View current page
...more recent posts
Wow! Thanks to Sally for tuning up my .gif. It's running much better now.
Here's a detail of Double Molecule, the animated .GIF in the post above. I'm putting up this close-up photo to show conclusively, I hope, that my recent animated .GIFs, installations, and works on paper are NOT HAND PAINTED. They are drawn in MSPaintbrush, a very old but very digital program, then printed, cut out with scissors, and collaged and/or pinned up on the wall. For the animated .GIFs they are photographed in crude stop motion. I realize that shrunk down to a small scale & fuzzed out by compression, they look like little painted maquettes but I assure you nothing could interest me less. I like painting OK but I'm sick of the "romance of paint." Hence I am "painting" in a readily available electronic/digital medium. The animations are just an extension of my usual 2-D practice. Thanks to K. and J. for pointing out that I haven't been making this as clear as I need to. Now if I could only make the animation this bright...
A paragraph on Page 3 of a NY Times online story, concerning the impracticality of the WTC memorial designs, has this exact juxtaposition of text and image (may require refresh because they shuffle the ads):
The Suspending Memory design has a bridge connecting the two memorial islands that is so narrow as currently conceived that it might become overcrowded, said Paul Buckhurst, who teaches at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University...
Update on the New Jersey Wasteland Tour. (Take the tour--
DJ Set List, 2000. Back when I was DJing regularly, I had the idea of integrating some mixes I'd been taping off the radio (from '93 - '99) into my own live "deep tech house" set (yes, the term sounds pretentious, but it's accepted jargon and I've collected tons of it so cut me some slack here). Kind of curating the curators, or padding my mix with those of my betters, if you want to be cruel. So I hauled my cassette player into the restaurant where I was playing and plugged it into the mixing board. In order to make it work, I felt I needed some kind of road map. This piece of doodled-on, taped-together, water-stained legal paper--which had to be read with a flashlight--is it. Yes, I rocked the house, i.e., people were moving as they ate. (Alert readers will note the presence of DHS' immortal "House of God" in the list.)
A bunch of new movie preReviews are up; allow me to shamelessly self-plug and steer you towards my entries on Man on Fire, Peter Pan, and The Day After Tomorrow. The Peter Pan post is so topical I'm going to put up an excerpt here.
Remember the front page "asteroid hitting earth" stories that happened a few months before Deep Impact and Armageddon came out? Or the giant shark hooked off Montauk Point the summer Jaws 2 was released? (OK, the latter did happen, or they said it happened, but no reason you should know or remember it.) Call me a cynic, but I find it very strange that the media is gearing up for a Michael Jackson arrest frenzy just as Peter Pan is hitting theaters.The theory is, the film studio gives the DA a wad of cash to prosecute the suit, which will be very costly for the state, in exchange for wide dissemination of the lost boys/Never-Neverland meme at a time when a film about same, which doesn't look very good, is coming out. Sales of Jackson product will also increase. Lots of bucks at stake here. But of course Hollywood (filmmaking, law enforcement) could never be that corrupt. Or could it?
Also, while Sally McKay's preReview of Bridge on the River Kwai is well written and funny, the film must be defended as a kind of classic '60s antihero story. It's much more nuanced than you would think. True, there's a commando raid to blow up the bridge but for most of the movie's length Alec Guinness is keeping his fellow POWs sane by building the bridge. He wins a moral victory over the Japanese by showcasing British engineering skills and "stiff upper lip" resolve under demoralizing circumstances. (The film's ethnic politics still aren't very enlightened.) The problem is, he has so much pride in his work he nearly foils the commandos' mission. The latter must kill one of their own to make up for his pigheaded folly. Guinness' penetrating look when he's searching for evidence of sabotage and his mask of pain when he realizes what an idiot he's been are just unforgettable. The bridge, which would have been a real asset to the Southeast Asian locale after the war, is of course blown up, and when the POWs' physician surveys the ruined structure and all the bodies of principal characters lying around his only words are "Madness. Madness." (The last line of the film.) A more detailed synopsis is here.