I saw the reprise of Cartune Xprez today. It had technical problems during the TBA Festival and so they put it on for free. It also contained both programs from TBA (one was international and the other was local), making it two hours of weird and awesome.
The first part before intermission was the international one I tried to see with Rubie and Nathan. I think that if they had seen it they would have been way too weirded out and will never visit me again. They set the mood the same way as before with the colorful looping blobs animation Tarpit by Takeshi Murata. The first was James Duesing's Tugging the Worm. It was very bright and had rather choppy noise. About a Utopian...something world where this bird walks about and changes bodies with a muscleman. I don't really know, it was weird. Amy Lockhart's Tell Mumsy I Love Her was about 2 minutes of a drag queen in a canoe. Shana Moulton's Whispering Pines 4 was magnificent. The first part was live action and then it went into something Pi-esque and talked about spirals and rectangles and the perfect spiral thing. Also a lady danced about while her body was filled with an animation of a fractal. That is always cool. Ola Vasiljeva's Michael Jackson Teaches Birds to Sing was short and rather unfocused. Didn't like it much. Philippe Blanchard's Stupid Tricks 2 was many types of brilliant. Some of it dealt with endless motion with objects and others were balance tricks. Really lovely. Ara Peterson's Treetops. Uhm. I forget that one actually. Timo Katz's Whirr. Uhh that one as well, not memorable. Martha Colburn's Meet Me in Wichita was a really violent recreation of Wizard of Oz.
Then we had intermission. Yay! Go out into the sunlight. And then back in and snack a little.
The pre-show loop was by one of the Hooliganship boys, Christopher Doulgeris. It had a lot going on in it and it hurt my eyes a little. Amy Lockhart returned for Walk for Walk. Which. I don't remember. Wow a lot of these shorts were highly unremarkable. Isn't that a bad sign? I don't remember Bruce Bickford's Inversion Layer or Nicolas Pittman's Synaesthetics II. One of them I think had some really intense patterns that continued to hurt my eyes severely. Hooliganship included one of their videos which was a nice little musical short (I really dig there music). It was just way to short. And it moved abruptly into Chel White's Choreography for Copy Machine.
In full it is simply amazing, that 45 second clip does not do it justice. I'm surprised that technique isn't used more often in animation. It makes a beautiful result and seems quite efficient as well. The next four animations listed on my program don't ring a bell either (Jeff Krischen's Singsong, Gretchen Hogue's Forest of the Flowers, James Sumner's I Will Truck and Corey Lunn's Darn Dance). If I didn't have my program I would have no memory that this many clips played. E*Rock + Mumbleboy's Superheroz started to annoy me as it went on. It had some great potential but then it would switch back to the same dull Superhero head change. Some great snippets but they were too short and far between. Finally, Joanna Priestley's Candyjam was a delicious treat (har har bad pun) to go out on. Excellent stop motion animation in combination with drawn out scenes.
Some pieces weirded me way way out, others were delightful and gave me a good laugh.
The whole event was at Clinton Street Theatre, which is in South East Portland. I rarely go past 5th in West Side, let alone cross a bridge and go into the 20's on the East Side. I should go there more often, it is nice, flat, and relatively low traffic and the instant I crossed Hawthorne Bridge a fellow cyclist complimented me ("I don't know what I like better, your leg warmers or your helmet"). The directions I got for getting to the theatre were designed for cars and so I couldn't take the proper exit to get onto 3rd from the bridge. It was easy enough to loop back around and under the bridge (safely of course) and get onto 3rd, which became Division and then turn on 25th and end on Clinton.
I left an hour before the show so I would have plenty of time (I have no way to tell how long something will take me to bike ride if it is out of Downtown/Pearl/Chinatown/Alphabet District) and I managed to score a pretty sweet thing-to-lock-my-bike-to. I didn't see anyone I knew (besides the Hooliganship guys but I don't really "know" them) so I nabbed a spot in the second row. I had twenty minutes to go till the show. Daniel, Rob and a girl I didn't know but knew she went to PNCA were there but they didn't sit with me. Jon was also in attendance and sat in front of me for the first part (don't know where he went during intermission as I didn't see him for the second part or when we got out). I didn't sit alone, and the people next to be were both very friendly.
I took a leisurely ride home from the theatre. Sunday is a great time to bike around Portland; I think I will try and take more meandering bike rides. I think my distance for today was in the 9-10 mile range.
Then for the rest of today I was really tired.
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