Joshua Dysart's Blog

2015 In Music

PREAMBLE… BUY SOME FUCKING MUSIC! Buy a whole album, go to a show, pick up some merch, Just spend some money! But if you buy it online, try to buy from the artist’s website, or the label (if it’s a small one). Cool? Cool. So here we go, all the stuff that moved me this year. This is my most expansive attempt to celebrate a year in music so far. There’s the inevitable TOP TEN list, and then TOP FIVE lists … →

LL-3 IRAQ

Finally, a year after my research trip to Northern Iraq, the comic I went there in service of is about to released. It’s called LIVING LEVEL-3: IRAQ. It’s thirty-five pages done across four separate chapters that will be published on Huffington Post over four weeks, starting the week of Jan. 18th. I don’t have an exact release date yet, but as soon as I do I’ll update this post. What I do have is an awesome trailer that the World … →

2015 in Cinema

BEST FILM OF THE YEAR THE LOOK OF SILENCE Director: Joshua Oppenheimer, Cinematography: Lars Skree An optometrist whose family survived the brutal mass genocide in Indonesia confronts the men who killed his brother while tending to their eye sight. Stunning. Shocking. Quiet, yet humming with danger and submerged violence. A companion piece to the perfect THE ACT OF KILLING, but different in every way. Smaller, less cinematic in scope but not in vision. With just two films Oppenheimer has proven himself … →

Faces of the Recent Peshmerga victory in Sinjar

First things first. The World Food Program operates under the four principles of humanitarian response. Humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence. Before we get to the meat of this post I must stress that at no point can the WFP, or I, as a temporary contractor in their service, take sides in hostilities or engage in political, racial, religious or ideological conflicts or conversations. It is imperative that the WFP be able to work with any organization or political power at … →

I am going to the Kurdistan region of Iraq

For over a year now I’ve been in contact with some people at the United Nations World Food Programme, the world’s largest humanitarian organization concerned with hunger and food security. We’ve been plotting to tell some stories about the complexity and necessity of feeding the world’s displaced people in an engaging way. Now we’re finally getting started and soon I’ll be leaving for northern Iraq. There, I’ll begin researching the current situation facing Kurdish refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict and the violent … →

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

Director/Writer: Ana Lily Amirpour Staring: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh Cinematography: Lyle Vincent Here’s how this film got me into the theater. It sported gorgeous black and white photography, was filmed in Farsi, and was a vampire art-house flick. Behind it was the apparently unstoppable hype machine powered by Vice Films (and Kino Lorber, usually a distributor worth watching) who promoted the picture beyond its actual appeal, in part with a dishonestly paced trailer. The ingredients sounded amazing. It was the … →

My week in music – Sept. 6 to Sept. 13, 2014

I listen to a lot of new music. This is what spoke to me this week. SAVAGES: Don’t Let the Fuckers get you Down/Dream Baby Dream Post-Punk. Less than a year after their debut album, this incredible all-girl London based band hits with two live singles built out of the scattered remains of the gothic post-rock Brit punk-wave scene. Dark and anthemic and consuming with a big sound that still manages to come off raw as fuck. The wide-screen performance below is captivating. This is … →

Interview!

Here’s a nice little interview about Harbinger and Unknown Soldier, and about my process. Check it! Excerpt: ““I wanted to be everything when I was growing up. A scientist, a historian, an adventurer and a journalist. A pacifist and a pugilist. I wanted to spend my life in a room with one window looking out at the mountain contemplating the arc of all things, and I wanted to be out on that mountain always doing and living and never being able … →

Resource War

Sometime last year I was asked to contribute, with other creators from the broad spectrum of “Geek Culture”, to a collection of essays. The point of the collection, as I understood it, was to create a sense of empowerment in young people who identified as geeks and were getting some grief because of it. So, basically, stories in which we, the authors, had felt embattled for who we were and what we loved, and how we coped. The collection hasn’t come … →

THAT THING I DON’T HAVE TIME TO WRITE RIGHT NOW

THAT THING I DON’T HAVE TIME TO WRITE RIGHT NOW The real problem, of course, is that the ideas don’t stop coming. Everything I see can be pounded into a story. It taxes me. All the old new things, the lives lived around me, on either side of me, front and back of me, the thick paragraphs in books and the emotions caught in filmic light, every howl in the face of injustice, every loving nuzzle, it inspires. It’s exhausting. … →