Paul Reubens - SWINDLE Magazine

Nice interview with Paul Reubens, the immortal Pee-Wee Herman-
Link

About : Anonima

The American artist collaborative, Anonima Group, was founded in Cleveland, Ohio in 1960 by Ernst Benkert, Francis Hewitt and Ed Mieczkowski. Propelled by their rejection of the cult of the individual ego and automatic style of the Abstract Expressionists, the artists worked collaboratively on grid-based, spatially fluctuating drawings and paintings that were precise investigations of the scientific phenomena and psychology of optical perception.

About : Anonima:

Why is there no modern graphics and interactions programming class/meetup in Austin?

Here's a list of things that I want to study in some sort of semi-structured group in Austin, but can't:

• processing.org


• arduino/wiring


• Quartz Composer and VDMX


• Pure Data


• Adobe Pixel Bender Toolkit


• Supercollider


• Jquery/Javascript for interaction design, burst engine, processing.js


• Inform 7

Why can't I? Because this tech-centric oasis of creativity is stuck in the stone ages when it comes to hybrid art and technology programs. The University of Texas at Austin is still lugging around ACTLab, and art/tech incubator that still busies itself with a lot of completely outmoded Mondo 2000 bullshit 1993 raver theorizing, and Austin Dorkbot, which as far as I can tell is primarily made up of a few actual techies and a lot of random burning man aficionados who's idea of the co-mingling of art and technology is making bikinis out of old circuit boards.

Why is this stuff all important? Because for the first time in a long time, the game industry is being cracked open by micropayment download services on major consoles- WiiWare on Nintendo, Xbox arcade, the iPhone App store - and we are preparing for what is going to be a torrent of "one crazy guy in his basement with a vision" games that are going to mutate our expectations of interactive media and usher in a new era of art and entertainment. There are a ton of new technologies that allow artists to begin to design interactions and play with logic and active narrative as they would with paint or video, but the tech scene in Austin seems to be very focused on traditional roles of technology. We have a lot traditional computer science nerds and traditional game programmers, a lot of musicians dicking around in protools and ableton live, a lot of traditional web designers, and a lot of 'artists' who would never lower themselves to have to actually learn a 'technical' skill. Very very rarely in this town do I meet hands on, full experience designers who are building the kind of art that is becoming very common in the major cities and abroad. The kind of stuff we see at the Royal College of Art or CalArts, Carnagie Mellon or NYU.

Is there anyone else in town that is as frustrated about this stuff as I am? Is there some secret resource that I am missing out on? I really feel like this is the direction I want my 'career' to go in, but I am not going to move at this point in my life.

SXSW Snapshot: Ben Steinbauer's 'Winnebago Man' - indieWIRE

“Winnebago Man” brilliantly encapsulates the transformative power of the online video boom. Director Ben Steinbauer focuses on “one of the greatest swearers of all time,” the furious subject of a series of outtakes for a Winnebago promotional video, as both an example of viral media ramifications and a poignant character in his own right. The eponymous “Man,” a former broadcast journalist named Jack Rebney, existed for years in the public eye as the hilariously vulgar star of the “Winnebago Man” video, but his actual whereabouts remained unknown. Before YouTube launched in 2005, Rebney’s rage circulated among various communities on VHS and even wound up on television. It was the original Christian Bale meltdown.

SXSW Snapshot: Ben Steinbauer's 'Winnebago Man' - indieWIRE

SXSW. "St. Nick" - The Daily - Blogs - IFC.com

A wrap up of press for David Lowrey's film St. Nick:
Link

Woolworth's Harsh Realm, Today!

thor, originally uploaded by weevil.

Freak out in a medieval daydream with bands from far and wide, free Southern Star beer and Dripping Springs vodka, fortune telling, carney games, maypole dances, and the biggest fucking dragon sculpture you have ever laid eyes on.
Microfiche (8:45pm), The Roller (8:05pm), Fiasco (7:25pm), Over the Hill (6:35pm), Coathangers (5:55pm), Diagonals (5:15pm), Wildildlife (4:30pm), Pillow Queens(3:40pm), Eat Skull (2:50pm), Crime Novels (2:20pm), The Mae Shi (1:40pm), Rat Bastard & Doug Ferguson (members of To Live and Shave in LA, 1pm) THU MARCH 19, noon-10pm at Monofonus Studios, 610 Vermont Rd.
In the year 1209, the terrible dragon Gnarglewyrm was terrorizing the village surrounding Castle Pendergrass. The villagers gathered all their gold to hire the weirdest wizard in the land, Woolworth the Weird, who used his powerful magick ‘gainst said dragon day and night, finally fusing it to the castle, turning blood into stone. Trouble was, the Wizard was a greedy bastard. He saw the potential value in holding the village hostage in a fear that only he could assuage; he never fully killed the Gnarglewyrm, instead leaving the specter of the dragon’s awakening to haunt the village, lest we pay him. Every year the dragon thaws out from the castle a little bit more. Now, 800 years later, with our accelerating climate change, Princess Pendergrass is in a hurry to get the wizard the rest of his money before the dragon finally breaks free and destroys the village!
The princess has asked warriors and wanderers from around the land to come to the castle, play games, party to the max, and free her people, once and for all! (Did we mention free beer and booze?)

Andrew, Matthias, and Rick

Andrew, Matthias, and Rick, originally uploaded by weevil.

SXSW. "Sorry, Thanks" - The Daily - Blogs - IFC.com

David Hudson collects the critical responses to our film at SXSW:
SXSW. "Sorry, Thanks" - The Daily - Blogs - IFC.com

Day 4

Four days into SXSW and I haven't written a single post? I've been incredibly busy being split between all three portions of the festival, but I really have no complaints this year. Both of our screenings of Sorry, Thanks have gone wonderfully, it's been a chance to see a lot of friends from the movie and from past festivals. I almost feel silly about the anxiety I had preceding the festival. I may jinx it by saying it, but everything seems to be going smoothly. I'll try to post some capsule reviews of any movies I manage to catch between "Sorry, Thanks" and Diagonals obligations I have.

Subtext is Andrew Bujalski's 'Beeswax' - Los Angeles Times

The LA Times has a nice, understated interview with Andrew about his new film Beeswax:
Link

Andrew used a couple of Diagonals songs as background in Beeswax, along with my computer room, and my friend David's butt. He also plays my buddy in Sorry, Thanks.

Facebook | Rodney Perkins's Notes

Rodney has posted what I consider the final word on 'Watchmen':

[...] Snyder strips out most, if not all, of the 'mad ideas,' dumps the wacky, mind boggling ending and tightly embraces the narrative and structural conceits laid out in the book. When unraveled in movie form, the flaws in the comic's narrative come out. Whats the password to this computer that controls the fate of the world? Oh, its the on the spine of the book sitting in front of me. These and numerous other moments like it may have worked in a movie 20, 30, or 40 years ago but do not fly anymore. Snyder's embrace of the comics sprawling structure seems to be nothing more than of rote formalism. Furthermore, the emphasis on stylized hyperviolence (what would we do without slo-mo martial arts?) where the book largely implied such things as well as the triumph of body fetishism over performances (save for Jackie Earle Haley) boils out any brains that existed in the original material. So, in the end, Watchmen is some sort of 'adult' superhero movie, with the word 'adult' meaning fighting (slo-mo martial arts, anybody?), sex, bad musical direction and some gee-whiz effects. This is exactly the sort of movie that I do not like. [...]

Austin is Rad - Interviews - Wiley Wiggins

Austin is rad did a quick pre-SXSW interview with me. They also shot some footage of the Diagonals' record release party that I am anxiously waiting to see.

Lars and Zack Present Cinemapocalypse West Coast Tour April 16-26

This April 16-26, Austin\'s original Alamo Drafthouse Cinema will take their popular classic exploitation movie series on the road - presenting EIGHT HUGE NIGHTS of white-hot exploitation thunder at some of the finest screening venues in the west!!! Alamo Weird Wednesday programmer Lars Nilsen and Terror Tuesday curator Zack Carlson will bring the rampaging Cinemapocalypse road trip to the Pacific Coast, and will be presenting rare and absolutely unseen treasures from the American Genre Film Archive\'s top secret subterranean 35mm archive, each film destined to peel the hair from your eyeballs, scorch the skin on your cortex and make you sterile for ninety weeks. From manic hicksploitation epics to bloodthirsty shoestring goreblasts, each movie is a railroad spike through the heart of limp modern cinema. Join us in shattering the wall between you and THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE!!!

Special thanks to American Genre Film Archive for making these screenings possible!

Full Schedule Here:
http://cinemapocalypse.blogspot.com/

Dark Visions: The Current Cinema: The New Yorker

[...] The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon. [...]

This is precisely what I thought was going to happen after having to sit through the sweaty slo-mo rough-trade car commercial that was Snyder's "300"; That he would clumsily try to carry Moore's politics, all the while showing his real (lack of any) philosophy in every CG-plasticized frame of his film. Editing and style will always, always speak louder than words. While the New Yorker article goes on to question the high regard that Moore's original work has been held in, I thought Watchmen the book was very effective as what it was- a commentary not necessarily on politics or life-the-universe-and-everything, but on comic books themselves. Removed from that context, it goes limp. The weird pirate-comic within a comic bit of meta-narrative in the original- will that make any sense at all in the movie?
(In the case of Frank Millers' original comic of "300", I have to say, the movie did an excellent job of making what was already a turd smell even worse.)

Dark Visions: The Current Cinema: The New Yorker:

Diagonals - "Clones"

Here it is in all it's horrifying glory. As director Nick Smith warned when he first posted it, "This may be very offensive, depending on how lame you are."