Twitch - Sorasoi Trailer

Twitch has a trailer posted for Katsuhito Ishii's (Funky Forest, Taste of Tea) new film Sorasoi.
Twitch - A Trailer For Ishii’s SORASOI!

Shooting Down Pictures -Things I Learned from Losing - and Regaining - My YouTube Account

Kevin Lee has posted a great article about how to defend fair use of copyrighted material from infringement claims on YouTube:
Things I Learned from Losing - and Regaining - My YouTube Account
Found via Filmmaker Magazine Blog

Animal Collective, My Girls

Animal Collective "My Girls" from Chad von Nau on Vimeo.

ProVideo Coalition.com: HD For Indies by Mike Curtis | Founder | HD for Indies

Mike Curtis got to see the Sundance preview screening of Soderbergh's 'The Girlfriend Experience'- Lots of technical information since it was shot with the latest itineration of the Red camera (Mike's specialty), some shoestring details about the plot, which seems to have mostly mystified him and led him to conclude that the narrative is either very experimental or very unfinished.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape just came on cable the other night and it was interesting to watch it again and think about indie film then and now. I'm missing Sundance this year, and I'm not particularly broken up about it, but I'll be interested to see which movies rise to the top this year.
ProVideo Coalition.com: HD For Indies by Mike Curtis | Founder | HD for Indies

Update: Karina focuses on the film itself at SpoutBlog:

With a tone and approach vaguely reminiscent of Hal Hartley’s The Book of Life, Experience (at least in the incarnation we saw tonight) feels like an extraordinarily up-to-the-minute slice-of-life, a sketch of the filmmaker’s current preoccupations and fascinations worked out in slick video images that are at once austere and seductive. Subjects are often presented in simple wide shots, with the camera far enough away to suggest surveillance. Close ups, especially of Grey, fail to function as the windows on internal life that Hollywood film trains us to look for. This is a movie about a woman whose sleepy eyes and slight smirk rarely betray the slightest worry or impression. She spends 98 percent of her waking (and sleeping) life strenuously avoiding letting anyone in, and Soderbergh sticks to her surface for about the same percentage of his film.

Last Days of Man On Earth - NOVAK: The Story Behind Dumb Records

I've been reading the excellent music blog Last Days of Man on Earth for a few weeks, and this post really caught my eye; the fascinating first person history of Dumb Records by its proprietor, Novak. This is a guy who has met and learned from some serious new-music heavyweights and electronic music pioneers, but who crossed over into punk (playing a keyboard out on loan from Bob Moog), hung out with Captain Crunch, and finally became a programmer for SEGA.

Bonus points for the revelation that Pons Marr, an actor that my friends and I had a passing obsession with for his portrayal of "Heroin" in the hilariously awful anti-drug educational video "Straight Up" was not only a performance artist and drummer for one of Novak's bands, but that he may also have been the voice for Domino's Pizza's " 'Noid" character.


Anyway, this article is a great read and chock full of mp3's of super obscure punk/new wave music.
Last Days of Man On Earth - NOVAK: The Story Behind Dumb Records

Diagonals "Clones" video, directed by Nick Smith

Over the weekend my friend Nick Smith shot a music video for one of my band Diagonals' first songs, "Clones" And I think it is going to be pretty funny. Here's some early stills:









I'll post the finished video when it's done in a couple of months.

Food Party, Episode 4

The next installment of Thu Tran's FOOD PARTY is up. Here's part one of three:


Link to whole episode

Screens: Never Forget: The humble, indispensable VHS - The Austin Chronicle

Zac and Lars lament the passing of VHS:

VHS is crucial, not just as nostalgia but also because it's a viable way to grow as a person who appreciates movies. Only 25 percent of the movies ever made prior to the birth of VHS were ever actually released on home video. Today, approximately 50 percent of the movies that were available on VHS are now available on DVD. So you're looking at huge sections of films that were just lost. I think there's about 90,000 feature films – besides porn – that are available on DVD, which means that there's another 90,000 movies out there that people are willing to just let fade away if they're going to forego the VHS format. And that alone makes VHS completely valid and an integral part of being a movie fan. I want to beseech people to not throw away their VCRs – or go get one for $5 at a garage sale – because VHS is that important.

Screens: Never Forget: The humble, indispensable VHS - The Austin Chronicle

F I D D L E S-T-I-X-X

Episode one of the Zellner Brothers' AtomFilms series "Fiddlestix" is online: a sobering philosophical treatise on man's relationship with nature, rendered in stark autumnal grays, each episode several hours in length.

Ok, they're actually 3 minute flashing neon blipverts featuring a gibbon in a diaper who shoots lightning out of his brain while a merciless laughtrack digs its way into your skull.

"Fiddlestixx is a primate.
He's also the hottest party animal on the whole entire interweb, with ten times more attitude than Koko!
Fiddlestixx is the first primate to create and star in his own web series, called 'Fiddlestixx', which he named after himself.
Fiddlestixx's name is Fiddlestixx.

F I D D L E S-T-I-X-X

Cellular Automata portraits in processing

A couple of quick and very cool examples of portraiture being drawn with cellular automata in processing. The first one is by a designer named Ryan Alexander, who I want to be when I grow up.

1cm: Mycelium Bjork


This one is from Golan Levin, who takes the time to ruminate about what all these filtered images and portraits might actually mean, and if they are artistically worthwhile. It must be interesting to be so accustomed to the technology and aesthetics of this sort of programming that you can move on to the next step of asking "yes, but is it art?"
Segmentation and Symptom, by Golan Levin and collaborators




I've been doing some artwork using the wolfram one dimentional cellular automata in a program called toolbox (this image has been color effected and run through it several times, but you get the idea)

I've been trying to figure out how to do the same thing programmatically in processing, but the problem is that the Wolfram ruleset is one dimensional- so I would have to find a way to pipe the bright pixels of the image in line by line as individual arrays or something. I'm just not advanced enough yet to figure out an elegant way of doing it. I am making some (slow) progress though. Considering that I am a highschool dropout who counts on his fingers, I'm doing the best I can to slog through the arduous task of teaching my brain how to program.

Avant Cinema 2.5: No Drinks Allowed In Screening Room | Austin Film Society

New media artists Ben Coonley and Kevin Bewersdorf continue AFS's Avant Cinema series with this two-man show of their deceptively simple and richly subversive works, executed with a wide array of digital tools. This evening of PowerPoint lectures, slide-shows, short videos, Internet curiosities and other sludge from the avant-gutter will also feature a special contest, with a tasty beverage as the main prize (not to be consumed in the screening room).

Avant Cinema 2.5: No Drinks Allowed In Screening Room | Austin Film Society
Kevin's Maximum Sorrow site.

First Blood: The Early Films of Brian De Palma | Austin Film Society

The Austin Film Society is beginning a series of early DePalma films on the 13th, culminating with two of my favorite films of grotesque 70's excess, Carrie and Phantom of the Paradise. Sisters of course gets an honorary mention for this classic scene:

First Blood: The Early Films of Brian De Palma | Austin Film Society

Diagonals - Free Week, Tomorrow Night

Show got cancelled, Steve was unfortunately really sick and couldn't sing