By Kate Beaton, via Same Hat! Same Hat!

Discovered a wonderful fashion photographer, Eugenio Recuenco. Here’s the photo that got me hooked, from the great photo blog riot rite right clit clip click:

Here’s the link to his website. There’s a lot of good stuff in the photo gallery.

Check out some of the new stuff in the right sidebar. I’m putting up documentation from old works (you can see them in the Works page). So far, I’ve done the larps I Regret Nothing and Elementary School and the installation Beauté désincarnée. Still waiting are my circus performance Bouffe c’que j’te donne and the larp Luminescence I did with Mike Pohjola.

(Photos: upper left, lower right Elementary School, photos by Olli Rinne; upper center, lower left Beauté désincarnée; upper right, lower center I Regret Nothing, logo by Eirik Fatland.)

Japanese CG artist Yock (Yoshitaka Kawakami) makes schoolgirl horror art reminiscent of Trevor Brown that’s just perfect for Kulak. Check out the gallery here.

via Pink Tentacle 

I found this great photo of two cosmonauts taking the ritual leak against the wheel of the bus before a spaceflight on English Russia. I used this detail in a Kulak one-shot I ran some years ago, in which Soviet cosmonauts encountered strange phenomena on a space station.

I saw two Guy Maddin movies at Sodankylä, Brand Upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg. The movie he’s made I like the best is a short, the 2004 film Sissy-Boy Slap-Party:

Movie: Roger Spottiswoode: Ice Bound (U.S.A. Canada, 2003)

Based on the story (and book) of Dr Jerri Nielsen who was wintering at the U.S. South Pole station when she found out she had breast cancer. The script of this schmaltzy movie seems to consist entirely of characters spouting homilies and life wisdom to each other when its not engaged with exposition and a terrible, cliché-ridden voiceover.

The set design is very nice, though. All of the polar stuff looks good, so if you can look beyond the actors and whatever it is they’re doing in the movie, its not bad.

I was at the Midnight Sun Film Festival with my wife and some friends, in Lapland. The photo was taken around two at night, after we came out of the screening of the Guy Maddin movie Brand Upon the Brain!.

The drive back to Helsinki took fourteen hours. We drove in a new car with a beautiful soundsystem on which every song sounded gorgeous.

My article Battle Against Primitivism from the 2004 Knudebook Beyond Role and Play, edited by Jaakko Stenros & Markus Montola, has been translated into Slovakian by Tomá Kozlík, and published here.

I used to like Army of Lovers a lot when I was younger, but then I lost the CDs I had and haven’t really listened to them for years. I just got a best of -collection, and boy, this is great stuff.

Here’s the video to the song I Am:

Guidebook: Arturo De la Barrera Werner: Antarctica - Navigation Guide (unknown publisher & year)

This is a bilingual (English and Spanish) navigational guidebook my mother brought to me from Chile. It’s full of navigational data, so I don’t really understand much of it, but it feels very professional! It looks like the material and printing has been chosen mainly to withstand the extreme conditions of the Antarctic sea.

Novel: Thomas Keneally: Victim of the Aurora (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich inc. 1978)

An Antarctic novel by the same guy who wrote the book the Spielberg movie Schindler’s List was based on. It’s a historical story about the fictional Stewart expedition before WWI, a murder mystery on the ice.

The big thing I wasn’t sure I understood was what the book is about. It borrows a lot of details, characters and events from the second and fatal Scott expedition. At first I thought this was just research on the part of the author to make his story more authentic, that the book wasn’t about Scott.

At the end, however, there’s a reference to Stewart dying on his return journey from the pole, which makes the parallels to Scott so explicit that the book has to be about him in some way.

The interesting thing about Victim of the Aurora is that it talks about sex and sexuality, a topic completely missing from all the period accounts of polar travel in the early 20th century. The book’s sense of a historical period is impeccable and the “uncensored” vibe you get is refreshing.

I’ve put up the documentation from my larp the Plastic Cup, played twice earlier this year. You can see the links to the material on the right sidebar. There’s an overview of the game, photos and written material distributed to the players, as well as PDF files both in English and in Finnish containing all the information needed to run your very own game of the Plastic Cup.

I’m editing together a video from the game as well, which I’ll put up later.

Here’s a photo from the game on 3.4.2008, taken by Staffan Jonsson:

That’s a quote from the Richard Kelly (of Donnie Darko fame) movie Southland Tales, which I recently saw. I really loved this movie, and here’s why:

- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Highlander, Justin Timberlake and the Rock, all in the same movie!

- With all the national security, weird science, military adventurism and porn stars turned reality tv stars it was a beautiful projection of a certain image I have of the U.S. today.

- It makes no sense, but in a just perfect way. You don’t really emphatize with anything, because it makes sense on a deeper level than mere character and plot.

- Gone are the days when the lead is supposed to be a sharp fellow. I don’t know if that was the Rock acting or Kelly directing, but it was great.

Here’s a picture of Justin Timberlake in a surprise musical scene about the soldier’s life in the aftermath of the Iraq war:

Found this Russian artist (or art blog?) through English Russia.