Rainy day in Vienna. Very subdued world. Muted greys.
Wandered out to do some grocery shopping. While comparing prices in the supermarket, I was thinking about code.
Why I thought am I occupied with these questions? I'd rather be thinking about poetry, planning a new dance film, visualising a new series of photography.
And it dawned on me.
The websites which are in my charge are responsible for millions of dollars of business a year directly accountable to my efforts (direct web business) and for tens of millions of dollars of business generally (referred to website).
I don't want to give the comparative figures for dance film, but let's just say the numbers are just not in the same category.
Time to push the accelerator down on the web side of the equation. There are millions at stake. I ought to and will take a more pro-active role in my clients businesses to help them monetise the online side of their business.
It might be a while before the next dance film.
In the last two weeks, Google has just gone through a very elaborate update which has seen some of my clients' sites drop dramatically and others rise to the top of some very difficult categories.
This turmoil has focused my attention very clearly on Google and things which might help with Google ranking and indexing. One of those is Google Sitemaps.
Google sitemap software Continues »
Tonight at Tanzquartier Wien, three films of Babette Mangolte were presented in the presence of the filmmaker as a coproduction with MUMOK.
The films were Water Motor (1978, 7 minutes), Glass Puzzle (1973, 17 minutes) and Four Pieces by Morris (1993, 94 minutes.
Water Motor was shot on 16mm and is easily the most interesting (and briefest) of the three works. Choreographer Trisha Brown executes a beautifully self-involved solo. It is only two minutes long. Immediately afterwards we see the same solo but in slow motion. Very high quality slow motion. The trick was that Mangolte shot the piece at 48 frames per second, so the first half at real speed was actually accelerated.
Unfortunately beyond the change of speed there is absolutely nothing engaging or original about the camerawork. We are at a middle distance from Trisha Brown who is on a very drab stage. All her limbs are fully visible all the time. In praise of the work, we have a clear view of the choreography and dancing. As documentation this is excellent. As filmmaking, it is dull as dishwater. A work of art it simply is not. But I was happy to see Trisha Brown's own dancing after having seen some of her work at Opéra de Paris and again at Impulstanz.
The next Glass Puzzle was very experimental with enormous closeups of dancer's faces with pendulums swinging in front of their eyes. Originally shot on video in the dark ages of the format (early 70's), the image doesn't have much texture.
Imagistic shots of pelvises, superimpositions, Glass Puzzle is totally different from Water Motor and Four Pieces by Morris. The answer to the mystery is that Babette Mangolte was charged only with camera and direction was in the hands of one of choreographer and dancer Joan Jonas. She and Lois Lane give enigmatic performances in this elliptical work.
Four Pieces by Morris is exactly that. Four pieces by sculptor Morris. I had somehow thought that the four pieces would be by Mark Morris so I was attending more. Robert Morris is an extremely ascetic creator whose structural compositions have less to do with the theatre and more to do with installation. We have a workman moving white boards back and forth across a stage finally revealing a female nude reclining on a couch behind the last one. The woman does not move, the workman does not notice her. Nothing happens. The sonic backdrop is an intense recording of street sounds and construction which was distracting and irritating to my ear but was supposed to serve to "heighten the presence of the performer".
Each one was more tedious than the next, with perhaps the exception of the lecture on perception in the third piece.
There were some closeups inserted - the workman playing with his gloves, the lecturer taking his enormous spectacles on and off - but more or less Four Pieces is in the same style as Glass Puzzle. That is to say, the camera observer. We just watch these stage pieces happen. The camera tracks back and forth the considerable horizontal movement of props in the first and fourth piece.
Again as documentation this is perfectly adequate. If one is a Robert Morris fan or were making a study of conceptual stage art of the period one would be very pleased with the work. But as a dance filmmaker, I find this kind it quite depressing. Engage movement, engage the camera.
In dance terms, Robert Morris's own preoccupations according to Babette Mangolte were "casual movement and untrained bodies" which she quite correctly notes are subjects of considerable interest to some of today's choreographers. A recurring vice among choreographers who are unwilling to face the unlimited challenge of trained, able and talented dancers.
This sort of work fits in well with the Vienna non-event school of dance on the ascendent now.
Babette Mangolte's dedication in recreating these mid-sixties stageworks to make a dance film of them in the nineties is astonishing.
ANECDOTAL
For some reason some guy in a long leather coat chose to intervene three or four times during the screening. He stood in the bottom right hand corner of the screen and made small hand gestures and struck strange poses to the bemusement of all. Finally Babette Mangolte rose from the auditorium and accosted him - "I can't allow you to do that, it is not respectful of Bob Morris's work" - before he was led away by Sigrid Gareis, artistic director of the Tanzquartier.
In something that could happen only in Austria, this same gentleman in his Cheka overcoat was lounging at the Tanzquartier bar enjoying a glass of red wine and an animated conversation with an attractive patron of the arts.
Is this laid-back attitude a good thing or a bad thing? Probably a good thing. I'm still wonder about his movtivation. I wish I'd asked him.
The conditions of projection were excellent with a very bright and large screen setup within the main dance studio with audio running out to a well setup sound system.
Just when you thought the web was a commercial mess, full of cloned ad-sense sites and flash-laden password protected media sites, along comes something really useful.
The world's largest how-to manual is being written online.
People write in their how-to tips and then others follow to rate the tips.
What was my issue? I bought a refurbished IBM T22 Thinkpad for my web business - it is in good shape but came with a bunch of adhesive stickers on the top of the lid. I was sick of looking at the stickers and decided to pull them off. Nasty adhesive underneath.
Wouldn't come off. Did a search on google for removing glue from tape. Found ehow in two offerings - how to remove bumper stickers and how to remove adhesive bandages. The bumper sticker article kept suggesting stuff I didn't have (weird solvent removers) or didn't want to use on my laptop (nail polish remover). On the other hand the adhesive bandage article offered baby oil (alternative olive oil). Olive oil I did have.
Worked perfectly. Afterwards a light soap and water wash and the Thinkpad looks like new.
Their article on removing calcium buildup from kettles looks good as well.
I will definitely be using this tips database in the future.
The genius is in the ratings system - bad suggestions get marked down and good ones up.
This place is not normally a home to pop psychology of any kind or any kind of motivational coaching. But I do have to say that the latest newsletter from Tom Venuto at Fitness Renaissance had some wonderful gems. The classic comes from Napoleon (I'd like to see the French for this one) apparently in 1769:
Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.
Some reflections on the possible from Vic Johnson picked me up a bit:
William James, the great psychologist and writer of the early twentieth century, said, “Belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that will guarantee the success of any venture.”....
One of the best known stories about the power of belief is about Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in under four minutes. Before his accomplishment it was generally believed that the human body was incapable of such a feat. Bannister, who was a medical student, held another belief, however. “Fueled by my faith in my training, I will overcome all obstacles. I am brave! I am not afraid to face anyone on the track. I believe this is not a dream. It is my reality."
As soon as he broke the barrier, belief about the feat changed and his record only lasted 46 days. Within two years more than fifty people also ran a sub-four-minute mile.... What happened in 1954 that hadn’t happened in the previous 6,000 years of humankind that allowed Bannister to achieve this? Did the human body change so that this could be done? No. But the human belief system did!
As a college student, George Danzig studied very hard and always late into the night. So late that he overslept one morning, arriving 20 minutes late for class. He quickly copied the two math problems on the board, assuming they were the homework assignment. It took him several days to work through the two problems but finally he had a breakthrough and dropped the homework on the professor's desk the next day.
Later, on a Sunday morning, George was awakened at 6 a.m. by his excited professor. Since George was late for class, he hadn't heard the professor announce that the two unsolvable equations on the board were mathematical mind teasers that even Einstein hadn't been able to answer. But George Dantzig, BELIEVING that he was working on just ordinary homework problems, had solved not one, but two problems that had stumped mathematicians for thousands of years.
How many great things could you achieve if you just "believed" they were as easy as they really are?
I went to look at taking some more German courses today - after losing my German for two weeks after my Spanish trip - it seems to have come back. My results would place me between level 3 and level 4 classes - with the choice of which to take totally up to me. It appears that even German is within reach with a stretch.
Tom Venuto's own editorial has a wonderful story from his own life about being hampered by excuses:
Many years ago when I had just started college, my friend and workout partner, Steve, had decided to take the plunge into competitive bodybuilding.
I had already been training for five years (I started when I was only 14), and I wanted to compete too. I talked about it all the time, but I was making all kinds of excuses for why I couldn’t do it. Such as:
I had a small business to focus on, I had a girlfriend and social life, I was in college taking five classes, I didn't have enough muscle mass yet (had to train a few more years to get bigger), I had recently injured my back, etc, etc. (believe me, I had a LOT of excuses!)
WELL… Steve went on to compete and at the age of 19, he won his first competition: the Teenage Natural Mr. America title. I didn't compete because I was too busy making excuses.
You should have seen him - he looked AWESOME! I had never met anyone who had developed a body like that at such a young age. And he did it 100% naturally (absolutely NO steroids!)
As you can probably guess, that was the single spark that lit a motivational bonfire under my butt!
But it wasn’t just the fact that Steve competed and won that motivated me. It was the fact that he had all of the same obstacles that I did, (and then some), yet he didn't let that stop him. He overcame, competed and won, and that's what “blasted" my own excuses out of the water.
Steve was in college too; except he had six courses, compared to my five.
On top of his full academic schedule, he also had a part time job as a foreman/manager at a textile factory.
He had also recently gotten married and although he didn’t have kids yet, but he did have three dogs to look after!
Steve even had a bad knee from a high school football injury which required surgery and forced him to drop off the varsity team. Even that didn’t stop him. He trained around it.
So what was MY excuse now?
Back to work! There is much to be done.
I am so happy to be back in my beloved Vienna - the most beautiful and charming of all cities in the world, if often old world and occasionally austere - and life begins again.