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The volume trailed off slightly during the last few minutes of the 8-Bit Construction Set mix I posted earlier, so I tweaked it in a .wav editor and re-uploaded it. The link in that post now gives you the "enhanced" version, or you can play the file here: [14.28 MB .mp3]
UPDATE: Ha, I asked Cory if anyone else had ever mixed the lock grooves like this before--"I'm not asking whether it's a good idea but just whether anyone has done it" and he said "no."
Wha--? Yes, the page has gone back to the two-column format, after a couple of years with a centered, single column. Firefox (which anyone with Windows is strongly encouraged to use instead of the virus-prone Internet Explorer--download here) did not like the one-column format, and kept rendering the page different widths. Links are now on the left side instead of the FAQ page; otherwise everything's the same. BTW, if your site is not in the link list it may just mean I haven't gotten around to adding it. The list consists of recommendations; absence shouldn't be read as non-recommendation.
"Groove Show," by wenstrom
Several people asked about the drawings a few posts back, so here goes. They are fan pictures of the character Nausicaä, from Hayao Miyazaki's animation epic Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (also a multivolume manga). The name Nausicaä isn't very catchy--Miyazaki took it from a minor character in Homer's Odyssey. The second drawing from the top on the left is mine (a larger version was posted here a few weeks back). The rest are from Google Images. The character is much known and loved throughout the world; she has a low profile in the States but the film is being re-issued by Disney to coincide with the next Miyazaki widescreen release after Spirited Away. The Nausicaä DVD was supposed to be out Aug. 31, but according to this Miyazaki fan site, Disney has delayed it AGAIN. I still think it has something to do with Miyazaki's unfortunate decision to give her flesh-colored leggings, which makes it look like she has nothing on under her kilt, so to speak. I'm sure that's driving the puritans at Walt's company insane (or just people worried about marketing it in the Bible Belt).
My ten-minute, live on the wheels mix of 8-Bit Construction Set tracks, alluded to in an earlier post, is now online. [14.28 MB .mp3] The raw materials for this Steve Reichian (or Ritchie Hawtinlike) techno-minimalist epic are the lock grooves from the "Atari side" of the disc, faded together in a continuous flow; I didn't have as much luck with the "Commodore side." Apologies to Messrs. Arcangel, Davis, Beuckmann and Bonn for this arty-fied nonsense, but it had to be done.
UPDATE:The volume trailed off slightly during the last few minutes of the recording so I tweaked it in a .wav editor and re-uploaded it. The same link above now gives you the "enhanced" version.
Before Sunset, Richard Linklater's 9-years-later revisitation of the chatty post-slacker characters in Before Sunrise, is better than it has any reason to be, and better than the first film. It's short (80 minutes) but seems even shorter--why does it move so swiftly? The dialogue is banal, the people only passably interesting, the steadicam views of Paris postcard-pretty, the story bare-bones, but some potent cinema magic is working here. Ethan Hawke hasn't changed--he's still the callow searcher with the bad existentialist schtick. Julie Delpy, however, is more neurotic, more of a controller, and funnier than she was in the first film. Maybe she (the actress) has "lived more" since '94; maybe it's just hard to see her as a nice person after the king-hell bitch she played in Kieslowski's White, but she seems to be driving the story and riveting the viewer's attention here. I wish I could mention a single concrete reason why she or the movie are so compelling, though.
Speaking of revisiting older films, count me among the non-fans of Donnie Darko, the Director's Cut. Until today I felt certifiably cool for having seen the original release during its one-week theatrical run in fall 2001, but I agree with the reviewer who said 20 minutes of added footage makes the film "bloated." What was a mysterious, off-center, multiply-interpretable film is now over-explained and I would say normalized, with the addition of superimposed pages from Grandma Death's book about time travel (formerly DVD extra material), scenes showing a warmer relationship between Donnie and his family (and his therapist), completely unnecessary classroom pontification about Watership Down led by beatnik English teacher Drew Barrymore, and rather ordinary videoscreen effects added to the trippy sequences. I just ordered the original DVD in a mild panic that this cut will replace it.
The line "Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion" remains intact in both versions, happily.Great moments in home taping, part whatever: Margaret Leng Tan plays a Philip Glass composition on toy pianos live in the studio on the Stork's (still-much-missed!) WFMU radio show. [3.12 MB .mp3] Recorded by me with a cheap boombox, aiming the mic in the general direction of my speakers at a time when I was between decent cassette players (around '97). Make no mistake, this is a cheesy recording (and I only caught the last 2 minutes), but the music is simply the best.
Update: The Glass tune is "Modern Love Waltz."
"The Infinite Fill Show" installation photos - thumbnails.
Press release (incl. artist list).
Critical pontification / more/ still more.
New York Times review (text) / (scan)
Time Out NY review
The exhibition opening was crowded but not too crowded and hot but not too hot. The work fell into two broad categories: things made with actual digital fill patterns (printouts, videos) and hand-crafted objects that mimicked fill patterns (paintings, drawings, needlepoints). Variations and exceptions abounded in this 90-some artist show. A nice touch was the silkscreen-printed dot matrix check pattern tacked up as background wallpaper--that (and the black and white color scheme) helped to unify everything. Overall, an amusing mix of lumpen craft and tech, politics and non-politics, the timeless and the topical (e.g., a tabloid cover of Martha in prison stripes). Paper Rad played a song in the hall and blew a fuse, which killed the gallery overhead lights but not the plugged-in laptops, TVs, or the strobe light. Enough daylight still came in to see the show. Kudos to Cory and Jamie Arcangel for packing the small gallery with nice stuff to look at.
UPDATE: More photos, showing the stunned and bemused opening night crowd (as opposed to my more severe photographic "statement") are at James Wagner's site.
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WHY INFINITE FILL? WHY NOW? (SOME THEORIES)
Speaking of Infinite Fill patterns, an artist saw the image of mine below printed out in the studio and said something like "It's so old it's new again." That's actually kind of a bad reason to be working with these patterns and programs: what might be called the fleeting buzz of historicization. Two generational moments connected with an emerging technology are when you experience it in all its newness (especially in pimply adolescence), and when you encounter it nostalgically as a kind of "future past." The rubbing together of those two instants can throw off some sparks, but they're pretty meager to power a body of work, or a career. Better reasons for using old programs might be: (1) to access good effects that have been superseded or "improved" in newer programs, (2) as a way of clearly revealing the futuristic assumptions, mass production values, or plain bad aesthetics of existing programs (most of which are just tricked-up, bloated versions of the old ones), and (3) because less is more, as Kate Moss once said.
Below is the press release for the "Infinite Fill Show," opening Thurs., July 22 at Foxy Production in New York. The call for entries describing the project is here. I submitted three animated .GIFs, which I'm told will be shown on a laptop. The .GIFs themselves (including two of mine & a collaboration with jimpunk) are here; the html display page
Curated by Cory + Jamie Arcangel
Opening reception: Thursday, July 22, 6.00 - 8.30 pm
Dates: July 22 to August 19, 2004
Summer hours: Tuesday to Friday, 11.00 am - 6.00 pm
Foxy Production (547 WEST 27 ST. FL 6, NYC 10001 - TEL 212 239 2758) announces The Infinite Fill Show, a group exhibition of dazzling black and white patterns, curated by brother and sister team Cory and Jamie Arcangel. The exhibition includes new and historical, readymade and handcrafted works in a range of media.
The curators sent out an open call to artists for found or made objects which had to adhere to two basic rules: they must be black and white, and they must contain repeating patterns. The curatorial concept was inspired by MAC Paint, the 1984 software application with varied 16-bit monochrome patterning that could be picked and dropped into areas of the screen to denote color and depth. For Cory and Jamie Arcangel, this rudimentary precursor to Photoshop's draw and paint functions provides a creative tool to explore multiple perspectives within a unifying aesthetic.
The Infinite Fill Show, features over fifty artists, from high school students to internationally renowned artists, including: Lucas Ajemian + LLFS, Elyse Allen, Cory Arcangel, Jamie Arcangel, Maureen Arcangel, Steve Austin, Jimmy Baker + Matt Coors, Michael Bell-Smith, Marc LeBlanc, Orit Ben-Shitrit, Chris Bors, Sascha Braunig, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, James Buckhouse, Anthony Campuzano, Henry Chamberlain, Peter Coffin, Ryan Compton, Elisabeth Condon, Devon Costello, Jim Drain, Sarah Dunbar, Dragan Espenschied (with Sofia Aleinikova), Devin Flynn, Nello Gacuda, Joy Garnett, Tamara Gayer, Paul Gigolotti, Benjamin Godsill, Katherine Grayson, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Jim Hamlyn, Tamara Henderson (with Brent Wadden), Honeygun Labs, G.H. Hovagimyan, Akiko Ichikawa, Ketta Ioannidou, jimpunk + Tom Moody, Aya T. Kanai, Chris Kasper, Ori Kleiner, Paul Laster, LoVid, Noah Lyon, Kevin McGarry, Joe McKay, Erica Magrey, Frankie Martin, Jonte Martin, Jillian Mcdonald, Louisa Minkin, Justin Mitchell, Kyle Mock, Mombert, Tom Moody, MTAA, Josh Nimoy, David Noonan, Marisa Olsen, PAPER RAD, Marcin Ramocki, Scott Reeder, Tyson Reeder, Douglas Repetto, Leif Ritchey, RSG, Sterling Ruby, Justin Samson, Gregory J Scranton, Daniel Shiffman, Sistaz 4Ever, Paul Slocum, Renee So, Erika Somogyi, Nancy Smith, Oriane Stender, Kirsten Stoltmann, Jennifer Sullivan, Joshua W.F. Thomson, Cody Trepte, Van Arsdale High School Art Students, Andrew M.K. Warren, Ben Warwas, Andrew Jeffrey Wright.
UPDATES: A short report on the opening (with installation photos) is here (also links to other posts, criticism, etc.) The artist list above has been edited to conform to the exhibition checklist.
In an earlier post I linked to some sample tracks by BASIC and other musicians from humanworkshop.com, a Netherlands-based sample and .mp3 trading forum, which has just released a CD of site artists. Track 14, about 30 seconds of BASIC's "Narrow Minded Fool," caught my ear, and after a few listens I pegged a couple of the sources (I know, music nerds, big whoop)--"Accidentals" by Broadcast (1997), a kind of post-Portishead ambient pop outfit from the UK, and "Gui La Testa (Duck You Sucker!)" from The Big Gundown, John Zorn's otherwise not very good 1986 tribute to Ennio Morricone (or is it just that anything with a jaw harp makes me think of that?). I dug out those tracks from the crates (as we say) and did a short "educational" mix, consisting of the BASIC sample followed by Broadcast, Zorn, and the BASIC again, just to hear how everything overlapped. We're talkin' some serious chronological folding here, with the non-hippie '60s as the epicenter. [.mp3 removed]
One of the finest things about Paul Thomas Anderson's psychotic film Punch Drunk Love was the revival of the Harry Nilsson/Van Dyke Parks/Shelley Duvall love song "He Needs Me," from Robert Altman's pretty-much-forgotten Popeye movie. Duvall, as Olive Oyl, sings this ballad of co-dependency (hers, to Bluto) with a meek, charmingly off key voice, and Nilsson's perpetually ascending kiddy-song melody coupled with Parks' Charles Ives-cum-Max Steiner orchestation pretty much guarantee goosebumps. The song was the reason I bought the Popeye soundtrack years ago (but regrettably wasn't enough reason to keep it during a later vinyl purge). I was actually thinking about tracking it down again, so I could play "HNM" obsessively and see if the score contained other warped gems.
But now I don't care.
I heard it again today, in the movie house during the usual interminable string of pre-show ads. Fucking Nilsson estate (or fucking someone) sold it for a commercial, fast on the heels of Anderson's rediscovery of it--hawking what, I don't even know (shoes?); it was one of those concept advertisements where the product isn't mentioned, with a gaggle of teenage girls competing for the amorous attention of a buff tennis pro while Duvall sings sweetly in the background. (The next ad featured the Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want'," selling soda, I think.)
Fucking hell, fucking marketing culture, it wrecks everything it touches. (OK, Popeye wasn't exactly Ibsen, but it wasn't about selling tennis rackets either.) Fucking sellout artists (or their dependents), always needing more to live the lifestyles of "playas," destroying creative legacies and the unique auras of songs. Fuck.
Still working on this, trying to nail the continuity bugs (and lapses in drawing skill) frame by frame. I found a good description of what it's about, though:
I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means. [Moody's dumb animations] are psychological provocations, mental tests where the aesthetic elements are no more than a framing device.apologies to bloggy and J.G. BallardIt's interesting that this should be the case. I assume it is because our environment today, by and large a media landscape, is oversaturated by aestheticising elements (TV ads, packaging, design and presentation, styling and so on) but impoverished and numbed as far as its psychological depth is concerned.
Artists (though sadly not writers) tend to move to where the battle is joined most fiercely. Everything in today's world is stylised and packaged, and [Moody] is trying to say, this is [Spider-Man vs Doc Ock]. He is trying to redefine the basic elements of reality, to recapture them from the ad men who have hijacked our world.
Good Tom Tomorrow cartoon here makes fun of the "Sensible Liberal" who thinks it's rude to call Bush a liar and who distances himself from Michael Moore's rather effective filmmaking. Slate movie critic David Edelstein is a typical SensLib, declaring Moore "a blowhard the left can call its own" and implicity comparing him to Rush Limbaugh and Morton Downey Jr. (really climbing into the wayback machine on the latter). Does Edelstein really see no difference in Moore's incisive, frequently hilarious documentary and this schtick from the July 1 broadcast of the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show (via Media Matters)?:
LIMBAUGH: [laughter] Folks, it doesn't get any better than this. [laughter] Do you know something that's -- I'm sorry. [laughter] Oh, I'm trying to maintain my composure. The Democrats have found their keynote speaker for their convention: Saddam Hussein. [laughter] "The real criminal is [President George W.] Bush." Give him a talk show. Put him on "Dead Air America". [laughter]Believe it or not, I actually can laugh at jokes at the expense of the left, but the above is just supremely unfunny. Moore's film nails Bush and his cadre (including the media) and doesn't deserve all the mealy mouthed qualifications it's getting from the center-left Democrats. Fortunately theatregoers are paying the full ticket price ($90 million in box office receipts so far), unlike the left-leaning pundits who insist on a "Michael Moore discount."[...]
LIMBAUGH: It makes you wonder who hates Bush more, Saddam or the Democrats.
[...]
LIMBAUGH: Let me -- let me ask you liberals out there: Did that image of Saddam in a sport coat and an open collar just melt your heart?
[...]
LIMBAUGH: All he's doing is reading Democrat talking points. Come on. Bush is a criminal? What's the difference in what Saddam says and what you hear coming out of MoveOn.org every day, or George Soros, or any of these other people that are out there speaking against George W. Bush?
[...]
LIMBAUGH: We killed his sons. We took his country. We put him in jail. He is still calmer and more rational than Howard Dean after he lost Iowa. He's calmer and more rational than Gore after he lost his mind. He's calmer and more rational than George Soros is.
An email for a "Bands Against Bush" event received late last night led to an orgy of random (mostly apolitical) linkage; here's what came up, some of which bears further investigation:
Cotton Ponies (boston garage rock)
cotton ponies download page (2 songs)
Googled "cotton ponies":
Deadly Productions Records (hardcore techno label based "in the Poconos"--reps another, different cotton ponies) w/ links to:
Widerstand Records (hardcore label out of Austria) mp3 download page listed:
doppelganger mp3 "Can't See Cali4nia With The Marlon Brando's Eyes" (Atari Teenage Riot-ish)
Leisure B & BASIC (nice neurofunk/drill track on mp3); widenstand mp3 download page for Leisure B & BASIC also listed homepage for:
humanworkshop.com (Dutch ambient D&B label) with link to sample page:
human workshop 1
Stephen Moody as Stretch Armstrong, 2004
Another film I watched on satellite this week was Michael Mann's The Keep, a tripped-out, ultraserious '80s artifact, filmed with lots of Mann's (then) characteristic slo-mo and a pulsing Tangerine Dream score. It's horror, somewhat in the Poltergeist mode, with weird "living fog" effects and gratuitous exploding body parts, but nevertheless great atmosphere and cinematography. The plot weds a German-side-of-World-War-II, "we have met the enemy and he is us" theme a la Das Boot with a Lovecraftian evocation of occult Forces Beyond Our Comprehension. In 1941, a German patrol arrives in Romania to guard an obscure but strategic mountain pass; the captain finds an enormous stone fortress there, bizarrely engineered with the largest stones on the inside (embedded with silver crosses) and the smallest on the outside. "This appears to be designed not to keep something out but to keep something in," he says ominously. Soldiers begin dying mysteriously. Some late-arriving Nazi brass declare the casualties the work of a local partisan cell, and begin shooting innocent villagers to make an example, but the captain and other "good Germans" have figured out the culprit is a primordial demon eating souls in preparation for a big keep-break. Ian ("Gandalf") McKellen plays an ailing Jewish intellectual who makes a pact with the monster, not realizing that it is worse than the Nazis he hopes to vanquish, while brooding existential hunk Scott Glenn appears on the scene with a tightly-locked wooden box strapped to his motorcycle, ready to play his ancient, recurring role as yin to the monster's yang. Apparently Mann doesn't like the movie so it isn't the getting the DVD-release-with-commentary treatment it deserves: one supposes he doesn't want to take away from his really fabulous recent work, such as The Insider, Ali, and the soon-to-be-released hitman movie with that super-fantastic actor, Tom Cruise.
I'm on the road for the next couple of days and am currently staying at a place with the Independent Film Channel on satellite. Last night I watched The War Room, the Chris Hegedus/D.A. Pennebaker documentary about the 1992 Clinton campaign, which I hadn't seen since it came out. It invokes what seems like a golden age of civility and fair-mindedness in politics, especially in contrast to the ugly themes underlying this year's campaign (no naked, shit-smeared prisoners, no veeps saying "Fuck Yourself" on the Senate floor). Early on in the film James Carville makes a speech about how, whenever the Democrats put up someone good who will bring positive changes to a public office, the Republican smear machine goes into action (he's talking about Gennifer Flowers' affair with Clinton, and the media's preference for dirt over issues), and says in effect, "if we beat this back, we'll beat this once and for all." In retrospect--after the Clinton impeachment and the 2000 election debacle--this sounds even more wistful and wishful than it did then. The movie inspires because you witness real, positive change take place before your eyes, at a point where you'd resigned yourself to a lifetime of lugubrious, repressive Republican rule. The reminder that this actually happened, and the thought that it could happen again in the current campaign--that is, that Americans don't fear change as much as everyone assumes--brings a ray of hope to an otherwise dingy (and fear-filled) horizon.
Jason Little, the cartoonist who created the great strip "Bee," has organized a kind of walk-in, multi-artist, multilayered, po-mo graphic-novel installation piece that one reads panel by panel while moving through a labyrinthine exhibition space. It's called Cartünnel: a comix fluxture:
Visitors are invited to walk through the maze and experience a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, with side-plots, dead-ends, and parallel narrative universes, created in a collaborative atmosphere. Depending on which directions visitors choose at various junctures along the way, the course of the story will be altered accordingly. A visitor would be able to walk through the maze several times and see different versions and permutations of the narrative each time they do.I haven't seen the installation yet (at Flux Factory in Queens, Saturdays and Sundays 2-8 pm through August 7) but I enjoyed paging through Little's panels online (go to the thumbnail grid, or even better, follow them sequentially here by clicking the right arrows above each panel). Not all of the show looks this strong (and the mounting of drawings appears awfully crude) but I'll say more after I...um, see it. All the artists are doing variations on a mutually agreed-upon story and characters: a cute Cambodian girl loses her leg to a landmine, moves to America with her parents, then discovers a magic goose in Central Park. The bird is the familiar of a witch lady, a naked hag in a wolf skin cursed to live forever in the park, who periodically morphs into a curvaceous babe and seduces joggers. Just as he did with Bee (whose adventures are assembled in the book Shutterbug Follies), Little makes creeped-out subject matter seem beguiling and "normal" through his clean, lucid, and enormously sympathetic drawing style. His panels are for sale, and a portion goes to the not-for-profit space--I acquired two (including the winsome one above), in a shameless display of Greenbergesque blogospheric power-broking.
"The pale surrogate humans of Michelle Handelman's performance work Passerby infiltrated Bryant Park today, mingling with the late lunch crowd." That was supposed to be the opening sentence of this post. I just noticed the "the" in "the late lunch crowd" was missing through my own sloppiness. It's fixed now. If anyone spots a typo here, or something you think is a typo, please leave a comment. You won't hurt my feelings; in fact I'll send you a no-prize (Marvel comics reference) by email.
This still needs some work, continuity-wise, but you get the idea. I notice New York Times columnist Frank Rich actually felt it was worth drawing some sociological conclusions from the fact that Spider Man 2 eclipsed Fahrenheit 9/11 at the box office. (America needs a hero that's concerned about the collateral damage he causes, yada yada yada.) Is anyone else as tired of Rich's schtick as I am? Read a week's worth of newspaper articles, tie them all together with the entertainment angle: it's Playdoh factory crit.
Matthew Geller's urban earthwork Foggy Day (previously discussed here and here) was vetted by the blowdried fascisti of Fox News last fall; an online video of the broadcast can be viewed at the Creative Capital website. As discussed previously, public funds paid for approximately 10% of the project so the conservatives swooped into action--first with a denunciatory cover story in the New York Sun, and of course the Fox broadcast features the obligatory thinktank intellectual in a book-lined room (who hadn't seen the piece) gassing on about the proper use of tax dollars. Fox did Geller a tremendous favor, though, not so much with the faux-controversy as with the camera work for his portfolio. Because the network keeps things fast-moving and fast-cutting so the couch potatoes won't wander away from their screens, it turned Foggy Day (a temporary, artificial fogbank with stands of bamboo and simulated puddles in Chinatown's Cortlandt Alley) from a "romantic stroll in the park" into Gulf War 3, replete with jittery handheld shots, views from a speeding vehicle, and an embedded reporter emerging from the steam. (Creative Capital now has two groups of pages devoted to the project, one with text and pictures and one with video, text, and pictures.)
Bob Somerby has a good series of essays on the negative response of so-called liberal columnists to Michael Moore's movie. He singles out Ellen Goodman, whose aversion to Moore and people cheering the film is so strong she actually defends Bush (who she admits "misled" us into war). Somerby pegs her reaction as class disgust, and suggests it's what's prompting many of the squeals coming from the pampered, perfumed "millionaire pundits" who shape opinion in Washington. Moore dares to rise above his working class station (even though he's rich now, himself) and show images in the movie of the people who will be--are being--ground up in the war machine, as well as revealing footage of Bush in his element of entitled movers and shakers.
The film critic tedg suggests that Moore's achievement--another reason the yammering head class is threatened--is that he's created a Movie that Undoes the Movie of the morning-in-America return to values the Republican disinfo machine has spun for 25 years:
[T]here is a strong tendency to adapt movie stories to political beliefs. This first washed upon America with Ronald Reagan - himself a film figure. He was able to stick to solid movie narratives to literally shape American's beliefs. His simple, movie-based 'sunshine in America' notion caught fire, even in the face of pesky facts.Since then, 'conservatives' have adopted the movie locomotive and hitched it to the similar dynamics of religion to build a story. 'Liberals' (how do these names get invented?) have the unentertaining job of trying to pry minds away from the comfortable movie narrative and explain that life is not so simple.
They are always bound to lose, especially when business interests have a reason to feed the machine. So what to do? What to do?
Well, you make a movie about how dumb the Republican movie is. You weave a metamovie, or if you can an 'unmovie' that dissolves the fiction with facts. But even an unmovie is a movie, so it needs a simple narrative. Moore is faulted because his simple narrative is similarly simpler than life.
But here it is: Bush is a febrile dimwit manipulated by slick weasels. Saudis pull money from the west and then feed it back with obligations. Thinking of the world as a 'Bonanza' western is getting us in trouble and seriously hurting people.
I'll credit Moore with extreme movie intelligence in spinning a simple story (incidentally based on facts) to deliberately destroy a similar simple movie story spun by The Powers (which unhappily flies in the face of facts).
In doing so, Moore cleverly omits much. For example, he shows administration babblers claiming weapons of mass destruction and terrorist ties. And he then says nothing at all about the truth of these, because we all now know they are false. Having us fill the gaps with what we know from outside the film is masterful, like just showing us Bush's vacant face. Is his brain fried by his admitted drug and alcohol binges? Moore never even hints... except for four bars from JJ Cale's 'Cocaine' when mentioning Bush's year-long absence from military duty.
Showing the preparation for the press announcements is similar genius: it shows that these guys are all about spinning their own movie. And that one sequence where he literally sets the Bushites in 'Bonanza' with the 'smoke 'em out' mantra puts us the viewers as those who are smoking out the truth at a higher level.
This is masterful storytelling, and could be a milestone in changing, but not breaking, our ineluctable need to see the world as a movie.
No real comment about the Spider-Man movie: better than the first one; too much digital stuff that looks fake; really sick of that pretty boy who plays the Green Goblin's son; worried that we'll be seeing that lousy Goblin again in Part 3; ashamed of seeing a movie that has a Burger King tie-in with copycat scenes; thought Alfred Molina was great; wondered why, when that artificial sun sinks into the Hudson, there's no steam. Molina's digital arms hyper-realize the Steve Ditko originals, in the Baudrillardian sense that they're bigger, shiner, and have more moving parts and nasty chattering bits. Nothing beats Steve Ditko Doctor Octopus arms; the animation above is a mere caricature of their primal magic. It's Work in Progress:
Weighty issue of the day: thinking about de-linking the Bonaire webcams from the FAQ page. Bonaire is the runt of the ABC islands in the Netherlands Antilles (Aruba and Curacao are better known) but the diving excels and it's fun to visit if you like desolate, ass-end of the universe kinds of places. Some local entrepeneurs had four wonderful cams basically aimed at nothing: two looked out on the open ocean facing south and north, one showed a largely empty street where you might occasionally see a dog, and the fourth was the "reefcam"--an underwater view that was mostly a blue rectangle and every once a while a diver waving at someone back home, or a few fish.
Looks like the cams weren't paying their way, so the owners "sold out" to a local resort. The street cam has been replaced by a view of an outdoor dining area, the north and south-facing beach cams now include picturesque palm trees and deck chairs, and the reefcam view has some big lumpy, sunken thing in it that never moves. The descriptions on the cam-page haven't been updated yet, and it looks like the site's archive of old screen grabs is gone. The photo below is a tribute to the Cam Page That Was, a view from the old north beach cam. Let's raise a colorful tropical drink (with a little umbrella) to the forces of modernity and inevitable commerce.
UPDATE: Okay, the link is gone. Needed a slot for the Eyebeam reBlog anyway.
Update, Feb 2010: the cams are still going; a few have been added, such as the "donkey cam." Check it out, the link above still works.
My first house track! This might be classified as "Latin Horror House." [mp3 removed]
ADDENDUM: These recent pieces are "hand crafted" in the sense that no existing loops were used (a la Sony Acid or garageband). They're done with a shareware program where you plug in individual notes on staves and choose from menus of low-quality instrument sounds. It should be fairly obvious from the somewhat halting, robotoid delivery but it needed to be mentioned that these are "my" dumb (but hopefully good dumb) melodies.
Artist Diana Kingsley, who was the subject of an earlier post here, will be showing video works at Leo Castelli Gallery from July 7 to August 5 (18 East 77th St., NYC 10021, 212.249.4470). Here's the press release:
Leo Castelli Gallery is pleased to present "Isle of August," an exhibition of video works by Diana Kingsley. The New York-based artist is known for her still photos, consisting of crisp, highly composed images where the subjects are undone by subtle flaws: an open fly on a nattily-dressed male model, ink from a name tag smearing the blouse of a bosomy conventioneer, a chocolate delicately placed on a hotel pillow but left too long in an overheated room.Her videos keep the focus on the little things that sow the seeds of chaos. In Eat in, a piece projected from the ceiling onto the floor, ghostly takeout menus are slipped under an imaginary apartment door until they begin to pile up on the floor--an unceasing, almost stalker-like intrusion from the outside world. In buster, a gorgeously assembled image of an apartment interior is marred by a large, colorful lantern fly beating endlessly against the window glass, trying to make its escape. In Court Disaster, the viewer nervously watches the legs and backside of a female tennis player as she hops around a grass court, oblivious to the untied laces of one shoe threatening to wreck her game. The sumptuously-lensed works combine the rigor of minimalist design, the angst of an existential one-act, and the humor of a Chaplinesque slip on a banana peel.
New tune: "Streetsong 2" [3.48 MB .mp3]
Adrien75's new CD-R, Chickadoo Chronicles (Vol. 1), is out and available from Space Mermaid Music. Go get it, it's superb. Recall that in the '80s a certain type of dreamy, slow-tempo, home produced electronic music came out that was marketed as a meditation aid for stressed-out yuppies and had its own bin. Well, this is not that. Rather, it's a lineal descendant of the so-called ambient music of Aphex Twin or the so-called IDM (I hate that term) of Plaid or The Black Dog, which began to emerge in the late '80s after basement producers got better equipment and a clue.
On first listen Chickadoo's leisurely, jazzy-technoid tracks wash over you, but by the second or third the hooks start to jump out--and Adrien75 can really write good ones, little percolating confections of notes that are sweet but never remotely saccharine (try this .mp3 sample from "Who Wants More?"). By the third or fourth hearing those standout melody-textures have completely colonized your brain (in a good, as opposed to AM radio way), looping around mutating your synapses while you go about your daily routines. Six listens down the road, you'll be noticing the structures of the songs more: "Oh, this one has a hook that you think is coming back after the bridge, but then the bridge turns out to long ambient kind of thing, and it just ends." This was how Brian Eno described his third solo LP Another Green World--a series of tunes and vignettes swimming up out of the void, never to be heard again.
Chickadoo extends and deepens the vocabulary of A75's last collection of tunes, Therms Forever. After a series of earlier albums that sounded initially somethat different from each other, he seems to have found a groove, or better, hit his stride. He has lost the overt drum and bass breakbeats of his first EP, released about five years ago, but added the bubbly synths that pervade this disc; his guitar comes and goes but isn't heard on this CD-R. He's clearly in love with electronic keyboards but also has an ear for musique concrete-y kinds of sounds (songs can suddenly detour into passages that are whimsically abstract), as well as classical structure, jazz grooves, and intricate rhythms. And did I mention that he can play instruments really well?Adrien75 might be called "the American Richard D. James," a "kinder, gentler Boards of Canada" (not as angsty and schoolyard fixated), or even a more atmospheric Recloose (Carl Craig's funk/deep house protege from Detroit). But it's not really fair to compare music this original to anything else. One finds oneself wishing for a music theorist who doesn't exist--that is, who knows classical theory but is also willing to stretch it to accommodate the nuances wrought by new instruments and recording technology. This hypothetical person could then begin to describe in technical language the substantial musical achievement anyone with a thoughtful ear knows this CD-R represents.
NOTE: A more casual, first-person version of this post appeared earlier; this one supersedes it.Personal Business Crapola and Random Links
Posting may be light here while I wrestle with a music program I recently downloaded. My 5-year plan is to get the computer music thing mastered (up to a certain point of competence, of course) and then start synch-ing up my own compositions with the animations I've been doing. In the meantime (meaning now, not for the next five years) check out my LoVid performance photo in the upper right corner of this page. The duo tells me it's been a much reproduced image, in newspapers and so forth, as they tour around. Here's the post where it originally appeared. An emerging side goal of mine is to be the Fred McDarrah of the new media and electronic arts world; better start using grayscale more.
Lastly, check out this website of Communist store windows by David Hlynsky, a link posted by Traveler's Diagram months ago. The pictures are still great!