"People haven't gotten really mad--that annoys me."

In an effort to improve blogging sustainability, I continue to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Last week, BSC's assistant director of alumni relations sent a query email re: what faculty are reading this summer. Here's the skinny....

ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac....I'm mentoring Mike Gálvez's ATP grant project, which is to make a documentary film while driving across the USA. Kerouac grew up in Lowell, and this classic captures some of the crazy maddening bliss of an extended road trip...We're reading all of these books together, and then talk about them on iChat (me on the Cape, him on the Road)...

DEKALOG 1: ON 'THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS' edited by Mette Hjort.... Mike's film springboards off of THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (2003), a superb collaboration between two Danish directors: Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier--von Trier sets up a series of "obstructions" to push Leth forward as a filmmaker and as a human being. This thoughtful collection makes us go back to the film again and again...

DOGME UNCUT: LARS VON TRIER, THOMAS VINTERBERG, AND THE GANG THAT TOOK ON HOLLYWOOD by Jack Stevenson....Lars von Trier was principal instigator behind the Dogme95 film movement whose attempts to jump-start creativity through constraint quickly translated beyond Denmark and into something of a global contra-Hollywood strategy. Nothing says "student filmmaking" quite as succinctly as "creativity through constraint," right?...

LARS VON TRIER: INTERVIEWS edited by Jan Lumholdt....This collection allows us to see von Trier wrestling with ways to attack film form and style in thoughtful and direct ways. Sample banter: "Q. What are your comments on the reactions [your thesis film] has brought? A: Well, they've hardly been good enough, because people haven't gotten really mad. That annoys me. But we'll just have to hope that that happens a little later."...

~bpi

On The Road...online

One of my projects this summer is mentoring my student Mike Gálvez, who won an ATP research grant to make a series of short documentaries whilst on the Great American Road Trip with his buddy Trevor. One of the books we're reading this summer as part of his foundational research is Jack Kerouac's On the Road. And this time through, as I read this at HOME in my HOUSE that looks over a GOLF COURSE (what would JK say?!), I find myself using the Internet to make the book more of a hypertext: MySpace pulls up tracks like Charlie Parker's "Orinthology" (1946); Google Maps bring up towns like Ogallala, NE in an instant.
So now I just need to find the origins of the phrase "Pisscall!" on Wikipedia...
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