Archive for the ‘youtube’ CategoryBSDFF 2009 Review: Saturday February 14thFebruary 13th through the 22nd, The Wilma Theatre was overrun with filmakers, volunteers, and fans of the documentary film. I was one of the fans (and volunteers), and here I’ll be sharing with you thoughts from some of the almost fifty films I saw this year. The festival is growing and getting better every time, and I’m proud to have been a part of it once again. Even in poverty and chronic fatal illness, the people in this film are able to find snippets of happiness. The singing by the children was incredible, the cinematography amazing. It’s great to see that the gogos are trying to educate the young. It was also surprising to me that those doing the testing and processing of test samples did so without eye protection or gloves.
 Bonecrusher directed by Michael Fountain, 2008Lucas the father is Bonecrusher, and Lucas the son follows his father into the mines for a life fraught with the dangers of coal mining. The women behind the men were largely silent in the film, while Fountain focused upon the relationship between the father and the son in this compelling story where mining overshadows all aspects of life in this small West Virginian town.
There is a beautiful scene in Bonecrusher where Luke has just been honored at a little league softball game. He’s been a huge advocate of and volunteer for the softball program all of his life. The camera cuts away to a train pulling coal cars. As the whistle whines, we are reminded that mining permeates every aspect of the Dante, West Virginia people’s lives.
 In A Dream directed by Jeremiah Zagar 2008Heartbreakingly beautiful film. Isaiah Zagar, responsible, by his count, for over 100 murals, 7 buildings and 7 alleyways in Philly, opens himself, and his family, up to us intimately and without looking away. The film truly was a “mysterium tremendum”. Amazing.
Gogol Bordello Non Stop directed by Margarita Jimeno, 2009
Having heard of Gogol Bordello, and heard some of their music before, I was glad to be able to see what all of the fuss is about. The film is about what happens when you start following your dream and doing what you believe in.
It would seem that these guys must be seen to be believed, and I cannot wait to see them live. The film captured a lot of that energy, fun, love of life and good times.
 American Swing directed by Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart, 2008Plato’s Retreat is the backdrop for a story that was really about the loneliness and egotism of Plato’s owner Larry Levenson. Kaufman and Hart have fashioned a compelling film using archival footage from Plato’s, talk show appearances by Levenson , and interviews with members and employees of Plato’s.
via Wooster Collective.  In Search of the Hobo Railroad Artist Last night Monday night at the Zootown Arts Community Center, Debby Florence brought in an amazing filmaker,Bill Daniel, who screened his short film that was 16 years in the making. We were lucky to have him, as his biodiesel van had broken down at the Orange Street exit, and he had to hoof it over to the ZACC for the screening. Who is Bozo Texino? chronicles the search for the source of a ubiquitous and mythic rail graffiti– a simple sketch of a character with an infinity-shaped hat and the scrawled moniker, “Bozo Texino”– a drawing seen on railcars for over 80 years. Daniel’s gritty black and white film uncovers a secret society and it’s underground universe of hobo and railworker graffiti, and includes interviews with legendary boxcar artists, Coaltrain, Herby, Colossus of Roads, and The Rambler. Shooting over a 16-year period, Daniel rode freights across the West carrying a Super-8 sound camera and a 16mm Bolex. During his quest he discovered the roots of a folkloric tradition that has gone mostly unnoticed for a century. Taking inspiration from Beat artists Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac, the film functions as both a sub-cultural documentary and a stylized fable on wanderlust and outsider identity.
The only CD I ever checked out of a library that I never returned was “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”, the David Byrne/Brian Eno collaboration. (After many overdue notices arriving in the mail, I went down to the library, told them I’d lost the item, and paid for it. they now have another copy in their stacks). I loved MLITBOG for a lot of reasons, the layered sounds, the samples, the beats, the moods that it created. At the time, I was already familiar with David Byrne’s solo work as well as his work with The Talking Heads, but I had only heard about Eno. Since then, I’ve come to love Eno and his work with a variety of other musicians, including his production work with Devo, Talking Heads, Jane Sieberry (now Issa, who, like Reznor, gives her music away for free) and especially James and the “Laid” and “Wah-Wah” albums. Eno, the “non-musician”, is most known for his prolific catalogue of ambient music, including the fantastic “Music for Airports”, as well as being an amazing record producer and contributor to such movies as David Lynch’s “Dune”.
Eno has always been fascinated by technology and how to twist and bend it for his own purposes. He’s experimented with generative music, music that composes itself, and has branched out into visual art as well, creating a computer game that generates a possible 77 million paintings, chosen by Eno himself. He is currently working on the soundtrack for the multi-player game Spore, “that allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a multi cellular organism, through development as a sapient and social land-walking creature, to levels of interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture.” [Wikipedia]. I’m here to make the case that Trent Reznor is the new Brian Eno.
Reznor got his start in Cleveland creating what would become Pretty Hate Machine by himself after-hours at the Right Track Studio where he worked as an assistant engineer and janitor. He became proficient at manipulating sounds and bending technology to his own purposes as well, just as Eno learned to do. He’s produced many record albums, including a handful for Marilyn Manson, as well as the phenomenal “Natural Born Killers” soundtrack and the “Lost Highway” soundtrack. His subtle contribution to Tori Amos’ “Past the Mission” on her “Under the Pink” album showed how quiet he could be when he needed to be. It was also the first time I can remember hearing him sing quietly while someone else took the spotlight. Reznor’s original music from id Software’s video game “Quake” was long one of my favorite ambient pieces of music to load into iTunes when I needed to get some work done and didn’t want to be disturbed. He expanded his fascination with technology and its possibilities with the release of “Year Zero” and its companion alternate reality websites/reality game and subsequent user-submitted art in 2007. Eno once predicted that music would one day become user-modifiable constructs, and imagined a day when future generations would look at past generations in wonder, asking in wonder, “you mean you listened to the same music over and over?”. Reznor took that idea and ran with it, releasing “The Hand that Feeds” from his dismal “With Teeth” 2005 release as a multi-track Garage Band download that fans could get for free and remix as they pleased. His newest release “Ghosts I-IV”, was released in a variety of formats, including a free torrent seeded by NIN itself. “Ghosts” was released as with a Creative Commons license (no copyright), and Reznor announced yesterday that the tracks can be used to participate in a NIN sponsored film festival on You Tube. Talk about user generated content. The album itself is supurb. I’d love to hear Eno’s thoughts on it. Those of you who haven’t hear it, go grab it at NIN’s official site and give it a listen for yourself. Grab the torrent if you’re familiar with the technology. “Ghosts” ranges from smooth and quiet piano to the heavy muddy guitar and keyboard laden layers we’ve come to expect from Reznor. I’m looking forward to what people come up with, and might even make a contribution myself if I can find some time along with everything else I have going on. NIN Ghosts Film Festival on YouTube .. I’m still recovering from the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, and promise I’ll be reviewing the films here soon. In the meantime, in the spirit of documentaries and creativity, I wanted to share a video I found recently. Regular readers know that I am interested in street art and graffiti. I’m also interested in the imperminance of art. And, ultimately, I’m interested in making art for art’s sake. But, we live in a capitalist society, right? And Shakespeare’s got to get paid, son, so I try to make affordable art. The video is a documentary created by Ana Alvarez-Errecalde and FILMCHICK PRODUCTIONS about Jorge Rodriguez Gerada, a street artist that creates huge murals of familiar figures in the neighborhood. Then, after creating them, they slowly vanish over time. Beautiful.
I’ve been insanely busy, plus it’s summer. Who wants to sit in front of a computer if he doesn’t have to? But I haven’t been avoiding work. I painted a foot for a marathon, am working on two individual legs for the AAS Benefit show on Wednesday, and have been getting my work together for an opening in August. I’ll fill you in on details on all of the above in the next few days. Meanwhile, here’s a pic of what happens after the following mathematical equation is completed: Gravel + High Speed Bike + Sharp Turn = ROAD RASH/Swollen Face
I look and feel much better today than I did yesterday, the day after the accident. The mirror effect is a result of having watched the below video and something that Mothersbaugh said about symmetry.
Still playing with some “How To” footage. Still hate iMovie. I don’t want you all to think I’m just sitting on my ass, so I’ll provide an update and then share some open mic love with you that I stumbled across in my experimentations. But first, let me give you the rundown on As my The workaround is to boot into XP and use the proprietary Sony app to import the footage onto my machine. The problem here is that I made the Windows partition pretty small when I created it, so I need to be able to access my external FW drives, which are Mac formatted. Because they are Mac formatted, Windows won’t see them. So I go and find MacDrive, and use that until the free trial expires. I got a lot of footage imported that way, but it’s in the shitty .AVI format. Which my Mac can’t deal with. Seriously, when I merely click on an AVI file, if I don’t attempt to open it right away, Finder crashes. WTF? So I install 3ivx as instructed. Still no love. Quicktime won’t play them, VLC will, but that still doesn’t help me with editing. iMovie won’t recognize them either. I keep getting a “wrong file type” error or something. So I need to convert the AVI files to a format my Mac can digest. I found iSquint, a free program that does just that. Works pretty good. Just takes a long time. The biggest problem I have with this process, though, is that the quality of the footage is being degraded every time I treat it in some fashion. I want to be able to just pull it right from the camera an play with the original footage. To give you an example, the AVI clip that I used for the YouTube video you’ll see here in a bit was 642MB. The .mp4 clip was 47.4MB after conversion from AVI. I know that if I were working with footage streamed directly from the camera, I’d be up into the gigabyte range, so I’m a little pissed that I’m expending large amounts of time on what inevitably will be a film with less than perfect image quality. So, I gained access to a professional quality film editing program. Granted, it’s an old version, but even when running FCP, the program won’t recognize my camera. I might be doing something wrong, too, and I have a call in to a director friend of mine that left me two voicemails explaining the less-than-intuitive way to capture footage into FCP. (Set four scratch discs, File–>Log and Capture. Log and Capture? But there’s an IMPORT option there too, why not just name it IMPORT and call it good? Sheesh.) Until I get a little bit more guidance, I’m leaving it sit for a time while I work on other projects, which I’ll talk about later this week. If anyone has any guidance they can offer me, I’d love hearing about it. Let me know in the comments. Now, though, it’s time to watch a little bit of open mic night. This footage was shot at Red’s Blue Goose Saloon in Gardiner, MT, 1999. The guy running sound was known as Shifty Brian, and Amy was dubbed Amy with the Boom and the Pow. I don’t remember her last name. She does a killer rendition of Hattie McDaneil’s 1929 song “Any Kind of Man Would be Better Than You” … |
Today the Hawk Takes One Chick
