Here is an interesting character from Argentina who was a graphic arts professor and advertising agency designer. After getting hold of a 16mm film camera, he began teaching himself to animate by watching Disney movies. In the early sixties he met pioneering experimental animator Norman McLaren and upon seeing his work began his serious experimental career with direct painting and scratching on film emulsion.
Toc Toc… Toc features scratching and painting on film timed to a soundtrack consisting of a pencil hitting a tabletop.
Here are some of the Argentine television commercials that Bras worked on.
Whenever I'm in a Los Angeles art gallery if I notice a piece by Gronk I always get snagged and hang around in front of it for too long. I tire easily of galleries and museums because of the general impatience you encounter in those places. People are at their absolute bottom level of stupidity when they saunter through a gallery, stopping for just an exquisitely timed observation period sometimes directly in front of where you happen to be standing. They also tend to move around a room in the same direction, going with the flow or listening to their little tape-recorded tours. I like to go backwards and jam these people up a little. I also like to massively flirt with pretty women but often get into trouble with their boyfriends whom I haven't noticed lurking in the opposite corner.
Gronk makes me feel at home in a gallery because I like to stand before greatness. I'm not fond of the equalization of creativity. This guy just casually blows everything off the walls like he's the kind of great artist we made in the time of Pollock. There's an air of hard-edged bohemian mixed with muralist mixed with art history scholar. In other words, he knows what he’s doing. He's got an enormous classical underpinning that may sometimes get obscured if you too closely associate him with the Los Angeles street. I mean classical in the more inaccurate general sense of an artist that has a deep connection to the artists and major movements that came before him. I see a calm and understanding continuation of American art history coming through the few Gronk works I have had the pleasure of standing in front of.
This is a short documentary about the last of the Los Angeles Yellow and Green streetcar lines of the mid-1950s. For me, Los Angeles is the most beautiful American city because of its nearly mystical relationship with the natural landscape intruding so markedly upon the urban scene. One gets the feeling that at any moment the terrain could obliterate the city entirely. The resulting dichotomy makes for eerie and unsettling intrusions of nature into the urban landscape. Turn a corner, even today, and you are quite likely to find yourself looking up a natural hillside with only a dirt path for access. Old films like these fascinate me for their glimpses of the cityscape and its long-ago relationship to the desert surroundings.
The new stop-motion 3D film ParaNorman features detailed sets that incorporate many tiny objects and details. All those things need to be built. This short film shows us how one small table lamp was created for the film.
This is a stop-motion Batman film made entirely with toy action figures and effective lighting along with a blockbuster-style action soundtrack. The figures are all by Hot Toys. The Filmmakers are Derek Kwok and Henri Wong of Parabucks.
I took this today in downtown Los Angeles' Pershing Square where Occupy protesters intend to make more chalk art tonight. Last month protesters were attacked by police in riot gear simply because they were drawing on sidewalks. Apparently the legal scholars at the LAPD think the use of children's chalks made by Crayola is illegal when an adult is doing the drawing. As protests go it seems to me that chalking is one of the less obnoxious. I have read that courts nationwide are dismissing these chalking cases. Prosecutors in LA have refused to press charges against those recently arrested by our inexplicably cranky police.
It's really okay, officer! Seriously. Just enjoy all the pretty pictures and move along. It all washes off in the rain.
People gathered to protest suspicious shootings by the Anaheim, California police and were brutally attacked by police wielding non-lethal weapons which included a dog being sent in at children. There simply comes an obvious time in the life of a civilized nation when the people must stand back and take a very good look at the savages that have been allowed to overrun police departments.
Vivian Maier, Photographer is a short film about a nanny who took magnificent photographs that went undiscovered for over forty years. The film was made by Michael Bullis.
This is a BBC radio dramatization of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. The book is still a shocking satire of Western culture gone to the youthful dogs of violence and mayhem. Burgess played with language by inventing a detailed and comically expressive slang for his criminal hero and the gang he leads.
The best info I can find about this recording dates it somewhere around 1997. It stars Jason Hughes as the murderous 'droog,' Alex.
Egyptian cartoonist George Bahgoury discusses the problems with being creative in Egypt where a nation seems to want to propel itself into the past by treating religion as if it is something new and by restricting women and beauty itself. I like the way this man talks.
This 2002 animated film by Haitian Canadian filmmaker Martine Chartrand takes us through Black history as a young boy hears stories from his grandmother. The gorgeous and bold images show scenes of village life, history of cultures on the African continent, the corruption and evil of slavery, work in the cotton fields, Emancipation, Industrial Revolution, fighting in world wars and the civil rights movement. It’s a beautiful, moving and graceful piece of art that tells history with a simple directness that gives the film immense power. It seems to have been animated by using a paint on glass technique in which certain parts of the image are erased and repainted to create frame by frame motion.
Here is a 1961 documentary film about the last ten days of the Red Car commuter train in Los Angeles. Alan Fishel filmed an entire run of the soon to be mothballed Red Car on the Pacific Electric Long Beach Line. It begins its journey at the Sixth and Main Street station in downtown L.A.
