For no less than two thirds of my life, I’ve been a doodle addict. I think it’s safe to say that all of us were, at some point or another. Hopefully none of you had the somewhat traumatic experience I had in the sixth grade when my English teacher deducted a full letter grade from an assignment because I made the absentminded decision of doodling cute little dragons in the margin of my Old Yeller notes. When you think about it, doodling isn’t merely an act of scratching out stick figures on the back of worksheets or old Rite-Aid receipts. It’s a ritual, a chance to take the ugly blue-lined landscape of a notebook and breathe a little life into it, or at least enough life to keep you from falling into a bored slumber. Brian Chippendale understands this distinction, and from it, he has derived the video for Black Pus’ “1000 years,” a digitized flip-book of doodles from his schoolboy years. Against the yellowed, planar backdrop, knights clash swords, dragons spew fire, and floating eyeballs shoot death rays. A hero appears, then vanishes. It’s an elementary-school epic, nostalgic for the days where our imaginations ran free, complete with a frantic, boyish soundtrack.
• Black Pus: http://blackpus.bandcamp.
• Thrill Jockey: http://www.thrilljockey.com
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