Michael Helsem, Sheep Used to Be Harmless, ca. 1984
resin oil on alkyd on panel, 20 x 20 inches
tom moody
Two Scary Clipfests
Via "links for the day" from The House Next Door, a film blog:
Montage of characters saying the name of the movie in the movie (not meant to be scary but fairly stomach turning)
Listicle called 25 Scariest Moments in Non-Horror Movies (from ifc.com)
Some interesting choices in the latter (the boy turning into a donkey in Pinocchio); some I'd rather not watch (Gene Tierney watching as a boy drowns--never heard of this film); some predictable (slug in Ensign Chekhov's ear); some debatably not "non-horror" (Deliverance). The list is recommended more for the writing by IFC guest critics, and their choices, than the clips. (Missing: De Niro's bat swing in The Untouchables.)
pdg sighting
Guthrie has spotted the parked domain girl on an ad banner for Brown College. That's not the Brown you go to if you want to study semiotics, but it is linguistically close.
Michael Smith Open Web House
A comment I made to the Michael Smith interview at Rhizome:
Good interview, thanks. Shout out to Michael.
I was lucky to have seen Open House in its real space incarnation. It made perfect sense in the old NewMu basement, which was a loft-type space such as the one Smith and White were pseudo-documenting. That gave everything a recursive layer that would be impossible in the new "modern" NewMu. The experience was immersive: you were surrounded on all sides by the archaeological layers of this fictional Soho artist's so-called life of false starts and stopgap solutions, from old paintings stashed in a storage nook to the artist's video-editing "day job" workspace (a room within a room within a room). I remember in Mike's video intro for the installation he talks mock-enthusiastically about "getting his own home page." A late '90s-style HTML interface would have been the perfect way to do the web version.Unfortunately I can't evaluate John Michael's handiwork because I can't get the web version to load. I launch from a pop-up and then my browser says "transferring data from rhizome.org" for a long time. I hit the start button and everything freezes. Instead of downloading the entire site with some indeterminate wait time why not use links to individual bits of content?
Best, Tom Moody