hub – IT IN Place

Cali Asi NIsi Masa

alex — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 11:26:29 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally doing the telling of the taling of asi in cali that blake whitman shot for me at the Disposable film festival

Sometimes it takes me four years to sit on a thing

may take a year to finish the egg now that it’s hatching.

Fin Again

alex — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:48:09 +0000

Fin Again from Alex Itin on Vimeo.

Another mundane epic.

Artist's Wanted

alex — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:49:54 +0000

I am the son of an abstract painter and graphic designer from Basel, Switzerland and an actress/fiber artist teacher from Long Island. I have always felt that I have one foot in the old world and one in the new. In some very real way my work and life have been an attempt to make a synthesis of the dialectic that is my parents both as people and artists.

I made my first film in the fifth grade and won several national festival awards by high school. I had planned on going to NYU film school, or something when I accidentally discovered writing (a perverse combination of screenplays, Paris, and Hemmingway by way of High School English).. Writing seemed so much cheaper than film and you didn’t have to get all messed up with actors. I spent the better part of five years trying to finish my first novel, “Heroes.” Those characters still live on in some of my projects (though the novel never did get published).

At Brown U., I started to feel that writing was removing my brain from my body and when I started to paint, I fell in love with it, .even though it was a thing my father had quit quite dramatically in my youth. For me, Painting seemed to live between the act of writing and the act of filmmaking and maybe even the act of acting, or at least dancing. It seemed like neutral territory… like Switzerland.

I have spent the better part of the new century trying to make these phases of my life into something of a coherent artistic practice… a new sort of multimedia authorship. I mean to say I want to tell stories. I have managed to get several great platforms in which to experiment: It In Space So Ho, IT IN place (A.I.R at the Institute for the Future of the Book), A.I.R. 17 Frost Street Space. But after spring I am homeless. My dog died, my woman threw me out. It sounds like a joke, or a country song, but

Paris Underground Skin

alex — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:48:05 +0000

First two collages made with U U at Café Sauvignon on the left bank. We were tearing up maps and The Little Prince.

Penser

alex — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:03:21 +0000

I have my manuscripts ready for Hub and Zipper and I’ll have plenty of time to think of you, me, and everyone and everything we know… which ain’t much, but it will simply have to do. The festival is in the middle of Les Halles, the famous market area of Paris that is now a mall, or something. Anyway a place I never spent any time and right near the Louvre. I still can’t believe I’m going to Paris. Lucky fucking me. I’m bringing two copies of Le Petit Prince.

Humpty Dumpty

alex — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:19:34 +0000

Fridge Doors going up to form The Endless Last Supper… two left to finish in the puzzle… Something like Stone Hendge and I hung a large crowd and lost my balance on the irregular floor and had a great fall. It was like something out of a silent movie, or a cartoon. It felt like I hung in the air for a minute… disbelieving in gravity. Video Coming

Pages From France

alex — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:46:29 +0000

Pages 114-115 from Remyyy on Vimeo.
Remyyy made this charming video as a Christmas present for his cousin. It seems to fit nicely with some of the imagery I’ve been playing with in HUB and it’s so nice that it comes to me from my favorite resident of France.

Frost Bite That Chicken

alex — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 05:03:19 +0000

Here is the updates from Friday’s Frost Space time lapses mixed with a Mingus song by way of Dylan’s old satellite radio show. Eat that chicken yes! Also some motion graphics made by a student of Golan Levin. The Eater is eating all sorts of heads I made over the years that they got off Flickr. I find this one thematically appropriate to the the first course of Frost Street… Food from the fridge… or whatever it is: Revenge Served Cold? Also a dead white pigeon I saw under the BQE on the way to the studio. Looked like an angel, or a Nationalist Seal….

Frost Bite Bit

alex — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:00:15 +0000

Second day at Frost Street was mostly about moving some of my older work from home and storage… it was fairly comical and thanks be to Major Tom for his hatch back and strong back and so a lot of things I haven’t seen for a couple of years came out of cold storage… like all my old fridge doors. I can’t resist showing the fridges in a place called frost… and the frigid air, etc. They look good and match perfectly with the new ones. When I went outside, the sky was full of “chemtrails”, or contrails, or whatever. It looked positively surreal.

Screetch

alex — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:54:39 +0000

Study after the death of Stanley Kubrick. Idea for installation at Frost Street.

New New York Correspondence School

alex — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 21:19:03 +0000

This is some mail art I got these last couple of weeks from my friend Chuck Sasson at the New New York Correspondence School. I fell on his mail art Fluxus fun while doing the Library Project. He works at my local wine store and it’s nice to run into him and find that he’s been reading the blog and then find some of his mail art in the letter box…in some way I think these works are his response to some of my recent stories, etc. Anyway I can’t seem to make anything I want to show anyone and I’m sort of saving up my mojo to go into Frost Street starting Monday and knock up some large dogs and dead ducks, etc.

Map of The World

alex — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:47:23 +0000

Much of my plotting and planing on Hub seems to relate to this map my father drew. To understand it, watch this. My mom dug it up for me and I thought I’d share it with you.

Thinking of Airplanes

alex — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 17:21:51 +0000

I spent a lot of time last night watching Bergman films and thinking about a visual sequence for the first hub story. I think of this first story as a small test beta to see if it is worth doing the whole hub memoir in Sophie. It has to do with flying and landing and the little bar that I went to in Paris that seemed like the center of things and was called hub and gave me the title. So maybe this first story is like a title page… or title sequence… or preface, or preamble, or something. I would pause the film (Smiles on a Summer Night) and story board a few frames and then press play, etc. I am imagining the visuals based off an old gif animation I did two years ago. It popped into my head after I watched the video below. I think my sequence could really take advantage of the layering possibilities in a Sophie book. We’ll see.

Flying from Sam Fuller on Vimeo.

Walking on Carousel

alex — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:31:27 +0000

A new Paris painting and an old Coney Island video (now in HD).

Rim

alex — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:54:40 +0000

I’ve finished the first four spokes and the hub of the wheel. Now I am working on all the periphery stories: the rim? Of Hub…. goes well. I think it’s a nice idea to sit on a story for a decade… you get a good sense of what matters and what doesn’t. Here is a video from about two years ago. I thought I’d upload it again, now that I know how to make it look good.

Other Green Worlds

alex — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:04:16 +0000

When I came back from Paris in 1998, I brought with me a stack of drawings and paintings and two gifts for Sylvie; an antique green glass fishing net float and and an antique green boule ball. I told her they were new green worlds, but of course they were also a joke about potency and my balls. She said to me, “You go to Paris and bring me back green balls? Why couldn’t you have gotten me a hand bag?” It’s just like a woman. You offer her a metaphor for your manhood and she demands a metaphor for the womb. You can’t win. But it’s fall again and the Osage oranges are falling in the park. I saw them yesterday on a long run, but everything had been smashed by a mower, or malevolent children. I ran back this afternoon on way to the vet for more dog drugs. I could only find two and it put me in mind of Paris.

Math Homework

alex — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:38:19 +0000

Draw a circle.

I found this sheet of math equations in the street while walking the dog around the block. It reminded me that later drafts of my “frist novel” were titled: To Walk A Circle. It was more or less about walking around all those etoilles they have in Paris that get you so lost sometimes and there is no grid by which to dead reckon your way home. Instead you go from L’Opera and walk for thirty minutes and somehow end up exatly again at L’Opera. Last time I was in Paris, I had one entire foot (my gimpy right one) turn into an enormous blister… the whole foot, one blister. For the next week I hobbled around Paris like Ratso Rizzo: Je promenne ICI! I thought it was a grand metaphor for life. Now it sounds a little pretentious, but it does explain Arc Along the Watchtower as a title too.

Paris Pairs

alex — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:03:50 +0000

Yesterday, I think I mentioned, that I’ve started greeting the day by trying to write prose accounts of my Paris Hub stories. These are little tales of manic madness and mad men of Paris I’ve been letting leak out in drips and drams of distilled essence for the last ten years. Oddly enough an e-mail for a contest to win a free trip to Paris showed up in my Inbox right after I hit save on the first installment (the Hub itself). I won’t give you the details of the contest, as frankly you’d be competition, but it seemed rather magical… several people forwarded it to me as well and I had to thank them but explain that I’d entered moments after the announcement. The first time I ever got to live in Paris was with my folks for a month. We’d gone out to taste Indian food in Greenwich Village for the first time. It was an odd and mysterious cuisine to my suburban sixteen year old palette. At the end of the meal I announced that we should go to Paris (both my older brothers were in college, so for the first time I had them to myself and thought we should make a sort of party of it). With two kids in college, it was probably not a good time for them to take a vacation… who could afford it? In a strange coincidance; the next morning a family friend called offering us to trade houses with the minister of the American Cathedral of Paris for a month in the summer. We got to live on the Avenue George V. Omens Oh man. Sometimes they work.