Elgin Park in Miniature

Not dissimilar from Alex Prager's work in their staging and beauty, Michael Paul Smith makes amazingly realistically photographs using miniature cars and forced perspective. His work is an impressive lesson on how much world creation one can accomplish with a relatively finite set of tools.

Alex Prager's Crowd

Fair warning: if I don't get to see this show in person, I will be a sad, sad man.

Hero in Decline

Andreas Englands paintings of an aged superhero are gorgeous, but more impressive is the fullness of the what he's created. Go through his gallery and watch the super powered man grow up from infancy, stubble with addiction, and deal with the eventual reality of his body's limitations. The individual paintings are funny. The arc is sweetly tragic and human.

City of Necessity

One of the major updates missing from this blog (but detailed plenty of other places on the web) is that in September, my family relocated from Chicago to the Boston area. Boston is of course a beautiful city rich in history, architecture, and accents, but it's hard to not miss the land we called home for over a decade. This amazing film from 1961 only drove home the nostalgia, in addition to being a great glimpse of the city as it was decades ago.

Making The Midnight Coterie

Thanks to Emily for forwarding this great dissection by cinematographer Alex Buono of how SNL was able to make (at breakneck speed) such an amazing mashup of Wes Anderson's aesthetic and horror films.

Ho Ho Hilow

Thanks to Hilowbrow for their kind words about my work in general and about the new book, Artists Authors Thinkers Directors, specifically.

Now Then

Now that the dust has been shaken off of a couple of the web sites, it's time to clean off the cob webs on the old blog. Let's see if we can't close out the year with a few posts, shall we?