chase the light

This weekend one of the guys I had worked with on Polar Express decided it was all too much. So he took his life. I worked with him a lot on the caribou sequence in Polar and man did I ever ask some dumb questions of him over a period of several months. From the simple… “Why do all of my caribou have white antlers?” to the complex “What’s for lunch?”

Above is one of my shots from Polar that he helped nurse through. Those thousands and thousands of caribou I had to light, render and comp all look beautiful thanks to him. He was quite busy fixing any little hiccup that came along to make them look good and make my life easier. It’s been a bit downbeat around here.

Ladies, check your boobs. Men, check your balls. Everybody, check your heads.

I have one of those mothers that has saved a ton of stuff from my childhood. A couple of years ago she dumped this huge box of stuff off to me that had everything from the wristband I wore when I was born on up to my college graduation. Why did she want to give the box to me now? Because they needed room in the closet… Oh, thanks!

There’s some amazing things in this box of wonders. I think at some point I could probably piece together my whole life with this stuff. One thing that cracked me up was my autographed photo of Miss Mary Ann from Romper Room. I used to watch that show like crazy.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, the Romper Room hostess ended each program by reciting the show’s signature magical chant:

“Romper, bomper, stomper, boo.
Tell me, tell me, tell me do.
Magic mirror, tell me today.
Did all my friends have fun at play?”

I love the idea that Miss Mary Ann and Romper Room were dabbling in the occult by using a magic mirror and chanting. With the chant spoken, Miss Mary Ann gazed through the empty mirror frame and recited the names of children whom she pretended to see watching the program. A different list everyday. “I see Tommy and Susan and Hannah and William and Mary and all you boys and girls out there.” Of course she couldn’t actually see the children, but we listened for our name to be mentioned. I’m sure she probably said Chris at some point and it probably freaked me the hell out. According to her you could either be a Do-Bee or a Don’t-Bee. Of course I was a Do-Bee. I didn’t want to upset the raven haired wicca woman who would chant just so she could see through her magic mirror. And that hair, it’s so tall? It’s like Rock Lobster tall.

TRIVIA NOTE: Via a news report. Former Romper Room hostess Mary Ann King (in Los Angeles from 1966-76) was mugged in the parking lot of a Hometown Buffet in the City of Industry on December 17, 2003. The encounter gave King, 70, a broken arm, rib and punctured lung. Besides her injuries, the thieves stole a black taffeta bag that contained the original Magic Mirror (white plastic mirror frame) used on the Romper Room program so many years. King began carrying the magic mirror around with her to satisfy the wishes of people who confronted her with the allegations “you never said my name.” In the case of the criminals who stole the item, King confessed “I’m sure those hoodlums who did this just looked at the mirror and said, ‘What in the world is this,’ and just discarded it.”

Oh my. Poor little fragile Miss Mary Ann.

BRAIN DUMP: I have not seen any of the movies up for best picture. They all seem kinda, eh. Of 54 films nominated for anything, I’ve seen nine. Six of those are nominated in just one category. Neko Case is doing an in-store at Amoeba Records. I want to go to Japan. Kyoto specifically, and to ride the bullet train there from Tokyo. hoops and yoyo [LINK] e-cards are pretty funny. My house is a mess. I bought Goldfrapp tickets for the Wiltern but haven’t received them. It’s been awhile. I called Rachel up and we went over to Burbank for some Penne al Pollo at Market City Caffe. At lunch tomorrow I’m going to ride my bike to my car insurance place and pick up some proof of insurance cards. I forgot to send them in with the registration. For a second I thought it would be funny if I got hit by car while riding my bike to Allstate to deal with my car insurance. Now that would REALLY be ironic, not this “10,000 spoons when all you need is knife” kind of ironic. Thank God the Olympics are over tonight. Even if the Mens 5000m Relay in Short Track Speed Skating was hell of exciting. Damn. This next episode of Lost better be freakin’ good. The Office is back too. A friend of mine sent me an email petition about putting prayer back in schools. Um, yeeeeeah. I was listening to Pandora [LINK] the other day and tried to get it to play “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me” by creating a Night Ranger station. It preceded to burn my ears with hours upon hours of the worst garbage of 80’s light hair metal. It never did play the song after 3 hours of suffering. Yep, Pandora’s Box on that one. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow. I’m still busy redesigning this website. It’ll have a search feature finally. I have a slot in my front door where the mail comes in. If I don’t pick it up everyday it starts to look like I leave trash just laying in the entry. I’ll never buy another Cinefex unless my name is in it. Qantas airlines never credits my miles to my frequent flier membership. They didn’t credit my flight home from, Fiji. I always have to bug them later. I have 50,000 miles right now. That’s a trip to Sydney, but I’d have to swim back. I wish Apple would release an updated version of the iSight. Mine broke months ago.

This is awesome [LINK].

[VIDEO LINK]

It was a grey day down at the docks as the Queen Mary 2 rode out of the port to continue on its maiden voyage around the world. It stopped in Long Beach on Wednesday to pull up to the original Queen Mary to exchange greetings and whistle blows. It’s now off to Hawaii, Singapore and wherever else. She’s the world’s largest cruise ship at the moment. I guess that means there’s another one being built that is bigger. Thought I’d go hang out and watch it disappear into the fog. Which it did. It’s a pretty damn big boat. So big it can’t turn around in the channel, so when they arrived they turned it around out by the lighthouse and then backed it into the berth. Watch for the kayaker in the video. He’s in the first shot and looks like a little ant in the two lighthouse shots. I wish kayaks actually went that fast. And yes we have a suspension bridge in Los Angeles. I call it the Golden Green Bridge. I made that up, clever huh?

So how does she stack up against the 100 year old Titanic? Longer at 1,132 feet vs. 838 feet for Titanic. Weighing in at 151,000 gross tons vs. 25 tons. Height of 236 feet vs. 175 feet. 157,000 horsepower vs 30,000hp. 3,873 passengers and crew vs. 3,547. In an odd little mention on the Queen Mary 2 website… “Extra thick steel hull for strength and stability for Atlantic crossings”. Ya know, just in case something, oh I don’t know, might happen.

About 6 months ago Culver City unveiled this lion statue in the downtown area. Most of the reactions to it were a bit puzzled, but I totally love the statue. I think it’s rather nice that the lion could care less what’s going on around him while he shuts his eyes and dances around in the water. A great moment of having no self awareness. The water fountains shoot up from below to about six feet. Nobody’s quite figured out who the lion’s supposed to be but a few theories have come up. One being that Culver City was the home of MGM studios for many years and whose logo was the growling lion. Secondly, there’s a lion and some wardrobe, but there really ain’t no witch. That’s a dumb one. Another is that The Wizard of Oz was shot at the studio in ’39 and it’s an homage to that. The hotel behind him housed the munchkins while they were shooting the film across the street. He doesn’t look anything like the cowardly lion though. So, personally I think it’s along the lines of the long long history MGM studios had in the city. MGM pretty much put Culver City on the map. Of course it could be just a lion, but I’m cool with that too.

Update… 12:20am. WELL, DUH! It just dawned on me! Yes of course it’s the MGM lion, but it’s the lion doing Gene Kelly from Singin’ in the Rain”! [GENE KELLY] I had to check, but yep it was an MGM film and shot at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios – 10202 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, California, USA according to IMDB. Which is now Sony Pictures. Ahhhh jeez… it all seems so obvious now.

And yes I was still thinking about this 5 hours later. Come on my little brain, think harder, think faster…

With three days of art gallery shows there was no way I was going to make it out clean. Friday night started out with Rachel and a show called “Remixing the Magic” [LINK]. Rachel and I have developed a simple code word for going out to eat. We just leave a message on our answer machine with one word, “huuuuuuuuungry”. That’s it. So I got the “hungry” call and I was planning on eating and then going to the gallery. So she was game for the gallery too. We did a drive by of the gallery to suss it up and there were a few people milling about. No worries then. So we went to eat and stumbled across a place called Zeke’s Smokehouse [LINK]. La Brea and Santa Monica. We gave it a pretty big thumbs up. Then about 45 minutes later we drove back to the gallery and there was a line down the street. It was also raining out so we bailed on the show. No need to fight the crowd when it’s just down the street and we can catch it some other time.

Saturday night I went and picked up Alicia and we went to The Counter for dinner. Again. Again, it was great. Then we took off for downtown to see the show “Visual Amalgam” [LINK]. Basically a group show made up of visual effects artists. Saw some people I knew and drank some wine and saw some friends and milled about and saw some more friends… Anyway, after a couple hours I started getting bored and got the urge to leave which was confirmed when Alicia was also giving the “all clear to leave” signals. Then Eric [LINK] showed up and I got to catch up with him and talk about his giant photo panorama. Which consists of 300 individual shots stitched together from a motion control camera. It was pretty impressive really. So I couldn’t actually give him shit about the crappy thing he had hanging in the show. Then Alicia and I hit the road and made it an early night. Well, for a Saturday it was early.

Then Sunday I went to a benefit show for an artist named Alfredo de Batuc. Alfredo has been stricken with Guillain-Barr?ɬ© [LINK] syndrome. A disorder where the immune system attacks the nervous system. One of the problems with being an artist is trying to support yourself and also having medical insurance. A lot of artists can’t afford to have good coverage and occasionally you’ll see a benefit show come together to help the individual with expenses. A lot of friends of the artist donated works for the show and it also included works by Alfredo. Alfredo painted the quite well seen Dolores Del Rio mural at Hollywood Blvd. and Hudson Ave. I shot a pic of the mural on the way home. So, of course I walked into the gallery and one painting by David Flury screamed at me. If I’m going to buy a painting, I usually don’t have a hard time finding it within minutes. The mental decision is usually made within the first glance around. This is the one that I walked in and said, yep, that’s it. If something’s going to grab you, it’s going to do that immediately. Which is of course different for each person depending on their tastes. I even spent the next hour looking at everything much closer but I kept going back to this one. Plus, it was within my budget. Ha!

It’s titled “de Batuc”, after the stricken artist. The artist even painted in a version of the sun that looks like the ones found in a lot of Alfredo’s paintings. I really love the woman releasing the winged snake and that the bed Alfredo is lying in is surrounded by candles. The saguaru cactus and sun are really nice. One thing you can’t see are the dabs of gold paint used as highlights so that as you walk by the painting it kind of shimmers. It was also the most current painting and really addressed the current situation. After I got it home I noticed the painting had been dated as February 14th, 2006. Valentine’s Day, just 5 days ago. The day we all went to Lucha Va Voom. That’s amazing. How fast all this came together and I was happy to put some money into the pot for Alfredo. You also know you’ve got something special when different people at the show stopped and asked if I had just bought the painting. Looking slightly disappointed they didn’t get it yet knodding their approval. So, now I’ll go get it framed this week and enjoy it the rest of my life. I really need to find something upbeat for some balance. Dogs playing poker has always cracked me up.

There was also a really nice book there called Chicano Visions [LINK] by Cheech Marin. He’s been collecting Mexican-American artists for more than 20 years and some of the artists in the book were represented at the show. Not that I know a whole lot about the East L.A. art scene, but the area is so tightly linked to the hispanic community of Los Angeles and it’s nice to see that the art coming out of that area is so amazing. As the review read… “The Chicano school began evolving 30 years ago as artists sought to combine traditional Mexican imagery, themes, and styles with American pop, and it is now the source for some of America’s most evocative, animated, brilliantly hued, inventive, and gripping contemporary painting.”

So all that aside, fortunately most recover to some degree from the syndrome, but they can be incapacitated for various lengths of time ranging from months to years. Learned a lot today. So, here’s hoping Alfredo has a quick recovery. And there ya go. Go call your friends.

Oy, glad I got all that out. And I had to work all day Saturday and Monday. I’m crapped out.

[PHOTO GALLERY OF SEXO Y VIOLENCIA!]
She was definitely my favorite act of the night, Michelle Toots L’Amour. It was back to Lucha VaVoom for a Valentine’s Day show tonight. It’s soo fun. I corraled a group of people to go this time around and it was a blast! Everyone of them was a first timer so it was cool that everyone dug it so much.

I carpooled with Lisa at 7:00 and we stopped for a quick dinner then met up with the people I still had to give tickets to. Everybody was running late, including us, so it all worked out as we met up out front of the theater. We still got there in plenty of time. The rest, I dunno. I had already given them their tix so they were on their own. All three nights are sold out and I think ringside seats are in order for the next one in June. Yeah, there was wrestling, but it’s really about the burlesque girls for me.

The stripper dudes were funny too. Barebutt Mountain guy was funny as he stripped while pogo sticking on his little horse. And yes there’s a picture of pogo dudes’ butt in the gallery. Then Crying Game dude came out and freakin’ killed with these hula hoops. It was unbelievable. The guy was a stick yet was twisting, flipping and hurling these things all over the place. Pretty amazing, especially when you consider he’s doing this almost naked. I swear that bottom he was wearing was going to fly off any second.

Cassandro the wrestler got whacked with a chair and actually started bleeding from his head. I like when a little bit reality seeps in and they just go with it. It kind of blurs the line really. The Wau Wau sisters opened with their take on “Welcome to the Jungle” which was cool but no where near their “Sister Christian” act at the last Lucha. Man, that was scary good. Ended at 11:15, home by 11:40. Awesome. You should go. Really.

Zathura, out on DVD Tuesday. And the DVD poster is soooo much better than the theatrical poster. It only made 28 mil. at the box office. At about 9 bucks a ticket these days that was about 3 million people that went to see a movie about a house in outer space. Not so good. Now… judging by the posters above which movie would you have wanted to see? The one with the cool retro robot with a buzzsaw, an astronaut, some rocketships, a lizard creature, AND a cute girl? Or the one with the giant house flying around? I mean, come on, how do you market a house to kids? Oh well. The movie’s cool though, especially if it had come out somewhere between The Dark Crystal, Weird Science, Gremlins, The Rocketeer, Young Sherlock Holmes, E.T. or The Goonies. But no, it came out about 20 years later. It was fun to work on even as a dud in the box office but it will do well on DVD.

Neko at The Derby February 28th, 2004

Yes I’ve completely lost my mind but I totally love Neko Case, and she has a new album coming out March 7th. Which I’ve already got, but that’s not point. Last year was all about her other band The New Pornographers, but this year she’s out on her own again. New Album, a website (finally, as she’s never really had one), tour dates, a Tonight Show appearance, and free stuff from Anti, her record company. She’s even going to do podcasts. When it rains it pours. The new album doesn’t feel that new to me as I’ve heard a lot of the songs from all the live shows I’ve attended. It’s a sleepier album than the others. The kind you put on during a rainy night. The first concert footage on the epk is from the Seattle show I was at last summer where it poured down rain. A friend of mine suggested a Neko intervention might be in order as I was obsessing. If I come home and all of friends have gathered at my house I’m not cooperating.

New Album: Fox Confessor Brings The Flood.

Sasquatch Music Festival: May 27th at The Gorge Amphitheatre 12:00pm.

The Tonight Show: March 9th, 2006.

New Website: NekoCase.com Coming Soon.

Free Neko Stuff from Anti-:
“If You Knew” MP3 The Tigers Have Spoken
“Train From Kansas City” MP3 The Tigers Have Spoken
“Star Witness” MP3 Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
Neko Case Video Press Kit Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
Micro-site The Tigers Have Spoken

Today, Ashes and Snow. First off, stop off at Alicia’s for breakfast. Hell yeah. Jill brought the bagels and Alicia cooked up some spinach and mushrooms with eggs. My fave. Perfect. Then we were off.

So, there’s like this nomadic museum and all. It was in New York last year, and is now installed in a bigger space out by the Santa Monica Pier. I’m actually surprised at how many people were there considering it’s this arty somewhat pretentious kinda experience. But there ya go, apparantly a lot of people are hungry for that.

I liked it for about 15 minutes but then I fell asleep while watching the films. Then I had to pee so I went outside. But, to get back in you have to go back to the beginning of the exhibit and walk through the whole thing again. Ugh. It took a little while because it was crowded like a cattle car. When I couldn’t find Jill or Alicia I went back out and people watched while I waited for them to finish. Then I went to the merchandise booth and laughed at the price of the big artwork book for the show at $7500. You would really have to be moved by this thing to fork out that kinda dough. I thought the $15 dollar entrance fee was too much. I love art, but I cringe when something starts to border on pretention. Some feel it, some don’t.

As I was sitting outside the exit I didn’t hear one derogatory remark about the exhibit. It was all very positive. Let’s see, I heard it described as angelic, moving, beautiful, and ominous. I would go with dark, sleepy, beautiful, but too crowded. That was my biggest beef with it is it’s probably much more enjoyable with a smattering of people. Take a long lunch and go during the week. So in honor of the exhibit I tinted my one photo of the building sepia. See, I can be all pretentious and stuff too.

Anyway… the after the Ashes and Snow plan was better. For me anyway. I thought while were down there why don’t we just hang out at the pier and be tourists and ride the rollercoaster and play in the arcades and stuff. Alicia lost her sunglasses somewhere inside of Ashes and Snow so she picked up a pair at one of the sellers on the pier. While waiting for her I was able to get Jill to pose with all the goofy shades we could find. Then we hit the rollercoaster, some bumper cars and the arcade. Then went off to The Counter for dinner. Breakfast, art, amusement park, and dinner. A damn fine day.

[SKI TRIP VIDEO LINK]

So we left work about 5:15 but the bus’s air conditioner was busted and they forgot our ice coolers! The bus got up to 86 degrees inside. It was miserable and we were sitting in Friday night traffic for two hours. So we stopped in the valley to swap out buses and reload everyone. Then we stopped in Mojave for dinner. Then ANOTHER stop in Bishop to drop off sandwich orders that we’ll pick up on the way home on Sunday. We rolled into Mammoth at 2:00am. Yikes. A nine hour bus ride.

This years ski trip included a new twist. Dog sledding. Yep I paid a bunch of dogs to drag my ass around the snow for an hour. And they liked it! Above is the only photo I took the whole weekend because I shot video instead. 54 gigs when I downloaded the video. Good grief, HD video will be the death of my computer. It’s about 11.5 minutes of fairly large footage. Bandwidth impaired people beware. On Saturday evening we all met up for the happy hour and then out to eat.

Sunday was snowmobiling, and then home with a stop in Bishop to pick up the sandwiches that we ordered on the way up. Which was total mayhem. They parked this truck van thing in the Del Taco parking lot and when we got off the bus it was pandemonium. Oddly enough it all worked out. The rest of the trip was uneventful. On the trip up and back we watched Harold & Kumar go to White Castle, Red Eye, Batman Begins, and The 40 Year-Old Virgin.

Oh Heather Joan Graham, for months your face has been plastered all over Los Angeles on billboards, buses, and production trucks. You were the queen of hearts for ABC TV. The next moment… well your face is still plastered all over except now you’ve been cancelled and are just the two of clubs. Premiering Jan 9th, dead January 16th. One episode. Cancelled. Ms. Felicity Shagwell, I’ve kinda enjoyed every morning that you and your big beautiful eyes would pull up outside my office window and watch me work all day. I know our time is short but when you do move on and no longer come to my window… I’ll be right here waiting for you Rollergirl.

A test of the new camera. HD Baby! HDV-HC1 [LINK]. So let’s see… my cell phone fell in the toilet and died, the Canon G1 I lost in the mud while quadbiking in New Zealand, the iPod didn’t live after it’s tumble down the stairs in the parking structure and my DV camera decided jump out of my hands and into the ocean when I was in Fiji. So I give this camera about a 6 month lifespan. I’d make a terrible basketball player. Be the ball.

1. Humpty buddha’s hand / in funny ways / culture sale / bouche et bijioux.
2. Dust my broom / spanning the infinite / deep in space / something fishy.
3. The flight of / partes / in platon hands / came crashing down.

The latest Exquisite Corpses [LINK] that I’ve worked. First one I did the second piece. The last two I did the first piece. It’s not all that rewarding doing the first piece as you just have to come up with something to get the ball rolling. I also bowed out of working on these for awhile as they were being sent to me fast and furious. These are the last that I worked on and I’ve now put myself back in the loop after a three month break. Let the weirdness begin.

[NEW YEARS 2006 GALLERY – 1280 x 1024]

Happy New Year, you’re about to get taken out by a wave. Ha ha ha. That’s not what you want to see when you’re looking through your viewfinder. I thought it would be nice to get a shot of the waves crashing along the rocks near Fort Point. Until a huge set came in and bitch slapped me all over the place. I’m 1 sec. away from getting soaked head to toe. Camera and all. Oh yeah everyone else thought it was funny, but it took me a minute to regain my composure before I could find the humor in it. At least I now know my camera can take the full force of a wave and brush it off like a champ!

Went on a little road trip over the New Years and stopped in Morro Bay and Half Moon Bay. Then made my way up to San Francisco and took in some sights before heading over to Keith and Shelli’s for their annual New Years DAY party they’ve dubbed “Reclination”. The storm was out of control this weekend. The surf was huge so I stopped in Half Moon Bay to check out Mavericks surf spot and the storm was going off so it was ugly out there. No surfers though, too nasty. After I got into San Francisco there was a ton of flooding and one poor bastard’s truck was killed by a tree. Headed up to Marin and more flooding until I got to Keith and Shelli’s where I parked myself for the night. The party went on for hours anyway so it was good to just crash there. Except for the fact that the drive home the next day would turn into a nightmare. I got up on Monday and headed out at noon to have lunch in San Mateo. Then decided to take the 152 by Casa de Fruta and take the 5 home. Lucky me, traffic was out of control. Gridlocked or really slow most of the way and pouring rain out. I thought that was bad until just before the Paso Robles exit they shut the freeway down all the way to the Grapevine. That’s like three hours away! I finally heard on the radio from L.A. that the winds were so high that trucks where laying on their sides and one had even hit a power pole and that was laying in the road somewhere. So they herded everyone off the freeway and I had to cut across to the 99 which was an hour away. Anyway, got home at 11pm after leaving Keith and Shelli’s at 12:30pm. Ugh. So that sucked, but in two weeks when we go on the Sony ski trip it’s going to be epic because of the storm. In the past 30 hours alone Mammoth Mountain has gotten 8 feet of snow. That is what you call duuuuumping.

After having Christmas with my parents in Idaho they headed up to Anacortes to get the boat shipped down to Southern California. It’s been up in the San Juan Islands for the past year. They got it on the truck today so if you see a big red Popeye boat coming down the 5 freeway it could be Scooter. It’s supposed to arrive sometime after the new year to its new home in Dana Point. It’s kinda weird to see a boat on the back of a Semi.

Boise airport December 25th

The holiday Bermuda Triangle. In L.A., will just be hangin’ out. Then to Idaho and doing nothin’, or shopping at one of their many strip malls. Then onto San Francisco for 4 days during the New Year! Woot! That all starts right… no, wait for it, right… one sec… now…

chrisc@beyonce:chrisc > logout
login: connection closed.

Photos from the kayaking trip to Fiji. It only took me a month this time rather than three years for the last trip. Unfortunately this time around I was hammered by mosquitos and came home with an unfortunate nightmare on my hands. I had an allergic reaction to the mosquito bites and they kept getting worse and worse to the point that they were scaring the shit out of me. They hurt, were oozing and one was the size of a silver dollar. They weren’t getting better and I had 40 of them that had gone completely haywire. They weren’t getting better so I made an appointment with my doctor and had him check them out. He prescribed me some Cipro, which was sounding oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Not because it’s a hugely powerful antibiotic anything, but… holy crap that’s what they were giving everybody that had been exposed to Anthrax a few years ago!!!! He also decided to send me to a dermatologist because he wasn’t quite sure about them. Anyway, I was miserable and with the help of the Cipro they finally started to scab over last week. I never took a picture of them because it was just to god awful to look at. But you can recreate it with pieces of beef jerky. Just take forty 1 1/2 inch round pieces of beef jerky and randomly place them on your arms and legs and you’ll get an idea of what I looked like. Meat scabs. The only thing positive I could think of was that there was no way in hell anyone was going to mug me. Mostly I kept them covered though so that I wouldn’t scare the shit out of people while out in public. Apparantly some people become more sensitive to mosquito bites the more they get them. Guess I’m one of those…

[FIJI 2005 GALLERY – 1280 x 1024]

Read the rest of this entry »

The first look at Ghost Rider was revealed today. Check him out [LINK]. He looks pretty freakin’ cool even in a compressed quicktime file. Official Site [LINK] and fanboy reaction [LINK] is positive. The release date is February 2007 and lots of work to do. It’s a flaming skeleton on a flaming motorcycle, that’s cool.