Bill Randall

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Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers floated a soporific city symphony on the walls of MoMA, balancing long takes with short bursts of rhymed images. The multiplane video was silent, but Aitken talks 26 ears off in Broken Screen, his book of interviews.

The thin thread connecting the interviews is put best in the subtitle: “expanding the image, breaking the narrative.” It’s really just an excuse for him to interview a bunch of mostly gallery artists and filmmakers (and an architect) he likes.

Even though many artists are close to overexposed– would that Werner Herzog had bitten Matthew Barney– it is refreshing to have them out of their respective ghettos. Broken Screen reads like a great magazine that only lasted for two issues because it tried to do too much.

Some of the artists are new, like the fascinating Olafur Eliasson. Others, like Manny Farber and Alejandro Jodorowsky, seem curiously old-fashioned. Better are the lesser-known, like Pablo Ferro, the titles designer of Vertigo, Dr. Strangelove, and many others. And especially welcome is Eija-Liisa Ahtila, whose interview glimpses the nuts and bolts of an artist working with a seasoned film crew.

The book’s real value is in its lavish production. Like a little coffee table book, it teems with full-color reproductions of art, film stills, and even a clutch of photos from Robert Wilson stage shows. I doubt I’ll reread the interviews, but I leaf through the book every time I see it.

I have a long essay about the stellar artist Daisuke NISHIJIMA, written in a haze of flu, in the latest issue of The Comics Journal. It’s online now for subscribers, but for everyone here are a few additional links about this artist:

A couple of Japanese-only sites, with art:

• His official site and blog (Japanese only, but the source of this witch picture, among others).
• His alter ego “Mangacchi” has a blog on the slow life: Mangacchi 2.0
• Actually, it looks like “Mangacchi” has been set to private.  Oops.  I fixed the link for the official site, though.

Awful YouTube has his charming flipbook animation, showing his philosophy of vapor trails.

A couple of interviews:

• Commonsphere Interview, translated into English.
• A 2005 interview by translator Matt Treyvaud, in English.

The French, as usual, are way ahead of us. Nishijima’s French publisher’s page explains that Nishijima is a “grand amateur de musique, et il écrit régulièrement pour des mensuels consacrés à la musique comme Studio Voice ou Music Magazine et il prend le nom de Mahôtsukai, pour ses activités de DJ.”

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From music to movies, Nishijima has an inveterate love of pop culture. His first work, O-son Senso (”The Universal”), riffs on Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds and Neon Genesis Evangelion, the anime TV series. He also tips the pen to:

• Blur’s video for the song “The Universal”
• Superflat.
• Some Hollywood movies: John Carpenter’s The Thing, Rambo, Rocky, like they need links. Like Coca-Cola needs to buy ads.
• The Prisoner (which once had Jack Kirby as its interpreter)

That’s just in his debut volume. Later ones have more riffs; Dien Bien Phu draws extensively from Vietnam War literature and film, particularly the author Tim O’Brien. Nishijima begins the comic with a quote from O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” (link to .pdf), but as always, Nishijima transforms his sources into his own idiom.

From my notebook, when I was working in Wakayama, south of Osaka:

I’m fascinated by Touch, but not for its eternal brilliance. It just comes on television every day when I get home from work. This 80s baseball soap, a creaky classic, matches nicely with new commercials for Calorie Mate and Boss Coffee. In a way, the 80s were to anime what the 70s were to manga, mapping the territory for everyone to follow. Touch, with its love triangle, high school tensions, and pop songs, could be any tv show from the 80s. Given that kids still watch it, it could be every tv show since.

Since I’m usually cooking when it’s on, I can’t say how the love triangle’s progressing. In fact, I can’t even tell whether they’re showing the episodes in order. They all run together: school, practice and games, tiffs large and small, life-changing teen drama. Sometimes I feel that five different scenes shoot out of a blender every day—there’s your show. In the episode where Punchy’s two illegitimate kids show up (he’s the dog, mind), in between slow-motion shots of Minami doing gymnastics and the baseball coach’s bobbing head, there’s an old school montage of baseball practice. The kids run, hit some balls, and hit the field like nothing else exists. It goes into the night, but it could go on forever.

This montage lifts the practice above the story, where it becomes an emblem of sorts. Touch does have a story arc, with twin boys both in love with Minami, both on a team headed inexorably to Koshien Stadium for the championship. The outcome is inevitable, and not the reason anyone watches. Rather, we watch to see the same thing every week, to see just a little progress without making it end, like everything in our lives eventually does. I finish cooking, turn off the television and the next day go back to school. Repeat.

Why not, then, a 26-episode series in which the road is clearly defined but the progress never told? It could work quite well, even as a thirteen hour loop played forever and only watched five minutes at a time. We don’t recall the long days and adjustments after, say, our first confession of love. We recall the excruciating buildup before we spilled our hearts out of our chests, terrified they wouldn’t make it out there on their own. We recall life on the edge of the cliff, right before you lose balance, knowing you won’t be able to pull back but enjoying every unmeasured moment.

I wind up at PingMag, a bilingual English-Japanese design journal, fairly often.  I first found it through this article on Namaiki while researching Fukuokan permaculture and the Power of Duck.  Since then, I often return to its articles on art, film, design, and pop-cult detritus .  A sample:

• This time, I was researching Koi no Mon, a crazed manga by Jun HANYUNYUU.
• Gez Fry, self-taught illustrator who fled a diplomacy career, explains his “manga-style” and slags US comics art
• The producers of Tokyo Loop, an omnibus of animation feature Tabaimo, Yoji KURI and Kotobuki SHIRIAGARI, among others.
• The making of Tekkon Kinkreet into an anime, with lots of production art and photos around the studio.
• The Butt-Biting Bug, about which the less said the better.
• YMCK, pioneering 8-bit band, with videos.
• Dark & comic animation from Run Wrake, described in an interview.
• Jennifer Baichwal, director of Manufactured Landscapes, a fine doc on Edward Burtynsky’s large-format photography (pictured above).
• Some guy who dresses in olde clothes and hand-cranks a projector to show film’s incunabulae.

I have a long essay about artists who jump between manga & galleries in the new Comics Journal. One of the artists, Akino KONDOU, has a web site showcasing her work.

She also has a number of animated shorts floating around the web. On dependable, ugly YouTube:

• Opening Animation for the 2002 Digista Awards
• “Tentoumushi no Otomurai”
• “Densha Kamoshirenai”

She’s represented by Mizuma Art Gallery, who indicate that a book of her work has been published in France, entitled EIKO, so perhaps non-Japanese readers can sample her stuff while waiting for English-language publishers to get their act together. The introductory essay seems to be bilingual English and French, but I’m not sure about the comics. Read it and you’ll feel “les sensations universelles d’un temps de solitude absolue et de métamorphose.”

Her French publisher’s page has a short preview of the book. Her gallery also has images from her latest animated work and new drawings.

(AKA “The King & the Bird.” Sounds dull translated, but it’s better than the alternate English title “The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird.”)

Hayao Miyazaki has exquisite taste. He loves Yuri Norstein and Frédéric Back, and most of all, Paul Grimault. This greatest of French animators, fearing neither sentiment nor destruction, left his traces all over The Castle in the Sky. In Grimault’s earlier film Le Roi et l’Oiseau, the castle doesn’t fly, but the Bird does. And the lovers seem to, drawn with such a light touch. As though Bob Clampett had flown to Paris for Jean Cocteau’s poetry, one could say.

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I’m fond of DivX and VLC, the freeware video codec & viewer, in the same way I like my laptop, held together with gaff tape. I wasn’t surprised when, watching some guy on a DivX video, he was engulfed in a swarm of triangles. Every movement left a trail of them, until he drowned in geometry. It seems the codec was misinstalled. Later, when VLC pushed the the gaff tape to bursting, this happened:

It’s an image of some poor farmer freaking out over losing his milk, swimming in digital blocks.

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Last fall in Washington, DC, I first saw the work of an artist who uses these technological lesions as his medium. Takeshi Murata had three of his recent video works in the Black Box downstairs in the Hirshhorn. One was a forgettable computer animation, a devil’s rorschach in color.

The other two, though, were excellent. “Pink Dot” and “Monster Movie” both run found footage through a digital wringer, with results half-Brakhage, half-codec panic. “Monster Movie” takes footage from the 1981 junk classic Caveman. Almost unrecognizable, Murata’s monster fights his way through flowing gobs of digital gunk. “Pink Dot” pits Rambo against the same gunk, joined by a pink dot throbbing on fluorescent blue ground. Rambo appears behind the dot, subsumes it, disappers in a mess of blocks, then bursts through. As he stands still, the dot engulfs him from behind. It’s a zero-sum game.

Murata renders the digital image as a flowing vat of colors, like a well-used palette. He also understands how insubstantial the medium is. Anyone who’s lost a hard drive knows how fragile digital images are. I’ve imagined chemical photography as bricks, but digital as sand. Murata prefers sludge, and he makes it literal. His subject appears to be the human figure in motion, fighting through his medium. And the music, by Lexington, Kentucky’s own Hair Police, counterpoints it all.

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YouTube never lets you down, with incomplete clips from both “Monster Movie” and “Pink Dot.” Shot handheld off the screen, it’s watchable, and YouTube’s own awful encoding adds yet another layer of muddy, endearing blocks.

This has probably made the rounds already, but: Researching an article on KONDOU Akino, I ran across a link to FUYAMA Taruto’s animated take on Jim Woodring’s Frank.Here’s the link.

(Picturebox has a clip on Youtube, but the above links to the whole short.)

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