A Blog...of some sort
03/02/2012
Lemon Jelly - Pushy
29/01/2012
Sometimes I feel like I am spread out over the landscape and inside things and am myself living in every tree, in the clouds, in the procession of the seasons.
We moderns are faced with the neccessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit, we must experience it anew for ourselves.
It is the only way to break the spell that binds us the the cycle of biological events...
Carl Jung
09/01/2012
Leftfield - Melt
08/01/2012 - Super-duper big singy songs
Florence and the Machine
Adele
28/12/2012 - More Adele
A really nice piano version of Set Fire to the Rain by Adele...
I started to practise it myself...it's relatively straightforward, atleast the beginning. I'm sure anyone could pick it up. Then I started playing around with my Dad's Ipad over Christmas and ended up throwing some kind of a house remix together with Garageband based on the general chords and melody. I never produced any music before and although it's not very good i really enjoyed playing with the sounds. I'm no musician but it's amazing what you can do playing with some simple chords and melody.
20/12/2012 - Art is weird
In some of the mainstream and widely publicised art of today the work itself, the media surrounding it, the money created, what it is saying about society, and what society thinks about it is all strangely interconnected. You can't tell where one ends and another begins. Damien Hirst's diamond skull is a good example...
Whatever it's says about anything - consumerism, money, media, marketing/branding, life, death... it feels the sense to try and define such an object of slippery shifting definition is what gives them such fascination and makes them cultural spectacles. Often they seem purposefully obtuse so that any real meaning in the piece itself is hard to decode. They act as a bed for a cultural mind/media phenomenon which takes on it's own life.
It's like the very act of working out something's significance feeds into it's significance, or lack of it, like a quantum mechanics experiment where the observer effects the outcome of the test or an event horizon where as soon as you start to think about it you get drawn into it's black hole of meaning which you become part of.
Stopping to bother to try to work such things out seems to be the only escape. It disarms the gravitational field. Allowing a feeling of ambivalence to be unresolved.
Maybe that's part of the point.
20/12/2012 - Shapes and colours
An emotive little piece about Matisse's Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence. You get the sense that the artist is working in his own world. Not trying to challenge or subvert, innovate, be clever, or make a fortune. He's just doing what comes naturally. He plays with shapes and colours to create a feeling of connection, peace, unity and harmony.
20/12/2012 - Spaceless, timeless and such loveliness...
Loosely leading on from the feeling of connection in Mattise's work here's a scene from the film Network...
20/12/2012 - A nice video...
I did write something about atheism vs religion with this but it became rather long and waffled on and I'm sure nobody is interested in what I have to say on such matters, if anybody looks at this blog at all. I don't really expect that anyone does but it's nice just having a place to put things for myself. But that's the weird thing about the internet. People stumble across these things just through sheer numbers of users and random links through vaguely related seaches, sometimes decades after they are written. So to any strangers from distant lands reading this in 2023 after accidently finding it...hello! Anyway I don't want to clog the blog up with waffle but if you want to read my nonsense click here.
05/12/2012 - Charming animation
I started watching some old Mr Men cartoons the other day, they are so magical! Beautifully slow paced, spacious and simple...and love the music too.
05/12/2012 - It's made of paper!
The Armando Ianucci Shows - philosophical and funny...but in a kind of moving way. The episodes have overall themes where everything works toward a sense of something. I always found this particular episode special... he feels singled out in the world, kind of paranoid of being judged and people laughing at him...with a feeling that everyone else seems very sure of what they are doing and saying. But then he unravels everything and comes to peace. (parts 2 and 3 are on youtube)
05/12/2012 - Burt's lost paperclips
This is just really cute.. i love how the boy talks to him like a real person, but at the same time he's not quite sure about the situation
05/12/2012 - Ren and Stimpy
I really don't know how JohnK (the creator of Ren and Stimpy - and he's got a really interesting blog) and those guys come up with their stuff. It really shows that how things happen is much more important than what actually happens, in a generic sense...and that you only need a simple basic foundation as a general script idea and the rest is based on characterisation and ideas through visuals and audio.
A lot of the most appealing animation is very sensual and doesn't need elaborate plots. Small things are very amusing.
The total opposite - A featureless talking script
Where characterful stuff like Ren and Stimpy is mostly about the audio/visual feel, this is the total opposite, it's all about the plain words in the script...I don't think it's easy to make something as uniquely dull and zombiefied as this. It must require a lot of planning and quality control to make sure no emotion slips through. The designs are some kind of lifeless vague realism and the characters are tools to deliver a rigid script.
05/12/2012 - Visions of Frank
A strange psychedelic world
05/12/2012 - The machine knows!
The quality isn't good but here's a brilliant American office clip. I love Michael's facial expression when he is in the water, kind of shocked and stiff
05/12/2012 - Echospace - Sunset
Really nice tune...i always felt the video seemed warm and tender too