THE SUPER 8
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Spiky San Francisco art punks in the late ’70s, moody expats living in Brussels throughout the ’80s, and global wanderers since, the members of Tuxedomoon reunited in 2004 to record one of their best records, Cabin in the Sky, which weaves sardonic electro with elegant chamber music. Now filmmaker (and former Hurrah nightclub videographer) Merrill Aldighieri has issued on DVD a doc, Seismic Riffs, that captures the reunion, the recording and a live performance.
2. WOOT.COM
Need a titanium coffee mug but don’t want to pony up top dollar? How about a remote control Thunderbike, or a surveillance system, or a stainless-steel dining set for your dog? Woot.com may be for you. The online retailer, which is run by the employees of an unnamed electronics disrtributor, sells one — and only one — product each day at bargain-basement prices. But be prepared to act quickly: after 11:59 p.m. CST, the item you’ve been coveting all day will be gone forever.
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Kim Adelman knows shorts: she ran the short-film program at Fox Movie Channel, produced 19 short films, and a series of DVD shorts collections for Warner Home Video. Her latest venture, The Ultimate Filmmaker’s Guide to Short Films: Making It Big in Shorts (Michael Wiese Productions, 200 pp., $14.95), offers numerous helpful tips for aspiring short filmmakers — from developing story ideas to budgeting to postproduction to marketing and selling the finished product.
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Written by Jack Rothman, a professor emeritus at UCLA’s School of Public Policy and Social Research, Hollywood in Wide Angle: How Directors View Filmmaking (Scarecrow Press, 199 pp., $24.95) is compiled from a sociological perspective. Striving “to keep technical language and academese under rein,” Rothman interviewed 32 American directors from diverse backgrounds about how movies are made. Wide Angle approaches a familiar subject with new, and often surprising, insight.
5. DENNIS COOPER
Having completed his audacious, beautiful and terrifying “George Miles” series of novels, America’s most transgressive novelist is releasing his first PG-13 work, God, Jr., this spring from Grove Press. Before that, though, Void Books will release a limited-edition side project, The Sluts, “a metafiction of pornography, lies, half truths and myth,” which Cooper deems too hardcore and experimental for wide release.
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If the whole red-state/blue-state thing has gotten you down, take heart. You, dear reader, belong to a new advertiser-targeted demographic, the “cultural creative.” “We are responsible for the creation of everything the world sees. We make the movies, we write the software, we take the photos… We decide what is cool,” says the Web site of Medium (www.mediumfootwear.com), whose stylish sneakers boast highbrow names (the Modernist, the Objectivist) and are branded by the names of their own culturally creative designers.
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Considering his slavish following and obvious influence on mainstream filmmakers today, surprisingly little has been written on cult director Dario Argento and his large body of work. Journalist Alan Jones takes a big step toward rectifying that with Profondo Argento (Fab Press, 336 pages, $39.99), a lavish tome chock full of stills, poster art and interviews with members of the Argento camp, including daughter Asia Argento and her mother, actress and screenwriter Daria Nicolodi.
8. CHRIS WARE
After his lauded 2000 triumph Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, vernacular-shattering comics artist Chris Ware has gotten the monograph treatment with Chris Ware, (Monographics/Yale, $19.95), a bright, slim square of representative work ably curated and aptly illuminated by Daniel Raeburn, who offers a skeleton key to the biographical elements of Ware’s work, both in life and in the graphic arts of the 20th century, in shimmering memories and from fading newsprint.
VOD CALENDAR
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