I’m happy to announce that I’ve finally launched a stock photo gallery. Now I don’t want you to think that I’m getting into the stock photo business cuzz I’m not. Ghetty and Corbis have that market already cornered. However, I call it that cuz I take a lot of photos. And I wanted to have a gallery where I could save them and use as a pool of creativity for me to sip from as well as serving a great number of other functions like people asking me if I can email them that random photo I took of them.
What is nice about this gallery is it will work along side this blog forever developing until my death or a fate worse. However, I have to say that it was a long internal debate as to how much I want to make this gallery public or regularly referred to. My main concern was, “do I really want everyone to have access to see photos that I’ve taken that would be considered bad from a professional photo aesthetic? I wouldn’t want to be seen as an amateur! As we all are lead to believe that a professional like Bruce Weber never shoots photos of his family that look like that of an ametuer.
This conflict is the bane of my professional existence… But this is a discussion for another blog post. But as I aspire to be a true iconoclast, I feel that trying to present myself and my work in the truest of manner is the best way to challenge the illusions that bind us to our conceptions in judgment.
I hope that you will enjoy clicking through the galleries.
I’ve hit a lull with work. Not much has been going on although there is tons to do. Recently I’ve been playing around with Facebook.com. Facebook.com is the third web based networking website that provides a networking platform and interface to link friends and associates. Friendster was the first, then Myspace and now Facebook. Facebook is today’s hype.
Now I’ve been slow in getting on the bandwagon of these cyberspace phenomena. When Friendster hit, I didn’t get it. I know I signed up with an account and had some friends on it but I never used it. So I never really explored its capabilities and what it may offer as a networking tool. It seemed a little abstract for me. I could never really see myself reaching out to strangers or friends of friends on some loose social connection.
Then Myspace hit. This caught on quickly. People seem to love the ability to customize their profile pages adding music, graphics and pictures allowing them to express how cool they are. I kind of liked this idea in theory and set up a page. However, I didn’t really feel like learning the intricacies of setting up the code to customize my page. I do that for my personal website and as you see with my blog, I am perfectly happy with using preprogrammed page themes that are limited in their aesthetic because their function takes priority. Myspace has given birth to a kind of visual anarchy that makes it difficult for me to even view friends and friends of friends’ pages. Also, I never really felt like writing on the walls of their pages and used the internal messaging functions rarely. Again it became another network tool that seemed frivolous and useless to me.
But now there is Facebook. Facebook is a network that I’m exploring more. This is because it is designed in away giving the user less choice in aesthetic but with functionality that is better suited for my purposes. In it’s function it provides a news feed that allows friends to passively promote as well as be updated with the activities of other friends in their network. For me this function is key. Now when I post a blog such as this one in which I feel does not merit a mass email to all my friends and associates, I now have a place that I can syndicate it to those in my network.
Now on another note, I was speaking to a friend of mine and he had told me that Home Land Security and the NSA where directly involved with development of Facebook. This maybe true. Remember… Big Brother is always watching!
I have a friend that is a post-grad literary student at Columbia University. She once said to me that what she loves about reading books is that it saves her from having to sit with her own thoughts. Reading was an escape from the fatigue and emotional fallout that was created by haunting thoughts about her self and her life. My experience has been different. I’ve always found it difficult to read cause I, some one, also that often is trapped in my head with a heavy interior monologue, found it difficult to read a page with out the over whelming power of my own thoughts interfering with my concentration to extrapolate what was on the page before me. But I always had this idea that I would like to fashion my self a person who is well read. And of course the only way one could do this is by reading. Also, I’ve always wanted to make films. And the foundation for most all filmmaking is a story and the written word.
In the mid 90’s I had an idea for a screenplay called “Pool Hall,” but I didn’t have the courage to write it. Growing up through my experience in school, it was brought to my parent’s attention that my reading and writing skills were very poor. I was taken aside, which felt more like being singled out, and put through process of having to meet with all sorts of professionals and take a few diagnostic tests. One test was an IQ test that included a Rorschach inkblot test. And if you have ever taken one of those, you would understand the kind of alienating experience that it could be. I thought I was retarded at the end of the whole experience. And I was left with profound feelings of inadequacy about my writing skills that haunted me through the rest of my checkered educational career. So now you could imagine the confounding barrier that I had to over come in order to succeed in actually completing a feature length screen play. But I’m not stupid and was not going to do it alone. So I enlisted the help of a person that I met on a job that quickly became a friend and his name is Drew.
Now Drew being about 10 years older and having been a post grad American lit student brought many things to the table. Beyond the discipline I had to muster up to keep up with him, he taught me many things about writing. But even more importantly, over the years he has helped me dispel the myth of my in inadequate literary skills. He’d often say, “Dylan, I don’t know why you think you can’t write. It takes just takes practice.” Or “Dylan you often like to claim that you can’t verbally express your self but you tend to be able to articulate your thoughts better than most people I speak to.” Drew over the years has become somewhat of a mentor when it comes to my issues with reading and writing. He loves books and is always willing to discuss the complexities of characters and their relation to a writer’s interest in creating them. He also will often encourage me, expressing to me how I might find the value and satisfaction in my own development in any endeavor of writing. For example, this blog.
It has been 10 years past since the completion of “Pool Hall.” And still I’m somewhat haunted by this demon that holds me back from writing the scripts that I’d want to make into films. However, recently I’ve just started and am just about completed the first draft of a short film I want to make. And I have to write what a wonderful experience that it has been. What I’ve found that I really like about writing is that it provides an alternative remedy to being trapped inside my head with thoughts and feelings of fear, failure, boredom and, loneliness. I find my self envisioning a whole world filled with characters, plots and images that are so powerful that I can be sitting with my eyes opened but lost in this dream. And the first step to share this dream is to write it. For me it seems a perfect. And now I must return to finish it.
I’ve hit a mid summer lull. This lull has not come on because of the summer. It is due to a common occurrence that has happened over and over again through my life working as a freelancer. It happens when I’m taken out of the rhythm that I have been able to create for my self when I’m not working.
When I’m not working I have to find ways to stay motivated and crank those personal gears that allow me to build momentum. If a small and short job comes along such as storyboarding a commercial I can usually sustain my initial momentum after the job. However, at the beginning of this summer I was presented with a great opportunity to run a few projects in which I art directed, consulted and did the motion graphic work for the titles of three movies. One was a small Russian film, the other two where American films. “Girl in the Park” an independent film staring Sigourney Weaver and Kate Bosworth and “Awake” which is a larger budget movie staring Hayden Christensen, Jessica Alba and Terrence Howard. I am currently doing another movie called “Tenderness” which stars Russell Crowe.
All this work hit suddenly and because it was new territory for me it was a lot of pressure. I had to acclimate my self to a new workflow and process that I’m not so accustom to. And most all the responsibility fell on me to be able to produce. It’s been a good and challenging experience and will lead to new things and I’m very excited for that. But this work is on a contract bases and when it rains it pours. But one can also find one’s self in a drought.
As of now things have really slowed down and I feel as though I have lost my momentum. I’m lost as what to do with my self and not sure where I should put this energy. And what I tend to do is let this energy knot up inside. This produces a depressed and sad feeling inside of me. Every thing starts to become an effort and my attitude starts to become despondent and my moral low. This is how I feel. However, I know and have faith in my resilience and I have to keep an objective perspective that this feeling will pass and I have tools to help. And the tool that kept coming to mind for me is this blog.
For the last two weeks I have thought about my blog. I’ve thought how I need to post another and that for so long I haven’t. I felt that I had to put up a picture or do something that seems more gallant than just words on page. I have a natural tendency to want to build things to grand and monumental proportions. Instead I end up with self-pity that I cannot live up to my own expectations. It’s horrible. But I realized that the show must go on! And words are just as important. This blog is important to me. It is a work in progress and will never be finished. So for all that may be visiting words are what I have to offer now.
Click to enlarge
This is my midyear report card of my sophomore year in high school. I cherish this relic of my past.
When recently asked why I would want to keep it? My answer was,” I’d like to show it to my kid when he is having trouble with school in his adolescents. I want to show him the proof and know that his father had trouble with school. I want him to know that his report card and experience in high school does not determine the worth of his identity and cap the value of what he will achieve in his lifetime.”
This report card for me is proof of a miracle. If you look closely at it, you will see that the common reason given for my failure is excessive absence. And this was true. I didn’t show up for school most of that whole quarter. But I didn’t fail every class. I passed one. And as the others I did not show and should of failed. Although science can rationalize it as a simple coincidence, I see it as a personal message to me by God or what ever you want to call that thing that is responsible for the cosmic order. Of all the report cards that I’ve had in my education, this one was the truest representation of me, my hope and the faith in my life, at a time when if asked, I would of denied and replied, ” If I had a button that could destroy the world, I would press it!”
On the report card the class is abriviated.
Now that studioDK is up and running it’s time for me to get back on creating the content. And if you have taken a look through the studioDK galleries you will see that I have many different projects and work in multiple mediums. This can be very difficult because when ever I’m working on something, I tend to put my full attention and focus into that particular project. So when I’m finished with a project I find that my brain is scattered and I often experience a lull that can easily turn in to a rut. I lose momentum and I can start to feel depressed. This is a bad spot for me to be in. And what I’ve found to be a good remedy for me, is to engage myself into what I call a, ”brainless activity.”
What I mean by, “brainless activity,” is an activity that is free from the burden and weight of decision-making. When we make a decision there will be always some kind of result good or bad. And when I find my self in that place out of focus and sitting in indecision, which is usually a result of fear of a bad result, I need to do something that I know will have positive results. Activities like washing the dishes and working out are great cause there is very little or no decision making in the process and the result is always positive. As an artist drawing by copying from life, photos or drawings is great activity cause it exercises an artist’s skills with very little thinking and of course no decision making in what to draw. Copying from anatomy illustrations is a great way and you be surprise what you learn by osmosis. Even this blog can be an exercise in engaging in a “Brainless Activity”
It’s been raining. And now that I have the studiodk website basically done, I can start to go back to what it’s all about. Doing things to put on the website or in this blog. This is what I do. Experiment! About a year and a half ago I decided to learn the guitar. I haven’t taking any lessons just tips from friends and I came up with this riff.
Click this…. Blues
well folks… I’m not sure. It will be an evolution. But I often find my self moving through life and experiencing all sorts of things that I’d like to share that don’t really fit into the format or have the level of aesthetic to be placed in the galleries of studiodk.org. Also the blog format is set up in a way that is much quicker to post. So I look forward to see where I take this. As with any log or journal, I find that I have to just type away before I get to the good “thangz.” So I’ll only email a post out if I feel that it’s something I think people might find interesting. I don’t want to bombard people with my daily or monthly rant. But I’ll try and archive things through the catagories best I can so that you may easily find thing you like.
