When Photographers Direct…Some Thoughts on “A Single Man”

I saw Tom Ford’s film last night, slightly behind the pack.  There was a deliberateness to his every scene, I could literally feel or hear him directing.   In contrast to all the Dogma school films I’ve seen coming out of Europe, where the director is, I believe irresponsibly absent, and set against all the huge CG- driven American films where the director is hiding behind a massive tech budget, I found Tom Ford’s almost heavy-handed craftsmanship refreshing.  I could relax into each perfectly composed, calmly calculated shot, knowing that he had thought this through, and trusting that his impeccable taste wouldn’t disappoint.

He is, to me, a photographer directing a movie.  Take the scene where shiny black shoes just enter the corner of a frame: this is attention to composition that comes from an understanding of a static frame and the tension that arises when something breaks it.  Very Cartier Bresson.  Or the beach scene where the footage of Colin Firth and his lover is converted to B+W, the high, overhead sun casting Edward Weston style shadows.  There’s a rigorous control, attention to detail, drive for perfection that photographers, especially fashion photographers command.  And this makes sense given Ford’s fashion background.  I’d argue that generally, this commitment to perfection is a liability in filmmaking since, in film, the eye never lingers long enough for perfection to register.  But the ability to really conceptualize and shape a shot – this does translate between the forms.  I think the last time the photographic sensibility of a film struck me so intensely was the first time I watched Antonioni’s Blow Up.  Let’s say the scene in Single Man with the huge Psycho poster in the background (brilliant staging, btw) is very Weege, and extreme close ups throughout the film of eyes…who else but Man Ray?

In another film, set in another time, about a man other than English Lit. Professor George Falconer, Tom Ford’s stylized and controlled approach would not have worked.  But here, the tight composition suitably underscores the 1960’s Los Angeles in which A Single Man is set -  a perfectly composed frame, a perfectly composed era.  But, just as the occasional object: a shoe, a cigarette may pierce the scene from the left or the right, so too the film seems to promise, will the coming cultural tides. (If tides could pierce).

Still, Ford’s composed, unswerving vision serves, I believe, a deeper purpose, without which the film would feel like an expensive ad for his suits.  The subtle message of the film, the hero’s own subtle but essential odyssey would escape us were it not held within the stricture of the scenes, the suits, the glass house in which Professor Falconer lives.  Ford’s well-framed scenes become a belljar through which we can see the fluttering heart of the film.

Photo: Edward Weston

- Tanit

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Log 01: I Do (still) Love Little Things!

And we’re off! We have received several delighted responses (one exclaiming, “YAY! I do love little things :)”) to our project announcement, which means it’s time to gather and mail out the little things. Recently, Tanit wrote in an e-mail, “It’s kind of scary when you put something out there and try it and actually get a response.” Very true. Exciting times are upon us!

I’m really looking forward to seeing whether or not a physical and tangible element attracts a different audience and hopefully, this social experiment will provide some insight into how a mostly virtual brand (and its audience) may market and exist offline. How will the real world and the virtual world interact, or remain distinct?

I’ve also recruited a few friends from around the nation (and globe!) to post signs, and it will be interesting to see which city is the most trusting of cryptic, hand-written invitations…

- Meredith

Project Launch: I Do Love Little Things!

With everyone connecting virtually these days, we thought we’d head offline and try reaching out to our audience in another way. We want to send you hand-made goodies in the mail. Call this an exploration in retro marketing (and maybe a little longing to bring the taste of postage stamps back into our lives).

What will we send you? Well, we’re taking inspiration from Sarah’s niece, Nell, who often declares her love for little things. We don’t want to ruin the surprise, but our gifts to you will likely come from our favorite artists and musicians. What you get may represent some part of their creative process, because we at Nightjar are all about sharing the creative process. And it will definitely be rather little – not of tremendous value, but something nice just the same.

So, if you love little things as much as we do, email us your mailing address:

idolovelittlethings@nightjarcreative.com

(We promise we’ll never use your address for anything other than this specific project).

Musings: OK, I have no pictures for this one…

I am often between two different and competing places in my head.  I suppose most of us are.  I call these two mental continents, the “creator” side and the “producer” side.  And I need both to conceive of a new art or writing project, and to execute it.  It just often seems that the producer side: organized, creased pants, a small, well-groomed mustache I imagine, so much more easily sets up camp and bangs on tin pans till his crepuscular counter-part has been squarely banished.

OK, enough of my forced metaphor tonight.  Point being, it’s sometimes hard to put away the emails and “action plans,” and switch head-spaces.

I’ve always used poetry to do that.  I’ll pick up anything, usually an un-read New Yorker and skip right to the poems. In the mid 90’s, temping, depressed, just out of school, I remember a poetry campaign the NY Metro ran.  I’d look up from my commute to the air conditioned office of some VP at Sony, Miramax, The New Yorker, and find a poem between those side bar ads for dermatologists and divorce lawyers.  There was one about a spider that literally saved me.  It didn’t matter that is was maybe not amazing.  I had a professor once who said that poets are the mental gymnasts of the writing world, and it is that very flexibility and shape-shifting that I suppose I count on.  Polish poets in particular.

Tonight, in the apartment I’m staying in, I needed to step away from the email.  How could I ever get my head back into “story” mode? I pulled a book off the old bookshelf of old books.  (It’s a classic Upper West Side apartment that I’m staying in, owned upon a time by a very well read grandmother).

On the shelf I found Allison Hawthorne Deming.  I’d never heard of her, though it turns out she won the Whitman prize the same year I took my first poetry class.

Anyway, to me she is homey, yet light of foot.  Makes me think of the late Deborah Diggs, or Jorie Grahm, though less knowing, or Tess Gallagher, though more grounded.

I am opening her book, “Science and Other Poems” and choosing a few lines at random…

From “Saturday, J.’s Oyster Bar”

“…

Inside those houses women set tables

with linen, crystal and pears,

while I look in from the woods, think

there is the wilderness that can’t be tamed.”


And from “Dreamwork with Horses”

“…

I spent months trying to solve this dream,

conjuring the troubled adolescent

who raged through a stable stabbing out

the eyes of his passion

for the distortion of civilized love.

What waking does to the dream -

when what I wanted was to remain faithful to its clarity.”


And so, goodnight.

- Tanit

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On Your Mind: Misnomer, Unraveled

Deaton Jones, a student at Columbia University who grew up in the South, shares with us his thoughts on a recent performance by Misnomer Dance Theater. While the troupe’s name declares a cheeky skepticism towards audience members’ or critics’ attempts to interpret what they’re observing on stage, we think Deaton’s done a pretty swell—and brave—job of offering up his perspective. It’s not everyday in NYC that you come across a mind unjaded, and so we’re excited to hear more from Deaton as he explores the city and its cultural offerings with an unusually fresh and open eye.

A few days ago, I attended a performance at the Baryshnikov Arts Center by the Misnomer Dance Theater. Rather than marveling at graceful pirouettes or effortless lifts, I found myself captivated in a search for the dances’ meanings.

Modern dance is still relatively new to me, as I have only a little bit of first-hand experience in hip hop and ballroom. Interpretive in style, the Misnomer performance served as medium for storytelling. The performance reminded me of the music of band The Dirty Projectors. The Dirty Projectors are an indie/experimental rock band out of Brooklyn – they’ve been around for quite a few years now, but I only recently started exploring their music. I am often caught off guard by the group’s juxtaposition of octaves and unsuspecting use of instruments.

The Misnomer performance echoed this emphasis on juxtaposition. The abstract performance took place in a studio named after one of the greatest ballet—a type of movement considered more traditional—dancers of all time. The performers’ outfits ranged from everyday wear to full on, alien-like costume. I was often caught off guard by Misnomer’s interpretation of what constitutes “prop.” At a point in the performance, one of the dancers crawled on top of another dancer and then wrapped himself horizontally around the other dancer before shimmying his way to the floor. I would have never thought to use another person as a type of “pole” before seeing this take place.

I applaud the Misnomer Dancer Theater for promoting innovation. It was obvious that the choreographer and dancers pushed themselves to achieve a unique performance aesthetic. Audience members may not always understand, spot-on, the meaning of their performances, but they can be sure of one thing: attending a Misnomer show means bearing witness to something refreshing and unusual.

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Deaton

From: Chris Elam 
Date: Thu, January 14, 2010 5:02 pm
To: Info@NightjarCreative.com

Hi Deaton,

Thanks for attending our show and for writing your post. I don’t know if you know this, but if not, it’s ironic that you mentioned the Dirty Projectors in your post about our show. They were actually in the audience that day :)

Glad to share the art with you and appreciate your curiousity!

Chris Elam / Artistic Director / Misnomer Dance Theater www.misnomer.org Ph: 917-602-0478

Musings: Fuglosumption

Fuglosumption: the ugly duckling in brand and product consumption.

The story Ugly Duckling is a tale of seclusion and reclusion, repudiation, omission from an order, and then, after a length of suffering, acceptance by a species, post-beauty transformation.

Brands, products, and Fuglosumption:
Once ugly, always ugly: there isn’t usually a way to free an ugly product from the Hades of brand adolescence.

There are products whose ugliness can never be concealed by a brilliant, sexy advertising campaign. Crocs and Uggs, for example, are hideous. It’s not attractive to wear shoes resembling Australia’s indigenous critters.

Uggs resurfaced in the early ’00 decade. The brand’s longevity remains intact. They are a fusion of snow boot and slipper, allowing women to hop around the urban wild, attracting spots of mud and dirty snow to offset the lightly-hued brown suede. And the uncanny shape? A kangaroo’s foot.

The premiere Croc is a garden clog that is part aqueduct, part masseuse. Water filters through the holes and seeps out the heel of the shoe and back into the water table, to preclude foot fungus and pruney toes. Spikes at the foot’s base massage your feet as you move. Unfortunate popular demand has impelled the creation of other clog styles: i.e., you can now don fossilized jelly wedges or heels. And so as to not ostracize snowbirds, Crocs designed a series of garden clogs that are lined in fleece—perhaps for nitrous-oxidizing your garden, in the winter.

Fit-Flops are another beast, utilizing an enormous, chunky heel to work leg muscles whilst ambulating. The prime audience for FitFlops is the over-40 crowd. Paradoxically, Fit-Flop’s advertising campaigns feature nubile female legs—free of vices like wrinkles, cellulite or varicose veins that plague older women’s physiques. And despite the ad campaign’s attempt at sexual appeal, the shoe is still ugly, fashioned in the shape of a 1980 station wagon. At least they omitted the wood paneling.

Claiming comfort isn’t a viable excuse for ugliness—Birkenstocks are very comfortable, and they neither resemble a beer pint nor a pretzel.

Lesson learned: Make something that at least exudes an aesthetic appeal if you want it to have a long shelf life.

Beyond shoes…

Cadillac finally redesigned the physical aesthetic of its cars, yet the vehicles still look like geriatric mobiles. Non-aerodynamic, square shoe-box of a car. If driving a Cadillac is a pre-requisite to: A) driving to Florida, and; B) toting golf clubs, then they should legalize golf carts on the Interstate—simply, these cars are a fusion between a motorcycle and Smart Car (both of which are allowed on highways and interstates).

SUVs
Speaking of shoe boxes, attractive SUVs don’t exist. Even the luxury car industry hasn’t produced an attractive SUV. Hummers are simply unnecessary: driving laws don’t allow ambush via vehicle, or driving up an embankment to exit an interstate. (More golf carts, less Hummer.) More specifically, Hummers are Legos on wheels. And if people get to ride in Legos, then I want my own Taun Taun. Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, and others, all produced a line of SUVs that look like footwear for mountain climbing.

The logos and branding for these companies are lovely, and perhaps that’s what we sometimes pay for—the delusion that a trendy product embodies a brand’s integrity, when the utilitarianism is actually defunct.

Snuggies:
We already have sleeping bags, so why do you need to wear your blanket? At best, you’ll resemble a fleece-encrusted slug. The one benefit yielded by snuggie’dom is the Snuggie Sutra—the kama sutra illustrated with a snuggie.

The aesthetic of a product adds value to it. It offers the cushion of future transactions, such as collecting, refurbishing and reselling. Does anyone recall the beanie babies fad? It’s inane to think people, mostly adults, thought cheap, fleece dolls would transition to high-end, collectible commodity. I was given some as stocking stuffers and subsequently stuffed them at the bottom of my closet. The fad lasted for how long—a year or two—before it was silenced by the concomitant embarrassment of owning a collection of miniature stuffed animals.

My tone is sometimes snarky throughout this blog, but I’m generally amazed at the excessive waste flooding the consumer product market. The marketplace is cluttered with goofishly designed products, as some of the aforementioned, that are mere fads—simply, immediate waste. How many products do you purchase that you soon after realize are disposable?

Ciao, Melissa

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Spotlight

Who: Shane Lavalette

What: Photographer; Publisher/Editor of Lay Flat

Where: Somerville, MA

Makes: Hauntingly honest portrayals of everyday life in his medium of choice: the photo. A recent graduate of Tufts and The School of Museum of Fine Arts in an ambitious, combined degree program, Shane demonstrates a heightened understanding of how to encapsulate sentiment in image and a maturity beyond his years. He gives pause to life in his photos—freezing the fleeting, honoring the constant—and there’s something beautifully melancholy about his style. Perhaps it’s how very skillfully he draws attention to the tentative nature of a moment; everything he’s captured on film is, in a sense, “no longer” by the time we see it. I suppose this is a characteristic of all photos, but Shane has a certain knack for presenting his work as visual ode, or elegy, to something or someone.

To explore Shane’s work on your own, visit http://www.shanelavalette.com/. To read more about Lay Flat and reserve a copy of the publication’s upcoming edition, head on over to http://www.layflat.org/.

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- Amanda

On Your Mind - Let the Series Begin!

Nightjar loves its audience. Why? Because we’re interested in what you have to say. Like, really interested. Our content is inspired by you and made for you, so it only makes sense we look to you to tell us, well, what’s up.

We’re pleased to offer you a new edition to the blog - regular posts, by guests, on a variety of topics. Whether you’re friend or fan, or a little bit (or a lot) of both, we encourage you to send us your musings so we can share them with the whole Nightjar community. We can’t wait to hear what’s on your mind!

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Musings: Derivative of Function = Why?

Derivative:
“… the instantaneous change of one quantity with respect to another, as velocity, which is the instantaneous change of distance with respect to time.”  –dictionary.com

I just finished reading Ad Age’s article Book of Tens: Ideas of a Decade. The article is just that—ideas. It depicted some CEOs’ attempts at a digital-age Ogilvy status by engendering buzz terms that merely amount to all things obvious or mediocre, or, in the worst case, both. Lacking examples of how advertising’s stepped up to the digital plate, we’re regaled with trends in creating emotional connections between consumer and brand (yawn); the marriage of entertainment and advertising in mini soap operas (hasn’t that already occurred with product placement in movies?); word of mouth trend setting via peer to peer influence (duh); crowd sourcing—the newest buzz term to influence advertising trends; and, the worst of the bunch, consumer control, where one-way conversations with the consumer end and interactive virtual engagement begins—though the process of engaging and retaining the consumer is still a bit of a mystery.

Converse to any proof, without any substantive cited examples of how these trends moderated or influenced a digital decade and consumers’ decisions, all of this was stamped, collectively, as ‘best of the decade.’

The article’s celebrated ideas eventually blend into an intellectual puree: brown, lumpy mush pointing to one thing only—that despite all the digital outlets available out there, we still need to talk to the consumers in order to tell their stories. It’s not a novel idea, but for some reason it’s one that evades even the top minds in marketing and advertising.

If you get them to buy your product, you’ve started a relationship—the courtship has begun. Now, in order to keep the person interested, much like dating, you have to let them tell his or her story. That’s where advertising needs to grow as a medium—as storyteller, documenting why and how consumers need products to not only sustain themselves but to feel connected to a community.

My initial complaint of the movie, Avatar, was that the plot was lost in showcasing animation technology. I think advertising faces the same debacle—that if we can’t properly tell a consumer’s story, then we’ve literally shelved the brand or product as pointless object.  Humans are still very much hunters and gatherers, though now, that primate quality is relegated to seeking and accruing information more often than physical objects.

The Derivative: ideological movement or change based on provocative, new ideas.

I love that most definitions for derivative immediately point to velocity as a common derivative—being that velocity is changed distance with respect to time. Observed from my ten year stint in advertising, I’d say the excelled rate of velocity belongs to the interactive boutique agencies—whose lifespan is ten years or less. For example, companies like Big Spaceship and Huge have quickly climbed to the top of the interactive ladder by seeming to emphasize creativity’s marriage to technology, and then consummating this combination in uniquely interactive campaigns that, for the most part, serve to entertain and engage users.

Big Spaceship’s microsite “HBO Voyeur’ is an eminent example, as users clicked within different apartment windows in an NYC cityscape and then watched looped videos of generally macabre or bizarre scenarios in what looked like a bunch of animated dollhouses. There was no consumer-derived objective to the site: it subliminally branded HBO as an online innovator and a leading storyteller, and it provided users with a subtle entertainment site that could play in the background or as a screensaver. It leveraged proof that not all sites have to showcase a product or USP to either engage or entertain users.

But these are companies that, I’d surmise, first explored their creative options from an intent to become innovators rather than just service-providers. The prominent service you’re selling to clients is the creative. What hasn’t really changed is the amount of process, discussion of process, and attention to process dominating advertising agencies’ work flow. Granted, this is conjecture, but I surmise that the combined total of project managers, account people, and administrative staff out-numbers creative staff to an extreme ratio. (Perhaps for the amount of work a creative does, there’s a mountain of paper work for account people to handle: the Excel flow charts, Power Point presentations, billing invoices, etc., that, if not handled properly, could make for a very unhappy client. Who knows.)

I’ve only worked at a couple agencies that sprinkled account execs and creatives together in the same space so they could work and communicate without the onus of having to arrange constant meetings.

I haven’t seen many changes in the ad industry in the last 10 years more prominent than the materialization of more boutique and digital agencies. The monolithic dinosaur agency is still alive, but barely kicking, it seems. Also, the transition from consumer to pharmaceutical advertising seems to have plagued the 2000 decade; it was realized that pharm advertising made more money…

Americans need drugs, and apparently they see sunflowers and blue skies when taking them.

To be continued.

-Melissa

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