Photos by Roos Shamanana
Wednesday, 23 December 2009
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
New Trespassers William EP with Roos Shamanana on various instruments and gorgeous art by the friendly artist, Raffi Kalendarian.
The SF Panorama is out and includes a billion amazing things, including a feature on the world series by Stephen King, a new story by George Saunders, an essay by Tom Bissell, and a little review of Thai Pop by Roos Shamanana.
NewVillager contributed music, art, and text to the new issue of The Lifted Brown, a fantastic literary magazine out of Australia. The issue also includes work by Michelle Blade, Tom Bissell, David Foster Wallace, and soooo foooorth.
The process starts with themes and agendas/goals, mentalities, expressions, costume ideas, transition feelings, set thoughts—I make lists. At the same time I start work on dialogue in an everything-goes, brainstorm-type way—the brainstorm may start with a place or topic. They start to inform each other—the list turns synthesis with segments of dialogue and I start to pull out scripts and revisit ideas of theme and structure. I start to focus in on the parts that when reread inspire new rants and tangents that shape some sort of an excitement to create workflow. I think about music. Eventually I’ll have a collection of scripts and I start to figure out how they connect and begin to pull characters out and define them more. I melt down numerous characters, lists, or ideas into one character or set ideas or separate themes and goals into places and costumes or sections of multiple character tension. At this point I start to have momentum and the conceptual aspects of the piece solidify and it becomes easier to write because the sections of vision now have pile. All the while I’m considering people I know who inspire me and who I respect greatly, and what or who can do you or that or them and how who can do what in what situation, and combinations of ideas, people, sets, characters start to inspire the quality of scene ideas—how does this person clash with that character or set to play what—it’s like organizing a setting to yield a quality behind the camera that informs the script, directing, set, costume, makeup, and general vibe of the shoot that night and then I go for it with a couple shots—I then build out the story—but I allow my self loopholes and extra shots and free space—I change the meaning of shots by shooting other shots. I fix a failed shot by changing what the shot was about while adding to plot or slicing into new content. The shoots are very active and the directing style is very kinetic and even when we stick to the script in a strict sense the room still becomes very collaborative and people take ownership of their characters and perform outside-of-themselves rather than act. Usually—I mean some people like to perform, others like to act, and some just want to be themselves but louder in a chosen style or imposed accent, accents being less geographic and more collected and sculpted to describe word delivery. And then once with the footage I reevaluate everything as supplies. And then I dive into EditEffect and sound as content and resculpt the whole situation—more than half the script gets cut out and many moments of people giving a burst of inspiration, improv, or add-ons get cut in. - Ryan Trecartin
"The Pota was a ceremony in which several rude dummies of tules were put up on poles. It appears likely that songs of malevolence and perhaps other expressions of hatred were directed toward the figures. The images represented foes of the village: murderers, successful war leaders in past affrays, or shamans believed to have caused sickness and death. Care was taken to invite the towns to which these individuals belonged; but as no identification was given the image, and no names mentioned at the time, this method of revenge could contribute little but moral satisfaction to the preformers. The guests might suspect that it was their townsman who was meant, but as no insult was tendered, none could be resented; until later, when care would be taken that the visitors learned that it was their kinsman whom they had helped to revile. The whole procedure is characteristically Californian."- Kroeber
Sunday, 12 July 2009
Robert Ashley's music is like nothing else. Listen. He calls it "opera," but Roos Shamanana attempts to distill it in a few other ways in a piece for the Village Voice.
The Music Issue is always a beautiful thing and this year Roos Shamanana was lucky enough to contribute both an essay about Jamaican Dancehall and an interview with Thom Yorke.
Wrote a piece for the newest issue of Yeti magazine on the brilliant artist, Jim Woodring. Below is the introduction.
THE FLYING HORN ERA: AN INTERVIEW WITH JIM WOODRING
“ONE OF THE BEST MEMORIES OF MY LIFE IS CONTEMPLATING THAT FIRST FINISHED DRAWING AND REALIZING I HAD CRACKED THE CODE, THAT I COULD MAKE DRAWINGS LIKE THIS WHENEVER I WANTED.”
For three years, without even knowing it, I lived a few blocks from Jim Woodring. Both of our homes sat on the border of Seattle’s old-growth Ravenna park, a wooded gorge that has now been codified in comic history with Charles Burns’ graphic-novel, Black Hole. During that period, I spent a lot of time wandering through the park, and coincidentally, discovering Woodring’s surreal comic narratives, which could easily be interpreted as guides for the wandering mind.
His Frank books follow the eponymous main character, a “generic anthropomorph” (not quite a cat, a mouse, or any other kind of animal) as he explores a world that bears vague similarities to early surrealist paintings and Disney cartoons. Since 1980, when Woodring self-published his “illustrated auto-journal,” JIM, he has developed the Uni-factor (as he calls it) or Frank-verse (as his fans call it) into a fully-realized dream-world that seems to stretch far beyond the page. In the introduction to the Frank book, Francis Ford Coppola describes the world as "wordless, timeless, placeless.” The cast of characters who inhabit it have also grown, and include Pupshaw (Frank’s pet), Man-hog (a snarling naked fat man), a vast array of frogs, and all sorts of un-nameable phantasmagoric bystanders, each of which serves its own tiny purpose in Woodring’s expansive, ineffable vision.
Woodring’s artwork has never fit into common categories of comics, fine art, or graphic novels. His narratives are slow and silent, with the arc of a calm spiritual quest or an introspective acid-trip. Despite the utterly abstract nature of his stories, they seem to follow a consistent visual logic and somehow evoke the menial actions of our everyday lives. In addition to his Frank and Jim books, all released by Fantagraphics, he has collaborated with the jazz guitarist, Bill Frisell to make a musically-inspired images and multimedia performances that have been presented at Carnegie Hall, among other places. He seems to be in a constant state of creating toys, drawings, and paintings, all of which he sells at galleries and on his website, sometimes to private collectors. Recently, he learned to read and write a little Sanskrit.
This interview was conducted in Jim’s home in the summer of ‘08. He looked bearded, wild-eyed - a self-described “bear of man.” When I arrived, he was in the middle of the Antonio Gaudà documentary by Hiroshi Teshigahara, an unhurried tour of Gaudi’s otherworldly architecture released by Criterion Collection. While we talked, Woodring let it play with the sound off. Sometimes he interjected, pointing at the screen, saying “Did you see that?” His wife came and left as we talked. We sat in his living room, among his handmade artifacts and his character dolls proudly displayed on a mantel that served as a shrine to Woodring’s spiritual and artistic heroes. – Ross Simonini
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