THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (Webber & Watson, 1928)

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It was the midwinter of 1926, in Rochester, New York, when James Sibley Watson, Jr. and his friend Melville Webber first started filming their adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”. They had set up in an old stable; the cast was made up of Herbert Stern (a local architect), Sibley Watson’s wife Hildegard, and Webber himself. They only had twelve kilowatts of direct current for lighting, and very little heat, let alone room for sets...

... it was clear they could not make anything like The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the Gaston Leroux adaptation that had reconstructed the Grand Opera in Paris for its shocked audience the previous year. So instead, over the next two years, they created a thirteen-minute feature that has been called one of the first avant-garde films produced in the United States: a work that seeks to evoke not the plot or even characters of its source material but Poe’s claustrophobic, itchy energy

the (as yet) unmade

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In the throes of limbo on two metal projects so here’s a list of things I’ve yet to make that I want to make:

  • a series / gaggle of weird little zines

  • a graphic novella (with or without a collaborator, though i'd prefer the former)

  • a narrative short film

  • a novella

  • a large metal dinosaur

  • a damn good track / ep that eschews my institutionalized music composition reflexes for the same visceral and improvisational central to my totally clueless – and intentionally ignorant – metalworking practice.

Do I have any of these in me still? I'd like to believe I do (99.99% that large metal dinosaur is happening this summer), but time will tell.

my 25 favorite films of the quarter century

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In no particular order and off the top of my head:

  • 25TH HOUR (Lee, 2002)

  • SINNERS (Coogler, 2025)

  • PARASITE (Bong, 2019)

  • CHILDREN OF MEN (Cuarón, 2006)

  • GODZILLA MINUS ONE (Yamazaki, 2023)

  • GOOD TIME (Safdies, 2017)

  • EX MACHINA (Garland, 2015)

  • ROAD TO PERDITION (Mendes, 2002)

  • SPIDER-MAN 2 (Raimi, 2004)

  • WEAPONS (Cregger, 2025)

  • COLLATERAL (Mann, 2004)

  • THE PRESTIGE (Nolan, 2006)

  • THE LIGHTHOUSE (Eggers, 2019)

  • THE MENU (Mylod, 2022)

  • THE INCREDIBLES (Bird, 2004)

  • TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN (Lynch, 2017)

  • PRISONERS (Vilaneuve, 2013)

  • ZODIAC (Fincher, 2007)

  • NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (Coens, 2007)

  • THE PHANTOM THREAD (PTA, 2017)

  • SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (Wright, 2010)

  • KILL BILL (1+2) (Tarantino, 2003)

  • CASINO ROYALE (Campbell, 2006)

  • FANTASTIC MR FOX (Anderson, 2009)

  • GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK (Clooney, 2005)