roostertails

Rollover Baby

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:28:41 -0500

The blues band Rollover Baby played at Artbeat in Somerville for the first time in two years. I was there to videotape another band and found out they were playing too.

Rollover Baby is an offshoot of an earlier band called Neon Grandma which started at the Naked City Coffeehouse and Passim. Check out their recent show on video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVmL0t-SmmY

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF-GzcPaPp4

Wild Elephants

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:09:27 -0500

Recently Rooster Tails Studios filmed three comedies: Wild Elephants, Restless Leg Syndrome, &

Correspondence Brain Surgery in Cambridge. The plan is to premiere the movies in the fall of 2008. These are some stills from the movie. Its amazing how cauliflower resembles the human brain.

The Cast: Steve, Mick

Eric, Jane, Deb, Dawn

Woods Hole Film Festival

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:12:40 -0500

Last weekend the Woods Hole Film festival went into

full swing. My movie

The Dreams of Leonardo da Vinci

played on Sunday night with other notable

animated movies. The week was spent hanging

out with other filmmakers at the after parties,

walking by the harbor, and seeing some of the

films. It was a pleasure meeting several people who will be involved in upcoming film festivals in Cannes and Berlin. Someone from PBS filmed me talking about my movie.

There were some great dramas and

comedies and several movies about the

environment and the ocean. Woods Hole

is the home of the famous oceanographic

institute. Below are photos of some members

of the film community enjoying the festival by the sea.

http://woodshole.bside.com/2008/films/thedreamsofleonardodavinci_woodshole2008

June Caricatures

Sun, 3 Aug 2008 12:23:27 -0500

A few new caricatures: Stooges, Sex & the City, Rat Pack, and Stephen Colbert

Paris

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:26:48 -0500

I met up with my friend Sho in Paris and we started out doing the traditional things..checking out the Louvre, the Mona Lisa, the painting of Napoleon's coronation..at 500 square feet it may be the largest painting in the world. That night we met my friend Maria who took us to an international party on the top floor of a Paris apartment. The host was an Australian guy who works for the United nations. There were people from Australia, Paris, Ireland, Russia, America, and a woman who couldn't remember where she was from.

As we drank more wine the group become more theatrical. This grad student sang her blues about the pressures of the academic world. One guy recited Shakespeare, another the Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. I did a poem about the Sixties. Lydia sang a song in Russian, and Maria told us the story about how she danced at a festival in Marrakesh where they had her make her entrance riding on a camel.

Truly revved up we went out on the street near St. Michel but had to wait while a procession for an African saint walked by. We were off to an underground night club. Walking down the stairs into this cavern with no windows were 100 people jammed dancing and drinking. There we danced late to Israeli music.

One day Sho was visiting her cousin so I took my video camera to the Paris Zoo. There was a hill covered with several dozen baboons. Watching these animals fighting, grooming each other, and swinging on trees was so fascinating that I must have filmed them for half an hour. This one baby baboon was trying to keep up with the older ones. He would try to climb up a wall they easily mastered but he slide back down again and again. He was the Charlie Chaplin of hairy anthropoids. It would be ironic if they turned out to be the stars of my Paris movie.

Sho and I had lunch at a 100 year old restaurant from France's gilded age and visited the Picasso Museum. I climbed the Arch de triumph and looked over the bustling Champs Elysées .

I hooked up with Karine and Jacques from that New Surrealists art show we were in together back in 2003. We ate French chicken which gave us stamina to climb the 300 steps to the top of Sacre Cour.

That night was a vernissage and met up with Surrealist sculptor Jacky Kooken. It was a controversial show of Israeli and Arab art spread out on 5 floors. Lots of people coming through. Too bad no one in the US thought of having a show like that. Jacky invited me to join him at the Maata gallery near Gare D'Lyon.

There were some paintings, furniture, a collage of a naked woman walking across a roof, and some metal blinking spaceships. It was a smaller gallery and less ambitious than the first one. They served peanuts and whiskey at the reception table on the street. Once we partook of that Jacky seemed a bit uneasy. He didn't know anyone there. The situation looked sort of dismal so I had to do something. I saw this striking blonde woman standing next to us alone. I talked to her in my very deficient French. Her name was Cecile and was from out of town there waiting for a friend.

I introduced Jackie to her and he was quite taken by her. Then her friend one of the artists showed up and the four of us hung out much of the night. As I pulled out my video camera the scene unfolded as sort of a Fellini movie. One woman showed up with her baby. She was tall, had tattoos and was the spitting image of Amy Winehouse complete with gigantic beehive hair. Another guy was walking around wearing a dress. I don't think he was the father.

This other woman friend of Jacky's Milene showed up with this wild hair and wardrobe...a true eccentric artist.

She had a furniture piece in the show. Evidently Jacky knew her and has been pursuing her for a long time. I interviewed her about her art for my video. She also has some kind of barrel installation that she is showing in galleries in London, Paris, and Germany. She is some kind of famous award winning artist and engineer and she wants to show this barrel all over the world. She wants to find a gallery on the East coast to premiere her work in the US. Of course I suggested that she contact my friends at Out of the Blue in Cambridge.

Seeing me videotape this woman inspired all these different people to jump in and pose for my camera as they made speeches in French including Jacky and Cecile. When we were leaving Jacky gave her a book of his scuulpture and at and I gave here Underground Surrealist Magazine. She was so pleased she kissed both of us as we left. I can't remember when I saw anyone having as much fun as she did. She was just laughing all night. What do the French call it Joie de vivre the Joy of Life...or was it just something in the whiskey?

On the Metro back Jacky was also going to place D Clichy. He bought me a glass of wine at a bar called the Cave. He then did a handstand on a chair in a bar which freaked out some of the patrons. A useful skill he picked up in the circus. That was it. There was nothing that could top that on my last night in Paris. So I headed back to Boston hopefully with a little Joie de vivre.

Transiberian

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:48:01 -0500

Recently the movie Transiberian premiered at the Boston Independent Film Festival. The Russian detective in the movie Ben Kingsley was there for the event. He said it was a challenge playing such a dark figure in this Hitchcockian type thriller. Afterwards several of my friends came along to the film party. We met Sir Ben and other filmmakers.

One guy was doing a documentary about machine guns in Boston. This woman I met teaches film studies at a local College. There were other local filmmakers there who we know from the scene which is very active in Boston. Tomorrow there is a seminar on working on the local film industry and Sunday some of us are going to see Twelve: a collecton of shorts from Boston filmmakers.

The festival will be covered by Imagine Magazine which is a very important part of the resurgence in filmmaking in Massachusetts.

New Years approaching

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 19:25:02 -0500

Vladimir Putin the new Czar of Russia gets picked as Time magazine's man of the year. Cheney is all set to invade Iran when the intelligence report comes out saying that Iran quit their nuclear waepons program years ago. Iran doesn't have weapons of mass destruction after all. Haven't we heard this story before? Japanese officials admit that UFOs exist. What a way to wind up the end of 2007.

In January and Feb. the Museum of Fine Arts singles nights draw the largest crowds of the year. One doctor suggests that this is because of all the people are there making their New Years resolutiuons to get out and meet new people.

What will the New Year bring? We won't know for another week.

Dragons

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 19:26:18 -0500

A while back I picked up a book about drawing Dragons. It was pretty detailed considering that they are imaginary creatures. There's a difference between ferocious Europeen dragons and benign spiritual enlightened Chinese dragons. I needed to come up with one for an upcoming movie about Leonardo da Vinci and the Rennaisance. I did the drawing in pencil, scanned it in and edited it in Flash....You can watch it by clicking on the movie camera below. No roaring or sound effects yet.

October

Thu, 1 May 2008 19:21:52 -0500

The morning news is bleak. More endless war in Iraq, an Israeli Palestinian peace process that appears to be going nowhere. Bhutto a reformist returns to Pakistan and is greeted by bombs. The stock market is shaky. The world seems to be descending into apocalyptic doom yet people are dancing in the streets.

Yes the Red Sox, defying impossible odds, are back in the World Series. People in the streets and bars are exuberent. Humans are the only animals who are capable of dreaming and hoping for something better...the only species that can believe in magic.

Yes the players are overpaid milliionaires in their twenties playing a kid's game for other adults ridiculously willing to pay $100 or more for the experience.

But a home run at Fenway Park and all is right in the world...if even just for a while. Play ball!

Middle East

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 21:37:57 -0500

Today I went to a Harvard Middle East seminar about the upcoming Palestianian - Israeli peace confererence that Condoleezza Rice is pushing to make happen. The guest speaker Henry Siegman Director of the U.S./Mideast project said right off that bat that there is practically no chance that it would succeed. He said that it willl fail because it is only an US-Israeli pretext for destroying Hamas. Siegman said that the two sides are too far apart to agree on anything and won't even reach a joint statement.

There was much discussion about the history of the establishment of Israel and how the Arabs origonally thought the Palestinians would get half the land. Now they have only 22% of it and he said that Israel demanding more was like trying to squeeze blood form a stone. Both sides see themselves as persecuted and oppressed.

Someone asked Siegman if any of the current presidential candidates had anything to say about the subject. Guliani says that the Palestinians shouldn't get a state. When Howard Dean announced last time that we should have an even handed approach in this issue his campaign was over.

Henry Siegman hopes that maybe a 3rd party ie: the UN can step in and try to get the 2 sides to negotiate.

But the bottom line for any eventual agreement is for both sides to put themselves in the other party's shoes...a quality that doesn't presently exist on either side of the proverbial fence. The seminar had very little optimism. The last seminar about the prospects in Iraq had no optimism whatsoever...not even a glimmer of light at the end of that tunnel.