Sorry for protracted blogging silence. Like last year, I disappeared after BRITDOC into the rural wilderness of South Africa (with a little urban time in my birth city of Joburg too). It was strange how fast the chaos of my working life dropped away and felt so far away. I started to think I had made up Shooting People and BRITDOC and the world of docs and independent film in general. In a weird double-move it all felt very irrelevant while I was away but now that I’m back in NYC it feels more relevant than ever. I’m getting obsessed with ideas around storytelling and narrative and who tells what stories about whom. Not to mention who funds and distributes and sees these films!

Anyway, blah blah blah, I haven’t formulated these ideas very clearly yet but I am feeling very excited and inspired about plans for Shooting People and for my own work.

And I am going to learn Xhosa! I said it last year and did bugger all about it but I really want to do it.

And you know how I love my photos so here are a few random pics from my trip - mainly taken in the Kruger Park and the Eastern Cape - and many taken by my marvelous sister and her marvelous new digital camera.

Elephant by the side of the road in Kruger

Impala Lilies in Letaba Camp

Giraffe munching

We saw lion three times this trip which was very exciting

Handsome old Baobab tree

Giraffe sculptures in Olifants Camp

Zebedee!

Me running down a dune in the Eastern Cape (running up and down sand dunes is one of my very favorite things in life)

Naboom - these plants cover the hillsides and I think they’re very poisonous but they’re so beautiful

Weird mushrooms on Hogsback Mountain - where everything is Tolkien-related and the liquor store is called The Ring!

Donkey cart (I love this picture because of the beautiful trees)

I may be over-tired and over-sentimental but this video does make me grin like a fool. Just like Boing Boing said it would!

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

From XKCD.

I was walking down the Bowery on Saturday minding my own business when I bumped into a guy with a TV on his head. As you do!

This article in The Guardian is rather amusing. Except it cost 30 people their jobs so it isn’t. The gist: a cockroach crawled across the news desk during Turkmenistan’s 9pm news show, Vatan. This went unnoticed by the news staff and the show was repeated at 11pm. Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the country’s president, didn’t see the funny side and fired 30 people from the main state news channel. At least it wasn’t a cooking show!

The Guardian includes this lovely bit of information:

“A cockroach will live after decapitation for several weeks before starving to death; the severed head survives several hours.”

I feel faintly embarrassed to admit that I read advice columns. But Cary Tennis is on Salon and he says things like this:

What about having a little humility and saying, You know what, I feel better when I paint duck decoys, so I’m painting duck decoys. And fuck you, get out of my garage. And don’t call them figurines. They’re duck decoys.

I love NYC so much that I give it a great, big bear hug most days but if I don’t escape every so often to stare at the horizon and look at some trees then I start to go a bit ker-azy. So my recent blog silence can be explained by the fact that I was in Canada hanging out on this beautiful Pacific beach.

A belated Happy New Year to you all. My friend says this is THE YEAR OF JOY which sounds like a very nice year indeed. Much better than last year which was THE YEAR OF THE BATHTUB (don’t ask).

I’m going to be taking a little blogging break over the next couple of weeks. There may be a few posts here and there but they probably won’t be terribly intelligent or interesting. You have been warned. I know this is rather infantile and I’m sorry to be veering so dangerously close to LOL Cats territory but I watched the 1975 Jamie Uys doc Animals Are Beautiful People last week and this scene made me laugh so hard I felt positively euphoric. Is there anything funnier than drunk animals? I would say not. Happy Winter Solstice for tomorrow. It’s all uphill from here. And a very Happy Christmas to you all!

Ah December. It’s that time of year when you take stock of the year gone by and think about the year to come. Everything about this season feels like a bit of a cliche but, festive hubub and cacophony aside, the days are short, the nights are long (the Winter Solstice is nearly here) and this is a time for thinking and planning and thinking some more. So in that spirit here’s a sweet film from Lev Yilmaz. I saw it at Rooftop Films over the summer and just thought about it again today for some reason.

I was feeling a bit bah humbug over the weekend. I love this time of year but seeing everybody frantically shopping (me included) made me feel a bit queasy. I felt like I should go see What Would Jesus Buy? and stop participating in this seasonal shopocalypse. But I sat down to watch It’s a Wonderful Life on Saturday, while I knitted myself a woolly hat, and suddenly the world seemed ok again. My roommate and I decided the perfect man would be a cross between Jimmy Stewart, Lloyd Dobler and Agent Cooper. Would that work or would it just be weird?

The ok-ness of my world was thrown into doubt again this morning when my upstairs neighbor’s toilet overflowed all over my apartment and all over my head but that’s another story. The important point here is that Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra saved my weekend and possibly my Christmas. Ah, the power of movies.