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Your Photoshopped Culture...on American Movie Classics
(on cable TV, that is--a service you pay for)
Easy Rider, 1969. Ending scene: Redneck in pickup truck points shotgun at motorcycle rider Dennis Hopper. Hopper responds by raising his arm and showing redneck the back of his glove. Redneck shoots Hopper and leaves him bleeding by the side of the road.
"Dad, why did that man shoot that man?"
"Well, Molly, when the movie originally ran, and was seen by millions, and shaped a generation, the biker 'flipped the bone' at the trucker."
"Dad, what's 'flipped the bone'?" [etc]
Visit part one of "Your Photoshopped Culture...on American Movie Classics," to learn how 'ratfucking,' the word that shocked the nation when revealed to be spoken (and practiced) by the President's Men back in the '70s, was changed to "ratting" to protect a tender cable audience.
Due to self-imposed guidelines the location where this drawing was made cannot be divulged. It is not a place where pictures like this are pinned up within eyeballing distance, waiting to be drawn. It is not a place where all the artist has to work with are the programs on the computer, and a mouse. It is not a place with stretches of downtime. The originator of this photo-image is probably related to originator of the famous, cool photo "String of Puppies."
[update: atom added later]
This is a piece from 2003 called Swarm (53 1/2" X 41 1/2"). Just getting around to scanning the transparency [taken by Bill Orcutt!]. A larger version is here. Photos showing how it was made are here. It's all drawn with MSPaintbrush and run through the printer multiple times. A detail (flipped vertically) of one of the overlaid drawings is below:
More on the egregious Kim's video raid. Bloggy sums it up thus:
And by the way, the next time the NYPD complains about their pay, suggest that their corporate bosses should kick in some money. I guess the War on Terror is under control if they have time to raid Kim's Video looking for mix CDs, and bring along a "representative" of the Recording Industry Association of America to help them round up and arrest five people working at Kim's. They kept them all in jail overnight.The Village Voice has a good follow-up report on this scandal. Apparently the cops were picking out employees at random to arrest, an MPAA thug may also have tagged along, and it was so poorly planned the cops didn't even know that Kim's has more than one store.
Miscellaneous:
Speaking of self-referential artmaking, Jack Masters figured out the right thing to do with Artpad, the creative website with the most onerous terms and conditions you will ever involuntarily agree to just by drawing a pitcher.
Michael Bell-Smith has been cast in an amazing one-act ballet, as a slow moving robot that looks like a cross between Big Bird and a toothbrush.
Travis Hallenbeck (and a bunch of other people on delicio.us) posted the page of a cassette dj with exquisite gear made of particle board.
Paul Slocum has updated his Loopcart ROM, a tracker program for the Atari 2600. Click to load an .mp3 example here. I like the way it starts out videogamy and gets more syncopated and weird.
Spraycan (MSPaintbrush drawing)
"Hello Down There" [mp3 removed]. Short atmospheric percussion piece with burbly but slightly ominous synthesizer. Not techno.
...but the same instrumentation. I've been picking up more software synths and samplers and am especially fascinated by drumkits--collections of samples but also live synthesis. This is where my lo-fi religion with regard to software breaks down. I really don't care about the creative potential of Photoshop, I mainly use it to resize things and tweak photos. In the visual realm I'm perfectly happy to try to do complicated things with older, simpler programs. But with music, I'm just blown away with how the tools have evolved. I think maybe my aspiration is to try to do simple (or minimal) things with these CPU-hogs, to just isolate the textures and groove on them.
...it kind of lost steam toward the end so added a few more sounds.