My idea of documentaries as a child were the animal documentaries I would catch a glimpse of while flipping through channels looking for cartoons. I say “catch a glimpse” because I would never stay on those channels for too long; as interesting as the animal kingdom can be, I was never truly drawn to the abundance of slow motion shots of bears catching their prey and the ominous “voice of God” narration.

My childhood bias gave me a skewed view of what documentaries were, or what they could be. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point, I realized that there could be more to it than I expected. Now that I’ve gone on the journey to make one, I am almost overwhelmed with the amount of possibilities available to me to tell my story in an inventive, visually-stimulating and compelling way. The UnionDocs Collaborative is one of the places where all those options are being explored, currently through the Los Sures project, which you can hear more about in the interview below; hopefully, that will help more people have the little epiphany I had and awaken them to documentary art.

You can find out more about specific documentary art techniques at their next event, “Everything You Want To Know About Transmedia Storytelling But Are Afraid To Ask,” this Sunday, January 29th at 4:00pm. You’ll get to hear from designer Takaaki Okada (ConditionONE), game designer Nick Fortugno (Diner Dash), new media strategist Brian Newman (sub-genre), filmmakers Amam Ali and Bassam Tariq (30 Mosques), who will be in conversation with producer and strategist John Bruce (Forward Mapworks).

For more information about UnionDocs as a whole, how you can help support them (through your work or donations), you can visit their website, www.uniondocs.org.

It’s fair to say that I like my work at Citywide to make connections and parallels to my own personal projects; in a way, I figure, if this is helpful and interesting to me, there must also be a link to be made by the listeners as well. I’ve been paying more attention to documentary films and the techniques they use in the last few months because I am working on my own documentary project about student debt so once I stumbled on the UnionDocs website, Christopher Allen, Steve Holmgren and Andre Almeida seemed like the perfect people for me to go to for a good interview about a genre that’s undergoing a huge transition/transformation right now and maybe at the same time a little guidance for places I should look to in order for my own project to be the best it can be.

The result: I have the equivalent of two interviews and the definite confirmation that I don’t need to (and really shouldn’t) feel restrained by the facts in my project and have plenty of room to be creative with my storytelling, even if my thesis is being completed for my journalism degree. Overall, scheduling these shows was a successful decision.

For more information on UnionDocs, visit their website, www.uniondocs.org, to read more about all the events you can attend. The next screening happening at UnionDocs will be in honor of the release of a book by editors Devin and Marsha Orgeron and Dan Streible, Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States. By video conference, they will introduce a sampling of 16mm prints from the golden age of educational filmmaking. Dan Streible will be in attendance for discussion. This is all taking place this Saturday, January 21st, at 7:30 pm.

Christopher, Steve and Andre will continue guiding us through the work that goes into compelling documentary art during next week’s show so tune back in next Wednesday at 7:30 pm.

You were wearing an average office suit with an admirably messy haircut. I was the girl with brown curly hair and a blouse with horses on it. We did that awkward back-and-forth shuffle of two strangers trying to pass each other on the street; then you grabbed me and gently swirled me in a mini waltz in the middle of the lunchtime shoppers and angry passersby. I would understand that moment if it happened now – two people sharing a delicate second in a day that hadn't gone to plan. But no, when it happened I was in my awkward early-twenties, so I just frowned, trudged away and hoped no one had noticed. Thanks for making my day.

It only took a few weeks of me moving to New York over three years ago to find out about Craigslist’s famous Missed Connections and subsequently secretly wish I might catch someone’s eye on a random train ride. If it ever happened though, I never knew, I didn’t check the personals enough to know. Still, love at first sight remains in the back of many of our minds as the ideal way to find a significant other. Sophie Blackall first started illustrating the hopeful ads on her blog, Missed Connections, and its success was so big, it’s now a book, Missed Connections, Love Lost & Found. How ironic that in a place with a no-nonsense reputation like New York, we’d be such suckers for sentimentality? Not that romanticism makes no sense, but it’s the exact opposite of the precision of the city’s cherished grid system and individualistic mentality. Blackall’s whimsical take on the Craigslist ads paints a more idealistic light on New Yorkers and their needs of the heart.

New York’s reputation is often defined around the world because of the famous line, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” We usually understand it to be referring to professional success. But could our compulsion to post (and live vicariously through missed connections) exist because we believe that if we manage to find love in the huge maze that is New York, we might have hit a bigger jackpot?

Taken inside WNYU, courtesy of Talia Kazarian @ WSN

I can’t believe 2011 is already ending. I know that’s what everyone says whenever a year ends, but I think the speed of time has hit me harder this year because the stakes at the end of the day are higher: now, I’m half-way through my senior year, meaning that I’m only a few short months away from having to start a real job search and being a financially responsible adult in a market that doesn’t seem to really be able to take me in at the moment. I’ve never been too scared of time passing but the closer I get to reaching that end-of-college milestone, the more reasons I find to freak out.

So it was nice to take some time to look at the year past and remember the new things I learned, the awesome people I met and the great conversations we had, which may all start with art, but all end up touching upon other seemingly distant subjects and social issues. As the fatigue of this hectic semester finally starts taking its toll on my body and energy, this exercise was a nice reminder that I better continue making the most of the months ahead of me.

To a wonderful new year!

For these interviews in full, you can click here, here, here and here! But, we have many many more shows for you to listen to if you search around the blog…

From very early videos of him dancing as a child in the USSR, to his dancing duet with Gregory Hines in White Nights, his performance in Roland Petit’s Carmen, or even just by looking at his handsome face in his old yearbook, his magnetism radiates through the various screens and vitrines of the exhibit.

I realize that I sound like a little fan girl, but I’m not the only one who’s excited about him and his talent. Take a listen to the conversation I had with Jan Schmidt, the curator of the dance division, after I met with Kate Stober, a press representative of the New York Public Library.

You can visit the this delightful little archival preview at the Library for the Performing Arts, the NYPL branch located at Lincoln Center, until December 20th. After that, they’ll be getting processed and entered into the collection over a few years. For more information on the library and when to see the exhibit, visit the branch’s website, www.nypl.org/locations/lpa/jerome-robbins-dance-division.

And for your viewing pleasure, the man at work with Zizi Jeanmaire, dancing Carmen:

Jen Bervin, The Composite Marks of Fascicle 28. Cotton and silk thread on cotton batting backed with muslin. 6 ft h x 8 ft w.

A little over two years ago now, when I was still a somewhat fresh-faced sophomore, I joined WNYU as a newscaster. During my training session with then-associate news director and former Citywide host Zoe Rosenberg, I was asked to write a sample newscast; if you’re here, you’ll know that on WNYU, those include one local story. I remember looking the NY1 website and choosing to write about how the Poets House was changing location. Well, it was about time I paid the place a visit.

Now, I regret not having gone sooner; their library overlooks the Hudson so it is a delight to behold when the sun sets, and the openness of the space just invites creative thoughts. It seems like a particularly appropriate place to have epiphanies about Emily Dickinson while studying her manuscripts currently on view there until January 28th.

Before my interview with the curator of the show Jen Bervin, which you can hear again at the end of this post, I attended the two-hour seminar she led about the poet and I was struck to see how responsive the crowd was and how curious they were about her words, her typographical and visual choices when writing and the variety of meanings present in even the shortest of her poems. I have to say, I’ve rarely seen pupils that animated and participative in my classes at NYU — but maybe I just haven’t attended the right classes.

What’s certain is that Emily Dickinson’s words leave no one indifferent and those initial reactions to her work were certainly amplified when readers were confronted with the handwritten originals. One look at them and Dickinson goes back to being an enigma; from the sheer size of her letters to the various markings annotating her poems (which Bervin magnifies in her quilts on display in the Poets House library as well), what took so long to decipher is given a new dimension and lens for reading.

You can read more about Jen Bervin and her work on her website, jenbervin.com or you can go see it for yourself at the Poets House, located at 10 River Terrace in downtown Manhattan; the manuscripts on view belong to the personal collection of Donald & Patricia Oresman. For more information about the Poets House, their website is poetshouse.org.

Less common is the melodramatic short story adapted into a feature film such as “The Lie” a  T.C. Boyle short story recently adapted into a feature film by Joshua Leonard and this week’s feature on Citywide. Short stories often take place in self-contained situations that the reader inhabits along with a set of conditions created by the story’s particular plot or setting. The distilled nature of these works cause them often to read like parables, which is how Boyle’s original work plays out. The oral version of the story is told from the perspective of Lonnie who is frustrated by the yuppie lifestyle he sees has consumed him. In his desperation to find temporary release from his inflexible adult life, Lonnie excuses himself from his day job by uttering one of the most devastating lies imaginable. The reader then observes Lonnie attempting to hold everything together in a rapidly unravelling life.

Joshua Leonard attempts to take this comedic concept and fill it out into a feature length film. Listen to the interview to hear him discuss the decisions he had to make in order to do so.

Here it is-

Here is the trailer for the movie-

Here is where you can read it on the New Yorker’s website

And here is where Stephen Colbert will read it out loud for you instead-

Here is a very good review of the book, but check out the interview to hear John Landis discuss it in his own words-

For a taste of John Landis’s work and for the helluvit, here’s the music video to Thriller-

Lucas Green

My house growing up was full of paintings, Van Gogh prints and even later some fusain portraits of me and my family. All in all, I was very spoiled because I grew up in an environment where art was important and something to cherish.

However, now that I don’t live at home anymore and that most of the money I have goes either to tuition, loans or groceries, my art budget is particularly low. I would ask to have some things shipped from home, but because I live in a dorm, the investment seems hardly worth it if I can’t even put a hole in the wall to hang paintings.

Artsicle appealed to me because it made me think that if I ever had a little bit of extra funds, I could constantly re-arrange and remodel my living space according to my artistic affinity of the time, which sounds like an unattainable luxury if art is only available at gallery prices. I also strongly believe that art is a lot more enjoyable if it can be lived with, as opposed to just existing during the working hours of a museum.

Artsicle also has the added benefit of being as good to its customers as it is to its artists; it’s a win-win!

His personal narrative is as legendary as his body of work. Listen to him speak about the path of his life on Citywide in the near future. In the meantime BAM is screening his films in their original prints and it’s a real treat. Check out the schedule here.

Landis has also recently released a book about monsters in the movies, a subject of fascination for him. Stay tuned in to Citywide to hear him discuss his new book, Monsters in the Movies, in the near future or see for yourself what the book is all about.

BAM performs a truly honorable job of programming film and theater to keep past great works visible and promote the work of new artists. One gem of this season involves a stage production of Richard III starring Kevin Spacey and directed by Sam Mendes. In addition to the Landis series, BAM will soon be screening a series of the work of David Gordon Green, another legendary comedy director. Actor John Hurt will be present to highlight a series of four films starring himself in the second week of December.

Lucas Green