It was a tough day, hearing about Adam Yauch’s passing. I feel very lucky to have known him, having met him through Cey Adams, my boss at the time, back in 1996. It was a dream come true for a Beastie Boys fan like myself - move to NYC, meet the band that had influenced me so much, and get to work on graphics for them. I spent a lot of time in their world, and in particular, working with Yauch. It was Yauch who christened me with the nickname ‘Billions McMillions’.

But I’m not writing to tell you about that. I’m writing to tell you about something I learned from Yauch one night, and I hope it resonates with some of the many creative individuals that read 12oz Prophet and happen to read this. Something Yauch gave me insight into that I try to remember every time I work on something creative.

It was fairly recently, back in 2008, during the recording of Hot Sauce Committee, Part I, which evolved into the album that eventually came out in 2011, Hot Sauce Committee, Part II. Yauch called and invited me to join him to see a screening of ‘TYSON’, the documentary film about boxer Mike Tyson. Iron Mike himself was going to be there, and the director, James Toback, was going to host a discussion afterward. We arrived a little early, sat near the front, and caught up. The band was deep in the songwriting/recording phase of that album. Yauch had his iPod with him - a second or third generation model he had owned for years, and one which he carried around during these periods, to listen to the band’s work-in-progress songs as he wandered around NYC or drove in his car.

He asked if I wanted to hear some of the new material. Of course I did. And no, I didn’t act very cool, geeking out knowing these songs had probably been recorded earlier in the week, maybe even earlier that day. As I donned the large, closed-ear headphones and Yauch guardedly picked a song with the iPod’s dial, Ice-T wandered in and sat in the row ahead of us, a few seats to the left. Yauch said “hello” and the two of them started talking, but I couldn’t hear them as I was immersed in some raw mixes of some very early versions of Beastie Boys songs.

Three songs played - a rough mix of the track ‘Too Many Rappers’ with Nas, two others which I don’t recall, and then the iPod went silent. I pulled off the headphones and turned to Adam, who immediately asked “Well?”

I answered “Those are sounding great!” or something like that, and then I mentioned the beat on the final track that I had heard.

His eyes widened a bit and went straight to the iPod, and he said “What? Is that on there? Oh… Wow. I didn’t want to play that…”

“Why? It sounded good! What’s the problem?” I asked.

“Ahhhh, well,” he smiled, “it’s not… done yet. It’s just a little… embarrassing, at the moment.”

And that was the moment I wanted to tell you about.

Something very simple, that Yauch probably forgot about immediately, but nonetheless something that has stuck with me ever since: Even Adam Yauch, one of the coolest, most creative, driven, detail-minded and successful creators that I have ever spent time with, was still not immune to the process, to the unsure pause that most of us feel as we try to create something and it doesn’t land exactly as we want it to. Even Yauch had to fight through the “embarrassing” levels to reach the finished state. It was a revelation to me: Beastie Boys songs didn’t always fly out of their mouths on the first take as the songs we all know. The song wasn’t how he wanted it yet, but that wasn’t going to stop them from working on it until they were happy.

I mean, this gets a big “duh,” right? “Hard work yields good results” is not a mysterious new concept. But my point is that it’s easy to forget that even the heaviest of professionals still go through it. It was an inspiring reminder. Even the most accomplished, those like Yauch, who make it look effortless, also need to polish and refine their ideas sometimes.

I often think back to that moment as I work on a project in its formative stages. I remind myself that the results I’m wanting will require more work, and that I have to avoid the trap of pulling the cake out of the oven before it’s baked just because I can’t visualize the icing yet. To stick with an idea even if it isn’t exactly right on the first attempt. Have you ever revisited old work, and realized it wasn’t as far-off from good as you felt it was when you stopped working on it? That’s the gap we all need to close.

Yeah, I know: it’s obvious, and It’s important to point out that it’s me that put the band on that ‘perfect’ pedestal - Yauch would likely laugh and say “C’maaaan….Of course we don’t get everything right in one try!” if he heard me talk about this. But I wanted to share that moment with you because maybe you’re like me: I don’t often think about the many revisions others do with their work, just as we all do with our own. We often only admire other’s end results, and wonder if we can ever do something as complete in ours.

Thank you, Adam, for the many years of friendship and inspiration, and for the many opportunities you gave me. And especially for allowing me to see that even the best aren’t always finished on the first pass. It’s helped me a lot with following through on my own work.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 1 Year, 2 weeks, 6 days, 1 hour, 11 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Saturday May 5, 2012

Opening reception is tomorrow night in Los Angeles… More details here.

Scion Installation L.A.
3521 Helms Ave. (at National)
Culver City, CA 90232
scionav.com/space

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 1 Year, 6 months, 6 days, 21 hours, 5 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Friday November 18, 2011

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 1 Year, 6 months, 4 weeks, 1 Day, 13 hours, 24 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Wednesday October 26, 2011

Ridiculous view from where we stayed in Montmarte

Saw some cool letterforms and signage

Stainless styles

This is a “No” in any language

Le Cop on rollerblades. Stop it, guy.

This thing got painted over the next night by some crew

Terry Richardson had a signing for his book Mom and Dad at Colette

Crazy cheese game at the supermarché.

Elsa at Deyrolle, the illest taxidermy shop I have ever seen. Must-go destination in Paris, on Rue de Bac. Rooms of lions, rabbits, polar bears, a giraffe, an elephant… I bought a few moths from Elsa in the insect room. Wes Anderson did a photoshoot there a few years back.

I liked this dude, his sign, and his cats. I left him some euros.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 1 Year, 7 months, 1 week, 4 days, 5 hours, 18 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Friday October 14, 2011

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 1 Year, 8 months, 1 week, 3 days, 22 hours, 12 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Wednesday September 14, 2011

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 1 Year, 10 months, 1 week, 1 Day, 12 hours, 6 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Monday July 18, 2011

Toy designer and artist Tristan Eaton asked me to be part of a book he was putting together last fall and it’s finally out - The 3D Art Book is now available. A bunch of artists were involved and there’s a signing party tonight at the Opera Gallery at 115 Spring Street in NYC. I can’t make it but several of the artists in the book are scheduled to be there.

Above is a section of a piece I did for the book called Never Breath A Word About Your Loss. If you have some red/blue glasses laying around, the 3D even works OVER THE COMPUTER INTERNET. Wow, man.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 3 weeks, 6 days, 6 hours, 58 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Friday April 29, 2011

Of course we all know about the beating the place has taken in the last six weeks and when my friend Mayumi Tatsuta contacted me about being part of tomorrow night’s JAPAN: RISNING, an auction and fundraiser for the Japan Society’s Japan Earthquake Relief Fund that she’s helped organize, it was a great chance to help in any way.

I wanted to create something specifically for the show so I made this sculpture called For Japan, a 12” by 12” piece in four wooden blocks that set together, forming a cherry-blossom accented frame around the sun of the Japanese flag.

My piece and many others are being auctioned tomorrow night at the event. The event is invite-only, but I think that only means you have to e-mail a request for one to info@japanrising.org. For more details and some images of other works being sold tomorrow, visit http://www.japanrising.org.

JAPAN: RISING, a silent art auction and fundraiser
Thursday, April 28, at Milk Gallery, 450 W. 15th St., NYC

All proceeds will help support the Japan Society’s Japan Earthquake Relief Fund, to benefit the survivors of the Tohoku earthquake and tsumani disaster.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 4 weeks, 1 Day, 6 hours, 1 minute ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Wednesday April 27, 2011

Presenting the “Your Cut” edition of ONE MILLION, edition of five, available at The Hole this week.

Art Machine at The Hole
February 10-21, 2011
104 Greene Street, NEW YORK CITY

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 3 months, 1 week, 5 days, 16 hours, 47 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Friday February 11, 2011

I’ve been driving past this sign every few days on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. It’s a painted-over abandoned sign with that weird old pre-internet Scientology logo, eerie and supernatural looking. Love it.

For some reason, in some form of loopy free-association, every time I see it I think of Raekwon’s classic banger “Criminology Rap” -

And in allowing that free-association to consume me for a just minute more, I was reminded of two of my favorite websites - Hip Hop Is Read, a great website that specializes in dissecting the samples used for various classic hip-hop albums, and Operation Clambake (  Xenu.net), a great website that specializes in dissecting Scientology.

So spend an hour checking out how someone finally figured out the sample for ‘Ice Cream’ and what the fuck is up with L. Ron Hubbard’s Sea Organization, the Scientology Navy. Yeah, they have a navy. More like a cruise ship, but yeah.

Stay “clear,” everybody!

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 4 months, 4 days, 10 hours, 50 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Thursday January 20, 2011

I wish I could buy you all of these. I really do.

2011: LET’S DO THIS!

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 5 months, 4 hours, 2 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Saturday December 25, 2010

I still woulda eaten that - I’m grimey with desserts, yo.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 6 months, 1 week, 5 days, 10 hours, 2 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Friday November 12, 2010

Chad asked several designers to participate, including myself, and the mission was simple: design and bake a cake to help out a good cause. The thing is, I’m in Baton Rouge, Louisiana right now living in a small hotel room, so baking a cake and getting it to the show was going to be a little difficult. Enter the fine folks at Ambrosia Bakery in Baton Rouge:

Still didn’t solve the issue of getting the cake to New York, so… enter the fine folks at FedEx, and the miracle of the ‘Overnight Express Box’:

I wonder how that cake did on that overnight express voyage. I’ll post a pic tomorrow of how it all turned out.

I can’t be there, but check it out if you can. Here’s the details of tonight’s show, from the Caked Up! website:

CAKED UP!
A one night only custom cake art show bringing together some of NYC’s best designers to create a cake for the NYC charity Art Start. Cakes will be eaten the night of the show.

Murphy and Dine Gallery
520 West 27th St. NYC

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 6 months, 1 week, 6 days, 12 hours ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Thursday November 11, 2010

But what I’m really bringing it up for is that he also published OMNI, the freaky sci-fi magazine that was always “the future” to me as I was growing up. I didn’t read it very often - I only had a few old issues that I had gotten from the swap meet (that’s “flea market/boot sale” outside of SoCal) but I always saw it on the 7/11 newstand. It was a little beyond me at that age.

It wasn’t steeped in reality like Popular Science before it, or the post-personal-computer, tangible directions that WIRED has covered after it - and unlike those magazines, since Guccione was involved, it also felt like the future was gonna have some freaky robot/artificial intelligence sex, along with space travel. Probably happening during space travel. OMNI seemed like it had the knob permanently set on a Syd Mead/William Gibson/Hajime Sorayama gouache-and-airbrush vibe.

In a way, selfishly, I’m glad the magazine isn’t around anymore (it ended in 1995) because it’s now locked on a weird pre-teen esoteric sci-fi plane in my mind that I can’t fully decode. It’s distant and misty like the weird airbrushed photo illustrations in the magazine.

Check out the huge collection of the ill pre-Photoshop covers at this site.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 7 months, 4 days, 13 hours, 38 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Thursday October 21, 2010

Funny how quick the world is now; feedback can be immediate and positive, or swift and punishing. Seems both good and bad… Here, it’s clear The Gap blew it. They never should have come off the blocks with such a generic, ‘American Apparel’-styled logo. But on the other side of the coin, the masses don’t always “get it” at first, so why listen to a bunch of angry Facebookers anyway?

Make your own “Gap” logo using this web-based generator. Yeah, OK, so I didn’t work all weekend on that 12oz logo. You got me.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 7 months, 1 week, 6 days, 23 hours, 54 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Monday October 11, 2010

You can go in and use a lot of equipment, borrow cameras, print on large-format devices, shoot on a photo cyc, use professional lighting, etc., all for free (within reason, I suppose). They have a full schedule of photo exhibits and photographers giving classes all the way up to mid-December. Stop by and decide for yourself. The collection of vintage cameras is worth checking out, although if that’s really your thing you might have more fun in the ‘Used’ department at B&H.

Ran into some heads at the event, and since the topic here is photography, got some flicks with my newest iPhone app fling, “Cross Process,” introduced to me by my friend Marie who still gets better results than I do with it.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 7 months, 2 weeks, 3 days, 1 hour, 23 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Friday October 8, 2010

All the info and a download link are over here at qualitypeoples.com.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 7 months, 2 weeks, 6 days, 1 hour, 23 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Tuesday October 5, 2010

FONTS NOT DEAD

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 7 months, 3 weeks, 17 hours, 40 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Monday October 4, 2010

EL GUINCHO | Bombay from MGdM | Marc Gómez del Moral on Vimeo.

Pervy out freak-out that Colby Parker Jr. put me on to earlier today… I almost think all other projects across the planet need to be put on pause, and reassessed under the higher standards that this video introduces.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 7 months, 3 weeks, 3 days, 1 hour, 49 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Friday October 1, 2010

Fantastic book - more than a book on street art, rather an effort to consider art put in public spaces without permission - yes, there is “Street Art” in the book, but there’s also some diverse documentation of offbeat art - the phenomenon of art occurring and happening in society, unsanctioned, which of course covers graffiti, but also things like the guy who built his own sub and headed out on the East River in 2007, or some of the ‘Locals Only’ tags from the Dogtown days’ beaches of Venice (at the time likely more emphasis on communcation than an attempt at art). There are some essays in the book that I haven’t had a chance to read yet (I’ve only had it a few hours!) but I’m looking forward to diving in a bit tomorrow.

Saw some 12oz Prophets in the spot…

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 7 months, 3 weeks, 4 days, 14 hours, 47 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Thursday September 30, 2010

Nice bag. Ari ran through the features with me - slick design, single strap to allow swinging the bag from your back to your front to get at your camera(s), room for multiple bodies and lenses, iPad pouch, small magnet-latched pocket on the front for quick access to your point-and-shoot. Plus it’s in a sick Roger Sterling grey-suit color. The bag comes with a limited-edition book of Ari’s photos called Now is Forever, which he also had on display at the event, by ripping all of the pages out of one and mounting them in a long strip on either side of the space.

Ari Marcopolous and Damon Way of DC/InCase

Ari’s arsenal on display - My man just doesn’t give a fuck and puts the package of Kimonos right out there! What!

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 8 months, 12 hours, 54 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Friday September 24, 2010

The Art For Tibet II fundraising auction is happening this weekend, and I put this piece in for the cause - to help raise some money for Students for a Free Tibet, the non-profit organization that, in their words, “works in solidarity with the Tibetan people in their struggle for freedom and independence.”

Over here at www.artfortibet.com, you can see the many fine pieces of art available other artists involved, and you can bid on pieces as well, up until Saturday at 5pm EST, when a silent auction at the event will begin.

Art For Tibet II Fundraising Event and Auction
Saturday, September 25th, 5pm-10pm
UNION GALLERY
353 Broadway
New York City

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 8 months, 1 Day, 13 hours, 33 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Thursday September 23, 2010

Ok, so read about all that elsewhere. The reason I’m bringing it up as that as we were pouring out of Arthur Ashe to head to the 7 train to head back, I was looking at the entire 7 line’s trainyard under the walkway…

Seeing the trainyard at night reminded me of the film Style Wars (maybe you 12oz readers heard of it?), which reminded me to mention here that tomorrow the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is hosting several benefit screenings of the seminal doc on graffiti, Style Wars, kicking off the fundraising to save the original negatives. Apparently the master negatives of the film are starting to deteriorate, and director Henry Chalfant (Tony Silver, the other credited director, passed away in 2008) and family are trying to raise the money to restore it digitally for future generations to study. More info at http://www.stylewars.com.

They need a lot of money. $500,000.00 is the target number. No one is expecting you to drop that fresh Jacob & Co. watch you spent a house on, playa, but I’m sure every bit helps. I’m heading out to BAM with Evan Bernard for the 6:50 show, tickets are $12.50. Director Chalfant and a few writers in the film will be having a Q&A after the 6:50pm and 9:15pm screenings. If you can’t be there, consider looking into donating online at the website, starting at a very reasonable $10.

Show your support to one of the key touchstones in graffiti history.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 8 months, 2 weeks, 2 days, 4 hours, 7 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Thursday September 9, 2010

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 8 months, 2 weeks, 2 days, 17 hours, 11 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Wednesday September 8, 2010

Friday started off with some time-warp, wrinkle-in-time shit:

Saw this dude at the Apple store with a “Clobber” shirt on - like whoa. Clobber was a big rave clothing line from Los Angeles circa 1991. Nice one guy! Don’t make me break out my SJobeck or ConArt gear! Meet me at the smartbar!

Went past Ryan McGinness’ studio for a visit on Saturday - this is him run through my favorite iPhone app of the weekend, Percolator. It turns your photos into these circle abstractions. Don’t base your next design project on it no matter how seductive it gets. We all know 500 people out there already are.

On Sunday headed out to Queens for a few spots on the CreativeTime Key To The City project by artist Paul Ramírez Jonas; it was the last weekend before it ended. Long story short, you could go a kiosk in Times Square, get a Medeco-supplied key presented to you, then go to various places around the city and get access to locked doors that would open with the key, places not normally open to the public.

Started by going out to the Louis Armstrong House in Corona, Queens, where the ‘Key To The City’ granted you access to Satchmo’s downstairs bathroom, unchanged since his wife Lucille passed away in 1983. No, you could not use it. There’s a tour, you should check it out if you’re a fan. There were some art pieces up on the walls, some collages Armstrong used to make out of photos and newspaper clippings, usually of some stuff he liked or was into - sports, other entertainers, politics. I had no idea he was into anything visual like that but it turns out he’d do these things on his recording tape boxes, etc. There’s a book there about it, The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong.

I didn’t get any flicks, but the coolest thing for me was seeing some envelopes from some fans that were on display - All that was written on them was “Mr. Louis Armstrong, USA” and the postal service still got them to him - THAT is balling out, people.

Next, headed south over to the next Key To The City spot, Tortillarea Nixtamal restaurant, a Mexican spot in Queens that has some excellent food going on, and a small factory for making corn tortillas in their basement. They told us that they supply the fresh corn tortillas for many restaurants all over the city. Using the key let you wander downstairs into the kitchen, where you got a tour of the tortilla area and got to make a tortilla to eat. Upstairs while I was waiting to take the tour, I had some excellent enchiladas and a cane-sugar Coca Cola.

Gringo making a tortilla. I kinda do this at home occasionally, so I knew what was up with the masa, hermano!

Me and The Sucklord heading uptown, fitting in a little interview for my podcast

On Sunday I met up with fellow Star Wars enthusiast and toy maker Morgan ‘Sucklord’ Phillips, and we headed up to a screening of The Vinyl Frontier, a movie about vinyl toys that we’re both in. There was a Q&A afterward with us, sculptor Mike ‘Nemo’ Mendez, and Daniel Zana, the filmmaker who put it all together. Check it out if you have any interest in the mild world of toymaking - Daniel put together quite an informative film.

Daniel Zana, filmmaker

I finished up the weekend doing some Photoshop. Back on that same ‘ol, hallelujah…

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 8 months, 2 weeks, 3 days, 21 hours, 43 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Tuesday September 7, 2010

That quote is from Charlie Wilson, brother of The Gap Band’s Robert Wilson, who died yesterday. A quick obit over here. Damn. If anyone knew how to utilize a bassline, it was The Gap Band. Warning: they also liked cowboy hats and sassy syncro dancing.

Bonus: Check out this official ‘Party Train’ video shot on the Venice Boardwalk in the 80s: classic popping, locking, lycra and meathead Cali sunshine culture. In a total dick-move, embedding the video has been disabled, so you gotta click here if you want to see it.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 9 months, 1 week, 1 Day, 19 hours, 51 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Tuesday August 17, 2010

My new gallery show CHECKS CASHED opened on Saturday, awesome night over at the HVW8 Gallery for me, great seeing the work finally finished and on the walls. Several months of stress, work, and shifting money to make ends meet finally over. Heads rolled out, I saw some surprise faces from NYC and LA, and then I crashed out, having only slept 2-3 hours a night the previous six nights.

The gallery has a thing set up with The Standard hotels here in L.A. where they put up murals to promote the show - here’s a flick of the CHECKS CASHED mural at the downtown location - cool ‘analog’ version of my work done by a sign painter:

We’re having a BBQ over at the gallery tomorrow (Thursday the 5th) if you can make it - 7-9pm, 661 N. Spaulding Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90036. If not, the show runs through September 14th, maybe you can fit it in to your schedule.

________________________

Thanks to everyone who helped out: The “colors” black and white, Luther and the Axelle team, SoHo Crates, Tyler, Usha and Mark at HVW8, Brooklyn’s one and only Eric Z (E.Z. Does It!), Max, the incredible Charlie Becker, my man Bart Blackstone, Colby and Kate, Vanessa, Teit, Claudio, the kind folks over at The Standard, and of course my mom, my brother Pat, and Yuki!

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 9 months, 3 weeks, 3 hours ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Wednesday August 4, 2010

Saturday, July 31st, 7pm-10pm at the HVW8 Art + Design Gallery in Hollywood. I’ve been deep in the trenches working on this show for the last several months, the time is nigh. Just getting everything ready, hope to see you there if you can make it. Here’s some sneak preview flicks…

CHECKS CASHED
Bill McMullen at the HVW8 Art + Design Gallery
661 N. Spaulding Ave. L.A. Ca 90036
Opening Saturday, July 31st 2010, 7pm-10pm

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 10 months, 3 days, 5 hours, 54 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Friday July 23, 2010

This film delivered something that I hadn’t felt for a while - a complete and consistent story that worked well, unfolding before you, offering fantastical turns that still work within the rules of its world, or at least work well enough to allow you to forgive the holes or contradictions. It’s a more organic Matrix, using dream states, sedative drugs, and a military-designed mystery machine to reach ‘virtual’ worlds - likely the way this sort of direct mind exploration could actually happen, and outdating methods we saw in The Matrix for me - dripping green type and a physical receptor at the base of the neck seem so quant now, and relatively unrealistic compared to Inception‘s methods.

The clever use of compounding factors of time the deeper one gets into the dreams, and that one of the characters was named ‘Eames’ made me sense a nod to the Charles and Ray Eames film Powers of Ten, but there were lots of great influences that were subtle and not banging us in the face with the obvious (like LOST always seemed to be doing). Some theory of reletivity in there, lots of architecture porn, Fassbinder’s World on A Wire, the cold cynicism of William S. Burroughs or Ballard, the slipping paranoia of Philip K. Dick (a friend just reminded me Inception owes a lot to Total Recall, the Verhoeven film based on Dick’s short story), some Frank Lloyd-Wright influence on several interiors, tough and timely visits to some of great cities of the world, allusions to the great public community projects and buildings like London’s Barbican or maybe even a little Brasília in there, as well as the video game action that I remember fondly from classics like Metal Gear Solid and GoldenEye... Lots of well-rounded influences were present. There’s a little bit too much exposition with dialog; likely going to get annoying when I see it again… But there were some rules that needed to be explained to the viewer, so I concede the necessity of the exposition. Small price to pay. The (relatively) sophisticated, pulled-back nature of the sci-fi reminded me of the nondescript timeframe of Gattica or even some of the non-action of William Gibson’s book Mona Lisa Overdrive.

But there was plenty of action. Despite the fantastical nature of the story, the movie reaches a fairly ‘realistic’ look in fight sequences and explorations of its environments that gets you believing that watching an “effects-driven film” doesn’t have to mean that’s a bad thing. There are some moments that put pure visual overload over substance, some Escher-esque visual gags that really only work for us, the audience, due to our camera angle. But visually it’s awesome. What I really liked is how scenes that are obviously not real still look very natural, with sunlight and haze and lighting that kept me believing in what I was seeing.

Also fairly ‘realistic’ was the sound - I didn’t really notice a lot of unnecessary juicing, sub-bass cues or goofy ProTools tricks when bullets were fired or fists were flying. Stark and vérité in the sound mix.

And in the biggest and most unexpected surprise of the night, Leo DiCaprio was excellent. Really kept his acting chops in order and there wasn’t an eye-roller of a scene for me in the entire film.

I went a little long here, pouring all this out, and I apologize… but I’m still trying to get my head around what I saw. It’s a definitive film, very ambitious, much the way Matrix was. It’s a little more low-key than Matrix (there’s no thumping techno or patent leather) and certainly not as sugared with guns and sunglasses. Comparisons are inevitable but I like them both. Inception is just a little more mature, a really great sci-fi film that evolves those ideas of the ‘virtual’ worlds somewhere in our future.

Could be director Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece. See it and let’s talk.

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 10 months, 1 week, 1 Day, 22 hours, 7 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Saturday July 17, 2010

I’m in the middle of getting ready for my next art show at the HVW8 Gallery in Los Angeles, so I’ve been a little slow on the blog roll lately. More on that soon.

Anyway, found time last week to finish up a new episode of the Emmy-winning (that’s a lie) Flavor Bin podcast I do with my friend Colby Parker Jr., click over here to listen to it: The Flavor Bin.

It’s the seventh one so we switched it up and made it a road trip episode - we visited Skywalker Ranch, and interviewed our friend, film editor Mike O’Halloran and got his story on what it’s been like to work with George Lucas on his upcoming film Red Tails. We got the usual mess in there, some World Cup discussion, some tunes, some Flavorcules, and of course, the audience favorite, The Peter Berg Motivational Moment.

Here are some flicks from the ‘Ranch, some with Mike showing us around. We had a kick-ass BBQ. We rode bikes. Yes it was very bucolic and relaxing/verging on boring. No Star Wars anything in sight; such a letdown. Except for one tiny, closed store that carried Legos and plush dolls.

Amsterdam-style - grab a bike and go.

Hot grill, don’t go more than 4-5 minutes per side on those flat cuts! Danger! Overcooked BBQ is NOT the move… You can always put it back on if it’s too raw, but you can’t UN-cook anything, boss

Is that a limited-edition Ice Cream Maker Guy figure? No, maybe it’s a Jar Jar Binks toothbrush…

This article was posted by Bill McMullen 2 years, 10 months, 1 week, 3 days, 10 hours, 56 minutes ago.
©Bill McMullen & 12ozProphet - Friday July 16, 2010