NY2005

The Debut Of The Dude With A Uke

2012-01-06T08:54:00.000-08:00

New Year's Resolution

2011-12-31T06:23:00.000-08:00

Mia and Dan

2011-11-21T19:43:00.000-08:00

Home For Sale

2011-11-14T20:58:00.001-08:00

<a href="http://theosmith.bandcamp.com/track/vendo-casa">vendo casa by theo smith</a>

You do it to yourself, it's you and noone else.

2011-11-13T18:27:00.000-08:00

OWS/Failed Romance Themed Halloween Costume

2011-10-29T17:11:00.000-07:00

33 and still rocking, baby

2011-10-12T10:37:00.000-07:00

Johnsburg, Illinois, East Village

2011-04-04T07:24:00.000-07:00

Art will come to my rescue.

2011-04-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

Wall Post

2010-10-04T14:26:00.001-07:00

Labor (?) Day

2010-09-06T17:08:00.001-07:00

Late Show

2010-01-06T20:13:00.000-08:00

First Day of Winter

2009-12-29T14:18:00.000-08:00

2009-12-29T14:11:00.000-08:00

2009-12-29T14:04:00.000-08:00

2009-12-29T13:50:00.000-08:00

2009-12-29T13:49:00.000-08:00

2009-12-29T00:40:00.000-08:00

Randomly Hanging Out at a Fashion Photo Shoot

2009-10-30T08:03:00.001-07:00

Untitled from matteo minasi on Vimeo.

One Long Night of Fear, Loathing and Filmmaking

2009-08-07T07:59:00.000-07:00

2009-08-07T07:09:00.000-07:00

2009-08-07T06:06:00.000-07:00

2009-08-07T06:02:00.000-07:00

2009-08-07T06:00:00.000-07:00

Time Traveler's Wife Junket

2009-07-31T15:00:00.000-07:00

Interview with Rachel McAdams, Eric Bana and director Robert Schwentke

Oh, and in case you even wonder, yes, the movie sucks.

New Start

2009-07-24T17:01:00.000-07:00

The Visitors

2009-06-15T16:25:00.000-07:00

2009-06-14T16:39:00.000-07:00

Hazy Visions of Virgil

2009-06-01T07:04:00.001-07:00

2009-06-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

with JJ and SB

Night Owls

2009-05-09T08:26:00.001-07:00

Woodstock!

2009-05-03T19:36:00.001-07:00

A Direct Director's Direct Cinema

2009-05-03T16:38:00.000-07:00

Whatever Works...

2009-04-24T16:32:00.000-07:00

Times They Are A-Changin'

2009-03-10T18:03:00.000-07:00

(2009)
(2005)

And so are we.

Last glimpses of election year

2009-01-06T10:55:00.000-08:00

2009-01-06T10:52:00.000-08:00

2009-01-06T10:37:00.000-08:00

Chicago: editing in the hotel, and meeting Obama's barber

2009-01-06T10:36:00.001-08:00

30th B-day

2009-01-06T10:26:00.001-08:00

Nev-olution in Central Park

Back in The City

2008-09-16T18:37:00.000-07:00

Fake Plastic Bliss

2008-08-09T10:17:00.000-07:00

2008-08-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

2008-08-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

growing older.

Images from a Recent Past

2008-07-01T10:37:00.000-07:00

Airstream Ranch

2008-05-03T13:30:00.001-07:00

2008-05-03T13:25:00.000-07:00

2008-05-03T13:20:00.001-07:00

Fear and Loathing at the Wedding Chapel

2008-03-14T16:31:00.000-07:00

Hello Operator

2008-01-02T17:43:00.001-08:00

Back to School

2007-10-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

Hit the Pavement

2007-08-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

Wild Horses

2007-08-05T21:25:00.001-07:00

2007-08-05T05:02:00.000-07:00

May the Mermaids save Coney Island

2007-07-03T16:07:00.000-07:00

A Midsummer's Night Post

2007-06-21T18:04:00.000-07:00

The plain yet effective plant and payoff scheme structuring "The dancer upstairs", hinging on the use of a song, is the most distinct and powerful characteristic to have struck me of this movie. It is also the most conspicuous added value of the film version as opposed to the original book by Nicholas Shakespeare. To be sure, it's one of those precious moments when cinema and music merge in an unforgettable way.

At the eve of his 12 years long revolutionary enterprise, Ezequiel - brazenly shaped after Peru's Shining Path's leader, down to his psoriasis condition - is riding in the car with a few cronies in the middle of the night, on his way to launch the rebellion in the sierra. They don't utter a word, even less so as they run over a cop at a checkpoint. During the trip, they listen to the radio playing a rare performance by Nina Simone where she gives a long introduction to the song "Who knows where the time goes". The singer introduces it by digressing with her toughts on time, its impalpability, its meaning for our life, its being crucial and yet, paradoxically vain.

"Why is she talking?", asks one of Ezequiel's men.
"She is getting ready to sing", is the leader's answer.

For brevity's sake, it could be said that what follows in the next two hours is Ezequiel's performance of terror and violence; it is his own song we are "listening" to; all the while we witness the patient and superhuman effort of a solitary police detective, Agustin, who brings him to justice after struggling not only with the revolutionary forces, but also with the army and the political establishment of the barely disguised Peru of the 1980s.

Nina Simone's lengthy introduction to the song, where she indulges in an improvised monologue on the nature of time, is played along the images in a way you don't usually see in a film: it is, after all, some very dense talking, apparently unrelated to the story, delivered by someone who is not a character, yet breaks into the plot.

It is at the very end, then, that the songs starts playing again. But this time it takes a totally different connotation. This time, the song preludes bitter-sweetly to Agustin's new life, maybe the country's new life, its new "performance". Indeed, Ezequiel has been handed in now. Agustin has won his double struggle, but with a personal cost: his newly found, impossible love, Yolanda, turned out to be one the closest of Ezequiel's people.
Yolanda used to be Agustin's daughter dance teacher. The dancer referred to in the title, though, is not her; it is Ezequiel himself, who lives in hiding one story above her dancing studio. He his the 'dancer upstairs'.

But there is more to it. Now that his job is done, Agustin is finally free to take time for his family which, willy-nilly, he has been disregarding during the frantic pursuit of the revolutionary leader. And the film version features a beautiful closure of the story, with Agustin barely making it to his daughter end-of-the-year dance.
We see him breathless, walking up the stairs to reach the ballroom. Once he is up, he lingers behind the glass doors and stops there, as to not disturb the performance. His daughter is dancing. She is the dancer upstairs now, and she couldn't be anymore different than Ezequiel. In fact, the dichotomies here are several and poignant: young girl/old man; beauty/ugliness; healthy/unhealthy; dancing/immobile; renewed hopeful country/decadent violent country. Or, more concisely, positive/negative.

Unlikely as it may seem, it just looks and sounds as the little girl is dancing to Nina Simone's song, as though the penetration of that piece of music into the movie, having transited from extrafilmic to metafilmic, is now complete.

2007-06-15T16:29:00.000-07:00

Dear friends.

2007-04-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

American dream

Love & Thanksgiving

2007-04-23T08:07:00.000-07:00

Be Kind, Rewind

2007-04-20T07:24:00.000-07:00

Higlights of the week:

Sunday: PAed on the reshoot of "Be Kind, Rewind", MG's next movie.
Quite a cinematic baptism: 14 hours of shooting most of which under an end-of-the-world rain. Here during a break with other interns from Partizan eating some food and warming up in the city hall of Passaic, NJ.

Tuesday: ROCK AND ROLL!!!!!!!
went to the Art Brut concert w/Sarah at the Bowery Ballroom. Alas, a fugly cow starts moshing, spilling beer, and annoying the hell out of us from the very first song, brawling and claiming her "right" to "dance". We just ask her to chill out, or at least to not stick her elbows in our ribs or spill her beer on us, but she wouldn't listen. We try and ignore her, but apparently all she is asking for is trouble. All of a sudden I feel wet all over my head and my shirt, as she emptied her beer cup on me. Unflinchingly, I turn around, look for her, and throw my beer in her face. She starts pushing, kicking and punching just as elegantly as a fugly cow would. No one is even caring about the band anymore. I push/punch her back, as her wasted, barely alive boyfriend realizes she fucked up big time and gets in between me and her with his arms up, trying to end the fight. I start clapping at the cow for the show she's conceding us all, while everybody is staring, wondering what the hell is wrong with her.
Good times, good times.

Thursday: the people at Partizan (one for all: Andrew) were cool enough to extend my internship, which bought me time to stay in NY as opposed to be shipped back to Italy right after graduation. I felt such a relief when I received the official approval from my sponsor. It felt like I had held my breath for months. Gotta find a real job now, though!

In the weekend I'll help my friend Monica with the shooting of her film, 'Love & Thanksgiving', in Queens. It's going to be done in 16mm, which is pretty exciting; I might even have to be on camera at some point.

All-time Low

2007-04-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

"If I can make it there / I'll make it anywhere"

My M.A. Thesis

2007-03-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school I’d take Religion. It wasn’t a mandatory class: the way it used to work, back then and there, was that if you were not a Christian and/or an atheist you would just skip it (even though the class was supposedly about religions, in general).
I guess I fell in the Christian category so I’d tag along.
It wasn’t bad. Especially in the first two years of school, by far the hardest out of 5, that weekly Religion period served as a break from the despair of all of the other tough classes. It was a sort of safe haven where people in class (well, actually half or what remained of us) would take it easy and discuss with the teacher about life in a philosophical way, I guess.

It was interesting and respectful, with everybody saying what they felt they wanted to say, and the teacher leading the discussion as an equal among us. (Still, it would be unfair to deny it, many of us just used that period to catch up with the other subjects not paying attention whatsoever to what was going on in class. But as far as I can remember, I was pretty much into the discussions more than I was into fixing my homework for what was coming next).

Then, all of a sudden, during the third year, something changed. The teacher had sort of switched gears, and class discussion started being strained and tedious. In particular, I remember this one time when I was trying to make a point about the fact that, even as a Christian, one can understand other points of view (whether belonging to an atheist, or a Muslim) and respect them. This seemed to me as a pretty logic and defendable position back then as it does now. But my teacher was differently advised. I remember him telling me something along the lines: “How can you understand them?”. I don’t know exactly what I said, but it was something like, well, I may have my own religion, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand someone else’s position about belonging to another religion, or not being religious at all. “I may not share it, but I understand it”.

He gave me a down-up look like I was an idiot. Just like a math teacher would look to a 16 years old student (that was my age at the time) that insists that 2+2 does not equal 4.

“What do you mean, you understand it? If you are really a Christian, you cannot say you understand it. They are wrong”. Just like that, he put the words ‘the end’ to our discussion and went on rambling about who knows what. I was appalled by his single-mindedness and dismissiveness. Not only was he exuding contempt for non-Christian views of life (and acting as a self-appointed inquisitor for judging a view, like mine, he’d consider not enough Christian), but he liquidated with that smirk all the progresses humanity had made as far as it goes for civil co-existence of people with different views. Probably I hadn’t been able to elaborate further, hit as I was by his repelling satisfaction in wearing blinders. But that was the moment when attending that class turned from being something half-boring half-interesting into a full-fledged pain. I’d have dropped it right there and then. (Unfortunately I was not allowed to do so until the beginning of the following school year).

I have been thinking of this episode very often lately, while writing my thesis.
Without even realizing it, this little work of mine addresses the question raised in that class. I talk about two authors, Popper and Berlin, whose thinking I really dig.
I decided to compare them because, apparently, no one ever did it before, despite they display striking similarities, and I thought it'd be interesting to put them one next to the other.

I knew Berlin only recently, while studying at NYU. The more I was getting into his ideas, the more I realized he had a lot to share with Popper, whom I had studied extensively in my first year of college. If I had to sum up in a sentence what the gist of their thinking was, then I would say:

Whenever those in power think they own the truth, then they will feel entitled to commit the most hideous atrocities to the detriment of those who don’t agree with them.

That’s why living in a democracy is so important: not because it is the “rule of the many” but because, as Popper says, leadership is constantly questioned and periodically subject to the judgement of “the many”. Moreover, in a pluralistic society people may hold up to different values and systems of belief; but no one can say to the other “you are wrong” just for basing his or her life on another set of values. There have always been clashes of values and there will always be; the point is to understand that they are sometimes irresolvable. Of course, this awareness alone does not make a perfect society. Far from it, a democratic, pluralistic society is imperfect, but so far it seems to be the least imperfect as for degree of violence required to regulate conflict and respect of personal freedoms.

More importantly, acknowledging the presence of irresolvable conflicts of values does not make a pluralist society a relativist one, as religious and/or moral authorities sometimes try to persuade us today. A relativist is someone who, to quote Berlin, thinks that “my values are mine, yours are yours, and if we clash too bad, neither of us can claim to be right”. In other words, while a pluralist can comprehend, understand views different than his own, the relativist ends up justifying whatever is out there. To him, any given set of values is defendable in principle. So, if Hitler were back today ready to trigger another Holocaust, a relativist society would be idle and just watch, since it may not share Hitler’s values, but not even fight against them because no one can claim to be right. Fortunately, I believe our societies are far from relativist.

Naturally, and I come to the limit of a liberalist/pluralist perspective, a society like this can work only as long as those individuals and groups constituting it agree to a certain amount of tolerance and understanding towards those who want to run their lives in other ways. But what can we do with those who don’t share this view? How does a tolerant society deal with the intolerants?

This is clearly today’s problem, especially if we see what’s going on in the world and how hard it is to have things run smoothly not just within societies but mainly among societies.

This problem is more accentuated if we think of religions. Religions are in their nature all encompassing systems of belief, and a liberalist framework is not always fit to do the trick. This remains pluralism’s main problem, one that not even two of its greatest champions have solved.

Enough, I am summarizing my thesis and that is exactly what I didn't mean to do. I should really get back to writing the thesis instead of writing about it. Having said that, the main point for me, here, is to highlight how pleasant it is to discover the way that some thoughts and experiences sometimes assemble in the most unexpected way across space and time to materialize themselves in an M.A. thesis that I am typing on a Mac laptop in Brooklyn but that really started in a classroom with worn-out walls and shabby desks in Rome some 13 years ago. Hadn't I had a stiff of a Religion teacher, I'd have written my thesis on something else.

Nurse Bettie-ing

2007-03-03T11:46:00.000-08:00

Monsieur Gondry et moi

2006-08-29T22:36:00.000-07:00

Key Largo - Neanderthal

2006-08-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

Get this video and more at MySpace.com

Pic-Nic at Central Park

2006-05-06T17:15:00.000-07:00

Avenue J Store

2006-05-02T18:48:00.000-07:00

A video assignment for school shot last February, just where I live
at the corner of 14th st. and Ave J in Midwood, Brooklyn

Untitled

2006-02-14T07:41:00.000-08:00

The White House
Washington D.C.

Coahuila Desert

2005-11-09T09:28:00.000-08:00

Cola de Caballo, Monterrey, Mexico

2005-11-02T09:38:00.000-08:00

Sun Shines in the Bedroom

2005-11-02T07:20:00.000-08:00

2005-11-02T07:16:00.000-08:00

Everybody rides the subway in NYC

2005-10-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

2005-10-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

2005-10-15T12:36:00.000-07:00

Skateboard contest @ the Brooklyn Banks

2005-10-15T12:32:00.000-07:00

home, sweet home

2005-10-12T22:23:00.000-07:00

2005-10-06T16:08:00.000-07:00