Month: August 2021 (Page 4 of 4)

Okay, so your PopCulteer spent the last few days having lots of fun in and around Louisville, Kentucky, even though Maysthena Gravis is still making his hands as useful as flippers.  I’ll tell you all about that, with photos and video, starting on Wednesday.

Just like with last week, I did not create any real-world art this week. I did try to draw some stuff on my phone with a stylus, but that didn’t work out too well.  What you see above is 100% digital, created by pushing around a mouse and hitting keys. It’s another one of my geometric abstracts, which, to be honest, I can pretty much knock out in my sleep after doing them for close to twenty years. This one was created by overlaying conectric circles and radial bursts, then colorizing them and ramping up the color.

Click to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, Monday at on The AIR, this week our Haversham Recording Institute friends are still busy providing translation services for The Olympics. We will be running encore plays of recent episodes of Prognosis, Psychedelic Shack and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat for the next few weeks. This afternoon you can hear Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack at 2 PM and Herman Linte with Prognosis at 3 PM.

At 7 PM tune in for 12 hours of the best of Curtain Call, hosted by Mel Larch.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.

This week’s video post is a repeat of a post from May, 2010, which I just discovered had all the video embeds broken at some point. So here it is again, with those videos that are still working  re-embedded this time.  More than half of them are lost to the sands of time…dammit!

When I was a kid, I was crazy about animation. I’m not just talking about Saturday morning cartoons or classic Warner Brothers shorts, I loved everything animated–commercials, broadcast network IDs, industrial films–anything with a cartoon hook had me. I was three or four years old when NBC showed a prime-time compilation of independently-animated shorts.  That was an epiphany for me.

The cartoon you see above is “Moonbird,” by John and Faith Hubley. This was part of that NBC special, and it would be over forty years before I would get a chance to see this again.  The soundtrack is an actual recording of their children playing, around which they then created the animation. “Moonbird” won the OSCAR for best animated short in 1959, but there was no place for it to be seen until a few years later.

After the jump, you’ll get to read more about my life-long quest for animation and you’ll get to see the rest of the first edition of the PopCult Animation Festival, a collection of cool animated shorts from around the world.  It’ll be a weekly feature here in PopCult this Summer. Continue reading