grippingly authentic!

From the 5.5 series by Brent Houston.

From top to bottom:

See more of the 5.5′s in the grippinglyauthentic! gallery.

From the biography on his website: “Caveh Zahedi began making films while studying philosophy at Yale University. After graduating, he went to Switzerland to try to work with Jean-Luc Godard, but Godard refused to meet with him after he phoned Godard at three in the morning to offer his filmmaking services. Disappointed, Caveh returned to the United States and got a job trying to teach video to autistic children.

When fellow workers started mistaking him for one of the autists, Caveh quit his job and moved to Paris to try to raise money for a film about French poet Arthur Rimbaud.”

The story continues in both heartbreaking and amusing directions, and might be one of the most self-effacing biographies you’ll read about someone on their own website. It also proves that nothing can stop Caveh Zahedi.

He is the winner of an IFP Gotham Award for “Best Feature Not Playing At A Theater Near You,” the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and  a Sundance Documentary grant. His films have won critical acclaim, yet they haven’t been widely seen. Each is autobiographical and fearless in the way they investigate Caveh’s idiosyncrasies and addictions, which probably doesn’t equal box-office success, but the film maker creates what is true to himself, and we like that quite a bit.

Caveh was good enough to speak with us over the last couple of months, and here’s what he had to say:

grippinglyauthentic: Let’s start with where we first “met” you, so to speak, which was the segment of Waking Life – Richard Linklater’s beautiful and ground-breaking film – called “The Holy Moment.” Can you tell us how you got involved with the project and how your segment was set up? Were you simply asked to have a conversation or was it scripted?

Caveh Zahedi: I got a package in the mail one day from Rick Linklater, who I’d met at Sundance in 1991 when we both had films in competition there. I was there with A Little Stiff and he was there with Slacker and we liked each other’s films and became friends.

The moment I got the package in the mail is actually documented in my 1999 year-long video diary film entitled In the Bathtub of the World.

In the package was a scripted scene as well as animation samples by Bob Sabiston, the head animator, to show me what it would look like. I loved the animation but I didn’t think I could deliver those scripted lines very convincingly. I explained this to Rick and he said “No problem, we’ll figure it out when you get here.”

So I flew to Austin and Rick asked me if there was something else I’d rather say instead. I said I had four ideas for things to talk about and he asked to hear them. I told him the four ideas and he said he liked all of them and that we might as well shoot them all and that he would decide later. We shot the four scenes in about half an hour and that was that.

He later used one of the deleted scenes for his own segment about Philip K. Dick. That scene (about a dream I’d had) was pretty much verbatim what I had said on tape, and he simply re-enacted it. If you listen to it carefully, you can hear the same verbal rhythms and inflections that I typically use. I thought it was a really good idea to put that scene in the movie at that point but with his character saying it.

The idea of the holy moment I kind of just made up, but the term is used in a slightly different context in A Course in Miracles, a “channeled” book that I was obsessed with for many years. In that context, it refers to a moment in which two individuals surrender their egos to what the Course calls the “Holy Spirit.”

ga: We’re not surprised that you talked about what you wanted to. You seem incredibly adept at being Caveh Zahedi, at stating your mind and being present, for better or worse. The performance felt spontaneous. What you were saying and how you said it, along with Sabiston’s ethereal animation, reminded us of those perfect little epiphanies we have when a degree of clarity enters our minds and we see what is truly important to us. We’d like to live in those moments, though it would probably be exhausting.

Experiencing someone on a level that feels authentic and sincere is always elevating, almost like a kind of high. Can you talk about some of your own epiphanies, when some piece of seemingly divine information opened up to you and maybe changed the way you saw the world around you or the way you lived in that world?

CZ: A lot of my epiphanies have happened on drugs. I was on LSD once and I “saw” a Buddha with a flower in his outstretched hand. And what I got from that was that “beauty” (symbolized in this case by the flower) is always available and right in front of you and that you don’t have to go looking for it – it’s right there in front of you!

ga: It seems that accessibility is an issue you constantly deal with, whether or not anyone will see your work. Admittedly, it took Richard Linklater to introduce us to you, and fortunately what we saw in Waking Life was compelling enough to inspire some investigation, to make us seek out your work.

You’ve collaborated with film makers who reach larger audiences with some regularity, whether working with them in creating a film or staring in their work. Is there some level of frustration you feel regarding the size of your audience?

CZ: There is definitely a level of frustration regarding the limited audience I’ve been able to reach. It may be that having a small audience is a condition of the type of work that I make, but I love a lot of films that reach a much larger audience, so I would prefer that.

One of my favorite filmmakers is Lars Von Trier, and he manages to reach a much larger audience without sacrificing depth or extremity or innovation. If I could have the filmography of anyone other than myself, I would choose his filmography (with the exception of his pre-Breaking the Waves films).

ga: Even when Von Trier makes a film that isn’t necessarily easy to “enjoy,” he seems faithful to his ideas and faultless in his integrity. These are qualities we appreciate in your work as well, admirable in a business where art is often turned into product, integrity traded for market appeal. Though Von Trier reaches a large audience in Europe, there’s still some strong resistance to a lot of his work here, especially because of the explicit sexual content.

Do you think your willingness to talk about drugs in your films is something that scares people?

Caveh Zahedi by Michael Grimaldi, 2008.

CZ: I don’t know if my openness about drugs is holding me back from broader acceptance. In a way, it’s part of the appeal of my work, I think, since there aren’t a lot of filmmakers who are open about it.

I gave a talk on hallucinogenics recently – really just the autobiography of my drug use, and it was given at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn – and  it was pretty packed and people seemed pretty hungry to hear and talk about this stuff. It would certainly be great if there were an intelligent debate about drugs for a change, and I’d totally be interested in participating in that. I love marijuana, but I think hallucinogenics are the really interesting drugs.

ga: Does being a parent have any impact on drug usage for you?

Caveh Zahedi: My wife doesn’t like me to get stoned in front of our toddler, so it means there are fewer opportunities.

ga: As far as audience-friendly films, is directing someone else’s story something you would consider?

CZ: I would certainly consider directing someone else’s story if I loved it (which is rare). I once got hold of the last screenplay that John Cassavetes had written before he died, and I thought it was ASTONISHING. I tried to get the rights to direct it but I was unable. I would have loved to direct that particular script. But it’s probably the only one I’ve ever read that I was DYING to make. The directors, other than Cassavetes, that get me excited – Von Trier, Ken Loach, Lukas Moodyson, Michael Haneke, Frank Capra, Mike Leigh, Andrei Tarkovsky.

I recently saw a film by the Safdie brothers called Daddy Longlegs that I loved. Other films I saw recently that I loved are Head On by Fatih Akin (which is not terribly recent but which I only saw recently) and Precious by Lee Daniels.

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We think it’s a perfect time to look at paintings by Scott Johnson.

All paintings are oil on linen mounted on wood, measuring 12″ x 12″ with the exception of “Last Dance” – which is 30″ x 32″ – and were painted in 2009.

Let’s just think about all this oil, about what’s happening and what this will really, truly, do to our world. It’s not just a “large group of carbons where they shouldn’t be,” as some people in some mindsets would have us think; and why is that something we would dismiss as no big deal, anyway? Carbons. One of the (what, three?) essential elements that we’re made of? Why is that what we’re willing to accept as the reasoning to not worry about it? A large group of carbons where they shouldn’t be… That is exactly what we’re concerned about. What’s a nuclear explosion? Oh, don’t worry about it. Just a large group of really little hot things.

Please note that these images can be clicked multiple times to zoom closer. And they are all totally worth your extra clicking.

Amanita Design is an independent game development studio founded in 2003 by Jakub Dvorsky. The Czech studio has created games for the BBC (Questionaut) and The Polyphonic Spree. They’ve won several Webby’s and have been nominated for a BAFTA. They’ve collaborated with Bjork for a point and click “toy” called The Pantry, and recently released their first full-length masterpiece, Machinarium – three years in the making – in which a self-made robot journeys through a bizarre and beautiful landscape.

Amanita’s work is magical and visually complex. They create unique worlds which require focus and concentration, which are non-violent and bereft of smash cuts, nor are they filled with thrashing music and the vibrating impact of bullets in bodies. They won’t tweak your blood-lust, nor will they train you for combat. The ten artists at Amanita seem more interested in making us think.

Machinarium presents breathtaking scenes navigated by unusual and unlikely heroes who poke and prod their surroundings – which vary from swampy garbage dumps to robot-filled cities in dank decline – for clues and tools to reach some far off destination. A character might find a bit of rope, the keys of a saxophone, or a houseplant, not knowing the purpose for any particular item until later in the game when they meet a musician, find a greenhouse, or approach a bridgeless ravine. The inventory of odd objects grows, and creative problem solving must be employed to fit the pieces together.

This circuitous game is, in fact, a puzzle in many shapes and sizes. At times the solution may materialize as something musical, mathematical, or purely visual, and without finding such solutions, progress through the game is impossible. Each pixel is perfect, the scenes rendered in ravishing detail down to every snaking stripe of rust on each bent pipe, hairline fractures in glass light globes, and the ornate tile work of floors and walls. Even the robots which inhabit the experience startle us with their personality; dented and occasionally demented, these characters seem to have lived actual lives, the difficulties of which are evident in their posture and dispositions, in the lack of sheen on their metal frames, which, in appearance, fall somewhere between Tim Burton, Caro and Jeunet, Fritz Lang, and Salvador Dali.

It is as if the artists behind Machinarium knew just how long we might have to stare at some little nook or half-obscured-by-shadow cranny to figure things out, and decided to reward us for our time by offering something we would never tire of staring at.

Support them, won’t you? Their work is independently funded, and it only takes a glimpse to see how gorgeously they blend art and science with each new project, all of which are far more deserving of your dollars than any Grand Theft Wild West Zombie Space Adventure From Hell that people are sleeping in tents outside of stores to get their hands on.

Amanita’s games are like nothing we’ve ever seen or heard before, and we eagerly await their next piece of digital conceptual wonder. Below are more images from Machinarium, courtesy of Amanita Design.

Please note that these images can be clicked multiple times to zoom closer.

See more images from Machinarium.

We recently attended a community conversation with New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof, who was speaking about the oppression of and cruelty toward women throughout much of our global society, as illuminated with provocative bluntness and intelligence in the new book Half the Sky. A collaboration with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, the book earned the first Pulitzer ever awarded to a wife and husband team. WuDunn was not present for the conversation, but Kristof illustrated one of her connections to the subject matter by relating a story about WuDunn’s grandmother, who grew up in China and was a victim of foot binding.

The conversation was made possible by Facing History and Ourselves, an “international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and anti-Semitism,” with the intent to promote a more informed and humane citizenry.

We are uncertain as to why the Thorne Auditorium of Northwestern University in Chicago was not fully attended; there must have been at least 732 people in the Chicago area who had time for this event, who might have walked away from the evening filled with a certain shock after finding that their quotient for compassion had increased considerably, which we would credit to the in-depth interviews and profound friendships embarked upon by WuDunn and Kristof as they spent time in Africa, Asia, and South America.

• Visit the New York Times archive of Nicholas Kristof columns.

According to Kristof, the central moral challenge of the 19th century was slavery. In the 20th century it was the battle against totalitarianism. And in the 21st century, the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle against discrimination of women and children. One might argue that the former still exist in the latter, but by the end of the presentation, that women are still treated like second-class citizens – especially in third-world countries, but certainly not limited to them – becomes quite clearly a truth beyond argument.

Kristof’s stories were often painful and graphic, but most importantly, they were personal. It was clear that he knew the women and children he spoke of, that he shared in their pains to some extent as they shared their stories with him, that he actually looked in their eyes and allowed himself to be affected by them.

He radiated a realistic sympathy as he spoke, and rather than try to make people feel guilty for how little they contribute to solving problems which seem far too large to tackle, Kristof focused – just as Half the Sky does – on making these insurmountable problems approachable by offering ways to get involved and engaged in the lives of women on the other side of the world, lives which can be radically changed by even the smallest generosity in the briefest of moments.

• Hear Nicholas Kristof discuss Half the Sky and advocacy journalism with Brooke Gladstone on NPR.

Beyond relating his experience and educating us about what we could do, Kristof offered hope as he spoke of women who have started fighting back, despite unbelievable odds and misogynistic patriarchal societies, not only improving their own lives but those of women around them, and in some cases gaining international attention for their cause.

In a moment we’re going to share some of these avenues for contributing to positive social change, but first we want to share some of the stories Kristof offered at the community conversation and through the book, because we feel that the many humanitarian crises which literally surround us are predominantly relegated to the back of our thoughts in abstraction; and there is certainly a reason for this psychic numbing.

How could we pay our Chase bills and watch the game or Idol or Top Chef, how could we Facebook our thoughts on the character arcs of Lost and Twitter our excitement at a Black Eyed Peas concert if we were always thinking about how acceptable it is to throw acid in a woman’s face in a country we have little or no desire to ever visit? And we’re not just singling out fans of “reality” TV or Facebook and Twitter users. To be honest, we think such social networks have an amazing amount of untapped potential for diminishing the ills of the world, but it might be that not enough social entrepreneurs are using these networks to get our attention in a lasting way.

• See Sheryl WuDunn interviewed by Charlie Rose.

Is it powerful enough to state that 3 million women and girls worldwide can be fairly termed as enslaved in the sex trade? That, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, there are more than 100 million women simply missing in the world today? That girls in India from age one to five are 50 percent more likely to die than boys in the same age group because of the value placed on gender? (Such discrimination kills up to 2 million girls each year worldwide.) That 21 percent of Ghanaian women reported their first sexual experience was rape? That 17 percent of Nigerian women had endured rape or attempted rape by the age of nineteen, and 21 percent of South African women reported that they had been raped by the age of fifteen?

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Some spam we’ve received masquerading as comments:

“Your internet site is beautifully decorated and easily navigated. I have liked visiting this website nowadays and wish to stop by numerous much more occasions within the future.”

-Rosenda Lenoch

“been a typo, Your webpage seems to be good. Use a great evening.”

-Romana Chaisson

Thanks Rosenda and Romana. We appreciate your support, and we will definitely use a great evening.

Chris Ware’s brilliant but rejected Fortune 500 magazine cover.

Chances are good that you’ve seen Ricky Jay‘s work, maybe even his face, whether or not you have any clue who he is. With his company Deceptive Practices (their motto: “Arcane knowledge on a need-to-know basis”), Jay has consulted and served as technical advisor for stage and screen alike, working on such films as Forrest Gump (he designed the wheelchair which made Gary Sinese look legless – there was no CGI, just smoke and mirrors), David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner, and Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, starring in both films as well), among many others.

Beyond that, Jay may be the world’s foremost sleight of hand artist, a renowned historian of magic and the art of the con, and the preeminent archivist and academic of human oddities, as explored in his Jay’s Journal of Anomalies. He can also throw a playing card so hard and fast that it pierces the rind of a watermelon, “that most prodigious of all household fruits,” as he refers to it.

Last December, Jay held court in the Mamet-directed one-man show “A Rogue’s Gallery,” billed as a more personal and improvisational performance, at the Royal George Theater in Chicago for a limited one-week engagement. Jay was good enough to share a few minutes of his time after he had just walked off a sound stage in Los Angeles, wrapping a long day on the set of ABC’s Flash Forward, whose cast he had recently joined. In his words, Jay plays “a menacing character,” aptly confirmed by a clip he later showed at the Royal George, a sort of introduction, in which he guns a man down at close range, then saunters off in all his bad-assitry.

(Jay’s actual physical stature does not necessarily intimidate or inspire fear, but on stage, even on the phone, there can be a gravitational force to his delivery and attitude that confirms all suspicions: If Ricky Jay can’t kick your ass, he’s probably got a staff which would be happy to do so.)

G.A. : Is “menacing” a stretch for you to play?

R.J. : Hardly. Watch it!

We here at grippinglyauthentic! have heard stories of how gruff and elusive Jay can be and what subjects he famously avoids; expecting less than welcoming, we simply asked how he was doing, just to test the water. “Honestly, I’m thoroughly and completely exhausted, meaning that I will be like putty in your hands.”

He was not entirely putty, as there were times when hesitation crept in to the conversation, when a long pause would announce itself after a potentially sensitive question. Aside from those few brief moments, however, Jay’s charm, which invigorates his live shows, was undeniable. He seemed happy to let topics stray wherever they might.

“There’s a fair amount of the show revolving around audience participation, and it differs from night to night. I have been reluctant,” Jay said, “to talk about personal stuff over the years, but to some extent “A Rogue’s Gallery” can be more autobiographical, and if that’s the route selected, I’ll go down that route. I suppose that’s one of the things that makes this show different, and I hope interesting. If it happens to become more personal, on that level I suppose there’s some intimacy. But I’m much too menacing to be intimate.”

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We’re interested in a bit of civil disobedience now and then, in people willing to cause a scene and step out of the “normal” and accepted operating procedure, out of the standard mode of being. We’re not terribly impressed with the standard mode of being, to be honest. We don’t claim that everyone is out there sleepwalking, making poor choices, but it’s impossible to ignore a certain apathy inherent in our mode of being these days. We won’t theorize (at the moment, anyway – maybe we’ll save the soap-boxing for our own megaphone experiments) as to the myriad reasons which foster that apathy, but we will say that we love to see and hear people express themselves intelligently, and we commend them when they do so in the name of positive social change.

Please help our brothers and sisters in Haiti by giving to Doctors Without Borders.

Photo by Lisandro Suero / AFP / Getty Images

“Hostess Cupcakes,” by Pamela Johnson. Oil on canvass – 64″ X 64″ – 2007

Although some positive changes have been made, and we’re not expecting eight years of poor leadership and corrupt government to be erased in a year, at a time when the public option has all but been extinguished and the bankers made obscene profits by treading heavily on the backs of the working man, we want to see more. And we don’t want to wait. What follows is an email we received from Ralph Nader, who we still think would have made a great president:

The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus (535-475 BC) said that “character is destiny.” He might have added that “personality is decisive.” Where is Barack Obama in this framework?

The venerable historian, James MacGregor Burns, in his book “Transforming Leadership,” drew an important distinction between “transforming and transactional leadership,” and calling Franklin Delano Roosevelt a reflection of the former genre.

Given all the burgeoning crises in the United States and the world, the only global military and economic superpower (albeit in serious deficit straits) needs a transforming leader, when, at best, it has a transactional leader in the White House.

I say “at best,” because President Obama displays an uncanny inability to deal. He is not even anywhere near Lyndon Baines Johnson in that regard. This lack is due more to his personality than to his character.

His is a concessionary demeanor, an aversion to conflict and to taking on entrenched power, a devotee of harmony ideology not because he doesn’t believe in necessary re-directions, but because he does not project the strength of his beliefs and willingness to draw the line—here and no further—as did Ronald Reagan or FDR.

In the shark tank known as the federal Washington, D.C. Obama’s personality projects weakness as someone who does not take a stand and fight, as someone inclined to rely on his rhetoric to explain his withdrawals, retreats and reversals. Some examples follow.

First, the President has been openly for single payer health insurance (full Medicare for all with free choice of physician and hospital) since before he became a politician. His friends included single payer leaders such as the stalwart Dr. Quentin Young in Chicago.

So, instead of starting with “single payer,” he descends to vague policy declarations, asks Congress to come up with a specific bill, while cutting private deals in meetings in the White House with drug industry and health insurance executives.

Now months later, with Blue Dog Democrats emboldened, with his progressive wing angry and starting to rebel, a hoked up insurance bill is having many provisions eviscerated. Once the Republicans smelled his lack of resolve, his wavering on one amendment after another, they became ravenous in their demands and obstructions.

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From the Wholphin YouTube channel, Baby Squid, Born Like Stars :

And from Bob Sabiston of Flat Black Films, Grasshopper :

“You can’t run a democracy with a citizenry that really doesn’t know how to make valid decisions. Most people don’t know what decision theory is, they don’t know what maximization of utility is. We live in a highly complex technological world and it’s not entirely obvious what is right and wrong in any given situation unless you can parse the situation, deconstruct it. People just don’t have the insight to do that very effectively. We have to have an educated and intelligent citizenry, which I regret to say we don’t necessarily have at the present time.”

- Christopher Langan, bouncer/ smart guy, from the Errol Morris series First Person, 2000

On November 9th of 2007, in Baltimore, Maryland, Thomas Schwandt, professor and Educational Psychology Department Chair at the University of Illinois, delivered the plenary address at the annual meeting of the American Evaluation Association before 1,600 of his colleagues. He modestly told us it was very well received. (Others told us he blew the doors off the place.) We here at grippinglyauthentic! came across a revised version of the speech as it was published in the American Journal of Evaluation in 2008, titled ”Educating for Intelligent Belief in Evaluation.” It was also quite well received by us. In fact, we were amazed, and decided to do all we could to help what we feel is an important paper, and an important voice, reach beyond the insular circle of academia (have you ever heard of the American Journal of Evaluation?) and into the heads of anyone who feels, as we do, that the critical thinking skills of the public at large are diminishing faster than one can tweet about their favorite breakfast cereal.

Tom’s excellent speech directly addressed so many of our concerns and raised so many questions that we nearly bombarded him, and he was good enough to respond at length with his thoughts on the general themes we raised in our questions. And we happily share his thoughts with you. He was also good enough to share an early version of his speech, which you can read here. It deserves some time. You can also find out more about the published speech, and subscribe to the journal to read the speech here.

And now, grippinglyauthentic! yields the floor to Tom Schwandt:

“I am at best an amateur social theorist, but it does not take the wisdom of Minerva to recognize that social life and public well-being in general these days seems particularly plagued by a set of interrelated problems that, simply for the sake of convenience, I will call a decline in civility, an inability (or unwillingness) to engage in critical thinking, an abandonment of personal responsibility, and a failure of moral courage. These are by no means new problems but they seem to be particularly acute of late. We see them manifest in many ways.

Perhaps most notable of late is the decline in civil behavior. The ratcheting up of rhetoric in the health care debate, the substitution of fear mongering for facts and reason, Joe Wilson’s outburst, etc. are but the latest examples. Last week, my local paper featured two stories that, juxtaposed, make my point. One was a op ed column by Leonard Pitts, Jr. on the shouting, threats, and general chaos that has erupted in town hall meetings over health care—a story carried in the NY Times and elsewhere—as well as the fear mongering, notably Sarah Palin’s Facebook claim that Democrats are posing a downright evil health care system in which the fate of the elderly and disabled would be decided by government ‘death panels.’ The other was an AP news story reporting a study that appeared in JAMA indicating that offering end-of-life counseling to dying cancer patients improves their mood and quality of life. Put side-by-side the two stories tell the story—civil unruliness instead of reasoned debate; the abandonment of the hard work necessary for careful critical thought in favor of easily championed and shouted ideology. Of course, I am all for civil protest—democracy is messy. But civil protest is not equivalent to incivility. Civil protest has a real place in altering the way we think about what it is right to do—a powerful case in point is the loud and very visible protest of AIDS activists in the early 1990s. That kind of protesting, that challenged scientists to take patients’ perspectives seriously, changed the science of the treatment of AIDS.

“Spin on both political and scientific issues has reached an art form. It is clearly a bipartisan undertaking, and it is, paradoxically, both fostered and checked by the proliferation of weblogs.”

From “Educating for Intelligent Belief in Evaluation”

I see the kind of incivility I speak of above linked to an inability or unwillingness to engage in critical thinking, that is the capacity to make reasoned arguments based on logic and evidence. Shouting and screaming talking points that one has been provided is far easier than doing some hard thinking and reasoned analysis and engaging in discussion and debate. No real new news here either—the anti-intellectualism of the American public is an old story (but most recently updated by Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason). Chris Mooney’s recent entry on American’s scientific illiteracy, Unscientific America, is a current case in point of the inability of citizens in general and many professionals as well to evaluate evidence. For a view of how to get better at that sort of thing one need only turn to one of the many very accessible books by Joel Best or take a look at statlit.org.

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