An improv from the last Zipperhead rehearsal. Mostly for the archives, but enjoy if you care to watch the process of writing some new parts using video instead of a pen. I was watching Orson in Touch of Evil and I DreWrote this. Boy was he good at playing bad.
Category Archives: orson welles
Novel Ideas (The White Whale Goes to the Great White North)
Orson Whales swam up to Canada for a show at Oakville Galleries. They are projecting the video and have all the original drawings stacked in a glass vitrine like some sort of unholy relic. Last week The Whale was also featured by Flavorpill’s Daily Dose. Like the Leviathan that inspired it, this viral video refuses to die. Here’s the Video in case you’ve missed it:
In a rapidly growing world of new technology and electronically disseminated ideas, books have become endangered entities. They are old-fashioned forms in a society that feeds on convenience, archival impulses and a constant desire for instant gratification; in which information travels fast, and at the single click of a button. In this exhibition, artists create tangible forms that demonstrate the book’s practical use: to be consumed, absorbed, and eagerly explored by inquiring minds and willing hands. Books become snapshots of a specific time and place, not only in the stories they tell, but through their very bindings and typefaces, even by the distinct telltale aroma that only the most time-worn novels can possess. Here, bound pages are transformed into sculptural objects of curiosity, valued not only for their content, but for the many aesthetic possibilities of reconfigured paper and ink.
Novel Ideas explores the reincarnation of found objects and literary detritus in a collection of bookworks by eight international artists. The featured artists seemingly resist suggestions of rapid technological progression with their more rudimentary approaches to art: acts of slashing, cutting, dissecting and extraction are reductive processes that reveal the presence of newly-appropriated meaning through the very voids they create. Thus, with marks borne from blades rather than brushes, these books become more than just vessels for information and narrative fancy—they begin to exist as physical testaments to their own novel forms and ideas, questioning the way we traditionally consume the written word.
This form of consumption mirrored in each act of physical extraction made upon aging covers and delicate pages demonstrates the ease with which ideas can be manipulated to create alternate modes of visual and intellectual instruction. Classic stories and didactic texts are transformed by acts of selective cutting that leave surprising and new visual narratives. Some texts are gutted and dissected, actively questioning the limitations of scholarly authority, while other artists play directly on the novel itself as a statement piece, with works that are sculpted to reflect their titular properties. Video pieces, on the other hand, present a simultaneous contrast and union of traditional and new media.
These artistic processes recall functions of editing, erasure and censoring, all vital elements in the act of literary creation. But perhaps more importantly, they reflect a constant human need to question, appropriate, challenge and interpret. In Novel Ideas, words are consumed and ideas are released from the bounds of their covers, wholly concrete, and forming new entities unto themselves. Here, books become curious objects of beauty to behold, and a celebration of everything that exemplifies the archaic charm of ink on paper, and of pages turned and cherished.
by Gabby Agoncillo
CinemITIN
A few ideas for an e-vite for a screening and talk I’ll be doing for the Frost Bite show at 17 Frost Street on Sunday, Feb. 22, 3:00 pm. Not sure which one I’m going to run with, or I may switch it up. Opinions appreciated. Thanx.
In Imago Speramus (1,000 Bills)
Each page $100. Use the video counter. Buy in bulk for great savings!
Hanging Myself
Kodachrome Nikon Daze
the animated bunny is from Brian Raszka for The Library Project. The first image is of my archive under my house in CT where all the old days are stored… outdoors… it’s a long story… you should read the old days of the blog, etc…. anyways I made that shit to last and last they shall and fuck time and fuck space and rain and….
gee don’t I sound like king lear?
Well a house devided, etc.
Orson Whales
This is more or less a birthday gift to myself. I’ve been drawing it on every page of Moby Dick (using two books to get both sides of each page) for months. The soundtrack is built from searching “moby dick” on You Tube (I was looking for Orson’s Preacher from the the John Huston film), I couldn’t find the preacer, but you find tons of Led Zep and drummers doing Bonzo and a little Orson reading from the Novel for a failed Italian T.V. film…… makes for a nice Melville in the end.
Cinqo de Mayo I turn Forty. Ahhhhhhh the French Champagne.
Another Green World
Another vlog while I scan and scan. This remix has a lot of Goddard clips and a Brian Eno mash up. The drawing is a finish of a Carloine VK start from The Library Project. Stangely today Moby Dick came on TCM. I missed, however, Orson’s Sermon.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh The French Champagne!
People on Youtube laugh a lot at this clip, but what I noticed is that Orson is on the 102nd set up according to the slate (scene 102 take 3). Clearly they must have muscled through a lot of commercials in one day and probably a sip of wine for each take… we’re talking hundreds of sips. What’s amazing is that Orson is still coherent at all and that he still sounds so wonderful and musical. He even slips in a little Irish brogue in a la Lady from Shanghai. What he had to do for money. I guess it could be worse.
Orson Welles once said that he spent about ninety nine percent of his time in search of money and one percent actually making films. He said, it was a terrible way to spend a life and he should have stayed in the theater where it was easier to put on a show. But after getting to play with the world’s greatest toy train set, how could he go back? Saying I should’ve stayed in the theater is like saying I never should have married that girl. What good does it do? I loved her, I love her still…..but she ruined my life. What kind of a life is it, always chasing money?
Orson figures pretty heavily (no pun intended) in the Moby Dick Animations. Here are some note drawings on what I’m going to animate in the first part of the week.
