Alexander Stuart

The Canyons, trailer image. Acclaimed author Bret Easton Ellis is making an original foray into filmmaking with his partners, director Paul Schrader (who wrote  Martin Scorsese's astonishing Taxi Driver and Raging Bull , and directed the classic, Giorgio Moroder-scored American Gigolo ) and producer Braxton Pope , with a project called The Canyons - set in contemporary LA and financed in part through Kickstarter , the radical new crowd-funding social platform. The trio set out to raise $100,000 to add to the money they were putting into the project themselves - in order to bypass the interminable Hollywood studio development process - and wound up exceeding their goal and raising almost $160,000. I know Bret a little, from a series of dinners we had a few years back, when I was interested in turning Bret's outstanding, self-referential horror novel, Lunar Park, into a film.  Several of his books have been adapted as movies - including both the zeitgeist-definin

Here's another stunning Lana Del Rey song and video. I have become such a fan. Her music really reaches me, and I love the filmmakers she works with on her videos (in this case, director  Yoann Lemoine ). This one looks especially great in black and white. Enjoy!

On Sunday, we picnicked and hiked at Lyons Lake Dam, one of our absolutely favorite spots in Tuolumne County.  All photographs and video by Alexander Chow-Stuart 2012. The forest around the lake has both a tranquil quality...and a subtle sense of a David Lynch silence haunting the spaces between the trees. The dam itself is magnificent and a thrill to walk across and to walk under. Our children love it here - and so does our dog, Husky Go-Go ("go-go" is Mandarin for "dog;" she is seen running in the video above), whose first major excursion off the leash led to a wild run back and forth through the trees and the water. Total abandonment and joy. A heartwarming welcome.

I have become so enamored of Lana Del Rey's exquisite songs and equally beautiful music videos.  This one, for Carmen , is quite extraordinary - please watch all the way through to the end, when the music changes and Lana dances to one of the most haunting classical piano pieces ever, Erik Satie's   Gymnopédie No.1 - just astonishing.

I'm rapidly becoming a fan of the work of Sean and Seng , who made this short film of model Frida Aasen for Dazed & Confused , as well as the Interview magazine film of Lana Del Rey , a few posts below.