The Proposition

Interesting, a Nick Cave written film starring Ray Winstone and John Hurt: The Proposition.
Found Via GreenCine Daily

Aftermath, New Orleans

aftermath, New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, by Rick Wilking, 8-30-05, originally uploaded by Lotus Lynn.

Flickr: photos tagged "katrina"

Jeff Bridges' Tideland Photos

Jeff Bridges has posted another set of his signature wide-format photographs, this time from the set of Gilliam's Tideland. I'm somewhat less excited about this picture after Brothers Grimm, but I'll reserve judgement till I see it.
Link

Cool Hunting: Charlie White, 6 Questions

Cool Hunting has posted a short interview with artist Charlie White.
Link

"Battle in Heaven", Plagarismo

David and Nathan are back from the Edinburgh film festival. David's favorite movie playing there?, A Battle in Heaven, by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas.

I recieved a solicitation last week for some short films for a art exhibition in Madrid called Plagarismo, which centers around appropriation and copyright infringement in art. It's something I've written about, but none of the small handful of shorts I've done myself seem really appropriate. I'm trying to decide whether to just send them the stuff I have or not sleep for three days and try making something new.

2001 icons

Zyotism has made some nice looking OS X icons of objects from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Astēr

I'm preselling pieces in the "astēr" (previously called "drain") series of images that I've been working on in order to pay for their printing and mounting. These are a series of images in which a simple shape is shown in a wide variety of materials and textures.
If you are interested in puchasing limited edition prints of these images, mounted on masonite/wood bases (with assistance from sculptor/assemblage artist Steve Brudniak) Please write me for more information. In addition to getting to select and own pieces (there are about 30 of these images now and only a handful of them will probably be printed), you'll also get to help facilitate the whole series' creation.

I posted screen resolution versions of two of the images from the series earlier for use as desktop images, but any prospective buyers can see a contact sheet of the full series.

'SXSW Presents'

Frontier will be playing on October 8th, as part of the 'SXSW Presents' series on KLRU-TV Public television in Austin.

Link

Jessica Joslin

Jessica Joslin makes amazing sculptural/taxidermy art that will one day populate my castle, entertaining guests and repelling intruders.

Found via Merrydeath

Flickr Glitch art

kubist krabbs 3, originally uploaded by groc.

Via Kottke.org: a flickr set of satellite tv artifacting. I made an almost unwatchable short back in 98 called "Binary Cancer Tacos" that spends its whole last half devolving into mexican tv satellite feed video artifacts.

The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art

Link
Thanks Chris!

Making Dazed

From my friend Kahane Corn:

Hi there Wiley,
It's done. The film is done (made-for-tv film, that is)! Just wanted you to know that the official airdate for "Making Dazed" is Sept 18th at 10pm on amc (American Movie Classics)

link

V for Vendetta pushed back to next year

Reportedly not over its touchy subject matter, though.
link

Drain Desktops

Awesome fantabulous creative day! The first really productive day in a long time. I banged out a big chunk of an article I've been struggling to write all year, and I worked on a big set of images that I'm going to mount on pieces of masonite and display at The Green Muse cafe. In the course of working on them, I thought they might make nice desktop images, so I've prepared a couple of my favorites along with an icon that goes with them. You can download the archive here. (The icon is Mac OS X only, but anybody can probably use the desktop images).

And yes, the shape in the images is the letter 'k' in Zapf Dingbats.

Meat Art

Victoria Reynolds: Down the Primrose Path, 2003
Found via Geisha Asobi Blog

Weekend movie notes

For reasons I won't discuss, it has been an extremely emotionally draining weekend for me personally, but it was a good movie watching weekend. Nothing soothes a tormented soul better than slow-stepping tone poems about ennui-racked middle aged men and suicidal rock-stars.

I really enjoyed Van Sant's Last Days. I like the direction he's going with this film- and I'm astonished he's able to get away with it in the current landscape of American cinema. Very skillfully done and totally against the grain of pretty much everything being made right now. Interesting appearances by Kim Gordon, Harmony Korine, and my old friend Lukas Haas. The sound design is pretty exceptional, as in Van Sant's similarly spirited Gerry, it's thick... hallucinatory. It's almost like Gus Van Sant has suddenly decided he's going to be the American Tarkovsky with some of this sound and camera work. Beyond just the moodiness of the film there's somehow a sense of humor too... Bizarre, lingering shots of bad television, muttered weirdness from Pitt's character, and some outrageously funny lines from Harmony Korine. Then there's an impromptu original song performed by Pitt that's an unsettlingly convincing imitation of Cobain (and actually a pretty good song.. it left me wondering if it was written by Thurston Moore, who's credited as 'Music Supervisor'). It looks like Michael Pitt had written the song himself, before ever meeting Van Sant.

Broken Flowers is my second favorite Jarmusch movie (after Dead Man). Anything I could say about it has already been on every other movie blog with any taste, so go see it.

On Sunday night I got to briefly meet Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi and watch a few totally obscene, never aired episodes of the show. Earlier in the day he attended a barbeque at Bob Sabiston's house and mingled in the brain melting August heat. Very talented, friendly guy. Write to Spike TV and tell them you want more Ren and Stimpy.

Walken 2008!

Yes, I know it's a joke. But the poster is priceless.

Funny.. in the Guardian

The SFBay Guardian interviews Andrew Bujalski about his first feature Funny Ha Ha. Andrew left us a copy of his new film Mutual Appreciation on his last visit to Austin and I'm happy to say it's another perfect-pitch, subtle movie with some great, naturalistic acting. I'm convinced that Andrew has a lot more great stuff in him, and I'm eager to see it.
(btw, you should scroll down on this page and buy a copy Funny Ha Ha from the Amazon link on the left).

Using Automator with Soundtrack Pro

This is probably only interesting to people making their own podcasts (I'm not one of those people), but I just discovered that Soundtrack Pro comes with several of its own Automator actions. None of the other Apple Production applications have their own actions, and this could be useful in a couple of ways.
You could have an action that takes a field recording, automatically repairs any problems with the audio and optimizes the levels, then names and uploads the file to a webserver. It probably wouldn't be too difficult to have the action automatically blog the file for you too.
There are some omissions from the list of actions that would have been really helpful for this kind of workflow, though. For one, the save action only gives you the ability to make AIFF and WAV files, which are typically too large for podcasts. You'd need to be able to save an MP3 or an AAC (iTunes has its own actions, so you could probably get around this by using some of those). Also, it would be very cool if there were Soundtrack Pro actions for adding an audio unit effect to a file (echo? robot voice?), or even combining the file with an mp3 at half volume, if you have a piece of background music you like to use in your podcast.
Anyway, it's still a good start, and its very cool to see that this stuff is becoming more and more scriptable.

Tags: podcasting osx automator soundtrack pro

unrealart.co.uk

Alison Mealey uses the FPS game Unreal and code written in Processing to create artwork.

Each image represents about 30 mins of gameplay in which the computers AI plays against itself, there are 20-25 bots playing each game. The Bots play custom maps I create. Each map has been pathed so that the bots have a rough idea of where to go in order to create the image I want. I log the position (X,Y,Z) of each player each second using a mutator I created, I also log the position of a death. I then run my own code written in processing to create postscript files of that match.
Every image represents 1 full game, and the position of the dots or lines reflects the position of a player at a given time.

Link

Found Via PixelSumo

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Scene Stealer

Salon.com interviews Lauren Ambrose of Six Feet Under.

Schaukasten

The Walking Dead (Michael Curtiz, USA 1936), originally uploaded by ThGroh.

Schaukasten is a blog full of vintage movie posters.

Found via Bedazzled

Decasia

Tamara and I caught a showing of Bill Morrison's film, Decasia tonight at Spiderhouse, video-projected by new Octopus Project member Kevin Adickes. The film is built out of half-oxidized archival footage. The pictures melt and clump into contrasty textures- your brain fights to pull images out of the visual entropy, just as it fights to build some narrative out of the jumble of scenes still barely clinging to the film. What I got out of it was that the images are dissapearing, like memories. There's something frightening and apocalyptic about how things form, only to dissapear, but it's also beautiful and exhilarating. The drive to film things, to write stories, to make any kind of art, is a fight to stop that process of decay, but it's ultimately futile.

R Kelly on a half pound of PCP.

R. Kelly's Trapped in a closet 1-5 all synced and played at once.
Freaky, hilarious.

FILMMAKER MAGAZINE | Hustle and Flow

Scott Macaulay posts a nice wrap-up about Hustle and Flow, a Sundance favorite that has less-than-stormed the box office so far, but may be gaining a following. Several of the reviews I've read have been violently negative, mainly centering around the film's 'immoral' protagonist rather than the quality of the acting or filmmaking, and I thought Scott's post was a nice counterpoint. I enjoyed the movie a lot. The rotting Memphis locations were crying out to be filmed... Although throughout the film I found myself wanting to see the real people who lived there. I could feel them looking at the set behind roadblocks and over the shoulders of production assistants.

At Sundance I cheered the film as it ramped up DJay's Memphis rap scene rise. But, I wasn't cheering the character of DJay specifically. I admired the film's ability to present DJay as a morally flawed, egotistic, and not really that talented rapper and still draw us into his "star is born" storyline. In fact, what was most interesting for me was the film's depiction of how others realized their own dreams of being part of a cultural moment by projecting them through the lens of DJay and his pimp life. My favorite scene was that tiny moment at the end when the DJ Qualls character hears his song while stocking a vending machine. You just know that he's never going to make a dime off that song, that five years later he'll still be stocking that vending machine, but it doesn't matter.
In his Filmmaker interview, Brewer referenced Purple Rain and Prince's fucked-up behavior to Appolonia. I'd throw in New York, New York, another movie about a misogynist musician getting tangled up between women and his dreams. As with those films, we go into Hustle and Flow thinking that its characters can be read as simply as its song lyrics. That winds up not being the case, and I guess the complications at the heart of what reads like a music-driven crowdpleaser make it not quite the crossover success I expected.

Link

HD for indies: The HD Analog Shutout - no HD on your HDTV

OK, a little geekery still (while we're on the topic of getting upset about DRM)- this one may affect you movie-folks too, depending on when you bought your TV.
Mike Curtis posts today about how the impending HD disc formats are already railroading themselves into moribundity before they've even left the gate:

It looks like the Hollywood studios are requiring use of an HDMI connector with HDCP (hardware device copy protection) for high definition video content on next generation formats, HD DVD and Blu Ray. [...]
So what does this mean? Imagine you spent $2000-$5000 on an HDTV a couple of years ago. You're into all this new tech, you love it. So HD DVD and Blu Ray discs actually ship, and you plunk down $500-$1000 for one of the first players (assuming you're OK buying into one of two competing standards) and you take it home and pop it in your player. Woops, your set lacks HDMI with HDCP, you only have HD component analog connections. Even though they work with all of your other high definition gear, the player will quietly downsample your HD signal to standard definition. You watch the movie, and frankly, it doesn't look any better than your regular DVDs that play on your kids' $50 player. Box it up and return it, you don't think it's worth it. You could be watching a regular DVD on a $50 player on a $300-$800 TV and it would look pretty much just as good.

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Daring Fireball on trusted computing

John Gruber responds to Cory Doctorow's stock spittle-flecked rant about the possible use of Trusted Computing DRM in Apple's Intel-based machines (right now only a developer conversion kit exists, so a lot of it is speculation about products that don't exist yet).

Sorry for the brief nerdery, non-mac folks, I'll get back to movies in just a bit. I went to a gym TWO WHOLE TIMES last week so I am feeling a little better now.

The Broken Flowers trailer is on iTunes (along with the soundtrack).

Black Bonnet

Tonight (august 4th) at 7pm my friend Pandora Gastelum will be performing her puppet show The Tragical Ballad of Black Bonnet with co-creator Nina Nichols at Spiderhouse Cafe. I'll have to miss it due to work, unfortunately, but anyone reading this in Austin should go!

SXSW Click 2005

The SXSW Click online festival finalists are selected and viewable Here in nice, big AVC/H.264 format (among others).

Chiho Aoshima - Asleep, dreaming of reptilian glory

Found via we-make-money-not-art