Ian McAlpin tells stories with pictures. He's versed in multiple forms of filmmaking — short, feature, analog, digital, documentary, animation, commercial, experimental, & narrative. His work as a cinematographer includes the documentaries Born to Fly, The Russian Winter, "The Obama Conversation" for Vox, & the upcoming shorts "Damnation" starring Melissa Leo, and "Capsule" — a stop-motion space story. He's directed for a diverse client list including Nest Labs, Banana Republic, and NPR.
Let’s face it: The golden days of summer are here and it’s too hot to function. Stop trying—and flee. Pack up the wicker picnic basket your mother gave you (she didn’t give you one, too?), hop on the commuter rail, and head to your secret lake, your secret meadow, perhaps alone or with your secret friend.
Unbelievable: it's August.
A very incriminating post: silver toast stands, hotel slippers, and tiny jams (just call me The Cat Burglar).
(Image: Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief)
In the last decade Liz Lambert* has undertaken the ambitious project of building Bunkhouse, a Texas hotel empire, and bringing the poured-concrete-and-succulents austere/luxurious aesthetics of, say, Los Angeles and Donald Judd, to the western part of Texas. Or at least the Bunkhouse empire has succeeded at making it look this way to T Magazine.
I picked up Ali Smith's Hotel World as I was waltzing out of town, alone on a long trip for work, first to take a flight to Nice, and later to take a train across La France to the Atlantic coast side of things. (To be honest, no waltzing was involved, just sweating and banging my shins on stuff).
In any case, I cracked open the slim Hotel World as soon as I nestled down into my purple velour seat upon the TGV, which was literally rattling from the Côte d'Azur towards Paris. From then, I was captive: I couldn't put it down, even for the hour I was in Paris (I'm a dummy), nor could I stop reading as my train continued to hurtle down south, through endless sunflower fields.
