Busy Shots

Well I mean really busy backgrounds in shots.

When I go to see a Bond movie, I go to see the Walther PPK, or the tux, or the jet-pack, or the Aston Martin, or the Bond-girl, or the glossy lipstick red undersides of her Louboutins, or the villain. I don't want to go and see some urban householder's interior design concepts, 'adorning' the set as well. 

The concept of FOUR objects for your eye to fall
on and to send to your brain to think about - the
shot is 'busy,' but not really...

I don't need to see that the actress is so thin that her arms literally compete with the fake pampas grass-tree on top of the never-used kitchenette. Or that she is so short that the armchair back is at head-height when she climbs onto it - so that, later on in the scene, she needs to literally sit astride the chair back! ...Just to be in frame of the other character in the shot.

We built long plywood runways for Mel Gibson in 'Year of Living Dangerously' to accommodate his walking into the ballroom with Sigourney Weaver.

This also seems busy - but again, it isn't.
It's a composed arrangement from a Spanish brandy advert.

In the last article here you will note that Diana Widmaier Picasso was one of only four torsos in camera shot. This photograph is a lesson in human subject photography. It has everything: subject, object, alternative perspective, and the abstract as also a representative 'other' human subject - and with even greater potential depth to that last element than all the rest.

Last night, the television was so boring, that I was avidly looking forward to the Geminid Meteor Shower - and, not letting me down, Nature also provided a lightning storm with limited clouds at the same time. We had thunder, lightning, meteors, and flying Pterodactyls. Okay, we didn't have the Pterodactyls. Although we might have had those but I fell asleep at some point in the hammock.

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.

If The English Had Stewart Kings Today

What would a modern-day 'Stewart' look like, or be like?

There were, of course more than fifty recognized claimants to the throne on the disappearance of James II - though these were not specifically sons of James of course! Nor of his brother Charles II.

When Henry Sydney and Thomas Osbourne brought in the House of Orange-Nassau, those Stewarts who I suppose 'missed out' turned to other matters - piracy, theater, all kinds of things.

Chivas Regal 'war-room' and Savile Row

Most of these people had very rare British surnames, and often those names are composites of French place-names combined with English or Welsh or Scots or Irish phrases and occasionally names.

One of these families is the 'Coverdale' family who were basically in everything from tea shipping and merchant trading as well as stage and theatrical productions and music and dance. Music, of course, especially of the more formal kind, was not a cheap business, as the paper stock used was the first grade even before bank certificate paper.

Here we have David Coverdale, originally from Yorkshire, more or less seventy years old now - whose grandmother was the leader of a Dance and Music troupe in Scotland and England known as 'Clara Coverdale's Nine Dancing Dots...'

The Coverdales are one of the legitimate lines to the Stewart Kings, also being closely related to Louis the 'Sun King' of France.

What kind of place might Paris be today, with David, King of France and Britain leading the band there, instead of 'Macron...' 

Waiting For A Star To Fall

The modern politician on the whole is a soulless individual. There is no scope to give ground on this description for someone like a Macron, for instance.

He is presiding over the total destruction of the Eternal City of Love and Romance...

No bad thing can come from the beautiful...

There are people in the internet world who believe he literally is some kind of 'End of All Time' figure in that speculative narrative about the future. Maybe Nostradamus spoke of him, maybe the Book of Revelation! I don't know...

You see, I think we've talked about this before - this 'chateau' in Belgium specifically, the one with the dome ceiling 'of a thousand points of light.' The Chateau des Amerois. People are of course, mixing up a lot of modern urban mythology about the Rothschilds and so on, and maintain that this chateau is where the 'elect' of a particular European Satanic cult conduct various gruesome blood-sports and then induct some acolyte of theirs, whom they then put into worldly power at their malevolent and diabolical service. Macron was a protege of the Rothschild (French branch) banking group.

But you see, that which has fallen is not a star any longer, and if it falls having lost its 'astral effulgence' it no longer has the 'spirit power' of a star. 

There are two distinct types of 'star' coming down to Earth. One comes without ever having lost anything - it comes on a deliberate purpose, on a mission...

  

Make A Wish II

Don't make any mistake, this is the place where magic is spoken about.

Ancient Egypt - although in fact the term was also applied at the height of the Pharaohs - to Byblos, and the city of Thebes - that whole empire was known as 'Al Khemet;' the lands of the greatest sorcerers. 

Christmas gifts from the East...

As you already know, the magician never shows his tricks - so a warm welcome to all those new folk who have responded to our little marketing stunt elsewhere re the poker staking advances project. But as little said about that for the present the better; let's not disclose too much there for the moment. Suffice to say, once you think about it you will realize that once you show where money is actually flowing, every man and his proverbial dog makes for that stream!

...And muddies it for you. And then you won't be able to see the diamonds or the emeralds or rubies in the clear stream as before.

Magic - real magic - is done by very few people on Earth at any given time. What you see everywhere are rumors about it and speculations dressed up as knowledge and these have even become actual ritualistic practices with names and labels about the bodies of belief entailed to the extent that at least in the wider and factually relatively ignorant community of ordinary people, these labels have become the very things they parodied or aspired to being from the outside. ...Leaving the real stream to be clear all on its own somewhere else.

This is a video made for the Arabian Oud company, and it very cleverly parodies some words and phrases from Islamic scholarly traditions - it talks about 'ideas,' 'lack of understanding' 'hidden depths of knowledge' and how those deeply learned are the only ones able to penetrate the mysteries and secrets even though all can experience the power.