getting used to being up at 7:30 in the morning is a crime (or should be)

Dynamo is the 3D animated short that just won the Imagina’s Schools and Universities prize. Benjamin Mousquet and Fabrice le Nezet, the creators, answer questions about their atypical crossroads of clever nonsense and unexpected meaning at ITS ART Magazine&lt, a digital art magazine available in English and French.

ITS ART Magazine&lt is a wonderful resource. I highly recommend taking the time required to explore their small video library. It’s slavishly devoted to high end, quality computer animated shorts. It can be a little hit and miss, as such things generally are, but the percentage of good is notable. Beware, however, as it’s not all fluffy sea sheep, adorable and bunny sweet, many of them accurately capture qualities of nightmare and display them as skillfully as fetishistic vivisection.

March of the Namelss, for example, the second video posted here, is an extraordinary look at the dark fatuity of war. Jean Constantial and Nicolas Laverdure exquisitely blend elegance and the threat of death into something powerfully bewitching. I watched it twice, unwilling to miss even a moment of War in a scarlet suit, thin as a cat’s collarbone, skipping through the calamity.

breathe


the merits of hating television
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

YEAR ZERO: the new NIN album.

Time is a cruel and whimsical creature. This week I’ve been barely sleeping, too busy with other things, kissing thin shadows and wrenching my system into sudden early mornings so hard I can feel my body protesting when I move, as if even walking is a strained effort for my tired muscles. Yet, oddly, I’m feeling rested for the first time in years. It’s like I’m finally feeding a deficiency I never knew was plaguing me until now.

Stephanie was writing today about how human memory works, how all positive memories are linked together, so when one is activated, they all light up. I’ve been trapped for a long time on the other side of that. After my Year Of Disaster, my positive experiences had little to link to, they felt constantly isolated. “Fleeting” was the word Steph used, and it fits, but now everything’s falling into place. My theatre project is ticking along quietly, just as it should, (though I sincerely need to take some time away from job-hunting to write some copy), my personal life is new, easy and only complicated in highly amusing ways, and rather than be simply ignored by magazines, I’m beginning to get rejection letters.

I think I’ve reached an ideal, the stable place I’ve been wanting from which to shake my life into some semblance of what I’d prefer it to be.