BIG FEET

I saw the premiere of this great short last night at ATA in San Francisco. Written and directed by Jameson Swanagon, shot by Joe Golling and starring some friends of mine, "The Big Feet" manages to reconcile some of Swanagon's more adventurous minimal guitar/tape loop pieces with striking visuals and a morbid, horror-film sense of humor. The locus of the piece is at about the halfway point, as the camera pans across an empty California beach to the sound of warped bells. Swanagon himself struggles against the waves, his shirt inflated comically, his foot bound by a rope, and his deliberately convoluted guitars pointing in no particular tonal direction.

Also check out Grand Lake, an unconventional, literate pop group to which Swanagon lends his sensibilities.