The Art of Memory, a blog that specializes in minimal film, music, literature, poetry and art, has posted a series of images from a rare book called The Books of Anselm Kiefer, 1969-1990.  Kiefer has worked on books since the sixties and incorporates many different materials in them, including photography, painting, sand, straw, cloth, and metal.  The books are one of a kind artworks and are seldom seen.

There is always something fascinating about a book made by the hand of an artist.  The problem with seeing books in museums is always the same though: you can only see two pages of any given book.  But since most people have no experience with turning a book’s pages, you simply would not want to trust patrons with this responsibility.

One of Kiefer’s main instincts has always been to try to look directly at the horrific history of Germany in the twentieth century.  These book pages contain some of his attempts to do so.

By Steve Bynghall

Steve Bynghall lives in London, England. Other poems about Brooke and her useless Dad appear on Smories.com.  Visit http://www.smories.com/author/steve-bynghall/ for more details.  If you want to be notified when a new Brooke story will be appearing please email brookesortsitout@gmail.com.

Vimeo user Quirky Pictures pointed me to this strange and dark little film about a dog losing its home and wandering through a rather horrible and tragic life. The film uses multiple flip book frames to tell its story in a series of loops. It was made by Stephen Irwin at small time inc. as an Animate Projects Commission for England’s Channel 4.

Another film from the Candlelight Stories Short Films group on Vimeo.

The Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles has made my latest short film, Yellow Plastic Raygun, part of their official selection!  So if you are in Los Angeles on Saturday, September 11, 2010 and you want to see an evening of short films, come by the Civic Center Theater at First and Main Street right across from the City Hall building.  The shorts program starts at 10:00 pm.  Here’s a link to the festival schedule.

I am very happy about this.  I like the idea of a film festival right here at home where I can go and hang around with some other insane filmmakers.  It should be an interesting Saturday night.

Who is Tanya Grishko? She made this film and it’s just absolutely magnificent. There’s not a false note anywhere in it. The timing is brilliant, never missing a beat. I love the scene in the bar where she starts lapping her drink and all the customers are just staring at her. Fantastic. Beautiful drawings. If you’re running an animation studio, just meet Ms. Grishko on the corner, walk her through the front door, sit her down at a desk and have her start working.

Another film from the Candlelight Stories Short Films group on Vimeo.

Dammit! I’m outta here! Weeeeeeeeee!

From DialHouse

Hey, tomorrow, Saturday August 28, 2010, is International Read a Comic in Public Day!

That means that all you unattractive, bedroom-bound, nerdish, geekster, loser, babeless nobodies can actually get up a little nonexistent courage and emerge from your domiciles to take your first tentative steps across the street with a real live honest-to-god paper-printed comic book in your hands!  Woooooo!  Get it on, baby!  Jivesteppin’ along the street with my ink pages!

Flavorwire has a nice little post about what comics to read for certain locations if you want to fit in and look cool.  I don’t happen to suffer from the decease of timidity or humble nerdishness.  I’m a real bastard who likes to walk up and push ballpoints into people’s throats if I think they aren’t showing proper respect.  So whatever your problem with reading comics in public might be I’m probably not going to understand it or be very sympathetic.  In fact, I might just chase your ass through the park to have a good laugh at your expense.

So, go for it.  Read your stupid comic in public tomorrow.  I dare you.

By Mark L. Glosser

The Ketchup Bottle Genie

“Hey,” Eric yelped as he watched his younger brother Ian shake a huge glob of ketchup onto his sandwich. “You emptied the bottle. What am I supposed to put on my hot dog?”

“Mom got another bottle,” Ian mumbled as he stuffed half the sandwich in his mouth, Go look in the refrigerator.”

Eric stomped to the refrigerator and pulled out a weird shaped-bottle. “Genie Ketchup Company? I never heard of this brand,” said Eric as he unscrewed the lid.

A moment after the lid came off; all the ketchup in the bottle squirted to the ceiling, and started to spin like a tornado.Eric and Ian dove under the table.

A flash of light momentarily blinded them.  When their vision cleared they saw a man with long, black hair floating in mid-air. His red pants barely fit over his bulging belly, and his white shirt was splattered with ketchup.

Peeking out from under the table Eric asked in a trembling voice, “Who are you?”

The strange visitor floated down from the ceiling and looked under the table. “I’m the Ketchup Bottle Genie. Haven’t you heard of me?”

Continue Reading »

By Pam Farley

Pamela Farley is an Australian author of dark fiction. She is a member of the Australian Horror Writer’s Association and has had more than a dozen of her short stories published in magazines in Australia and the UK. Pam lives in rural South Australia with family and assorted animals. She works in a country veterinary practice.

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/PamelaFarley

Today’s weird tale takes us to a remote farmhouse… at night.  The power goes out… Where are the matches?  Where’s the cat?  What’s that glow through the trees?

Adult Themes

Reaping

Samantha had been away for the weekend with her girlfriends. The break had been fun and all the girls were still laughing raucously when they dropped her at the gate. Her small farm house was ten kilometers from town, and in the still rural-twilight the din the girls made seemed to linger in the air.

As she got out of the car Samantha could hear the telltale clinking of empty Cruiser bottles rolling around on the car’s floor. The girls were singing, loud and off key while she got her bag from the boot. When the tooting vehicle departed there were limbs flailing from all four windows. The car turned at the end of the road and disappeared. Darkness came on suddenly, accompanied by a cool wind. Samantha swayed and clutched the gate post. The three drinks she had gulped down in the last hour had gone to her head. She gave a giggle.

The sensor light failed to come on when Samantha walked to the porch. The area was in shadow and she couldn’t see a thing. She tripped on the metal boot scraper by the door and swore. It was sheer luck when the key in her hand found its way into the lock, and the back door sprung open.

It was darker in the house than it had been outside and Samantha’s hands fumbled along the walls from memory, but there was no response from any of the light switches. More obscenities sprang from her mouth as she realized that the problem was within the fuse box outside. By bumping and feeling her way to the laundry she located the torch on a shelf next to the clothes dryer.

‘At least this still works,’ she muttered to the night.

But the globe glowed dim and she knew it would not last for long. She rushed outside to check the fuses. Panic had rendered her sober and dexterous. A systematic check of the old porcelain plugs soon helped her to identify the blown one. She re-threaded it with the fine steel wire kept inside the power box. But when she replaced the plug and threw the switch there was a loud bang as it blew again.

Continue Reading »

This is a visualization of the top one million web sites in the world according to Alexa traffic data.  You can go to Icons of the Web at NMap.org to search for domain names that might be included in the image.  Candlelight Stories is there!  We are ranked 517,582 in the world!  So our tiny little flame logo is buried in there just below the lower right corner of the big CNN logo on the righthand side of the image.

Check it out.  It’s fun.

Sometimes it’s difficult to imagine the far-flung past in anything other than black & white because that’s the kind of image we usually see. But here is one of the oldest color film tests from the Kodak company in 1922. Here’s a link to information about the footage.

Via Neatorama

This is the opening cinematic from the upcoming Wii game Epic Mickey. It is fun and has that ever-flowing look of a Disney cartoon. I have one quibble with it. You can’t always do in computer animation what you do in hand-drawn animation. In this case, I think the problem is in Mickey’s hands. They are a little off.

Simon Tofield has another episode of his extremely amusing Simon’s Cat series.

In general, I am deeply suspicious of the web trend for geeks to head toward steampunk, octopuses, and all things Cthulhu.   There’s a vague and creeping racism underneath the cute old-fashioned, brass-fitted surface.  I’ve also held a certain amount of contempt for H.P. Lovecraft. I think the guy was a closeted white supremacist with a knack for telling horrifying tales that are about white supremacists.  I can imagine him as Sarah Palin’s favorite author… if she reads.  The Cthulhu stories are genuinely frightening and his writing does contain a high creep quotient. But I’m just about ready to launch DOS attacks on sites that dig every alien octopus that shows its tentacles.

This, of course, is Lovecraft’s Call of the Cthulhu in under 2 minutes. It’s very well done and I like the use of the newspapers to move the story. Declan Moran made it. He also made Dante’s Inferno in Under 2 Minutes.

A film about an attractive spy during a rocket launch. By Clement Bolla, Aurelia Vernhes, and Laurent Gillot.