atlantis / North pole theory / sacred isles.
• [3/5] The shadow / confusions / characters.
• [4/5] Groundhog Day / references / the car.
• [5/5] En plein air / counterworlds.

[sacred isle]

The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis

[poster design by James Fryer]

It's two days now since that strange booklaunch in the English Department common-room at Auckland University. I've always thought it a pretty odd space, even before the carpets were all dyed slaughterhouse purple. Once we'd turned off all the lights and arranged little lamps around the window-ledges, though, it turned into a kind of Orphic cavern: the temple of the mysteries.

I think there had been a film preview in there before we arrived, so there was still a huge white screen in the middle of the floor. We didn't dare to try and take it down without instructions, so it stayed there behind the podium with the speakers projected onto it, like the chained-up captives in Plato's parable of the cave.

Michele Leggott had kindly agreed to introduce the speakers, and did so valiantly despite having hardly enough light to make out her notes.

Scott Hamilton went first. He's already given a spirited account on is own blog of the talk he gave introducing Bill Direen's J. G. Ballardesque novel / Apocalyptic text Song of the Brakeman. Brett Cross of Titus Books (the publisher of both novels), comments about the reading Olwyn Stewart then went on to give from it, that "it got quite surreal and trancelike there for a while, with hazy music in the background, the low lights, and words tumbling over the top ... I don't think I'll ever get those nodules of Tyrian purple nosing out of thinning fur out of my mind ..."

Then came Gabriel White, introducing my book The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. "Jack has a cold front," he said. "Jack puts his worst foot forward." He went on to compare me to Plato -- or Plato's more subversive side, at any rate. He sure got a laugh at that! I despair of doing justice to all the extravagant stuff Gabriel had to say -- it was a pretty goddamned impressive performance, though, I reckon (though I say it that shouldn't). For a video-clip of part of Gabriel's speech, click here.

The wine flowed freely and bread & cheese went down by bucketloads. Strange shapes loomed up in the semi-darkness, insisting on sharing their own views on Atlantis. "Perhaps some of their descendants are here in this room," speculated one poet. "Perhaps we're all Atlanteans," I riposted.

Andrew McCully's mood music was the other unique feature of the evening. He played on heroically as evening turned into night and the stars and citylights came on. He was still playing when I left. I hope he and all those others got safely home.

If you didn't manage to get there, I'm afraid that you missed an experience. Both books are now on sale, though, and can be ordered from the Titus website. I'll finish with some of the plaudits my own book has earned already:

· The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. ISBN 0-9582586-8-6. Auckland: Titus Books, 2006. RRP $NZ 27.95

"… after having read some of the contents, maybe it just wasn’t meant to be printed …"
– Marian Reeves, Massey Printery

"… rather rude …"
– Bronwyn Lloyd

"… women don’t always respond well to girl-girl erotica written by a bloke."
– Martin Edmond

I think that says it all, really. You owe it to yourself to check this novel out.