==pla|\|ing lakes==

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

DVD Savant review of new Pulse (Kairo) Region 1 edition makes me glad I bought the cheapo Korean version even though I don't have Dolby 5.1 set up yet

8:19 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, February 27, 2006

R.I.P. Octavia Butler

She was only 58.

I've read Dawn, Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents, all of which I found intriguing, though they aren't easy reads, but more challenging literature towards Samuel Delany's Dhalgren in psychological complexity and in portraying a dystopian near-future (though this is not to draw any other comparisons -- these are 2 very different writers, though they are the 2 most prominent black SF writers).

I'm sure I'll get back to her work sometime, and I'm sorry she never completed the third Parable book.

She will undoubtedly be acknowledged in closer estimation to her worth in future years.

Wikipedia entry.

Nice short tribute written a while ago by J Douglas Allen Taylor.

10:29 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Happy Maha Shivaratri!

Maha Shivratri, the night of the worship of Shiva, occurs on the 14th night of the new moon during the dark half of the month of Phalguna. It falls on a moonless February night, when Hindus offer special prayer to the lord of destruction. Shivratri (Sanskrit 'ratri' = night) is the night when he is said to have performed the Tandava Nritya or the dance of primordial creation, preservation and destruction. The festival is observed for one day and one night only.

Remember to bathe your lingam...

10:39 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

R.I.P. Darren McGavin

Always liked him, from The Outsider (my first exposure to the PI genre -- or the one that took) through The 48 Hour Mile (a private dick TV movie with Carrie Snodgress & William Windom which always stuck with me, partly because of the scene where Snodgress's character slips him LSD) to the ahead-of-its-time Tribes (directed by Something the Lord Made's Joe Sargent) to for me his most memorable role as Kolchak in The Night Stalker, particularly the pilot and the follow-up The Night Strangler with the scenes in "Old Seattle's underground ruins" which tripped me out.

Looking back at those IMDB pages, I see that the Night Stalker pilot was the most watched TV movie up to that time.

I was never that much into A Christmas Story, which was his most famous role, nor were the 2 episodes of X Files he was in very memorable.

But some of my favorite memories of television included McGavin.

Thanks Darren.

10:12 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

A recent story on large jellyfish hampering Japanese fish catches reminds me of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future, which didn't really work for me the first time I saw it anyway; next week perhaps his best film Kairo (Pulse) finally achieves North American release on disc

I liked Cure a lot too, but I think Kairo is more successful.

One note: the Region 3 release I have of Kairo edits out the sound of a key scene towards the end, which involves a plane. Without spoiling the story, I'll just say that it might work better that way, oddly enough. More on that after the Region 1 release (which apparently does not edit out the sound) has been out for awhile.

12:09 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Saturday, February 25, 2006

and now for a word from the often hilariously distracted Overheard in New York

Guy: We have to figure out a way to get rid of her bird.

Girl: I hate birds like that. They're full of secrets and dust.

Guy: And lice and opinions.

--13th & A [link]

7:43 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Astrologically, the next few days -- particularly Monday & Tuesday -- look a bit dicey:

As a result it is best to expect a disruptive period of moods with high stress and anxiety. . . This may appear quite daunting but provided one can exercise a measure of restraint and tolerance then coming days may not be too turbulent.

However there is always the behaviour of others to contend with and this may become provocative, argumentative, rebellious, or otherwise keen to pick an argument just for the sake of it.

Good time for creative experimenting though...

7:30 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

no type -- one of the first and best netlabels featuring experimental electronic music -- is finally back with new material and lower CD prices [disquiet]

They tend towards the harsher end of the spectrum and are based in Montreal, so there's a strong electroacoustic influence as befits a Canadian label. Also more um meat on its bones than many labels.

7:13 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, February 24, 2006

Also from WFMU: Get College Credit for Writing Blogspam!

10:08 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

artist Wilfrid Wood [WFMU blog]

9:52 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

French archaeologists have figured out a way to extract ambient sound from the grooves of ancient Roman pottery, apparently allowing us to hear them, well, laugh at least

9:18 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

from twitch

Tsukamoto's 2000 suspense thriller Gemini (Soseiji) will be released by Image in North America May 23 & Bad Cop Bon Cop the first "quintessentially Canadian, bilingual" buddy cop movie will be out in Canada (at least) this summer -- which only a transplanted Canadian would be interested in I guess

Also from twitch: Terry Gilliam's thumbs up on movie piracy.

8:59 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, February 20, 2006

Unlikely I'll be getting to it, but if you're in NYC until May, definitely check out the Munch retro at MoMA

Someone stole The Scream last year in Oslo, so it's represented by 2 woodcuts, but otherwise this is a rare look at the career of an icon of existentialism.

7:39 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Worth a look

Howling Dog Press and Mike Palecek's Looking for Bigfoot in particular

11:29 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis on successfully recovering from depression with the help of a good GP and SSRI drugs

I still wouldn't recommend the drugs myself, though I haven't taken them.

I have been what I would call clinically depressed, more or less, off and on, throughout my life.

But I keep my own counsel, especially when it comes to my own consciousness -- and who's pulling the strings.

11:15 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

twitch also posts a link to a nice (though a bit offputtingly cornball) trailer for Richard Linklater's summer release of Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly, in Waking Life stylee

Not the script that Charlie Kaufman wrote nearly a decade ago, though.

I'm encouraged by this note of approval from Dick's daughters.

This might be my yearly trip to the theatre.

Did he say "offputtingly"?

10:33 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

The twitch review of John Hillcoat's very Aussie um Western The Proposition, which looks to be a sleeper when it gets released in North America theatres in May

With Guy Pearce, Emily Watson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston & John Hurt.

Another review from the Toronto Film Festival site.

Oh yeah -- it's written by Nick Cave, which will tell those who know his work what they need to know, methinks.

Reports stress that it's pretty violent.

10:12 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

You can download the new issue of Arthur in pdf on their homepage (scroll down to issue cover)

Hope they do this with back issues too.

8:30 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, February 17, 2006

The digitally obsessed review of Sally Potter's Yes DVD, surely one of the best films of last year, of the last five

Come to think of it, while Yes is easy enough to comprehend on a level of pure plot mechanics, I'm not sure I get a lot of it. Why, for example, is the dialogue written in poetic form? With a contemporary setting and language, it seems an odd choice. Why slather on so much symbolism? Why try to tackle so many controversial issues? This is one case where, I think, what exactly everything means isn't really an issue, because Potter has clearly put a lot of herself into making a deeply personal film. The stylized speech captures the heightened emotions she must have felt weighing these issues—wars over oil, suicide bombings, religious persecution—and the cleaning metaphors have their own odd lyricism.

One of Joan Allen's best roles, and one I've no doubt she's particularly proud of.

The script is entirely in iambic pentameter, but is so well done you hardly notice -- except for the rich layering of meaning which requires several viewings to er dissect...

It reminds me of Masked and Anonymous, because of the mannered script, actually. It succeeds to a greater degree than the latter, but both films come across amazingly well considering how terminally pretentious such artistic conceit usually ends up being.

Most of the films I enjoyed most last year were released in earlier years (like Last Life in the Universe & Goodbye Dragon Inn & Stage Beauty) in other countries, but these 2 were perhaps the best I saw last year of those officially released last year in North America.

But when a movie is released in the American theaters matters so little to me, that this seems like an artificial, arbitrary categorization.

8:09 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, February 16, 2006

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has won a key battle in court re the NSA surveillance of Americans, and it's made the mainstream media take notice

The EPIC site has been a clearinghouse for finding anonymizing software and such for years.

Send them money: they're doing us all a service by being a security and privacy watchdog in these weirdass times.

6:36 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

DVD Savant review of the new Dune DVD, with both Lynch's cut and the extended TV version in widescreen

Like the author, I actually quite liked the original; unlike the author, I had read the book, long before as a teenager.

I agree with his conclusions. This is the edition to have, since it contains both versions, and while there are scenes added to the Lynch cut which are pleasing to see, the extended cut remains edited in the version shown on TV, and has little of the dramatic tension of Lynch's version.

Neither is truly satisfying, and it is a shame there will be no new director's cut.

But Dune remains one of the most interesting film versions of a sf epic, and has some great scenes.

8:02 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Saturday, February 11, 2006

For a mere $211 (or so), North Americans can own this cool box set of "most of" Herzog's shorts & documentaries -- which really means the ones not already available and best known, as Anchor Bay has released two boxes of what most would agree is his best work up to 2000

Still, if I were rich, I'd grab this in a heartbeat. There are 25 films included, most of which aren't available elsewhere, certainly not in quality transfers. These are the ones you've heard about (like the short wherein he eats his shoe, satisfying a bet with Kinski), but probably never seen.

I've made my way through most of the first Anchor Bay box (without Kinski), and though I'm not crazy about Fata Morgana or Lessons of Darkness, the other five films (Heart of Glass, Even Dwarfs Started Small, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Stroszek & -- though I haven't seen it yet -- Little Dieter Needs to Fly) more than make up for them.

Glass & Dwarfs are just remarkable experiences. As are Aguirre, the Wrath of God & his remake of Nosferatu with Kinski, Bruno Ganz and Isabelle Adjani in the other box. I haven't seen My Best Fiend, Herzog's tribute to Kinski, yet either, but I hear it's up there too.

A recent post summarizing recent examples of Herzog's sangfroid at cinemarati.

10:17 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

"It is not necessary to be someplace else in order not to be here."

One of a few titles I found on the DVD Beaver best of 2005 page that I've added to my queue is Deborah Stratman's anthology disc Something Like Flying; she has also experimented with placing a parking booth around her native Chicago metro area

The others are Devils on the Doorstep & Iranian director Forugh Farrokhzad's 1963 short The House Is Black.

9:14 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Boy it would be great if cable companies were forced to offer a la carte channels

8:54 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

I too have been "throttled" by netflix, but until lil' ol' Cottonwood has a 50,000 title DVD rental store that charges $2.75 a rental, there's not much I can do about it...

Though it did cross my mind to reduce my membership and join up with nicheflix to fill the gaps....but nicheflix's minimum is $24.95/month for 3 at a time, which is too much.

8:50 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

The Internet must be killed file

U.S. Concludes 'Cyber Storm' Mock Attacks

The government concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.

Bloggers?

Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events.

The Internet survived, even against fictional abuses against the world's computers on a scale typical for Fox's popular "24" television series. Experts depicted hackers who shut down electricity in 10 states, failures in vital systems for online banking and retail sales, infected discs mistakenly distributed by commercial software companies and critical flaws discovered in core Internet technology. [my emphasis]

"Activist" bloggers? "Rantings and musings" that threaten American civiization?

What?

Clearly certain privileged factions within the government are once again experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs...

8:45 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

DVD Talk review of Shinya Tsukamoto's Vital, just out on disc

I'm too tired to write about it, but it kicks nearly as much ass as A Snake of June, and few directors are making movies as bracing and beautiful as Tsukamoto.

10:47 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, February 05, 2006

I too wondered when Hollywood would catch up...

Online movie reviews replacing traditional movie review media

10:21 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Mike Ryan's playlist for the launch party of J G Ballard's Conversations last September

I know a number of these pieces and they feel right on.

On the other hand, so much of the "haunted" music I listen to seems Ballardian to me too.

Gravenhurst's new album, Tod Dockstader's Aerial series, and the post piano 2 remixes for example, though I could go on indefinitely.

And the cinema I'm drawn to as well; I can see Pen-ek Ratanaruang or Shinji Aoyama or Akihiko Shiota doing a movie of, say, several of the Vermilion Sands stories, in a heartbeat.

9:44 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

slant magazine review of Peter Rosen's new doc on Modern Art tastemaker/mogul Henry Geldzahler

9:25 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

"The most likely candidate for dark matter material is the so-called weakly interacting massive particle, or Wimp"

Astronomers have for the first time put some real numbers on the physical characteristics of dark matter

It's probably just the frame of mind that I'm in -- for all I know this is the discovery of the century -- but something about this article just makes me giggle uncontrollably.

I do have to say I know how it feels to be a weakly interacting massive particle.

And I'm not proud of it....

9:16 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

For the way-too-serious film students out there (like me):

DVD Beaver's Top Ten DVDs of 2005 from their listserv and noted film jounalists like Jonathan Rosenbaum & Acquarello

That's from ANY region, mind you -- many of these are not Region 1, meaning you would need a region-free player to view them, and more bucks to buy them. Or in some cases a nicheflix membership.

9:54 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

A movie some consider the best silent film ever made, and surely one of the best films of any type, period, Murnau's Sunrise, is on TCM tonight, 8PM ET

It's available on DVD, but only as part of a 4 movie box from Fox (in North America that is -- see the DVD Beaver comparison of this edition with 2 Eureka editions here).

I'll be seeing it for the first time.

Also from the TCM site: news of the publication of Hollywood secretary Valeria Belletti's private letters depicting life in early Hollywood's Halls of Power, and obits for Chris Penn and Anthony Franciosa.

And an interview with President of the Film Noir Foundation Eddie Muller, who just hosted the Film Noir 4 Festival in San Francisco -- with whom I share enthusiasm for The Breaking Point, the version of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not much closer to the book than the Bogart/Bacall vehicle, starring John Garfield & Patricia Neal. It's still not out on disc.

9:20 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Some good music links

Sonorama (streaming edge, old school)

textura interview: Douglas Benford (si-cut.db)

Table of the Elements site finally up (kind of); Leif Inge's 9 Beet Stretch DVD is listed but not available yet, nor is the 3CD/5LP set of John Cale's early experimental music. Much classic minimalism here.

Apparent announcement of an authorized bio of Brian Eno at amazon/uk -- due summer 02007 [enoweb].

Mr Magoo to musique concrete to recombining shortwave transmissions: Tod Dockstader's homepage. Dockstader started out as a special effects specialist and sound engineer, then began experimenting with musique concrete in the 60s. A lack of academic credentials prevented access to equipment he needed, so he spent years doing educational films. He "retired" in 1990 and began working with computers, remixing shortwave radio transmissions and releasing the results on sub rosa as Aerial vols. 1-3 (the third volume is yet to be released).

As an 11 year old, I visited Expo 67 with my family in Montreal and heard his work for the first time (aside from Mr Magoo) at the Air Canada pavilion, on which he was an "audio-visual designer".

What I've heard of Aerial 1 I like a lot.

You can hear samples of his work here.

10:55 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, February 03, 2006

Yesterday was the Birthday of the Hindu Goddess of Wisdom, Saraswati so if you wore yellow or signed up for a course, perhaps you had a past life in India...

Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom, art and music is the daughter of Lord Shiva and Goddess Durga. It is believed that goddess Saraswati endows human beings with the powers of speech, wisdom and learning. She has four hands representing four aspects of human personality in learning: mind, intellect, alertness and ego. She has sacred scriptures in one hand and a lotus — the symbol of true knowledge — in the second. With her other two hands she plays the music of love and life on a string instrument called the veena. She is dressed in white — the symbol of purity — and rides on a white swan that symbolises Sattwa Guna or purity and discrimination. Saraswati is also a prominent figure in Buddhist iconography — the consort of Manjushri.

I think I could use more wisdom and beauty in my life come to think of it...

8:03 AM - [Link] - Comments ()