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