Occupy Wall Street-Zuccotti Park Revisited

by ACE PRESTON | November 20, 2011 at 06:29 pm

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Occupy Wall Street-Zuccotti Park Revisited-The Goode Olde Days | Photo 02

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Walking down Memory Lane...

"When my Journey ends...I will be back, but for now, show up and bring your very best to the moment, and don't stop till their reality is a nightmare and your dream is a reality."

Ace Preston 15 NOV 11

Zuccotti Park... the goode olde days revisited..??

Wall Street Alternatives ~The People's War

Out of all the Latin revolutionaries, Fidel Castro, came closest to pulling it off and almost bringing down the state.

"The 'Call to Arms' — bare-breasted, her arms flung wide rises  behind him [the warrior]. Screaming her fury she trys to rouse the warrior who has fallen in battle..."   — Augustine Rodin

Thucydides says it best from recounting the 5th Century BC War between Sparta & Athens which viewed the relations between nations as based on might rather than right showing an interest in developing an understanding of human nature to explain behavior in such crises as plagues, massacres, and civil war.

▪ "So that thou has been overcome by three of the greatest things, honor, fear, and profit, we have both accepted the dominion delivered us and refuse again to surrender it, we have hereby done nothing, right as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, but the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory, and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it, but whereas the State that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."

This special feature of Memory Lane is due to the incredible performance of the NYPD who must be accredited to the loving memory of the officers of the People’s Liberation Army who helped quell the Tiananmen Square uprising on June 4, 1989.

On that date the Chinese People’s Liberation Army sent troops into the square to disperse the crowd of protesters. Each soldier participating in the operation was given a watch. The stainless steel watch featured a profile of a soldier’s head as well as the word Beijing and the date of the protest, “89.6,”.

The NYPD, however will prefer coffee over tea and donuts as to a watch since they can't tell time anyway.

I have just viewed the compilation of 'Occupy Wall Street' videos my outfit "Shoot That Shark" filmed which was edited by the powers that be.

I was shocked and dismayed by the coarse and vulgar mentality this Mayor's administration brought to the enterprise. A flavor of their juvenile depravity may be gleaned from any one of nine or ten scenes in which, after a simulated gunship approach from an unseen male police officer, as if a bucketful of blood gunk is thrown over the crowd's face by some chump off-camera.

One wonders at the puerile nature of the infantile brain that thought this was worthy of inclusion on the movement. I could go on and on about this travesty of a semi-violent video but suffice to say the production values in all departments are dreadful, even by industry standards for this type of work. Poor leadership reveals a lack of "Feel" for the medium, despite artistic pretension to the contrary, with a resulting inability to capture moments of tension. This takes ineptitude to new heights when one considers the rampant beauty of the subject. It highlights the lack of both the skill and intelligence, not to mention the imagination, that went in to the making of this video.

I had hoped to see the protesters in all their glory. No hope of that with the editor of this production at the helm.

Instead I was presented with an interminable series of random and acutely close tight focus shots of them masked(an obscenity in itself) pudenda, all other shots around eighty percent of the video were of a similar kind.

That is to say acutely tight close focus.

So tight in fact, that for a great deal of the time it is difficult to tell what one is looking at.

This is the main reason that despite a subject of rampant rage this travesty contains not one scintilla of the panic.

How could it when an ego driven editor has in effect removed from screen the physical presence of those involved in the action.. They have been eliminated as a person. Visually deconstructed. If it is about anything it is about the person and not about only each captured in isolation by a swooping camera.

Lacking context as they do, these videos are no more stimulating to the male libido than a lesson in basic Revolution 101. Anyone hoping to view the Wall Street Protesters in their full form will be disappointed.

The few mid-range shots are nearly all taken from absurd, albeit, in the editor's opinion, "Artistic" angles.

That is to say, either looking down or looking up.

An up-shot of say, a skyscraper is a "Natural" shot for it can capture the sense of vertigo experienced in real life but an up-shot of say a person, for no reason other than the editor thinks it expresses his artistic ability of a camera as is clearly the case in this video, is not a "Natural" shot for it simply deceives the eye of the viewer in that it foreshortens and triangulates the subject, deforms it, hardly satisfying when one wishes to see the true nature of the rebel form, one of the main reasons for ignoring the video in the first place. Sadly the instigator of this little opus lacks the nous to understand even this self-evident truth.

During these videos the viewer is fed a sequence of bits of random, that is to say, without intelligence, rationale, or logic, information. It is in effect a visual jigsaw. From this mish mash one must try to extract a semblance of what is happening on-screen.

This is frustrating to say the least and in my opinion, doomed to failure. Paradoxically, despite operating in a visual medium, this outfit have rendered video in to something that is barely more effective than the radio. Just as one must deploy one's imagination when listening to the radio so to must one use one's imagination when viewing this nonsense.

With regard to "Shoot That Shark" cinema, Ace Preston has produced some world greats, but the guy responsible for this farrago of bird droppings has learned nothing from them. If he had, he would know that a primary aim of the director/cameraman ought to be the removal of himself and his camera from between the viewer and the screen.

This guy does the exact opposite. It is clear he wants to be noticed. Every move he makes, every poorly angled shot, every tilt of the camera to the left or the right is designed to draw the attention of the viewer to him and not the subject.

Watching him at work I imagine his voice in my mind. It takes the form of an immature child and it is shouting, "Look at me everyone. I have a camera. It is me you are watching. I think I'm clever and talented, don't you". Far from making himself invisible, he is actually competing with the subject of his camera.

I suspect that secretly he considers himself and his talent to be the true "Star" of the show. Ultimately this merely serves to distract the viewer and totally destroy the content of the video.

With an overweening ego overwhelming a limited intellect it is inevitable that he will be afflicted with a congenital inability to hold the camera motionless for even only short periods of time. Instead the camera swirls and swoops constantly with neither rhyme,reason or logic behind it, except for the self-aggrandizement of it's manipulator. This hyper-movement also is a reason that moments of heroism are absent from these movies. I am sure during the shoot plenty did develop, how could it be otherwise with the rampantly censored presence of the protesters but through incessant tight focus shots and the peripatetic gyrations of the camera it is missed and lost to posterity. More importantly it is lost to me. Sob. Sadly watching these videos it is patently obvious that the production team lack the wit to understand this salient truth. I have little doubt they will continue as they have in the past and make the same mistakes again and again.The quality of their work would improve dramatically if they would employ an editor who understands the nature of the medium. A man who has the mature intelligence, confidence, and wit to set up the shot, leave the camera alone, and let the subject, in this case the incomparable Ace Preston to do his stuff and electrify the audience and pigs might fly.

Despite this unpleasent experience I still want to see more of the violence inflicted on the Wall Street Protesters but not in videos produced by this crack-handed mob. I have seen enough of their work to realize they are too stupid to be self-critical and improve production values in all areas of their work. I have already created four of the Wall Street Protesters videos. These are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, afflicted as they are by excessive movement of the camera and the usual penchant for tilting the camera ninety degrees from side to side so the subject sweeps back and forth across the screen like a windscreen wiper but they are far superior in content than that which is to be found in the editor's efforts. They are lame but the cameraman/director captures more tension in any one second than does his counterpart in all of the videos here under discussion. So without virtue are they, that I had to fast forward through large segments in an attempt to assuage my frustration at the witless garbage I was viewing.

There is not a single thing in these videos to commend on. Not even the delightful arrests of the Wall Street Protesters who, through no fault of their own, are swamped by the visceral instincts of an intellectually limited team.They are grotesque beyond redemption and an affront to aesthetic sensibility.

These little gems are an obscenity in and of themselves. Self-sustaining turds of things floating down our web channels and best avoided by those with even a modicum of critical awareness.