Navel Lorrac

Jeremy Blake 1906

2009-07-13T17:51:00.001-04:00

Bill Viola at the 2009 Venice Biennale

2009-06-11T10:46:00.002-04:00

Chris Ware animation for This American Life

2009-05-03T17:23:00.001-04:00

Kent Lambert's Condensed Movie #1

2009-05-02T10:16:00.001-04:00

Decasia

2009-04-27T17:17:00.003-04:00

Director Bill Morrison used deteriorating film from various archives to create Decasia in 2001. Take a look.

Ryan Trecartin

2009-04-27T16:53:00.004-04:00

Just watch.

Nietzsche Footage

2009-04-27T14:02:00.002-04:00

Warren turned me on to this- it looks like subtle digital manipulation of still photos, very slight motion. Darkness.

Catherine Sullivan

2009-04-22T17:52:00.005-04:00

From her PBS Art 21 Bio: "Sullivan’s anxiety inducing films and live performances reveal the degree to which everyday gestures and emotional states are scripted and performed, probing the border between innate and learned behavior." I thought far from being anxiety inducing, Triangle of Need was a nostalgic experience. The discord was comfortable, the claustrophobia embracing, the song transcendent.

Thank you for returning my wallet kind stranger!

2009-03-22T13:46:00.004-04:00

Recently I lost my wallet in Northside. A week later it was returned anonymously to the college office, all 4$ intact. Prominently displayed inside was my yellow sticky process note:

Miraculous! Thank you.

More Layering Fun

2009-03-05T19:52:00.005-05:00

Layering fun: the making of Sea Orchestra

2009-03-05T19:48:00.002-05:00

Sea Orchestra: The Making Of from Shy the Sun on Vimeo.

The face of Brad

2009-03-05T19:10:00.004-05:00

This was forwarded by Denise- a talk by Ed Ulbrich of Digital Domain on creating the aging Benjamin B. Character.

The best stuff is in the latter half.

Work In Progress

2009-03-03T01:40:00.010-05:00

medium envy

2009-02-19T17:18:00.003-05:00

2009-02-03T22:09:00.004-05:00

...

The anxiety of being trapped in a twelve-sided die!

Middle age in the basement.

The basement bedroom

2009-02-01T16:01:00.004-05:00

The Cycle

2009-02-01T15:45:00.005-05:00

The Sailor, armor up! portion of the cycle. He's about to get decadent.

Hole head, Internalization of Dogma portion of the cycle.

How everything flows.

Knot Head

2009-02-01T15:42:00.002-05:00

Initial model for the intellectualization part of the cycle.

Refreshments

2009-02-01T15:37:00.001-05:00

Coffee and donuts for recovering starchildren. Another still.

Crest #1

2009-01-28T16:43:00.004-05:00

Adolescent totem/crest #1. Rebellion, the road to a Rousseauist Paradise.

Starchild Support Group

2009-01-28T02:43:00.003-05:00

A still from what I'm currently working on. The Causa Sui project.

Demis Roussos, Aexhaltation, Phaedrus. He was sad beyond sad but did it anyway.

2009-01-21T20:24:00.014-05:00

This man's performance is sublime. If I could sing, move, and emote like Demis Roussos, well... maybe my generation has aestheticized and internalized profound irony so deeply it's subjectively indistinguishable from exaltation.

D's remarks: "okay, take a little Devendra Banhart, shake with some Joe Cocker pit stains and Roger Whitaker seaspray aura, and puree till nice and smoooooth"
I haven't heard much interesting from Banhart but appreciate Joe Cocker's twitchy soulishness, and look forward to a new world in the morning with Roger Whitaker. Matter of fact I would have melted had they played that at the inauguration.

My new term-Aexhaltation: an act of relating to the greater human whole upon finding an aesthetic object which provides a renewed relationship with culture allowing a release of what, in the observer, is being witheld in its perceived absence. Edits pending.

Back to Roussos: House of the Rising Sun. Chariots of Fire. Vangelis. TWA flight 847, 1985

There's a darkness in Roussos' face beyond theatrics related to the character of Phaedrus (the wolf) in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Here's a passage, essentially describing the death of Phaedrus (warning, spoiler!):

What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

It is what he was saying months before in the classroom in Montana, a message Plato and every dialectician since him had missed, since they all sought to define the Good in its intellectual relation to things. But what he sees now is how far he has come from that. He is doing the same bad things himself. His original goal was to keep Quality undefined, but in the process of battling against the dialecticians he has made statements, and each statement has been a brick in a wall of definition he himself has been building around Quality. Any attempt to develop an organized reason around an undefined quality defeats its own purpose. The organization of the reason itself defeats the quality. Everything he has been doing has been a fool's mission to begin with.

On the third day he turns a corner at an intersection of unknown streets and his vision blanks out. When it returns he is lying on the sidewalk, people moving around him as if he were not there. He gets up wearily and mercilessly drives his thoughts to remember the way back to the apartment. They are slowing down. Slowing down. This is about the time he and Chris try to find the sellers of bunk beds for the children to sleep in. After that he does not leave the apartment.

He stares at the wall in a cross-legged position upon a quilted blanket on the floor of a bedless bedroom. All bridges have been burned. There is no way back. And now there is no way forward either.

For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he does not answer. His wife becomes angry, but Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware of what she says but is no longer able to feel any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow and slow, as if gaining an imponderable mass. So heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels himself extending into the universe with no limit.

He begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all his life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his urine flows not deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls for help.

But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire consciousness of Phædrus begins to come apart -- to dissolve and fade away. Then gradually he no longer wonders what will happen next. He knows what will happen next, and tears flow for his family and for himself and for this world. A fragment comes and lingers from an old Christian hymn, "You've got to cross that lonesome valley." It carries him forward. "You've got to cross it by yourself." It seems a Western hymn that belongs out in Montana.

"No one else can cross it for you," it says. It seems to suggest something beyond. "You've got to cross it by yourself."

He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream and no one's dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own efforts. Then even "he" disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it.

And the Quality, the areté he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.

Almost there

2009-01-17T20:17:00.002-05:00

Chez Pazienza of The Huffington Post gives us One last look back before the inauguration. I was particularly moved by his take on this hellspawn:

"CNN's Nancy Grace is the most loathsome, feckless troll to currently, unfathomably have a forum on national television. She's a vile, unscrupulous monster who peddles morbid prurience like a five-dollar streetwalker and whose brand of rank solipsism is matched only by her near-sociopathic disregard for the lives she's ruined and exploited and by her apparent contempt for the tenets of responsible journalism (to say nothing of basic human decency). "

Wallbuilders

2009-01-17T18:39:00.004-05:00

I rented this from Netflix thinking it would detail philosophical struggles around the First Amendment. Turns out it was a series of battlefield folktales narrated by a stern, geeky figure with Blagojevich hair. Now, I couldn't watch the whole thing, but the thesis seemed to be that God deflected a baker's fuck-ton of musket balls from our founding fathers in order that they could build a Christian nation.
Shame on me for not paying attention to the absurd title and clumsy cover layout. Wallbuilders is actually the subtitle.
Anyway, I wrote a comment rant:
"Netflix, how about moving this out of your documentary slot and into a brand new category: "Christian Perspectives." Works, no?
I believe the addition of this category will allow Netflix subscribers greater accuracy in choosing documentary films corresponding to their interests- to effectively discriminate between films intended to promote creative discourse on religion and government and those intended to…"
Of course this was the result of editing and re-editing, removing phrases like "revisionist fucktards", etc. in order to make it sound more reasonable, but having reached this last anemic editorial iteration, I lost interest.

Process triptych.

2009-01-17T13:16:00.002-05:00

A short animation done for Dissolving the White Cube.

Lustfaust

2009-01-17T12:11:00.001-05:00

Part of UK artist Jamie Shovlin's latest cultural fiction, a 70's German glam/experimental band.
More Lustfaust can be found here and here. Also check out Mirrorworldmusic which I had incorrectly believed was entirely manufactured for the project. Turns out it's real, some of the artists at MWM happen to be collaborators (apologies and thanks for the correction, Murray).

2009-01-15T19:26:00.000-05:00

Five months until rebirth.