As a starter project for the Intro to Digital Entertainment class, the students wrote scripts for an Xtranormal short -- Xtranormal being a service where you can type a script for pre-built avatars to "act out," giving them gestures, picking camera angles, and so on. The class picked these two as the best of the batch:
I Am a Cat, script by David Arslanian, directed by Victor Gutierrez
Coffee Shop Career Change, written and directed by Trevor Jackson
I'm co-curating a show at the Cartoon Art Museum, opening May 14 and running through the summer. The show, called The Art of Howl, has been a great opportunity to re-connect with a couple of folks who have been important in my own artistic development: Eric Drooker, who kindly blurbed my first graphic novel and has been a friend and artistic resource/inspiration ever since, and John Hays, who was crucial in shepherding my web cartoon Romanov into the world. I owe a debt of gratitude to both of these guys, and am glad to have the occasion to toot the horn for their recent work.
In addition, the show allows me to tip that hat to some "art heroes" who I've admired but never met: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, whose documentary The Times of Harvey Milk is an exemplar of socially committed historiography, and of course Allen Ginsberg himself.
And while there are no paintings or even doodles by James Franco featured in the show, I'd like to think it offers at least a small extension of his project to establish all reality as an emanata of the all-encompassing Francoverse.
I'll have a small bit of my own work in the show (for past posts on my involvement with Howl, click here) -- what follows is the official press release:
The Art of Howl at the Cartoon Art Museum 655 Mission St. San Francisco, CA 94105 May 14 – September 11 Opening Reception Thursday, May 19, 7:00-9:00pm
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's film, Howl, produced by Werc Werk Works, opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Featuring James Franco as the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the film took an experimental approach to documenting the creation and performance of Ginsberg's revolutionary poem, "Howl"– as well as the obscenity trial that followed when, after undercover policemen purchased copies of Howl and Other Poems from City Lights Bookstore, the state tried to suppress its publication. The film blends glimpses of Ginsberg's personal life, recreations of the obscenity trial, and animated sequences that accompany Franco's performance of the poem, riffing on its ideas and images.
The Art of Howl gives a revealing look behind the scenes at the creative process of turning poetry into animation. The film directors enlisted Eric Drooker to design the animation; Drooker, a graphic novelist and painter, was friends with Ginsberg and had collaborated with him on the book Illuminated Poems. John Hays, a San Francisco-based animation veteran, directed the sequences, which were animated by The Monk Studios in Thailand.
Translating Ginsberg's incendiary, oracular, stream-of-consciousness language into moving images was a unique challenge. The animation, like the poem, conjures a world of outcasts, "deviants," outlaws, poets and prophets digging for scraps of connection and enlightenment under the shadow of "Moloch" – the overpowering industrial cityscape that demands submission, conformity, and ultimately annihilation.
This multimedia exhibit includes character design drawings, animation keyframes and concept art, photos by Allen Ginsberg, storyboards, animatics, and images from Drooker's graphic novel version of the poem. The Cartoon Art Museum is pleased to present this animated interpretation of a piece of literary history – just a couple miles from City Lights Bookstore, the launching-pad for Ginsberg's poetic career, and through their victory at the Howl trial, a historic ground zero for freedom of expression.
Curated by Andrew Farago, Eric Drooker and Chris Lanier
Telling Pictures: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have been making non-fiction and feature films together since 1987 when they founded Telling Pictures, a San Francisco production company. Their films have played in movie theaters, at festivals, and on television throughout the world. Between them they have received two Academy Awards, five Emmy Awards, three Peabodys, as well as Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships. Their films together include Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (Academy Award, Feature Documentary, 1989), Where Are We? (Sundance Documentary Competition, 1991), The Celluloid Closet (Emmy Award for directing, Peabody, duPont-Columbia Awards, 1995), and Paragraph 175 (Sundance Film Festival jury award for directing, 2000). Their website is www.tellingpictures.com.
Werc Werk Works Werc Werk Works is an independent film production and finance company dedicated to the production and financing of high caliber, story-driven films with wide appeal. Recently released films include Howl starring James Franco, and the multiple Spirit Award nominated Life During Wartime. Upcoming releases include The Convincer and the new Lawrence Kasdan film Darling Companion. Werc Werk Works is also co-producer of the Béla Tarr film The Turin Horse that was recently awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Their website is www.wercwerkworks.com.
The Monk Studios The Monk Studios is a boutique Visual Effects and Animation Studio, located in Thailand. The philosophy of the company is to focus on producing world-class imagery using highly skilled artists and cutting edge technology. The company produces high quality Visual Effects (VFX) and Animation for both feature films and commercials in the Asian and Western markets.
Eric Drooker Eric Drooker is a painter and graphic novelist, born and raised on Manhattan Island. He's the award-winning author of Flood! A Novel in Pictures, and Blood Song. His paintings appear on covers of The New Yorker, and hang in numerous collections. His website is www.Drooker.com.
John Hays John Hays is an award-winning animation producer and director, having worked at ILM, Colossal Pictures, Lucasfilm, and co-founded W!LDBRAIN Studios. His projects range from Howl to Yo Gabba Gabba, and a recently completed animated dream sequence in Lawrence Kasdan’s new film Darling Companion.
Hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable new year's. Here's a parting shot from 2010 -- a few days ago the Library of Congress announced the 25 films they're preserving for 2010. In addition to catching up on some SNC art-related stuff over break, I wanted to link & embed a variety of interesting stuff to read & look at, for any of you out there jonesing for wider art-related material in between the family pleasantries and the wintersport exertions. The Library of Congress list provides a good excuse to embed some of the shorter films -- which can be found on youtube or elsewhere. There was a wide range of selections, ranging from pop-culture heavyweights to independent experimental films. Here's the list (If you want to read some descriptions of the films, click here. There are several personal favorites on it: "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," which is more tough-minded than its reputation might suggest, "The Front Page," "Airplane!", and I still have a soft spot for "The Empire Strikes Back," despite all the oxygen Star Wars sucks up in the culture. The one I most want to see, but haven't yet, is "make Way for Tomorrow," which sounds kind of devastating.)
1) AIRPLANE! (1980)
2) ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976)
3) BARGAIN, THE (1914)
4) CRY OF JAZZ (1959)
5) ELECTRONIC LABYRINTH: THX 1138 4EB (1967)
6) EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, THE (1980)
7) EXORCIST, THE (1973)
8) FRONT PAGE, THE (1931)
9) GREY GARDENS (1976)
10) I AM JOAQUIN (1969)
11) IT'S A GIFT (1934)
12) LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946)
13) LONESOME (1928)
14) MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937)
15) MALCOLM X (1992)
16) MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)
17) NEWARK ATHLETE (1891)
18) OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE (1969)
19) THE PINK PANTHER (1964)
20) PRESERVATION OF THE SIGN LANGUAGE (1913)
21) SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)
22) STUDY OF A RIVER (1996)
23) TARANTELLA (1940)
24) TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, A (1945)
25) TRIP DOWN MARKET STREET, A (1906)
Of the experimental shorts, I've never had the chance to see Mary Ellen Bute's "Tarantella" (if you drop her name in youtube, you can see several of her excellent animations). Larry Jordan's "Our Lady of the Sphere" can be seen in a muddy transfer here (come to think of it, it's probably another source for the Ramona Falls video I blogged about a while back).
Click here for a bio of the San Francisco-based Jordan; if you want to see "Our Lady" in a decent transfer, it's on a DVD called "The Larry Jordan Album" -- review here, and you can order it here.
Another selected short available on youtube is from the Prelinger Archive, a great resource that I leaned on heavily, for raw material for the documentary class last semester. "A Trip Down Market Street" is one of the purest expressions of film-as-a-time-machine I've seen: a camera, affixed to the front of a trolley, glides down Market street in san Francisco, recording all the horses, bicycles, pedestrians, cops, and so on, that pass before its fixed gaze -- shortly before the 1906 earthquake hit, and obliterated much of the scene. As someone who made the Market street traverse several times in my decade+ as a San Franciscan, it holds a special sort of temporal whiplash.
You can download a copy of the film from the archive here. A youtube user going by the name lunarparcel created a side-by-side juxtaposition of the film, and a film taken on Market street after the earthquake, here.
Lastly, the inclusion of "Airplane!" allows me to segue into something I saw at the local Savemart a couple days ago -- a Leslie Nielsen birthday card that probably should've been retired, still hanging about on the racks. I hope Nielsen would find it funny. Though now we're beyond knowing:
Marco Ciafarone, one of our students from L'Aquila last year, recently posted a note on the SNC/FA facebook page. An animated short he created in the advanced animation class here at SNC was accepted on an Italian art website. Click here to see the animation (I've posted a still below):
Here's Marco's message:
Hi to everybody from Italy! The video I realised for Advanced computer Animation at SNC has just been accepted by an Italian art website which gather young Italian video&sound artists, and I'm very happy of that. It's a good occasion to thank the SNC fine arts department for making my experience in the states so unique and productive - the faculty and the students, everybody! - thanks so much folks, i love you!
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I did some storyboarding work for an animated sequence in the upcoming film "Howl." The film opened the Sundance Film Festival, to wildly mixed reviews. Oscilloscope Pictures finally picked it up for distribution -- the release date is Sept. 24. The film has been outfitted with a terrific poster (anchored by the distinctive font City Light Books used when they first published "Howl"), and a trailer is online.
Here's the trailer:
The only bits of animation in the trailer are almost-subliminal glimpses, alas. I'm kind of dying to see how the final animation turned out.
I wrote a few paragraphs about the experience of working on "Howl," for an interview with SNC's Eagle Eye last semester. Here are my comments in full:
A friend of mine, Eric Drooker, was tapped to design the animation for the film, which looks at Allen Ginsberg's famous Beat poem "Howl," and the obscenity trial that followed its publication. Drooker and Ginsberg were friends, and Drooker had previously illustrated an edition of Ginsberg's poems. Drooker is a cartoonist who specializes in wordless or "silent" comics, where the story is told purely through images -- no captions or word balloons. That's related to how we met; many years ago I did a comic in that vein, and approached him to blurb the book. He called me up, agreed to do it, and we hit it off from there.
At any rate, the film-makers were looking to Eric to design the characters and storyboard the animation (the movie mixes live-action recreations of Ginsberg's milieu, with James Franco playing Ginsberg, and animation that seeks to give a visual interpretation to the poem). In a way, his work as a cartoonist already resembles storyboarding -- that's when an artist breaks down what the shots will be for a film, sketching out ideas for composition, camera movements, and so forth, so that when it's actually time to shoot the movie, there's a well-defined visual plan. On Eric's first pass, the storyboard flowed well on paper. But once it was timed out to a reading of "Howl," the timing seemed to move too slowly. Then, other animators were brought on to work out a more quickly paced storyboard, using Eric's draft as a starting point.
I was one of those animators -- I got the chance to take a whack at the third section of the poem. I worked up digital drawings that were emailed to the animation studio -- I even worked out a rough "animatic" (which is basically a storyboard that's timed out to the soundtrack, with some rudimentary animation from one shot to the next) in Flash. Because the poem free-associates from one strange image to the next, it was a very open-ended task. I took some images from Eric's draft, and pushed them in other directions, and sometimes I just came up with images of my own (stemming, of course, from the text of the poem). The storyboard went through at least one more draft, with another animator, after I was done with it. At a certain point it seemed like no one working on the storyboard really "owned" any of the images -- the images were just passed from one artist to the next, tweaked, digested, discarded, regurgitated. I haven't seen any of the finished animation, and I have no idea if any of the scenes in my draft made the final cut.
"Howl" is a poem I've admired for a long time. Its incantatory vividness made an impression on me -- I wrote at least a couple of bad poems in its shadow, back in the day. It was somewhat daunting trying to come up with a visual interpretation for such a famous, and such a self-sufficient, work. Ultimately, I felt it would be obvious that the animation was a riff on the poem, and not an attempt at a definitive encapsulation. The poem is singular and strange enough to resist any whiff of encapsulation. It was certainly the most enjoyable storyboarding gig I've ever done. I felt like I really got to inhabit that stanza of Ginsberg's poem -- it forced me to think it through, line by line. It was a chance to play in Allen Ginsberg's mental sandbox for about a week.
I know I won't be alone in missing terribly the Italian students from L'Aquila who have graced our campus over the last year. Speaking personally, they were all wonderful to have in my classes, full of enthusiasm, good cheer, and curiosity. One student, Elisa Mancini, made a short cartoon for her animation class -- it tells the story of her journey to Sierra Nevada College, after the April 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila destroyed the university there. I thought it would find an appreciative audience here on the blog (doubleclick to watch it on youtube at a larger size, or click on the fullscreen button on the player controls):
I caught Avatar over winter break, and liked it a lot more than I expected to. I went a bit grudgingly, out of a sense of quasi-duty, to see where state-of-the-art digital technology was pitched. There's no doubt that at the level of writing, the thing is toweringly dopey. It has the grandiose incoherence you can only get when you marry warmed-over Joseph Campbellisms to 21st-century mass media technology. When bronze-age myth meets the pixilated age of representation, bombast is the only way to efficiently move your mind past noticing that nothing makes a lick of sense (the best, and funniest, takedown of the script's discontinuities is here).
And yet the thing won me over. It was like spending a couple hours in a $250 million lava lamp. Except for the night scenes, illuminated with neon bioluminescence, which were detours into a $250 million black light painting. Looking at the trailer, I thought the aesthetic was kitschy and downright ugly. Watching the movie itself, I was pushed through tacky into a kind of rapture. I was reminded of the pulp scifi artwork of Hannes Bok, which at first glance radiates unintended camp, but retains an integrity of weirdness that's admirable and ultimately (to me anyway) beautiful.
I mean it as a sincere compliment when I say I found Avatar's gyroscopic insects and dust motes as exciting as the predatory hexapods and crimson dragons (at one point, someone in my row at the theater playfully tried to bat away a cloud of gnats that was hovering a few inches from his 3-D goggles). The movie is a compelling act of creative hubris: there's something self-consciously godlike about creating such a convincing, entire world from scratch, down to every little art-designed alien fern.
It's at once impressive and off-putting. I had a conversation in my animation class last semester about what Avatar seemed to represent, once the trailer was rolled out on the internet. I told my students that my initial sense of distaste toward the trailer might mark me as a grumpy old guy; I was curious if they'd find my skepticism toward the film rooted in something genuine, of if I was just being mentally sclerotic.
Avatar brings some cultural tendencies to a climax: the realization of fantasy with a visual authority that places the fantasy on par with the real world. It's a cultural arc that was kicked off in earnest with Star Wars. Star Wars hit me at a very impressionable age. I was 8 years old when it came out, and it's fair to say I was obsessed with it. I played with Star Wars toys, read Star Wars comic books, had Star Wars bedsheets on my bed (for several years, that was the zone of my dreaming -- enwrapped in the cast of Star Wars, ranged statically like a blockbuster Mount Rushmore, Han Solo with a lazer bolt perpetually frozen in emergence from his gun, like a jagged icicle that would never melt).
Part of the reason it captured my imagination so strongly was that its visual authority was unique at the time. This was no saturday morning space show with rockets hanging from strings. It was just one movie, the sole place where the spaceships and aliens didn't seem resolutely fake. In contrast, all the other movies and TV shows that invoked that impossibility and fantasy were completely unconvincing.
By way of comparison, I showed the students in my class a clip from Isis, a live-action Filmation superhero show of the same era. It was a favorite show of my wife's when she was young. A couple years ago, out of curiosity, we dug up some Isis clips on youtube, and were amazed at how shoddy, and especially how aggressively boring, it was. In one scene, Isis is chasing some joyriding teenagers, and the overdubbed squealing of tires is the only thing that indicates the chase is occurring at something faster than second gear.
(Coincidentally, according to Wikipedia, the actress who played Isis, Joanna Cameron, is a distant relative of James Cameron)
I'm not advocating for any of these 70s kid-focused shows with any misplaced nostalgia. They were crummy. Criminally insulting, even. The writers were working from the assumption that children were dolts, imbeciles. Isis was packaged as a companion show to Shazam (the two heroes sometimes joined forces in cross-over episodes); Shazam was so stupid, it remains in my memory chiefly because it was the first thing I saw that actually destroyed my ordinary childish suspension of disbelief.
In one episode, Shazam had to break into a cave whose entrance was being blocked by giant boulders (maybe he had some friends who were trapped in the cave -- I don't remember). For some reason, he couldn't just punch or kick the boulders out of the way. Instead, he rubbed the sand at his feet until it liquefied. The he polished the liquefied sand into a giant, smooth glass lens, hoisted it above his head, and used the lens to focus the sun's rays into a laser -- which, trained on the boulders, made them explode. I turned to my mother, who was also in the room, and said flatly to her: "He can't do that." I was willing to provisionally believe that people could fly, or be turned into mythological superheroes at the crash of a thunderbolt -- but this, this was taking things too far.
Which is all to say I have no real affection for the crap of yesteryear. Though I do have a certain gratitude for its flimsiness, and its somnambulant pace. It cleared space for my child's imagination to inhabit other, better imaginings in the interstices of its slowed-down time. Of course, reading books, you have free play to imagine as you will. But on TV, the slowness and incompetence encouraged you to re-imagine what you were actually seeing even as you were seeing it. Even the pace of the editing was slower, allowing you to stay a step or two ahead of what was going on; in contrast, the rapid-fire editing of today seems designed to keep you from digesting images -- your only choice is to react to them.
The result of all this was an unintended but profound dynamic: as an 8-year old, my imagination could do better. It could do better than 99% of movies and all of TV. Which made the imagination seem like powerful force. More powerful than a multimillion dollar industry devoted to dazzling the eye and captivating the brain.
I distinctly remember a dream I had, either in late elementary school or early Junior High, in which I saw a dragon in flight. There was nothing particularly dramatic about the dream -- I wasn't being chased by the dragon, or riding the dragon -- in fact, the dragon was at a considerable distance, high up in the sky, glimpsed through an open latticework of tree branches (I was walking down some woodland path). It had the sinuous, unhurried grace of a relaxed swimmer, luxuriating in her element.
When I woke, I stayed in bed with my eyes closed, savoring the dream, letting its details imprint themselves on my now-conscious mind, so I wouldn't lose the vision to the mundane obliterating machinations of the morning. The vision was precious because it seemed so real. At the time, there were no movies where a dragon could be seen gliding through the sky, with the casual vividness of an actual living thing. At best, a living dragon could be suggested with the eerie clarity of stop-motion models, or through two-dimensional animated drawings. My mind was the only place where such a thing could be found.
I was reminded of that dream while watching Avatar, during a scene where about twenty dragons simultaneously occupied the frame, strewn from foreground to background, each one expertly articulated by talented animators. I had to laugh. What hope would I have as an eight year old, next to that? What impulse to savor a dream-scrap, if I could just get my hands on a DVD and scan to a scene a dozen times more elaborate?
Over the course of my adolescence and adulthood, there has been a dramatic shift in the alignment between the childhood imagination and mass visual culture. Avatar currently exists in an elite class of representation, but it sits at the apex of widely disseminated technologies of depiction and animation. A chief cultural difference between my childhood self and the children of today is that access to realistic fantasy (if not "photorealistic fantasy," then at least "persuasive fantasy") is now a pervasive condition, not an exceptional one.
As soon as they're old enough to be propped in front of a screen, kids now see vast quantities of programming designed by teams of professionals, art-directed from top pixel to bottom -- there's scant room for their own imaginations to make improvements. It amounts to a professionalization of the fantastic.
And, perhaps, it casts "imagining" as a fundamentally passive act. Which seems tied to the sense of helplessness and depression some people felt after watching Avatar (at least according to an immediately notorious CNN article that starts out: "James Cameron's completely immersive spectacle 'Avatar' may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora"). The imaginative world exists outside them -- it's not something they can conjure themselves.
(It should be noted that a group of Palestinian protesters took the opposite tack, dressing up as Na'vi before being pelted with tear gas containers. Of course, there's no way for them to conjure the paradisiacal world of Pandora, they can only conjure its inhabitants, who perforce look out of place amidst the scrub grass and barbed wire: they can only take up the mantle of the Na'vi as exiles.)
So I have to wonder if this is the end result of our technologies of fantasy: to generate spectacle that overpowers the spectator, turning the spectator into a sort of recieving robot for all the images that precede him. The imagination of the spectator (especially the child spectator) is at the mercy of what has come before. Of course, when images spring from the "interior," or the subconscious, you could argue that those images are no less unwilled. But it still seems like a radical restructuring of the imaginative enterprise: an exteriorization of the dream life. Dream becomes a collective and purchased experience, as opposed to an interior, subjective, and individual one.
The wellspring of images is localized as something socially ratified and funded, versus something more distributed and mysterious. It's roughly the distinction between an opiate and a dream (and for the record, when I suggested these sorts of distinctions to my students, they didn't think I was just wallowing in old-fogeyisms).
All the same, I don't want to get apocalyptic about it, and start keening over the imminent demise of the imagination. It might rather be a realignment of the primary imaginative task: not to individually bring worlds into being, but to take the pieces of a world engineered by other people and to wander through it at our own pace. Not to construct, but to explore.
It's an approach that's deeply embedded in the postmodern condition, but the roots go deeper than that. In a way, that's what happens when we wander a city, isn't it? Who has time to build a world from scratch? Virtuality will produce its own flaneurs.
For now, it's James Cameron's world, and we're living in it. I'm curious to see what sorts of habitations will be built there by future interlopers, squatters, vandals and utopians.
This Friday, "Cartune Xprez" is coming to Reno -- hosted by GASA and the Holland Project. The CX folks have put out two DVDs featuring a diverse set of contemporary animation -- the fact that they're coming to town with a screening and live show has really made my day.
You can go to the facebook event page to learn more -- or see the info below.
Cartune Xprez brings a bundle of carefully selected short films and animated snippets by independent and emerging artists, ranging from hot up-and-comers to established filmmakers who have shown their work at the NYMOMA and Sundance Film Festival.
Portland, OR band Hooliganship will be in tow to provide a live (and lively) performance of their newest cartoon theater, a mash-up of video projections and audio arpeggios fit for art fans and dancing feet.
The program begins at 8 p.m. Entry is $5 for general public, and $3 for students with valid I.D.
Gyembo Gyeltshen, a student who took one of my animation classes, came by my office to show me some pictures he took over winter break. He was in Tokyo for a couple weeks, and visited the Ghibli museum -- Ghibli being the animation studio run by two of the greatest living animation directors, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. I talk about Miyazaki and show some of his work in most of my animation classes -- last semester, the advanced animation class went on a field trip to see "Ponyo" on the big screen. Gyembo wasn't allowed to take pictures inside the museum, but here are some of the shots he took outside, including a couple shots of a life-size replica of a robot from "Laputa: Castle in the Sky." I'm happy he gave me permission to share these on the blog.
I'll actually be giving a presentation on anime on March 23rd at SNC -- I'll put more info on the blog as the date approaches. In the meantime, here's a link to an article I wrote for Animation World Network when "Spirited Away" came out -- it remains my favorite of Miyazaki's films.
I got a pleasant surprise about a month ago, clicking on an article at the NY Times, about the upcoming slate of movies at the 2010 Sundance Festival. The picture heading up the article featured James Franco staring down a typewriter page: he's playing Allen Ginsberg in "Howl," which will be making its debut at Sundance tonight. It's been getting some good anticipatory buzz, snagging the premiere Sundance slot. The movie focuses on the poem and obscenity trial that took place in the wake of its publication -- and the poem itself has been animated. I did some storyboarding for one of the animation sequences, riffing off an initial storyboard created by the main designer of the animation, Eric Drooker.
(photo from the NY Times)
It certainly wasn't your typical storyboarding job, trying to work out Ginsberg's charged, pseudo-free-associated patter into sequences of images. I worked on the third section of the poem, which is addressed directly to Carl Solomon, a fellow inmate with Ginsberg at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute (Ginsberg spent several months at the mental hospital). Here is an excerpt of that section:
I'm with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter I'm with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio I'm with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses I'm with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
Obviously, the images are already there -- the challenge was to make visuals that wouldn't seem redundant -- that would spill out into their own poetic associations -- and still be able to link together, the stanzas vertebrae in an overarching spine that would weave through the entire poem. Eric had already laid out an over-riding image for the section, a surreal boat journey taken by Ginsberg and Solomon, linking them like the images of Dante and Virgil that have descended, through the works of Blake and Doré, from the Divine Comedy.
The storyboard went through other passes after I was done with it, getting worked over by John Hays, the animation director (who I've known from my days at the WIldBrain Animation Studio). I haven't seen any of the finished animation, and have no idea how many, if any, of my shots made it through to the final edit. But I have my fingers crossed for a positive reaction from the premiere. I'll probably have more to write about this project down the line, but wanted to at least send out those crossed fingers on the big day.
Brittany passed along a link to a pretty amazing animated music video, posted below (though it's worth it to click through to youtube, and watch the thing in HD).
It's for the Ramona Falls tune "I Say Fever," and it was directed by Stefan Nadelman, through his company Tourist Pictures (his site is full of stuff worth looking at). It plays like an expansion of some sequences from Max Ernst's collage-novel Une Semaine de Bonté, with its splicing of an unruly bestiary into corsetted Victoriana, and its sinister birds. The video starts out well enough, but when the chorus kicks in, it really jumps to a higher level. The stroboscopic outbreak of color, and the way the stride of the characters syncs up to the suddenly-implacable beat, makes for some genuinely thrilling moments.
A nice selection of images from Une Semaine de Bonté can be found at helloooooo.com. Several pages from the Dover Edition of the book can also be found at Google Books. Of Ernst's collage-novels, I've always preferred La Femme 100 Têtes; Bonté has a thread of misogyny to it that I found of-putting last time I read it. There's some terror of womanly wiles in the "I Say Fever" video, but I end up being intrigued by the perfumed lady, with her expression of combined malice and rapture.
Here's an interesting article in the NY Times about the feeling of "nonsense," and how absurdity can focus our perceptions: "How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect." To me it relates to the sorts of creative thinking and creative problem-solving that art-making encourages. It's telling that the title of the article frames things in terms of "nonsense," a trivializing word that'll have to do until "countersense" or "othersense" enter the lexicon.
"Nonsense," in the article, is shorthand for an experience that violates "all logic and expectation." According to a recent paper by Travis Proulx and Steven J. Heine, when people are confronted by such an experience, they may subsequently have a heightened sense of pattern recognition. The theory is that, when there is a rupture in our sense of ordinary meaning, the brain works overtime to establish meaning in some other area. From the article:
When those [normal] patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.
Proulx and Heine's paper has the great title Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar. "Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar" is wonderful enough, but "Meaning Threat" is a phrase that should really migrate from psychological jargon to general use. It indicates something that violates the "meaning frameworks" that ordinarily keep us coherent from day to day. Some mornings, I could be convinced that Life Itself constitutes a "meaning threat" of staggering proportions.
As might be guessed from the paper's title, for an injection of the absurd, the researchers resorted to Kafka. "Nonsense" is difficult to synthesize in a laboratory setting, but it can be well-preserved in a work of art. Twenty students were asked to read a tale adapted from Kafka's short story "A Country Doctor" (which can be read in its unadulterated form here). The story is one of Kafka's greatest achievements; in it, a doctor goes out one night on a hopeless errand, intending to alleviate the suffering of a very ill man laid up in a house ten miles distant, but instead, after being bombarded by various hallucinatory incidents and images, ends up naked in the bed with the patient, who only wishes for more room on his deathbed, expressing the desire to scratch the doctor's eyes out.
This story was intended, by the researchers, to constitute a "meaning threat" in its intense absurdity. And they discovered that, after the students had been exposed to the story, they had a greater facility for uncovering patterns in cryptic letter sequences they were given to decode; that's where the "Artificial Grammar" comes in. (Curiously, in their adaptation of the story, downloadable here, the Country Doctor becomes a Country Dentist, and the protagonist's errand becomes one of pulling teeth rather than of diagnosing an axe-wound; as the researchers explain, "All references to death and dying were removed to distinguish affirmation following from the absurd nature of the story and affirmation following from mortality-salience meaning threats.")
The efficacy of this dose of the absurd is predicated on the notion that absurd feelings are unpleasant ones. Proulx is quoted as saying: “We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere.” Which wasn't my feeling on my first encounters with Kafka. Kafka made me uneasy, but the feeling of unease wasn't offputting -- in fact it was sharply pleasing. It broke my head open, in a gratifying way. I remember being amazed at the sorts of incidents and impressions Kafka was able to lay claim to, as the provenance of his fiction. There was a bracing audacity to his work. "Wait, can it be that these sorts of things really amount to a story? Can you really get away with this?' And of course he could -- but not without inventing new territories for fiction itself.
The NY Times article, in an attempt at humor that nonetheless aggravated me, winds down like this:
Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
That last sentence -- "the urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of evidence" -- is a neat summation of much of human history, politics and religion. But the rest of it brings up the ugly bugbear of utility that always dogs evaluations of art activity. Art activity is only judged useful if it creates some positive spillover into other, less "nonsensical," areas of activity. If screening David Lynch or performing John Cage would improve the memorization of French, then they'd be admissible to the curriculum. No one would ever flip that equation -- suggesting that we should have students memorize French because the memorization of French has the demonstrable effect of making students enjoy David Lynch and John Cage.
This sort of reductive utilitarianism is what lead Elliot Eisner, an Arts Education scholar, to warn against enthusiasm for studies that linked exposure to classical music with better performance in Math testing. Eisner argued for Art Education's inherent value. If a Music program's existence is tied parasitically to its functionality for Math, that's pretty shaky ground to stand on. If researchers eventually figure out that jumping rope increases Math scores even more, your music program will be out the window: make way for the ascendency of the rope-jumpers.
If we can argue for the inherent value of Music, can we argue for the inherent value of "nonsense?" Is "nonsense," properly understood, closer to the texture of the actual world: the world that lies beyond the screen of our habitual, stereotyped and narrow view of it? One could look at art practice, in the industrialized world in the 21st century, as a sort of machinery for producing nonsense. Restrictively defined within the framework of social utility (and using the sorts of medical metaphors 'A Country Doctor' might suggest), you could make the argument that it's a practice that produces a "nonsense vaccine," giving the social body enough hits of weakened absurdity that society is able to create its own antibodies of pattern recognition.
But contrary to that implied dichotomy between healthy and sickness, within the act of art-making itself, one gets comfortable with absurdity, with ambiguity. You don't want to banish the nonsense, you want to dwell in it: to let multiple patterns unfurl from its invitation. If you're comfortable and at ease with the absurd, are you as motivated to seek the solace of pattern? Art seeks pattern not just a solace, but as an ethic.
I'll close out with a couple things: first, a thanks to Gonzalo Barr, for posting a wonderful nugget from The Times Literary Supplement to his blog; it seems that, a year after Kafka's story The Metamorphosis was published, a Doctor Wolff wrote Kafka, pleading that he explain the story (which famously opens with a man waking up in his bed, and finding himself transformed into a giant insect):
Sir, — You have made me unhappy. I purchased your Metamorphosis and gifted it to my cousin, but she could not make sense of the story. My cousin gave it to her mother: she could not explain it. Her mother gave it to another cousin, but she could not explain it either. And now they have written to me, the supposed doctor in the family. But I am at a loss. Sir! I spent months fighting the Russians in the trenches without batting an eyelash. I won’t stand idle while my reputation among my cousins goes to the devil. Only you can come to my aid. You must, since you cooked up this stew in the first place. So tell me please what my cousin ought to think of the Metamorphosis.
I'm sure he never got a sufficient answer, but it's interesting to think that while this doctor was puzzling over the symbols and signs in the Metamorphosis, perhaps he was also doing a better job at diagnosing his patients.
And here's the first part of an animation based on "A Country Doctor," directed by Koji Yamamura. I think it's a worthy interpretation. Click on through to youtube to see the other two parts.
At the prodding of Ralph Carney, I've posted up an old animation of mine that he scored. I miss collaborating with the guy -- it was always great fun to give him impossible musical suggestions ("This section should be like a Hari Krishna chant, but as a blues number"), which he would subsequently pull off to a T. The cartoon, "Scarf Mania," is what got us both out for an ill-starred visit to the Sundance Festival -- it was selected for their Online film category. Ralph ended up scoring 24 cartoon shorts featuring the "star" of "Scarf Mania," Romanov, under the auspices of the WildBrain animation studio. Hopefully someday in the not-too-distant future Ralph & I will have an excuse to collaborate once again...
Here's a link to a great new interactive game/environment called WINDOSiLL. It was created by Patrick Smith, who has been making interactive animated environments in Flash for some time now; I included his "Vector Park" work in a show of animation I curated for the Ottawa International Animation Festival back in 2003.
The game presents a very meditative experience. There is a goal, where you progress from one screen to another, but there's no urgency to get on to the next thing; part of the pleasure of the game is to dawdle, and explore the strange doodads and creatures that inhabit each environment. Part of what's effective about WINDOSiLL is the way it introduces its own logic to the player. What's even better is the overarching sense of mystery that permeates everything-- there are suggestions of deep and probably fundamentally inexplicable cosmologies lurking behind the images and facades. Over the course of the game, Smith lightly tips his hat to Bosch, Magritte, Brueghel, Rube Goldberg, and Dr. Seuss.
You can play the first half of the game for free; I plunked down the three bucks to play the remainder of the game, and it was money well-spent.
Patrick Smith's sketchbook blog is located here, and you can see WINDOSiLL sketches and tests here.
Melissa Swanson's BFA show, "Atychiphobia," opened today. The show featured prints, animation, and installation pieces composed of dried rose petals.
The prints hanging on the wall were "reduction prints" -- which also go by the name "suicide prints," if the printmaker is in a black humor mood. The printing block is gouged for the first color, then gouged away further for the second color, and so on, until eventually getting whittled down for the final pass. It's a bit of a tightrope process, since there's no going back. The block has to get killed for you to reach the end of the print.
For Melissa, the technique is tied to the show's title, which means "fear of failure." As Melissa put it, "Atychiphobia" isn't your everyday run-of-the-mill fear of failure -- the kind of fear everyone has, "the same way everyone has a fear of falling out of an airplane" -- but rather, it's a paralyzing fear. A fear so pronounced, it negates the ability to even try. Because if you try, there's that chance you'll fail, and then it will be confirmed: you really weren't good enough. It's better to not even put that on the table.
The floor of the gallery was strewn with rose petals that had images or words printed on them. They crunched nicely underfoot.
Three sheets of rose petals had been sewn together and printed on; at the opposite end of the gallery there was an animation, composed of several printed rose petals that had been scanned before they were discarded for the floor. The same image was printed on several petals, and the animation ran through the printed petals frame by frame: the repeated image remained fairly stable, while the rose petal forms themselves flickered out around them, their veined textures leaving faint impressions on the eyeball as they ran headlong through the projector. The printed imagery revolved around forms of birds and cages. Their silhouettes pulsed with a kind of brittle insistence.
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