March 2011
1 post
WatchFrauds and Frenzies - yet another these-things-and-those-things film by the imfamous Larry Semon. This one has some interesting bits, but after I researched embedding this obscure russian video in Tumblr I realized that what I wanted to blog about was actually Huns and Hyphens, which has even less to do with Huns or hyphens than barrel of monkeys.
All that’s to say that I’ve set up a...
February 2011
1 post
January 2011
3 posts
“The deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of...”
– Walter Murch ending the debate on 3D as far as this film-making team is concerned. Posted in full at Roger Ebert’s blog.
For more anti-3D theorizing, read my silent film “I’m 3D too!” here: http://that-a-way.tumblr.com/post/375760374/im-3d-too-a-that-a-way-short
WatchTesting, testing …
6 tags
November 2010
1 post
4 tags
August 2010
1 post
"Yellow Mustard" - Free Download
That-a-way.com now hosts a free download of Walm Art’s original score for the short adaptation of Mark Twain’s “The Stolen White Elephant”, composed and recorded by J. Rosenau and A. Ciccone.
Download: “Yellow Mustard”
July 2010
3 posts
WatchColor Bars
“… I enjoy myself walking amid insane houses, staring at windows that look...”
– From Fantazius Mallare by Ben Hecht
June 2010
4 posts
“The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve...”
– Raymond Chandler in “Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story”
5 tags
“A SANDBURR is a foolish, small vegetable, irritating and grievously useless....”
– Alfred Henry Lewis, New York City, November 15, 1898 in preface to the self-same book, worthy of a read and even a film adaptation.
May 2010
5 posts
“It needed a beefy person with fat legs and a large amount of inexplicable...”
– Stephen Crane, from The O’Ruddy
7 tags
Ross Santee
A Wild West triptych by author and illustrator, Ross Santee, whose works include Pooch, Rummy Kid Goes Home, Men and Horses, and The Bar X Golf Course.
That-a-way is currently embarking on a novel entitled Cowstein & Bramblestamp: The Wrong Trail. Santee’s illustrative work (charcoal?) in Miller’s two books The Arizona Story and Arizona: The Last Frontier is noticeably abstract...
Auguste Tardier & Ambroise Tardieu
August Tadieu, French pioneer of forensic science was also the son of a noted cartographer Ambroise Tardieu, and included his father’s illustrations in his clinical books about (among other morbidly captivating subjects) cemeteries, child sex abuse in industrial factories, and poisonings. Here’s one such collaboration concerning the alluring horror of mental illness:
April 2010
7 posts
Magnetic Cactus
The following inspired tale was concocted in 1899 by an infamous Munchhausen’s sufferer, Joseph “Joe” Mulhatton, and printed in the local newspaper outfit of Florence, AZ at that time:
” … no doubt caused by vast beds of copper or some other magnetic mineral that underlies it all, this species of cactus from its fibrous nature acts like a telegraph instrument to...
An exhaustive list of films with "gambling themes... →
Preston Sturges Learns To Fly
Before film directing in L.A. and playwrighting in N.Y.C., Preston Sturges tried inventing vertical flight.
From LIFE Magazine, January 7th 1946: “In addition to the lip rouge and the loopless camera, Sturges’ inventions include a projection machine intended to make it easier for brokers to read ticket tape, which his foster father wrongly pronounced impractical in 1917; a vertical...
6 tags
“There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories. While it...”
– G.K. Chesterton, A Defense of Detective Stories
3 tags
“Where is the ingenuity of unraveling a web which you yourself … have woven...”
– E. A. Poe on detective fiction, of which he was the English-language pioneer, and which he referred to as “tales of ratiocination”
5 tags
Canard Digérateur or Why A Duck?
This is Canard Digérateur or The Digesting Duck (or The Doo-Doo Bird) - a 1739 invention from Frenchman Jacques de Vaucanson. Infamous at the time for replicating the creation of bird droppings, and even purported to metabolize foodstuffs entered into the metal beak through completely artificial ingenuity. It’s now remembered as a hyped-up farce that deposited robo-shit from a separate...
6 tags
Psychological Ergonomics from Jim Flora
The newest Jim Flora retrospective from Fantagraphics, this one titled The Secretly Diabolical Art of […], contains some of his most mind-blowing commercial work from 1956 where he designed art for whole issues of Research & Engineering magazine, not just the covers.
An Example:
In this section as well, Flora partakes in a bit of structuralism, drawing caricatures of workplace...
March 2010
0 posts
February 2010
16 posts
The Embodiment of Lack
There are hosts of images in modern commercial production as well as contemporary art that depict not so much the color black as pure “absence”, an embodiment of lack. They all stem from different histories and disciplines, and so generalizing them is very dangerous. But the close proximity in time when they all sprung is impossible to ignore: 2004-2010.
Could they perhaps indicate,...
“[Examples of mathematical chaos] — leaves fluttering in the wind, water...”
– Physicist, Robert B. Laughlin, on disappearance in Crime of Reason, pg 28. In a recent interview on the radio program “To The Best of Our Knowledge” he decried the so-called “Information Age” as, ironically (and sadly) a new “Dark Age.” Emphasis...
That-a-way recently finished script development...
5 tags
“A simulation aims at imitating (reproducing) the external result through a...”
– Slavoj Zizek, from The Parallax View, pgs 222-226
5 tags
6 tags
"I'm 3D, too..." (a That-a-way short)
INT. MOVIE THEATER - DAY
AL, a young movie usher.
Al sweeps the aisles of “THEATER 1” while a crowd enters, taking their seats. A waste bucket has been placed on the front and most central seat in the theater, and as the crowd settles, after dumping the swept trash, Al replaces the tin canister with his own rear end.
Now the whole crowd is eager to watch the film, and they place there 3D...
3 tags
On Film Schools - I
In an over-mediated society, films schools should offer equal parts practice and therapy. Not just fill in the gaps of ignorance, but open the gaps that allow for creative discovery (dis-cover-me). This highlights the essential difference between two distinct notions of what defines an “education”. Is it a process or is it a thing in itself? Value-hordes will say that practical...
4 tags
Modal Cinema
Art is somewhere between beauty and a stupid thing. Between play and a rut.
Cinema is a dialectical art. Not only because it deals with the record, and then darts from there, cutting and constructing. It is dialectical also because it does not exclude the completion of other forms in order to achieve its own status. (NOTE: all mixed art postdates the development of motion pictures). Cinema...
January 2010
7 posts
“Women and men of wit are dangerous tools,
And ever fatal to admiring fools:...”
– John Wilmot Earl of Rochester
Re: The Narrative Structuring of Stuff, etc...
Of the five outlines laid out earlier this month, only 2 and 4 - the even numbers - are found to be in any way bold or valuable, considering each in their formal way. This is shocking because everyone talks about story structure ONLY in terms of the odd numbers: 1, 3 and 5. The problem with talking about 2-act and 4-act structure is that it requires that you perform the exact act in which one...
Narrative Structuring of Stuff (in 1,2,3,4,& 5...
1: SSSSSTTTTTUUUUUFFFFF
2. This stuff; that stuff
3. Stuff is moving along; stuff falls the hell apart; stuff is resolved, for better or worse
4. Bad stuff; worse stuff; the worst stuff; the stuff of miracles
5. Stuff is complacent; stuff unfolds based on a bad decision; stuff tries to fix itself but cannot and actually unravels further; stuff gets used to being unraveled only to stumble...
