Jordan Swartz- The Rad Times #4

I recently went to a short film night where they played five films. The longest of the five was also objectively the worst; a lack of narrative, bad acting, inconsistent cinematography, poor sound mixing, etc. As the credits rolled my immediate thought was that not all art needs to be seen, that that film shouldn’t have been played that night.
A couple days later while rewatching Studio 60 (speaking of great art) the producers run a sketch by two writers knowing that it is going to bomb, but that’s the point. The producers need the writers to feel that there are stakes. The whole time I was thinking about this film I had seen a few nights prior, the director potentially sitting in a reclining chair feeling the air being sucked from the room, watching their movie bomb in real time. I have learned way more from brutal critiques than I ever did from glowing reviews. It’s not that certain types of art shouldn’t be shown, it’s that art should be shown within a context. Share what you’ve made with the world and learn from that, carry it with you to whatever you do next.

Thanks for hanging!
Be good to each other.

In 1994, with the underground right on the edge of pop culture, Sofia Coppola with Zoe Cassevetes (another child of film royalty) turned the camera on their own lives and gave us a peak behind the curtain. Bi coastal and brimming with their famous friends, it’s a high energy, frenetic time capsule of a pre social media and pre youtube era. In just three episodes they feature Martin Scorsese and Gus Van Sant, Debbie Harry, Keanu Reeves, and Nic Cage, the Beastie Boys make an appearance as the cops from “Sabotage,” Thurston Moore interviews Anna Wintour and Joey Ramone, and a pre Kids Chloë Sevigny makes an appearance in a runway show for Kim Gordon’s fashion line.

For something I was never especially good at it’s amazing how much skating has influenced my life. It was one of my earliest forms of expression when I had nothing else, it also opened me to the worlds of art, design, and music. I learned photography from studying the pages of magazines and film techniques from watching skate videos over and over (go watch Welcome To Hell and Yeah Right!) The sentiment of this video is one that has stuck with me as well, even if never outright stated. The idea that sometimes just trying the thing is enough. There’s an old line I found years ago that has been a guiding life principal and of a similar ilk; “Maybe it won’t work out. But maybe seeing if it does will be the best adventure yet.”

I never realize how much of a sailors mouth I have until I’m around kids, it’s just part of my vocabulary. I guess you learn to curtail it once you have children. Chris Gethard (who had his own TV show and one of my favorite episodes of tv ever.) delivers this perfectly from the very start, with the rabbit hole growing in real time.

There’s a little sliver of time between old Hollywood and the New Hollywood scene of the ‘70s. With the old school studio system collapsing and a fraught social climate, a group of films emerged that depicted mental illness, psychological collapse, violence, and challenged masculinity of the times, while opening the door for the experimentation that would come with New American Cinema. Two of my favorites from this time are In Cold Blood and The Manchurian Candidate.

A bunch of new collages as well as some stickers have been added to my store. Keep an eye as some fresh paintings will be going in this week!t