Having been so heavily involved in the scene, what artist do you believe are pushing the boundaries of music in NY?

I would say anyone playing to a crowd of 5 people in a city of millions is on the other side of the fence.

What straw2gold releases do we have to look forward to in the near future?

There are literally about a thousand recordings ready to be produced into DVDs…let me know when you have time to edit them.~

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Catching Wally West

Posted on April 12, 2008

At the turn of the century (not this weekend but last weekend) Americans and Europeans alike still had some incredible misconceptions about lightning. Thanks to Franklin and others, they knew they were dealing with electricity, but they didn’t know how it traveled, or what caused that epic thunder we have all come to love and occasionally sacrifice virgins to.

One prominent theory was that electricity needed a vacuum through which to travel, and that thunder could be the sound of air rushing out of a path from cloud to ground. Another theory was that thunder was caused by they very impact of electricity on the point of contact. Turns out thunder is the sound of air molecules inflating from incredible heat like condoms in a high school health class.

Lightning moves at incredible speeds and reaches temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun which makes it a difficult subject to study. So a man named Sir Charles Vernon Boys designed his own camera in an effort to learn more.

“The scheme was to use a pair of identical camera lenses (specially selected for stereoscopic photography) and to mount these on a disc which could be rotated by hand through gearing at any desired speed. In the apparatus I then made I could drive them at any speed up to about 40 turns a second. The lenses were four inches apart, center to center; the two images of a lightning flash would then be carried in opposite directions up to about fourty feet per second,and if the flash in each part of its length should be “instantaneous,” a difference in time between the two ends of the flash of about 1/40,000 seconds would be observable. If, for example, the flash were a vertical line and the lenses at the moment were one above the other, one image would be tilted in one direction while the other would be tilted in the other direction, and the more so the greater the duration.”

Sir Charles Vernon Boys: Progressive Lightning, Nature, 1926.

He finally succeeded in 1928, offering a print like the one above.

What does this have to do with film? Simply this: one must use extraordinary means for capturing the extraordinary. Film is the perfect medium to capture the metaphor and the associative workings of human social interaction. A lot of people get swept with the argument that the American public only wants to consume familiar things, but this is an age where imitation and innovation are not segregated. To claim we have already exhausted techniques with the tools we have presumes far too much.

“One must free the cinema as an expressive medium in order to make it the ideal instrument of a new art, immensely vaster and lighter than all the existing arts. We are convinced that only in this way can one reach that polyexpressiveness towards which all the most modern artistic researches are moving. Today the Futurist cinema creates precisely the polyexpressive symphony that just a year ago we announced in our manifesto “Weights, Measures, and Prices of Artistic Genius”. The most varied elements will enter into the Futurist film as expressive means: from the slice of life to the streak of color, from the conventional line to words-in-freedom, from chromatic and plastic music to the music of objects. In other words it will be painting, architecture, sculpture, words-in-freedom, music of colors, lines, and forms, a jumble of objects and reality thrown together at random. We shall offer new inspirations for the researches of painters, which will tend to break out of the limits of the frame. We shall set in motion the words-in-freedom that smash the boundaries of literature as they march towards painting, music, noise-art, and throw a marvelous bridge between the word and the real object.”

“Our films will be:

Cinematic analogies that use reality directly as one of the two elements of the analogy. Example: If we should want to express the anguished state of one of our protagonists, instead of describing it in its various phases of suffering, we would give an equivalent impression with the sight of a jagged and cavernous mountain. The mountains, seas, woods, cities, crowds, armies, squadrons, aeroplanes will often be our formidable expressive words: the universe will be our vocabulary. Example: We want to give a sensation of strange cheerfulness: we show a chair cover flying comically around an enormous coat stand until they decide to join. We want to give the sensation of anger: we fracture the angry man into a whirlwind of little yellow balls. We want to give the anguish of a hero who has lost his faith and lapsed into a dead neutral skepticism: we show the hero in the act of making an inspired speech to a great crowd; suddenly we bring on Giovanni Giolitti who treasonably stuffs a thick forkful of macaroni into the hero’s mouth, drowning his winged words in tomato sauce.

We shall add color to the dialogue by swiftly, simultaneously showing every image that passes through the actors’ brains. Example: representing a man who will say to his woman: “You’re as lovely as a gazelle,” we shall show the gazelle. Example: if a character says, “I contemplate your fresh and luminous smile as a traveler after a long rough trip contemplates the sea from high on a mountain,” we shall show traveler, sea, mountain.

This is how we shall make our characters as understandable as if they talked.”

- F.T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra Emilo Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, Remo Chiti: Futurist Cinema

Connotations move quickly like the steps of electric ladders. Following a character’s arc from a to b takes a lot more than a cold still image of its physical path.