My workmate alerted me to this article about an incredible piece of kinetic sculpture, a model of San Francisco constructed entirely of tooth picks. The artist’s name is Scott Weaver. The piece is entitled Rolling through the Bay. Weaver playfully narrates this short video which illustrates the sculpture in action.
It’s things like these that give me hope and fill me with optimism and wonder about humanity.
Scott Weaver’s Rolling through the Bay from The Tinkering Studio on Vimeo.
I was recently reading about this new typography magazine called 8 Faces edited by designer, Elliot Jay Stocks. The cover of issue number 3 was designed by McBess, a French illustrator who lives in London. His style reminds me of R. Crumb a bit, but perhaps that was just the prevalence of naked women in the illustrations. Looking around on McBess’ website was pretty fun. I especially enjoyed this short music video/cartoon.
Following a Twitter link to brainpickings.org, Maria Popova introduced me to both Andrew Zuckerman and his Wisdom project. The first video is an interesting, inspirational talk about how he came to do the Wisdom project and some of the things he learn from it. It is fairly long (for this blog) at 27 minutes, but very worth it. And now I’m really excited to see the Wisdom film, the trailer for which is the second video below.
Andrew Zuckerman from 99% on Vimeo.
WISDOM Trailer from Andrew Zuckerman Studio on Vimeo.
If you’ve been reading the news and are feeling a wee bit dour, this movie should rejuvenate you a bit! It’s a 14-minute video of Terry Gilliam explaining his cut out film animation technique. It’s a great how-to for artists, and it’s filled with examples of Gilliam’s ingenious, hilarious work. I especially like the holiday-themed series of short animations just a few minutes in.
Found myself especially cognizant of the importance of music and sound effects in these films. Enjoy!
To dig a little deeper, see this openculture blog post.
Some days I wish there were a door behind which lay another world or a pill one could take to transport one’s self to another time and a different place. My workmate, Sue, brought up the color puce this morning and in my search for what exactly this color was, Kenneth Anger’s short movie, “Puce Moment”, came up in the search results. It provided speedy transport this morning…
Hollywood or outer space? I’m not sure where, but this psychedelic video—after the initial floating dresses scene—carried me into a state of dream-like memories of Béatrice Dalle in “Betty Blue” or Isabella Rossellini in “Blue Velvet”.
The movie is accompanied by two really wonderful, lo-fi psychedelic folk rock songs too which I’ve never heard of before. According to the comments on YouTube:
@tailendcharlie
The music is by Jonathan Halper, who mysteriously appears to have done little else.@withlotsabutta
Anger talks about him on the BFI blu-ray of the Magick Lantern Cycle, and he says that Jonathan Halper has lived in a monastery in Scotland since the 1960′s, and the ‘I am a hermit’ line is exactly what he did.It’s a really cool disc, actually – Anger’s stories are wonderful.
A bit of further research revealed that the film was made in 1949. Initially, the score was by Verdi and was changed by Anger in 1966 to Jonathan Halper’s “Leaving My Old Life Behind” and “I’m a Hermit”.
I came across more wonderful commentary about Kenneth Anger’s “Puce Moment” and Jonathan Halper in what is my favorite blog title of the month, Biannual Haircut—the post actually quoting another blog called WFMU…more tracks to follow. Happily the library has “The films of Kenneth Anger. Vol. 1″, now reserved.
