1- What's the best thing for a human being?

2- What is your favorite form of information?

3- Why do we collect/gather information?

4- Is this need or want to collect information learned or hardwired?

5- What is your earliest memory?

6- Is memory a curse or a blessing? (Please note that we are trying to get beyond either/or, and deeper into the meta-cognition of it all. We know it involves the context and/or the specific situation, but what is this question really about?)

7- Who were your earliest role-models within your immediate family, and how did they specifically influence/affect you, briefly?

8- Who were/are your role models outside your immediate family and how specifically did/do they affect you, briefly?

Earliest, and/or later in life.

9- Were you raised a particular religion? If so, are you still practicing?

10- Do evil people exist or does evil use people as a vehicle?

 

11- How do you deal with enemies? Consider - Alan Watts: "If you acknowledge your enemy, you empower them." Coppola stole from the Mob and Samurais: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." Frenemies. JFK: "Forgive your enemy but don't forget their name." Fellini: "I need an enemy." Chinese proverb: "He who cannot agree with their enemy is controlled by them." Levi-Strauss: "Cannibals boil friends, and roast enemies." Also, please comment on the first quote.

12- James Joyce was the first projectionist in Dublin over 100 years ago. He checked out and asked, "Why should I go inside a building and see a movie of a tree when I can go outside and see a real tree?" Years later William Faulkner said that the best fiction can be more true than journalism. Why do we have to recreate/reproduce things in order to get them? Why do we go to a theatrical play of people acting out life? Why don't we just live life?

13- Lewis Hines published photos of child labor in newspapers, printed matter. Upton Sinclair wrote the book The Jungle. They both have been credited as the tipping-point to change laws. Can you tell me of any music, theater, art, or film that actually was the tipping point to change laws?

14- A screenwriting teacher told me a great film is when you can clearly see the intention of the maker. Stanley Kubrick says the opposite: great art is when you can not see the intention of the maker. What role does intention play in your creative process?

15- What first attracted you to pursue filmmaking? (and/or writing, activism, painting, etc) 

 

16- If clothing is an extension of skin, and knife & fork are extensions of teeth, what human sensorium does the moving image camera extend? (or the pen, paint brush, musical instrument, etc)

 

17- McLuhan said there is no such thing as a good or bad movie, it's a good or bad viewing experience. Any comment.

 

18- Peter Greenaway said that cinema is much too rich a medium to be left to storytellers. Are experimental filmmakers telling stories a different way or doing something completely different? Is Tony Conrad's The Flicker storytelling?

 

19- If you and I were starting the Ann Arbor Film Festival with George Manupelli many years ago, would you want to be more inclusive or exclusive? Keep in mind that it's featured a fraction of animation and documentaries, but mainly is experimental films. Chick Strand was starting Canyon Cinema around the same time in the SF area. She told me they were trying to recreate their 11 cent movie-going experience by showing a feature along with a newsreel, a cartoon and then added an experimental film. Stan Brakhage told them to just show experimental because those other genres have venues. And what are the possible motives and consequences of being more exclusive or more inclusive (which means showing all genres: animations, documentaries, experimental and mainstream movies too)?

 

20- What are the services and disservices of the ghettoization of experimental film? When Jackson Pollock was on the cover of Life Magazine in 1949, regular folks could start developing an aesthetic on experimental painting. There was no Bruce Conner or Maya Deren Life Magazine covers. Generally it's the privileged (alot of rich art kids) who develop an avant garde aesthetic and dominate the experimental film world. Any comments.

 

21- When I asked Michael Apted years ago why rock video makers feel so obliged to edit fast, he told me "because we have learned to take in information faster." Martin Scorsese also said that he edited his films faster because of MTV. Can we indeed learn to take in info faster?

 

22- "Film as an art form has been swindled by capitalism." Any comments.

 

23- Jean-Luc Godard told Michael Moore his film Fahrenheit 9/11 was going to help Bush get elected. With the slew of political documentaries over recent years, do they more activate or more passive?

 

24- Marcel Duchamp said there is no art without an audience. What role does the audience play in your creative process (during the making)?

 

25- What was the motive of the cave artists?

 

26- What is more important - conviction or compromise?

 

27- Is ambition based more on fear or joy?

 

28- Is loyalty based on reason?

 

29- T.S. Eliot said that poetry is outing your inner dialogue. What language is your inner dialogue in? What form is your inner consciousness in?

 

30- George Manupelli says "Ignore yourself." Jonas Mekas says there is no self-expression. Cecil Taylor says he is a vehicle and it comes through him. Is art making more self-expression or more vehicles for whatever dominant technology or culture is currently present? Can art be egoless?

 

31- Is perception reality?

 

32- McLuhan probed Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: artists dream awake. We all have creative powers we use to dream while sleeping, but artists also use them while awake. Dream awake. Have dreams played a role in your creative process? How?

 

33- McLuhan reworded Browning's "Our reach should exceed our grasp or what is heaven for?" to "Our reach should exceed our grasp or what is a metaphor?" How and why do you use metaphor in your art?

 

34- Why is it so difficult for humans to consider the possibility that life may be pointless?

 

35- Lewis Carroll said "I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Have you believed in any impossible things lately?

 

 

45- How do you find peace of mind?

 

46- If you were walking down the street today and you met yourself as a 12 year old, what would you say to your 12 year old self?

 

47- Should toilet paper go over or under the roll? Why?

 

48- If a publisher was to release your autobiography, off the top of your head, what would the title be? They want to scent the glue in the binding. What smell would it be?

 

49- If a statue was built in your honor, where would it be displayed and what would it be made of?

 

50- Please tell me something good you never had and you never want. 

 

51- If you were in a vat of vomit up to your neck and somebody threw a bag of shit at your face, what would you do?

 

52- What is the healthiest cultural shift you see developing today?

 

53- What gives you the most optimism?

 

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EXTRAS:

 

54- What is the most overrated idea ?

 

55- Please answer the 4 questions of McLuhan's Tetrad for the Ann Arbor Film Festival, or any human invention (tangible or not)

A: what does the Ann Arbor Film Festival enhance or intensify?

B: what does it render obsolete or replace?

C: what does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?

D: what does it become when pressed to an extreme, what does it flip into?

 

56- Any rituals or routines in your creative process?

 

57- What is the function of poetry? music?

 

58- What questions remain unresolved for you?

 

59- What is it about your art that audiences resonate with?

 

60- Larry Jordan: "Human beings conduct their lives from much stronger sources than the rational mind." Name other sources? How do you navigate and understand their relationships. What about the spaces between the sources?

 

61- Put in order what the most important "W" words are for you: who, what, when, where or why.

 

62- Summarize your life in three words, all starting with the same letter.

 

63- Are we hardwired for blaming? storytelling? 

 

64- Consider: TV is light through, like stain glass window, right brained, more female. Film (movies) is light on, left brained, more male. Movies present reflected light ('light on') to the viewer, while a TV picture is back lit ('light through'). McLuhan said the cinema image, typically a 35mm frame, is made up of millions of dots, or emulsion, and is much more 'saturated' than the lines and pixels of the TV image. He argued that the TV screen invited the audience to 'fill-in' a low-intensity image, much like following the bounding lines of a cartoon. That made TV more 'involving' and more tactile. The high-intensity film image allows for much more information on screen, but also demands a higher degree of visual perception and cognition. In that sense, he said, film is a 'hot' medium, TV a 'cool' bath. Hearing is related to the associative thought attributed to the right brain, while sight is connected to the left brain's rational structuring. "The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. Man was given an eye for an ear." -McLuhan. "What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for." - James Joyce Finnegans Wake (482.30-36).Any comments.

 

65- What is the worst thing for a human being?

 

66- What artist would you want to do your portrait?

 

67- If you were a chair, who would you want to sit on you?

 

68- Who started it all? Are we going to make it? Where do we put it? Who's cleaning it up? Is it serious?

 

69- Are we making it happen or watching it happen?

 

70- "I am trying to get more control over my spontaneity." Any comments.

 

71- What moment (memory) in your life were you absolutely totally loved?

 

72- Introducing Andrei Tarkovsky to an audience at the 1983 Telluride Film Festival, Stan Brakhage declared: "I personally think that the three greatest tasks for film in the 20th century are 1) To make the epic, that is, to tell the tales of the tribes of the world. 2) To keep it personal, because only in the eccentricities of our personal lives do we have any chance at the truth. 3) To do the dream work, that is to illuminate the borders of the unconscious." Any comments. What are your 21st century's updates? 

73- What qualities must an artist bring to their work regardless of the era, medium or technology?

 

74- What is that thing in art (and what causes it) that makes it transcendent and flips consciousness? Why is it often elusive?

 

75- What guides your decision making? Allen Ginsberg says first thought, best thought. Jonah Lehrer (How We Decide) says fast-blink decisions are not always useful. Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) recommends gut-decision making.

 

76- "Whatever happened to letting kids stare out the window?" - George Carlin (updated to "Whatever happened to letting kids stare at their cell phone?" - GF) Any comments.

 

77- Will there ever be silence?

 

78- What is going to be after the Internet?

 

79- "A person's identity is a socially induced hallucination. There's no such thing as a person. There's only a bundle of consciousness that's constantly in flux." - Deepak Chopra. Any comments.

 

80- If you were an experimental film, what would your subject matter be? (or a novel, painting, etc)

 

81- Are the laws of nature cruel?

 

82- If you were the ruler of the world, what would you do on your first day?

 

83- Are we hardwired for competition? "Games were created to give non-heroes the illusion of winning. In real life, you don't know who really won or lost, but you can tell who is a hero and who is not." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

 

84- On what occasion do you lie?

 

85- "It's not what you are that counts, it's what you think you are." Any comments.

 

86- Is that a real question?

 

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"The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development" - Alfred North Whitehead

 

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MUSIC specific:

 

87- Thelonious Monk said there are no wrong notes. Agree or disagree. Any comments.

 

88- Miles Davis spoke of the space between the notes. Any comments.

 

89- "The key is to bring the audience up onto the stage and into the scene with you. It is they who must give you even more than you give them in way of imagination and creative power." - Ruth Draper. How do you accomplish this?

 

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POLITICAL specific:

 

90- What is the difference between rights and responsibilities?

 

91- What is the difference between rebellion and revolution?

 

92- "Anarchy is making rules for yourself, not others." - Utah Phillips. Any comments.

 

93- "Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty."- John Basil Barnhill. Any comments.

 

94- In the 2005 film V for Vendetta, the quote from 93 was paraphrased "People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." Any comments.

 

95- Are you for or against the death penalty (capital punishment)? How do you qualify your decision?

 

96- Discuss "them or us" and "divide and conquer." "In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant." - Charles de Gaulle. Baudelaire wrote that the devil's greatest achievement was to have persuaded people that he does not exist.