Month: April 2009

David Fincher’s Billy Idol Video

stardate

PAOLO: david fincher is the best famous director i know
PAOLO: i just saw his best work ever
BRAIN: which one is that
BRAIN: I liked Fight Club
PAOLO: the billy idol video
BRAIN: better than Alien3, The Game, Seven, and Fight Club?
PAOLO: dude.
BRAIN: (I still havent’ seen Panic Room or Zodiac)
BRAIN: (or the Fitzgerald thingy)
PAOLO: have you seen the video?
BRAIN: no, url me
PAOLO: it gets props for like referencing electric dreams and ford fairlane
PAOLO: Billy Idol: Cradle of Love
PAOLO: actually i think the genius is this
PAOLO: ok rdy?
PAOLO: idol at the time of the sooting
PAOLO: was wheelchair bound.
BRAIN: oh really?
BRAIN: how did that happen
PAOLO: yes he had severe motorcycle accident
PAOLO: could not move from torso down
PAOLO: lol this video like spawned world of warcraft
BRAIN: Oh I remenmber this video
BRAIN: that girl always pissed me off
PAOLO: hahah
PAOLO: why’d the girl piss you off
BRAIN: because at the time I didn’t understand she is meant to be a fantasy for this nerdy guy
BRAIN: she basically comes to his nice apartment and wrecks it
BRAIN: she fucks with his stereo
PAOLO: oh
BRAIN: then she spills red wine all over the place
PAOLO: yeah i had some chick blow out my speakers once
PAOLO: it sucked
BRAIN: she messes up his bed
BRAIN: and he’s expected to cower in another room
BRAIN: while she plays this obnoxious music
PAOLO: why is he cowering that part i didn’t get
BRAIN: and then basically her macho boyfriend implicitly threatens him!
PAOLO: yeah if it’s a fantasy for that guy
PAOLO: why does he imagine the guy
PAOLO: the machog guy
BRAIN: maybe he is a cuckold fetishist
PAOLO: i think it makes sense that way
PAOLO: or as if the viewer is supposed to be in the apt too
PAOLO: ‘ok hot chick’
PAOLO: ‘ok dude isn’t doing shit, so’
BRAIN: what do you think the idea is?
PAOLO: i think the idea is “well she’s young, we should have her strip, and the last video that did well was the aha video so..”
BRAIN: so you think there was no narrative idea
PAOLO: lol no

Hipster Grifter link collection

stardate

I heart the Hipster Grifter.

Let me just say that although I am not a hipster, I do adore them, mainly because I parasitize the byproducts of their lifestyle. I need ready access to indie music, cheap fashion, cheap new art experiences, and even their mostly-baseless disdain for the tragically unhip.

Also I love con artists, because I am nutty like that.

But you know? The curmudgeons are right when they complain that there is nothing really that noteworthy about Keri Farrell. She’s doing what has been done before. I have known half a dozen sketchy sociopaths like her– partied with them, lost money to them, and pointed them at people I wanted to watch them destroy, like you might a pit bull in a dog fighting ring.

So this is not real new. Why is Kerri Farrell an internet celebrity then, when most of the other scam artists languish in relative obscurity? No idea. I can only surmise that she is pushing enough buttons all at the same time, or perhaps the internet-savvy percentage in the victim demographic has reached a critical mass. Who knows!

I kind of wonder if it’s due to some hipster backlash, like the “Disco Sucks” movement (July 12, 1979, “Disco Demolition Night” at Comiskey Park in Chicago, IL). Maybe this will be the beginning of the end of the phrase “hipster.”

Hard Candy

flix

Someone needs to do a “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?”-style redub of Hard Candy.

It’s the reason I don’t see Ellen Paige movies… she’s so so bad in it, it might be just the writing, but it’s also a really smug movie that is just annoying and pointless.

I think it’s meant to be, Is he a child molester? Is he not? What is her big plan?

But wait, who fucking cares?! There’s absolutely no investment in either character. Doesn’t matter; you’ll be more interested in the victims in a slasher movie who you see naked for two minutes before they get killed by the axe-wielding maniac.

What kinda sucks is I really like the fashion-y cinematography in it. I guess I’ll just take screencaps of it for later analysis.

If you haven’t seen Hard Candy, aka “the Ellen Paige pedo movie,” picture Ellen Paige acting like a gangster rapper, and it’s not meant to be funny… now picture Ellen Paige monologing like a Bond villain as she tortures some guy, also not meant to be funny…

That is like 80% of Hard Candy.

Ponoko sent!

flix, stardate

I just spent most of the day making a prop for my giallo movie.

What is giallo? Read about it on wikipedia. I’ll write more once the project is done.

Anyway, I needed a cult-looking cross for my movie. I originally made it in clay, sometimes covered in aluminum foil, sometimes spraypainted silver, to look like metal… it melted in the blood we were using. This was unfired clay. Actually clay in general was looking way too sloppy.

So, I needed something more precise. I decided to laser-etch it. I bought a “prime” membership at Ponoko on the off chance I would need to make a bunch of these.

My initial cross design was a Rosicrucian cross, complete with all the rosettes and hebrew letters. But, it looked too fat, too alchemal, and not sinister enough. So, I drew a new cross, more Chaos-inspired, and put some glyphs on there from the Necronomicon (the big seal on the front of the book).

The thing that took me the longest to figure out: I really like brushwork in my illustrations, using custom pressure-sensitive brushes on my Wacom. But laser cutting needs zero-point strokes. No stroke. That means all your brushwork has to be converted to outlines. Okay, done.

Also, all the fancy compound shapes need to be simple, nonoverlapping outlines. So I used a lot of Pathfinder and the “Expand” function, which is basically “make a vector path that is what I’m seeing at the moment.” Very useful.

Ponoko color-codes their laser operations. Cutting is blue. Heavy raster is black-filled. Heavy vector (not cutting) is red. So my design has a lot of those three colors.

I started at around 2; I just finished at 7:30. 5 and a half hours… including shipping, it cost only $20 for 2 copies of my design! Very worth it! Here’s hoping the design worked!

Maybe if it looks super awesome I’ll make it in metal and sell it as jewelry to gamers.

Art School Confidential

flix

I just saw Art School Confidential, by locals Terry Zwigoff / Daniel Clowes. I really liked it.

You know what was awesome, is both the leads, judging from the behind-the-scenes footage, are English. They have accents when they speak; yet in the film they have very American voices. Kudos! I kind of want to watch it again now.

I am a sucker for Dan Clowes; I own a whole bunch of his comics. My favorite is “Like a Velvet Glove Cast In Iron,” which I usually describe as sort of like David Lynch. Except somehow I don’t feel like I’m humoring Clowes when I read it, unlike watching Lynch’s more impenetrable imagery.

This is why fishbots are a drag

stardate

Fishbots!

As detailed at nixiepixel, a fishbot is a AIM bot that picks two random strangers and sends them each provocative conversation openers. The strangers are connected and have a conversation, each thinking they have been contacted by the person they are talking to.

Kind of annoying. It’s bad enough when absolute strangers try to chat you, but having a bot connect an unwilling person to you kinda sucks.

On a positive note, you might be thinking, “isn’t that clever!” or “how nice, a way to connect with strangers!”

But over here in real life it usually doesn’t work that way.  Here’s an actual transcript which is pretty representative of how these chats go:

malnourishedcoho: Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental illness?
BRAIN: and is bulemia a mental illness
malnourishedcoho is now known as malnourishedcoho.
malnourishedcoho:  whos this?
BRAIN: you are a coho victim
malnourishedcoho: huh
BRAIN: anything ending with -coho is a bot
BRAIN: that randomly connects strangers on IM
malnourishedcoho: i see
malnourishedcoho: get a ffucking life idiot
BRAIN: see to me it looks like you IM’d me first
malnourishedcoho: how
BRAIN: you said:
BRAIN: malnourishedcoho: Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental illness?
BRAIN: and I responded
BRAIN: but see it was actually this coho bot
malnourishedcoho: did not
BRAIN: yes, do you understand, it’s a bot
malnourishedcoho: stop being such a loser and go do sum worth while nerd
BRAIN: you are not very smart
BRAIN: I feel sorry for you
BRAIN: but you are probably a teenager
BRAIN: with low reading comprehension