Fumiko's Confession - a short film animated completely by one person. (via)
posted by flatluigi on Nov 12, 2009 - 23 comments

Wonderfully artistic video for the song "God Loves My Country", by Balthrop, Alabama, a small-town band.
posted by emelenjr on May 26, 2008 - 12 comments

@mateurdart is a French-language blog on erotic art in a wide variety of eras and styles. (NSFW)
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Apr 24, 2008 - 17 comments

T.R.A.N.S.I.T. is, by a wide margin, my favorite animated short ever produced. Set in the art deco Europe of the 1920's and (and released in 1997) it tells the story of a journey throughout several major vacation destinations of a wealthy tycoon, his young wife with wandering eyes, and a murderous turn of events. The story is told in reverse, from the final stage of the "vacation" back through each prior stop, and the artwork for each segment is painted in the style of the luggage travel sticker for that stop.
posted by jonson on Sep 2, 2007 - 14 comments

My Little Dead Dick is the visual diary of photographers Madi Ju of China and Patrick Tsai of the USA. They got together on July 17, 2006, when they both traveled to Macau in order to meet face-to-face after a month of intense internet correspondence.

After nine days, they went back to their own countries, quit their jobs, settled their accounts, and said good-bye to their friends and loved ones to pursue their dreams of a life spent together taking photos.
posted by four panels on Aug 7, 2007 - 31 comments

On December 5th, a Croatian man named Nico awoke to find a map his girlfriend had left him featuring a specific path she wanted him to take to work; along the way he saw stencils, paint, aerosol, collage wheat pastes & other art she had laid out in the pre-dawn hours letting him know how much she loved him. The sights Nico saw, in order, are collected here.
posted by jonson on Dec 10, 2006 - 80 comments

Extracts from the journals of Susan Sontag dating from the 1950s and 1960s were published in this morning's Guardian G2.
posted by nthdegx on Sep 14, 2006 - 9 comments

Drama is impossible today. I don't know of any. Drama used to be the belief in guilt, and in a higher order. This absolutely cruel didactic is impossible, unacceptable for us moderns. But melodrama has kept it. You are caged. In melodrama you have human, earthly prisons rather than godly creations. Every Greek tragedy ends with the chorus — "those are strange happenings. Those are the ways of the gods". And so it always is in melodrama.
His career as a film director lasted more than 40 years, but Douglas Sirk (1900-1987) is remembered for the melodramas he made for Universal in Hollywood between 1954 and 1959, his "divine wallow": Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1958, William Faulkner considered it the best screen adaptation of one of his novels), Imitation of Life (1959) -- all considered for decades little more than a camp oddity. Now audiences are beginning to look deeper at the films of Douglas Sirk, at how, in megafan Todd Haynes' words, they are "almost spookily accurate about the emotional truths". Now, lucky Chicagoans can enjoy "Douglas Sirk at Universal", matinees at the Music Box. More inside.
posted by matteo on Apr 29, 2006 - 14 comments

Other loves
still breathe deep inside me.
This one's too short of breath even to sigh.
"First Love", by Wislawa Szymborska. (via the Daily Poems of poems.com)
posted by matteo on Mar 29, 2006 - 19 comments

For all the hoo-ha about Callas first bringing real acting to the operatic stage, one has only to view the footage of Risë Stevens legendary 1952 “Carmen” to see what kind of Method she brought to the Met. Stevens was the definitive gypsy wanton, and her performance has it all— fire, ice, and that impossible balance between elegance and sluttiness. Her technique is superb—licking her fingers before extinguishing the candles in what will be her death chamber, then flicking off the wax; flinging her unwanted lover’s ring at him, spitting out a contemptuous “Tiens!”.
The Metropolitan Opera Guild honors the Bronx-born singer, now 92. More inside.
posted by matteo on Feb 9, 2006 - 9 comments

"... we are sweeping everything under the carpet, but the oddness is cropping up all over the place. And then, the carpet starts to move…".
Michael Haneke, "le manipulateur" who introduced his latest film, Caché, at Cannes with a half-amused “I wish you a disturbing evening”, is the proponent of a "cinema of disturbance". A cinema of loving self-mutilation, where time is non-linear and everything happens in long take shots; in Haneke's world, guilt destroys lives decades after the original sin. All his male characters are "Georges" and his female characters are either "Evas" or "Annas", "because I lack fantasy". Unsurprisingly, he is a Bresson and Tarkovsky fan. He'll direct "Don Giovanni" at the Paris Opera in early 2006: "In 20 years of working in the theater, I only staged one comedy, and that was my single failure".
posted by matteo on Nov 18, 2005 - 19 comments

Not the most Poetic of Declarations Art from Little Rocket.
posted by ColdChef on Mar 6, 2005 - 17 comments

300 love letters to someone, to no one, to every one. [via fishbucket]
posted by skoosh on Aug 3, 2004 - 7 comments

The story of love is sometimes one of pain. Who amongst us doesn't have some failed obsession from their past. You know the one, that person who didn't love you back or didn't love you in the way you needed to be loved. So, what do you about these unresolved feelings? Well, you create a web site and paint a lot of pictures of the guy naked of course. The result is Naked Dave -- A Woman's Obsession.
posted by willnot on Mar 1, 2003 - 34 comments