Last week I posted my old remembrance of the grisly and botched slaughtering of an eel in my kitchen to make a pie. The recipe was named Eel Pie Island Pie. Today my oldest dearest friend, Bryan, sent me the link to this bit of video about the source of the eel pie recipe: Eel Pie Island.
Turns out the place has quite a bit of history behind it, including being where Dicken’s wrote Little Dorrit and where the Rolling Stones had their first gig. Go figure.
Bryan has also suggested I record the story and put it online as a podcast. He seems to think I’m a good oral storyteller. I’ve got some writer chums on Twitter who are very involved in doing the same sort of thing so I might just give it a go. What the hell – I could always use a good distraction to keep me from pursuing – something – like writing new stuff.
I’ve been having a series of email discussions with my friend Bryan that has become a wide-ranging exploration of how humanity is likely to evolve alongside our rapid technological advancements. I do intend to distill those emails into a one big fat ass blog post but I’m a bit too busy at the moment to get that done for you.
Instead, I found this fascinating talk by Juan Enriquez at this year’s TED conference where he touches on some of the same territory Bryan and I have been treading; and I thought I’d share it with you.
This kind of stuff has been consuming me lately because I think it is really fucking cool and pant peeingly scary. I’m not a technophobe by any stretch of the imagination and have no problems envisioning a future where we and our machines are one. The idea of the Borg makes for good storytelling but it’s not a frightening future in my eyes.
Bryan and I are not profound scholars when it comes to this shit – we just like to think up the most fucked up possibilities and then extrapolate them further to see if we can glean a sense of where the human race is heading – or maybe just scare ourselves like kids telling ghost stories around the campfire. Each time a new article or news report is published we start kicking it around like a big blob of silly putty just to see if it’ll bounce off the walls or leave dents in the ceiling – metaphorically, of course. I do have large quantities of silly putty – I know where to buy it in bulk – and when you drop five pounds of that shit you better protect your kidneys ‘cuz it comes hurtling back at you like a motherfucker.
But I digress.
I’ll come back some other day with all our notes and pimp it up with pretty pictures and links to all the crap that was inspiring us. In the meantime, enjoy Enriques and don’t be afraid of the future. Just keep your eyes on the assholes in charge right now.
Geek alert! This an animation entitled: Pencil Test. It was created in 1988 to show what could be done on the then new Mac II computers.
I’ve been messing with CG for a while now and although I am far from being any sort of pro with packages like Cinema 4D, Blender and others – farting around with machinama too – I do enjoy what can be created with them. The tools just get better and better and the machines get faster and faster. The advances made in the field have been extraordinary.
Here’s the behind-the-scenes of Pencil Test. What’s extraordinary is they are talking about using computers with only 4 megabytes of RAM. 4 megs?! Christ – I have pencils with more memory now.
About 10 years ago I had the good fortune to meet up with Steve “Spaz” Williams and give him and his family a tour of our shop where we made our kids TV productions. He was lamenting the mechanical realism of CG at that time, where re-creating a faux reality was more important than innovation in character design and pushing the art of the medium. We agreed that the best CG would be to created something that looked like torn out sketch taped to a popsicle stick and waggled from under the camera. Silly idea, yeah, but we got a giggle out of it.
I love puppets and always will – but I’m not wholly devoted to them. I began my interest in filmmaking with my friend Bryan, making stop motion movies in his mother’s garage and in the back room of our high school art teacher’s office. That was puppets too – sort of. My interest in film brought me into theatre studies and I became (among other things) a mime. God help me, I still shudder when I say that. But my work in mime and mask and physical theatre was also a kind of puppetry – manipulating the human body to express character and emotion. All those things combined, the physical and visual expression of character and narrative, fed my ability to work with the Muppets and gain a career in puppetry.
It’s all the same shit.
As geeky and dated as these videos are it’s still refreshing to see that the most simple tools can be used to created works of wonder and amusement.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go finish my own animation work – but first I gotta find some popsicle sticks.
I’m just really busy trying to make things happen.
The hardest part is keeping my mind in focus on the tasks at hand. There’s so much really interesting shit I want to rant and babble about. I’ve been bothering my friend Bryan via email – knowing he’s busy himself and will just start bouncing off the walls when I send him more and more intellectual detritus gleaned from my ADD net wanderings.
True to form he’s been leaving big head shaped dents in the drywall of his house. I get to giggle and then carry on with my own attempts at creation.
Soon soon soon. So close. Almost. Very soon.
Cheers.
P. S. And, for no reason at all, here’s a picture of Henry Kissinger picking his nose and eating it.
I'm going to be slowly making some changes to the website both in format and content - and I'm pretty sure even the URL will change.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.
I’m just really busy trying to make things happen.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.