Saturday, September 30, 2006



There is some great stuff at fantasticanimation blog... Andrey Khrzhanovskiy's The Glass Harmonica, above, and Christy Karacas' Space War, up top... mixed in with some really gnarly icky stuff I don't care for ... plus Richard Sala, whom I just don't get.

As a bonus, there's an animated Bosch painting. Do you really want to to see an Hieronymous Bosch painting get all animated? Think about it for a second. Bosch. In motion. With a Buckethead soundtrack.

I think Bosch would have done a similar job himself, frankly. He may even have worked with Buckethead. Really makes a person want to avoid hell, if you ask me.




All I want for Christmas is my own ATOMIUM!

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More pics!

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Thanks boingboing!

Friday, September 29, 2006

Jossie Malis' Zumbakamera, the love child of traditional shadow puppets and Czech mushroom-inspired animation, was profiled at Drawn a while back. And I didn't even notice, at the time.

Which goes to show why you have to read Drawn every day.



And pay attention to those links! You could miss something!!
I must clean my monitor now, having sprayed my cheap wine all over it after viewing the scribbled marvels of Thomas Herpich, whom I had never heard of before.

One of those sites that makes you want to grab a crayon and a paper bag, ANYTHING!... and start drawing.

No?!

From an old post at Drawn that I stumbled across...

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Well I just saw Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep; and my opinion is that it is not a movie for everybody.

I loved it, mostly, because it is very dismissive of boundaries between the real and the imagined; and for the schizophrenic in all of us, this idea is very romantic. It also suffers from arrested development, proposing that being 12 years old is the only time when one truly sees life as it really is. Or, as Gondry put it on his DVD collection, I've Been 12 Forever. This is a good thing?!

However, being 12, and schizophrenic, and really whimsical, and living in Paris next door to Charlotte Gainsbourg, is not a bad way to spend an evening... so I encourage both of you readers to pony up and go see it.

Sunday, September 24, 2006

I don't even know what's going on here, but it looks really marvellous.

I want to see the insect puppet movie, because there is no such thing as a bad stop-action bug movie.

Thanks to fousdanim!

Friday, September 22, 2006

The Brothers Chaps are always rich, and thick, and chocolatey, but they have outdone themselves with their 10-year-anniversary remix of their original lame children's book.

The potential outpouring of spectacularity was clear from page one of this Macpaint masterpiece, and the gold-standard Flash juggernaut they have become is palpable in every 10-year-old image.

Be proud, Bros Chaps!!!
Presidential Doodles is a book about doodles wot our Presidents have doodled.

Is this from WFMU blog? Of course it is!

I honestly don't want to make anybody feel bad.

Just 'cause I got my own Doop action figure from eBay for wicked cheap... there are still plenty out there.

As Cheap Trick always said: just Reach Out and Take It!

You know you want to.
TV on the Radio's latest is the best recording I have heard in a whole bunch of minutes.

I'm too old to figure out if they're considered cool, or totally last year, or wotever.

I always liked 'em before, and their new release is their bestest ever. I think you should get it.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

This is a godsend for anybody like myself who gets completely lost in Tarkovsky's The Mirror and enjoys being lost, yet sort of wishes he knew what just happened when the end credits roll.

It is a strange and incredibly beautiful film that just doesn't make any sense.

I've seen it 3 or 4 times now and I finally despaired of "getting" the plot, when an IMDB forum saved the day.




So, in summary: if you are confused by Zerkalo then check this out.

If you are not confused by Zerkalo, then you need to go see Zerkalo,
then feel confused, and then go here.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Sure, my homie Damon has a totally buff star wars movie on YouTube, but you should still send him money for your own personal copy.

It will make you remember why George should not be allowed to make star wars movies, only Damon.

Plus, for cryin out loud, he has an interview with Warren Demontague. Yes, him.

The original chocolate cake with eyes!

I love leafing through Dan Krall's scribblings. He's smart, funny, and draws like some kind of liger... by which I mean a terrifying hybrid of two of my favorite artists when I was 15: Saul Steinberg and Jack Davis.
Secret Fun Spot just kills me. Like your friend who is always up to something pointless, labor-intensive, and quixotically marvellous. All secret fun spots should be this good.

Saturday, September 16, 2006



New Orleans will never die, kids.... cause there's tons of Miss Pussycat's puppets on YouTube !!!

O Glory! I love these guys!!!

I was pleased to come up with something I'd never seen before, just from doing a YouTube search on "Joel Trussell," whom you remember from his mind-crushingly splendid War Photographer movie.

Yow!!

Plus, check out The Miser from Jonathan Klassen, the Eye for Annai guy.

Cymatics (Wave Phenomena)
Resonance Effect
Acoustic Levitation Chamber

WFMU blog. How many times must I thank thee???
My pop-up blocker has been rampaging for about 2 months, blocking everything that isn't, say, a Word document. So I was forced to apply for a job without getting the details of the job, cause my PC thought it was a pop-up. I tried to get some weather... weather forecasts are also cannon fodder for the crazed pop-up sniper on my rooftop, cackling and shooting everything that moves.

I finally got serious about fixing the bloody thing when it wouldn't let me poke around the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra site. This means war!!

If you haven't seen this infuriatingly funny 2001 classic, go watch it tonite with someone you love. I love good (as in "wicked stupid, yet ingenious") comedy writing, and now that I've officially given up on the Super Troopers guys, and SNL, and have to wait to see if the new Greg the Bunny is as goofy and marvelous as the original, my milk money (as in laugh-til-milk-comes-out-my-nose money) is on Larry Blamire's next project!

Plus, obviously, Battle Beyond Belief.

Friday, September 15, 2006

I have never seen this show Squidbillies. Which is hardly shocking, seeing as I stopped watching TV in about 1986.

Ben Prisk's backgrounds are perfection tho... messy, goofy, beautiful. Is the show any good? Anybody?

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

What to do with all those great character ideas you have... and all those maxi-pads? That's easy! Do what French people do!!!

Magical Le Dernier Cri. They are miles ahead!

This is a bit of a stretch for my tastes, but I like the way Codehunters doesn't look like run-of-the-mill CG animation. They shoot for a mix of the Kill Bill animation, Tank Girl, and a little Miyazaki, and I think they did just fine.






Comes out a little too serious/narcissistic/self-important for me, but what the heck.. don't cost you nothing to go look at it, does it?

Thank, or blame, Drawn for this one.

..
Further proof that the world is getting better every day: you can now get 5 DVDs of sci-fi serials for a fistful of dollars. If you are a fan of unhinged, exciting, imaginative drama from the days before clichés were invented, this is your collection.

God knows where, though... I found this used in Boston; it's hard to track down online, unless you're in the UK or something, but worth the chase.



Gene Autry battles the robots from the center of the ever-lovin Earth, in 1935, and you are there!!!

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Usually, I say lounge music is like a beautiful woman: one man's treasure is another man's "barf bag."

And yet, strangely, I have to agree with Xtabay that this may be the best lounge recording ever committed to vinyl.

Try it, and hear for yourself.
The Kirby Museum is not as much fun as the Kirby monster blog*, but it is bigger and has zillions of Kirbescent particles floating around.

More Kirby, by the way, is better.









*handy-dandy link is available in the lefthand column in this blog, whenever you need it!
Very excited about the new boxing movie...
Rocky Took A Lover is probably the best work Sylvester Stallone has done since... oh wait, this is something else. My apologies.

For anyone else counting the days until Studio AKA makes some sort of spooky, delirious followup to Jojo in the Stars... please succour yourself with this! Worth watching if only for the constellation-people strolling about. Wow!

God bless hydrocephalicbunny. Still mackin'!!!

I am always raving about free stuff on the web. There is an amazing amount of stuff wot is better than anything I could get my hands on growing up in the 80s, that is now to be had for free... if you know where to look. It's sort of the raison d'être for the AFATECS blog, really (since I so seldom work on my own comic).

It is with great fanfare, then, that I allow that I blew some money on something. Just got vols 1&2 of Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier, and I would gladly buy it all over again. This guy kills me with his writing, and sends me completely with his updated-1940s-style art. Truly a comix powerhouse.

As is usual for my comix recommendations, this is not hot-off-the-press (it's from 2004). I never really go into comix stores, so I'm out of the loop. But if I have somehow found out about M. Cooke before you, please go drop a couple bucks at Amazon and start reading. Really top-drawer material!

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Got a camera, some talented chums, and a mess of flashlights? Then you can make the Pikapika Lightning Doodle Movie. It's that easy.

Tochka looks a barrel of Japanese snow monkeys if you ask me. My kind of folks.

Thanks fousdanim people!
Forget everything else I said - - watch this thing instead: Minuscule from Futurikon...

What a masterpiece! I'll take timing and foley work like this over dialogue, any day.

Check out the post at cartoon brew for more tasty info.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

bens room

My daughter was asking, so I put this together: this is what my room looked like in 1974. Except the Star Wars stuff, which must have been later. OK, 1978.

(You have to click on it to engorge it. It looks less crappy engorged. [No... no, actually it doesn't.])

There are dreams there, too, of the trap door to a tiny house where I could get away from my parents. And of me, floating at the treetops. That's how I remember my room.

If anything looks familiar, please note this time portal to the early 80s and let me know what works for y'all.

Plus, check the wikipedia entry on Creature Double Feature.

Umm, please?

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Spent much time around real hippies? I have... it gets old.

Still, some of these grooved-out geezers have interesting ideas left over from whenever they were still functional. Like Obi-Wan's eerie imitation of a Sand Person.

This here collection of homemade instruments is a good example: looks like fun, don't it?

Do me a favor, tho, and don't go tuning in or dropping out or whatever. Just make more instruments!