TIGERCHIEF

BETA Video + Instructions for YMCA-RGE Video

Breathe. A full day at the World YMCA office in Geneva ends today with a little environmental psychedelia (courtesy of the band deerhunter and some boke).

This video is intended to provide a general idea of the final version of a video that YMCA’s all over the world are invited to participate in. 

Each YMCA that would like to submit their own video need ONLY to send a video of the highest quality, imitating the section from second 28 to 29 (your version can be up to 5 seconds long). The sequence should only include an uncut image of a YMCA participant scrunching up a piece of paper and throwing it directly at the camera.

Follow the [forthcoming] instructions closely to film the video and submit it either through youtube, via email, or through dropbox, and then send the link to teamrge@ymca.int

Thank you to Matheus Medeiros (@_Dynamite) for providing his cheesy face to this wonky 2 second production.

It’s another day at the YMCA, cadets.  Baboom. The image and the people dance again.

Hurricane Sandy—Irene’s meaner, badder, and considerably huger sister—€”makes us remember a time over a year ago when our New Jersey apartment became an island-beach house residence overnight. If you are our friend and you are on the east coast you are probably on our mind right now. Yes…you. Take care and remember: there is no such thing as over-preparing. [Technical note: This video was filmed right after Hurricane Irene washed through Princeton by holding my little white macbook open and using the laptop camera.]

Genève Jour 1

-“Fly gold, from the heaven to pavement”

-Simulacra & simulation: dream-making through the gaze in Genève. Beauty must be meaningful. 

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(OS) Jour 1: Silence is perhaps more Real than the desire to communicate. La resistancia ante lo categórico de la mirada. 

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-“Simmer down, simmer down, now” 

-¿Pero donde está nuestro continente? ¿Y alguién muéstreme, por favor,  el sitio sesgado de lo grotesco? 

-“La peal sur la peau.”

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-“Ce qui est politique?” 

-“Vivimos de Europa. Su pensar y su sentir nos encantan. Acodados en el puerto, de espaldas al país, esperamos la última palabra de los pensadores, literatos y artistas de ultramar con impaciencia de novios. Sin fe en nosotros mismos, sin esperanzas en nuestro esfuerzo, estamos alimentando uno de los grandes factores de nuestra esterilidad. Hace cuatrocientos años que nos vienen de Europa las escuelas musicales, que imitamos, las normas teóricas, que seguimos, y los métodos de trabajo, que aceptamos sin discusión; nos movemos de acuerdo con la flecha de sus veletas.” (Carlos Vega, Fraseología.)

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-“Walls simmering, the air, simmering” (Mos Def).

-Untangle, unmangle, take a sip.

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(OS) “Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.” (Jean-Luc Godard)

-TIGERCHIEF

EDITOR’S NOTE: The big square in the middle was added after the small video was cut to protect the identity of individuals who expressed their desire not to be shown in the video. 

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Commit to the image for the duration of the video. Watch it in full size if you can.

2. Do not allow the external world to move you away but do play with whatever memory/thought is evoked. Juggle them along with the light and the sound.

3. Remember all things.

………..

This camera washed ashore on an unknown beach in northern NJ. Presumably it was lost by the boys sitting on the surfboards. The evocative musical piece, “Les Étoiles Secrètes” was composed by Vincent Calianno, and it was performed—perhaps found, as well—by Andy Miller and Melissa Vargas in Bogota, Colombia. What remains is a readymade face that recalls Truffaut and his 400 blows. And it remembers a time when youth was allowed to roam the geometry of Eden; when labor was not a curse and naivete not as dangerous. And it understood memory as a place where there was no authority to temper the relentless sense of potential dancing drunkenly on the horizon.

Many thanks to the performers at the CCMC (Circulo Colombiano de Musica Contemporanea) in Bogotá for this composition. Get excited for an upcoming project featuring these young composers in a documentary about the contemporary music scene in Bogotá, Colombia. Filming will begin in March 2012 by Macondo Films.

-TIGERCHIEF

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s sensitivity to discontinuity led him to end many therapy sessions short without any advanced warning, most often jarringly in the middle of an important word or phrase. He relied on what is known as the Zeigarnik effect— in which “interrupted activities produce more associate materials than completed ones” —to allow the real of the unconscious to gush past the “cohesive” but distorted narratives that we may want to tell ourselves about the past.

May these jarring, color-soaked images propel your own imagination and memory as you move into 2012. May this movement be a mirror to your own parallel experiences and sensations (as LA-based composer and friend Jonathan Byram put it) as you look back to honor and express neural pathways created, destroyed, and enforced throughout 2011.

We are certainly grateful for ours.

-TIGERCHIEF

Mike Pechter, aka Snagwing, is a playful man.

He enters a space like a kitten on a yarn ball, and fills it with the reds, blues, and yellows of music-making. However hard it is to convey these things in filmic form it is the ashy residue of these live sessions that crosses over like shadows in a cave. One could imagine “Music Box”—the piece shown here— as a widowed grandmother’s resilience walking the streets of a Latinamerican metropolis. It means talking to the weathered beggar on the corner, god knows how old he is, and the man who sells spinach fetuccini at the grocery store. Lick the loneliness off each other’s wounds, please. Light steps, heavy steps, easy dancing, a primordial waltz, a spin with death, a flirting with God, and a sad kiss on the lips of a grandchild who someday too will start this cycle all over again. This is one such music box.

Check out more of Mike’s music at http://snagwing.bandcamp.com/

-TIGERCHIEF

Poetry seems to be just within our grasp. Most of the times it eludes us because it lacks a distinct body; we are titillated by its shadows and light, and we are kind enough to turn towards it. Perhaps, a poet can turn what used to be chance into a willful gesture—a positioning towards a certain kind of light.

-TIGERCHIEF