Well, I stand up next to a mountain, and I chop it down with the edge of my hand.

Some days you wake up, and you don't know that you're about to have an experience that will change the way you think forever. Then again, some days you wake up in Paris, with plans to visit the Orsay museum, and it's pretty safe to expect one of these experiences.
In the Orsay museum, there is a painting by Claude Monet named "Effet de neige à Vétheuil". It hangs in a room that I'd like to be buried in, but let's leave that for another discussion. For the point I'm making today, I was lucky enough to find an online reproduction that is clear enough to show what I mean.

So, whenever  I look at impressionist paintings, I like to first come up very close and swim in the brush strokes of a while, and only then walk back and watch them turning into shapes. If I manage to get my nose up to the canvas without being really sure what the whole painting looks like, that's my favorite thing.
This "Effet de neige à Vétheuil", when seen up close, has a grayish-green area with these happy, bold white brush strokes on top of it, and I couldn't figure out what they were. Clearly it's a snow landscape, but what are the straight-up pieces of snow?



Then, as I walk back, I realize it's a fence, and the white stripes are the snow behind it!

 

Does it look exactly how it should? Absolutely. Could I ever have thought until then that it's right to paint the background thing over the foreground thing? Hell no! Will I ever, having seen that, be that liberated in my art? Remains to be seen. Could I ever think of it all by myself the way Monet did? The inevitable answer: not in a million years.

I have managed to carry with me that lesson about how important it is to be daring and free of preconception in art. Last week I came back to it when I heard my friend and colleague Doron talk about a scene he once animated, where the character is pushing a huge boulder uphill. Knowing that in reality it's the character that moves the boulder, he first hid the boulder and put all his effort into animating the character. When it looked almost done, he brought the boulder back and tried to fit it in - it didn't work. Then he realized that the way to solve this scene was to first animate the boulder, and then to build the pushing around it.

In Hebrew there's a beautiful cynical saying: "don't let the facts confuse you". In art, when we're creating new worlds, or re-creating this world in our image, we need to first be free enough from what we know to be true.

Xam'd: Lost Memories

This pencil test sequence was just posted on Pencil Test Depot - one of my favorite blogs. One of their readers later commented that it's from the TV series "Xam'd: Lost Memories", which I will definitely be looking up.

Thought: the rough animation is so much more engaging than the ink-and-paint end result.

כתבת השבוע 2

Ganesh

Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children", tied by the time of his birth and the shape of his head to his motherland, is snotty and miserable. I, allergic to my homeland and suffering from a cold after an unexpected meeting with my birth-land, am snotty and miserable. I make a cocktail from my allergy meds and my cold meds and read on...

:מושג חדש היום בעיתון

 "מחוסרי דת"

Lady GaGa and Beyonce: "Telephone"

In this horrible decade of mediocrity that we live in, which couldn't be wished away by all the people who celebrated its end two and a half months ago, there lives a magical princess named Lady Gaga. She created her name from a Queen song - one of their later, tamer songs, not their early and truly good ones.Well, she couldn't very well call herself Lady Liar or Lady Mustapha, could she?

And while her idol Freddie Mercury was burning himself out on sex drugs and rock'n'roll, she was getting a good musical and religious education, to prepare her for her first record deal at the age of 19. And even though she had all the right role models, all she could ever write for herself were boring little pop bubbles that make a ga-ga-ga noise in your ear. Fortunately for her, she also had a real talent for design, which helped her make some great looking videos for her not-so-great songs, and made her very famous and successful indeed.

But, the princess couldn't stay in her little bubble of success; she had dreams of being Tarantino, Oliver Stone, Ridley Scott. But instead of trying to create her own Kill Bill, Natural Born Killers or Thelma and Louise, she thought it was enough to reference their aesthetics, in a nice safe way that was in no danger of making little girls run away from home and shoot people.

And so, in Lady Gaga's new video "Telephone" she's in a prison, where all the inmates are wearing her cool costumes. And she is naked in her cell, but only to disprove the rumors that she is a hermaphrodite. And she dresses like Madonna and kisses a woman, but only the one that looks most like a man. And she is released by her lover, but she is let out, she doesn't break out in an insane bloodbath. And her lover is the sexiest pop star in the world - Beyonce - but she'll never kiss her, because Beyonce does look like a woman, and besides everybody knows that she's married to a scary thug. Instead they have a weird little dialogue in which Beyonce isn't allowed to use any "cuss" words. And their car says "Pussywagon", but they probably didn't get it from the hospital rapist. And they end up in a diner, where they poison a guy - the most "female" crime of all - they most certainly don't stab or shoot or beat anyone to death. Instead, they dance. And at the end they hold hands and together decide to not jump into the Grand Canyon. After all, how can you "be continued" if you die in the end?

Perhaps if George Carlin had been among Gaga's inspirations, she would've been exposed at some point to his "It's not enough to know which notes to play, you gotta know why they need to be played", and we would've been spared this roaring rampage of regurgitation.

Project Runway drag queens episode

One of the reality shows that I'm not ashamed to admit I follow is Project Runway. And one of the best episodes they ever had was the Season 5 drag queens challenge. Now, this next sequence has a few points of interest: one, the kimono-inspired one is my favorite; two, the lady in the pink body suit is really a very attractive US-marines-style guy who is completely wasting his time dressing up as a woman, in my opinion; three: this is so much fun!

This hair...

I like getting haircuts. When my hair is too long, I lose my mind a little. But ever since I saw the Coen borthers' "The Man Who Wasn't There", every time I go to get my hair cut I remember this one scene - half way through the movie, the meditative Frank makes an observation to the simple-minded Ed. It's pretty random if you think about about hair, but completely mind-blowing when you realize he's actually talking about time, about our lives:

Ed: Frank.
Frank: Huh?
Ed: This hair.
Frank: Yeah.
Ed: You ever wonder about it?
Frank: Whuddya mean?
Ed: I don't know... How it keeps on coming. It just keeps growing.
Frank: Yeah-lucky for us, huh, pal?
Ed: No, I mean it's growing, it's part of us. And we cut it off. And we throw it away.
Frank: Come on, Eddie, you're gonna scare the kid.
Ed: ...I'm gonna take his hair and throw it out in the dirt.
Frank: What the...
Ed: I wanna mingle it with common house dirt.
Frank: What the hell are you talking about?
Ed: I don't know. Skip it.

2010 Osracrs® - Land Of Confusion

This is what happens when irresponsible people get to make big decisions - now everyone will want to see "The Hurt Locker", and  it's up to me to put out a warning. I don't know why the "members of the academy" thought it's their job to humiliate James Cameron by giving every possible prize to his ex, but the facts are these: "The Hurt Locker" is a bland, boring, uninspired little film, and everyone who's ever been near a battlefield (and I know a few of those) says that it's laughably unrealistic. Just hours of your life that would be better spent knitting a nice scarf, or even watching "Avatar", which is at least a masterpiece of technique.

While we're on the subject, let me warn you about "The Blind Side" and "Precious" as well. The only interesting thing about "The Blind Side" is that it is shamelessly racist, thinking that if it's based on actual events that makes it OK. And while "Precious" has some good acting, it can only be considered great in a universe where "The Color Purple" never happened. Luckily for us, we don't live in that universe.

So, what can we do? I suggest we try a prayer for our souls and the future of cinema:

An ethical dilemma

I never know, when recommending something - a book for example, if I should warn people that the ending is disappointing. If I warn them, the anticipation might spoil the good parts for them, or they might decide not to bother - I'm not the most convincing person in the world anyway. But, if I don't warn them, they kinda look at me in the end like I've betrayed them.

The two main works that give me this problem are Battlestar Galactica, and the Roger Zelazny's Amber books. Both amazing works of art that noone should try to do without, and both spit in your eye at the end.

כתבת השבוע 1

How to make it in America

Every time I feel depressed about how bad mainstream cinema is nowadays, I am reminded that we live in a time of great television. I know that the uninformed "Oh, I haven't owned a TV since the 80-s" snobby types think that all there is to watch nowadays is reality shows and "Lost", but they couldn't be more wrong.

The quantity of good TV shows that are currently running is really unbelievable. This new one for example is called "How to make it in America" - it just started three weeks ago, and already you can tell it's going to be something. Besides being witty and interesting and beautifully shot, it is a collaboration with a still photographer named Boogie - his amazing photos of Brooklyn and Manhattan catch your eye right from the opening credits.

"How to make it in America" is, as they like to say, from the produces of "Entourage". The difference is that, unlike "Entourage", you don't get the insufferable they did this so much better in "The Larry Sanders Show" feeling while you're watching it.
Oh, and Luis Guzmán is in it!

Boogie's website

Trailer:


Opening credits: