This is labour of love

Icarus 2.0

So. I've (mostly) finished shooting Spenser's Image Design film. The camera jammed twice! Once during the city shots, and once during the wing shots....which is really to bad. We probably didn't get it on 16mm....but c'est la vie.
It was all intended to be done on 16mm but I also was able to capture some video of the burns, as well as both 35mm and digital stills.

So what to do with what I have?
The film was supposed to be a hybrid film between the stories of Prometheus and Icarus. A story about gaining fire (industry, technology, energy) and about what happens when it gets to hot and burns out of control. It looks like the Prometheus section (Kits Film) may not even get done now...

So what to do, what to do...

I've been playing with the Icarus myth for awhile now. And I would like to continue. This project may not have come into fruition this time. But now I have some building blocks. I want to play with the Icarus story more! And it will build, maybe into a completely different project that I had previously though.
Anyone out there want to collaborate?

Well anyways. Here are some photos of process and shoot.

Starting to build the city


Miniature DPW city planning


Getting ready for the shoot with Spens and Mike.

The city with detail on the water


The City Burning


Gears


Wing Test w/ Andreas drooping seed in the foreground.

Mike as Icarus


His hand is supposed to be on fire....and then it fell off.

Im lighting the wings on fire on the back of Mike here.

Mike looking horrified.

Icarus running with his wings on fire.

35mm #2:

So I spent some time in New York & Boston.
Seeing some friends, writing a good deal, and wandering...

Here are a few of the pictures: 35mm - 200asa


Lower East Side, NY


Igor Jazz in Subway


Miriam being assaulted by a subway violinist


The cieling of the Boston Bus Station


Downtown Boston


Jordan Ganz

quick mention....and then more a bit later

First of all: KEO
And for those of you who are more into: Wiki

The Keo Project is a piece of Space Art, (wait? Thats a genre!) conceived in 1994 by Jean-Marc Philippe. KEO is a satellite that will hopefully be launched into space and then fall back to earth in 50,000 years. It will hold personal messages from anyone who writes in. Messages from people all over the world- those who are unable to write (elderly, children, hard-to-reach places) are especially encouraged to write in- which I'm digging. Apparently there is enough digital room in the plans to hold a 4 page letter written by everyone on earth. (So you should write in!) The satellite will also hold a drop of human blood, chosen randomly, and a few other artifacts like a digital modern day "library of Alexandria".
Which when you think about it.....50,000 years? Thats like taking a time machine back to when our ancestors invented fire!
How much will our species accomplish by then? Will we even be the same species? We maybe wiped out, we maybe so differently evolved....
Reading the letters of 50,000 years past is an amazing glimpse of the past for the future! Imagine...we may seem like beautiful, dreaming, and hopeful creatures! Or we may look like fearful, paranoid, unsure creatures....it depends what WE write.

Cool idea. Cool concept.
Here is a picture of the satellite:

2008 Chicago Halloween Parade (Rats Rats Rats)

Welcome to Rat City!

My good friend, Tom Laporte, has been running the Chicago Halsted Street Parade for the past 6 years. This year, he gave away some of his responsibilities to Ben Fain. A graduate student from SAIC. He transformed the parade into a very loose, fruedian, analogy of our subconsciousness. It was complete with a float with spinning pizza, a scared old man, and some 30-40 rats!
We got some great reactions from the crowd. Scared some kids, scared some adults!, and got a bunch of "ooohs" and "ahhhhs".
I'm never quite sure how we get away with these things....Thank you Tom Laporte & Ben Fain.



The Rat Float


I'm dressed as a Rat with a Flame Thrower!






I, looking quite tired and sweaty, along with Downtown Dave on his cellphone.

Third Coast Culture Cooperative (TC3)

So I need more excuses to do more things. Wreck more havoc. Create more Chaos. Cultivate more community, energy and love.

I'd like to throw a fund raiser concert/art show for the West Memphis 3.
One of the most embarrassing things, in my opinion, that the American court system continues to keep alive. 3 teenagers arrested and convicted in Arkansas, for the killing of three young boys. Damien Echols was given the death sentence while Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin were sentenced to life imprisonment. They didn't do it though. They were convicted on fears of 'witchcraft', a false testimony, and a scared jury. The evidence overwhelmingly shows that the boys didn't do it.
Damien hasn't been killed yet. But they've been in jail for 15 years! They're not young teenagers anymore, they're grown men, and they've lost so much of their lives. They need to be freed. Damien is on is last appeal with habeas corpus.

I think it would be groovy to run a fund raiser for their legal fund.

Classical Gas

109 birthed the Catholic Church.
1609 held the worlds worst witch-hunt, the Basque witch trials.
1809 saw Napoleon causing hell in Europe.
1909 was when Theodore Roosevelt left the white house.
1939 marked the outbreak of World War II.
1989 marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
2009 is rapidly coming.

A hundred years isn't that long. We can consciously guide the future of ourselves as a community, as a nation, as world, as a species.
Gear our selves, change ourselves, evolve ourselves. Everything we think is normal will be foolish in the future.

There is something up ahead.

We are planning the next inevitable step in things to come. Our machine is running out of steam. and the gears need more oil, but the ground has gone dry. The crazy men, who've been tinkering in their attics are ready to come out now. They've made a few new gadgets that run on wind and sun. If you look around the gold watch-band they give you- it's covered in astro-physical symbols like those of Dr. Zeitgeist. They tell you things about your soul, but only after you've already discovered them.
The big guy is practicing air brakes. So that we can all run away in a bus when the world starts tumbling down. I'm hoping we dont have to use the shotguns, but we're not taking any chances.
Maybe we can run away from all of this and make our own microcosm. Ordered after the stars in the sky on the night we first set free. We look inside ourselves and we find the mysteries of the universe. Our hands melt through trees like they are water. It was only a matter of time until all the atoms met up right. We are mostly empty space.
Forgive us for being quiet for so long. Forgive us for when we become over-zealous to late. We all knew it was coming. some of us prepared for nothing and some of us watched dumbly. The ones who had been practicing using their minds like jedi, they were the only ones with any real upper-hand. But it was all in their heads, and yet it was in ours too.
Take-Note:
- You are more powerful than you imagine.
- They are speaking to you even now.
- Aliens are among us. And all of us just laugh.


-GSYBE knew it all along. and RAW is writing this as I type-