Still from Death of the Gorilla by Peter Mays

Los Angeles has been overrun with events put on as part of the Pacific Standard Time initiative of the Getty Foundation; far too many to actually keep up with. 

Perhaps the most obviously appealing to me are the Los Angeles Filmforum’s Alternative Projections series, which have been bringing in unusually large crowds for most of the shows I’ve been to—including two sold out programs featuring films by Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Russ Tamblyn, Toni Basil, and others. Many of the films are familiar to me, but something that has been a real revelation are the two films of Peter Mays that they’ve screened—Death of the Gorilla and The Star Curtain Tantra, the later of which was screened last night at Cinefamily.

Death of the Gorilla was filmed on 16mm entirely off of television images, using a variety of colored gels. The film was rewound repeatedly and run through the camera again and again, creating numerous layers of lush, seductive imagery. The Star Curtain Tantra begins with images of hand-painted film being projected onto a body. This hand painted material later appears in the film in superimpositions with a variety of material, and finally on its own. Interspersed are all manner of other images. The soundtrack is a collage of material, with an interesting interplay with the image. They are remarkable films, and I look forward to seeing them projected again some day.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to seeing a performance by the light show ensemble Peter Mays was a part of—Single Wing Turquoise Bird. They managed to sell out two performances in a 100+ seat hall at UCLA, but luckily a third show was added (and much more on my schedule at 11 pm) and I was able to snag a ticket before that too sold out.

Have I mentioned how much I love dessert? Well, it’s winter, and so nice warm desserts are high in demand in my stomach, which I am only too happy to oblige.

Recently a place opened up downtown called The Pie Hole. I tried going on opening day, but it was during my season of waking up at 3 pm and so by the time I made it down there at 6:30 or 7 they had already sold out of everything. I finally made my way back down a couple weeks ago, and it was pretty good, I have to say. The chocolate bourbon pecan pie is probably my favorite so far.

However, I also decided before I went home for Christmas that I wanted to at least make an attempt to be vegan. This means I’ve been making trips to Babycakes. I was first acquainted with Babycakes by a friend from New Jersey, whose mother would ship out an apple pie and various other goodies from the famed vegan New York bakery every Thanksgiving.

Now we have two in Los Angeles, and I am addicted to it (brewing Stumptown coffee doesn’t hurt either). It’s a little unfortunate that they made the dining area in the downtown location smaller in order to accommodate an expanded kitchen, but I guess it means they’re doing well. And I’ve never had to compete for the one table out front, so I suppose I have nothing to complain about.

It’s been talked about for months now, and yet when I got home the other night and saw that Kodak had declared bankruptcy, I was still shocked.

Or maybe shocked is the wrong word—just intensely distressed. For as long as I can remember, I have had to deal on a regular basis with Kodak removing from production the products they made that I had come to rely on. Among the most depressing were losing reversal print stock just after I began working with motion picture film, meaning I was only able to have prints made of my first film; then of course shooting my last rolls of Kodachrome in a rush just so I could have them processed. Plus-x reversal stock was a beautiful film I was sad to lose, with only a couple of rolls remaining in my crisper drawer.

Anyway, no sense eulogizing yet, since, at least for now, things are “business as usual” until they restructure. But it’s pretty clear from the language of the press release, and really from the way the company has been led for the past decade, that film is not on their mind for the future. Hopefully someone will take the business from them, and keep these wonderful film stocks in production, and maybe even bring back some that have been senselessly lost.

Ironically, the same day the bankruptcy was declared, Variety published this article about how the Motion Picture Academy has issued a report about the extreme problems of storing digitally completed works. The most stable solution for storing these works is, no surprise here, not digitally, but on separation negatives on black and white film. If Kodak had a CEO that cared about their history and products, they would be more interested in aggressively pushing what they are good at, rather than trying to stake their future fortunes on … printers?

A bar I like more is Tony’s Saloon, downtown in the “artists district” or whatever they call that industrial area near the Greyhound station. Aside from making delicious old fashioneds and Manhattans, it also has the benefit of being attached to Pizza Nista, perhaps my favorite pizza in town. Order a couple of slices, and they’ll deliver them to you at the bar. And on Sunday nights they have macaroni and cheese pizza—it sounds pretty horrific, and I suppose in many ways it is, but it is terribly delicious.

Also coming out earlyish next year is Julia Holter’s next LP—it’s actually going to be a gatefold double LP called Ekstasis, coming out on RVNG Intl. The label has released one track so far, Marienbad, which is absolutely exquisite. I know I’ve raved about Julia Holter on here endlessly already (and in real life constantly) but seriously, she deserves it!

One thing I missed in the festival, since it was a gala premiere and that would have been too much to deal with, was Lars von Trier’s newest film Melancholia. I have no real opinion of von Trier, having seen only a couple of his films and neither particularly liking or disliking them. This film, however, is something entirely different. It is beautifully photographed, totally compelling, and highly amusing. It’s really a great film—I’ve seen it twice and would like to see it again before it leaves theaters—with a real highlight being a moment near the end of the first part when, after spending about an hour looking at people photographed under artificial lights with no filter, giving them all a ghastly orange cast, Kirsten Dunst and Alexander Skarsgård are talking to one another, and behind them, the sun appears to be rising, as the sky has a deep, vivid blue color to it, the first time you’ve seen the color since the beginning of the film. It’s a really stunning and memorable moment.

My initial reaction whenever a friend sends me a link to listen to some new music that they think I will like is always to hate it.

Usually because I can tell immediately why they think I will like it—synth heavy, dark, vaguely “80′s” sounding music—and I can’t help but be upset that it’s so easy to predict what I’ll like. So of course, when my friend sent me a link to one of the songs from John Maus‘ new album We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (this one in fact), I immediately responded by saying that I hated it.

Of course, a few weeks later, I have hardly any interest in listening to anything else. Playing Quantum Leap for a friend, he said immediately “of course you like this—it sounds just like Joy Division”. Then after the arpeggiated synths came in he added “with Philip Glass”. The album certainly reminds me of many things (the third track …And the Rain sounds like it could have been taken off The Wake’s album Here Comes Everybody, while Head for the Country sounds vaguely like early Pet Shop Boys), but ultimately it’s real charm lies in how new it sounds.

I don’t have much to say about Honeydrum, but they’re OK. They’ve been releasing tons of singles this year that are available free on the internet or you can order cassettes from them, some better than others. Here’s a video for one of the songs I particularly like. Or you can just download some of these singles from their bandcamp.

Unsubscribe No. 3: Glitch Envy

There are people in this world who acquire and discard endless amounts of things without compunction; there are other people whose guilt over throwing away even the garbage that they never asked for or wanted is so great that they feel compelled to make use of it.

Jodie Mack is one of the latter people, and in her ongoing series of films Unsubscribe (watch No. 3 Glitch Envy and No. 1 Special Offer Inside), she does exactly this: she takes the junk mail that comes to her and transforms it into gleeful, beautiful work. This quality pervades all of her work, a healthy portion of which was screened on 16 mm by the Los Angeles Filmforum, from the abstract animation using floral patterned fabrics of Posthaste Perennial Pattern to her half-hour long cut-out animated musical Yard Work is Hard Work, which seems to take not just the detritus of magazines, but also the cultural detritus of the housing boom and economic collapse as source material for something that exceeds the banality of the materials, an ebullient revelry of existence. I couldn’t help but guiltily chuckle as I thought about how her work seems to take the pure cinema of flicker films and structural film, and fills it with the trash of our lives today, without irony or malice, but out of pure joy.

Yard Work is Hard Work

One of the earlier films on the program, Lilly, uses negatives of family photographs to create an animation while on the soundtrack the filmmaker’s grandmother tells a story about how she lost her family, home, and all of her belongings during the Blitz in London. As she tells the story of loss, Mack begins to cut the negatives into smaller and small pieces, until by the end the film is animated using sprockets, small shapes and shreds of the film. During the Q&A Mack said that she had gone through the photographs with her grandmother, and these were negatives that were “no good” and which were going to get thrown out. So, like with the junk mail used in the Unsubscribe series, Mack took these negatives, destined for the trash, and used them to the last shred to create a beautiful film that, while documenting a tragic tale, ultimately seems to be celebrating the ability to create out of destruction, and, as Lilly’s voice in the film says, “to get on with it.” Her work is a reminder that there can never be enough beauty in the world.

From a person with such a generous personality, it would come as no surprise that Jodie Mack makes all of her work available for viewing online. However, as with all film art, the work should be seen on 16 mm, the way it was made and intended to be seen—so keep your eyes out for screenings in your area.

It’s been a few decades since anyone was manufacturing Super 8 equipment of any kind. Many individuals and institutions, not realizing that people still use the equipment, often throw things out that are functioning perfectly well. And then, of course, things are always breaking, and a shrinking number of people know how to repair them. Even if Super 8 film stops being produced, there will be enormous quantities of processed film around the world. Though most people are content to transfer to video and watch it that way, there will always be people who prefer to watch the film itself.

It was, therefore, somehow a heartening thing to see that a man in German built a fully functioning Super 8 projector mostly out of Lego’s. I’m not very good at building things, and the idea that I could go out to a toy store and buy some things, come home and build my own projector, was just kind of mind-blowing.

Of course, with my salvage/restore mentality, I would much prefer to just repair the projectors I find in thrift stores or at flea markets that for whatever reason aren’t working anymore. One of the main hurdles to repairing a lot of equipment is that the extremely precise parts that sometimes just wear down or break are no longer available. Some people buy other projectors and salvage parts from them to use in other machines. I suppose there are a few people out their with machining skills who could lathe and machine various parts as needed. But for someone like me, the idea of instead printing parts is just… you know, too alluring.

Of course, 3D printers are way too expensive right now. But the way technology goes, it seems inevitable that one day owning a 3D printer will be within reach for many people. The implications of such a machine for all sorts of analog / obsolete / discarded technologies are great. It seems almost ironic that this sci-fi future technology holds the potential to bring back from the oblivion so many other technologies.