Mark Alan is an L.A. based musician who is getting ready to release is second record by his band Alphanaut entitled, “Little Sun.” This post however, is not so much a review of the band or of the record, but rather a post regarding the concept of this album and the accompanying video.

It’s no secret that I am a little over the top when it comes to my love for dogs, so when I received an email from a publicist about this new record that was written as a remembrance and memoriam to Alan’s dog Dingo who died of doggy lymphoma, it was pretty much a done deal.

Each song on the album is a chapter in the story of Dingo’s life, with many of them told from Dingo’s perspective.  The lead single “Back to the Stars,” is an  animated video in which we join Dingo as he dons a space helmet and leaves Earth to explore space, visiting other doggy friends is space (also wearing their space helmets), ultimately transcending into another universe.

Clearly I never met Dingo, but the video conveys the deep love that Mark must have felt for his canine friend; there is a bittersweet sadness to the song, but I imagine that the process of writing the album was cathartic. I can think of no better way to say goodbye to someone you love. See you in the stars.

The “Back to the Stars” video was directed by Tonda Ros of Dogubomb Productions

I am the oldest of three grandsons on my mother’s side. Of the four of us, I was the one who was most interested in, and knowledgeable about art and art history at a fairly young age. By seven or eight, I was familiar with dozens of artists. Among my favorites were (and still are) Van Gogh, Klimt, Monet, Escher, Saul Steinberg, Rembrandt, Albrecht Durer, Renoir, and Henri Rousseau. I bring this up to provide context for the photo below and for the story about it.

I don’t know if I was eight or nine when this picture taken, but it was taken by my friend Chuck Gould, a contemporary of my father, and somebody I have known for the bulk of my life.

On this particular day, for reasons unknown, I decided that I was going to dress up as Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec. His art utterly fascinated me, as did the fact that his path as an artist started at about the same age that I was then. I started with grabbing an oversized jacket worn by one of the adults, something that would dwarf me, or at the very least come down to my knees. Next, I grabbed a fat black El Marko pen and proceeded to draw a beard, moustache and glasses. I was ready to present myself. The resultant conversation went something along the lines of this:

Ivory (my father’s girlfriend:)  “Oh my god, what did you do to yourself?”

Me: “I’m Toulouse-Lautrec! Whaddaya think?”

Ivory: “what did you use to draw on your face?”

Me (proudly): “I used this El Marko pen!”

“…But…isn’t that indelible?”

“‘Indelible’? What’s that?”

“It means that it won’t wash off your face!”

That was the day I learned what the word “indelible” meant.  I have never forgotten it, and indeed the mighty El Marko was just that. We spent a while trying to scrub what we could off, but for all intents and purposes, I got to be Toulouse-Lautrec for the better part of a week.

* * *

This image is included in a fantastic collection of photographs by Chuck from the Digger Archives. These photos are of particular excitement to me because they chronicle a world that my father was part of in the late sixties and into the early seventies….and by extension me.  I know or knew most of the people in these photos, so it’s really great seeing these photos all pulled together like this. From an historical perspective, this collection is perhaps one of the better visual records of activist hippy life in and around the scene that surrounded the Height back then….and of many of the Diggers.

File under the discovery of cool and interesting cinematic obsucrities well worth passing along to others for their discovery and delight.

Marika Rökk was an Egypt-born Austrian-German singer, dancer and actress of Hungarian descent who became famous in German films most notably in Nazi Germany during World War II. She first gained prominance in Paris in the 1920s starring as a dancer at the Moulin Rouge with the “Hoffmann Girls.” In 1934 she moved to Germany where she became one of the most famous movie stars in Germany working for Universum Film AG (UFA). Her film career spanned from 1930 through to 1962, however she appeared in two subsequent films, one  in 1973 (Der letzte Walzer) and her final appearance in 1988 (Schloß Königswald ). Marika Rökk died in 2004 at the age of 90.

This clip is from the 1958 German musical film, Buhne Frei Fur Marika. In “Mir ist so langweilig,” Marika is an alien girl who steals a spaceship and heads for earth where she dances with snakes, elephants and African natives. Just another boring day in the life of a German alien girl. The sets and art direction are fantastic.

Wow…cool obscure little find: In 1970 Henry Chapier directed “Sex Power,”  a film with Jane Birkin and enlisted the talents of Vangelis to write the score (this was his very first film score after leaving Greece). It played the San Sebastian Film Festival where it won the Silver Shell Award and quickly slipped away into obscurity. The soundtrack however was the only one of Chapier’s films to ever get its score released.

Most of the dialogue is in English, and the feel of the film has a charmingly naive impressionistic, psychedelic bent.

Slowly finding its way around the web is some of the most stunning and incredible time-lapse photography you’ve ever seen, taken by one remarkable Dustin Farrell. Every frame of this video is a raw still taken with a Canon 5D2 DSLR and processed to create the breath-taking landscapes you see here. The quality of these videos is jaw-dropping. Full-screen them on your computer and you’ll see what I mean. WOW:

Lotte Reiniger was one of the twentieth century’s major animation artists, pioneering a unique and distinctive style of black and white silhouette animation initially inspired by the Chinese art of silhouette puppetry. Her films were interpretations of classic myths and fairy tales. After escaping Nazi Germany in the early 30′s, Reiniger settled in London and together with her husband Carl Koch, created a series of fairy-tale films for Primrose Productions based on the Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm Hauff, Hans Christian Andersen and the stories from One Thousand and One Nights. This is the Magic Horse.

Read more about her history HERE

“The Dark, Dark Hours” was first broadcast live from Hollywood on December 12, 1954 from the General Electric Theater series. It features both Ronald Reagan and James Dean before either of them were huge names in Hollywood.

John Meroney of the Atlantic describes how the footage was found:

“No one has seen this episode in the decades since; the kinescope has been locked away, until now. My friend Wayne Federman, a writer for NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, unearthed the broadcast, condensing it from its original 23 minutes (without commercials) into the six-minute version you see [here].”

I’d like to say that I’ve been a long-time follower of this award, but I’d be lying. The ISEVC (much easier than typing it out each time) is sponsored jointly by the journal Science, a nonprofit international science society, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and is intended to “captivate and engage the viewer by revealing the hidden meaning and intricate details of our world in visual form.” The winners have just been announced! The competition is in its seventh year and is equally focused on science as it is on the visual arts. The criteria for judging the entries include “visual impact, effective communication, freshness and originality.”

The winner (pictured here on the February cover) was for Branching Morphogenesis, “an installation made from more than 75,000 interconnected cable zip ties, [and] illustrates the predicted forces generated by human lung endothelial cells as they form networks within an extracellular matrix over time.” As a example of the challenge, NPR explained “let’s say you want to know how human lung cells interact with their surroundings. You could take a picture of what you see through the microscope…what if you took 75,000 cable zip ties and used them to create an 11.5-foot-tall sculpture that represents those interactions in three dimensions?” That was exactly what Branching Morphogenesis did.

Yonder from Emilia on Vimeo.

My friend Al introduced me to a friend on his on Facebook (Scott) and so I did the obligatory digging around which led me to his blog, Destroy Your Computer. There I found an exquisite and inspiring piece on animation from a woman in Germany named Emelia Forstreuter. She uses Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Cinema 4D and Flash to create some of the most inspired work I’ve seen in a very long time. I am stunned, hope you are too. Fullscreen it!

This was an amazing piece that I discovered while still working @ Creative Asylum overseeing the development and launch of the Peer Squared Project. While this is not a new find, it’s a piece of work that warrants a rediscovery as it’s still one of the more amazing projects I’ve seen in recent years.

Brambilla’s work, entitled “Civilization,” is a continuous HD video collage, “taking hundreds of stock footage, movie footage and original clips and combining them to create a moving landscape depicting the ascension from hell to heaven” (500 clips in all) as an installation inside of an elevator in New York’s Standard Hotel.

The Video moves up and down depending on the direction of the elevator car, and passes through hell, lower purgatory, middle purgatory, upper purgatory, heaven and upper heaven/lower hell (which is where the video collage ultimately loops to create the continuum).

The total size of the piece is in itself daunting: 1920 x 7500 pixels played back on a 42″ plasma screen.

To view the entire piece, read the details of the project along with an interview with Brambilla, please CLICK HERE: it’s well worth the time. You’re welcome!