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This notebook video from Ayse Birsel reminds me of my own sketchbook, just 90 degrees cleaner. Somehow mine always ends up warped, coffee brown and filled with strange messy drawings that I don’t remember ever making. I’ll have to do one, and then have some spilling too, for that brush of realism
I took these little stop motion blips last month at the Turkish Cultural Center of Pittsburgh’s presentation on Ebru, or marbling, down at the Pitt Union. I won the drawing for my choice of a painting — after winning the TCCP’s previous event’s raffle as well. The next TCCP event is henna hand painting at the end of June, so more Turkish art! Very exciting…
Somehow we found a parking space among the Brown Snow Mountains on Liberty Avenue in time to see Michael Jantze speak at the Toonseum. He was visiting from a (snowy) Savannah, he teaches at Savannah College of Art + Design.
The theme of the night? His studio’s new online comics work. A short overview:
He’s the creator of the strip The Norm, and he’s playing around with putting comics into motion, but not full steam animation. Comic strips would be viewable online, with the “the paper experience” preserved.
My favorite of his clips was Mr. Lux. He was born as a corporate tool, to socialize service staff into five star work — it reminded me of a recent New Yorker short on the secret life of hotel concierges, even though Mr. Lux shows no signs of psychological dissonance.
Mairead and I were coffeeing on Botanic Avenue this past June in South Belfast, and a man asked if he could join our table on the street. He turned out to be Joby Fox, a member of the 80s-90s Northern Irish band Energy Orchard, and they had shot the music video for their single “Sailor Town” in where else? Braddock, Pennsylvania.
So we recorded an impromptu reminiscence session right there at Clements, Mairead on audio, me on video. And “Sailor Town”, you can see it woven into the interview, or in its completeness here. You can see Joby in his 1990 version, in the thumbnail gallery above or on the right in the video. And his website is here.
I made this video out of photos + recordings I made over the summer on Dublin Road in Belfast. I put it up over on Another World too, thanks to Helen for the interview.
Ksenia introduced me to this Soviet cartoon from 1983, I love the drawings and the singing and the drunken eating. She says they have some Ukrainian slang. Where does such a wolf come from? So excellent! And I found it with subtitles too.
