Bodycage got some play in the Chicago Reader last week, and I did a little interview with them, but it doesn't look like they've posted that yet. Very interesting and thoughtful article on the subject of fan-made videos, with some humbling compliments on my Arcade Fire video:
It’s one of those bits of almost magical audiovisual synergy that argue most persuasively for the music video’s status as an art form, and almost immediately after it was released it was reposted across the indie blogosphere, accompanied by breathless commentary in praise of its genius. The band and its label could hardly have hoped for a better reception for a video.
Thanks Miles.
This should make up for the past few weeks of missing posts..
Shepard Fairey's nearly iconic Obama poster is for sale at the official campaign store now. It's nice to see the campaign recognizes the work of their fans. Or is it more interesting that a campaign is actually inspiring work from fans?
Trent Reznor calls for fans to make music videos for their recent all-instrumental four disc release, "Ghosts". Something to ponder for sure.
Mike Hill, a sculptor that made the iconic full-size figures of Batman and Superman, has been working on a bust of Heath Ledger as the Joker. Lets put a smile on that face, indeed.
"We Are Wizards"… a film about Harry Potter fans/followers that proves people can find themselves in anything. Looks great.
SNL drinks your milkshake. Great skit from last night's first episode since the end of the writers' strike. The whole show was much better than usual. I imagine that might have to do with having three months to think about new skits.
I just noticed that my desktop options in Leopard now give me the choice of translucent or opaque menu bar. A lot of people (kind of ridiculously) complained about this. A pleasant surprise.
We could use these in Chicago: a storm/wind-proof umbrella. Most interesting is the asymmetry—a surprisingly beautiful example of form following function.
Short video interview with Chip Kidd in his own apartment/museum thing. I wouldn't mind spending a day rummaging through his Batman memorabilia.
Autechre has definitely opened up to the public a little more than usual with their Quaristice release. Pitchfork has landed an interview with Rob Brown of the duo.
Steve Smith and Jeff Hamilton "Drum Duet with Brushes". Watch it all. Thanks Kain.
One of the dream movie projects I'm sure for a lot of directors, and happens to be one of mine too, is finally going under production. Leonardo DiCaprio is set to produce a live-action Akira film. Yes, that's Leonardo DiCaprio (one of the best actors alive today in my opinion), and Akira (a movie I was once so obsessed with directing a live-action version myself that I created an entire unofficial movie score out of obscure electronic songs… maybe I'll post it sometime). I would normally be nervous as hell about this project, which could realistically turn into amoebic disgusting mess faster than Tetsuo's right arm… but knowing that someone like DiCaprio is behind the scenes gives me a bit of hope that maybe they'll do this right. We'll see.
From the NYTimes store, this is incredible: "Custom-printed reproductions of any front page from The New York Times from September 1851 to the present on a white cotton T-shirt. Geared to mark birthdays, anniversaries and other important life events - this makes a unique and personal gift." And it's silkscreened! Brilliant. I wonder how that process works.
Brilliant idea. A curated design/photography/art bookstore in Berlin called Bildschöne Bücher that doesn't sell anything they don't love themselves.
The NYTimes has a nice interactive graphic highlighting the political, celebrity, and media endorsements for the 2008 race. Now that looks like an entertaining party.
Added a page to the site for my films. Kinda skimpy right now, I know. I'm working on it.
A slew of free shows coming to the Chicago Cultural Center this month, which mostly looks like really good Jazz. Notable names include Ken Vandermark, Frank Rosaly, and Ben Allison, with plenty of latin in the mix too. I'm looking forward to this.
Regardless of who you're voting for or what the outcome of tomorrow's primary elections may be, when our allied countries overseas look admirably upon our diverse line-up of candidates and the amount of passion this race is igniting in all states, it is a sign that we're all doing something right as a country…and a sign that we're finally doing something right for the world.
In case you were wondering what it's like in Chicago right now.. here are some Flickr photos. Here are some more.
Living in Chicago, a city with plenty of parks that are your only natural retreat year-round, you become aware of not only how beautiful they can look in the warm seasons, but also how well, or poorly, they age in the winter. Piet Oudolf is a Dutch garden designer who has done some work in Chicago's Millennium park, and is known his attention to how a garden both lives and dies. Here's a slideshow.
He’s interested in the life cycle, how plant material ages over the course of the year, and how it relates to the plants around it. Like a good marriage, his compositions must work well together as its members age.
It also caught my attention that the hedges look like sine waves. Always an attractive form.
An interview with the rarely outspoken Autechre about their surprise release Quaristice, which became available on Bleep.com for download last week. I'm still absorbing the album, and as they say in the interview, it might be another year before I feel familiar enough to review it.
We do celebrate the futurism of that behaviour, but we’re here, it’s 2008, and kids might just presume the requirement to be hit with loads of detail and overlaid effects is there just to be valid – and I think that’s where it goes a bit wrong and people miss the point.
Guillermo del Toro, director of Pans Labyrinth among other extremely inventive films, is set to direct the two upcoming The Hobbit films. Yes! I was cringing at the thought of anyone other than Peter Jackson filming these movies, but this is great news. Jackson is still the producer, and I'm sure Weta is still doing effects, so I think a good amount of stylistic continuity with the LOTR trilogy will remain. Honestly, if Jackson were to direct The Hobbit, you can almost imagine exactly how they would be treated. Del Toro will bring a fresh perspective to franchise.
Slate has a good update on how The Dark Knight will continue without Heath Ledger, who plays the Joker. There have been plenty of rumors lately that Ledger had not finished his work on the film, but Warner is insisting that they have everything they needed. Another reassuring note, Slate claims if they did need to hire a voice artist to fake a couple of voice loops for the Joker, the professional result would be completely unnoticeable.
Archer, a minty-sweet new slab serif from Hoefler & Frere Jones. Looks pretty delicious.
A Drum Buddy is a "custom-built light-activated analog drum-machine" created an used by the artist Quintron. See the demonstration here. A light activated synthesizer is definitely a new concept to me, but it does seem to have some haptic qualities similar to a theremin. It looks like it is a mini-game straight out of Mario Party.
Arcade Fire has released a new (and official) music video for the first track of Neon Bible, "Black Mirror". Nice quality and plenty epic. Also an interesting touch, on the website you can press keyboard keys to turn audio tracks on and off, offering some unexpected ways to hear it.
And now I realize I somehow missed another interactive video for the title track "Neon Bible". Click around.
Director of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan, writes an article in Newsweek remembering Heath Ledger and his dedication to playing the Joker:
I would visualize the screening where we'd have to show him the finished film—sitting three or four rows behind him, watching the movements of his head for clues to what he was thinking about what we'd done with all that he'd given us. Now that screening will never be real. I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly.
It has been over two weeks since I saw P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood. I still can't shake it. I have that rare impression that I get from a movie where I leave the theatre feeling like I was part of a great event. I actually saw something happen, and on some level, whether fully conscious or not, it will have an influence on my life. This only happens to me when a film is so well put together that you forget it's a film, therefore doesn't feel "put together" at all.
And though everyone seems to have something to say about it, not enough can be said for Daniel Day-Lewis's performance. That wasn't acting. Day-Lewis was a different person altogether. I have confidence that his portrayal of the power-sociopath and loving father Daniel Plainview should go down in the history books as possibly the greatest actor performance on film. Not to belittle all the great work there has been, but when honestly and objectively thinking about it, I can't for the life of me think of a work with this amount of nuance and depth. I was convinced this Daniel Plainview existed.
To complete this tryptic are Johnny Greenwood's sound poems. In an interview he said that he didn't create themes for characters or situations, but more it was all a study of Daniel Plainview's complicated mind—and it reads that way. It is shaped by the landscape he lives in, with the swells of hills and atonal hums of empty desert plains. It is shaped by the drumming labor within him, with all the clanking and pounding of a mind that never stops running. And it is shaped by the melodic peace he finds in the thought of his son. But throughout the score there's always the looming dissonance that says something is wrong—that something is coming.
And boy does it come.
Having some fun this morning looking at old book reviews in the NYTimes archives. Here's a snippet from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian review from 1985—a book I'm reading right now—which is as ambiguous as the story itself. If you enjoyed No Country for Old Men but are open to a lot more violence, and hazier plot, and according to this review, an ending that is even less resolved, you might try this one. It's the kind of book you spend a few chapters learning how to read, and once you figure it out you realize that the language is in complete control. You just have to give up, saddle up, and go along for the ride.
The horsemen cross the plain ''as if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality.'' That line, buried in the middle of the book, contains the heart of all Cormac McCarthy's fiction - its deep horror, the reality we are forced to witness, the qualifying ''as if'' throwing everything into doubt, and above all the brilliance of the work's conception.
Growing up, either you're a Star Wars kid, or a Trekkie. I was a Star Wars kid. But the three horrible Lucas prequels of the past few years, and an upcoming J.J. Abrams directed Star Trek film might finally convert me. What a handsome teaser trailer. Wow.
I'm not sure who Victor Taba is, but he has my attention. The Presstube-like animations are great, but the audio accompaniment is especially beautiful. Give it time, let it build up for a while.
Frodo cast the ring into Mordor…
And Microsoft is releasing an update on February 12 that will upgrade all
versions of Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7. Yes! I can't express how happy this makes me. For those of you that don't know the feeling of wondering through the vast, black depths of programming and debugging for IE6 let me tell you, this is big. Don't bother getting me a birthday present this year. I won't like it.
Install Mac OS X Leopard on your PC in just one step. I repeat, install Mac OS X Leopard on your PC in just one step. This is wonderful.
To accompany the post below, here is There Will Be Blood PT Anderson being interviewed on NPR. Don't listen if you haven't seen the film. Too many revealing audio clips.
NPR has a series of fantastic short interviews with Daniel Day-Lewis on his performance for There Will be Blood, and Johnny Greenwood's score for the film. If you have never heard Day-Lewis speak out of character before, brace yourself. It's a totally different person.
Six volunteers agreed to be shut inside a cell in a nuclear bunker, alone and in complete darkness for 48 hours for a BBC documentary. Easily the most potentially frightening part for me would be waking up:
Within half an hour of being locked up at the start of the experiment, all of the subjects lie down and go to sleep. But the real ordeal will begin when they wake up and find they have no idea what time it is.
The thought of that makes my skin crawl.
T26 "Print" shirt—designed by me—up for sale at the merch store. Grab a few for the family.
A gallery of vintage travel posters. From Quipsologies.
"Its huge skull, more than 20 inches long, suggested a beast more than eight feet long and weighing between 1,700 and 3,000 pounds." A new species of dinosaur perhaps? No, actually it's a rat. A rat the size of a bull.
Just want to share a couple simple and seriously useful apps I've found lately. Please feel free to contribute in the comments.
- Spanning Sync: Sync iCal and Google Calendar very easily. Been waiting for this for a long time.
- Anxiety: Ironic name. Simple to-do list that syncs with Mail and iCal.
- Fluid: Build site specific applications. Great concept. I tote my Backpack around with a little more confidence now. Google app users especially take note.
- iWork: Yeah, not too uncommon, but I can't tell you how useful I've found these apps lately. No Office ever again. Pages is a dream.
Just one photo and one paragraph, but a pretty nice idea: bookstores offer free bookjackets with each purchase, produced by publishing companies or used as advertising. Again, nice idea, but only in Japan could this be pulled off with enough class so that customers would actually want to use the thing.
“Modern architecture has become totally homogenized and uninteresting. We’re losing our sense of who we are, how we developed and where we’re going." Richard Driehaus loves neo-Classicism. He lives in Chicago. This concerns me. (Though from the sound of it, I wouldn't mind attending his annual "birthday extravaganza".)
For more, check the archives.
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