B3ATLE M4N1A (a subset of Obamania)

The Beatles are back! And better than ever! How do we know? Media saturation!
Between Rock Band, Across the Universe, Love and the Re-Masters they're everywhere! AGAIN! Magazines, Game Stops, Best Buys, Blockbusters, the Interwebs. (I can't wait to get my Ringo Starr spoon in my Frosted Flakes box!)

I'm happy as hell to actually hear and see ads for some GOOD music for a change, but should this near mid-twenties optimist approaching his jaded late 20s see this as a sign of our cultures embrace of honestly good music in acceptance of a time of new thought and rEVOLution for the betterment of the social construct and enlightening the ape-beings to the point of calling down the mother-ship to take us chronally inhibited three dimensional beings into a new understanding of the forth that we only perceive instantaneously? Or is it in fact a sign of the Great Structuralist's ability to sanitize, vanillize, venalize and excritize the works of societies visionary forefathers into a Macodity with little or no value beyond its purchase, import and consumption.

Where is this energy coming from and what is its purpose?

It feels positive, it's infectious, it comes with some of the best music ever recorded, but is it just one more campaign of apathy and pretty color stimulation designed sublimate our brains within our skulls? Is the day when we plug our brains into videodromes full of pretty colors and sounds far away? Has the machine given up and truly decided to go back to basics and kick-start a new generation of bands based upon the tried and true fab four?

Maybe I'm once again reading and putting too much into this but they are the Featals. Their music is indelibly embedded into the subconscious of the upcoming generation. What will happen if their music is ingested by the populous like the Spice Girls or the Jonas Brothers? They inadvertently created this world and hopefully their music is powerful enough to act as a counter-wave to set things right.

Meh, either way, I'm enjoying the hell out of listening to Rubber Soul on my iPod.

HUMS NORWEGIAN WOOD WHILE HE EXITS STAGE RIGHT.

Star Trek: XI

Captains Log. Star date: 05092005.

I started Blogging on Xanga all those years back in order to (as the subtitle says) "turn squaresville into coolsberg." Blogs seemed like the future had arrived in some weird way. Everyone on earth finally got their own Captain's log. Okay on to Trek...

Fangasm.

I try really hard to NOT get excited about films like Watchmen or Daredevil or X-Men 3 or Matrix 3 or Return of the King or Ghost Rider or The Spirit or Batman & Robin or Transformers or Spider-Man 3. It's tough. It's really tough. I love these properties a lot. And I do say properties because that's what they have become. Nothing more than revenue for major studios. And I'm cool with that. I've come to realize that they want to strip mine anything that made a penny over the past hundred years just to see if it will make them two pennies. And HUZZAH! IT HAS!

Given such a long bad track record for sequels/retcons/re-launches it's amazing audiences buy into this stuff over and over and over(granted I lovED SpMn3, XMn3 and I STILL FREAKIN' LOVE WOLVERINE! So my opinion loses weight), aaaanywho. And with this being an odd numbered Star Trek, I was set for it to bomb bigger than Search for Spock, Final Frontier or Insurrection. Before I dilute the power of this powerful review, I want to say very simply, STAR TREK RULED! I couldn't believe it. J.J. Abrams, I will gladly eat my blueprints of the NCC-1701D.

I wasn't thrilled with Cloverfield and Lost lets me down the more I watch it. So I was pretty much checked off in the "sigh, it's all for the fanboys" category. But over the past few weeks I've been realizing something more and more about myself. I was brought up a Trekkie. Every Sunday after church was spent watching ST:NG with my family and when I was older it was ST:DS9 every Friday with my friends watching back to back episodes until late in the morning (INTERGALACTIC TRUCK-STOP FTW!). It was only when I started hanging out with people that were raised Warsies (I've been friends with pretty much only Warsies since those DS9 days) that I gave up on Trek and didn't force myself to be come a Warsie, but certainly dove more headlong into it than I ever had.

But, one night a few months after I had moved here to San Francisco, I went to a friends house and his uncle was watching Wrath of Khan. Suddenly it all came flooding back to me. PHOTON TORPEDOES! VULCANS! EVIL EARWIGS! GENESIS PROJECTS! ::sigh:: I had denied it too long. When I bought my LaserDisc player the second set of discs I bought after "The Trilogy" was 4, 5 & 6 (the rest I'm waiting to appear at Amoeba although they are on Blu Ray...).

"GET TO THE POINT TOLKIEN!"

Fair enough.

I realized, I was and always have been: a Trekkie. And if J.J. Abrams brand of Fanboy zeal seemed to appeal to others of my ilk, mayhaps it would (in the end) work on me. I mean Simon Pegg? Anton Yelchin? John Cho? How the hell do you find a better set of casting than that to play the legendary Montgomery Scott, Pavel Chekov and Hikaru Sulu? I was still nervous about Quinto and Pine as Spock and Kirk, especially if they were going to be as Screamo as they appeared in the trailer, ("I WANNA BE CAPTAIN!" "NO I WANNA BE CAPTAIN!" "WAAAAAAAH!!") but J.J. Abrams pulled the wool over my eyes on this one. He showed me everything I would need to get me mad as heck in that trailer then made me love their context when I finally saw each scene unfold before my eyes. One of the best ones was that the Facebook ads kept showing the USS Kelvin (which has two vertically aligned nacelles instead of two horizontal ones) and I kept screaming, "WHAT THE HELL IS THAT! That's not the Enterprise!" And indeed, it wasn't. ;)

They change the story quite a bit. I'll leave out the spoilers ('cause that's who I am) but no one's past gets away unscathed with this ret-con. But in the end they manage to do the greatest thing 21st Century "remakes" have afforded us and that's ::gasp:: improve on WEAK ideas. Most characters of the past were created without any forethought to the journey they had ahead of them. It wasn't until Kirk's son died long after the series was over that he finally gained some motivation. I had never been fully sold on Kirk or Spock's backstory/character type but they made some changes that made me excited to see where they are taking this branch of the franchise.

I have plenty of other glowing amazement at this film, but I'll move onto the "Args!" fast before I need to go to bed.

Well, we finally get more Romulans. Without making them interesting AGAIN. I love that they're the flip side of the Vulcan coin, but no-one can do anything interesting with them. Eric Bana has some fun with it, but it still just feels like a poor man's Klingon or Vulcan. Or a dime store Borg (especially with all that green). They give 'em an awesome ship that is one of the most menacing things I've seen in a Star Trek film since V'Ger (yes, V'Ger freaks the crap out of me. I am a Trekkie, leave me be) so Kudos on that.

And the alien makeup looks ridiculous even though all the CG in the film made my jaw hit the floor. Some things never change I s'pose.

I'm gonna say one thing and then drop it 'cause it's too close to a spoiler to go any further. Wynona Rider.

Man, I can't say much more than that on the negative side. It's one awesome incredible high flying action sequence after another as the film travels at warp speed (couldn't resist) through a myriad of classic Trek references all the way to the credits. By the end they ARE the crew of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 even if they took a different route to get there.

P.S. IMAX!!

P.P.S. Thank you for breaking the Trek curse, Nemesis. We owe you big time.

Expressions of Light

I've started on a project that represents a strong move away from traditional linear narrative and brings me more in line with installation. My big inspiration on this is the writings of Christian Metz.

The first six videos are up on Youtube. And over the coming months, you can expect to see a lot more of them.

HAPPY TRICENTENNIAL!

The Passion of Charlie Sheen hit 300 views!




That's the most views any piece of art I've ever uploaded has received! I know a lot of people out there who have 400,000,000,000 hits for their cat barfing twinkle twinkle little star, but I'm just happy that 300 random strangers stumbled upon my project and maybe made it through the first five seconds.

Time is a river... a ribbon?... It's not a line.

I just recently made a short film entitled Waters. It's 30 seconds and runs rather fast. But through making it, I have talked to the dead, molded time and figured out what the hell i want to do with film.

I have lately become obsessed with water. Both due to its influence in my name (Dylan: god of the sea), my family (Waters) and my California rising sign (Cancer). So this film involved hand manipulation. I had to scratch, cut and color it. It had to be 30 seconds, and that's 20ft of film, so I measured my body three times, and grabbed a handful of footage that people had discarded from their projects.

I took it all home and started to ask the film questions. I scratched and scratched and listened to a silent hand guiding me. I scratched the ten feet of black leader with symbols and sigils and I colored the clear leader with the same. Then I branded my true name on the emulsion and hand tinted it.
But one odd thing I realized was that I had a small bit of footage of an old man. And some of the found footage was a guy digging in the sand. And what he discovered there was a can. My brain lept to the idea that my grandfather (Pop) was trying to speak to me and tried to let his hand guide me through the building of this film. I took all of the footage back to the edit labs and spliced it all together. But what was interesting, was that I embedded the last thing I had worked on at the beginning and folded the time worked in on itself. Suddenly, the film became about my journey to speaking with my grandfather. All of time collapsed in on itself.

The film I wound up making was about it making itself. And my frustration at the projector and the inability to make the three frames of the old man appear was reflected on the face of the actor in the found footage. This made me realize that (much like The Invisibles is to Grant Morrison) my creations are sigil extensions of self. I must use this tool of manifestation to change this world. I always thought it was possible, but never thought of doing it through the dream logic of film. It's much more freeing and primal. I feel as though I'm tugging on the strings of the universe and they comply to my touch.