Showing posts with label Aesthete TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aesthete TV. Show all posts

2/26/2008

Aesthete TV 8

Welcome to episode 8: A Stitch in Spacetime, where we search marginal picture space (all but the apparent focus) for evidence of alien visitation.

The camera crew is dispatched to the Bowery.  Their cover assignment: to document the area's metamorphosis from alcoholic hell to international playboy destination.  Their real assignment: to collect 72 hours of footage in the most innocuous way possible at a site -- where the earth still fumes with tormented spirits -- considered a soft spot in the membrane between this and other worlds.

The crew blends into the background as the camera rolls, sleeping in shifts head to toe on the sidewalk, warmed by nothing but a sheet of cardboard, fortified wine, and each other's onion breath.  That is, in pretty much the same shape I first found them on a visit to Bulgaria a few years ago.

The climax of the episode is the left side of the split image above, captured shortly after dawn just as I snatched the camera from the jittery crew, about to sell it to a cab driver for $20.

Note the intense visage burning across the bottom of the left side, enlarged on the right.  I've seen that look before; it fronts either (1) a human mind howling through space, fleeing worms big as whales, carnivorous blankets, and merciless, ululating armies of children, or (2) some alien mind that finds life on earth just as strange and frightening.

Oddly, the next few minutes of tape are filled with milky white light and what sounds like bubbles bursting on a carbonated lake.

11/02/2007

Aesthete TV 7

Welcome to episode 7: The Empty Bench, Part I.

We placed the camera between bars of the gate protecting the garden here from the street, at Park Ave. South near 38th St.

Our mission, and the source of the episode's suspense: to see if anyone sits on the bench.

With its heavenly white paint job, and Jesus' ambiguous stance* -- is He shooting rays of love from His palms, or raising them in warning because the bench is designed to fry the unworthy like vampires in morning light? -- it will be interesting to see if anyone approaches or sits on the bench.

Notice I say "if," and that the episode is labeled "Part I."  We filmed for a week, and nothing but birds, rodents and flying litter visited the garden.  (Though I see evidence here that someone tracked chalk across the asphalt; did the camera crew desert its post just when something, perhaps a miracle, occurred?  It's so hard to find dependable aesthetic help nowadays.)

* Religious statues are tricky.  People like to see divinity "in the flesh" -- it suggests they have a chance themselves.  But then they invest the lump of stone or plastic with supernatural powers -- crossing the line to idolatry -- and plant it in the garden like a scarecrow.  Before long the birds and rodents lose their fear and desecrate the idol, then vines pull it down into the dirt, where it rots in the silent company of countless billions of plastic bottles, dinosaurs and Barbie dolls, disdained by worms and ruptured by roots, its eyes stuck open staring down into hell.

10/16/2007

Aesthete TV 6


This gritty episode, the most suspenseful yet, is titled The Swarthy Man.

On a cold and windy day the camera crew is sent to find a temporary structure that, by chance, provides a grand approach to an unremarkable door.

Once unpacked, the crew crawls toward the door with all the awe and apprehension of a simple peasant approaching the palace of his lord (say, to beg permission to chop down a tree favored by vultures scaring his milk goats, thus starving his children).

When the crew finally arrives at the door 25 minutes later, the bravest of them knocks, then jumps back.  Loud clanking and scraping can be heard within the building, as though a deformed giant is dragging leg chains across a metal floor.

The tension mounts; the wind blows; the crew whimpers.

The door finally creaks open to reveal a small, swarthy man wearing rubber knee boots, a leather apron, and a hair net.  He peers from the shadows, scratching his cheek with a greasy finger, then barks an aggressive question in an unfamiliar tongue (we assume it is a question; one eyebrow is raised in a ?).  He waits, unblinking, then pulls a rusty pipe wrench from behind his back.

The wind blows harder; the tension mounts higher.  Finally, "To be continued..." flashes across the screen.

But of course it won't be continued -- both the temporary structure and swarthy man will be gone by the time the crew can be convinced to return.

7/20/2007

Aesthete TV 3

Welcome to episode 3: Gray Skies Full of Color.

You look out the window in the morning and see wall to wall clouds, the world so drained of color you'd rather leave the blinds pulled down than look at it.

But every so often, it's shocking how colorful gray skies can be.  Other than being dumbed-down by the digital process, this picture is accurate -- there was a rainbow throbbing in the clouds.

6/25/2007

Aesthete TV 2


Aesthete TV is pleased to bring you episode 2: Snapshots That Look Staged.

I had to sneak up on the butler/videographer to capture these, in one of those "hidden right in the open" spots in Central Park.

I'm sure countless episodes could be shot by parking a video camera with a telephoto lens on a hill, then panning and zooming in on secluded spots visible through the trees.  The spots are small stages, where people wander down paths or, sensing the distance and quiet just a few hundred feet from traffic, stop and relax. Or stop and videotape a picnic in their best butler attire.

That's an invasive idea, but what's powerful about the view is the sense of sharing a world at rest.  It's a deeply peaceful feeling to survey the world around you like an eagle, and feel it relax.

6/13/2007

Aesthete TV 1

Finally, a reality TV show for the finely tuned aesthete.

The camera sits stationary for the full half hour.  Nothing much happens for 15 minutes, then the parts snap into place for an instant, before 15 more minutes of nothing much.

As someone somewhere must once have said, "Through a single teardrop, seas ye can see."

The picture here is from episode 1: When Clouds Line Up with Trees.  I thought about this shot (at McCarren Park) for weeks; when it finally presented itself, it was as hard to capture as a shy rhino.