The Loudness of New York City Trains

We arrived in The Netherlands yesterday (after a cancelled flight and British airport security tried its best not to get us here) but, before embarking on our strange journey, we stopped a moment in New York City on our way down from Troy, NY (pictured below) to see some close friends which truly began our trip in the best possible way!

First, we followed Martha Colburn, who oddly enough also has a film premiering at the Rotterdam International Film Festival too, to a live cable access show taping at Louis V E.S.P. (pictured). The music was really really good and I noticed that their previous line up had been pretty spectacular as well (especially Erica Magrey , the lower eastside NYC darling whose alter ego Metalmags seems to constantly seep into my life, in the best way possible!).

Then it was onto the house of some good friends we hadn't seen in awhile, the wonderful Chris & Tim! I didn't get a chance to write about Chris Doyle 's newest work when it premiered in the fall but he has somehow managed to mix his perfect artisan skills with his fresh, clean animating style to make some stunning, new, dense apocalyptic work- way better in its huge immersive environment but here are some images to peak your interest! The day of our flight was spent doing chores and hanging with our dear friend/Gravity band mate Drew Henkels , who is currently having a bout with technology recording his new album, Protools tech support anyone? I cannot wait to see what Drew's new music work sounds like being that it just keeps getting better!

This sort of NY tour of some of the people we love there, and people who have been whole heartedly supportive of Gravity from start to finish,  was a great send off to the exotic locale where we will spend the next few days sharing our film with a whole different group of makers from across the globe! But first, I must figure out this damn city map?!

Gravity is Premiering, Premiered, in Europe!

I completely forgot to mention! Gravity is is premiering, or premiered (?)- wait I just checked the schedule, it premiered (!) and sold out! Two shows! Oh my goodness!- in Rotterdam this week! 

We are headed out to the festival Saturday which will mark not only Gravity's first time in Europe but mine too! If anyone can recommend things to see, and films to watch, please do! We've been so busy that it is only now just starting to hit me that I am going the farthest away I have ever been from where I was born...nerves and excitement!
If you want a postcard, send me your address and I'll try my best!

Performing Arts Center or Death Star

The thing Brent is working on up here in Troy is pretty incredible- I saw it today with my own eyes and it still feels unreal! It is still in a testing phase so I can't really share too much of what the end result will be but let's just say that it will be awesome and have elements of a magic television. Yup. WHAT?! Amazing! While running errands today I had time to wander around the current exhibition in the lobby of EMPAC! At first the pieces didn't seem to stand out mainly due to the overwhelming architecture of the building (pictured) but, upon further inspection, the show is just jaw dropping!

The exhibit is called Uncertain Spectator and plays on the idea of voyeurism and tension in our fear driven culture. One piece, actually called FEAR, is made of a circle of chairs that when approached begin to hiss, the table in their center starts to emit tiny red lights, making you feel like an intruder and loaded with questions about what that means. Kate Gilmore (who I've admired for years as one of like 3 female artists making feminist work that doesn't suck) has her video piece Main Squeeze on display which shows her trying to pass through a narrow enclosure in fancy dress, struggling as we watch unable to help yet transfixed by, I don't even know by what..pure anticipation & hope?

The other piece I loved I walked by twice before investigating, it looked like a bunch of quarters encased on a museum pedestal but, of course, it wasn't! It was a bunch of quarters hollowed out with tiny switchblades hidden inside. I don't think I've ever seen a piece of art so small and so rife with meaning! All of this wonderful art being in the lobby of this insane building made me even more excited about Brent's residency here but who wouldn't be...did I mention MAGIC TELEVISIONS!

Watch for Icicles Falling From the Polymer Synthesis Building

After all of the loading, driving, unloading and then more driving I'm glad we're stationed in Troy, NY for a few days. The reason we are stationed here is due to the lovely people of EMPAC- you might remember them from Brent's two previous (sold out! yay!) performances! Associated with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center has a great residency program where they basically let artists play with their super computers and cutting edge technology to try and figure out creative ways to use or modify science!

Brent has currently embarked on a residency here with today being the first day of studio tests for an animation/video/sculpture piece..? I think? Something like that...we'll see! For now I shall revel in the biting cold of Troy, actually, I feel slightly at home here since this is my grandmother's old college stomping ground where she trained to be an engineer and bring microwaves to us all! Way to go Grandma (heats burrito, smiles at heritage)...!

My New Kentucky Home Good Night

We unloaded two entire trucks in Louisville Kentucky yesterday, then we drove home, slept a little, woke up and drove some more! Ending up in Troy, NY via New York City and some area of Pennsylvania we had never been before due to a closed highway (can they do that?)! Before we get to Troy though....now our entire film set is in pieces in the basement of a building on East Broadway in downtown Louisville Kentucky (and boy are my arms tired)!

The current basement home of the set belongs to LOT (Land of Tomorrow, which is supposedly an old Native American name for Kentucky) an artspace that started in Lexington and only recently expanded to this spot. The gallery building is completely beautiful, sources say it may have once been an elaborate YMCA which makes sense given the ornate molding and odd-pool like landings- all of which make me excited to rebuild our town/set in this gorgeous, revitalized spacec (pictured)!

While in Louisville, we even got a (lucky) chance to stay at 21C, another space run by the founders of Art Without Walls who are the organization behind bringing Gravity to this Kentucky locale, the legendary museum hotel! Yeah, it's pretty neat...the main show they had up in the lobby gallery space now was perfect for our stay too; Tracey Snelling's film noir feeling installation of hotels and horror movies felt like it was meant for the film nerd inside me and a piece in one of the back galleries by this artist (who knew inside out plush animals would be so poetic, spooky and machine cold?) made the show feel like it too was meant for me! The museum also sponsored a piece from one of my favorite artist/designers awhile back, Stefan Sagmeister, whose evil art monkey balloons dotted the landscape of this old Kentucky town spelling out a perfect sentence of a sad truth.

Great times in Louisville with more to come when we build up the set in April- Kentucky in the Spring, juleps for everyone!

Snowy Highway

The truck started again! Only to die again! At least Dan was lucky enough for us to be passing him while he was stalled by the side of the road so he didn't freeze to death in a snowstorm on the highway in Looking Glass, Illinois. Long hauling this film set provides very strange ways to spend time...here was our view for about an hour as we huddled in the cab trying to stay warm, so close to Kentucky yet so far!

Dinosaur Trees & Dinosaur Trucks

Hell yeah we stopped at the petrified forest on our way from Arizona to Louisville! Hell yeah Dan, our Pennsylvanian assistant who is driving one of the trucks, called this morning and said his truck died! Not sure what to expect next but hoping the truck can get up and running instead of having to reload tons of artwork into another truck...

Re-Cap for Rotterdam

Noticed that a lot of people from the Netherlands have been visiting this here blog lately...! Welcome! Or should I say, Welkom! (Is that right?) My name is Donna K. and I run this site and I thought I should give all the newcomers a brief re-cap about the blog and about the American artist/filmmaker Brent Green's first feature film, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then.

I was living in NY and Brent told me to move to a barn in Pennsylvania where he lives and help him make this movie and we built a town in our yard and we made the film (entirely in stop motion animation) and then we screened it and then we screened it with a live, improvised score and then we took down the town and now we are shipping the town around to American museums and showing the film in as many places as we can! One of these places being the 2011 Rotterdamn International Film Festival! We will even be there, in person, for the last screening of the film! I hope that helps everyone who is new around here...can someone pass me the virtual potato chips? Or should I say friets? Anyone? (Real life can be so much better sometimes...!)

I Can't Believe Our Whole Film Set Lived In Arizona

Ok, ok, we left Arizona but, as we had dinner last night with some of the amazing art folk of Phoenix and after having such an amazing time there in general, I felt the need to give one more hearty thank you and farewell! First Heather Lineberry, the phenomenal, thoughtful curator who, after seeing the preview in Miami two years ago, followed Gravity through to completion and was seriously one of the first people to be supportive of this project! I can't even begin to thank her (and her overabundant coolness) enough! Gordon Knox, the new director of the ASU Art Musuem who started his time in Arizona when we began our install, was there as well-  a brilliant man whose ideas are engaging and enormous. I hope he finds his place at the musuem and is able to both support the amazing curatorial talent he has while bringing his own scope to this exceptional institution. John Spiak is also part of the museums fuel, even bringing Brent out there years ago with his short films! He tends to work on intrigueing projects with all types of artists, reaching out to everyone to spread the word on the vast Phoenix art scene & all it can do!

Lastly at dinner was Jon Haddock! Not only is Jon the nicest man on the planet, he is also pretty much one of the most amazing artists I've ever met (socio-political hand cranked boxes? vintage cartoon style mouse pornography? sexy photos reedited to remove the figures leaving only the bland, empty sadness of the surroundings behind?) his concepts and execution are both refined, interesting and, quite often, tinged with a sense of humor that all come together to make what he does incomparable! Sitting there eating falafels wih this group of current, creative, genius Arizonians made me so grateful for being allowed to have this experience and to share our project with them and everyone else from this strange desert land! O, and those who opted out of dinner after helping us all day- a huge, huge thank you to Stephen & Chris who win the preparators of the year award! Their own artistic skill, smarts and just plain awesomeness made every aspect of putting this show together (and taking it down) an absolutely amazing experience! Ok, ok, do you get it? Arizona was amazing! If only the rest of the state could get its act together..teehee...cough-cough...

Goodbye Arizona

Hitting the road tomorrow, with trucks full of Gravity, heading to Louisville Kentucky where the set will be rebuilt in conjunction with Lousville's marvelous arts organization Art Without Walls in the new space of another growing Kentucky arts org, LOT! Here is one last look out of the entrance to the ASU Art Museum, what a great experience this place gave us, I can only hope they will remember us just as fondly as we will remember them (tear)! Bye Arizona, stay safe, warm and on the cutting edge of contemporary art!

Heavy Hanging Oranges

After a delayed flight and too much tv watching on the plane (Me, not Brent of course) we stumbled awake yesterday morning to start taking down our Gravity town to take it to it's new town....but, to our surprise the ambitious, overly competent staff at the ASU Art Museum already disassembled almost the entire set! Oh my goodness, thank you! We did do a bunch of heavy lifting and truck loading the past two days but not nearly enough...which left us with plenty of time to do what one does in Arizona- eat tacos, revel in the un-snowy weather and (still be) amazed by citrus trees!

Speaking of the ASU Museum Staff, a beloved member of their team recently passed away, the lovely Susan Ables.  We got to work with Susan when we were doing the installation down here. She was an amazing, dedicated, joyous person who was a huge part of keeping the museum operating and happy! Everyone at the musuem misses her dearly and I am sure every artist who she ever crossed paths with will remember her fondly as well. Here's to Susan (raises glass), the museum won't be the same without her smile!

Coal Mining Row Houses (With Totem Pole)

In attempts to avoid packing for all of the various Gravity related excursions that begin tomorrow Brent & I went to Goggleworks. Goggleworks is a nonprofit artspace located in an old optical lens factory in Reading, PA (which is the nearest bigger sized city to our rural farmland). The space includes dozens of artists studios (most with a nice open door policy), huge exhibition areas, arts organization offices, a pretty impressive folk art gallery, an artisan gift shop and a tiny movie theater that  often manages to program a decent amount of foreign & indie titles to make it worth the drive! The facilities also include a glass/ceramics shop and woodshop (and after consulting the internet it turns out they have darkroom, jewelry and a ton of other available art-centric machinery) that host a wide array of classes for the community and, most importantly, the youth of the greater Reading area.

The last few times we've been there we've seen the progress on this giant totem pole which now guards the Goggleworks parking lot  (above photo also from parking lot)! I kind of wish we were connected to this space a bit better...it would be so much fun to curate a show/film event or run some kind of animation workshop or maybe even do a mini live show there? Who knows what the future will hold for our local art activities but, until then, we'll continue to go to Goggleworks to drink coffee, amble around and procrastinate our encroaching, expansive Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then schedule!

On The Road Again

Monday Nervousfilms embarks on an epic journey starting in the southwestern desert of the United States to disassemble the set of Gravity and ending in The Netherlands for the Rotterdam Film Festival! With stops in between including Troy, New York and Louisville, Kentucky I can't say I know what to expect! I have never, ever in all my life been to Europe either so I am soooo unbelievably excited to see what is over an entire ocean of travel!

I hope to try and make a few shorts of the trip in a kind of video log for this site which I hope works out well and I hope I have enough time for...how does that sound? Too much? I can't tell since I am too excited...why does it smell like burning? Okay, must find the fire extinguisher and follow the burning smell to what I am sure lies on the other end: Brent Green!

Do You Know This Man?

John Swartz? Do you know him? He plays the cello along to Gravity in our band. I don't know him well at all. He seems to like to keep it that way. What I do know about him is very little: I know he is an amazing cellist who, when given the opportunity, will play every cello in a room full of cellos. Just ask the two shops we've rented cellos from! Both shops were so intrigued and intoxicated by his playing that they just kept providing him with more and more instruments to play...usually resulting in us being late to sound check or Drew napping in the van for amounts of time exceeding what is known as a nap and turning into a straight up length of sleep. I also know that he went to Sarah Lawrence college. While there he was a science person, after years of interest in the subject and even a job at the local planetarium as a teenager, but somehow he managed to find himself engulfed in the arts. I guess this explains why his deep, vast array of knowledge puts most others to shame! I once heard him try to describe what plasma was. He is also bitingly funny.

John played in the orchestra for the live version of Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain too. I know John Swartz is from San Diego and lives in Brooklyn now. I know he takes stunning photographs. He even took the self portraits on this blog post. I know he produces/sound engineers albums. I know he occasionally makes electronic music. I also know that when John played the first screening of Gravity with live musical accompaniment at the Hammer Museum in L.A. he took a train across the country which resulted in him being delayed by flooding in Oklahoma which made him have to hop on a plane in New Mexico to reach California by sunrise. Then, after the show, he went to Disneyland. I assume he likes playing with us and we definitely love the beauty and intelligence not only his cello playing brings to the shows but that his very being brings as well! O, yeah, and this just in: he makes really good pancakes! Okay, I think that exhausts most of my knowledge about John Swartz, please send leads on John to donna@nervousfilms.com! Thanks and I look forward to hearing what YOU know about John! This just in, correction: A source says John did not take science in college. He was corrupted into the arts prior to his college experience.

A Winter's Tale

We are officially snowed in! Yay! This after my beautiful snowed in vacation to Vermont where the outhouse was frigid and the woodstove toasty (pictures from the snow covered green mountains of VT seen here)! So glad I started taking apart the piles of yard mess leftover from the film before they became a dangerous white covered obstacle! Despite the wintery weather Gravity will be doing a bunch of traveling in these cold months- there's a detailed list on the Nervousfilms site of our Jan.-March schedule! Hoping everyone can put on their long johns and brave the cold to come see us as we bring Gravity into 2011...!

Ten Stories High

A few days ago we ended up in New York running various errands and mailing various DVD orders...the evening winded down with dinner at the home of an amazing couple: Eve Sussman (pictured at bottom) & Simon Lee. Eve (usually working with The Rufus Corporation collective) is a superb artist  with such a thick, gorgeous eye for film and photography. Her work is so amazing that I sometimes find it hard to even put words to the saturated images she can create. Simon makes images that are equally as full but more gritty in feel and execution. It seems he prefers a grim, scratchy yet lushly sated starkeness  as a kind of foil to Eve's more vibrant one.

 Both of them show their work internationally at museums, galleries & film venues, I personally haven't seen enough of it but right now I'm lucky: Eve's newest venture White on White, a film made of sections that reorder with each viewing over a central noir story- a brilliant idea and a technical feat- is currently screening online at the wonderous Triple Canopy! Simon's most recent not-so-short-short film Where is the Black Beast? will be playing at the Rotterdam film festival (where Gravity will also be showing!) and is composed of found photographs edited to the narration of a poem with a variable score for each reader. It's funny that both of their newest work has variation as a central component? But it makes total sense in our not so stable world I guess! Eve & Simon truly embody the artistic sense, their work comes from them so naturally and beautifully...so much inspiration from them and all of their never ending creative output, which included a delicious dinner!

Sitting in the theater (pictured above with Brent and our friend Griff, another brilliant artistic spirit) that Eve & Simon constructed inside their space high atop a Brooklyn factory building, seeing the New York skyline stretched out in front of us, surrounded by such amazing company, hunkered in the warmth away from the cold streets, made me miss winter in the city but we will be back soon enough with two nights of live Gravity performances at The Kitchen! This is Brent's second time performing at this legendary space, the other time being the first Brent Green live show I ever saw making this an extra special show for me! Super excited and really hope everyone who missed us during our summer New York rooftop performance can make it out to this cozy late winter (February 17th & 18th) show! Tickets can be puchased here! Hope to see all my favorite New Yorkers (That means you! If you are from New York!)!

From Desert to Derby

I've been away for a few days without internet (or indoor plumbing for that matter!) so it's been pretty amazing to come home to even more 2010 Gravity applause! We got four nominations for this guys Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, wait, no category for stop motion acting?! And we made it on the Top Ten Films of 2010 compiled by MarBelle of the wonderful Directors Notes! This in addition to the roaring response from the recent article in Art In America, which I finally got to see in person- complete with some amazing frame by frame pictures of the car crash sequence and some sweeping images of the entire set in the museum in Arizona!

Here are some other recent pictures, taken by the ever so talented Olya Vysotskaya, of the set as it sits in the warm southwest..that is until next week when we head down there to take everything to it's next destination: Louisville Kentucky! Another long haul across the country with our town! I couldn't be more excited especially since Louisville is the hometown of Leonard Wood, the inspiration for the main character of Gravity, making the trip an odd homecoming of sorts, a kind of memorial/remembrance of his life's work which no longer exists in today's world of homogeny and forgetfulness. I can't wait to celebrate this man and his story in the place that he was lost the most, towards Louisville! Huzzah!

Gravity is Everywhere!

Woah...today was a great way to start off 2011! No, not because our phone suddenly stopped working and right now I am watching Brent plug in a rotary phone/Gravity prop to make necessary phone calls but because The Hollywood Reporter (of all things!) let everybody know that Gravity will be having it's European premier at The Rotterdam Film Festival and, if that wasn't enough, a stunning article (which I still haven't seen in print, you know, due to the fact we live in a barn and all...) in the new issue of Art in America  features the likes of Brent Green!

YAY! Seriously proud of him! And us! It's so great that this labor of love is getting attention in so many awesome ways! Oh my goodness- that phone is loud! Oh my goodness- I've never been to Europe! So exciting! Well, not the loud phone part...

A Band Pic!

Quite possibly the best band/gear photographer working out there today got us to hold still in San Diego long enough to capture all of our weary giddiness after our last 2010 show! Me (sound effects), Brent Green (narration & guitar), Brendan Canty (percussion & keyboard) Drew Henkels (theramin/organ/guitar/misc.) & John Swartz (cello) stood tired & dazed, still awake only by the adrenaline of the awesome performance- what a great time! Thanks for the memories Southern California! Here's to more shows in 2011- updates on that soon! More exclamation points!!!!!

A Jug Of Winters Light

Today I spent the day dismantling the shards of architecture that were left behind from our film set in the yard. The enormous walls we constructed have been falling down in the sever winter weather so I went about unscrewing the fallen grid pieces, snipping the tangled yards of airplane wire (that acted as our makeshift solar system & angel suspension flying mechanism) and cutting support pipe.

That's right, I cut a 2inch iron pipe with a hacksaw all by myself after modern power tools were defeated by the mighty metal! I felt like superwoman! Now I just feel sore. At least the view from our yard (pictured) is subtley beautiful in this season and the mild temperatures made it all the more pleasant! Cleaning the yard up is still kind of sad but I feel it is also like painting over a canvas, making a big wide open space dying to be filled again! And I'm sure it will take no time for Brent to do just that....or, maybe it is my turn to construct some huge, towering thing of beauty? Until then, deconstructing....

Animation Vacation

Depending on which internet translator you use this (pictured) might be a great year end recap of the best animation...or not! I'm going to bring in the New Year on a happy note and assume it is an amazing review- woohoo! This definitely was a great year for us on the animation front though- The L.A. Animation Fest, The Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema, The San Francisco International Animation Film Festival and even The Ottawa International Animation Festival all screened Gravity, showing that you don't have to be a 3-D mega tech computer genius to make a beautiful animated story! I hope more lo-fi animations are made in 2011. As much as I love to see artistic progress & new uses of technology, there is something about the visible hand in creating things that I think is important for everyone to see, especially the young audiences of most animated features. Who knows, maybe Brent is secretly plotting a new hand drawn animation....hmmmmmm?