Server Changes
Hi all, If you’re seeing this, you have gone to rockelmatt.wordpress.com. I’m changing my server back to ThisIsMatt.net directly. Please refer there for future blogs.
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On knowledge and success.
The winter months in Boston are getting harder to handle for my Californian blood. I have spent a great deal of my time at my home to escape the cold. Since there isn’t much to do in my 10×12′ box, I have been working and reading a lot. Last night, I watched “Don’t Look Back” by D.A. Pennebaker. The film which follows Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour has been recognized as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,”and truly is a work of art. I couldn’t help but to watch the film and compare it to what I have shot with Josiah over the last year. More on this later.
When I got home from school today, I was greeted by a package from Emory Holmes. Emory wrote the essay that appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Daily News on Inauguration Day that I posted some time ago. His vast knowledge in screenwriting and essay writing helped me develop an appreciation for character development. A lot of what he taught me was put to use when I got asked to work with Josiah. I had no doubt that Josiah was an incredible songwriter when we first met, but the knowledge that Emory gave me allowed me to capture his story as a complex character on film.
The envelope that I received included a copy of the newspaper. In handwriting, he wrote: “To my great friend Matt – One of the most gifted young artists I know. - All the best, Emory.” (I scanned it below.) That truly made my weekend – I really appreciate the copy. If you haven’t read the essay yet, read it here.
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Tags: bob dylan, emory holmes, Josiah Leming, matthew taylor ruggieri, obama
If I had to select a single favorite song, there is no doubt that I’d pick “Blowin’ In The Wind” by Bob Dylan. I’ve probably posted five different clips of Dylan and Baez singing it, but I can’t help posting another version! Maybe I’ll get to meet Mr. Dylan one day. In the mean time, this in an electric performance from Newport Folk Festival.
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Tags: blowin' in the wind, bob dylan, joan baez, nonviolence
Students are shit.
The world-renowned saxophonist and Berklee College of Music alumnus, Branford Marsalis, talks about college students today. Quite interesting in an extremely blunt fashion, but very true:
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The death of rock music.
If you have been watching the music industry lately, you probably understand that rock music sales are collapsing. A rock album is becoming increasingly difficult to sell to an audience that just leans to illegal downloading. Not to mention, the rock scene is just over saturated and hard to see through. Though I believe that there are other ways to find funding through modern rock music (i.e. product and event sponsorships, live concerts and branded merchandise), the top record labels are struggling to follow the “old school” formula. In turn, it is becoming rare for these record labels to even sign them.
The glamour of rock music is practically dead (in my eyes, at least – you can argue) because absolutely everything has to be sold and released to recoup the funding that is spent. The mystery is given a monetary value (behind the scenes videos, b-sides, etc.) and released as a product and the magic is lost.
Because of this, rap and pop (usually overly produced) is more prevalent on television and in magazines, simply because money is still made on a single to single basis. Rihanna is known for releasing hits and not particularly hit albums. Every now and then, we see a band that hits it “big” (i.e. OneRepublic), but it is not nearly as common as the past.
I’ve been following the downfall for a couple of years now and created a documentary titled “Independent” which featured two bands, Barcelona and Melee. Barcelona acted as the unsigned, independent band and Melee was the major label act. Recently, Barcelona signed to Universal Motown Records to use their major label resources.
About a year and a half ago, I had a meeting with a video commissioner at Sony BMG. I was referred to her by one of my previous vice presidents at Warner. After she made a few rude comments about my age (after walking into her office, she said, “are you fourteen? because you sure look it…”) she told me that she was in need of the next “OK GO” video. If you are unfamiliar with OK GO, I’ll explain briefly. OK GO was put on the back-burner by their label and decided to go ahead and record their own brilliantly choreographed video with no budget. The video went viral and then the label started paying attention to them. Yes, their video is an extremely creative visual representation of their music, but I can’t pull viral videos out of nowhere. She continued to explain that she needs videos produced for budgets less than I was making in a single day of work.
With this situation, I have come to the realization that the years of “epic” music videos are over. My interest, particularly in visual media, follows not only music videos, but also live videos, documentaries, and short films. Have we seen the death of the “gigantic” rock band with the epic videos? If yes, I am all for developing creative video content for the internet. The new industry plan is to produce more content for less money per project. Quantity over quality, if you will. In accepting that my future depends on quantity over quality, lets look an epic video (epic meaning big budget, light shows, stellar performance, etc.) from one of the last huge bands, Coldplay.
As always, I would love to hear what you think. So feel free to comment!
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Tags: coldplay, matthew taylor ruggieri, music industry, music videos
Green Eyes.
The first week back in Boston has been great, even though I feel like I am lacking necessary Vitamin D! The temperature has been in the 20s and I was just told that it gets worse in February?! School is going to be a challenge this semester. I am taking Intercultural Communication, Western Perceptions of Africa and Africans, Principles of Advertising and Sociology of Everyday Life. I also took on the Photo Editor position at em magazine. This should be interesting!
For a quick “work update”: I am currently finishing up a video project that I did for Peter Cincotti. Over winter break, I shot a bunch of really cool stuff in the studio with Evan Taubenfeld, edited some clips for The N network for Jacks Mannequin and filmed with Renee Olstead.
In hope of getting out of the snow for a little bit, I just booked my flight back to Los Angeles for spring break (March 5th-13th). I’m looking forward to seeing some family and friends again – I couldn’t get enough during the month-long winter break! And some more work… and maybe I’ll do another photo shoot?
I apologize for my lack of photography lately. More updates (and hopefully some pictures) soon!
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Tags: Boston, california, emerson college, spring break, winter break
A rush of blood to the head.
Artwork by Edward Ruscha
While in Los Angeles over break – and numerous times before, I was told that it is best to let go of the things that you love. I figured that letting go of my hometown, childhood and work would better my personal growth. So I got on the plane and moved to the Northeast. One year in Boston has allowed me to see what I really love.
My decision to leave Emerson College after this semester has spread across the spectrum of Emerson students, so I guess I can state it publicly now. I will be moving back to my hometown (using the term “hometown” for its humble connotation) Los Angeles, to pursue my passions and continue my education there. Unfortunately Emerson College and Marketing Communications just do not fit my personality. I will be continuing my studies in a Media Studies program at Occidental College, Pitzer College or USC.
While attending school in Los Angeles, I plan to continue to working and developing The Media Collective. I plan to loop back in with one of my best friends and share the experience with those that can relate.
For those that decide to take part in the Emerson Los Angeles program or move to LA in the future, I would love to spend time with you there.
In the meantime, I am looking forward to having a fantastic semester with the friends that I have met in Boston and an adventurous summer of ’09.
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Tags: Boston, emerson college, los angeles, matthew taylor ruggieri
Founders’ promise is fulfilled.
A family friend of mine (and my former screenwriting mentor,) Emory Holmes II, was published on the front page of the Los Angeles Daily News on Inauguration Day. Read the absolutely brilliant essay below:
Today, when I awake, the routine troubles of my life will greet me with customary fury as they have as long as I can remember; and the media will report on the grander troubles of humankind, proliferating like a cancer around the globe as they have for centuries. I’ll still have to find a way to deal with all that.
But I also know that today, in my 61st year, having been born under segregation in Nashville, I will sit in my living room here in my adopted hometown of Pacoima, and I will see unfolding around me in every direction, “from sea to shining sea,” an America never before revealed in the full splendor of its promise and possibility.
Today, as sunlight spreads across the frosted rooftops of our nation, I will watch – with expectation and humility – the pageantry and drama of Barack Obama’s inauguration. And as that singular and ineffable moment plays out, I will be a living witness to a principle-affirming, liberating and transforming fact of history being made – there in Washington, back here on the West Coast, and resounding in every American home.
I know this because the events unfolding in our lives today will affirm, in writing, in flesh and in fact, that now and for all time, there should be no bar to human potential for any American, no matter their gender, race or station; and that America, for all its limitations and failures, is still a land of epic ideas and achievements, and of unimaginable possibility.
Until today, this reality was never fully verifiable. It certainly wasn’t in 1959, when my parents moved across the tracks from east to west Pacoima. It didn’t matter that my mother was a teacher and my father a decorated World War II vet, or that he was now a senior research scientist with the Rand Corp. Our white neighbors painted messages on our walls reading: “Black Plague, Don’t Let It Spread.” They burned crosses on our lawn and waged a yearlong campaign of terror and harassment against us.
In 1960, my parents sued our neighbors in state court and won the first successful anti-discrimination suit for fair housing in San Fernando Valley history. Over time, we became friends with some of our former enemies, and my father, a living embodiment of the dreams they tried to deny him, chose to forbear, though he never forgave the indignities visited upon his home in the name of American liberties he had pledged his entire life to preserve.
I will imagine my father today, not in heaven where he went in 1995, but here in this perfect home he made on Earth, sitting by the fire with my sweet mother, stroking his trimmed white beard, an unlit pipe in his mouth, pride and contentment on his face, watching President Obama on the flat-screen.
And I will recall those iconic leaders of Pacoima who he proudly worked alongside, my political and moral mentors, now gone: Margaret Avery, and Rev. Hillary and Rosa Broadous; Bishop Benjamin and Katherine Crouch; Freddie Carter, the peerless barber whose shop, Stylesville, was ground zero of African-American gossip and debate for a generation; I will think of “Mother” Ida Kinney, who died this past New Year’s Day at the age of 104, at least with the comfort that today was coming. America’s debt to them was left unpaid.
Many of those elders were Southerners, and some from my family tell a funny story about growing up in rural Alabama in 1935. They’d learned that the brilliant new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was to make a whistle-stop nearby. They threw on their best clothes and rushed down to the segregated train station. But the viewing stand designated for black folk was situated on the backside of the yard, and when Roosevelt stepped onto the platform, he could not see my mother’s half of the adoring throng. He saw only an audience of white folk. And though my mother and her cousins peered under the belly of the train, “You couldn’t see nothin’ but his feets,” one of my cousins bemoaned. “You’d be glad,” another added. “You did good to see that.”
Like the lyrics of a blues song, the story is vivid and telling and funny and painful all at once; and it is a true depiction of what it was like to exist as a Negro in 20th century America – a being without personhood, forever “invisible,” as novelist Ralph Ellison put it. The Negro had been cast in the American story as a commodity whose worth was assessed, so the Founding Fathers said, at “three-fifths of a man,” a patently grotesque and absurd standard of humanity that has, across the centuries, engendered the very cancers of injustice – moral and civic – that America was created to transcend.
Though I realize that Obama’s election will not erase the racial enmity and rank intolerance that threaten our body politic, I also know that today I stand upon elevated ground, fertile and abundant, in full view of perspectives denied my ancestors. This is ground I once thought I trod upon, but now know I never had until today – the hallowed ground of American liberty and opportunity.
With the vistas before me unobstructed, the view is sublime. Whoopi Goldberg said as much when she told her chat-mates on “The View” that the election of Obama meant she could “finally feel like I can put my bags down for the first time.” Today I witness the living confirmation of Goldberg’s bittersweet formulation. To steal a Booker T. Washington line: I can finally “cast down my bucket where I am.”
Today, I recall Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s reminder that our Founding Fathers had signed “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
That “promissory note,” which King admonished had come back to the American Negro marked “insufficient funds” – that note, bloodied and tainted by 500 years of duplicity, racial oppression and injustice – has now been formally redeemed. And it is the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama that redeems the promise of equality, freedom and human dignity that Thomas Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence.
Today, I’m seeing the grandeur and beauty of American life without a barrier, without squatting on the backside of a train yard. I am standing on my home turf, shoulder to shoulder with Americans of every age and kind. One lovely outcome of Obama’s victory is that I do not feel like running through the streets exchanging high-fives with my fellows. Now is the time to do everything in my power to ensure that the coming years point the way to American success, and with it, my own.
Today, I will applaud our new president and sip champagne with my friends, and I will sing “America the Beautiful” as clearly and sweetly as I can. And once my interlude of song and celebrations are done, I will roll up my sleeves and engage the troubles and terrors that fate now rains down on my head.
Not only because it is a matter of life and death, but because I believe – in a deeper, more spiritual and emotional way – that we are called upon now to show our resolve, our inventiveness, our courage, our resourcefulness, our efficacy, our steadfastness and the fullness of our humanity, in pursuit of the values our Constitution enshrines and now confirms – in writing, in spirit, in person and in deed – on this Inauguration Day.
Source: http://www.dailynews.com/search/ci_11494541
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Tags: emory holmes, obama
OBAMARAMA!
Adam Freeland remixes Daft Punk to pay their dues to such a glorious new figure.
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