Night Plus Light Makes Right

by 2 Comments

From the toxel.com design blog:

Light writing is a form of stop motion animation wherein still images captured using the technique known as light painting are put in sequence thereby creating the optical illusion of movement for the viewer.

Two examples:

Impacto Criativo (Creative Impact)

Created by Propague and MidiaEffects with 2 cameras, 1700 clicks, 18 people, 20 nights, 35 flash lights, and 234 batteries.

…and:

Light Paint Piano Player

Created by Ryan Cashman with a small green LED keychain light. The frames were photographed with a Canon Rebel using 20-30 second exposure time.

See them all. (Warning: visiting the toxel.com home page can be hazardous to one’s productivity.)

Share

Of Time, Things Small, and Things Green

by 6 Comments

Typestick Thank-You Card, from Green Chair Press (click for original)From whiskey river:

The Moment

Walking the three tiers in first light, out
here so my two-year-old son won’t wake the house,
I watch him pull and strip ragweed, chicory, yarrow,
so many other weeds and wildflowers
I don’t know the names for, him saying Big, and Mine,
and Joshua — words, words, words. Then
it is the moment, that split-second
when he takes my hand, gives it a tug,
and I feel his entire body-weight, his whole
heart-weight, pulling me toward
the gleaming flowers and weeds he loves.
That moment which is eternal and is gone in a second,
when he yanks me out of myself like some sleeper
from his dead-dream sleep into the blues and whites
and yellows I must bend down to see clearly, into
the faultless flesh of his soft hands, his new brown eyes,
the miracle of him, and of the earth itself,
where he lives among the glitterings, and takes me.

(Len Roberts)

Not from whiskey river:

[Read more…]

Share

Department of Barely Restrained Comment
(Jane Austen Desk)

by 2 Comments

From Variety (courtesy of The New Yorker‘s “The Book Bench” blog):

Rocket launches ‘Predator’
Clark to direct aliens vs. Jane Austen pic
By MICHAEL FLEMING

Elton John’s Rocket Pictures hopes to make the first Jane Austen adaptation to which men will drag their girlfriends.

Will Clark is set to direct “Pride and Predator,” which veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.

[…]

“It felt like a fresh and funny way to blow apart the done-to-death Jane Austen genre by literally dropping this alien into the middle of a costume drama, where he stalks and slashes to horrific effect,” [Rocket Pictures’ David] Furnish said.

Share

What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 2)

by 13 Comments

Excerpt from Hoagy Carmichael's 1st draft of 'I Get Along Without You Very Well'[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with long histories. Part 1 — on the song itself as finally recorded by numerous artists — appeared on Tuesday.]

Hoagy Carmichael published “I Get Along Without You Very Well” in 1938. (The copyright date was November 18.) But the song’s history stretched back over 15 years earlier, and the sheet music as published bore two signs of this past:

  1. The full title of the song included, at the end, “(Except Sometimes)” — a phrase which appears nowhere in the lyrics.
  2. Following Carmichael’s name as the songwriter appeared the note, “Words inspired by a poem by J.B. (?)”

Why “Except Sometimes”? Who was J.B.? And why that trailing question mark?

[Read more…]

Share

The Short Films of Canada, O Canada

by 2 Comments

Eyes for handmade fishing lures, multiple hourglass sizes

Short films — say, 40 minutes maximum, tops — remain one of the great blind spots of most American audiences. After all, shorts don’t fit into the format of movies (80- or 90-minute features and up) or television (30-minute multiples on PBS, 20-some minutes elsewhere to allow for the paid filler). You can see animation and short-film festivals in larger cities or the art cinemas in smaller ones, but you’ve got to know what you’re going to spend ten bucks on or you won’t spend it, eh?

Aside: Yes, of course Pixar does wonderful short animations, and packages many of them to be released with feature-length films in theaters and/or on DVD. I’m just saying that in general, short films — those by film-school students aside — don’t have much of a noticeable profile here.

So our understanding here of what to expect from short films is shaped by what’s delivered in cartoons, or in fill-in-the-gap documentaries like those on Turner Classic Movies — keeping the audience in their seats until the next feature rolls around at the top of the hour. It’s as though short stories had very few outlets (well, okay, that’s not much of a stretch) — and for the outlets which existed, all stories had to be exact multiples of 3,000 words in length.

Naturally, since American audiences won’t ask for something they scarcely know exists, media outlets don’t provide it, so audiences remain ignorant, and then those audiences won’t… and so on. Less a vicious cycle, than a pernicious one.

Elsewhere, short-film traditions (like other kinds) have evolved differently. Which kinda makes sense, from a story-teller’s perspective: you tell the story completely, and when it’s done you stop, hmm?

[Read more…]

Share

“Shoulda Thoughta That.” And the Worst. Songs. Evah.

by 7 Comments

One of The Missus’s ongoing laments involves the infamous curve, which she seems forever ahead of. “Did you see,” she’ll say to me, “that [insert name of formerly unknown person] just made [insert some number which includes many zeroes and a currency symbol] from [insert random clever idea here]? I can’t believe it. That was my idea!”

Over at the Writing Well Is the Best Revenge blog, a recent post starts out by touching on a similar phenomenon: encountering ideas they’ve never had, but wish they did. Specifically, they talk about the Publisher’s Lunch e-newsletter, which provides reports of recent book deals. BIG book deals.

I know it’s, what, masochistic? Not because I begrudge anyone the fabulous deals they made–oh no way! If books are getting purchased and publishers are humming along, I’m all for it.

No–what’s masochistic is the constantly recurring thought that I am unable to suppress. And that is: oh–I should have thought of that.

Or worse: Oh, I COULD have thought of that.

We won’t even discuss “I DID think of that, years and years ago, but didn’t do anything about it” [Ed. note: viz., The Missus’s lament] because that way lies true madness. (Two little words: Animal Planet.)

Which leads them — gotta love it, someone else is easily distracted, too — to consider the announcement of the sale of Christopher Bowles’s book, Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart:

[Read more…]

Share

A Career Made of Fiberglass, Foam, and Fun

by 5 Comments

[Gotta get back into the online rhythm again after a couple days off… digging out the draft of a post I’d meant to put up some time ago…]

If I had my own personal MacArthur Foundation-like setup for rendering “genius grants” to people in all walks of life, I would give one tomorrow to Mark Cline. (Today’s, of course, I’d give to myself.)

I first learned of Cline in a post on the io9: Strung out on science fiction blog, where I encountered a post with the arresting title “The Alternate History Theme Park Where Dinosaurs Fought in the Civil War.”

At right is one of the photos used in that io9 post. From the text which accompanies it:

…roadside attraction creator Mark Cline has imagined an entirely different kind of Civil War science fiction. His fiberglass creations tell the tale of a group of Union soldiers who discover a lost valley of dinosaurs in Virginia and plot to use them as weapons against the South.

The attraction, called “Professor Cline’s Dinosaur Kingdom,” imagines a lost chapter from Civil War history. It supposes that in 1863, a group of paleontologists inadvertently stumbled upon a valley of live dinosaurs. The discovery comes to the attention of the Union Army, who, recognizing the destructive power of the giant lizards, decide to capture them and unleash them on the Confederate Army. Naturally, it results in Jurassic Park-inspired carnage.

(I encourage you to visit the io9 post to see more photos.)

[Read more…]

Share

A Cat’s Departure

by 10 Comments

Cat nap, c. 1993

[With a cat — Dilly, I’m told, but to me the stripes
 rather say, Nameless — sometime in 1993.]

Dilly first entered the life and home of The Missus-to-be sometime in the spring of 1993, shortly after I myself moved down here and some months before we moved in together.

As with her predecessor, Nameless, Dilly probably would have gone anonymous for a while — we’re notoriously indecisive about most things, singly and as a couple — except for one happy circumstance. She needed happy accidents at that point, too. She’d been in the animal shelter with her little brother; The Stepdaughter-to-be had gone there with a friend who was looking to adopt. The friend pointed the two little kittens out. (As I recall, the backstory to that point was that Dilly and her brother had been abandoned by the side of the road.) The Stepdaughter-to-be, on behalf of her mother, “adopted” Dilly. (To this day, she remains haunted by uncertainty about whether the little brother got adopted, too.)*

When she arrived at The Missus’s place, then, the kitten still had on one foreleg the ID bracelet from the shelter: D1L, it said, and voilà — with the substitution of a letter for a digit, she had a name.

(She acquired a couple nicknames over the years. Dillybutt, for one — a reference to the “elevator butt” that kicked in when you so much as approached with an about-to-pet-her hand, sometimes when you merely spoke her name. Later, there was Dilgoyle: the cat who’d be sitting on a windowsill, as if carved there, when we got home from work or a trip.)

[Read more…]

Share
Verified by MonsterInsights