Angelos at the Dunlop

 I met up with Angelos and his family at the Dunlop Art Gallery this afternoon. His kids (with his wife Christine) are enjoying Jeff Morton's audio toys above. Belinda New, an old friend from film school who is now the RPL film programmer, popped by to chat as well (below).

Angelos Hatzitolios and Belinda New

Sock-vile and paper cutting

My only break from the Sock-vile shoot was to go to the Dunlop opening with Ed Pien. He creates amazing paper cut installations. On the Sock-vile front, the team dressed a sausage in a paper dress.

Reflecting

Today I spent too much money. Bought all the episodes of Poirot tv show on dvd as well as a small sliver extremely overpriced plastic to protect Margaret's new Ipod.
To cap it off, we went to the Mercury for supper (Margaret paid since I was griping too much) and I took this photo of William reflected in the glossy formica tabletop.
I also updated my website in a few places, added a page for the new Dunlop show as well as my "Rerun Amok" and "All the Boys are Called William" projects.

not kid stuff

Today I woke up early, being back to my regular schedule of bad nights, but then fell back asleep and everyone had a slow start to the day. In fact, William never did get out of his pajamas. Margaret and I went to Sylvia Ziemann's opening of her tremendously alluring miniature houses, each demonstrating a different approach to post-world-disaster architecture, complete with functional tvs and (non-functional) toilets. They are up for another couple weeks at the Dunlop branch at the Sherwood Village library.
This evening Margeret went out paper making and William and I tried out the two player Carcassonne Wheel of Fortune variant I bought a few months ago. We had fun. I tried to take the opportunity to teach him the strategies to compete at the game. I pointed out how when we usually play, Paul and I viciously attack each other but not him because he is eight. However, when he turns nine, these rules might change so he'd best be prepared.

restored

Today I finally finished restoring "Daytona: A Happening", a film by Jean Oser that was accidentally cannibalized for found footage sometime last year. Luckily most of the parts were intact. I accidentally destroyed a six inch part in the process and have another six inch part that part that I could not locate a home for. There are a couple other gaps but overall it is there.
Jean Oser was a film editor and a great filmmaker in his own right. He made quite a few short commissioned films in the fifties and sixties (industrials when such things were still pretty cool). He then came to teach at the UofR where he became one of the most influential people in the creation of a film community and film industry in Saskatchewan. The films he made are housed at the Saskatchewan Filmpool and are unlikely to be housed collectively anywhere else in the world. While many of them likely exist in other collections or in the archives of their commissioning companies, no one else has them collected as "Jean Oser" films. This one in particular is a fast paced short about motorcycle racing. Made in the 60s, it is filled with odd bits of slang. At one point the narrator points out that when the race is over, the action hasn't stopped and we see the rider necking with a sexy girl. It was commissioned by the Triumph Motorcycle company.
It was Paul's birthday today: HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL. We had pizza and cake. His brother Mike came to town and surprised him half way through supper. Then we went to the opening at the Dunlop. William was doing a number of drawings and had them laid out on the floor. Two people, including one person who is a programmer at another local art gallery, walked by just as he'd finished them and stepped directly on them. What kind of people go to art galleries these days?

Saturday laziness

Margaret had to work all day at the Dunlop at Sherwood where they had an opening of work by Vic Cicanski, Donna Kreikle, and i-Ann Siwek, as well as some garden events and dancing by New Dance Horizons. William and I watched Johnny English this morning then went to the opening. I'm really tired from staying up way to late watching Veronica Mars season 3, which I've been waiting four months for through the library (I was about 25th on the list, but luckily there were 3 copies). I also read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, an amazing book which was mostly drawings, all set in1931 about clocks and cinema. Check out the sample first pages on the website. I had a nap and am ready to watch Veronica Mars again until morning.

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Met with Chrystene this morning and took a look at more scenes from Sisu. I am hoping to sit down and watch the first rough cut all the way through around the end of next week. Looking great.
Went to Speed Racer with William this afternoon. Lots of movement, I got a kick out of it, especially the barbarians who threw bee hives into the other drivers cars.
This evening there was an opening at the Dunlop with a projection performance. Really good. My niece Michelle is in town and came with us.
My Youtube videos total number of hits reached 10,000 last night.
Tired. Good night.

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Saturday is cartoon day, William announced at 7:30 this morning. I'd told him he could wake me up in the morning to continue reading the Bionicle Legends book I'd started last night (volume 4 out of a current 9 book set, in that Bionicle series). However, my promise was before I decided to watch the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men at midnight, so was up until past 2. Ouch. We watched an episode of the Tick (vs Brainchild), then the Iron Giant (Brad Bird's masterpiece). This afternoon we went to the Sherwood Dunlop branch for the opening of Cindy Baker's "Gimmick" show, which I have mixed feeling about. This show features an array of objects which appear to be parts of magic acts. It looks pretty cool, but they don't make much sense without being able to handle them, which is partially allowed, but they don't all stand up to this type of scrutiny. See video: sorry if it's longer than most video I post (1:37). Leesa and Daniel were there and got lots of attention during the magic act that followed the artist talk. Supper was at Margaret's mothers houses as she is hosting a couple of kids from Africa who are part of a school of orphans who are touring North America and singing in church choirs. William played with them in the back yard for a while, it was nice. We thought we'd surprise them with the bucket of snow we were storing in the freezer, but apparently they've been here for six months already, so were not interested.

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Today I bought William the giant Harry Potter Hogwarts Lego set that was on half price at Toys-R-Us and Paul came over and we built it. This evening we went to the Dunlop and to the Neutral Ground art openings, both good shows. The Dunlop show is on contemporary independent Canadian comic books. The gallery is filled with pillars with alcoves in them in which stacks of comics are stored. There are lots of comfortable places to sit and read them. There is no original artwork up, the curator claimed that this fetishizes the process, and instead presents only the comics as they were published.

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As I write this, William is in bed, supposed to go to sleep. He says he's sad and lonely. He says he is slad.
This evening I went to the "Unscripted" session at the Dunlop Art Gallery. Some interesting points were made about art and cities, but it wasn't the madhouse that I heard the last session was. I began grabbing interesting words from the air to create a new "Mr. Saul" film, probably for the Cathedral festival. I also convinced Jeannie Mah, Elwood Jimmy, and Lorne Boeg to appear in my Modern/Warhol video/films. Margaret and I saw the Warhol exhibit today (her for the first time, me for the second) and I spent most of the time watching the 90 minutes of films I'd not had time for previously. I realized, while watching them, that I shouldn't be doing a 10 minute set of portraits in Warhol style, but obviously I should do 15! I'm calling the set "15 minutes of famous". My role call is now Tyler Banadyga, Leesa Streifler, Eric Hill, Carle Steel, William, me, the three new ones, and six more I've not shot yet. Margaret will be one of them, that leaves five.
I thought I had one of the three dvds done for New Dance Horizons today, but when I looked at it, the image disappears inexplicably after the first two minutes. I recall there was some sort of error when exporting the video, but it looked in tact. I guess I was lazy and didn't check it far enough in. Grrrr. I need this done and deleted off the hard drive so I can move on.
Saw my doctor this morning, he says there's nothing too wrong with my liver (recall test with giant needle a couple of weeks ago) but abnormalities could be from some fat on my liver and I should look into my levels of triglycerides. Hitting the books again I guess.

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This afternoon was a Dunlop opening (Sherwood Village) where three young artists where shown. Most interesting was Griffon Baker who sculpts giant (7-12 foot high) plastic bottles out of bottle lids. Apparently we rarely recycle the lids of our bottles (type 2 plastic) because it is a bit more difficult. He collects them and creates amazing replicas. He has what looks like a giant evian bottle, although it has the name spelled backwards: naive. Along with Twyla Exner, who disassembles old telephone wire into its thin inner strands then braids it and then weaves those braided cords into sculptures, they create very powerful statements using recycled materials and a strong commitment to handcraft, labour, and precisions work. The third artist also created work from recycled materials, although her working philosophy was quite dissimilar as she was exploring the idea of minimum effort with her rickety sculptures, complete with open electrical circuit that shouldn't be touched, that barely stand on its own (physically and aesthetically).

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I finally got a dvd made for Tanya of the single camera documentation of her dance (as opposed to the edited version that I cut a few weeks back). I figured it would only take me a few minutes as I already had Michele Sereda's footage in the computer and all, but it proved difficult. Maybe because it was from a digital 8 camera, but the file just wouldn't be accepted by the Adobe dvd software. I tried out the Sorenson software and it will be really useful -- it is for turning one kind of media file into another. However, I still couldn't get it to burn with the Adobe Encore, but then I realized that with the file converted to the Mpeg, I could use the DVDit software, which is pretty easy and I know it quite well. Thus, the disc is done. I'll mail it tomorrow.
I got into the other edit room (as soon as the strike is over, we'll be putting all the edit rooms together, which will be very useful on days like today) and I reviewed the conference material I did yesterday then cut the fourth section which is only 9 minutes long. I should be able to finish cutting the first draft after one more session.
Power shopping on way home: I picked up Frank Sinatra's Christmas album today, some Webkins for William's cousins, 6 cans of espresso, gas and a lottery ticket, and a $5 Three Stooges dvd set.
This evening there was an opening at the Dunlop, Miss Canadiana did a photo session at the Canadiana Barber Shop, then an opening with some nice bannock with jam and maple syrup.

lucky lucky

The pancake breakfast for the 50-104 film festival was wonderful. Thanks to all the staff and volunteers, we had a nice time.

There was an opening/curator/artist talk at the Sherwood branch of the Dunlop Art Gallery today. Casualty, curated by Sigrid Dahle with work by Lorna Brown and Bernie Miller. Sigrid talked and wrote about the importance of unstructured time and rest. It made me think about the number of times that people have commented on how rested I look now that I'm on sabbatical. Considering I'm still running on 6 or so hours per night, I must have looked bloody awful before! Sigrid also asserted that more information is not helpful, we do not rest our minds and find our creativity by having people tell us more, we get it by getting away from the constant infux of the new, that essentially we are creative through our boredom. I had an interesting conversation with Lee Henderson about experimental film made by filmmakers versus experimental film made by visual artists. He was at an experimental film festival in Seoul Korea and was taken with how the work from all over the world seemed to maintain a number of similar aesthetic characteristics, whether from curatorial choice or from an shared evolution of the form by the artists he did not know. However, I am certain that the program he saw was primarily the creation of work by people trained in film as a specialization. While it can be controversial to write about this as it requires labeling people as being from one camp or the other, he thought it could be a good paper (there, I've committed you Lee!).

three score

Today was William's first day of grade one, the first day that he's stayed in school all day long. I walked down and picked him up for lunch, as I intend to do every day, and we ate sandwiches in front of the tv. I looked for Flintstones season 1 at the store the other day but they didn't have it, so I'll have to look around some more. I would like him to have at least one year that reflects my own childhood, and don't we all? I think a key to nostalgia is the desire to convince others to have the same nostalgic feelings we have ourselves. Today William made his own sandwich for the first time. It seemed a bit of a mess as the peanut butter was chilled and the bread was soft, but he made it and ate it, so who am I to criticize?

While he was in school I finally got a chance to watch Sylvie Blocher's "Wo/Men in Uniform" at the Dunlop Art Gallery (see July 14 posting). It's been up for 6 weeks and closes today but to date I've only managed to watch short clips of this 50 minute project that closes today. It was quite engaging, although perhaps both too short and too long. It could not impact with as its maximum potential audience because few gallery goers are prepared to sit for an hour during a stop at the library. However, I know that there were dozens of hours of footage and I often felt it was just skimming the surface. There are short portrait/interviews of about a dozen Regina police officers and her off screen (muted) questions must have been well delivered because each officer broke from his or her expected response and revealed something personal about their relationship to this job. I wanted more, but each was only allowed a few questions, a few minutes, and then fades away. I have to criticize the gallery, although I have a great deal of respect for it generally, for the quality of the presentation; the projectors and air conditioning created an annoying din that made it less than comfortable to listen to the voices. I ended up sitting on a chair, rather than the couch, so that I could sit next to the speaker and be better immersed into the program.

I finished "Loose Screw", a one minute video in a similar style to the five second video I have on YouTube from a couple of days ago. The Filmpool is having a screening of short videos with an open entry with the deadline in a couple of days, so I'll enter this. I will probably also kinescope it and work it into my Modern project.