Must See Documentary: The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

I've just watched the recent, riveting documentary The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz on the visionary programmer and political activist who died by his own hand last year after inordinate persecution by the US government. The film is by turns inspiring, frustrating, engaging, and deeply saddening. It's significant to mention both that it will be screened at this year's upcoming New Zealand Film Festival and that the Creative Commons version of the film is freely available for streaming and downloading from the Internet Archive. A must watch for anyone interested in the pursuit of civil liberties, social justice, the freedom of information, and technical innovation.

Tim Burton's Short Films from the 1980s

Here are three of director Tim Burton's earliest (and best) short films from the 1980s: Vincent, Frankenweenie, and Hansel and Gretel. Enjoy!

Frankenweenie es un mediometraje de unos 35 minutos de duración, filmado en blanco y negro y dirigido por Tim Burton en el año 1984, cuya historia parodia la novela Frankenstein de Mary Shelley.

AT LAST!! For you obscure media fans, here is one of legendary filmmaker Tim Burton's early efforts in collaboration with The Disney Channel that aired only once on Halloween night in 1983. This is Burton's unique, twisted, Burtonesque version of the classic Grimm Fairy Tale featuring an all Asian cast.

Opening of Hito Steyerl video exhibition at Adam Art Gallery

Please join Christina Barton, Sophie Jerram and me at 5.30pm on Friday 4 July at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi for a special screening and discussion to launch the second in the RELOAD │Kirk Gallery Series 2014:

Hito Steyerl
Is a Museum a Battlefield?
4 July – 10 August

Refreshments will be served.

For full details of the public programme associated with the RELOAD series and Kim Pieters’ exhibition, what is a life? visit www.adamartgallery.org.nz

From "Boom": Author Rebecca Solnit on SF's Gentrification

From Boom: A Journal of California, an interview with the author Rebecca Solnit on the troubling changes in San Francisco's public sphere, as the city becomes home to the largest tech corporations and its longtime local residents, artistic culture, and affordable lifestyle fall by the wayside. As Solnit comments (in this unsettling but terrific discussion):

"You think of so many individual people who have been absolutely amazing and done wonderful things. And I don’t see that in the new San Francisco, where it just costs so damn much to live here, you either have to have a trust fund or be working really hard at making money. You can’t be doing what people have been doing in my tenure in San Francisco, which is to do something part time for a living, but do for free with no expectation of return what you’re passionate about, whether it’s human rights or environmentalism or painting or poetry or scholarship. That scope to be poor and idealistic no longer exists, and it was those poor idealistic people that made the great culture of San Francisco. They are portrayed as slackers in the mainstream conversation, and there have always been slackers, but also people working on AIDS issues, on environmental justice, on human rights, on after-school programs for at-risk kids, and not getting rich at it." 

A must read.

Teju Cole's novel "Every Day is for the Thief"

I’ve just finished reading Teju Cole’s novel Every Day is for the Thief, which was originally published in Nigeria in 2007 but has been republished by Random House in the wake of his second novel Open City’s tremendous success. Cole, born in the US and raised in Nigeria, writes in this short autobiographical work of returning on visits to Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city. Over the course of the book, Cole’s flaneur-like wanderings touch upon: the state of jazz record and book shops, public transportation, internet scamming, reencountering a first love, power failures, malaria, crime and corruption, religion, and the attempt to read the cultural signs of a country he is both geographically and temporally separated from, but nonetheless closely identifies with. Interspersed throughout the novel are photographs taken by the author. I missed Cole’s visit to New Zealand a couple of years back, but read Open City around that time, which I’m keen to reread. Cole is an active presence on Twitter also and has been offering energetic, aphoristic dispatches on the World Cup lately. For more you can check out Cole’s website and a recent interview from the Guardian.

Gary Lutz on the art of writing...

As I am employed to “teach writing,” no, let’s scratch that and try again, “teach artists to write,” no that’s crap too, perhaps “work with art students on their writing”, yeah that’s probably more to the point, I thought I would post this talk/essay by the great (and hideously under-acknowledged) writer Gary Lutz, published in The Believer magazine awhile back. I mean what a great opening: “I came to language only late and only peculiarly. I grew up in a household where the only books were the telephone book and some coloring books….” He goes on to get into the really dense and confounding heart of matter, in a variety of eloquent and insightful ways: “The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language.” Whew! If you are up for it, do please give this remarkable essay a go…

Artists Kemi, Niko & Co. and Olivia Webb on Radio New Zealand this Sunday!

Artists Kemi and Niko and Olivia Webb will be featured on Radio New Zealand's Sunday afternoon arts program Standing Room Only tomorrow. Kemi and Niko are a collaborative art and design duo who create fanciful alterations to the everyday in my local Wellington suburb (among other projects), and Olivia Webb has started the Voices Project in which she has recorded the rehearsals of "community choirs" in Christchurch and creates sound installations. For more information on the program, check out the weblisting here.

Tricks n' Treats exhibition and Hitchcock screening at the Film Archive

Last night went to the opening of the new exhibition Tricks n' Treats curated by Gareth Watkins at the Film Archive. In conjunction with the exhibition which features a staggering amount of fascinating footage from the Archive's collection (and a new mirror ball in the media gallery!) Watkins chose to screen the recently restored film The White Shadow from 1924 directed by the now little-known Graham Cutts, but assisted by the now-legendary Alfred Hitchock. It's a slight, but extremely entertaining film along the rather Victorian theme of the "fallen woman," in this particular case a twin who escapes upper-class England for the bohemian nightclubs of Paris. MIstaken identities and all kinds of mischief ensue! If this tempts, see the link below to the film (unfortunately part of the nitrate original was lost, but what has been restored is pretty gorgeous.)

Notes: The earliest surviving Alfred Hitchcock film. Thought to be lost until it was discovered in 2011. Based on the novel Children of Chance by Michael Morton Directed by Graham Cutts Alfred Hitchcock (uncredited) Produced by Michael Balcon Victor Saville Written by Graham Cutts Alfred Hitchcock (uncredited) Michael Morton (play) Starring Betty Compson Clive Brook Henry Victor A.