Monday, March 2nd, 2009
The body. Can the body disobey? This is the film I made for my thesis about a lot of things, but in particular, it speaks through art, music and poetry about how the body is interpreted, and hideously misinterpreted, by Western culture. 33 min.
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
This is about what happened to push us as a culture, so far from our bodies.
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
This comes close to what I saw when I wrote the words. They’re an incantation that gained power once they were melded with color, water and the Asian baby in the sink. I was born in Japan and I can’t think about childhood without seeing Japanese. I’ve looked at my birth certificate since I was a kid, so the blue footprints are probably a glyph for my father. There’s cruelty in that finger pressing hard onto delicate foot. I think the film is about human frailty. The whore is the baby as an adult, still fragile behind her fierce demeanor.
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
This was written when I was thinking about cannibalism and sex, and love, which at that time was different, and I wanted to devour and be devoured by someone, metaphorically, I guess. The blues… it’s sexy and it rolls like a woman’s hips. This was an early film, with one layer each of images and song.
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
This is a rant I wrote when I was thinking about body mechanization. I was also thinking about the startling, freeing realization that, “it’s all made up.†Religion, law, gender, opinion, bias. All made up. But what about the body? Is that made up? My Goddard friend Al told me a million people can look at something and perceive it a million different ways. So I was suddenly and theoretically free of trying to please a majority, since they don’t exist. I was also thinking about the crazy shit fundamentalists believe, and if they can spout nonsense, so can I, because it’s all made up.
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
This is an intro made from old home movie clips and video I shot at the flea market.
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
This started as a pissed off rant I wrote after a crappy relationship, but it turned into an exercise in repetitive sound. The moving light on top of texture and the windchime sounds are from my old back porch.
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
This is about dissociation and duality, with some vintage porn, and shots from Carlisle, where I live now. The voiceovers are sermons and other. Cicadas are so percussive and tense, and they sort of hold a place for nature in the film.
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
This is a short part of a longer film, with a fast drive through my neighborhood, some old home movies and video I found that was shot out a subway window.
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
I can’t overemphasize the power of seeing ones words as flesh.
I was getting medical tests, which all came out fine, but I was nervous about outcomes, and then I got pulled over twice in two weeks by the police for minor infractions. Life felt uncertain, and the tests made me mistrust my body for keeping me out of the loop.
I show hands a lot. I think they’re warding off.
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
I like tunnels. I guess its symbolism is obvious, but I’d like to do a film that’s nothing but that weird tunnel green light effect, on-off, on off, the scary cracks and dripping walls, and visceral claustrophobia. The dog belonged to a friend, but the other animals are from stranger’s old home movies I copied onto video.
Monday, February 25th, 2008
Very preliminary – just the structure so far.
Monday, February 25th, 2008
My take on disobedient bodies. I’ve been looking at a website called Heaven666.com,. It has lots of disturbing, freaky body and sex stuff and some of the most heinous body modifications I’ve seen. Did you know some people slice their penises into vertical slices until they have a penis that resembles a starfish? Some people are idiots.
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
“I cause her flesh to be born beneath my caress.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
This was an early video based on a poem I wrote about love, but sideways, so I couldn’t be accused of writing a cliche. The music is by Cinematic Orchestra.
Friday, July 13th, 2007
This is an early one. I wanted to boil down the most important components of embodiment theory. The tenets. I wanted to memorize them. Grapple and wrestle with them. I was still trying to understand, so I wrote them into a kind-of-poem. An incantation.
I was collecting vintage porn that didn’t look too posed. I liked models smoking between shots, and awkward women with honest faces. I was also learning the Ken Burns Effect, of panning across images slowly.
our skin divides us from the world. the world mediates our vision of our bodies. perception is embedded in the body. metaphor is rooted in perception. modernity manipulates the body. boundaries shift between physical and mechanical. we live each day with hybrids of men and machine. beauty is seen as morally right. an out of control body is grounds for social exclusion. the body has become a project. we work and then consume, work and then consume. in a cycle to make our bodies perfect. beauty is the body’s physical capital. appearance equals social acceptance. a youthful body is the dominant ideal. the more we transmogrify our bodies with surgery and scar the less we know what our bodies are. we are all so far from our bodies. we are all so far from our bodies. the womb is the way in. the womb is memory turned back to nature. god is the body. god is in the body. the body is god. god is in the body. god is the body. the body is god. the womb is the way in. the body is the way in. the body is god.
Tuesday, June 26th, 2007
A party at our friend Dave’s house along the river, Summer 2007.
Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
I had a little thought yesterday about contemporary Japanese art and design. I think most anime art is unwholesomely icky:
…and Japanese corporate design is ugly:
…but traditional Japanese art is often gorgeous, subtle and strong and one of my major influences. On a quick search, I found this odd Japanese woodblock of pregnant women:
And this one:
…and they’re both so much more subtle than what I see lately from Japan. That’s all. I just thought it was weird
Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
I searched for “Ken Burns,” on YouTube, because I wanted to see some of his stuff, and instead, I found, “The Old Negro Space Program,” which I think is funny as hell.
To back up a little, Ken Burns directed the ten hour Civil War documentary ages ago, and it consisted of lots of still images, panned over slowly, accompanied by voiceovers and music.
I want to incorporate something similar for all the still images I’ve been collecting.
I have tons of netsukes and octopus porn that I want to use, and now I’m collecting retro porn like this:
and this:
I’m also collecting anatomical illustrations like this:
…and I want to combine them.
I’m also thinking about going funny with all this, like the Old Negro Space Program.
This all hinges on my learning Adobe Premiere, which has a huge learning curve, or maybe my attention span is just shorter than it used to be, but I am making progress, and I think it’ll be my video tool of choice once I figure out more of its quirks.
Monday, June 18th, 2007
I created some videos, and they were, admittedly, experiments. I started with crappy Ulead Video Studio, the only program that worked on my old laptop, and it was hard to learn because it kept crashing, and because I didn’t know the basics of video software or video terms, like Set In, Set Out, Pan and Ken Burns Effect. Just when I was semi-conversant with Video Studio, I got the new computer and switched to Adobe Premiere Elements, which is more versatile and elegant, but also pickier and more challenging. Just when that was a little comfortable, I started running into its limitations, so last week I switched to Adobe Premiere Pro, which is, I guess, the design industry standard, if not the film industry standard, but it’s dense, complicated and unfriendly, and none of the videos I made in the previous programs came along because they aren’t backward compatible (and because Adobe sucks) so I’m leaving trails of unfinished video, which okay, wasn’t great, but wasn’t worthless either. Sigh. Argh. Fuck. So now I have slightly better video skills, but I still feel clueless, and I want to CREATE, with that smooth collaboration of computer and mind that happens when you know a piece of software. After years and years of using it, I know the image-editing program Fireworks inside out, so there’s no gap between my vision and what happens on the screen. Video feels like changing tires or brain surgery because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, and that’s always uncomfortable and frustrating.
Check out my tons of new MySpace friends!!!