Genius found their moment

There are 196 countries in the world. But the most problematic and common question is “How many people are in the globe?” The official current world population for mid-year 2013 is estimated at 7,095,217,980. And all this vivid numbers are sharing the same Earth today. The documentary Life in a Day gambles with this apparent evidence to lots of captured moments reported by millions of people filming itself on a single day: July 24, 2010. The result is a big plain suggestion: the planet is a landscape framework of human interconnections. Definitely, it is not a movie; it is rather a human geographic investigation.

Life in a Day travels around a day-to-day routine but made by human involvements: people awake late and people waking up, washing their faces and drinking Indian tea. While a young boy is working in a flower market in Old Delhi, an American teenager is shaving his face for first time. Little normal and ordinary moments are mixed along Australia, England, Zambia, Indonesia, Filipinas, Egypt… stages settle down under all the same stars. “Sometimes the banal details can be the most telling, and the most familiar and touching to view,” said the film director.

The movie criss-crosses loves, fears and things people have in their pockets. There are a few that have coins in their pockets, a man has a gun and an old woman has miniature flags, a lot of curious things, telephones and other technologies… And there is a man with anything in his pocket. What about love? There is someone who love dirt or dirty river smell, another one likes grass, there are men who loves women and women who loves men, someone love the Lord and another one loves doing about 150 miles an hour down a motorway in a good car.

And there is a young girl who loves the word ‘mamihlapinatapa’. Behind this feelings, kids and adults are afraid of any kind of monsters, ghosts or witches, zombies, noises, dogs, lions or Alá and nothing else… There are people who are afraid of growing up or losing a place they like. An old man said that politics scare him more than anything and he wonders if we’re going to have another war. Another one is only scared of himself. There’s someone who has no fear.

Life in a Day shows us, above all, a clear evidence: everyone has something to tell, things to show. Also this experiment gives the chance to the spectator to value current stories that everyone wants to hear and touch. The producers of this film received, the 24^th of July, more than 5,000 hours of footage distributed in more than 80,000 videos from 192 different countries. This is what happens when someone gives the possibility to express to normal people: the extraordinary from the ordinary.

It’s time to continue my journey.

What’s beyond the classical

Usually all we know about an artist is the material he produces. Fortunately, the notorious jazz pianist Bill Evans recorded this conversation with his brother, the music teacher Harry Evans, in which they both divulge and discuss about the creative and self-teaching process in jazz music, and that lets us get a deep message about the philosophy hidden beyond the harmonies.

But, what is jazz? Bill Evans thinks people tend to have misconceptions about it. He defends the idea that jazz is not really a music style, as it is generally considered. He explains that in the XVII century there was a great development of improvisation, but there were no technological means to record it, so the only way to make it remain was musical notation. This technique progressively gained significance, and improvisation ended up being a lost art very seldom practiced by composers.

And jazz resurrected that process. The circumstances in which improvisation revived –the black America of the first 20^th century– made associate the jazz concept with the music style that was developing it, but jazz is really “a process of making one minute’s music in one minute’s time”. Namely, a composer of classical music can take three months to compose one minute’s song, whereas in jazz the creative process is spontaneous.

Evans brothers are very suggestive when they talk about the lack of restrictions in jazz improvisation. No matter how far the musician gets from the original harmonic structure, Bill Evans insists on the fact that there’s no freedom without being in reference to the rules. To be far from something, there must exist something that has to be understood, assimilated and respected.

Only when the theory is deeply understood and combined with an exhaustive practice, it goes to the subconscious part of the brain, and the conscious portion can concentrate in the instantaneous creative process. If you think about it, that is actually similar to learning how to drive a car. At first you have to put your five senses in how you’re driving, but after some months you can talk or listen to the radio while you’re driving.

The Evans are talking about jazz music creation, but if you want they’re also talking about the relation between tradition and innovation, the power of hard training and what freedom is. Their message is deeply inspirational applicable to other disciplines and that’s what make it powerful. That’s actually what makes music powerful. 

Marina Hernández

The emotional intelligence of menstruation

Every month the reproductive system of women is preparing for pregnancy. It starts when the ovum travels throw the fallopian tube toward the uterus. At the same time, the endometrium is formed in the uterus and it becomes full of blood and nutritive fluids. If the female cellule is not fertilized it dissolves in the tube. Since the endometrium is no longer needed it too dissolves away and it flows out of the body throw and opening in the hymen. This is called the menstruation, the natural process of ovum’s life that empowers women to being mothers.

Until very recently, there has not been a movie neither a book about menstruation and this open silent has been very disorienting for woman. In this way, the potent symbol of menstruation is turned to a problematic, impure, harmful and a little bit disgusting red mark. “The moon inside you” is a documentary by Diana Fabiánová about the ignorance and the knowledge in relation to menstrual. The candid voice of reporter could be all women speaking in a deeper attitude about femininity. The main propose is to break down with the scientist, religious, political and social taboos that had avoided women to sincerely appreciate the menstrual cycle.

When Diana was a girl, she learned that a man should never know when she was menstruating. Time passed and she realized that she wants to make sense of the period time, which has nothing about dirt or shame. There are millions of women discretely menstruating because of the “occultation culture” that coats this simple biological function. The same power of female blood that once served to connect women with their sacred is now the source of their isolation. In spite of this, there are still vestiges of a sacred knowledge about menstruation, including tales.

In these sorties, the young woman reaches biological maturity when it exceeds the fear of blood. And this is the point: it is essential encourage women to become aware of their latent power. In sum, “The moon inside you” is a 75 minutes trip to the roots of women as a moon which is not always the same; it is sometimes full and sometimes waning. So, it seems a relaxing trip to the women themselves in order to feel the moon inside them.