Obsolete Formats

We've been printing many of my films in 35mm this last month, for archival reasons, and checking the prints at the Fotokem lab in Burbank, in a screening room.

I'm always uncomfortable looking at my own work, but when I saw these prints at Fotokem I was shaken up a bit. Film looks SO GOOD, so totally different from any dvd or digital format. Geez! Animation! Cels! But only a handful of specialty labs are even printing film now, and in the years ahead all the studio releases will be coming out as digital only. (2014 already declared by studios as no film releases anywhere.) So if you have film negs think about printing them now.

Although my cartoon "Quasi at the Quackadero" was put on the National Film Registry list of films worthy of preservation, the list comes with no perks as to preservation (or even a piece of paper to frame and put on the wall!) In fact even the link to the pdf which came to me as official notification was a broken link!
Government.

Film is the latest obsolete format. wow! The world is becoming so damn virtual.

I've often wondered if the monster magnet from outer space really appeared what would happen to our collective culture? Then the Republican candidate I find most unappealing, (though it's hard to narrow that group down),Newt G, mentioned this in some recent debate as a real threat.

I'm going to write about my own computer history. I poured so much energy and YEARS into Flash, and before that into some other formats that also scream obsolete format.

Stay tuned.

For a Laugh

After I posted this little cult outfit on Facebook I tried to find the original storyboards for the animated/live action feature which I wrote in 1982. It seemed all that was left were some beat up xeroxes, but after I'd scanned a bunch of them I found the original four volumes of pictures.

I've popped them into a little presentation which is on line here. A few of the storyboard pages were in full page comic strip format so when I separated the individual panels I had to blow up the images quite a bit.

Let me know if it's hard to navigate- I was feeling a bit lazy when I put it together. It's just the first act or so but there's some funny stuff going on.

Peach and Blessing

I've decided, reluctantly, to find new homes for my birds, and it hasn't been an easy decision. First I posted on a pigeon forum, and got some weird responses there, none of which really worked out.

So I took the craigslist step. The first week, just offering the least desirable set of birds, I got a flurry of emails from a guy who could barely spell and didn't seem to know where Hollywood was, much less Northridge. When I suggested a specific place and time to meet up he panicked, "not so fast!". Like we were going on a date or something.

So I waited a week and posted today. Here's one of the responses:

HELLO ! IS BIRDS STILL AVALIABLE ? I CAN PICK UP TOMMOROW MORNING & OFFER YOUR CHOICE SODAS THESE FOR MY RETIRE DAD HE HAD BIG AVAIRY IN BACK YARD IF STILL AVALIBLE PLEASE CALL 714-***-**** CELL. THANK MUCH.

PEACH & BLESSING

BENNY


the soda part really stopped me. But sounds like a nice guy and I wish him much peach.
another one:

hi
call me at
818
***-****
t-u
Yair

that one was formatted at extreme right of email in tiny letters. Anyway, later today a woman contacted me and I could hear birds in the background. She said birds are her hobby and she would possibly take them all. She's going to contact me tonight or tomorrow. She sounded really nice.

Let's (Not) Have Lunch

I was a tag along yesterday for a miserable lunch. Ever meet somebody who just spews creepy stories? This older British gal next to me claimed the aisle seat in a booth because :

• she might have spasms and will frighten everyone (because her hip surgery wasn't quite right.)
• told how she'd been on a run away horse with her daughter beside her and their stirrups got twisted together right before they came to a fence.
• told how another runaway horse threw her and she broke two vertebrae. (All these horses she owned.)
  
• told all about her husband's experimental stem cell cancer treatment as they drained and refilled his body. (he was in the booth too.)
  
• told how she and two other realtors got locked into a house by accident the day before and the other two realtors had accidents.
• warned us that in Italy people come up behind you and slit your throat to get your wallet. (we're going there in two months.)
  
• told how her disabled son liked to take his pants off in Harrod's and scream.
• told me how and what to put in the decoy purse I had to carry in Italy for the pickpockets.
• covered her ears at possibility of a dirty word as part of her story.

When the waitress came to ask how everything was, (after three out of our four had already sent back their fish and chips for being ice cold), I said "It's awful, it's terrible, it tastes like it was cooked last week and reheated many times." "Would you like a box for that?" the waitress asked.

I never complain about food at restaurants, only when I get home.

Today Dinah's horse had to have emergency colic surgery, and we couldn't locate Dinah. Major awful, but her horse came through it okay. Major awful.

My mother is still living on the S.S. Dementia. Today she said, "They can't decide whether this boat should go across the river or to Paris and back."

She said, "I like disciplined straight lines for everyday living, not for creative things, but for everyday living."

I told her I was going to visit her in about a month. She said, "Are you going to leave the baby in the nursery?"

Cold Case Carnival

Hey, what's in that tent?



I'm back on the track of taking my German Shepherd Molly to Lake Balboa every morning at dawn. I thought the big news this morning was that the pelicans were back-- I saw 10 landing-- but then turning down a side road I came upon this amazing carnival set for Cold Case. They're filming tomorrow and Monday so they have to keep the sets up and I guarantee they'll have a rough time this weekend convincing people that it's not a circus and it's not a carnival.

The pleasant(ly plump) security guy told me I couldn't have a walk around even though it wasn't filming till next day. I understood. Just wish he didn't have that tattoo of his name crawling up the side of his neck. Freaks to the left of me, freaks to the right of me.

Money Fish!

credit Won Park

I spent a couple of hours going through (and editing) old bookmarks and came upon all sorts of nifty things. This koi fish is made of a dollar bill folded into its glorious shape. I came upon it at the terrific illustration site drawn.ca You may have other ideas of things to do with a spare dollar.

The artist is Won Park, and he even offers a video on how to make your own money fish.

Another interesting site is doing strange things with animated faces.

Oh and here's a gloriously peculiar product you may have heard of but I would have thought it was just a weird dream: It's a doughnut smelling wrist relaxer/stress reliever.

Could you really sit at a desk all day and not have to make a sudden run for the doughnut shop?

And don't forget a site devoted to Laff in the Dark rides. Got any favorite weird sites to share?

Namowal's "I'm So Tired"

Fellow artist Namowal has just completed her first Flash animated musical piece and it is stunning!!

It's a song I never thought about much but here it takes on a mystery and beauty-- love the way the spiral movements echo the clock's movements, the way it captures the beat and the obsessive feeling, the refined and elegant while also charming animation of the girl and the phone. I think the teapot section is my favorite. The backgrounds work well to add depth while keeping focus on what's animating.

It's not easy to use Flash tweens so smoothly and effectively and for emotional effect too. Great work, Namowal. And a brilliant ending too, with such innovation and yet feels just right.

Truly amazing that this is your first drawn animated work as it is quite masterly. I hope some new form of animation will open up so your talent can be more widely seen.

You can read more about it at her blog here.

Mushroom as Big as the Ritz

We retraced our hike from yesterday and here's the giant puffball mushroom. In my mushroom book it says a specimen like this one can contain 3 trillion spores. Take that, stimulus package!

It also said it's choice edible if the flesh is white, but we decided to leave it there. Added fun: we haven't seen any bear trace since we've been back, but today we saw a load of pitch black bear poo nearly as big as this mushroom, right on the path we'd walked yesterday. Knowing not all of you like those pictures, I left the camera in my backpack for that one.

Forget Swine- the new BAD is Pine!

When I was in Florida I was troubled by a persistent bitter taste in my mouth, stronger than anything I could eat. It worried me enough to google it on the computer in the exercise room. I decided it must be psychological, you know, a bitter thing to swallow being there for the memorial service. Dr. Sally at your service.

Then two days ago it started again. Creepy. This time when I googled it I discovered there are hundreds of people going through the same thing this month, and they say it's caused by Trader Joe's pine nuts. According to the posts I've been reading, it strikes about 24 hours after eating pine nuts, and can last a day to several weeks! Not everyone who eats the nuts gets the bitter bad, and it has no other related symptom. We had pesto two nights ago.

Here's a typical post.

Here are some twitter tweets:

Official name for pine-nuts-make-everything-I-eat-taste-bitter-for-weeks: Pine Flu. Feel free to panic. Bloggers everywhere are getting it!

The pine nuts on Flat Belly Diet make everything else I eat taste bitter and metallic. Didn't know this was a side effect of pine nuts!

The bitter metallic taste that i've had for the last 3 days apparently is caused by the ridiculous amount of pine nuts I ingested.

On and on like that. It's even in wikipedia now. They aren't even from China! They're "product of Korea, Russia or Vietnam."

Looking for my Missing Cult

whew, hope I don't pick up that telephone when it rings! Might be Werner Erhard!

This self portrait was taken in a motel room in Sarasota Florida at a very far out film "festival" around 1981. A wealthy young guy invited a small group of artist filmmakers to come to his motel for a goofy get together. Films were projected on a raft on the gulf. We were all supposed to get along, as Rodney King might have said.

It was awkward, it was fun, it was weird. It was all paid for by the host. Southwest Florida at that time was a very sleepy place, strictly seniors and locals and miniature golf. 16mm films. SERIOUS artistes in a silly place. Films you'd watch and try not to look back at the projector to see how much more was still on the reel.

San Francisco in the 70's

The 1970's in San Francisco really was an odd decade, though I didn't see it as a signifigant decade at the time.

When you think that not only on the world stage was there Patty Hearst and the SLA but also all the people who went down to South America with Jim Jones and drank the killer Kool Aid, and the Zebra murders and Harvey Milk and then there was Werner Ehrhard, the creepy guy pictured above who formed a personality transformation cult called EST.. His followers got to clean his big Victorian house. I admit they look like they're all happy in the picture.

This former car salesman, Werner Ehrhard, was very popular at Snazelle Films, where I was working. Even my boss signed up with him. Suddenly weird little mottos were appearing on other people's desktops, sayings of Werner Ehrhard. I remember there was one woman especially devoted whose name was Cyndra Ravelle. She wore dresses unbuttoned almost to her waist . Bet she didn't have to clean the bathrooms. There was definitely a feeling of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" to the whole thing.

Ehrhard still has followers. I poked around a site with lots of quotes.

Here's one of his quotes: "Icing mud pies requires energy. Icing mud pies requires work. It's work remembering which mud pies are iced. It's work maintaining icing."

Actually a kind of funny quote, but the est philosophy seemed decidedly unfunny and self absorbed. Unfortunately I can't find the link to the quote I just posted. It must be the icing is getting in my way. Or melting in the rain, or something.

And the Mitchell brothers opened a sex club that had tracks in it, an x rated laff in the dark style ride with surprise porn events as you went around a corner in your little car. I never saw this but sure wondered about it.

On the Tunaphone

This is a Charlie the Tuna Telephone. From 1987. Why was this popular? Who wants to talk into a fish?

Last year I got fired up with the idea that cel phone animation was the coming thing. But you know what? I don't think so any more. I don't think people want to just look at their phones. They want to do things with them. Just sitting there looking at your phone seems kind of sad, doesn't it?

That's why the iphone games are taking off. That's what I think.

But I'm getting emails from art students who've decided animation is what they want to do, and they want advice. Sounds as if animation is a popular course of study on campus these days, the way marine biology was a few years ago.

I don't know what to tell them. The way the world is now, it seems like a terrible choice to me. (Have you considered entymology?) There are so few ways to make money with animation, other than teaching more students.

But sometimes a bubble of interest can be foreshadowing some new format that we can't quite identify, and maybe these students are right in front of the wave. I don't think it's just more games on phones that will be coming along, but maybe some whole new manner of interactive animation. I usually tell them to learn Flash, because it's a way in to interactive animation, even if the code language has become a bear.

Whinsey up close and personal

A friend sent me a link to a whole bunch of crazy horse hairdos this morning. This one looks a lot like my horse chatbot Whinsey, don't you think? I spent about three hours fixing Whinsey's television this morning. Whenever google image changes its code, the tv stops working. Hadn't checked it in about a year. Sometimes the image looks a bit wide, oh well.

Haven't read the logs of Whinsey's chats in about a year either. That's always a bit scary!

Hypnotized Again?

I feel strangely like a chicken today. I have very good balance .

L.A. '84 weirdos aplenty

I wrote what follows in 1984. I don't remember this guy (hope he's not a visitor here), but I do remember he commissioned the illustration above for the back cover of a little magazine he published. It was at a time when my career still seemed promising! I thought you all would enjoy this bizarre story that I'd written in my sketchbook. Came upon it yesterday. Here goes:

When I first met Brian, he came in the house with a yellow telephone. I thought it was because he didn't want to miss any calls. But he'd brought it along so I could autograph it. He thought it looked like something I'd designed. (? I hadn't designed it!)

Autographs mean a lot to him. He collects first editions signed by William Faulkner and would collect signed first editions by other authors too but his vacuum cleaner collection takes up too much room already and it's either give up one or the other and the vacuums won out.

He keeps them arranged in a semi-circle around his desk in his office. I said I'd like to see them.

His girlfriend Brink, who's breathy and beautiful, was very enthusiastic about the Kirby vacuum cleaner Brian had given her. She said it has all kinds of wonderful attachments including a paint sprayer and a massage unit.

You can't just buy these Kirbys in stores, they both explained, nodding their heads. Kirbys are the Rolls Royce of vacuum cleaners, as they put it. You have to call the company and then a salesman pays you a visit. But does he demonstrate the massage unit?

Brian is very good friends with his vacuum cleaner repairman. They invite the repairman to their parties. He used to work in the aerospace program but when that went bust he switched to vacuum cleaners.

I told Brian I'd seen a wonderful exhibit of carpet sweeper in London, in the basement of the Science Museum, but he said carpet sweepers didn't interest him. "No suction" he explained.

He and Brink have told me that they are into dream control and have an EEG but so far I've let that pass. I've also heard sketchy details about the time travel party they held with lectures by three people famous in their fields.

We went outside to pick apricots from my tree and he was excited. He'd gotten fruit from two science fiction writers already that week. "And now, apricots from you," he said. "Celebrity fruit." I wondered if I should sign the bag.

Suits on the Wall

My mother has always associated blue jeans (aka dungarees) with the uniform my poor cousin Charley (different cousin) had to wear in the mental institution when he told the world he never wanted to work. He was locked up for life. My mother cannot comprehend the blue jean nation.

I always make a point of not wearing anything resembling blue jeans when I visit my mother. Even though she thinks my entire wardrobe looks sad, at least it doesn't look like they gave me a weekend pass. If only all the relatives realized what a flash point this is, including my niece who worked for Valentino for years...

If Sarah Palin had donated her wardrobe to me my mother would have been so happy. She loves tailored suits.

In fact, when I called her yesterday she told me in her low Exorcist voice that the nurses had pasted pictures of her in beautiful tailored suits all over the walls. They were pictures from different times in her life. "Pay attention" she told me.

When she called collect this morning she said no one had been to see her at the hospital, but she'd been at the football game yesterday. She told me not to get on a train until I got a letter from her.

Tonight when I called she was laughing and entirely herself. Whas going on?

Interactive Snout

Isn't this goofy? By artist Golan Levin. Not sure if this will embed in my blog or not. The artist uses really serious words to describe his project, the kind typically used only in grant proposals.

Krampus time

I think I've posted Krampus postcards before, the weird bad guy who travels with Santa in Germany. He's kind of cute in this pic. This year we're more or less ignoring Christmas, except having people for dinner, and a small tree to decorate.

But, but, I'm animating a song for you guys, just for you. It will probably get pulled off of youtube in a hurry because it's using a famous song, but I figure I'll have a few days before some copyright nut reports me. Since we have a monster storm due in tomorrow, I should be able to make a lot of progress, so stay tuned.

Are you doing the recession xmas this year too? or kwanzaa or hanukkah?

Another Photo Resource

LIFE and google have pooled resources and offer up an amazing photo archive which provides plenty of entertainment as you type in random words. This is from a German pre-Lent carnival in 1967. The photographer is Ralph Crane. There's even an option to order prints of pictures you like.

Pneumatic tubes and Razor Blades

I woke up thinking about pneumatic tubes, those amazing compressed air shuttle systems that somehow suggest a means of time travel. When I googled them for an image, I was amazed that the Swiss Swatch store in New York City has an ultra cool pneumatic tube system to deliver the watches. Almost enough to make me want to visit New York again! There used to be a large department store in Berkeley that used pneumatic tubes for all the cash transactions. In fact it's the store where Patty Hearst was working before she was abducted. Did I tell you I always worried the police would mistake me for Patty Hearst? What a nutcase I was.

And then non sequitur I remembered how in our old house there was a slot in the medicine chest for throwing out razor blades. So they went through the slot and into the guts of the house, where they must remain till this day. Ever see one of those slots?