Christmas Vacation...

We're surrealists but we still celebrate Christmas and all that stuff- of course we do it upside down and backwards.

What?

I don't know- that doesn't actually make sense, which brings me to the point of this post. With the holidays and all that we're just too damn busy for this thing right now. So... This is the last post of 2008 (our most post-tastic year this far!), but we'll resume all this in 2009.

Thanks for reading the past (whatever) and have some happy holidays!

Dan and Vince

P.S. This video at the top is the first thing that came up on YouTube when I typed in "Surreal" and "Christmas". I didn't even bother to watch it to be totally honest. "Enjoy"...

P.P.S. We will post again next year- please come back...

Zzzz-Mail

Since you follow our Twitter feed (which you can find here) this will probably be old news to you- but whatever, let's pretend you aren't following our Twitter feed (which you can find here).

A while ago we complained about the fact that Twitter has yet to develop a way to "tweet" while sleeping. (See our original post here)

Then Twitterer yurigoul replied that he thinks Sleep Twittering would be Followed by Sleep Second Lifing. (See original post here)

Then we said "They'd call it Second Life of the Mind"- which we thought was pretty damn clever. (See original post here)

And then- and this is sort of the point of this article. He directed us to this article about a woman sending out an e-mail while sleeping. It's pretty weird check it out...

That's all I got.

Oh and thanks for following our Twitter feed (which you can find here).

Dan

We're Fans of Our Fans!

We've already discussed the fact that we've got tons of fans on "the twitter."

But who are these people? Are they important.

Dude, yeah, you could say they're important...



Thanks Mr. Elliott- we'll keep the tweets to a respectful mimimum...

Dan

ART WE LIKE: Walt Disney

Before they were producing awful straight-to-video sequels, terrible tween sitcoms, and the 80 minute long pieces of crap that they try to pass off as family-friendly feature-films, Disney did some pretty cool- and pretty surreal stuff.

For example, Destino, the 58-years-in-production collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney. Here it is in super bootleg-o-vision (the way Disney intended it be to seen- really!)



But of course, Disney didn't need to collaborate with noted surrealists to produce crazy crap. Take for example this Donald Duck cartoon entitled Duck Pimples:



And then they made Wall-E... uh... and then that's about it...

Dan

We're Number 1! (Almost)

According to Twitterholic.com, we are the 615th most followed Twitter feed in the Los Angeles area. (And we've actually gained a few followers since they compiled the list and we should actually be in the 570s by now...).

Anyway, we just felt like bragging. And it's almost the holidays and we've still got shopping to do and don't really have a lot of time to blog. So there.

Follow on us Twitter by clicking on this link right...

...

...

...

..HERE!

Thanks,

Dan

Kaufmans. PSUA.

Vince extended an invitation for Charlie Kaufman to join PSUA. I agree with that, and would like to extend it even further to Charlie's even more elusive brother Donald (co-writer of Adaptation).

And should the brothers decide to join, the Kaufman family will have a huge stake in our union- with 3 members, all brothers- Charlie, Donald, and Andy.

Dan

At the Beach, Keepin' it (Sur)Real

We don't usually go to the beach. We've got a lot of reasons for this- the main one rhymes with "bird bipple"... Anyway, we've just sort of assumed that the people at the beach aren't anything like us- But then we saw this dude.

He's a possible PSUA member, adding a little bit of surrealism to the lives of everyone on the beach that day.

Thanks dude, well done. And as a tribute I'm going to set my desktop to a beach scene and drag my mouse around- it looks exactly the same!

Dan

Welcome, Charlie Kaufman

Charlie Kaufman has just been named a lifetime honorary member of the Practicing Surrealists Union of America, thanks to his film Synecdoche, New York. A lot of you might be thinking "Crap, shouldn't he have already been in there for, like, that movie about the puppet and the actor who played that jewel thief? Or that one where Francis Coppola's nephew tried to steal some orchids? Or, hey, what about that one where Ace Ventura and that naked girl from Titanic gave their brains to Mary Jane Watson?"

No. Because Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may have all been odd, but on some very fundamental level, they all made sense. People did and said and felt things that exhibited some continuity within the narrative space of the films.

Not so with Synecdoche, New York. Among other things, Samantha Morton's character moves into a house that's constantly on fire because she's thirty-six and thought she'd be married and have a family by now. To say anything else about this film would be spoiling it for you.

So we say congratulations, Charlie, and offer you dues-free lifetime membership in the PSUA. For those of you who haven't seen the movie (which is all of you, probably), here's what Charlie Kaufman did in the space of two hours and four minutes:

1) make the highst-profile, most expensive, and unabashedly Surreal feature film since That Obscure Object of Desire, and
2) win all the bets he made that "After this, nobody will ever let me direct a film again."

We don't even need to ask if it was worth it. It was. We know it was. Charlie, thank you.

Vince out.

ART WE LIKE: They Might Be Giants

Now, Dan and I don't have kids, and I don't know anybody who thinks that's a bad thing, but a friend of ours with a kid gave us a copy of the HERE COME THE ABCs CD/DVD release from They Might Be Giants, and I have to tell you, these guys have more than earned their place in our library, largely because of this song:



Unfortunately, this is just a video somebody made on YouTube, but you can appreciate the genius of the song. The real video TMBG made and put on their DVD includes a bear sitting at the mixing board during a live in-studio performance of the song, and then the bear comes out to sing duet in the "George Washington's head" segment.

Here's the best part: This is for kids!!! HERE COME THE ABCs is the second of three children's albums TMBG has released to date, and Dan and I are pretty sure that a lack of exposure to Surrealism is one of the root causes for all the trouble people seem to be having with kids these days. Let it be so no longer. If you have children, you should pull a CLOCKWORK ORANGE on them and make them watch these videos.

Of course, TMBG has been on our radar for a long time. We've been fans pretty much since they did this:



Vince out.

Kids Can be So Surreal...

Ever listen to a kid tell you a rambling, improvised, stream-of-consciousness "story?"

It's this random series of events, so genuine in its randomness that you know that you, as a sane adult, could never recreate it.

Someone should really capture that- oh wait! Somebody just did!


Once upon a time... from Capucha on Vimeo.

Copyright laws will prevent this little girl's story from ever getting published (and more importantly, optioned...) but it's still pretty good- it deserves to be published!. Let's say she's culture jamming ("oh, she's commenting on Winnie the Pooh and how [insert pretentious crap here]") then that makes this totally legit. Just like how Vince and I are going to start selling re-dubbed DVDs of the 1990 Stuart Gordon film Robot Jox as Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen on Ebay sometime before next summer...

It's okay Mr. Copyright Law- it's art...

Dan

Artful Global Warming Protest...

Sometimes art doesn't mean anything. (See everything we've ever done).

But sometimes it does- and that's cool, I guess... sort of takes the fun out of it, but I'd rather these people (i.e. people with beliefs, who like, care about stuff...) express themselves this way instead of picketing, writing letters, voting, etc...

This at least looks cool.

And it certainly does make the world a little more surreal for the people who pass by- which, now that I think about it, is the one cause that we support.

So we agree with this protest, however, ideologically we believe it's much more surreal to think that global warming is some sort of conspiracy made up by a team of radical environmentalists who want to... um... like... pass laws to make the world better... or something... Oh! And deregulate trees, and then the trees can take over. If they have their way, this time next year we'll all be married to trees... Or something, right? Could someone clear this up for me?

Dan

Surrealism Hijacked 2! Empire 2!

INT. SOME TRENDY BAR IN NEW YORK CITY - NIGHT

Surrealists Dan and Vince bust through the door and begin flipping over tables.

Poe! Amos Poe! Is Amos Poe in here? Where is he? Somebody bring me that No Wave motherfucker! He's on my list! And not my Christmas list- my other list- my shit list! It's right here. It says:

1. LA Times
2. Amos Poe

End of list. Anyway we're here to talk to Poe about his 2007 film Empire 2. The trailer's embedded at the top of the page, give it a watch, we'll wait...

When I watched that trailer I felt like I had already seen it before- but, c'mon a sequel to Andy Warhol's Empire- I know I haven't seen that before- unless... I saw it inside my own brain!!!

I present EXHIBIT A in the trial of Dan and Vince vs. Amos Poe. Here is a clip from an interview I did in 2001...



You think you dada, Poe? You ain't dada! You ain't nothin'! This ain't over Poe!

Dan

ART WE LIKE: Trent Harris' The Beaver Trilogy

The Beaver Trilogy is a movie. Crispin Glover is in it. We like him.

So it starts with this dude in a parking lot being filmed by this other dude. The one dude does some impressions and stuff. Then the two dudes split up... Then the one dude writes to the other dude and tells him that he's doing a show and he's going to dress up as Olivia Newton John and the dude (the camera dude) should film it. Then we see this talent show, which ends with this dude singing like Olivia Newton John.

(Pretend this paragraph is in black and white.) Then we see these two new dudes in the parking lot. One is holding a camera and the other is Sean Penn and he is doing impressions. Then they split, and it turns out the one dude (Sean Penn) is putting on a talent show. The camera dude goes to film it, and film it. Eventually Sean Penn dresses up like Olivia Newton John and sings. Then the camera dude leaves. Then Sean Penn calls the camera dude and goes 'hey dude, I don't want that to be on TV,' but the camera dude says 'no' or whatever...

(Now we're in color again, and we look like a movie.) There's this dude who like Olivia Newton John (like we said, Crispin Glover). He goes to a restaurant and Dottie is there. People make fun of him, but he will be on TV, he says. The he goes to a parking lot and runs into this camera dude. He does some impressions... etc... talent show... etc...
[SPOILERS]
dresses like Olivia Newton John...
[END SPOILERS]

So as you can tell from my synopsis, the movie is awesome! It is a documentary, a narrative, and an experimental film. It is case-study in obsession, hind-sight, and regret. No amount of thesis papers on the re-enactments in The Thin Blue Line will tell you as much about the objectivity (or the lack there of) in cinema as The Beaver Trilogy.

Check out the official site HERE.

Dan

Deneuve

If we somehow justified that Kate Winslet pretending to be Catherine Deneuve counts as surrealism news, then clearly Catherine Deneuve being herself would also count, no?

To promote her forthcoming (not all that surreal) movie A Christmas Tale Ms. Deneuve has given a few career spanning interviews. The first with Film Comment...

Read it here.

And another, shorter article from the LA Times...

Read it here.

Dan

Inanities, Part 4

Things I've written on my typewriter:

I saw this movie once with Ronald Reagan. But the thing was, he wasn’t president yet. So I kept watching this thing going "Man, that guy’s going to be president someday." It was nuts. You can now do two things you couldn't do before you read the preceding:

1. I've been in movies, too, just like Ronald Regan. So now you can watch me in a movie and think "Man, that guy's going to be president someday."

2. This Ronald Regan movie I mentioned, I forgot the title, Patricia Neal was in it, too. I think it was her first movie, as a matter of fact. So if that helps you any, now you can go watch that movie and sit there thinking the same thing I did (Ronald Regan + President = One Day). Then, if you ever read in the news about me doing something really awful and somebody tells you that you shouldn’t judge somebody until you’ve walked in their shoes or known what it was like to be them, you can say: ‘I know. But I have, and that guy's nuts."

We've been Typealyzed

This nifty new website called Typealyzer will analyze a blog and then tell you about the writers. We tried it with our site and expected it to come back with something like:

Damn, yo! These guys are honest to God surrealists. There is no limit to their surrealing!

Instead we got the following:

The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.

Sort of right on... sort of. I'm not sure about the "pleasure and beauty" thing, we like some ugly art- maybe we've blogged a little bit too much about Catherine Deneuve as of late... also the "soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells" thing- makes it sound like we live in some sort of Sears commercial. And we don't. Our cramped L'apartment de surrealism is not too fancy...

But then the site offers something interesting, a chart of which part of our collective brains are being used when we write- in other words, the part of the brain that surrealism comes from.



Apparently it's the practical part.

Go figure.

Dan