Summary: The guest this week is the filmmaker Andrew Fillipone. Andrew Filippone Jr. is the filmmaker in New York City made the short film 'Charlie Rose' by Samuel Beckett. Some of Andrew's other works include: The Status Films, an all-text, 4-part, 80-minute documentary film cycle made from real-time searches of public Facebook status updates; Happy Monday, a film-sculpture hybrid that he describes as a "documentary film object;" and The Auroras of Autumn, a silent, abstract short that screened at the 8th Berlin International Director’s Lounge, but in this episode we discuss two other films the first being his mock conspiracy film No! Gabba, Gabba and the other an experimental film entitled 999. In this episode there is a point where I explain the idea of a concrete abstraction, and I thought it would be worthwhile to explain that idea here at the outset. The other day I was asked to define the idea of a concrete abstraction and I said that this was the idea that reality is inexorably both conceptual and sensual. One can’t separate out the idea of what it is to be something from the sensual qualities one encounters upon meeting that something. An apple is both an idea and an experience. Once you’ve grasped this the question isn’t “What is a concrete abstraction?” but rather “What isn’t a concrete abstraction?” Couple of announcements. First, the Philosophy Workshop has been on hiatus over the summer I will be restarting that project in September and I want to encourage people to join up. Subscribing to the workshop is really a way to support the podcast and if you enjoy Diet Soap you should consider subscribing or making a one time donation. So, in September we'll pick up with Hegel's phenomenology, and I think I'll try to use Google Plus to host the online conversations. Another announcement is that soon I'll be launching a second, monthly, podcast called Pop the Left. C Derick Varn and I have been recording conversations for this and this coming podcast will be an examination and critique of the left from the left. Along those lines I recently received an email from TJ Clark accepting an invitation to come onto Diet Soap. Clark is an art historian and former member of the Situationist International and his latest essay "For a Left with No Future," for all it's flaws, is a valiant effort and really required reading.
