Set of the day

I don't know if there is a group for this or if there has been a thread, but if not, there should be.....it's so hot, even if thats all you can see in the shot (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) sorry, that's a hell of a lot of pictures....and i just had to... more

I don't know if there is a group for this or if there has been a thread, but if not, there should be.....it's so hot, even if thats all you can see in the shot


















sorry, that's a hell of a lot of pictures....and i just had to start and end with Clover

by Brad Warner I’ve been included in a Facebook group made up of people who are trying to plan my high school class’s reunion. I’ve never gone to any of the others – if there even were any others. I was living in Japan when they would have happened. So last week on this FB group someone posted:... more

by Brad Warner

I’ve been included in a Facebook group made up of people who are trying to plan my high school class’s reunion. I’ve never gone to any of the others – if there even were any others. I was living in Japan when they would have happened.

So last week on this FB group someone posted: “It’s Friday night, what would you have been doing on a Friday night in January back when we were in high school?” And people are posting stuff like they would’ve been out at a party at someone’s house, or with a bunch of friends doing donuts in the school parking lot or cruising by McDonald’s, which was the closest thing Wadsworth, Ohio had to a hang-out spot after the local Red Barn closed down (a prize to anyone who knows what a Red Barn was).





[Bully Suicide in a Schooled]

In case you live in a place where the roads never ice up, “doing a donut” means driving your car real fast in an icy snow-covered parking lot or street then slamming on the brakes so that the car spins around leaving behind a donut shaped mark in the snow. It struck me then, and it strikes me now, as a stupid and unnecessarily dangerous thing to do. As for parties, I never enjoyed getting drunk or being around a lot of people who were. And I was already edging toward becoming a vegetarian so McDonald’s was not an exciting destination. The things most people in my school did for fun seemed either boring, pointless, stupid or potentially dangerous. Very often all of the above!

So what I would’ve been doing back then was pretty much what I was doing that Friday night a week or so ago, which was sitting at home alone practicing bass. I didn’t party when I was in high school. I was not invited to parties. I was not one of the in-crowd. I was not somebody anyone cool wanted to be seen with. I looked like a member of the trench coat mafia, standing around in front of the school, not even in the commons where the cool kids congregated, dressed in my army surplus trench coat (yes, really) complaining about stuff to the few other nerds I knew.

Although I didn’t like almost anything that the other kids at Wadsworth High liked, I still wanted to be included. I was not a loner because I enjoyed being alone. I wanted to have friends. I wanted to be cool. But in the high school I attended this was impossible for me.

I have a certain degree of lingering resentment about that even now. And this FB group is bringing all that back up to the surface lately. I told this to another friend who’d gone to my school and she said, “You were one of the most interesting people in school and that was kind of intimidating.” I never knew this.

I’m not sure that was what everyone felt. The football guys who decided I was a “faggot” and wanted to whip my ass did not seem to feel intimidated by me. The cute girls who turned down my awkward attempts at asking for dates didn’t seem to think I was interesting. But maybe I was wrong.

I am not above thinking that it would be fun to go to the reunion just to see those people and be all like, I’m a fabulous famous writer who travels around the world to speak to people, has done eight records and made a movie that was shown at film festivals. Oh, and some people are making a documentary about my incredible life and I’ve just gotten the lead role in a feature-length narrative film too. What have you been up to? Still beating up “faggots” in Wadsworth, Ohio? At which point I shall tilt my nose skyward and flick ashes off my cigarette, that I’ll be holding in a long ivory holder. I’ll take up smoking just so I can do this.

(And why if I’ve done all this am I still poor as shit? But anyway…)

Such juicy bitterness! Oh it’s all in there and more, folks! You don’t get over this stuff. And the folks in high school were sweethearts compared to what I dealt with in junior high and grade school. I was “Bucky Beaver” back then due to my massive overbite. I was the guy everybody made fun of. Even the worst losers could score points by coming up with new insults for me. I’m sure some of them will be at the reunion too.

But the truth is I should probably thank those people for treating me the way they did. I understand what happened a lot better now. How could they have treated me otherwise in high school? I probably wouldn’t have gone to their parties even if I had been invited. The only possible fun I might have potentially had at one was getting laid by some girl who was too drunk too realize how uncool I was. And even that idea didn’t seem very enticing.

I managed to find fun things to do. I formed my own band. I traveled around being a roadie for my friend Joe’s band (much more popular than mine, natch) whose drummer, another Wadworth High loner, went on to join the band Warrant and drummed on (She’s My) Cherry Pie. Mmmm. Cherries.

I also got into meditation. Granted, that was a little bit after high school. But the seeds were sown in the days when I didn’t have anything to do on weekends except play bass and read a lot of books. If I’d been more popular, then I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.

I feel kind of bad these days for kids who are popular and well-liked in school. Some of them will be all right. But a lot of them are missing out on what’s really important. They’re being fed lies by a system that wants to keep them stupid and un-creative. They buy into these lies because they’re sold so powerfully and nobody is around to tell them there’s any other way to have fun. In some ways things are far better now then they used to be, though. Nerds are cool. Kids now have access to a lot more options than I ever did at their age. So maybe there’s hope.

But what do I do with all of my lingering resentment? Even though I did just fine in spite of the torments I suffered, I still feel all this rage. What does one do about that?

One of the greatest myths about meditation practice is the idea that it will somehow erase all the bad stuff from your personality. It doesn’t. So how come a guy who has meditated for longer than he was even alive up until high school still feels anger about those four short years? All that stuff was over when people still thought stone-washed denim jeans were cool! Lots of people would wonder what the hell good all that meditation did me. Shouldn’t it have made me all serene and stuff?

Meditation practice will not eradicate your likes and dislikes. It won’t cure you of your past. Nor will it alter your basic personality. You’ll still be who you always were. But you might come to terms with what that really is. You will not become like one of caricature meditation-guy types you see in bad movies. The guys who pretend to be like that are acting. The mask comes off as soon as they’re out of camera range.

In my case, I still have all my old resentments. But I see them for what they are. Just a lot of thoughts that come and go. In case anyone from my school is reading this, you’re not hearing now what I really thought of you. I thought a lot of different things about a lot of people.

Along with all my resentments, I had a certain sneaking admiration for the football team and their athletic abilities and their confidence. I thought a lot of the popular girls were cute with their big hairsprayed hair and were wasting their lives on things that I could see even then didn’t make them happy. All of us had a lot more in common just by growing up in that sucky one-horse town than we ever knew at the time. And Wadsworth, Ohio was kind of pretty and quaint. I hated that at the time. I don’t anymore.

I don’t need to cling to any of these feelings, though. The good or the bad ones. I don’t need to try and replace all the negatives with positives. I don’t need to believe in any of them. I don’t need to add them to that long, convoluted list of items that I grasp tightly for fear that if they ever went away I wouldn’t be me anymore. I’ll be me no matter what thoughts flow through my head. I never understood that until I really reached deep into myself.

High school resentments are comparatively easy ones to let go of. Most folks manage to drop them when they get a little past those years, even if they don’t meditate. But we all carry around a lot of other stuff that’s a hell of a lot harder to dig out.

It’s in getting to these hard-to-reach places that meditation really helps. If you can come to terms with the fact that all your thoughts, no matter how juicy they are or how important they seem are just thoughts, you can experience a tremendous sense of freedom that too few people ever get to experience.

***

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.

You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!

Brad Warner’s hardcore band Zero Defex is playing a gig on February 9th at the Matinee in Akron, Ohio.



Brad is also on a book tour right now and may even be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next visit his blog.

I Am Love is a cinematic tour de force that explores the revolutionary power of love. The film is the result of a long-term collaboration between British actress Tilda Swinton (Orlando, Michael Clayton, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Italian writer and director Luca... more

I Am Love is a cinematic tour de force that explores the revolutionary power of love. The film is the result of a long-term collaboration between British actress Tilda Swinton (Orlando, Michael Clayton, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Italian writer and director Luca Guadagnino, who first worked with Swinton when she took the lead role in his 1999 feature-length debut, The Protagonists.

At the center of I Am Love, is Emma Recchi, played by Swinton. She's a trophy wife acquired by her Russian art-loving husband on a foray into the former socialist republic. By marriage, Emma is part of an Italian industrial dynasty that is born of fascism but embracing capitalism. But having served her primary purpose, giving birth to and raising those that will carry on the Recchi lineage, Emma is searching for a place in life beyond that at the end of a well-laid dinner table. At a point where she's at a crossroads in her own life, Antonio Biscaglia crosses her path. As a chef, he's below stairs and below her status, but he proves to be irresistible to her, and their passion ignites a chain of events that rocks the stability of the Recchi patriarchy.

Though I Am Love is a work of fiction, there are distinct parallels to Swinton's own life. "You're always playing yourself," the actress told The Observer newspaper back in 2005 while promoting the film Thumbsucker. "It's all autobiography, whatever you're doing. It's using them as a kind of prism through which to throw something real about yourself."

With luminous pale skin, Celtic coloring and disconcertingly vivid green eyes, Tilda is clearly not born of Italian capitalist / nouveau aristocratic stock. However she comes from one of the oldest feudal baronial families in the United Kingdom, and can trace her bloodline back to the ninth century, so understands what it is to be a woman in a grand family. The mother of twins by Scottish writer John Byrne, who is twenty years her senior, since 2004 Swinton has been in a much-speculated about relationship with German-born painter Sandro Kopp, who is her junior by 18 years. Though this love triangle has echoes of that in her latest film, ultimately the outcomes are very different. The choice Byrne made to give Swinton his blessing in order to preserve their love and family life for the sake of themselves and their children is as progressive as her partner's alternate choice in the film is archaic.

We sat down with Swinton at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons to talk about her philosophies on filmmaking and love.

Nicole Powers: What originally drew you to this project?

Tilda Swinton: Well Luca [Guadagnino] and I have been friends for a very long time. I say that we've been talking about this particular film for about eleven years but we started developing the story about seven years ago. The reason I can date it is because we made a film eleven and a half years ago and, as tends to happen when you have a long-term working relationship with someone, you make a piece of work and then as that film is being cut you start talking about the next one and it's usually 180 degrees from the one you've just made.

NP: What was the initial concept behind the story?

TS: Seven years ago we made a film, it was an interview. Luca interviewed me and he made a film out of the close-up of me as I talked. It was called The Love Factory and it was basically us having a conversation about life in general, but at a certain point we were talking about love. At the end of the process of making that film we turned to each other and said let's make that idea - the idea of the revolutionary aspect of love - the germ in the heart of the narrative of the film we make.

We'd already been talking about a kind of film, what we call a sense-sational film. For many years we even talked about the possibility of it being a silent film. A film that does things one hopes that the films we adore from [Luchino] Visconti, from [Alfred] Hitchcock, from John Huston do, which is to get you feeling and smelling and luxuriating. We'd been thinking, how is it possible for modern cinema to be sense-sational in that way? To actually be involving in that way, rather than being satisfying as a story or interesting as a concept or maybe overwhelming as a special effects experience. How is it possible to make a modern film that's sense-sational like these classic language-of-cinema films? So that's what we've been discussing for eleven years.

But when we started thinking about the story, we started with this idea of love that we decided to place at the heart of the story, the concept of the revolutionary aspect of love. From that we sort of went outwards. So this love story would happen in the heart of a woman who I would play. She has to be an alien in an environment which is breakable by that love. It has to be able to actually disrupt the status quo. Then like detectives we started to [think] what's that status quo going to be? What is antipathetic to that kind of volcanic love? And then we worked our way through all the possibilities and very quickly ended up in Milan.

NP: Working in Milan, that must have been...

TS: Hot - especially in the winter scenes. Milan was the only [place]. Milan is the subject if you like. Milan is where those families live and go about being very discreet about their lives and their great industrial wealth. The architecture of Milan is everything. You'll walk down what looks like a perfectly normal business street but behind every single door will be a courtyard with some exquisite palazzo inside that's lived in by some great family that made most of their money during the fascist era.

NP: And you refer to that in the movie.

TS: The story in a way is a fable, it's like a fairy story really. It's not a documentary. It's about tendencies, but it's not about any particular family. But the reason why it felt most productive for us to set it in Milan is because we wanted to explore this idea of love and this idea of nature being set, human nature and the bred-in tooth and claw element of natural progress...

And it occurred to us that we're not talking about the feudal aristocracy of Visconti's Leopard, which has much, much more latitude within itself to change, to be organic. It's a much more robust phenomenon the aristocracy because it's a social project. However exploitative feudalism might have been, there's always this sense that it's necessary to keep morphing and evolving as a beast, the whole aristocratic principle. Whereas this kind of high capitalism, you know, it's pretty brutal. It's very anti-natural. It's all based on the idea of denial.

If you're going to spend your days operating a house like that, operating a business like that, ordering countless Diptyque candles and getting more and more fittings for your Jil Sander wardrobes, you're going to have to be in denial about where that money comes from. You can't sit in a corner and worry about the workers who are living in high rises - they're actually earning the money that is keeping you in these Ferragamo shoes - you have to operate a kind of blinker system, and that makes you very vulnerable. It makes you vulnerable to the idea of real natural evolution and change.

NP: Which leads us to the glorious love scene, which sows the seed of change within the Recchi family, which is set within nature - Emma and Antonio are just like animals in the grass.

TS: Well it's all so democratic.

NP: You're stripped of your designer clothes and your pearls.

TS: Completely, it's an animal and mortal business. And of course we then intercut it with what I call these Dallas letters - "LONDON" - and come straight into an industrial London landscape and go back into the concrete world, which is manageable, and again breakable. I mean it is as much about nature as anything.

NP: That scene is so real, so tangible and tactile, and you talk about how you wanted almost to make a silent movie that involves the senses. Obviously the use of food plays an important part in the execution of that in this film, but I also love the way that you used sound and silence. So often when there's a stressful scene in a movie, it's so shrill and high volume that I'm repelled from it. But in this film, when you had those highly emotional scenes you turned the volume down so it actually draws you in, which is such a powerful device to use. The silences speak volumes.

TS: It's a very honorable tradition, and it's something that we learned from Hitchcock. Hitchcock is always talking about the style of a film being the content and the dialogue just being atmosphere. We knew always that we wanted to make a film where what people actually said to each other was not really that important. For that reason we decided that the woman, Emma, would be out of her own language. She's not an articulate person. She's not somebody that uses language, possibly not even in Russian. The most she speaks is when she's talking about her past to Antonio. She's not someone who relies on expressing herself verbally.

And we wanted to show behavior more. I remember saying very early on to Luca that I wanted to make a film where the way in which a woman would roll up a ribbon off an unwrapped present would tell you more than some long speech about her life. Just those details, which you don't often see in modern cinema - you still are able to look for that kind of detail in modern novels but you can't really look for it in modern cinema very often - we wanted to recoup that possibility.

NP: Right, there's not the texture there anymore.

TS: The texture and the observation, for the camera to observe that. For there to be both in the direction but also in the cinematography the possibility to go there and catch it, and not always be there and be listening to what's being said. To look at body language and to feel the way in which people fill space. To try and work out what they're thinking and feeling rather than just listening to what they're saying.

NP: The film also explores the idea of happiness. There's an amazing line that your daughter says in the movie where she talks about how happy is a very sad word. In cinema and literature there's always a price to be paid for happiness. We're always told that about happiness, and made to feel guilty about it.

TS: Well I think the idea of love as some kind of antidote to pain, the myth of romantic love, particularly two people in a romantic situation being joined together in such a union that they will never feel pain again, and they will never really need to be alone again, and in fact they will never experience anything alone again either, this kind of bondage forever, is something that we talked about in that film The Love Factory that was the genesis of the idea of this film.

What I was talking about in The Love Factory was a different kind of concept of love, which is that at the very heart of a real proper concept of love is an idea of loneliness. That if one is really, really in proper collusion with one's own loneliness then one is really in a fit state to love another person. And that's something that I think parenting has the opportunity to teach you, which is why Emma is presented as a really quite advanced mother. I mean the way that she is able to embrace her daughter coming out and they way that she gracefully absorbs her daughter's liberation, and the way in which her daughter comes out to her, there is absolutely no feeling of there being any schism for Emma at all.

It shows that she actually is quite an advanced mother. She's prepared for her children to leave. She understands enough about love in relation to the love of her children to know that she is alone from them. They have left her now and they are going on to live their own lives, and she's kind of cool with that. So the idea that to truly love another, whether it's in a romantic situation...I mean her husband has the opportunity to love her at the end when she says to him, "You no longer know who I am. I love Antonio." He has the opportunity to say, "That's fine." And, "On you go, my love. I will support you." For him to love her conditionally, so conditionally that he actually says to her, "You don't exist," that's a very archaic and breakable kind of concept of love I think.

NP: Going back to this idea of love being a cure for loneliness, I always think you should work on being as complete of a human being as you can on your own, then you'll likely find and attract other complete souls. But if you consider yourself to be half of a being and are set on looking for another half, all you'll find is another incomplete soul. Even if you find a partner under those conditions, instead of ever being whole you're destined to walk through life as two incomplete or broken souls.

TS: Well the idea that loneliness is either something that should be healed or could be healed is completely ridiculous. I think it's a modern construct, and it's something by the way I think that capitalism has co-opted very successfully. The idea that the second you feel lonely you have to go out and buy more stuff, and that you can actually be cured of your loneliness by buying more stuff is one of the ways that capitalism actually works...

Lonely people make the best company it seems to me. And there's a difference between alone-ness and loneliness. But really that existential loneliness of knowing that at the end of the day you are the only one on your particular path means that you can really properly communicate with somebody else who knows the same thing about themselves.

I mean, what do you do with the idea that you have to cut parts off yourself in order to be in communion with somebody else? Whether they're a lover, or whether they're a child, or whether they're a mother or a father or a brother or a sister, or even a friend, to sort of go, "Well, we're very close but I used to love to go raving, and I can't go raving anymore because he doesn't like it" or "I can't go raving anymore because my children wouldn't approve," that's kind of a terrible waste of life.


I Am Love opens in theaters on June 18.