December 2007

earcon's Party Lion CD

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Recommended: earcon's Party Lion CD, available at CD Baby [dead link]. Tuneful electro with just the right balance of refinement and raunch. Yours truly did the (8 Bit) cover drawing. Also at the link is an interview I did with earcon (aka John Parker) a few years ago, which describes his music and working methods. I'm slightly less ignorant now than when I wrote those questions but the answers are as good a blueprint for a sound artist/musician as ever.

Update: more info about the CD on Parker's site.

Mary Heilmann at the CAM

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These photos aren't from the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston), where I saw the Mary Heilmann show last week; they are from the Secession in Vienna. The CAM exhibit looked somewhat like this, but the paintings enjoyed less wall space, the walls met at angles, not perpendiculars, the floor wasn't glossy, and there were no domineering overhead light panels. I liked the crowding and the cockeyed space--you could see more at a glance and note the all-important subtle differences in these thinly painted, deceptively simple canvases. The boxy seats with lawn chair webbing were a nice touch--I didn't ask if you could sit in them, fearing the answer would be no. Heilmann is the best of the smart dumb painters (abstract variety) and could teach the young'uns cluttering the galleries with their graduate thesis shows a thing or two about restraint, that is, knowing when a piece is done, but also how not to quit a work too soon. Her intelligently worked out pseudo-geometry, clunkiness of paint application, and exquisite eye for color make an unbeatable combo.

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I Am (Sucky) Legend

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Here's my post from a few years ago on The Last Man on Earth, the definitive movie so far based on Richard Matheson's novella I Am Legend.
Don't bother with that Will Smith timewaster--it's a dumbed-down, Hollywoodized version of the story. Some of the early atmosphere is poignant and makes you think it's going to be a credible update of Matheson's tale of unrequited grief and political obliviousness but then it turns to ultra-fast CGI zombies hurling themselves at the camera.
The zombies change from smart to dumb and back again with the scenery.
It's another case of coked-up tinseltown screenwriters not telling a coherent story and wrapping it up with feelgood cliches (Akiva Goldsman may not actually be coked up but certainly writes like he is, having previously jabbered out the empty voids Lost in Space, Batman & Robin, and I, Robot).
Why can't the current adapters trust Matheson? Just go on autopilot and let him tell the story. He's a whiz at spinning yarns--he wouldn't end the story with "the hero sacrificing himself so that a theretofore unknown colony of survivors could go on."
He'd have a gut-wrenching sociopolitical twist, or something.