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…

It was room-large, a gallery full of televisions + earphones, each television with a different person from the same neighborhood, Küba, in Istanbul.  Enough voices + faces + stories to last a month of visits to the Carnegie, I wonder if anyone has actually listened to all of them all the way through.

More from Ataman at his website, The Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks.

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.

I love snow, I love Pittsburgh, thus mathematically, logically, metereologically, I should be in a new transcendent state of bliss!  As long as my feet stay on my legs.  (As inspired by Ron Nasty’s short film in The Rutles).

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.