Going to China!

Tomorrow morning I head to China for the ASIFA General Assembly. While there, we'll have the assembly and an in-person board meeting, and most of us will also give presentations to the Jilin Animation Institute. Mine will be on stop motion technologies here in Portland, with a focus on Laika's use of rapid prototyping technology in Coraline and Paranorman.
To be honest, I'm not sure what to expect, but it will be interesting, that's for sure. I'm looking forward to the trip.

I've been corresponding a bit with Malcolm Turner, of the Melbourne International Animation Festival. Apparently we've both been been asking for a while why there is so much great animation here in Portland, and the perennial answer ("because it rains so much") is highly unsatisfying. As Malcolm says, "it rains in lotsa places that produce truly dire animation".
I shared with him my pet theory, which goes a bit like this:
Basically I think that Portland has long been home to people who don't care much about conventional measures of success or status; people who are seeking wealth and fame tend to go somewhere else. Portlanders talk a lot about "quality of life", and "quality of life" seems to be code for "I don't want to work too much" - it goes with low cost of living, ease of access of public transportation, and a diversity of non-work activities. Because people don't work too much, they cultivate weird hobbies; unicycling and juggling and knitting and animation. Portlanders are expected to have side-projects; we welcome strange habits and (and this is important) are very tolerant of failure
So I think that atmosphere cultivates the culture that has become peculiarly "Portland" - we not only have an abundance of animation and film and music, but craft shows and pedicabs and artisinal beers and specialty foods and so forth. We aren't so supportive of the Arts-with-a-capital-A, but celebrate and support Crafts of all kinds, and our animators present themselves as craftspeople, as experimenters and tinkerers, as people in pursuit of the interesting.
He likes my theory, and maybe it will be more fleshed out and substantial in time for his Portland-specific feature in next years' festival.

Next week is the Best of the Northwest Animation Festival, but I won't be in town to catch it. If you are, it looks like a strong program.

And I'm working on bringing a program of the Polish School of Animation to Portland next year, partnering with the Northwest Film Center. It may be the US premiere of the program, which would be exciting.

I'm rereading if on a winter's night a traveler, by Calvino, and some Robert Frost poetry. Life is good.

loss of momentum

So, somehow over the snow days and the holidays, a kind of inertia set in and I'm struggling to get out of it.

Correction, I'm not trying that hard to struggle out of it, because I am enjoying pulling inward a bit right now.

Rest assured, soon I'll arise and attack this animation festival and get my teeth into Bobbsey and forge ahead on Women in Animation and so on. Drinking and Drawing is next week and that will probably get me going.

So, because I'm not really acting on those things right now, and I'm deep in Don Quixote (which is really long and strange), I just don't have that much to blog about.

I'm still mentally wrestling a bit with issues of creativity and connection, but I don't feel like I have anything new to share. I'd still like to chat about it with anyone who wants to. :-)

My next topic: creativity blocks

After talking with some folks at the Legion of Tech the other night (I hope they pick me- I sent Dawn a massive email that may have been overkill), I've been dwelling more on the whole issue of why (it seems to me) the technology industry is so much more creative than the entertainment industry.
I have some thoughts on the subject, but it's mostly theorizing on my part. I'd like to do some research on creative blocks and creative workplaces, and maybe try to frame up a someday-in-the-distant-future Ignite talk.

If anyone has any thoughts on the subject, or maybe just have lunch or a drink to chat about it, let me know.

What's with all the reading, Rebekah?

It occurs to me that someone might wonder why I devote so much space to books when that's not, ostensibly, the subject matter of this blog. For all five of you who read it (love you! and sorry to clog your feeds with my multiple posts), I'll explain.

I think that writing is almost unique in the art forms in that it can be done in complete isolation, with no investment. An actor, an animator, a dancer, need to be hired by someone in order to practice their art (that seems like such a vulnerable position, to me). A musician, a painter, a sculptor, need place and materials in order to practice their art. A writer can use a napkin and a pen, they can write in a bar, at work, at home, they can write in the morning or the evening, they can write whenever and wherever, the only tool a writer needs in order to practice their art is discipline.

It seems to me that is why I meet more aspiring writers than any other kind of artist, and more failed writers, writers who don't write, writers who say they write and then produce a battered sketchbook they've been carrying around for years, writers who tell you the idea they had years ago and are going to "do something with someday."

Writing has also the greatest potential as an art form. Because it's made of nothing, it can be anything. It is in books and literature that we see the most extraordinary ideas, it is in great writing that we see the truly original. And every great movie, every great play, we can look through it to the great writer who conceived it and bore it into the world. It's through literature that we see the greatest, most creative, most lasting explorations of our world, our human consciousness.

I'm terribly interested in artforms that are fundamentally collaborative, in tapping the creativity of disparate individuals and wrestling forth something greater than the sum of it's parts, and yet it is in the mind of the writer, that strange, private, unknowable place, that so many amazing ideas are born and made concrete. So I read to know the writer, and I read to conceive the world.

Events!

There are so many interesting opportunities to learn and share in this town. There's always something going on, and I'd like this blog to be a space where I keep track of what's coming up, and share those opportunities with others.

I would also like to share my response to those things here, to continue the conversations begun over coffee or drinks, and fan the flame.

The library is having a "Read the Classics" book group, with discussions led mostly by professors from Reed. It sounds amazing, and I'd love to participate, but the groups are limited to 25 people, and fill up immediately. While 25 is a good number for group discussion, I wish they would have more groups or sessions, so I could get into one.

The problem with using my google calendar to track these things is that it isn't really collaborative- feel free to suggest an alternate widget, or let me know about events I should publish.