Animation: Table For 2
A nice little love couple enjoying a simple meal together with plenty of food and knives and forks to throw. A messy relationship. Strong table required. Israeli filmmaker Dafna Axel made this as her graduation project film.
I Write Like David Foster Wallace
Apparently, I write like somebody named David Foster Wallace. I know… it’s weird. Who would have thought? Who is David Foster Wallace? I think he’s kind of high literary serious-minded and wild sort of college professor type stuff. I should just do a Wikipedia on him, but I don’t really want to know who this person is that I supposedly write like. Below, you can see my official badge that proves the Wallace connection:

David Foster Wallace
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
I got my writing-like-David-Foster-Wallace badge from I Write Like. It could not have been easier. I simply pasted several of my very opinionated and slightly acidic blog posts into the I Write Like form and then pressed the button. Each time, this David Foster Wallace guy popped up. One blog post that I dribbled out because I had nothing of interest to say on that day came up as Dan Brown. No surprise there because Dan Brown is so numbingly uninteresting that his brain should be transplanted into the body of Tom Hanks where it would dwell very contentedly for some time I would suppose.
I Write Like is really loads of fun. I could paste entries into it all day long and feel that I had spent my time well. That’s what I’m doing today. For the entire rest of the day I’m going to sit here dropping my blog posts into this machine to find out if maybe I really am David Foster Wallace. I may even start to make stuff up just for this writing machine and eventually maybe I’ll see my own name pop up: I write like…
Film: Outer Space
Marc Campbell posted this 1999 film called Outer Space by Australian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherassky. Using found footage from something featuring actress Barbara Hershey, Tscherassky creates a jumping and jittering psychotic version of a haunted house movie. The simplest of shots showing a woman entering a house, sitting down, looking into a mirror, looking out a window, are turned into extravagant, multi-layered cubist visions from a nightmare.
Picture Book by Terry Bisson and Rudy Rucker
Billy’s Picture Book by Terry Bisson, a collection of jarringly twisted short stories for adult children, has a set of illustrations by Rudy Rucker. The stories follow one precocious Billy through the harrowing and sickening ordeal of being a kid. If your kid has a mind that is easily warped or disturbed or if your kid is just plain crazy, don’t read these stories to them! But if your kid has a casual interest in murder and mayhem, well this might be just the book for the little monster.
The book is available as a free e-book and as a paperback for purchase.
Art: John Baldessari Designs iPhone App to Rearrange Crappy Dutch Painting
Artist John Baldessari has designed a curiously dopey iPhone app that allows a user to rearrange most of the objects in a 17th century still life painting called Banquet Still Life, by Abraham van Beyeren. Looking at this mess of a Dutch painting is like being beaten about the eyes with a hammer. But Baldessari is promoting his huge current retrospective, Pure Beauty, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show is extraordinary. If you are in L.A. between now and September 12, you should certainly go see it.
The app is called In Still Life 2001 – 2010.
This is the still life I came up with on my iPod Touch. I got rid of all the annoying little objects and just kept the good part of the painting. But my main question is, who painted in the parts of the background that are hidden in the original? Baldessari? That would be mildly amusing. Frankly, it would be more interesting than the app. Original missing parts of 17th century paintings by John Baldessari!
Here is the horrific original painting:

