9/9/09 - Reading material: Spike Jonze

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06jonze-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Spike Jonze has made some of the most incredible music videos of all time, and his two movies are both awesome. In fact, if Charlie Kaufman only collaborated with Spike and Michel Gondry for the rest of his career, I'd be more than OK with it. Reading this article makes me wonder about the difficulty of identifying people with genuine vision/genius - I mean, by all accounts Jonze doesn't necessarily present the picture of the most together auteur in a professional sense, but his work is pretty amazingly singular and much more expressive in ways than the man itself. It must be hard to suss out though because a lot of what makes him distinctive is a very, very deadpan sense of humor underneath all the grungy skater cool.

The video for Wax's "California" that he made is a case in point. Sure, it's really cool to have a man on fire running down the street, but the best part is the utterly banal reason that he's running - dude's trying to catch a bus! Get out the way!