IT IN place

Polyethylene Bag

alex — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:03:32 +0000

Notes on Friday night, remembered on Saturday and Sunday.

Dog Boy

alex — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:36:28 +0000

Once Upon A Time

alex — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:47:52 +0000

Dylan Played Prospect Park in Brooklyn. He sounded pretty good and I enjoyed how he works the key boards these days.

Spent a lot of yesterday watching Renaldo and Clara on You Tube. In the way it uses music and reality and fiction and improv and documentary it feels like online video long before there was such a thing. I’m so glad to have found it after all these years of wondering. I even like how it’s divided up into 53 sections by someone called Kafka 05. Poetry is a virus.

The Ugly Little Pugilist

alex — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:01:30 +0000

put em up.

8888 Drum

alex — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 04:38:14 +0000

limited means to capture maximum drums. I will say this: it flet like the aliens should land in China and Brooklyn and all and just say: “HELLO.” Wild stuff.

A Foot of Heads

alex — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:56:33 +0000

Up to about 350 pages of heads for the talking head animation. Stack is about a foot tall. Having myriad conversations with myself ina search to see what the head will be saying (and even talking to a few others to possible do some alternate voicings.

Fetal Position

alex — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:27:24 +0000

We are all hanging out by the evening blue pool under the flower blooming trees when the planes appear over head. At first I can’t tell the explosions from the blooming trees. It’s all so colorful and the slow silver shine of the planes caught in the search lights.

Colossusteps

alex — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:28:03 +0000

Sonny Rollins played Central Park last night. He’s walking a little stooped over, but he still can blow that horn. If New York were Jericho, the walls would all be down. I’d been scanning and drawing all day and my head wasn’t really open to the sounds. I slowly warmed up and the old foot starts tapping and then the band drove the sound on one number (Sonny Please, from his recent album of the same name) so hard that the whole audience began to go slightly insane. It ended in a spontaneous standing ovation. I can’t remember the last time I heard a group of players really get into the cracks of my body and soul and those of my neighbors’ and sort of lift the entire audience to some new dimension that is not quite earth and not quite space… better than any drug, or drink… and certainly more plural than sex. Makes me believe in Jazz again. Viva Colossus!

Coming Storm

alex — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:35:09 +0000

Another time lapse while grilling on the roof. Interesting to see how the shower at the end moves from the harbor into Brooklyn.

Plum

alex — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:32:08 +0000

Tasted a plum at the farmer’s market. This is one of cigar box paintings I’ve been reworking since last summer. It is shown about real size here.

Heat Street

alex — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:55:26 +0000

Drawing some crowds between faces. I’m in a strange state of production where I’m digging into all sorts of BBC documentaries on Youtube about great filmmakers and when I play back my taking head animation it has this strange ability to sych up with say Polanski, or Woody Allen… meanwhile running errands, I nearly melted on the sidewalk.

Hands

alex — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:32:05 +0000

Drawing heads and more heads and then more heads I took a break yesterday for some studies of hands. I was also spending some time listening to Hiram Bullock who died the other day and this memorial surf lead me to spend some time with Jaco Pastorius and his adventures in sound and insanity. So I was sort of sad, but also in the thrall of some amazing sounds and sweating and scanning till the we hours.

Gog

alex — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:50:06 +0000

Mostly I’m still drawing heads for that eventual animation. but here’s a strange creature I made over the weekend.

Glitchportrait

alex — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:28:11 +0000

Drawing after broken machines on broken machines. Covered things with plastic wrap and decided to color outside the lines and all the way off the paper. Been thinking about the phenomena of talking head videos online. I set out to make one as a reference for drawing faces for the talking head animation, but got carried away with this project instead.

blueingreeninred

alex — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:56:32 +0000

Another experiment with the glitched camera. This time I placed a layer of plastic wrap over my screen and shot old videos from Vimeo in full screen mode while drawing over them with sharpie markers on the protected screen. I then downloaded the archived films and re edited them. This is a fairly direct response to paintings I went into yesterday. The music here is a remix of Miles Davis and Bill Evans’ Blue In Green.

Hello

alex — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:39:14 +0000

Whenever I’m in something of a creative rut, I like to draw faces. I had the idea to do a few hundred faces and try to invent a kind of type face of mouth and eye expressions so that I could deploy them as letters and form long run on visuals. I want to make some spoken pieces and just use the face like a mask. It’s still going to be a lot of work as just to say hello took me two days. Still as I figure it out it could be interesting and I could do smaller little animation moments to customize each piece….anyway: Hello.

Paint Over The Past

alex — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:35:27 +0000

Reworking some of the cigar boxes I’ve been playing with since last summer.

Cracking Vanya

alex — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:49:19 +0000

Sun and Eggs and watching a workshop of Uncle Vanya got me thinking about the geometry of time. Seven eggs in a bowl form a hexagon.

Room

alex — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:00:48 +0000

I keep having this dream where I am supposed to speak polish and they are installing a huge print from one of the glitched frames from the last few experimental films. Why Polish?

Redeye

alex — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 21:50:56 +0000

still thinking about yesterday’s video.

Drawings For Broken Machines

alex — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:45:13 +0000

Experimenting with my glitched camcorder; I made drawings in black ink and red paint. I was looking at the camera and simply making abstract marks which were abstracted further by whatever music of failure has entered my machine. I tried to sing along with it in garage band (using cardboard tubes pointed at the tiny mic on my computer).

Cough Cough In

alex — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:29:07 +0000

I awoke in the middle of night. The dog was coughing; that phlegmatic cancer cough of hers and it made me open my eyes and I coughed too in the blur of a heavy breeze moving the trees blue the light through the window in such a wind shadow way that I saw it as a ghostly figure floating over the bed and I became terrified that it was death coming after us - that the we, or she were coughing towards the coffin. It took a while to fix my eyes.

Fever

alex — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:11:09 +0000

The Royal Wylds played a garden gig in Red Hook over the weekend. I couldn’t resist the strung lights distortions and made a little photomotion video. What else can I do with low light and no working video camera? Still it sort of captures something about the rawness of the group that I like.

Tired

alex — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:05:28 +0000

Feisty

alex — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:04:11 +0000

Went to the Feist show last night at Prospect Park. Lot’s of Estrogen. Lot’s of rain. Some interesting simple visual projections got me thinking about the abstract shape of the stage and the crowd and the sliver of vision I could capture with my little still camera. For what it’s worth.

Make Up Your Mind

alex — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:06:14 +0000

Willoughby sits on the bed and notices the askew sheets. He tries to make the bed while still sitting in it. This doesn’t work, so he lays back down.

Sublerno

alex — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:18:09 +0000

Tales of the cock at the empty store. This was from the dawn of the holiday… went out with ladies to one of these places that has “Mixologists” instead of bartenders… Lot’s of odd cocktails that conspired to give me the worst hangover I’ve had in years. I didn’t even think I was drunk, but it sure killed the next day. I was taking note of things I over heard. Everyone on the street sounded straight out of Willoughby.

The Cost of a Bummed Cigarette

alex — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:57:46 +0000

Is in this case, listening to Clark go on and on about Willoughby behind his window.

Patriot

alex — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 03:52:21 +0000

not working much on the holiday, bu thinking about working and fireworks and food and such.

Magic Drawing

alex — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:04:58 +0000

Will He Be?

alex — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:05:02 +0000

This is to test some ideas about motion in a project I’ve had on the back burner for a while. I-movie let’s you do some corny motion graphics for inserts, so I thought I’d toy with them a bit… I don’t know how to do real motion graphics, but I wanted to see what that and layers and scrolling and such might turn into on the screen. The story is a bit more involved and involves three characters: Willoughby, Clark, and the narrator. Feed back, collaboration, etc. welcome.

Willoughby at The Window

alex — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:49:07 +0000

Willoughby wakes up and watches the world out the window.
Willoughby wakes up and holds his head in his hands. He says, “I don’t want to die.”

Willoughby Wakes Up

alex — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:58:53 +0000

In terror and let’s out a single tear and says softly:

Sleeping In

alex — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:21:15 +0000

We are all on the beach at night when they start setting off the ordinance. Who knows where they got a hold of it, but they are far enough off shore that it is hard to see the great plumes of water rising into the air - fifty? a hundred feet? It reads as smoke or clouds, but then there is the roar as the towers of water collapse and seem to walk towards us on the beach like gray giants, lumbering out of the ocean and the dark. It’s marvelous and haunting until they start shooting the ordinance closer and closer into the waves and the towers of water react randomly; seeming to skit around our heads like giant snakes, bursting forth at impossible angles and pouring down and we panic. I dive into the sea and swim over to the harbor police and tell them they have a problem: very well armed lunatics, having way too much fun for a beach party.

Water Falls

alex — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:20:47 +0000

Saturday I went to Governor’s Island for something called the Emerge Festival… and to see the Waterfalls. Sunday there was a ferocious thunder shower that ended in a sun shower.

Vimeonster’s Ball

alex — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:53:04 +0000

Vimeo had a big meet up party on Friday. It was quite surreal to see so many virtual people in one real room. Much fun and blurry memories.

Nothing Left To Say

alex — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:57:00 +0000

I imagine myself at a dinner with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and I keep on talking and talking and I never let the ladies get a word in edge wise.

Stupidfuckingbrokencamera

alex — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:10:36 +0000

Upset, sleepless thinking about my new camera that is now completely fucked up. I don’t know what happened. One minute I’m happily uploading Coney Island footage and the next minute the camera went on the fritz; didn’t drop it, didn’t get it wet. It’s only a year old and I’ve treated it like a baby. Can’t really afford a new one and getting it repaired seems pricey too. Anyway there’s a strange beauty in it’s broken image and I’ll have to revert to photomotion and animation I suppose. As it is, I’m drawing in my new big pad and as I put this blog together I am shocked at how much the thumbnail for the video looks like one of my dad’s paintings. Ghosts in the machine, perhaps?

Turn The Page

alex — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:35:50 +0000

Bought a new pad of paper yesterday. Wide and large and impossible to scan, so I’m playing with what I can do with it by shooting with the camera and taking out the noise in photoshop. Still looking for the big idea.

Sea Made Tail

alex — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:03:53 +0000

Mermaid Parade

alex — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:09:18 +0000

I’m off to this today… video to come?

Miles From Here

alex — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:02:53 +0000

Thinking Up A Master Plan

alex — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:11:41 +0000

The Narrator is walking along looking at things and people and trying to figure out what to make of it all and how to make something out of whatever he makes of it all and all.

Question

alex — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:56:55 +0000

Toying with new projects and run out of fresh paper. What’s next?

Over Heard

alex — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:56:20 +0000

I’m walking along Seventh Avenue and I hear a man say into his cell phone, “Where are you?” and I walk a few more steps and hear another man say, “I’m right here.” I suppose they were to meet right there beside the pizza parlor, but it also seems possible that the logical flow of words might be a total coincidence; two snippets from two entirely unrelated cell phone conversations. I thought how beautiful it would be if this illusion of a conversation continued up the street from the mouths of a series of unrelated strangers. That would’ve been a great Bloomsday miracle.

Under The Back Seat

alex — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:26:17 +0000

I am driving around with my hand searching in the back seat of the car. I slide my hand below the seat and feel something smooth and warm and I am wondering if it is flesh, or leatherette. I feel around the area untill my finger touches lips and the mouth opens and tries to bite off my finger.

Thrown from the Dream Throne

alex — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:40:49 +0000

I had more elaborate dreams last night, but in the morning they escape me. Here’s the end of yesterday’s.

A Night Out With The Whores

alex — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:01:37 +0000

The pretty young one has the idea first, but the ugly and the old and the plain all go along with it. “Let’s have a dinner party,” she says. “Just a few friends at a restaurant some place downtown; away from the little bar and all the beds.” She’s so cute as she says it and so full of naive vitality that it convinces the whole bitter group and they set about making lists and reservations and raiding closets to find the right outfit; something classy, something that doesn’t scream “Whore!”

I get talked into going. I don’t know why. I never could afford the brothel, but I know the pretty young one from when she was an “art student” and I had wanted her then and I suppose I still want her now, or I’m at least fascinated that she has capitalized on what I felt was MY desire. I had wanted her. Now everyone wants her. She’s the star of the whole whore house and it makes me feel strange. Do I have common taste, or was I simply ahead of my time? It’s like a song you love until it becomes a hit and then everyone likes it and you pretend you never liked that song but still you tap your toes when you hear it.

She had on a purple short shorts number when I saw her and she made the night sound like an erotic dream. I told the wife I had some dumb thing to do at the gallery and she barely listened because she had some dumb thing to do with her idiot friends and I wasn’t even invited and it pissed me off to the point where I nearly announced: “I’m off to dinner with the whores. Don’t wait up!”

I smiled to myself and beat it down to the back room of the restaurant where some of the girls were setting up decorations; streamers like it was a child’s birthday and I take a seat next to the large brunette with the curly hair and she jabbers away asking me all sorts of questions about what I do and how are the paintings coming along and frankly I feel at a loss. It puts all the onus on me and I can’t turn the conversation around because I know what she does and I can’t very well ask her how’s the fellatio going and how are the johns coming…..along. At least I can’t sober. I order a whiskey and slip out of excitement into irritation.

Not only my mind, but my bowels. I Never should’ve had Indian food for lunch. Gurggle gurggle. Then the “boyfriends” arrive. They wear little leather jackets like toughs do in the movies and they sport elaborate, ugly tattoos and speak in dees dem and doze. I can’t imagine what the hell any of us will have to talk about all night. Why had I agreed to come? SHE isn’t even here yet. I drink down the whiskey and resolve to get drunk when my stomach constricts and I quickly run off to the toilet.

A whole gaggle of men and women fall out of restroom door, laughing. “Now this is interesting,” I think. “Some sort of cocaine orgy right here in the bathroom.” Pity I missed all the fun. Pity I’m about to shit myself and I rush through the door only to find that It’s one of those gender neutral restrooms they have now, with one common sink area and separate stalls for both men and women. No orgy, no cocaine, just too cheap to put in separate bathrooms. They’ve spent the money instead on an elaborate decor where you have to climb a sort of pyramid of box shapes to get to the toilet. It’s way up there near the ceiling. It looks wonderful, but not when you actually need to crap. It’s a god damned obstacle. I get to the top and drop trow and let out a symphony of shit just as I hear HER laugh down by the sinks. Suddenly I realize that this will not be a night of erotic heights, but rather an evening of humiliation and embarrassment… but still I love her laughter. It makes me nostalgic for the days when I thought that I alone wanted her that she was my own mystery; back when I thought I loved her, back before I was a hack and she was a whore. Then the whole room starts moving, like a train leaving the station and I’m clinging to the toilet; terrified that I’ll be the thrown from the throne and topple down the pyramid of useless decor, shitting myself at her boot clad feet. Then I wake up.

Pictures From A Lost Day

alex — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:36:29 +0000

This was yesterday. All day on the phone to Roadrunner rebooting the computer and the modum ad naseum. Later I ate dinner alone on the couch watching the finale of Top Chef. Pointlessness so grand, I felt I had to paint it today.

The Sun Bathers

alex — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:58:43 +0000

Somewhere out there is lovely half naked humanity basking in the bright light of this summer day, but I wouldn’t know it. I’ve been on a phone all day trying to figure the recent internet troubles I’ve been having. It’s too god damn annoying to describe, but they came pretty close to having me take the computer to the shop, but when I talked to the the third person (after going through two charges of hand held phone batteries so I had to keep calling them back and go through the whole elaborate script again and again) he realized it was probably a faulty modem. I’m posting this by the good graces of a neighbor’s open wifi.

Dumber Summer

alex — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:08:21 +0000

Sorry for certain stretches of silence lately. Nothing on the internet seems to be working properly for me. Maybe it’s the heat.

Some Summer

alex — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:08:51 +0000

And then the heat came and the dog freshly shaved and soft as a new lamb lies under the table in a shadow and the whole neighborhood pours out to the street with wine and beer and the kids all with squirt guns and its like an enormous block party.

Dogone

alex — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:16:08 +0000

Dog off getting shaved for the summer. After the events earlier this week. She is conspicuous in her absence.

Conversations With Myself

alex — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:20:24 +0000

Recently, I’ve had cause to want to point out the documentary bits out of my last couple of shows in Portland and New York. They were extruded onto the blog in bits and pieces several months back. I thought it might be nice to have them all together in one entry so that I could just forward that link to people. It becomes something like a four channel video piece if you can play them all at the same time, or a story if you play them in order. The box gif is new.

Sky Drums

alex — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:10:42 +0000

More a concept than a finished piece. Making drums from fireworks seems like it could be a great idea in the right hands. I’ve never seen it done, but send me a link if you have an example.

Pet

alex — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:28:05 +0000

The video comes out of a Vimeo video challenge where one person uploads some silent video and others interpret through editing and sound. I hope there’ll be a lot more of these kinds of online collaborative explorations in the future.

The Look

alex — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:03:25 +0000

It’s a morning like any other. I see her in the mirror fixing her hair and she says, “Do we take the dog to the vet?”
and I say, “If we do, they’ll kill her.”
“Not if we don’t let them.”

The dog woke up in the night and found that her hind legs no longer worked. I heard her nails scratching the floor and the weight of her body hitting the floor and then scratching and flop and scratching again and again. I turned on the light and she looked up at me like a lost child and I got out of bed and tried to help her stand. She fell into my arms and then started to spin around like a dying shark. She crashed back to the floor and emptied her bladder. Now she was lying in a pool of urine and panting and drooling in a panic. I spent a while just sitting on the floor petting her and calming her down and smelling the piss and she just kept looking at me. Staring at me. I found it somewhat odd. I spend a lot of time accompanying the dog on her explorations of neighborhood urine smells, but I’m essentially unfamiliar with the smell of hers. Now I think I’d recognize it anywhere. Once she was calm, we cleaned up the puddle and when I came back from the trash can she immediately threw up on the floor. More cleaning and more petting and the other half says to me, “This could be it.” Because the dog is fourteen and has some strange cancer of the lymph nodes and she’s already lived a year longer than we ever expected and we’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I shoot back, “No Kidding!”. I spend some time on the floor with the dog to make sure she doesn’t panic again and somewhere around dusk I go back to sleep

When the necklace is on, she says, “Well?” and I say, “I don’t know.” and she says, “Can she walk?” and I say “I don’t know.”
She goes to the kitchen and gets some dog treats and the beast pops to its paws and wags it’s tail and all is as it ever was, but for bit of a limp in one leg. Charlie horse, I suppose. There may be more nights like this ahead: confronting mortality and those pleading eyes.

Tristram

alex — Sat, 31 May 2008 22:33:13 +0000

Finally saw A Cock and Bull Story last night. I drew these pictures during it. I found it to be one of the more clever films I’ve seen in while. Leave it to the British to be literate and funny. I also dreamed I could fly last night. It’s been a while and it was good to dust off my wings.

Tales of Brave Horsecookies

alex — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:46:42 +0000

When I finally get back to my loft, I find an enormous box at the foot of the stairs. It is addressed to me and of course the elevator can’t be found. I wrestle the thing up several flights and I feel like Buster Keaton, when I notice someone filming my progress. My whole building has been invaded by a company of film players. The actors are all over the building pretending that they live there. They are even pretending to live in my studio where I push the box and ask someone what’s going on. The Camera then comes through the corridors and up the stairs in one long continuous shot as the drama unfolds in real time. There are intimate acts and gunshots and people I know and people I don’t and everywhere is the set, everyone are the players. Reality and fiction are completely blurred and I end up with a fairly large scene in the movie. Apparently the climax of the picture is a big wedding party on the outskirts of town and the whole company and I are loaded up into coach buses and taken off to the location/wedding/reception. When we get there it looks like an Italy I know from the movies of the early sixties: a few new modern housing blocks in a field of brick rubble and tall grass. They’ve set up a tent and strings of holiday lights and a fashionable band that I don’t know, but I think I’ve heard of starts to play and we all eat and drink and dance in the intermittent showers that cast a cinematic sheen on all the edges of brick. I am no longer sure if I’m an actor, or a person; did someone get married, or make a film… anyway it’s a pretty good party.

Teach Reach

alex — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:14:05 +0000

I am on the campus of a modern university; so modern in fact, that it has a satellite campus…literally. They have built an enormous space station that serves as a quiet library to study in, etc. I’ve gotten it into my head to spend the night up there and watch one of the Star Wars films. When I get to the quadrangle with the space elevator, I find a pavilion displaying an exact replica of a soviet era atomic bomb. It’s all there, but the plutonium. I’m curious to see this once top secret object. An artist/engineer has set up an elaborate machine to render the bomb in various shades of molten silver. The silver is applied by a complex robotic arm with an old flibert head paint brush clamped to the end of it. I start talking to the artist and he convinces me to go get my video camera and document the process of painting the atom bomb in shades of silver and tarnish. As I head back to my room, a terrific storm blows up and all the students scramble. I take my shoes off and walk home in the puddles. I won’t take my camera out in the rain and I’m certainly not riding up to space in eighty mph winds. I’ll just watch Star Wars at home, or better yet get blown around the campus and wade in the puddles.