1-Jul-2008a film about the roerich garden project in montreal
Found this on you tube about a project by a local artist i know. Emily Rose Michaud & company built it in the winter. Miss Janet made this excellent 6 min doc about the day Emily and a team of volunteers set it up together over the course of one very cold day. The Garden lived on, you can keep up with their progress here. It's pretty damn cool.
posted by max at 7/01/2008 11:23:00 PM 0 comments links to this post  Stumble It!
6-Jun-2008Desk side chat: On layout and page flowOk, so another more polished how to video on the craft of comics. This one came from a question i got on Panel and Pixel from Kevin Mellon & Jason Copland. I'm thinking this is fun stuff, so I'm probably going to start making vodcasts part of the regular CH 0 feed. Labels: "Dream Life", Art, av, design, ideas, layouts, media, podcasts, tools and trade, video posted by max at 6/06/2008 08:30:00 PM 0 comments links to this post Stumble It!
8-Sep-2007Blocky Thing v.2
Working out how this guy will look still, I'm liking this version right now...maybe....
 Labels: "Dream Life", "finger string", Art, Comics, ideas posted by max at 9/08/2007 01:14:00 AM 0 comments links to this post Stumble It!
27-Feb-2007 Stumble It!
21-May-2004The Italian Machine Wow!I just found this link very cool! channel4.com is hosting streaming video of an early David Cronenberg short film titled The Italian Machine. You can watch it there, unfortunately it's not downloadable, I want a copy. There's a DVD collection of early Cronenberg shorts that includes it, i'll have to get my hand on a copy of that i guess. I found a bit of background on the production from this site, The Italian Machine was actually meant to be a 60 minute long TV film for CBC before the head of CBC Drama removed Cronenberg from the editing of the final cut to create her own 30 minute long version, or so the story goes. It's central charicter is based loosly on real 'legendary acid and pot dealer', general trouble maker, writer and photographer, Lionel Douglas [played in the film by Gary McKeehan], who was killed in a freak motorcycle accident in 1979. It features an array characters all to familiar to me, and displays Cronenberg's classic off beat approach to his subjects. "When motorbike fanatic Lionel learns that a rare and prized Ducati has been bought by a rich art collector purely for the purpose of display, he enlists the help of his friends to liberate the motorbike." Now while I am a Cronenberg fan, my reasons for being hyped about tracking this down are a tad more personal. The real Lionel was my father. This version is an exaggerated caricature, but I recognise the source material. I'm told that the premise may have been influenced by a true story about a bike being displayed as art and Lionel's reaction to the idea "how can they not want to make it go!!". The other guys in the film with him are loosely based on people who shared a garage with my father in behind his house. I remember bikes in parts, being worked on all the time, made to go a bit faster and bit smother, tuning till they hummed like instruments. Always lots of talk and laughter. And the smells of metal, oil, cleaners and gas. That garage, and him talking with other people around the kitchen table about all sorts of crap, astrology to philosophy, these are probably the most common icons in my memory of my father.  He and Cronenberg were close friends I'm told, they went to university together and rode bikes out at mosport speedway a bit one summer. My grandmother says there was a time when the two were inseparable. This film was meant as a little tribute to him. Lionel was a larger than life kind a guy; he left his mark on a lot of people. Every once in a while someone comes along whom knew him, and when they find out that I'm his son their behaviour towards me tends to change, suddenly I get these wired reverent looks. When Ron Mann made his short documentary about Rochdale College called Dream Tower (1994) he contacted us about looking through my fathers photos for stills to use [a number of which ended up in the film]. In researching the film he told us, every one he talked to told him look up Lionel Douglas, he's the guy you should talk to, until he found someone who told him Lionel had died. So then he tracked us down to get permission to use his photos.He had watched some film of my dad giving speeches at the collage found with the reels of old film he dug up on Rochdale, and he showed up in some early CityTV footage apparently. And even with that, not having met him in person, Ron talked to me about him with the same kind of mythic aw as everyone else did. I've never seem much of that footage Ron told us about, except a short bit that appeared in the film [He explains for the camera how they conducted security checks at the door of the building after Yorkville imploded]. For a long time this was all very strange and odd for me. Sadly I hardly remember the living Lionel now. I was 8 when he died, it knocked me for a loop as you would expect. When I came out of that emotional coma 10 years later I barely remembered him any more. I have his photos, a trunk full I'm planning to make a book from some day. And there is  a small chap book sampling his poetry, text and photos his friends put together after he died.My two copies are both raged and dogged. One, that I've had since I was a kid, is marked with tabs so that I can flip right to my favorite poems. Over the years I've tried to tease more of him out of my head by digging up more of him out there, so I'm always happy to find another bit of him floating around. Here's a slide show of a selection of some of my favorite bits of his book. I think you might be able to still get it here. Labels: comic conventions, ideas, Lionel, personal posted by max at 5/21/2004 09:05:00 AM 0 comments links to this post Stumble It!
20-May-2004Rochdale & Lionel & The Dealers Sort of continuing with the sentiment of my recent post about The Italian Machine, a short Cronenberg made for TV film that features a fictionalised version of my father in one of the central roles - here is some more of Lionel online.From the mid 60's to the mid 70's Lionel was a central player in the experiment in anarchist education called Rochdale [links to media on the CBC archive about the school]. It was many things to many people, and in the 90's as I mentioned in the last post, Ron Mann made a short documentary called Dream Tower about the place. A very large portion of that film appears inter-cut with an interview with a Rochdale survivor here on POT TV's web site . A very young Lionel has a brief appearance in the Doc [time index reads about 9:27:00 on pot tv's video]. This was filmed back then for a log documentary about the project that was never finished, but in the end provided a greater deal of raw footage for Ron's film. Lionel was at the time of the interview, helping to coordinate the newly instituted building security along with several of his biker friends, in an effort to stem the tide of Yorkville junkies that invaded the place after the cops cleared out Yorkville [paving the way for a major gentrification of that neighborhood - its now a luxury condo and shopping district for the very very rich] When Dream Tower was made, I had not seen any footage of Lionel or heard his voice for 10 or so years. Ron gave me a dub of the film when it was done, I recall rewinding and watching this very short bit of footage of my father several times over that night. I've posted Photos of Rochdale here on my Flicker site, from the collection of Alex MacDonald. And more can be found Here, the whole set! And I have a tape of Lionel anonymously interviewed on the CBC maybe before he had me I think, or just after, anonymously as a Drug Dealer, it's pretty strange and interesting! I have them on my site here, two sides. I used them in this little bit of video art i made low-fi back in 98 or so i think. Lionel was a complicated guy as far as i can tell. The whole dealer thing was just one side of the guy. He wore many masks. I'll talk more about them next time. Cheers. Labels: "finger string", ideas, Lionel, personal posted by max at 5/20/2004 06:56:00 AM 0 comments links to this post Stumble It!
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SALGOOD
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