'Dog Star Man' & 'A Wizard, A True Star'

About 10 minutes into watching Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man, a 74-minute avant-garde silent film, I realized that there was no sound.

So, I put on Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star as a sort of filler or soundtrack to the film. I realize now what the people that paired The Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon. It's funny how the sounds (despite the 10-minute disparity) and the pictures kind of a pair up. Silence with a blacked out screen or perhaps and explosion of sound with the flare from a shot of the surface of the sun.

Anyway, the two works are kind of similar in a way.

Rundgren was a pop-rock wunderkind, who had already made a name for himself with Something/Anything? Then, he started doing drugs and the cerebral exaggeration turned into sonic expansion in the studio. As the little insert in the album describes, Rundgren was able to play the studio instead of the instruments.

Side A is a medley of noise and aggressive numbers from instrumentals to extremely short songs. Side B is more like it. Another medley of R&B songs.

Brakhage had always been a different filmmaker. He was experimental from the start and Dog Star Man, filmed over a series of several years.

Like side A, it's a hodgepodge of reflections, visuals and art plugged together. A series of editing that must have taken forever considering all the cuts and splices he had to make.

These two pieces, however, have no real connection. I created the connection. I decided to ingest both at the same time as just an off-the-cuff decision. But on another level it shows how all of this fits together. That there's little difference between what all these artists are doing. That's kind of neat.