What Is Gold...

You know, what I really want to do, is just show a series of well-composed photographic shots. For me, I find that even the rich studios making movies for Netflix and mainstream Hollywood, are apparently not capable of finding camera directors and production designers who know a single thing about why human beings are attracted to visual images and stories told through the visual media.

I was watching through - I stopped following it properly almost within seconds - this new production titled 'A Simple Favor,' and the whole thing was made by an amateur; if you ask me.

Great place, what the hell are we going to show, though

You see, whoever made the movie has an ambition to present, to show visually, one thing - which is namely, these 'motifs' about the upper middle classes, maybe even the elite; all kinds of images and more-or-less memex concepts and style object/icons particularly to do with male-centric 'success'-related culture. Underlying the narrative themes is a twisted political hypothesis about gender...

Yeah... Boringly, we have an apparent female plotting and committing, and then failing, to get away with a murder for gain and materialistic objectives. How original and so stunningly confronting to our attitudes...

Not.

I say 'apparently' because this leads me onto another (live performance) art form I recently sat through - this time the 'high-brow' cultural disquisition in actual practice, of operatic singing.

Now it's no big deal for European high brow people this whole thing about gender-swapping or gender vagueness or gender uncertainty - Edward De Vere's plays are filled with the kind of thing, so to the writing of Virginia Woolf, and the most famous theatrical Impresario of all time - Diaghilev - had many friends of the 'uncertain gender' kind.

I can tell you that it is well known in the world of operatic singing for there to have been lead singers and stage performers said to be male, who were not, or female, who were not.

But today, in a world that makes much of 'honesty,' I think it would be somewhat of a shock that mainstream opera and classical singing production companies are pushing 'stars' - literally the lead sopranos - around the world, who are in fact men or transgendered.

I am not going to say who is, in the current season of opera performance around the world.

But suffice for me to advise you, that there are, some.

But back to the film shot composition matter - these idiots who are making this run of modern era rubbish (and there have always been the crowd that does it) do not understand a lot of basics; and it just won't do to say 'oh they intend to do it this way.' No, they don't. Because the movies are failing at the sales counters.

They are failing to make money. And yes, you can go full Gonzo and insist that this also means they are so smart they actually intend to fail because it is consistent with their intellectual objectives of 'art.'

So in any case, what I will be doing over coming articles, is attempt to showcase a few photographs and images I think demonstrate what a good shot is like. I'm not going to go into the technical details because hell, others will have a lot more technical detail than I can enunciate hereabouts. 

Here is a pic of Diana Widmaier Picasso, the grand-daughter of Pablo Picasso. You can see she has the sensitivity to the composition of shots, that too many of today's camera directors simply do not have. 

She is also a proponent of gold-backed currency.