the book of love is long and boring

Though my obsession with digression is well known to some, I will not bore you with my rant on the current state of the film and television industry. This headline from Deadline is enough for right now, because it reveals, to me at least, how profoundly sinister "disruptor" culture is for audiences:

So, after undercutting movie studios, i.e. the industry standard, thanks to VC money and deep pockets from other internal departments, and stating that streaming is the future, your new end game, your new BIG idea for the industry, is to put movies in movie theaters?! Slow clap.

Darn, I digressed, again. Suffice it to say, I'm always looking for a different way to tell stories – and a different way to offer those stories to an interested and engaged audience outside of the current system. When I think of what to make, I circle around the idea of short video essays. When someone asks what the heck a video essay is, I mention Penny Lane.

I stumbled upon Penny Lane's work back in 2010/2011 when someone pointed me in the direction of her short film The Voyagers. I remember hearing a few years prior to that that NASA had made most of their video library pretty much free to use for anyone. Basically, you could take their video or images and create your own thing with them. (Note: That continues to this day – as far as I can tell from their guidelines. NASA Image and Video Library here.)

It escaped me at the time what to do with this, but Penny Lane dove right in and made a masterpiece of a short film. (Dare I call it a video essay?) It's a beautiful, haunting, emotional, and uplifting experience that's part-love story and part-history lesson. And I was a bit jealous she created such a brilliant thing from the NASA videos. She turned a few of their missions into metaphors for love and loss and hope. She has other films, feature-length and short, on her website PennyLaneIsMyRealName.com, which is a great website name. To avoid digressing any further, The Voyagers begins in three, two, one:

indoor animal is curated by a human: Tim Papciak. On Mondays, he shares one link to one music video to help spark creativity in himself and in other creative types. On Thursdays, he recommends a book, movie, show, art piece, or link to some dusty corner of the internet that he believes either 1.) adds to the human experience, or 2.) serves as a coping mechanism in the year 2025. Note: this is not, and never will be, self-help content.