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Greetings! I hope that you can still take up my call to empathic arms from last week<\/span><\/a>, dearest readers, where I asked you to help support our friend Leslie<\/strong> in battling a financial pitfall as she fights a cancer scare for her life. Please go now to her GoFundMe<\/strong> campaign<\/span><\/a> as this can wait. However, if you\u2019re still here on C-U Blogfidential<\/span><\/strong>, then we might as well get down to freakin\u2019 business by recalling the former Champaign-Urbana<\/strong> cultural event that she and I gave many volunteer hours, the Freaky Film Festival<\/strong>. We\u2019ve talked about this cornucopia of left-field cinema once<\/span><\/a> or twice<\/span><\/a> or maybe even thrice<\/span><\/a> in the past but, for today, I want to load you up with colorful weirdness because I\u2019m simply in that kind of mood.<\/p>\n But, why this<\/em> time? \u201cLeft field\u201d is the closest point of origin any of us could come up with for the YouTube Premium<\/strong> series CHAMPAIGN ILL<\/strong> when it was first announced last summer. I still haven\u2019t watched the non-free episodes of the set, which follows rap star entourage members played by Adam Pally<\/strong> and Sam Richardson<\/strong> as they attempt to find a footing back in Midwest society, and the Atlanta<\/strong>-as-Champaign-IL location shooting did not dampen my mild enjoyment<\/span><\/a> of the first three. While many Facebook<\/strong> and Twitter<\/strong> voices who apparently know the C-U and its hip-hop quotient cried foul over inaccuracies, I decided to care less about it. The story wasn\u2019t very dependent on geography. Since then, YouTube has nixed ILL<\/strong> as the service retools its original programming slate<\/a><\/span>. Everyone can chillax.<\/p>\n Yet, my movie brain is not wired like other movie brains so I considered a more extreme comparison. \u201cIf people feel that CHAMPAIGN ILL<\/strong> is aesthetically \u2018off,\u2019\u201d I had thought at one point, \u201ctheir minds would melt down at the sight of URBANA<\/strong>.\u201d Thanks to the miraculous algorithms of Google<\/strong>, I was able to quickly pull up the experimental short film URBANA<\/strong> made by San Francisco<\/strong> artist Brien Burroughs<\/strong> in 1994, a depiction of that city\u2019s architecture as an alien landscape in reverse color photography. Its title is a derivation of \u201curban\u201d and not a direct reference to Urbana, IL, yet it was chosen anyway for the first Freaky Film in 1997 and played back-to-back with another Burroughs venture into unusual technique, AQUAMORPHEUS<\/strong> (1996). You can replicate the sensation by pressing \u201cplay\u201d below.<\/p>\n ~~~~~<\/p>\n