Holiday Gift Idea No. 234 Dept.: Alan Watts, the man behind the enormously popular (it’s big in Chile, even!) 16color.com flash animation site, has launched a new attack on interoffice boredom, and it’s about time. His new Pixeltees.com site (created in conjunction with Clay Ferguson) combines two great American virtues — T-shirts and DIY Web art — and comes up with a whole new way to fritter away both time and closet space. Designing their own T-shirts online via Watts’ easy-as-pie interface, users can then opt to sell them via online “stores” that are accessible on the site or can keep them for themselves and forgo the capitalist rigamarole. The site has only been open for a week or so and has already garnered one of Yahoo!’s “daily picks” nods, which of course sent gazillions of curious (and curiously half-dressed) surfers to the site to figure out what all the hubbub was about. Go. Now. Make. Sell. Buy… As we were going to press, we received word of the death of charismatic Austin acting legend Charles Gunning, 51, who had been battling complications sustained in a car accident in November 2001. Gunning — who was featured in several Richard Linklater films including Slacker, The Newton Boys, and Waking Life, as well as the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing and numerous television projects, including Star Trek: The Next Generation and Murder, She Wrote — died in his sleep on Dec. 11 in Desert Hot Springs, Calif., where Gunning was shooting a short film. He is survived by his wife Amy and numerous friends. An integral part of the Austin film community, he will be sorely missed.
This article appears in December 20 • 2002.