(2022-08-03) Kenna Behind No Scenes

River Kenna: Behind-No-Scenes. LotR has great examples of one of my favorite genres of photograph: behind the scenes pictures of practical effects...their purpose isn’t to be interesting conversation fodder, their purpose is to add something to a story, to further the goals of the movie... Hanging around the parts of the internet that I do, I often get a feeling like I’m hanging around at a practical effects convention.... There is really-truly-actually magic in the air, you can see it on people’s faces and in everything they present. But… I’m not really seeing many movies being made, so to speak.

A couple concrete examples:

DevPsych

Back in my day (like 2 years ago) my Twitter-neighborhood was really into Robert Kegan and his developmental psychology

But no one did much with it.

Self-Therapy

every zoom call I have with someone brings an uncanny level of clarity on some major issue or other, and potential paths to addressing it. The ways people are hungry and searching and building paths to healing around here are powerful and inspiring. And, uh, a little unfocused and incoherent, kinda. Maybe.

it feels a lot like technique-for-technique’s-sake nerdery, without a project to anchor it and give it focus.

I feel shaky on this point—after all, why should we have to have a project for self-therapy beyond helping people feel how they want to feel?—but my intuition is pretty loud and clear that there is something real behind my unease

“Focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of” Visakan Veerasamy’s locally famous maxim, an excellent rephrasing of the perennial insight that our thoughts, actions, and attitudes matter. (Theory of Change)

it feels more like we’ve discovered fire, and we’re using it to make more charcoal for our art projects