Brad Neely - Sodom and Gomorrah

Austin360: Austin Movie Awards

Some ballot stuffing crazy person is picking The Dobie Theater as best theater in Austin on the Austin360: Austin Movie Awards poll. While I support the Dobie as much as I can (it was a huge part of my childhood) to vote for it over The Alamo Drafthouse South or Downtown locations is completely insane. The Dobie has postage stamp sized screens, bizarre skewed seats that offer neck cramping views, and none of the amazing special events and touches that the Alamo brings to the cinema experience. Anyway, if you're a movie-going Austinite, I encourage you to vote. And vote for Fantastic Fest for best Austin film festival while you are at it.

Aftermath on Meadowlark lane at Sundance

David and Nathan Zellner's short Aftermath on Meadowlark Lane, showing at this years Sundance film festival, can now be seen on the Sundance site and consequently also on iTunes. I got it off iTunes even though I know I could get a DVD from the Zellners, because it's a good transfer and it saved me the time of ripping the disc to my ipod. Now I can randomly plug into tv's at parties and blow drunk people's minds. Music by smooth operators, The Octopus Project.

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL - Welcome.

Brad Neely - Baby Cakes

Terror Thursday- Troll 2

Oh GodDAMMIT.

The Alamo Drafthouse is playing Troll 2, a Joe D'amato produced (working under pseudonym), legendary badfilm , with cast members in attendance on the same night as my band's first performance at a club (we're playing at Beerland with our friends Horse+Donkey). This means I'm going to miss Troll 2 and probably about half of my friends are going to miss me.


Link

David Lynch in Austin (without cows) | Slackerwood

I've been extremely lax in my film blogging of late and have been spending a lot of my time focusing on video art and interactive stuff. I even missed David Lynch's screening of Inland Empire at the Paramount. Luckily Jette Kernion was there and provides us with details.

Oh, by the way, Austin is frozen solid.

Zac from my company Mediatronica (and Medicinefilms) is down from Chicago, and he brought the cold with him. I was looking forward to showing him around town, shows, movies, what have you- but the town is boarded up in horror. It's actually worse than it looks in these videos, our car was under an inch of ice last night and of course the heater in my home decided to go out. A few space heaters and some logs for the fireplace have made up for it (sort of). Of course this would be a hot day anywhere up north, but the fact that we went from balmy to meat-locker in a little over 24 hours was disconcerting.

New Stars of the Lid album is nigh!

I'm an enormous fan of the difficult to describe but sublimely beautiful music of Stars of the Lid (ambient seems like a really limiting term, and none of the dumb music-press labels like "lowercase" have stuck). Today from Brainwashed:

We're really excited because Stars of the Lid return with their first album in over five years. Once again it's a triple LP/double CD of all new material. Brainwashed is hosting an exclusive MP3 on the front page of Brainwashed.com right now and we've also gotten the green light to open up pre-orders for the set by Kranky.

Normally I don't do this type of announcement but since both SOTL and Kranky's official websites are at brainwashed, I thought I'd let you know that Kranky (brainwashed.com/kranky or kranky.net - whichever you prefer) is offering the pre-orders, due for release on April 2nd, but will ship the week of March 26th.

We might not have exclusive MP3s every day at Brainwashed but at least the ones we do have are important enough!

mikons.com beta | now in color

I posted a while back about Mikons, the company with the cool vector art web application that my friend Alan Watts created that lets you make vinyl stickers and shirts from images you create and curate on the site. I have a bunch of the stickers and they truly kick ass.. they are high quality, cut vinyl... incredibly useful and cool looking. They've got a big library of clip art for you to mutilate and repurpose or you can just find cool mikons other people have made and print them up. Anyway, they just released a new version of the engine that allows color and text and I am going to crank out a bunch of new stickers as soon as I can. They've also got a mikon creation contest going, and if you win they'll fly you down here to sxsw- and I'll totally buy you a beer if you win. If I win, the beer is on you, though, whoever you are.

What's this I hear about your wanting to do a 'rainbow' song?

My utterly Inferior version. Debbie Harry is a better partner than Be'elzebub.

Slow news day in the land of the dead

I haven't been posting a lot because until yesterday I've been in New York, working hard with the rest of Mediatronica. No, I can't tell you about any of it yet. One day you'll just come here and get raped in the mind by interactive video. One really cool side-happening is that one of my co-workers, Eric Fino knows processing and is going to help me start learning it. What does that mean? Well, it means I'm on my way to building the video art installations I've been dreaming of for the past few years. Immersive environments that involve physical computing. All sorts of good stuff. I'm moist just thinking about it.

I had a really bad morning and spent the day cleaning up my workspace to try and clear my head, then I saw a late show of Children of Men. I can't tell you enough how stunning this movie is. You'll walk out of the theater shaking, but don't let that scare you away (don't let the scchmaltzy looking trailer scare you either). I'm going to watch it again before I try writing anything substantive about it, it's truly amazing.

Helen Hill

My friend Angel today relates the upsetting story of one of her friends, a filmmaker and mother, who was murdered in her home last night by an intruder.

Paul and Helen's house was destroyed in Katrina,
but still they returned- determined to clean up,
pick up the pieces and continue living in New Orleans.
Even though her films were damaged and mostly
ruined by the mucky water, she continued to fight
to preserve her work- and to show the films
in their new, altered state.
Decay that tells a story-
before and after.

Her stories are worth taking the time to read-
to be inspired by the next time something
seems so insurmountable..
She just took it on, always smiling..

Chale Nafus in the Chronicle

My friend Chale Nafus, programmer for the Austin Film Society, is interviewed in this week's Austin Chronicle.