Take a walk on the wild side!
I’ve been doing some work for LA band Gods & Monsters. Frankly, I don’t know how I found the time as I haven’t touched any freelance projects for close to a year. Anyway, check out this simple (preliminary) design we’re working on. More coming real soon…
As an artificial limb designer and hobbyist robotics engineer, artist Christopher Conte rarely uses blueprints or sketches to craft his elaborate biomechanical sculptures. Instead, the New York-based machinist relies on his imagination. “I just get a vivid idea in my mind of what I want to make and start hunting for the parts,” he said. “I have a large inventory of antique parts, so I’ll often play with them like Legos and see what comes together.”
Inspired by the intricate craftsmanship of turn-of-the-century technology and Japanese bronze work, Conte also turns to obscure sci-fi films for stimulation. “I’ll see something in a movie and think, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if that existed?’ And then I’ll try to bring them to reality,” he said.
via Wired
Well we’re back… although I dunno how long for. I’ve tried to implement some bandwidth saving features… (wp-cache & htaccess to protect my images directory) - I guess these should have already been in place but I just didn’t ever get round to it.
My blog ‘categories’ have been shot to hell but all my posts are still alive and well. Some fine-tuning will fix all that so if you see some inconstancies here and there… you know why.
Dogmatic has been documenting Heath Ledger’s forthcoming appearance in the new Batman movie, ‘The Dark Knight’. Overnight the hits went from about 2,000 per day to over 60,000! It renedered the site useless and began to draw the attention of my hosting company ‘Dreamhost’.
This morning, they pulled the plug on me.
In an email to me this morning:
"I’m really sorry about this - and I wish that I didn’t have to do it - but I needed to throw an .htaccess rule in place because your blog (at dogmaticblog.com) was getting hammered pretty badly and was driving the load of the server up near 200. Since putting the rule in, the load on your server has consistently dropped and continues to do so. Less than a minute later, and the load is already down below 20 and continuing to drop."
I do understand their situation and it totally sucks that a vast number of other blogs were serving my images direct from their blogs. Couple that with the news interest in Ledger and his untimely death - then the end result will always be server overload.
I’m not sure when the blog will be back… but hopefully sooner rather than later.
Bummer!
Introducing a new feature to Dogmatic… wallpapers! Every so often, I’ll make one of my photos available as a wallpaper. Feel free to download these and do with them what you will! Also, send me through any screen caps of any of these on your desktop! I’d love to see how they look on people’s systems.
First up is a shot of Cocker Alley, Melbourne Australia. Melbourne is famous for some of the most creepy and downright urban alleyways. Cocker Alley in the heart of the CBD also features graffiti by the world famous Banksy and rats that could probably devour cats whole!
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It’s always a tragedy when anyone gets paid a visit by Death. I was saddened by the (sketchy) news today that Australian actor Heath Ledger had been found dead in his hotel room. He had generated quite a bit of interest on this blog as we had been documenting his forthcoming appearance in the new Batman movie, ‘The Dark Knight’.
Currently, this site is taking an absolute hammering as Googling Ledger is bringing a lot of traffic right here. (We won’t even begin to mention the countless of blogs who steal our bandwidth by serving their Heath Ledger/Joker images right from here. Fuckers!) so you may notice some slow-down today.
But I digress… a talented young man has lost his hold on life, and that really is sad and has put a morose dampener on this day.
The Joker… is dead.
Adult film megastar and Playboy pal Jenna Jameson has produced a comic book for Virgin Comics, and it’s not what you think. Turns out Jenna has a horror fetish, or as she puts it: “When other folks go back to their hotel rooms at night and watch me, I go back and watch horror films. I’m addicted to them”.
With comics pro Christina Z (of Witchblade fame) Jenna has created Jezzerie Jaden, the titular Shadow Hunter. Modeled on Jenna herself, both physically and psychologically, our heroine has been seeing otherworldly visions since childhood, and is soon to discover that her family is, quite literally, from Hell. We’ll shut up and let Jenna, Christina and the amazing art (covers by Greg Horn, Greg Land, Daniel Brereton, J. Michael Linsner and Niko Henrichon, and interiors by Virgin Comics star Mukesh Singh) do the rest:
Click here for a 26-page pdf (32 MB) of Jenna Jameson’s Shadow Hunter issue #0.
20th Century Fox has provided ComingSoon.net with four new photos of David Duchovny as Special Agent Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson as Special Agent Dana Scully in Fox’s The X Files 2, coming to theaters on July 25.
The film will dump the long-running “mythology” plotline — that aliens live among us and are part of a colonizing effort. “We spent a lot of time on (the mythology) and wrapped up a lot of threads” when the show went off the air in 2002, Chris Carter, creator of the series and director of the new movie, told the USA Today “We want a stand-alone movie, not a mythology conspiracy one.”
Check it all out here.
I love David Lynch. Unashamedly. I love his eccentricity, his symbolism, his outright geeky quirkiness. I love his films. The ambience he creates. The music… ah the music! Heck, I’m a fan. Have been for a long, long time so it was with great anticipation that I wanted to catch his latest offering ‘Inland Empire’ on the big screen. And what better theatre to see it at than the classic Astor?
Where did it all go so horribly wrong? We were there for close to four hours (intermission and a dud projector) - let alone loud, yawning hecklers which made the whole experience tinged with more inspired David Lynch moments off the screen rather than on.
I’m sorry to say, I found ‘Inland Empire’ to be an arduous movie experience. I hated it. With a passion. Boring. Mundane. Tedious. Devoid of any fuckn edits whatsoever. A gratuitous, self-indulgent wank.
And there’s that question of four hours of my life, that I will never, ever get back. I’ll have to remember that when I am on my deathbed…
Could laneway graffiti be worth more than your average house? I’ve shot this piece many times, good to see it still intact and sitting there with most of my fellow city inhabitants oblivious to it.
A Banksy artwork has attracted bids of more than $200,000 on eBay - even though the successful bidder will have to cut out part of a concrete wall if they want to take it home.
The stencilled design, which shows a classically-dressed painter putting the finishing touches to the real artist’s scrawled name, has so far received bids topping $207,000 with less than 24 hours until the deadline.
The work appeared in September outside a post-production company in Portobello Road, west London.
It was created on a Sunday morning, when Banksy put scaffolding up and draped a cloth over it so he could work undetected.
Only after he had finished and left the area did Luti Fagbendle, the owner of the firm, realise he had become a beneficiary - or victim - of the Bristol-based artist’s latest creation.
He put a Perspex sheet over the work to stop it getting vandalised and then put it on eBay.
Any buyer must pay for the removal of the section of wall themselves if they want to take the painting away.
Banksy’s representative said the work was his, but added that the artist would not comment on the sale.
Paintings by the elusive artist, who famously hides his identity, have grown in popularity in recent years.
Fans and buyers include Christina Aguilera, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
He recently extended his canvases of choice - Bristol and east London - to include the illegal security wall in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Last year, one of his paintings, Space Girl and Bird, fetched $288,000 at auction.
Bobby Read, art expert at specialist insurer Hiscox, said: “It is a demonstration of the changing art market that the eyes of the art world are on ebay eagerly watching the sale of a wall gratified by Banksy.
“This sale confirms Banksy as a modern-day cross between Michelangelo and the Scarlet Pimpernel.”
Banksy is a well-known pseudo-anonymous English graffiti artist. He is believed to be a native of Yate (near Bristol) and born in 1974, but there is substantial public uncertainty about his identity and personal and biographical details. According to Tristan Manco, Banksy “was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier engineer, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s.”His artworks are often-satirical pieces of art that encompass topics such as politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti with a distinctive stencilling technique, has appeared in London and in cities around the world.
More here and of course here. And whilst your at it… some stuff I’ve shot here and could this be Banksy’s flickr page?
