literature
Pigs on the Wing
Part 1
If you didn’t care what happened to me,
And I didn’t care for you,
We would zig zag our way through the boredom and pain
Occasionally glancing up through the rain.
Wondering which of the buggars to blame
And watching for pigs on the wing.
Part 2
You know that I care what happens to you,
And I know that you care for me, too.
So I don’t feel alone,
Or the weight of the stone,
Now that I’ve found somewhere safe
To bury my bone.
And any fool knows a dog needs a home,
A shelter from pigs on the wing.
Cinematography: We’ve come a long way?
We don’t have to ask why we love videos and movies, visual literacy is becoming more important as time goes on.
Produced by Thomas Edison and directed and filmed by Edwin S. Porter, The Great Train Robbery was the first narrative movie ever made.
Thinking about today’s conventions I see in contrast to the silent films of the early years of cinema, the first thing is obvious: there are a lot of talking heads. The cinematic elements that make me love movies, especially silent movies, are mostly lacking, having given way to VFX and complicated dialogue. Cool effects work well in the right places but, as we learned from the great, early filmmakers, a story is best told with a visual, artful use of the tools to lead us to make connections on our own. This is what cinematography is. The American Society of Cinematographers defines cinematography as:
a creative and interpretive process that culminates in the authorship of an original work of art rather than the simple recording of a physical event.
The difference between a good film and a great one is that even with the audio removed a great film stands on its own. The audience can still make sense of the action because the cinematic elements keep moving the story forward.
Silent films didn’t have the luxury of audio tracks to bolster what was happening on the screen. Directors worked feverishly to keep the inclusion of cards with words on them to a minimum as audiences often found them distracting because they broke a certain rhythm to the visual story that was unfolding before them. The fundamentals of editing were more than enough for directors in those early days as they saw a seemingly infinite number of conventions that could be used to craft atmospheres, psychological experiences that led audiences to emotional heights and dramatic lows in response to the visual sequences taking place in front of them.
In contrast to now, when a majority of popular films have so many stylistic choices in common, produced with technology that can shoot high and low, inside and out, leave no stone unturned, no thought of a character unknown, possessing perhaps a similar cultural rhythm about them, too, that can at times make them feel almost like the same movie. Technology has certainly opened up many more options for modern day shooters, myself included. Shooting with a Canon 5D Mark II allows us to shoot cinema quality footage at 24p at a fraction of the cost. However, as in design, there is a time and place for whitespace, which is to say, to not exploit the tools for all they’re worth just for the sake of exploiting the tools for all they’re worth. Does it add to the story? Yes? Keep it. Does it not add to the story? Lose it.
I surely don’t mean to discount the work of the great cinematographers of our age, only to suggest that limitations are what create the opportunities for innovation, not a lack of them. The life pursuits and soaring accomplishments of a legion of great screen directors in the early days of cinema stand testament to it.
So how has the rapid deployment of these new tools impacted our ability to tell a story cinematically? Surely it’s both helped and hindered. A great story is still a great story, regardless of what tools are used to tell it.
Curious Herzog
Our man Werner Herzog reads Curious George in a tone that only the German filmmaker can muster:
hats off to @jeremyryancarr for this tasty tidbit
Sycamore Review: Zach Falcon
Sycamore Review: Winter 2010 featuring Zach Falcon
ZACH FALCON was born and raised in Alaska. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Quiddity, the 2009 Bridport Prize Anthology, and the Bear Deluxe Magazine. He lives in Iowa City where he is working on a novel.
Michael Pollan and The Botany of Desire
Author Michael Pollan says:
The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow more of it and plant more of it. The potato, by gratifying our desire for control, control over nature so that we can feed ourselves has gotten itself out of South America and expanded its range far beyond where it was 500 years ago. And the apple, by gratifying our desire for sweetness begins in the forests of Kazakhstan and is now the universal fruit. These are great winners in the dance of domestication.
Taxing the Artist
The five months of furious short-story writing in 1923-24 had left him with a stake of $7,000. In Great Neck, that would only cover two and a half months of expenses. How could he stretch the $7,000 to gain the time to finish Gatsby? Earlier, as he was struggling to save, a friend wrote from France to suggest that Fitzgerald join the many Americans living well in Europe on the strong American dollar. The friend wrote that it cost one-tenth as much to live in Europe: he had just finished “a meal fit for a king, washed down with champagne, for the absurd sum of sixty-one cents.” Fitzgerald thought, based on the friend’s recommendation, living expenses on the off-season Riviera would be low enough to let him finish Gatsby without any short-story interruptions.
Thanks to Jason Kottke for posting on such good stuff. Cheers.
Maurice Sendak : Where The Wild Things Are
Spike Jonze worked with Lance Bangs on this new documentary about Maurice Sendak, who wrote and illustrated Where The Wild Things Are, which is in post-production having been directed by Jonze. Click on the image to see the trailer for the documentary.
Morris on Lying
Errol Morris is arguably one of the great filmmakers of all time. I especially hold Vernon, Florida as one of the pinnacles of documentary filmmaking. I watch it at least once a year, twice this year.
Morris holds a discussion about lying on his hosted NYT blog, specifically on Genesis 37:29-34 regarding the story of Joseph.
Now, some pals of mine wondered why he chose to use the story of Joseph. It’s difficult to say. There are surely many stories that would have been fit for his purpose, detached from any sort of potentially touchy, dogmatic ties.
Personally, I think it’s interesting he chose the story he did. Having grown up in a fundamentalist environment, these stories are quite familiar to me and I see what value he was trying to bring though using it as his example.
However, I wouldn’t have chosen it. Instead, I would have chosen from a massive assortment of films and novels, stories that aren’t so charged with a belief system, opening the value of his thoughts up to more people without alienating them.
This point, alone, makes for an interesting debate.
Thus, it is only for our speculation.
Regardless, it’s an interesting meditation on lying and worth the time I spent reading it.
Tangent: In this age of seemingly infinite access to information, it goes without saying that it is easier than ever to be manipulated. Especially while we don’t exercise our *discerning* muscles. Teaching a child to be discerning may be the single greatest challenge of them all in this context.
For example, if collectively we only just agreed that the world is round, there would still be sites up all over the Web saying it’s flat.
Just sayin’.
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Cranies (sic)
I received one of the most beautiful SMS’s ever today. Is that how we say SMS in the plural?
Doesn’t really matter. Case in point: “I received one of the most beautiful SMS’s ever today.”
It was from my father, who’s never cared much about his spelling, only about the message:
Cheers, Pop.
Happy Birthday, by the way.
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Ordinary Affects
Ordinary Affects is an exercise, not a fact. I like this very much.
Ordinary Affects is a singular argument for attention to the affective dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a series of brief vignettes combining storytelling, close ethnographic detail, and critical analysis, Stewart relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and strange encounters, half-spied scenes and the lingering resonance of passing events. While most of the instances rendered are from Stewart’s own life, she writes in the third person in order to reflect on how intimate experiences of emotion, the body, other people, and time inextricably link us to the outside world.
Stewart refrains from positing an overarching system—whether it’s called globalization or neoliberalism or capitalism—to describe the ways that economic, political, and social forces shape individual lives. Instead, she begins with the disparate, fragmented, and seemingly inconsequential experiences of everyday life to bring attention to the ordinary as an integral site of cultural politics. Ordinary affect, she insists, is registered in its particularities, yet it connects people and creates common experiences that shape public feeling. Through this anecdotal history—one that poetically ponders the extremes of the ordinary and portrays the dense network of social and personal connections that constitute a life—Stewart asserts the necessity of attending to the fleeting and changeable aspects of existence in order to recognize the complex personal and social dynamics of the political world.
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Walks the walk: Jim Rossignol
Jim Rossignol is an interesting fellow, particularly in the context that he writes in a unique way about gaming and its influence on culture. Not to mention, the trajectory and contrast of his own story against what he writes makes him an authentic source IMO.
I am anticipating the arrival of his book, This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities published by the University of Michigan Press.
Amazon’s product description reads like this:
“In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me.â€
So begins this story of personal redemption through the unlikely medium of electronic games. Quake, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and other online games not only offered author Jim Rossignol an excellent escape from the tedium of office life. They also provided him with a diverse global community and a job—as a games journalist.
Part personal history, part travel narrative, part philosophical reflection on the meaning of play, This Gaming Life describes Rossignol’s encounters in three cities: London, Seoul, and Reykjavik. From his days as a Quake genius in London’s increasingly corporate gaming culture; to Korea, where gaming is a high-stakes televised national sport; to Iceland, the home of his ultimate obsession, the idiosyncratic and beguiling Eve Online, Rossignol introduces us to a vivid and largely undocumented world of gaming lives.
Torn between unabashed optimism about the future of games and lingering doubts about whether they are just a waste of time, This Gaming Life also raises important questions about this new and vital cultural form. Should we celebrate the “serious†educational, social, and cultural value of games, as academics and journalists are beginning to do? Or do these high-minded justifications simply perpetuate the stereotype of games as a lesser form of fun? In this beautifully written, richly detailed, and inspiring book, Rossignol brings these abstract questions to life, immersing us in a vibrant landscape of gaming experiences.
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Reading List : The Black Swan
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a book about randomness and uncertainty by epistemologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The Black Swan theory refers to a large-impact, hard-to-predict and rare event beyond the realm of *normal* expectations or logic. His theory refers to events of large consequence and their dominant role in history. Black Swan events are a special category of outliers.
From the prologue:
I am drawn to his book so much these days that, DURING the days, while often spending thought energy on the arbitrary, I crave returning to read more of Nassim’s words in the wonderful and whimsical evening to help balance against, as he writes so eloquently, naive empiricism.
That’s the trouble with good work like this : such ideas find us re-examining our immediate environment, our time-investments, priorities, the whole can of worms, all-the-while identifying every detail both aligned and misaligned with our freshly-evolved perspective and motivation.
Tough? Sometimes.
Highly recommended? Indefatigably.
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Lars’ dad
Backcountry
When you are in town, wearing some kind of uniform is helpful, policeman, priest, etc. Driving a tank is very impressive, or a car with official lettering on the side. If that isn’t to your taste you could join the revolution, wear an armband, carry a homemade flag tied to a broom handle, or a placard bearing an incendiary slogan.
At the very least you should wear a suit and carry a briefcase and a cell phone, or wear a team jacket and a baseball cap and carry a cell phone. If you go into the woods, the backcountry, someplace past all human habitation, it is a good idea to wear orange and carry a gun, or, depending on the season, carry a fishing pole, or a camera with a big lens. Otherwise it might appear that you have no idea what you are doing, that you are merely wandering the earth, no particular reason for being here, no particular place to go.
 Louis Jenkins
This is the same poem that Mark Rylance read as his acceptance speech at the Tony Awards this past year:
Cheers, Lars.
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In the Beginning was the Command Line
My pal Steve turned me on to this essay, written in 1999 by Neil Stephenson.
Highly recommended.
Here’s an excerpt :
If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. Which sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk your ear off about biology.
If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would be the sort of unsigned folk art that’s for sale in Disney World’s African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both.
In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.
Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a reader or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this is that the execution is superb. But it’s easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can’t argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking.
But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command-line interface to the GUI.
Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself–and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.
If you wish, you can download and read his essay in its entirety here.
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Zach Falcon writes amazing stories. For kids, too.
Zach Falcon is a great storyteller because his whimsical muscles are completely intact and functioning optimally.
Most of us stop using these muscles somewhere between the ages of 8 and 10. We start conforming to our risk-averse culture, playing it safe as we say, leaving the inspirations of youth behind and stop listening to voices of mischief that often enough lead us down mysterious paths to discovery.
Falcon has managed to protect his sense of curiosity with an amazing non-stick coating, which keeps it safe from such ridiculous notions. This, combined with a rigorous training regimen for said curiosity and other, related muscles, keeps him fit and dextrous as he delivers these tales with clarity he owns.
This is the stuff that powers great storytellers who’s lives haven’t been spent only in the telling.
Perhaps, that explains how the Alaska native was able to leave his post as Assistant Attorney General in that fine state to pursue his natural gift for writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa.
His work, like “Cloud Fishing” published in Spider Magazine, is moving in a way that will help keep us all continuing to exercise this most-important-of-all muscles : our imagination.
Without it, we’re all just player pianos that might be able to reproduce a tune – but haven’t even a thimble full of the spirit of the real thing.
Don’t count him as just another sweet and jovial kid’s fiction writer, though. When he’s not writing or starring in subversive films, he’s a stone-cold Hollywood pimp.
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Geek Love
My pal Todd sent an email along with a link to goodreads, a site that let’s you share what books you’re reading/have read with your friends online. a great idea, no doubt.
the only problem i have with such things is that i have to remember yet another miserable login for a site that does only one thing. there are sites that do multiple things, best of which are my own blogs, run on my own servers, which require only as much time as their value can balance.
still, no matter how you share your reads, it’s a fun thing to do and the gods know how much i enjoy talking about stories!
here’s what i’ve been reading lately : highly recommended!
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Flatland
This is one of my favorite books of all time!
Edwin Abbott wrote the story in 1884 and it stands as a great epic to this day.
I first read it while living in Chapel Hill and recently discovered it on YouTube recreated as a somewhat crude animation:
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Adaptive Technology :: Evolved
Doctors laugh at me when they ask me ideally what do i want to do about my knee problem and i tell them how i’d like them to just lop it off and gimme a rad prosthetic.
if there are any doctors out there who’d like to help a fella get his quality of life back by hooking him up with something akin to this would you email queue [ - at - ] thinfilmsproductions dot com, please?
i don’t wanna be the fastest runner on my block or break any records other than the furthest walk i’ve had in months.
there’s no doubt this new technology is fascinating but, as we all know, every new solution brings with it a new set of dilemmas.
Whatever. You are my total fucking hero! THANKS, OSCAR!
click here to learn more about Oscar.
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Kurt Vonnegut has left the building
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2000 in review
In 2000 did the US courts govern politics or were politics governed by the courts?
The US presidential election is the big story. The world watched the most powerful nation on earth use the courts to sort out what was the most evenly divided recent presidential election of the United States. George W Bush will have difficulty because of this during the next 4 years.
In the spring the world was riveted to a little Cuban boy named Elian Gonzales who came to Florida in a boat and left some five months later with his father.
Economics
The rapid rise of the cost of crude oil and carbon based energy has taken the world by surprise with Alan Greenspan still struggling to get inflation and the oil cartel under control.
NASDAQ propelled by Internet.com stocks over the traditional industrial stocks took many by surprise and then crashed later in the year when the dot.coms could not deliver the goods.
Space
Finally, we finally saw the International Space Station is up and running after years of delays.
Scientists are puzzled by the fact that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate.
Health
The threat of Mad Cow disease decimates the beef industry in Europe and especially France where beef once the staple of the French palate. Now only rarely found on French plates.
Work is continuing on the use of genetics to cure nearly everything. The big story in 2000 was the use of animals and even a human who had specific genes injected into egg cells to produce specific traits that were used to cure specific diseases.
And they found that this approach works….
In Canada, a public water source kills as public officials scramble to find out why.
Environment
Europeans believe that there is a crisis in the environment caused by global warming. North Americans whose economy relies heavily on carbon based energy to survive are a loggerheads with them. A conference is called and nothing is resolved to carry out the agreement reached at Kyoto.
This story will not go away.
Science
The Y2K story scared the living daylights out of everyone and amounted to no big thing. We still don’t know whether or not this was a hoax or not. My theory is the census bureau acquired a much more accurate count of people – whoever doesn’t have a computer and, thus, didn’t apply for the “patches” doesn’t really count going into the new era of Web-based commerce. Just a thought…
Second but not far behind is the global concern about the use and consumption of genetically engineered crops.
Sports
The sports story of the year again is Tiger Woods winning three majors in a row. Now Tiger wants a share of the PGA TV revenue and I don’t blame him.
The Olympics always is the big story and this year was no exception when the Australians provided the best Olympics Games that have ever been held.
NBC were the big losers thinking people wanted to see time delayed sports events.
Peace
The Middle East, there is big trouble as Israel and her neighbors start again to battle over religious principles. Clinton’s failure to bring the two sides through a peace process will haunt him until he dies.
Internet
Connection speed was the main focus this year as the eCommerce people told companies that consumers were turned off by the fact that pages took too long to download.
Wireless, Broadband, Cable TV, Fibre all are taking a swing at the bat trying to get consumers to sign on. .
Generally, the world still believes that the Internet can deliver but still is puzzled on how.
Entertainment
Perhaps there is something to say about the state of people watching television in the western world to say that “Survivor” and :Who Wants to be a Millionaire” were the most watched shows.
Man of the Century
Pierre Elliot Trudeau, former Canadian Prime Minister who coined the word “just society” who died in 2000.
