Charlie Parr in Minneapolis this morning

Amidst such a perfect backdrop for his sound, the morning flew by listening to him sing and play his National down there along the river while we did our three-camera shoot. He has a new album out soon, too, so keep an eye peeled for it.

I’ll be sure to post the final edit here but, meanwhile, please enjoy this clip taken in ‘09 while Charlie played Cheap Wine at the Victoria Pub in Birmingham, UK:

This past Christmas, we gave our niece a pass to come visit us in the city for a week this summer. So, for the next few days, Pip will be junkin’ out on all the good chillin’ Lofto Relaxo has to offer:

there was no magic moment when meta and frankie hula met they just became sisters:

pups chillin @ lofto

This one Bergey and I made together:

Bergey made some things that inspired me to start tinkering with stills digitally and call it pixeliering, which is a meager attempt at adding an element of painting to digital images:

Click on that first image right there to see before and after examples larger and more in charger:

This is cool and I like the way the digital mixes together with the analog. These are very time consuming to make so I only have a few of them to show but this is one of my favorites, so far:

(1879-1953)

This is just the fat trimmed off a project I’m working on: a multimedia installation about people asleep in public spaces called, appropriately, “Asleep”:

Some think content will keep getting longer and longer until movies are 3 and 4 hours long. That’s fine. OK with us. We also like the idea of not spending 3 or 4 hours to get something out of it.

Like music, there is a time and place for a long song and a short one. We like them both. We do listen to waaay more short songs than long ones, though. This is the reason we love still images more than films. If our house was on fire and we had to save still images or films, we would have to save the stills. We know. Sounds surprising! We work in motion but, like most of our favorite filmmakers, we think in stills. Moments. In a moment, a still image can change our lives. Films take a little longer.

Which is one reason we created and curate 10secondfilms.org. In 10 moments, a film can pack quite a wallop. Some maybe not so much, but are still worthy as friendly exercises in media literacy.

Howard Rheingold called this site “genius, funny, and yes, friendly expression of participation media literacy” via his Twitter account.

Gever Tulley also commented on it using the most appropriate phrase ever: “oddly compelling” – also via Twitter.

Compliments coming from fellas like these make us feel pretty darn swell, to say the least. Thank you, Gever and Howard. You both have our most humble admiration and deepest respect.

This is all just to say that we believe the experience of producing media should be a friendly one for all ages, especially as technology can still be an obstacle to the creative process for many of us. As an exercise in media and visual literacies, the 10-second format is vital. It minimizes the need for complex tools. These moments as movies are gratifying and occasionally inspire larger, more ambitious projects.

Make a 10 second film with any device that captures motion pictures.

No editing — One take — 10 seconds maximum length — Sound is optional.

Have a 10 second film you like?

We’d love to hear about it and perhaps even feature it on the site – click here to tell us more.

Meanwhile, thanks for reading and — keep playing.

One thing keeps coming into my mind now that I’ve been back in Spain from Senegal for a couple of weeks: grace and generosity are a completely different sport there, as shown to us by our hosts. It was astonishingly unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. Anywhere.

Generosity is the habit of giving freely without coercion, which leads my mind to something else: while there, our hosts would typically and immediately describe to us their need, listing specifics in some cases, leaving no margin for egotism or hidden agendas. They relinquished any such notions, admitting freely that they needed our help and welcomed us wholeheartedly into their intimate communities. The best part of this is: this freed us all up to then enjoy each others company in earnest, having gotten the “business” of expectations quickly out of the way.

In the developed world, it’s all about the poker face, which I wonder what the effect of is, exactly, over time to the way we relate to each other.

Once past the meeting stage, the graciousness displayed by all of our hosts was unrivaled. Truly. Letting a complete stranger into their home to film them: me and my camera shooting the poverty surrounding them and yet also how little it seems to matter to their general satisfaction with their lives. The people of Keur Mbaye Fall need little to make them happy. In contrast, I worked hard not to project my own guilt about taking so much for granted in my own life, for having problems that aren’t really problems at all outside of the traps my Western mind sets for itself for seemingly no reason at all.

One example of what I mean is worth relating here: after one particularly long and hot work day, one of the community leaders invited a few of us to his home to wash our hands and faces. Upon entering, I felt a most peculiar feeling come over me. It felt familiar. Deja vu. Familiar as if from an early childhood memory, from a room in my mind that had had its door shut a long time ago, only to have it opened on this day. It certainly could have been the heat, however, I choose to believe there was much more to it than that.

Upon preparing to leave his home and return to our team and the shuttle that would return us to the compound where we were staying, he offered us the most unlikely of things: from a freezer (photo below) he removed four small, plastic baggies, twisted in half with an orange-ish substance in them. As soon as he placed one in my hand (it was cold, frozen) my entire body shuddered from the shock of it – pleasantly. I was stunned. Here was a man who had exponentially less than any of us could ever imagine, sharing something of a most exquisite nature with us, something not just anyone could acquire in this place. Something that surely took him a great deal of trouble to finagle into his own life for his own family and here he was, sharing it freely as if it were no trouble at all.

As we left the shady comfort of his home, we bit off a corner of our baggies and began manipulating the frozen stuff out through the hole using our lips to smash it gently without further tearing the baggy. It tasted not unlike a Push-Up, yet another childhood memory that I couldn’t have known would be connected to this day. I dawdled along behind the others, savoring it, wondering whatever had I done to deserve such an amazing experience and this selfless and so very fine a gift from a man of such simple means. Right then and there I stopped in the middle of the road and stood, humbled, with a cool and soothing ice cream in the harsh desert climate of Africa.

These were the words spoken by one of my young, student directors as she attempted to motivate her 3rd grade counterparts appropriately during one of our practice shoots: