Cool vlog electrovorticism. Très sympa. Bet you’ve never seen a candyflipping videocamera before… Actually, about the possibilities of machines on drugs: instead of special effects, we could just dose our equipment and see what happens. Also reminds me of the hyper-CGI of the Transformers movies; only transformation happening on the perceptual rather than physical plane. Like I said, machines on drugs. Transformers was worse than unwatchable. It did suggest an odd horizon for Hollywood, however. A friend posted a facecomment, asking:

“Transformers 3 on sleepy cold meds feels like the craziest experimental film ever. What’s it like clear-headed?”
I replied with:
“Same, only without being interesting. Half-Zaha Hadid, half-root canal. It did make me think that the next CGI blockbuster should be completely non-representational. It’s not like the films signify anything anyway.”

Film people, has this already happened? CGI pitched up from formulae to formalism?

 

Bad day for the Scolopax Rusticola, poor thing. You just have to think about the rhythms and manners of country pastimes. How does time pass? Consider this, in a larger sense, a cross-section of centuries offered to us in under five minutes.

These three videos involve Man Made Hill, from Toronto. That’s his code name. His real one is Randy Gagne. I think. Looks like a Randy Gagne. Two are videos with Exploding Motor Car, and the other a slow jam by Randy himself. I like the vibrations, especially right now lying down in bed, with my school work done, and nothing left to do but snooze and video-dig.

 

 

 

数詞アニメ. The orders of magnitude are limitless. Japanese seems bolder than most when matching words to numbers. Wonder why. Every day that passes without knowing Japanese is a day wasted.

 

I think, by now, we can all appreciate a deep-VHS aesthetic, as found here in the video work of heartland weirdbeard David Bagsby.

 

 
This vid reflects a vogue within highschool and university sociology classes for having their students film experiments on “breaking social norms.” Check for yourself. Youtube has thousands; most being unsurprisingly bad, with all the shtick and jock-talk typical of the class-video-project genre. Some might be viewed obversely as sociological documents about teenaged conceptions of transgression, normativity, and the public sphere, but few live up to their intended principle.

The clip above is a rare gem. The more I watched; the more smitten I became by the squirmy divulgence and screen-grabbable beauty of its frames. By the thirtieth time through, I was obsessed and thought it belonged in PS1. The cafeteria scene at 2:09 is the envy of all video science/art, and unparalleled. The aggro-nerd deadpan. The Charlotte’s Web T-shirt.  The sociological crucible of the highschool cafeteria. It makes me want to explode. Fullscreen for best results.

 

 

This is but one installment from Purple Haze Goofy Grape, the family, video-collective and high watermark in the coolness of blood relations everywhere. The kids are cool. Dad is cool. And the backyard definitely seems like it is the place to be. The vids are Nickelodeon-safe, though with strong hints of soon-to-be Destroy All Monsters. Have you ever seen a better reminder of the possibilities of family as cultural unit? Dad is obviously a very inspiring and fun-loving patriarch, but the kids themselves really know how to bring the noise; their stars are rising. Watch all of their videos and subscribe, like me, and maybe they’ll even let you come over.

 

 
I appreciate high school renditions of The Classics. Not all, not most, but every once in a while, I stumble upon a batch that earnestly, or half-earnestly, attempt something like Prometheus Bound or The Bacchae, and I think I see a young genre coming down the pipes. They get me in unexpected ways. This is for one of two reasons. One, it might be that, when read verbatim, the underlying sense of the Sophoclean dialogue still shines through; making it seem all the more enduring and incorruptible as a classic.  It’s like that with me and Ode to Joy. That tune has been through Nazis, banjos, Muppets, the Boston Pops, Busch Gardens and countless commercials, and something— its “universal sense of Godhead,” maybe— still resonates. Say what you will. This might explain the tingle I get with some highschoolized classics. The other possibility is that in various ways— by the acting, by using the parental garage as the stage for King Lear, by full-on stares at the camera— we get a kind of inadvertent Verfremdung or alienation effect. This is there too. Not sure of the proportions though. Expect more on this.