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Chris Ashley, Untitled, 2005, HTML, 420 x 360 pixels
Another nice one from Ashley, whose abstract html paintings make browsers all over the world burn with a hard, gem-like flame.
Interview with Sam Hamm, who wrote the screenplay for Homecoming, Joe Dante's Showtime antiwar zombie movie. Hamm was a year ahead of me at the University of Virginia, making waves even then as a student film critic and festival organizer. His program of Sam Fuller and Don Siegel films, called Shit Fest, had a flyer that got censored by the University--they made him black in the capital "I" so it read SHOT FEST. He got famous with the script for the Tim Burton Batman, and I'm a fan of his Monkeybone (directed by Burton protege Henry Selick), an amusing sleeper* film that happened to be a big critical and box office flop. I don't have Showtime so missed Homecoming, with its dead Iraq war vets rising from the grave to vote against the Republicans, but it's great to hear films like that can get made and distributed in this age of pro-authoritarian media. I like this comment of Hamm's from the interview:
The moment you attempt to address right-wing punditry, you are in a realm beyond parody. How do you top the vaudeville duo of Falwell & Robertson, announcing that 9/11 was God’s retribution for rampant homosexuality? How do you top that necrotic turd Bill O’Reilly, offering Coit Tower in San Francisco to Al Qaeda? A couple of decades ago you would’ve paid fifty cents to see these circus freaks in a tent, with the bearded lady and the dog-faced boy and the India rubber man. Now they’re part of our national political discourse.*heh heh--it's about a cartoonist plagued with sleep disorders.