Seo Young Deok’s work utilizes chains of various sorts (though, most commonly, bicycle chains) welded together with painstaking precision. His figures are superb, they have a fluidity that shows a deep understanding of the human form. They also scream volumes about weight. Many of them are bent underneath it, seem to be in danger of being crushed by a heaviness equal to that of the materials they are comprised of, their faces — if they have one — seem to hint at some great inner turmoil. It’s a stark, often grim collection of work, but beautiful nevertheless.
I was at my wits’ end, dear readers. I really felt that it was all over, because that’s how one feels when your employer shows up with a video of a guy playing a Joy Division song on a cat’s ass. I mean, really, how the fuck is a guy supposed to compete with that? It’s impossible. I was pretty despondent most of the day, to be honest. Bad enough they keep me down here, shackled to a desk, kept alive on a diet of water and beet gruel, but then to post, perhaps, the be all and end all of weird, cat-centric internet videos, well, it was too much. Digging frantically I looked for something, anything of interest but found nothing.
Just when I was about to give up, send word to my overlords that I was done, doomed to be moved to the Lower Levels to tend the infernal Machines, going about their awful work deep, deep under the Catacombs, I found I tiny glimmer of hope, a small, barely gleaming nugget of web-based detritus. I reached out and plucked it, brushed it off and gazed at it’s simple beauty. This would do, I thought, this is what will save me, at least for now. If, years from now, I am still doing this and someone asks me what my lowest point was I will cite this day. And if they ask what got me through it I will proudly say: “Robot quadroters playing the James Bond theme song.”
A stunning series of anatomical cross sections by artist Lisa Nilsson, made using paper filigree, coiled strips of paper (in this case, Japanese mulberry paper). Using photographic references, Nilsson’s pieces are beautiful to look at, the rolled paper adding another level of detail to images already brimming with them. You can read about how she made them here and here.
I had never heard of Swedish duo Niki & The Dove before this, illness but their new single, capsule “The Fox”, ask has won me over with its loping, electronic beat and lovely vocals. The video, created by Seattle-based WINTR is, perhaps, more technically impressive than thematically. The constantly shifting mask and geometric shapes are beautiful (the night time scenes near the end being especially impressive) and work well with the song, but there is not much more to it than that. Regardless of your feelings on the visuals, however, the song itself is well worth a listen.
From Kelsey Holtaway and Mark Cersosimo of Departure|Arrival Films, This Is My Home profiles East Village resident Anthony Pisano. Mr Pisano has a particularly spectacular home, so crammed with wonderful oddities that people often mistake it for an antique shop. This could also be because his home looks suspiciously like a storefront and Mr. Pisano is often seated outside near the entrance. Whatever the reason, he doesn’t seem to mind and is more than willing to let people look around anyway and gaze at his collection of baubles and bric-à-brac. Surprisingly, he says nothing has ever been stolen, though he has, on occasion, given things away. You can see some bonus footage of his densely packed abode at their site.
So, Will Schofield over at 50 Watts has abitof afetish forGerman poster illustrator Walter Schnackenberg (1880-1961) and I’m finding it pretty easy to see why. Schnackenberg’s work is almost like Salvador Dali and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (whose work Schnackenberg admired) had a child, swinging wildly between the more traditional theater illustration and extremely surreal dreamscapes and oftentimes these two worlds collide.
His figures are lithe and twisting, their faces many times animal-like — stretched and disfigured. The tone of many of these is hard to nail down, evolving as he grew older and introduced stranger elements into his work. His older work seems more playful, and certainly there is some of this in the later pieces, but one can definitely see a darker, more cynical streak enter his oeuvre as time went on. It all makes for a truly captivating body of work.
Randy Halverson’s gorgeously ethereal “Dakotalapse”. Comprised of thousands of 20-30 second exposures stitched together, it was shot mostly near the White River in South Dakota, with additional footage shot in Utah and Colorado.
In the opening “Dakotalapse” title shot, you see bands of red and green moving across the sky. After asking several Astronomers, they are possible noctilucent clouds, airglow or faint Aurora. I never got a definite answer to what it is. You can also see the red and green bands in other shots.
At :53 and 2:17 seconds into the video you see a Meteor with a Persistent Train. Which is ionizing gases, which lasted over a half hour in the cameras frame. Phil Plait wrote an article about the phenomena [for Discover Magazine] here.
There is a second Meteor with a much shorter persistent train at 2:51 in the video. This one wasn’t backlit by the moon like the first, and moves out of the frame quickly.
The soundtrack was done by Bear McCreary, who some of you may know from his work on Battlestar Galactica If you like this there is a 23 minute(!) extended cut available for download.
Kiss – A Love Story is a stunning short film directed by Joseph Hodgson & Franck Aubry set to a beautiful song entitled “Stille” by Bendik. It’s not a complex piece, and fairly abstract, but it’s almost a perfect combination of sound and imagery. ( As John Martz at Drawn notes, you may want to set it to full screen when you watch it, as the aspect ratio makes the video tiny when scaled down to fit our template.)
You would probably want to be careful when making a movie that involves Afghanistan. You could, perhaps, be more cavalier in dealing with Osama bin Laden (in the U.S. at least), but I’d think you would want to exhibit some sort of sensitivity when making a film about a country we’ve been involved with on, let’s just say, unpleasant terms for a while now. It seems like a bad idea to make a film about a group of white people (like, super white people) running around a poor, war-torn country (our war, no less) doing sick karate kicks and slaughtering the local populace in droves, even if they’re “zombies”, and then have them partake in hot, white people make-out sessions in between said slaughter. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me.
If you were a Parisian gentleman in 1923 looking for the newest thing in personal mobility, cialis sale you may have had a keen interest in the above: cycle-skating. Essentially small bicycle wheels strapped to your legs, medical they could be used with or without poles, “ski style”. Perfect for the hip, urban man on the go. Just make sure to hike those trousers up over your knee-highs.
