I’d been thinking of animating the saddest little tree in Brooklyn… maybe with music, maybe with color… but when I saw this little tree in Chinatown today…well it seemed as good a place as any to start… particularly as it feels like spring today and we are all reborn in the new year. You’ll find some music to go along down below…

This is a hunk of wood I’m playing with…I think I’ll keep changing it and post future variations… not everything has to move. below is earlier, above is later. The idea being to let time talk in space, or spatial relations.

Walking through the Brooklyn Museum today, I came upon a bunch of reliefs with cuniform across the bodies… it caught my eyes for obvious reasons. Turned out they were Assyrian from a town not far from Baghdad. It was impossible to look at them without thinking about the looting of Iraqi museums. Talk about dropping the ball… or something that won’t bounce, like a rock.

This is almost a rough draft. I have this idea for stripes of texture and pattern to sing along with a melodic line, but there’s so many variables to keep track of…. hopefully these bass lines give the basic idea. Anyway, it brings us back to the ground where some young lady walked up to me and asked, “Are you actually filming the sidewalk?” I nodded my head and she looked at me like I was a completely insane… after tryig to get this to work, I maybe agree.

Still, I like that it looks like a cross section of tectonic earth or human skin.

Here’s another idea for a music animation…. ends up looking like a Pollock almost. I don’t want to beat the music metaphor to death, but seeing these sad chestnuts up in the winter wind, just cried out as musical notation…. and it continues the suspended in air theme.

I was thinking of a synthesis of the crosswalk and the helicopter when I walked up the street and saw these shoes twisting in the wind. Seemed like an apt metaphor for my state of mind. For several years I’ve felt like I’ve seen the path before me. No doubt this was an illusion, but a comforting one. Now I don’t know where to turn. Anyway, this might look nice with the layered Monk moment on the right side quicktime below.