The cover story of the June issue of Wired is about the Pixar creative process and the making of Toy Story 3. I encourage you to check it out. Here’s one particularly amazing fact:

The average frame (a movie has 24 frames per second) takes about seven hours to render, although some can take nearly 39 hours of computing time. The Pixar building houses two massive render farms, each of which contains hundreds of servers running 24 hours a day.

7 hours for 1/24th of a second of a 90+ minute movie. And that doesn’t include all the drafts required to get to the final rendering stage:

COLOR SCRIPTS It took art director Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi one week to create this impressionistic digital version of the scene. The goal is to begin to define the style and lighting scheme of the frame. Concept art from past movies is on display in the Pixar art gallery.

PROPS Toys are positioned in the 3-D “dressed set.” The TS3 team wanted the nursery to be alive with movement, so hundreds of characters are placed on the shelves. Now the director can fine-tune the camera’s movement to best capture the action.

LAST DETAILS The amount of labor spent on each character depends on its prominence in the final shot. Background toys are given simple textures and basic movements, while Lotso and Woody—the stars of the scene—are lavished with attention.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

FINALE Surfaces—walls, clothing, faces—are fed through rendering software that simulates light and shadow. It also adds texture to Lotso’s fur, Barbie’s leggings, and the carpet. An average frame takes more than seven hours of computing time to render. A more complex frame like this one required eleven hours.

Read the whole thing here.

I’m gonna be giving a TEDx talk in a few weeks so I’ve been searching the amazing TED site for inspiration. The video speaks for itself. I’m feeling it.

Just back from US where I had a lot of fun. Many highlights, some of which I will hopefully be somehow documenting on here in the coming days. For now though I want to show some love and gratitude to my dear friend Josh who put me up for several nights and supplied me with a constant supply of awesome media things. In the interest of karma, I’m gonna tell you like he told me:

1. Louie

Louie is the new show by the comedian Louis CK and it is very good. Sort of like a dirtier, less Jewish Seinfeld. In the US you can watch it on Hulu, otherwise you can probably download it legally or otherwise. Here’s a preview:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And as a bonus, here’s a rant from Louis CK that I totally forgot about but was one of my favorite things ever a couple years ago:

Click here to view the embedded video.

2. http://beatelectric.blogspot.com

So much amazing shit on here it’s crazy. Check it out for yourself. Here’s one classic that I downloaded and then rinsed out at my friend’s wedding to mixed reactions.

Gwen Guthrie - Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On But The Rent (Larry Levan Club Mix)

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right-click + save target as (windows) / save link as (mac)

3. Fact: Dr Dre is currently working on an instrumental album dedicated to outer space.

According to Spinner.com:

Dr Dre has revealed one reason for the delay on long awaited album ‘Detox’ — he’s working on an instrumental album.

In an idea somewhat reminiscent of Holst’s orchestral suite ‘The Planets’ (it even shares the title), each song will be based around the nine planets of the solar system.

Speaking to Vibe magazine (via Gigwise), Dre said, “Oh yeah, that’s in the works. An instrumental album is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have the ideas for it. I want to call it ‘The Planets.’

“I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but f— it. It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like. I’m gonna go off on that. Just all instrumental. I’ve been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet. I’ve been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. I wanna do it in surround-sound. It’ll have to be in surround-sound for Saturn to work.”

4. Kanye Kartoons

The musical comedy team Paul and Storm had a very bright idea to combine Kanye West’s weird/boring-ass Twitter feed with cartoons from the New Yorker. Some of them are great. Example:

5. Kanye A kapella

This I guess has been going around for a few days, but in case you missed it, Kanye performing a song off his new album, a capella, in very clean suit, while standing on a table in the Facebook headquarters. Sounds corny but it’s not.

Click here to view the embedded video.

6. How to make your own pirate vinyl

It’s not simple, but it is doable and not that expensive. Full lowdown here.

7 (but definitely not least). NEW ANDRE!

Andre 3000 - I do

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I’m back in the Land of the Free, Home of the Whopper and all everybody I know seems to be talking about is weddings, hospitalizations, and this clip. If you’re up on Internet crazes, then you know I’m late as hell, but this thing is VERY FEEL to the max. The clip pretty much speaks for itself, only thing I would say is that the narrator is a man called Hungry Bear who became a cage fighter to prevent himself from dying of obesity. It’s true. Look it up.

The wonderful web TV series Sexy Beijing has just posted a couple of new episodes examining transgendered life in the capital. They feature Mei Mei, the queen of Beijing`s cross-dressing scene, and a few of her acolytes. Check it out.

Part 1:
Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 2:
Click here to view the embedded video.

Real shit. Plus that David Guetta and Kudi song was my guilty pleasure jam of 2009. No joke. Uncanny likeness…

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Happy Independence Day from Boogie Down Beijing where pro-Americans pop up in unexpected places…. Already had a hot dog and two burgers. Hope you get yours…

I just realized today that I never made a post recognizing my homey James and his great new bio of Marina Abramovic. That is maybe because he has been rocking the house so thoroughly lately, receiving love from The New Yorker , The Guardian, and even Bjork herself, who called the book magnificent and “an invaluable document in the hard-to-document world of performance art.” Salute. But also BUY - out now from MIT Press, available at all bookstores that know what’s good for them.

Here’s one really nice piece from the book release media blitz that I want to put up because it features both James and another friend Shumon. It’s from Tank Magazine and it goes like this:

Performance art is not for the fainthearted. James Westcott explains to Shumon Basar how it all started with starving saints and may well end in our age of obsessive re-enactments.

It has often been art’s unique privilege to sanction those eccentric behaviours that would in any other circumstance call for police action or the intervention of a local asylum. Performance art is especially notorious. Its protagonists famously use their bodies and increasingly, the bodies of others to shock, stimulate, sicken and show off bits the rest of us keep behind locked doors. James Westcott is the author of the new biography When Marina Abramovic Dies. It’s a frank appraisal of an artist who has referred to herself as “the grandmother of performance art” and has been called its “empress” by others a status acknowledged by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which this year awarded her a major retrospective, the first they have given to any performance artist. Abramovic, like her contemporaries Vito Acconci and Carolee Schneemann, pioneered a tradition of performance in the 1960s and 1970s that foregrounded endurance, suffering and personal peril: a reminder that regardless of wealth or poverty, fame or wretched fate, we all begin and end with our bodies. Basar asked Westcott to outline performance peaks in the 20th century and to bring us up to the present moment where, to paraphrase Don DeLillo, the suicide bomber’s deadly performance eclipses the so-called radicality of today’s most shocking artists.

Shumon Basar faces a mirror and begins to walk back and forth along its length mumbling to himself. He stops and takes a seat next to James Westcott.

Shumon Basar: James, can you recall the first performance piece you saw and the effect it had on you?

James Westcott: It was Marina Abramovic’s 2002 performance The House with the Ocean View, for which she lived in a gallery for 12 days without eating or speaking. Her only nourishment came through sustained eye contact with the audience, and I returned to the gallery every day in the hope of repeating the amazing eye contact we’d had on my first visit. It was also like keeping a vigil for the dead or the dying I saw the fluctuations in Marina’s strength as she starved, how her skin changed colour. Like watching a captivity-weary animal in a zoo: the slightest variations in her obsessively repetitive behaviour became disproportionately fascinating.

Was there a religious provenance to these kinds of minutely repetitive gestures?

She was inspired by the Hindu vipassana meditation technique of repeating the most fundamental human physical actions sitting, walking, lying with extreme slowness and a kind of blank concentration. She was both robotic and somehow excruciatingly human.

And this “vigil” was how your interest in the medium began?

I had only discovered the existence of performance art a week earlier, reading about Marina’s 1988 performance The Lovers.

What did it entail?

She started walking at the eastern end of the Great Wall of China, and Ulay, her lover and performance partner since 1976, began walking at the western end, in the Gobi Desert, at the same moment. They simply walked towards each other along the Wall until they met in the middle 90 days later.

They had an infamously fractious and volatile relationship, didn’t they?

When they conceived the performance, in 1981, they thought that they would get married when they met in the middle. But by the time they managed to actually do it, their relationship had disintegrated and their meeting ended up as a kind of divorce ceremony, marking the end of their love and work together.

What is it about this piece that got you thinking that performance art was significant?

It was the way their best-laid plans went to waste that really blew me away: at the end of this epically romantic and heroic adventure, which demonstrates what you can do as a human being interacting with planet Earth, things went “wrong.” Marina and Ulay were looking for the limits of their power and they found them. I was enthralled by their attempted rebellion against the given-ness of life.

James jumps out of the second-floor window and returns, hobbling, a few minutes later.

Unlike other media – from tempera painting to video art – performance art doesn’t rely on some technological invention. Do you think it’s at all useful to assert that performance art began at some specific moment in time, with a particular piece or artist?

Some people say it started at the Cabaret Voltaire with the Dadas during the First World War. But of course you can trace it back to religious theatre and the self-inflicted agonies of the saints… and I’d much rather do that, because there was conviction and authenticity in the stuff they did – sitting on a pillar for 39 years (St. Simeon Stylites), trying to talk to the birds (St. Francis of Assisi) rather than the nihilism and banality of the Dadaists.

Western art history (naturally) emphasises the significance of New York in the 1960s when it comes to the invention of a new attitude towards the use of one’s body in an artistic practice. Is it a coincidence that in parallel you had an explosion of avant-garde dance: Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti and the Judson Dance Theatre?

Dance was also extending the definition of art to cover the banal and the broken-down: simply walking in a funny way or collapsing could be a kind of dancing, so doing something boring or painful or ugly could likewise be a kind of performance.

Shumon climbs under an inclined plank. Sounds of dubious shuffling can be heard. James hands him a box of Kleenex.

I feel a lot better now. What else was there in the milieu that contributed ideologically to the generation of artists including Abramovi´c, Acconci, Burden and Schneemann in New York?

There is an underground connection I think between performance art and the political and existential climate of that time: how activists and artists were somehow turning the horror of the Second World War and Vietnam onto themselves, how self-expression and freedom were something Boomers had to fight for, and how maybe they imposed new rules upon themselves as a result of the sudden absence of societal rules, which they had successfully demolished.

What about with the advent of conceptual art? Was there something in common with early performance art?

The freedom that could be found in the imposition of arbitrary rules. But while conceptual art aimed to depersonalise art, performance art is inextricably linked with the charisma of the artist. That’s the reason Vito Acconci gave, years later, for stopping performance in 1974 and turning to sculpture and architecture: “It started to seem strange to me that everybody who knew a piece of mine knew what I looked like… I started to feel that my work was about the formation of a kind of personality cult rather than the doing of an activity.”

Whereas some artists thrive on this focus?

Marina is more than happy with the formation of a personality cult around her.

Cults are a kind of mass performance in a way. I’m thinking of those incredible Moonie Weddings, or the ritualised suicides at Waco…

Or the Mass Games in North Korea, which are unbelievably seductive. In a way they are the opposite of performance art because it’s about obedience and about subsuming individuality in a collective sublime. But I think performance covers the whole spectrum from activities that exult human-ness and strive for perfection and unity, to doing something totally skill-less, self-harming or simply quotidian, like brushing your teeth Allan Kaprow said that brushing your teeth could be conceived of and carried out as a kind of performance. I have time for both ends of the spectrum.

Shumon flosses his teeth repeatedly until the entire box of floss is empty.

Can you tell us about another piece from the 20th century we should not forget?

Chris Burden, 1971, December 21-24: Disappearing – “I disappeared for three days without prior notice to anyone.”

What’s unforgettable about this?

Well, can you imagine trying to do that today, bound as we are by constant digital ties? People wouldn’t only immediately think that we were dead in a ditch; they would probably take our unannounced disappearance as offensive.

James disappears for three days. He eventually returns and resumes the conversation.

Thanks for coming back James. Do you draw lines around gallery-sanctioned performance art and other kinds of contingent actions that take place in everyday life?

Outside the official realm of performance art, I think Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt of Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final might be the greatest performance of this century, and it must not be forgotten.

Why so?

Zidane was sacrificing what was most important to him – winning the World Cup for France in his last-ever game of football – and also taking some satisfaction in defying the fairy-story ending to his career everyone wanted to write. He was “taking a strike at himself.” This is the phrase Slavoj Zizek uses in The Fragile Absolute to describe an apparently irrational and self-destructive act: “This act, far from amounting to a case of impotent aggressivity turned against oneself, rather changes the coordinates of the situation in which the subject finds himself: by cutting himself loose from the previous object through whose possession the enemy keeps him in check, the subject gains the space of free action. Is not such a radical gesture of ‘striking oneself’ constitutive of subjectivity as such?” This is an excellent definition of performance art.

Shumon hands James a pair of scissors. James randomly cuts away at Shumon’s clothing, leaving it in tatters.

Ouch. If you had to re-enact one of Marina’s seminal performances, which would it be?

The Lovers, and I’ve already tried to do it. I spent a long time persuading a woman I was in love with to join me in this re-enactment: I would start walking from the northern tip of Manhattan, she would start walking from the southern tip, and we would meet somewhere on Broadway.

What happened?

In the end, she didn’t want to do it, so I just walked the entire length of Manhattan by myself.

Do you consider it a successful performance then?

There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.

James begins living with a coyote huddled under a blanket, for three whole days.

That was very moving, when you hugged each other at the end. In 2005, Marina Abramovi´c re-enacted five famous performances by other artists at the Guggenheim New York. There seems to be a lot of re-enacting going on today. Doesn’t it somehow undo the powerful historical singularity of the original works?

Yes. I don’t think you can turn performance art into a performing art because the pieces are so tied to the personality of the original performer. And the whole point of performance art was supposed to be that they are not performances in the traditional sense: they are unpredictable, unrepeatable, real acts.

Theorists of the genre are calling it “reperformance,” right?

Reperformance is a noble and brave effort to preserve the history of performance art but I just don’t think it works. And I think it undervalues the beauty and strength the aura of the documentation of old performances that you never saw but have to imagine.

What about the last 10 years? Has performance art managed to renew itself from those halcyon days of the 1960s and 1970s?

In a way we don’t need performance art as such any more because it has seeped into the culture so successfully: reality TV, extreme dieting, people living by ever more elaborate sets of self-imposed rules, the endless possibilities of surveillance, acting out and global amplification that are granted by the internet. An evolved, new kind of performance art might also be able to offer an antidote to all this by giving us an unadulterated experience of time, and a (maybe old-fashioned) sense of authentic experience. But it hasn’t happened yet.

James and Shumon re-enact this conversation in exactly 20 years time with female actresses who bear an uncanny resemblance to their former selves. It does not happen in a museum but in a pub in the East End of London.

When Marina Abramovic Dies is published by MIT Press and out now.

The World Cup is on and Soccer Fever is back in effect. I realized yesterday, while watching R Kelly perform at the opening ceremony in a golden chain mail coif, that I started this blog exactly four years ago during the last World Cup. Nobody really checked VERY FEEL back in those days, so in all likelihood you missed all the posts I made about that tournament, including my series of haiku dedicated to Japan’s ill-fated run. Anyway, here’s one of the posts for that time where I try to explain my late enrollment in the community of WC maniacs.

Originally posted on June 11 2006:

Blog Bonito

I’m in Beijing now on various UNIT-related missions, but once I arrived I was knocked over by the enthusiasm for the World Cup here. China’s not in, of course, and maybe it’s considered a kind of warm-up for the Olympics, but damn this city is bang into some football right now. So, I’m gonna go with the flow… UNIT updates coming soon….

In honor of the 06 World Cup Finals, I offer my testament - Confessions of a Football Convert:

“Can I kick it?” - A Tribe Called Quest

Having been raised in the the US - the often-cited isolationist exception to football’s global conquest - I didn’t play or care much for the game growing up. I was a city kid and so played basketball. Soccer, as we call it, was a light-weight, slightly effeminate game played by spoiled, white suburbanites and immigrants (two groups that rarely break bread together - a crystal clear demonstration of football’s unifying qualities that went completely over my head…) During high school, every so often there’d be a few weeks of physical education dedicated to soccer, and we’d be brought outside to play. The teacher wouldn’t provide any advice on technique or even basic rules, we’d just be divided up and let loose. The result was always the same: a handful of kids from Central America or East Europe and maybe one or two from my hometown’s affluent East Side would dominate, carrying on as if they were in a pick-up match in an obstacle course. Those who generally didn’t enjoy sports would endure the 50-minute class with the same level of unobstructive disinterest that they brought to all other games. The rest, those who otherwise considered themselves athletes, would pre-empt their certain humiliation by aggressively underperforming until eventually the game deteriorated into a farcical exhibition of who could play the worst.

This is often the American way: if you aren’t good at something, belittle it. No doubt if Team USA disappoints this year, as I expect them to, you will see this reflexive disinterest acted out in pubs and on public squares across the world: over-loud discussions of more familiar USports interrupted occasionally by drunken croaks of “I don’t even really care about soccer anyway.” And I admit, I’ve been contributor to this ritual for most of my life.

My change of heart came during the last World Cup in 2002. I was living in co-host country Japan at the time, and, like most of my neighbors, succumbed to the virulent strain of “sakkaa feeba” that was going around. It was my first time abroad during a World Cup, first time as an active observer/participant in FIFA’s collective orgy of sport and hysteria. I watched compulsively, drank heavily, humiliated myself repeatedly in conversation with Asian and European colleagues, and a new love affair was born.

Still, the damage from my years of vehement indifference to football is done. I am now that saddest of creatures, a zealous spectator of a game which s/he cannot play. To this day I endure a suffocating dread when a wayward football rolls towards me in a park. Once, in Holland, I thought I’d save myself the embarrassment and toss the ball back to its owner - using my arms, as is the custom in my native country. I picked it up and delivered what is called among the basketball playing set a chest pass. The pace of the pass was brisk enough to establish that I wasn’t, in fact, a gimp, but unaggressive. Nevertheless, my target was caught completely off guard. The ball was coming at a height and trajectory rarely experienced by non-goalies, and lacking the use of his arms (figuratively, of course, from what I observed later that afternoon, he did in fact have two fully functioning arms), he was ill equipped to handle my well meaning toss. Head or chest, there was so little time to decide. In a panic, he attempted to use both, lunging comically in way to left his neck outstretched and exposed. The ball struck him square in the Adam’s apple, then skipped harmlessly away. He grabbed at his throat, coughing and weezing dramatically. I rushed over to apologize, but he paid me no mind. I asked him if he was okay, but his eyes were darting around the park - I guess in search of a passing referee who could serve the red card that my assault so clearly warranted… I fetched the ball, placed it silently near his feet and retreated.

Outkast is my favorite group ever and it’s been too long since they made an album together. Also been too long since either of its members, Big Boi and Andre, has released a solo album. BUT that situation is due to change soon enough when Big Boi AKA Daddy Fat Stacks AKA Sir Luscious Leftfoot AKA Billy Ocean Cuervo AKA Hot Tub Tony AKA Francis the Savannah Chitlin’ Pimp releases his much-delayed, no-longer-so-new album ‘The Son of Chico Dusty’. A few tracks have been floating around the internets for a while, but I only felt compelled to post after reading this interview by Will Welch for GQ. It provides your daily dose of rapper quotables and explains, among other things, the tragic absence of Andre from the album:

This morning, the tracklist for the final version of Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty hit the internet, and none of the songs you’ve recorded with Dré are on there. No “Royal Flush,” and no “Lookin For Ya.” What gives?

Well, basically it boils down to Jive Records. That’s how they do it. Jive Records told me my album is a piece of art, and they didn’t know what to do with it. So I moved it over to Def Jam. And now Jive is trying to block Dré from being on my record. We can’t be on songs together now.

So because OutKast as a group is signed to Jive, they’re able to legally block the two of you from working together?

Au contraire! They cannot block it. Au contraire. Either they’re going to do it the right way, or they’re going to do it my way. How you wanna do it? The fans thirst will be quenched. You know, I’m no stranger to that internet, baby. So you already know what time it is. The thirst of the fans will be quenched.

“Royal Flush” with Dré and Raekwon has been out since 2008, but you’re saying we will be hearing “Lookin For Ya” [with André] even though it’s not on the album?

I guarantee it.

Can you speak a little bit about your frustration here? What you’re saying is that you and your friend from high school can’t rap on the same song and have it get an official release.

It’s plain stupidity. It’s stupid business and it’s stupid politics. I mean, Jive Records had [Big Boi's current Def Jam single] “Shutterbug” for three years. And [new Sir Luscious leak] “General Patton” for three years. You see what I’m saying? They told me to go in and make my version of Lil’ Wayne’s “Lollipop”! I love that song. That was my favorite song when it came out. But how you gonna tell me to go bite another MCs style? How are you even going to open your mouth up to tell me to go and do that? That’s the highest form of disrespect ever. So that’s when I wanted to get off Jive. And the only honorable thing they’ve done is allow me to do that. So I’ve had nothing to do with them. Dré tried to have a talk with Jive and they said, “No, we can’t. That’s gonna make us look bad.”

Let’s talk about how the records you made with André for Sir Luscious came together.

We’re gonna keep one of them for the next OutKast record. “Royal Flush” was supposed to be on the album. That was a leak that got nominated for a Grammy. The other track we did, “Lookin For Ya” was produced by Boi Wonda and it’s me, Dré, and Sleepy Brown—the Dream Team going back to “Playa’s Ball” and “I Can’t Wait.” They want to keep that from the fans, man, and I can’t have it. I won’t stand for that shit.

How’d “Lookin For Ya” happen?

I was outside the studio just chillin’ and Erik Sermon from EPMD rolled by the studio and said, “Yo, I got some music for ya.” I was like, “Word.” So he came in and played a beat, and then he played the Boi Wonda beat. I was like, “What’s that?!” So he was like, “We’ll let you get that one, then.”

The whole time I was working, Dré would come in and out of the studio. Like, he heard “Royal Flush” and said, “I wanna get on that.” And he heard, “Lookin For Ya” and said, “I wanna get on that.” The following day, he jumped on it. Two verses apiece, just raw lyricism. OutKast to the fullest. It was slated for the album. We tried to get everything solidified but Jive said, “Naw. Y’all can’t rap together.” Then I was going to take Dré off and make my own version, but then I thought, “No. Fuck that. If he can’t be on it, then I’m not using it.”

Did Dré do his verses at Stankonia or at a home studio?

Stankonia. Came right back the very next day and killed that shit. Matter fact, he put both his verses on there before I even had a chance to put anything on there.

Last time I interviewed Dré, he made it clear that sometimes he feels like he’s got something to say, and sometimes he doesn’t.
Right.

How does that affect you?

When he says he wants to get on something, you better go ‘head and let him get on it. That’s how we do it. Whenever he says, “Hey man, I wanna get on that,” he can do it. That’s my partner. He can get on whatever the fuck he wants to get on. He could’ve got on every song on the album if he wanted to. So they can’t stop us, man. I been knowing Dré half my life. And for these people that we don’t even know—that haven’t even had a hand in our career at all—that’s fucking blasphemy. So stay tuned.

OK, so here are the songs that Big Boi mentions. All I can say is that they’re good and I’m proud to play a small part in making sure that ‘the thirst of the fans will be quenched.’

Outkast w/ Raekwon - Royal Flush

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Outkast w/ Sleepy Brown - Lookin 4 Ya

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BUY the album. June 6 2010!