Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies
26 October, 2008
There are things living in the walls, behind and under the world. They keep us moving, they keep us watching, they are waiting.
The Meaning of Life
26 October, 2008
Breathe. You are forgetting to breathe.
A Course L’Abime
26 October, 2008
Stop thinking you know what you are doing.
everything will be ok
11 October, 2008
You don’t understand, do you? Everything could go to hell and it still would be ok. Horrible is ok. Everything is ok.
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies
4 October, 2008
Untie the strings. Pull the ends and unravel the world.
The Animation Show (Vol. One)
13 September, 2008
This is my favorite of the animation shows thus far, partly because of the intro, intermission, and closing animated by none other than Don Hertzfeldt. The work in this collection is, it seems to me, far more sophisticated and far more interesting than most of what has come later. The presence of work by Georges Schwizgebel and Adam Elliot lends the thing an air of true artistry, which isn’t necessarily lacking in later shows as much as it is harder to find, unless there is a Hertzfeldt piece playing. I do love, very much, the simpler pieces in this volume as well- Fifty Percent Grey and Das Rad will always hold special places in my heart.
While there are misses in this portion of the festival, of course- Cathedral being one of them- the hits seem to be much more powerful than the misses ever will.
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies
10 August, 2008
I cannot stop humming the score to myself, and I cannot stop dreaming of things made of string. Like almost nothing else, the Brothers Quay can invade the mind and expose parts of the psyche that perhaps did not exist until they entered. The delicacy of this particular piece is astounding, the loops of narrative that play back and forth and parse the film of which they are part until aesthetic and story are one.
Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)
10 July, 2008
If ever there was proof that Lynch was not meant to be a sculptor, this is it. The piece is clever, in that art student way. And of course, there is Philadelphia all over the place. Vomited across the screen.
Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)
Just as an aside, did you know David Lynch sells coffee? Apparently it’s delicious. Tastes like existential terror.
Lewis Klahr
30 June, 2008
Lewis showed three pieces which I do not feel like separating into different entries- The Pharoah’s Belt, Valise, and episode two of The Diptherians. The first two pieces, like much of Lewis’s work, are completely entrenched in his own world of near semaphoric communication- indecipherable except superficially to nearly everyone, and at the same time mesmerizing and beautiful and possessed of a subconscious clarity completely unique to Klahr.
The Diptherians features Willem Dafoe. I don’t really have anything else to say about it.
The Alphabet
18 June, 2008
David Lynch has always been… present… in my film consciousness, a sort of hovering phantasm whenever I consider creating anything. Not necessarily his later works, but his early shorts and Eraserhead. The Alphabet is, I think, my favorite of the early pieces. The animation is elegant in its simplicity and the ever-present Lynchian themes are more delicately wrought here than elsewhere. He is a simple man, really, neurotic to the bone about the things that every thinking man is. Children, women, dissemination of seed and of knowledge, power and the loss thereof, waking and sleeping, dying, aging.
