Absolutley

Maya Deren - Lost far too young, she was a force in her community. The fact that she was willing to give so much of herself with her films is kind of what amazes me about her. Learning that she toured with her films is crazy. She didn't have to take that extra step. That says so much about what filmmaking meant to her. She was willing to travel around and engage in a dialogue and connect and probably explain a lot about her films. To me that is huge becuase a lot of what I think I miss with experimental films is the context. Jonas Mekas - I hope I still have the love for making movies that this dude does at his age, hell, at half his age. To hear that he is still out there in the community and still even at the front of new modes of production (vlogging) like he is, is the true meaning of avante garde. At the front.

I had never heard of or been to an microcinema before in my life and I'm kind of amazed by that because both of the cities I grew up in (CLT & ATL) are not what I would call small towns or what you would consider underserved in the art community, well up until reading this article anyway. This lack of access to independent productions is to blame for my coming to film school thinking that Chris Nolan was the pinnacle of film directing. No shade on Chris, just saying there is so much more out there.

Recording the sound, I learned that we were holding the mic a little too close the source of the sound. I feel like a little more distance between recorder and source would result in a better quality recording. While editing, I learned that a lot of us had the same ideas and recorded similar things. Editing the sound was a fun, carefree experience that was not as structured as the actual recording. Playing with levels and doing things like trying to anticipate what others might interpret our soundscape and trying to somehow make sure people hear in our soundscape what we were creating was a cool, challenging exercise.

My car's headlights on my landlord's john boat. Headlights are harsh. Like someone who does not play the trumpet, blowing through a trumpet as hard as they can. The light is very close to being white. I think the oxidation on my headlights is giving it a slight eggshelly quality. The eyes of the stray cats (at least I think those are cats) glow in it. I wonder if they know that light means I can see them. Maybe they don't know that I see them until they see me. Right now they just see two beams of light. Light that gives everything its shining on long, distorted shadows.

My desk lamp.  The grey lampshade filters the light into a dull, jaundice hue. Someone with synesthesia would describe this lamp's light as a dial tone. It renders my white desk top  textureless, giving the illusion that everything on it is adrift in it. Things directly under it cast a dull, hazy shadow. The shadows cast on things further away are so soft that they can only be described as gaseous. This is probably due to the fact that the 5 year old bulb is so dim, at this point, that I can look directly at it.