Friday, December 4, 2015

Get Your "Southern Gothic" On For The Holidays!

For a limited time you can watch a FULL SCENE of the forthcoming Tropic Pictures film A SPIRAL WAY. The scene is a "lady of the lake" story  Warning: mature content and this scene is macabre. But the point of the macabre in folklore is to chase bad luck away. I hope you enjoy the clip and have great luck this holiday season!

Here's the link: A SPIRAL WAY

Tropic Pictures makes films with mythic emphasis, poetic language, and sharp humor. Find out more at www.TropicPictures.com.





Thursday, November 26, 2015

Rock ’n’ Roll & Somethingness: Dead White Zombies

My review of of the immersive theater piece "DP92" by Dead White Zombies has been published by Glasstire
"Let’s revel in few of the show’s details: Lots of skin showing through ripped or open clothing; tight body suits; youthful vigor in combat boots; contact and writhing; the upsetting of authority; backup singers; and one hell of an improvised guitar, the body of which is an amplifier."

To read the article, click here.




Monday, November 23, 2015

Journal of Short Film

The Journal of Short Film has selected the Tropic Pictures movie "A Well-proved Helpmate" for volume 36. It is an honor to be included in the peer reviewed journal, which is published in DVD form. 

This volume will also include works by Annie Berman, Margaret Orr, Cole Becker, Jared Katsiane, Dustin Grella, Nick and Lexie Trivundza, and Franz Ross

Click the link below to watch a short scene from "Helpmate." 

A Well-proved Helpmate: Teaser
https://vimeo.com/121637258









Monday, November 16, 2015

Metamorphosis: Robert Lansden at Cris Worley Fine Arts in Dallas

My article on Robert Lansden's "Metamorphosis" has been published by Glasstire. Click the link below for the article:

Glasstire

Robert Lansden draws small, repetitive marks that link into larger pictures that look like strange fabrics, blooms, and topographical data. Lansden bases each picture on an algorithm, and the marks are typically triangles or rectangles that the artist makes with pen, gouache, or watercolor. The rules of his algorithm make for an operation that is not wholly deterministic. That is to say, the algorithm allows for variance in the output—variance that results in the illusion of gashes, folds, peaks, and vales. (Read more.)



Friday, October 23, 2015

"The Mock Destruction of the World" Podcast

Thanks to Rob and Chad of The Clubhouse podcast for this interview at Dallas Video Festival. I had just walked out of a theater, was adjusting to the light, when I got signaled over for a talk. No time for preparation, but candor is always best. Even candor with a stammer. Taped on 10/18, my interview starts at the 1hr, 22min. mark. 

The Clubhouse, Episode 6-13
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-6-13-dallas-videofest/id674600956?i=354826958&mt=2

"The Mock Destruction of the World" played as part of The Texas Show at Dallas Video Festival. The Texas show is a juried event, and was the closing number on October 18, at Angelika Film Center in Dallas. You can find program info here: Prekindle 

Always a pleasure and a challenge to try to describe the movie. Here is what I put down for press materials"

Pictorially, "The Mock Destruction of the World" plays out like a dark and peculiar dream. I would also add, a funny dream. It is the story of an unusual toymaker, who shows his hospitality for the processes of malfunction and decay through the creation of nightmarish toys. What the toymaker says about his work is actually generous and affirmative. He believes decay is a creative process.

I've included a brief excerpt from one of the toy maker's speeches and some pictures. 

"I think the initial discomfort someone feels when they see someone disfigured . . . birth defect or severe burns . . . is they see or get a sense of the end of humanity. I mean, just a glimpse of that final image, probably not a whole thought. But that speck of doubt, it reveals just how fragile flesh and bone really is, how fragile our sense of beauty.

We see, in a sense, our own destruction. As a kindness, we might think, 'There but for the grace of ...Whatever... go I.' A way of sympathy for the afflicted that is also a term of hope that our own good luck continues.

We like to think our lives will go on and on. Hospitality for decay or blisters or some catastrophe of bone is pretty rare. We make an enemy of deformity and decay . . . an enemy of death. And so, faced with such distortions, we feel an urge to combat them."



Friday, October 2, 2015

Occiput: Lucia Simek at the Reading Room

My article on Lucia Simek's two channel video "Occiput" has been published by Glasstire.

The sense of inevitability in highway driving that Simek evokes through editing is occasionally cracked open by surprises. Click the link below for full article.





Link: 

Saturday, September 12, 2015

Proyector Videoart Festival


I'm excited that the Tropic Pictures film "Other Wounds" will play at Proyector International Videoart Festival in Madrid, Spain on September 20. The screening will take place outdoors at Cinema Usera. I'm grateful to Sabrina Durling-Jones de Miranda for the artful translation into Spanish and to the organizers for selecting this film. (More info on the 9/20 program in the link below.)

Link:
Cinema Usera



Sunday, August 23, 2015

A Quick Look at a Long Drive

I put 230 miles on my truck yesterday, out gathering footage for the forthcoming Tropic Pictures movie "One of the Rough" -- a poetic road movie. See some of the footage in this link.

Link: Quick Look: One of The Rough





Friday, August 21, 2015

Sex and Death in Mexico: The Films of Carlos Reygadas




My article about Mexican filmmaker
Carlos Reygadas has been published by Glasstire.

Reygadas' images are, by turns, beautiful, hallucinogenic, brutal, erotic, and subversively funny.

Find the full article here:
Sex and Death in Mexico 










Sunday, July 26, 2015

An Errand of Hip and Chin

I'm proud to show a  quick look at the forthcoming Tropic Pictures film "An Errand of Hip and Chin."
It's an art film. It's a Hula Hoop movie. It's . . . not easily categorized.  But I bet you find it interesting!

Here is the link:
"Errand of Hip and Chin"

And here are a few film stills.






Friday, July 24, 2015

Technotopian Dreams

My article about Antione Catala's "Emobot (Teacher)" at The Dallas Museum of Art has been published by Glasstire.

Excerpt:

What Emobot (Teacher) teaches,  I suspect, is a lesson about the inhibiting forces of social authority and the insolence of the individual. It is an intelligent and ambitious line of thinking. The emobot seems to describe the shortfall of the digital world to house or even understand our emotions, and Catala seems to be having fun with this shortfall. 



Find the full article here:  "Creepy Emotions"



Friday, July 17, 2015

The Poem within the Film, Pt. 5

Day five of the Five Day Poetry Challenge. Today, a poem you can watch! "The Border Between Human Heel and Serpent's Fang" appears in the Tropic Pictures film "A Well-proved Helpmate."



The link below carries you to the scene in the film where actor Mayo Purnell tells the audience a strange and haunting story, which is the narrative poem.

Link:
Clip from the film "A Well-proved Helpmate"





And here is he text:

BORDER BETWEEN HUMAN HEEL AND SERPENT'S FANG


Every little talk of philosophy
will go astray
with the appearance of a snake.


Even Bacchants
leave off ructions and capers
when slither takes the room.


Cannibalism in snakes
serves the mythic mind two images:


i.
The devouring cycle.


ii.
A careful hunter sighting prey
from an ingenious blind
has her concentration thunderstruck
by a visiting snake.
And a facile tap of her machete
puts its head spinning yonder—
a stone rolled away from a tomb
as out slips one devoured,
a reclaimed snake wriggling and taking over,
fangs beading in the sunlight.

And one time

I saw a bird pick a snake from the grass like a ribbon.

For lack of anything but an act of faith,

the snake struck the raptor and fell loose:

small in the distance—dark, twisting, alive —

falling through the blue . . . Then I lost it in the pines.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

The Poem within the Film, Pt. 4

Day four of the Five Day Poetry Challenge. This poem, "Resisting Rapture" will appear in the forthcoming Tropic Pictures film "Satan is Real."

















RESISTING RAPTURE




A headstone rises modestly to firmament,
and I remember—or rather invent—
my grandfather as a youth
in striped jersey and football trousers
breaking through empty meadow,
purple tops of field grass exploding
at the points of his knees.
And the stone on the ground, I suppose,
speaks of past traditions, emulated virtues,
exhorts the living to remember their own end.
The space between the etched dates—
wide fissure in the brain—
I work a lazy calculation but never make the sum.
Blackbirds flick from a lone cedar,
my young haunt underneath,
to-ing and fro-ing, awaiting the ball
he'd punted to tumble through the boughs.
Birds scatter and re-form—jots of a professor
toward an elusive proof.
Is eternity one long, empty afternoon
sharing youth with my grandfather?
Maybe the symbol is not the stone
but the grass seed. Cataclysm without names
etched in—anonymous way back
into the parenthesis of the soil.
themselves now faraway burrs in the white summer sky.
Or its the sum-shaped absence left by the blackbirds,



Wednesday, July 15, 2015

The Poem within the Film, Pt. 3

Day three of the Five Day Poetry Challenge. This poem, "Ruins at the Well," appears in the Tropic Pictures short film "Other Wounds."





RUINS AT THE WELL

I skip school and go down to the old well,
hatching a scheme against the ancient washing machine
— 
a kind you had to crank by hand
and rollers up on top
how long
it'd take to kick and beat it out of the ground
and drag it to the well.
I am the anti-Archeologist.
Discoveries fall away. Crumbled stairs,
square nails, strange pieces of tile

let them echo down the walls of the well.

Rome is far. Almost unthinkable.
The
ikons, the sophisticates
in European cinema magazines,
they are far. And I am here. This well. 

One hand is bleeding.
An old brick has splashed, now sinking— 
deep calling to deep.
And the stone I raised in my hand to chase it, 

I stack now on top of another stone.
Let some traveler come by and find them. 



Wednesday, July 8, 2015

The Poem within the Film, Pt. 2

Day two of the five day poetry challenge. Today's poem appears in the short film "Other Wounds." This film has shown at Anthology Film Archives in the U.S., at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in Scotland, and will show later this year at Proyector International Videoart Festival in Spain.





OTHER MUSIC


Walking in a dry meadow
I found an amputated wing—lyrical and strange,
like a harp whose song is closed to the earth. 
I thought I might take it to Cherubim City,
work for cheap on the back streets,
in the hot houses, build my chops and a reputation.
For a choir I trapped three quail in a basket,
but in the morning I found a snake there by itself,
belly thick as a human heart.
Did I squash the snake with a tree limb?—somehow, no.

Once you've wrapped your delicate hand
around a quail, you know the intoxicating struggle
of its hope. There's something fierce
in what the snake knows about this
and something brilliant for the Cherubim—
how exquisite the song of wings,
perfected in the chamber of a snake.


Monday, July 6, 2015

The Poem within the Film, Pt. 1

In a belated answer to the five day poetry challenge, I begin this series titled "Poetry within the Film."  I'll be sharing some of the original poems that appear in my movies. In this instance, here is the poem that gives a forthcoming movie its name, "A Spiral Way." A portion of the poem is used within the film, spoken by the character you see below, who is played by Cameron McElyea.

I hope you enjoy the poem. For more details about the movies, please check in with TropicPictures.com and the Facebook page

A Spiral Way, film still


A Spiral Way, film still

A SPIRAL WAY



Something there is that does not show,
but has its sign in the thunder
and in quieter symbols like morning light;
whatever it is in its farness,
converts a feeling it is near.

And how are we perceived
by this alien on the roof,
or thing from myth we thought never lived?
Are we judged? Made sport of? 
Lost things to be found . . . even loved?

"What of us?" My aunt Cecilia used to say,
when she dropped dishes or mashed her hand.
She'd have a glass of whisky when she cooked,
and un-sticking portions that got burned to the pan:
"What of us? . . .What of us? . . ."

It was her best friend, Rose,
that died on the side of a dirt road.
This is an awful story. But please look.
She left two young children in the car
when she got out to pick dewberries—

they grow wild in the thick brambles
along rows of barbed wire fence,
and a favorite treat for snakes.
Rose, not seeing one, got bit in the forehead.

I wonder about the corruption of venom,
if Rose was thinking a thought that
blistered and broke like a degraded bit of film
that decays in the projector,
melting a scene into grainy white light.

It was my cousin, Calvin, and I that found them. 
I was fourteen, he was seventeen. 
First we saw the children—sweaty, bewildered, 
crying in the car. Then Rose. Sloppy summer clothes.
Somehow, she had one shoe on and one shoe off, beside her.

Cecilia made the meal that followed the service.
She burned her knuckles on the roast.
Bit her tongue, bad, cutting onions.
Sip of whisky, "What of us?"
Sip of whisky, "What of us?"

But I don't mean this a dark, regional tale,
like something you'd find on Sundance Channel.
What I want to get to, is awe.

Black sheep Camille is Rose's oldest daughter.
She'd been up in Detroit, stripping bare
for her artist boyfriend. And him showing
abstract images of her, bare, for the
speculation of the world. 

She was devastated throughout the service—of course!
Later, exhaustion sort of perked her up.
She invited me out to the back yard, 
so that she could smoke and talk about her new mode. 
The boyfriend had switched media to video. 

"We're applying sentience to complex data. . .
The continuous present, there on tape. Life is the only 
thing of value.  Problem-solving, intelligence—
the point of these is to get more life. Nothing else .  . .
Nobody dies like a Humanist. We die like animals."

When good country people talk about God,
we're reflecting on moments in everyday life, when
something broke into our thinking and turned it upside down.
God-talk is a way of whistling past the things that shake us up,
and a way of clearing space for the present moment. 

After the reception, most everyone was day drunk.
Voices and thoughts were thick.
"What of us?" "What of us?"
Hymns were not invented for wild love to pour out.
Hymns were invented so that the singer could get a hold of himself.

It was a quarter-mile driveway at dusk, and Calvin
coming off the road like a shadow, holding something aloft.
I watched every step of his approach.
What he held was a dead snake. Not the snake, but a snake.
One he kicked out of the brambles and killed with a stick. 
     
He showed it to us, and Camille wept.
He showed it to us. A man spat in the dirt.
He showed it to us. The children cried out.
He showed it to us. Dogs snarled and came forward.
He showed it to us. And the thing was a villain no more. 


Saturday, April 4, 2015

Carolyn Sortor: Seismic Hive

My article on on Carolyn Sortor's web-based art has been published by Glasstire. Find the article in the link below.

Glasstire


Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Two Articles: Web-based Art and Folk Art

My two most recent articles to appear in arts journal Glasstire  address very different modes of expression. One driven by a technological imagination and one by religious imagination.

Here is a link to my article on Dallas-based video artist Carolyn Sortor:

http://glasstire.com/2015/02/09/talking-about-web-based-video-art-carolyn-sortors-seismic-hive/





And here is a link to my article on the folk ministry art of El Pastor, who lives and works in Juarez, Mexico:

http://glasstire.com/2015/03/17/evil-in-modern-thought-el-pastor-at-webb-gallery/

 

More pictures from these articles:











Sunday, February 8, 2015

Poetry & Movies

February is an active month for Tropic Pictures! A festival screening of THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE GRACKLES, a poetry reading by yours truly at Margo Jones Theatre, and a new movie titled A SPIRAL WAY shoots several days this month.


On Friday, February 13, at 7:30PM the Tropic Pictures short movie THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE GRACKLES plays as part of The Dallas Medianale Festival. The screening is at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (The MAC) and this is a free event. There is a terrific line-up of films and videos involved, including work by Ben Russell, Harun Farocki, Mike Stoltz, and many others  For more info, please see The Dallas Medianale website.  The MAC is located at 3120 McKinney Ave., Dallas, 75204




On Monday, February 16, I will be reading new poems at The Margo Jones Theatre in Fair Park as part of the Pandora's Box Poetry Showcase. The reading is at 8:00PM and this, too, is a free event. Although they do appreciate a donation, and suggest $10.00. 
The Margo Jones Theatre is located at 1121 First Ave. Dallas, 75210








For your first look at the new movie A SPIRAL WAY, click here: A Spiral Way

As always, for more information check out www.TropicPictures.com and find Tropic Pictures on Facebook.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Photography Review

My review of the Mike Osborne exhibition "Monopoly" recently appeared in Glasstire.