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DVD captures from Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). In the top frame Ghost Dog removes a license plate from a car he has just stolen and in the bottom, replaces it with a plate from some unsuspecting picnickers. I saw the movie twice before noticing the deadpan mottos for nonexistent states. The music is by Wu-Tang Clan guiding light The RZA, who is featured in cameo (and camo) near the end of the film as a fellow urban samurai. The RZA, who also did the Kill Bill score, is the subject of a wild interview over at the Onion AV Club. Amazing that music so heavenly could come from such a down-and-dirty talker.
(O: What was ODB like before the Wu-Tang Clan? RZA: He was similar, without the money and without the name. I've been involved in a lot of things in my life, and I'd always count him in. Like if I wanted to see some girls, I'd call him and say, "Yo, I've got these girls. These girls are going to steal some shit for us, and all we have to do is hang out with them, spit right with 'em, fuck 'em, and then they'll do that for us." He'd come over, and then the next day, the girls would be ready, and he'd do something to fuck up the whole shit, or get the dough and spend it in one day, or something that's real fucked-up. Like if he got hold of a car, he'd crash it. He was always like that.)
The Ghost Dog score is a strangely heart-tugging melange of hiphop beats, Asian temple chimes, industrial ka-chings & whirs and wispy, pretty recurring melodies. According to the DVD notes, RZA assigned the film's characters their own musical motifs a la Peter and the Wolf. Well, I'm damned if I find any relationship, but each motif is heard exactly when it's needed. The music, working in tandem with Jarmusch's entranced views of the city and frequent close-ups of Forrest Whitaker's sad face, creates an elegiac mood so powerful that it survives even the director's characteristic outbreaks of weird humor and inexplicable behavior (e.g., the old mafia guy suddenly yelling "passenger pigeon! passenger pigeon's been extinct since 1914!"). To hear the score properly you need to get the DVD, because the CD soundtrack is mostly songs by other artists, apparently (or get the Japanese version of the soundtrack for $44).
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.)