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How CineSource and Understanding Loss Could Save Us by Doniphan Blair
Despite its difficulties, CineSource remains dedicated to covering all 20 sectors of Bay Area film/video. photo: D Blair
WHILE CINESOURCE IS DOING WELL
and we just reupped our annual hosting fee, including a "virtual server," so we can go viral at any moment (a million hits a day without crashing!), my own fiduciary status is not so sanguine.
The City of Oakland just emailed to inform me that, after designing and running a website, web magazine and photo service for them for five years, much of it at half pay or pro bono, I had been fired.
Indeed, just this month, I have reached the end of my credit; I am 75 "G"s in debt; the bank initiated proceedings and I am about to lose my place.
"Real men don't bellyache, they just go bankrupt and start over," my taxman told me the other day, as he reviewed my microscopic numbers (the only nice thing about going broke is the brevity of that review). "The first you hear about it is when they announce their 90%-off sale."
"Sure, everyone hates a loser, so 'business is booming' until the last moment," I responded, "But I'm in an 'arts-related' industry. What do you want me to do: Not tell my story?"
I know it sounds self-indulgent but my fate has inspired to me to tell stories and otherwise create faster and more furious than ever, notably during the 50 to 100 monthly hours of work I do at quarter pay or pro bono for CineSource.
This author, in front of some CineSource promo posters, in the studio he is about to lose. photo: D Blair
"If you are about to lose your place, why are you so dedicated to CineSource?" a friend asked recently. "You just did a subscription campaign and got, like what, five subscriptions? You started a film movement and got no response except for those two directors you claimed were famous—isn't it time to pull the plug?"
You'd think, wouldn't you? But what the unenlightened can't understand is that the arts are not business, sports or war, where history is recorded by the victors. Indeed, despite four years of hemorrhaging, CineSource has been writing the history of Northern California film/video—637 articles and counting.
In fact, friends and family have been saying, sometimes shouting even, "Shut down CineSource for god's sake," since the year it was born, 2008. As you may recall, that was when "some bad things started happening," as Diane the Detective, our spokesperson, used to say.
Nevertheless, we keep staggering onward and upward. Indeed, in 2013, after our poorest quarter yet, not only did we do a gala, five-year anniversary issue with 16 articles, we declared the "Oakland Film Stammer" movement designed to focus on what I have identified as California's "Structural Ambiguity."
What most Californians can't cognate is that we have to operate as both a Versailles, the seventh richest "nation" on earth, with seven of its top industries (media, music, computing, biotech, aerospace, agriculture and marijuana) and a third world country. This is a multicontextual conundrum an order of magnitude beyond multiculturalism.
Although it has many facets and complications, perhaps the most perplexing is how California can be so materially rich but romantically poor. There may be more mystical adoration in one neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro than our entire state.
Even more confusing, although California's identity is highly romantic—going somewhere new, reinventing yourself, inventing things, being surrounded by fabulous natural beauty and bounty—it also fosters a transient worldview, a winner's culture and an inability to perceive loss, which is obligatory for romance.
Even environmentalists, who are rightly obsessed with the demise of nature, turn competitive in California: "I recycle my toenail clippings, do you?" Many of the Silicon Valley billionaires have romantic, rag-to-riches backstories, especially those who started as nerds and endured profound emotional mistreatment, but they are engineers not poets of fragility and transcendence.
CineSource's first spokesperson, Diane Karagienakos, played with film noir and the realization that in 2008 we were all on the brink of impending financial catastrophe. photo: D. Blair
Of course, Californians are loving, if not "in love," and their schools, hospitals and highways were once designed to be Sweden-like in their luxuriant socialism. But with the invasion of the hippies, English and Central Americans, as well as almost everyone else, such grand gestures became impossible, a sentiment made law by Proposition 13's limiting of real estate taxes in 1978.
To sit comfortably with such complexity, we must integrate loss and, on this subject, I happen to be an expert. In fact, on the face of it, I've pretty much failed at everything I have put my heart into—women, cities, philosophies, magazines and movies.
My brother's and my documentary, "Our Holocaust Vacation", wasn't accepted by a single Jewish film festival because, as one official explained, "The title sounds a little neo-Nazi," even though the actual story is about a survivor's family returning to Eastern Europe to understand that history.
Another said, "We'll show no films about fraternizing with the enemy," and, as it happens, our film includes its heroine (my mother) flirting platonically with a German officer.
What those silly schlemiels couldn't comprehend is that both the German and the Jewess were incredible romantics—he brought her NYLON STOCKINGS in a concentration camp—and those simple activities reaffirmed their humanity.
The thing about romanticism is loss. Love is the war you want to lose. First, you lose your heart, then you lose your autonomy, finally you lose your beloved, since all living beings, by definition, must die. Alas, understanding such profound loss frees you up to live in the moment.
It all begins with biology, Darwin's second theory, Sexual Selection, which is significantly more powerful than his first, since it defines reproduction, but it was brought first to narrative awareness by the Hebrews.
Although the Old Testament is sometimes reviled as patriarchal or abusive, it developed all the basic themes of romanticism: "They were naked in the garden and not ashamed... kiss me kiss me the kisses of your mouth because thy love is sweeter than wine... we will bind you with chains of gold while thy king sitteth at thy table."
A scene from 'Our Holocaust Vacation' which includes a platonic romantic moment between a concentration camp inmate and a German officer. photo: N. Blair
Then came the Arab male poets, who, before Muhammad, lived in matriarchies where reproduction required the seduction of smart women. Although transcendent romanticism has disappeared in the Middle East, Sufi poets carried it to Spain, where it inspired the neighboring troubadours.
Seven centuries later, the German, English and French poets caught the scent. Falling madly in love with nature as well as each other, they revived mysticism, denounced classicism and insisted on absolute freedom—standards we live by to this day.
But every step of the way, the Romantics emphasized: you have to be ready to sacrifice the physical and financial for the ephemeral and visionary.
I submitted a full syllabus on this thesis (mostly mine, albeit with acknowledgement of the great work of Isaiah Berlin) to almost every college and university in the Bay Area. But guess what? OK you can probably guess: it was rejected by every single one. Ah, my festival of failure knows no bounds!
Speaking of festivals, Cali-ambiguity is iconized to an extreme by the Burning Man celebration currently gearing up just across the border in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Although an exciting, artful and romantic return to the primitive, without parsing the subtleties, it's hard to get from there to true love—especially with polyamory standing in the way.
What those romance-reduced rebels can't quite cognate is that they're begging for the Oakland Film Stammer to produce a nuanced look at not their conquests but their losses.
After being covered with love and memorial notes, the buring of the Burning Man temple is significantly more metaphysical then that of the Man—shown here the 2011 'Temple of Transition', built by International Arts Megacrew. photo: IAM
Sure, the madam of the Silver Sphinx art car can strut around stark naked commanding South Asian sexperts to satisfy all comers, and her performance art is certainly startling, if not titillating (which obliges some mystery). But it won't produce an iota of insight into what most Burners are attending for. If it did, there would be a bonanza of Bay Area babies born the following May.
There are projected to be 70,000 Burners this year, spending over $70 million on tickets, trailers, food and fantasy clothing, of which about ten mill will go to the festival organizers, who in turn issue grants to artists.
One of the main projects each year is the Temple. Lined with love and memorial notes and burned on Sunday, after the party-down immolation of the eponymous man on Saturday, that act is a significant ritual resplendent with mystical and romantic ramifications. But to understand and build on such a spectacular experience needs new narratives.
If each Burner kicked a buck into CineSource—and ditto our readers, or the 1000 subjects of our 637 articles, most of whom depend on us to keep our servers going so they can link the articles to their website—we could certainly more effectively nurture Bay Area film/video. We might even stimulate an Oakland Film Stammer movement visionary and active enough to save their sorry romantic asses.
Why Oakland Film Stammer? With its gorgeous redwoods and grotesque killings just a few miles apart, Oakland personifies Cali-ambiguity. It has the perfect landscape, stories and characters to address those complexities and provide an alternative to both Hollywood's commercial and Burning Man's hipster triumphalism.
What those fatuous folks can't fathom is the only way we're going to fashion a robust UnHollywood—what the Hollywood Northers moved here to start in the first place, what the art filmers have been doing since the '50s and what the world really needs to express alternative narratives—is to hybrid under- and over- ground, or as we say at CineSource: "Get the 20 sectors of Northern California film/video to talk to each other."
CineSource's research indicates that there are 20 sectors to the Northern California film family, some barely aware of—or even able to tolerate—the other. design: D. Blair
As it happens, that has been my dream since film school, even though virtually all the students at the San Francisco Art Institute and most of teachers, except Lawrence Jordan and George Kuchar, used to ridicule me for it.
As Schopenhauer said, "[Truth] is ridiculed [before] it is accepted as being self-evident." Unfortunately, just because you're being rejected is no guarantee you're being innovative.
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail Again. Fail Better," counseled Sammy Beckett (1983) while Bobby Dylan said, "There ain't no success like failure," (1965).
While I may go down—and the end is approaching fast, although, as you can see, it is inspiring me to get more furious—CineSource is here to stay and stay the course 'til we get the Film Stammer cooking, crack the code of Cali-ambiguity and convince the 20 sectors to talk to each other.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, filmmaker, graphic designer and fine artist living in Oakland and he can be reached .