==pla|\|ing lakes==

Friday, February 29, 2008

an essay on the art of combining sound and image from a master of applying sound to film, walter murch

So we all begin as hearing beings — our four and a half month baptism in a sea of sound must have a profound and everlasting effect on us — but from the moment of birth onward, hearing seems to recede into the background of our consciousness and function more as an accompaniment to what we see. Why this should be, rather than the reverse, is a mystery: why does not the first of our senses to be activated retain a lifelong dominance of all the others?

Something of this same situation marks the relationship between what we see and hear in the cinema. Film sound is rarely appreciated for itself alone but functions largely as an enhancement of the visuals: by means of some mysterious perceptual alchemy, whatever virtues sound brings to film are largely perceived and appreciated by the audience in visual terms. The better the sound, the better the image.

10:26 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

R.I.P. Kon Ichikawa

only recently caught one of his films (The Burmese Harp), but his reputation is justifiably legendary.

He made 88 movies over 60 years, and his last film was released in 2006, when he was 91.

I look forward to seeing more of his work.

10:15 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, February 28, 2008

bill griffith's campaign summery

8:12 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, February 25, 2008

a poem my girlfriend wrote for her mother, who passed away last year on fat tuesday

For Mama

To hear you speak of yourself
one might imagine you were speaking
of someone existing at the lowest resonances
of human beingness
Instead of the Angel
whom you were

You wholly believed yourself
unworthy of even God's acceptance
let alone Love
When in Truth
you were always God's Own
precious jewel
and the radiant Sun
to my child's soul

You were convinced that
you were unloveable, even contemptible

But I knew differently...

I saw you, Mama...

While you were still here with us
I allowed myself the indulgence of my frustration
toward your self-loathing
Wanting so to shake you Free
When you spoke of the ugly witch in the mirror
I'd put on my tough-love hat and scold you
for speaking of someone I so loved
in such a hateful way...

How I wanted, instead,
to envelop you in softest maternal Moonlight
and in hushed, sacred whispers
speak the holy words each child must hear
and Feel to know themselves Adored
those words you never heard
in the wake of your terror and fear and shame

But from so many fruitless tries
I knew you could not have them
from me nor from anyone
That in this life you constantly wrestled
with some dark nameless pointed finger
tangled deep within you
From which you allowed yourself
no escape

And I knew it would be just as it was.

And that there would come this day,
this now,
When all I could do, finally, is
Tell you:
I saw you, Mama.

I swooned in awe
of the tender majesty,
beauty and power
of your Essence
of your Uniqueness.
And when you sang to me,
My heart rose to heaven.

I saw you!
You never hid your splendor from me.
And though you could not
own these truths of yourself
In your honor,
and in both our names,
I will own my own.
And in so doing,
I will fulfill the legacy
your soul left me
I will fill the hollow that pointed finger carved
with Flowers at my inner Altar
And to our next meeting
I will bring the overflowing vessel of
All I was given
by Beholding You
by being shone upon
by the glory of your Love
as my Mama...

Love, Dollie

10:07 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

i think it's interesting that this list of the 50 best hospitals in the US includes none in the northeast save for pennsylvania, which has several

florida has the most i think, and the mayo clinic down in phoenix made the list.

missing for some reason among the criteria is cancer treatment, which is odd.

also in the news, another study which claims prozac and its sister drugs don't work. i know a few people who swear by anti-depressants (i don't remember which ones), but why would a placebo work just as well except for the most severe cases?

8:24 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Saturday, February 23, 2008

R.I.P. Teo Macero

underrated and very significant figure in modern music.

Helping to build Miles Davis albums like “Bitches Brew,” “In a Silent Way” and “Get Up With It,” Mr. Macero (pronounced TEE-oh mah-SEH-roh) used techniques partly inspired by composers like Edgard Varese, who had been using tape-editing and electronic effects to help shape the music. Such techniques were then new to jazz and have largely remained separate from it since. But the electric-jazz albums he helped Davis create — especially “Bitches Brew,” which remains one of the best-selling albums by a jazz artist — have deeper echoes in almost 40 years of experimental pop, like work by Can, Brian Eno and Radiohead.

11:48 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

devo lives

8:57 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

interview with charles hayward of this heat, quiet sun and camberwell now

FACT: Cultural bandwagons aside, were you aware of the the likes of Joy Division and Wire, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and New York No Wave? I feel that both This Heat and Camberwell Now shared a certain amount with these diffferent bands – a kind of desperate anger and energy combined, or even at odds with, with studio/technology (ab)use, a more cerebral Brechtian/modernist use of alienation effects, and a refusal of direct communication (via machinic tape edits and effects, strict time signature changes etc.)

Charles: Yes, as these bands and This Heat started working more, so we got the chance to hear and sometimes meet each other. I had already been interested in Dada and Surrealism since the age of 14, so the name Cabaret Voltaire triggered all sorts of expectations that weren't fulfilled. I'd seen Coum Transmissions at the Oval House, South London maybe 72, 73 at the latest (maybe earlier) they were doing a sort of happening thing around recreations of Duchamp readymades which seemed to miss the point completely; when I heard them six years later in their Throbbing Gristle format they seemed to be missing the point about Burrough's ideas, too. Wire I saw a little after Chairs Missing or was it Pink Flag and they seemed to be conceptually focussed, maybe a little too much for my taste, staying in one zone too much, but nicely stripped down and not telling you how to be, which always seemed to be the TG schtick. Joy Division were a sort of existential boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl and therefore contemplates-his-own-mortality sort-of-thing and never really spoke to me, although I had a flaming row with a This Heat roadie friend who loved them and could see all sorts of similarities with what we were doing.

8:56 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

looks like moscow is a hot spot

A widely-travelled, culturally-attuned, English-speaking, self-motivated entrepreneur, Mazurenko runs what are considered by those in the know to be the city’s two best club nights, Idle Conversation and Thriller. The former started a year ago as a small party in a sleazy basement bar, which quickly established itself as, “a playground for the kids to do debauchery,” recalls Roman. Buoyed by its early success, the party shortly moved to Propaganda, Moscow’s longest-serving underground club. Modelled on musically diverse, fashion and art conscious London nights like Trash and Boombox, Idle Conversation likewise became a meeting point for local creative kids to make friends and thrash about on the dancefloor to an Erol Alkan/Justice-inspired mix of upfront electro, rave and indie-dance mash-ups. Guests like the Filthy Dukes brought international kudos, but the night was, and still is, musically directed by its resident DJ, 23-year-old Dima Ustinov.

8:39 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

despite decades of warnings from environmental groups, the french government ignored the industrial contamination of the rhone until now it has been forced to ban the consumption of fish from the entire length of the france's second longest river

The ban on consuming fish from the Rhone has been extended to other French rivers poisoned by PCBs: in Normandy the popular delicacy of eels from the Seine has been outlawed as well as fish from the Somme. Scientists predict more bans will follow. The Chernobyl comparison by the WWF comes not from the potential number of deaths of humans, but from successive French governments' attitude of ignoring what campaigners call "a ticking timebomb".

8:22 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, February 22, 2008

in local news

our honorable congressman rick renzi was formally accused in a 26 page indictment today of "35 counts includ[ing] charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering, insurance fraud and extortion"

meanwhile, about a thousand feet from where i work this little incident occurred

and in my workplace there was a nasty blow-up between people i work with and am very fond of.

how was your week? enjoy the eclipse?

9:51 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, February 18, 2008

R.I.P. Alain Robbe-Grillet

The world of the Robbe-Grillet novel is anxious and unheroic. There is usually a dark plot, a mystery, an obsessive chase or detective quest, but resolutions are shrouded in ambiguity and the reader is left to piece things together as best he can. The novels are freighted with a sense of trauma which is left unexplained, flickering at the edges of consciousness.

haven't read him yet actually, but i liked La belle captive.

way ahead of his time, i think.

Robbe-Grillet's emphasis on form over content appealed to the Tel Quel group, who wished to reinvent literary history by reinventing its forms. But it led critics to accuse him of having nothing to say.

In the end this may have been because, as Roland Barthes perceived so early on in the author's career, Robbe-Grillet is a visual novelist for whom perception is intrinsically fascinating but fraught with uncertainty.

In the course of his career he collaborated with numerous artists and photographers, amongst them Magritte, Rauschenberg, David Hamilton and Irina Ionesco.

His films contained the same themes as his books: camp eroticism, violence and self-deluding quests through labyrinthine cityscapes.

9:33 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, February 17, 2008

democracy american-style

NY demo primary vote somewhat less than kosher [wayne madsen]

City election officials this week said that their formal review of the results, which will not be completed for weeks, had confirmed some major discrepancies between the vote totals reported publicly — and unofficially — on primary night and the actual tally on hundreds of voting machines across the city.

In the Harlem district, for instance, where the primary night returns suggested a 141 to 0 sweep by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the vote now stands at 261 to 136. In an even more heavily black district in Brooklyn — where the vote on primary night was recorded as 118 to 0 for Mrs. Clinton — she now barely leads, 118 to 116.

"141 to 0" against the first serious black presidential candidate in us history -- in Harlem?

and we're just hearing about it now?

1:04 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

new study says lake mead may be dry in 2021

aside from recreational activities, lake mead is vital to arizona and nevada water supplies.

we get water from local aquifers here in central az, but much of az would be affected.

5:22 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, February 10, 2008

R.I.P. Roy Scheider

For The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, Jaws, Sorcerer, All That Jazz, 2010, and Naked Lunch.

Always liked him.

He started out at my alma mater, Rutgers, though he graduated from Franklin and Marshall.

9:46 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, February 07, 2008

seth macfarlane on the gay stuff in Famliy Guy [pop candy, where i read about chloe's show too]

What inspired Family Guy’s season 4 gay marriage episode “You May Now Kiss the…Uh…Guy Who Receives,” in which Brian’s flamboyant cousin Jasper visits with his Filipino boyfriend?

A couple of years prior I had teamed up to write a pilot with two writers, both of whom were gay. One of them said that when he travels through the Midwest with his partner they have to go through this fucking dog and pony act when they stop at a hotel and the guy behind the counter says, “You want one room or two?” They have this charade where they’ll say to each other, “Is one room OK with you?” “Yeah, I’m cool with that if you are.” “Yeah, no big deal, we’ll just take one.” That was one of many conversations I had with them where I thought to myself, Why is it that Johnny Spaghetti Stain in fucking Georgia can knock a woman up, legally be married to her, and then beat the shit out of her, but these two intelligent, sophisticated writers who have been together for 20 years can’t get married? It’s infuriating and idiotic. I’m incredibly passionate about my support for the gay community and what they’re dealing with at this current point in time. I have arguments with people where I get red in the face, screaming at the top of my lungs.

8:01 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

i follow fashion not at all, but i'm getting a kick out of posting about chloe sevigny's new line, the debut featuring the slits, whom i'm glad to see still in action

more here, here and here.

unhappy camper reaction here.

7:47 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

"I read all three of the morning papers over my eggs and bacon the next morning. Their accounts of the affair came as close to the truth as newspaper stories usually come -- as close as Mars is to Saturn"

today is the 49th anniversary of the publication of raymond chandler's the big sleep, which if you haven't read, you should, if only due to chandler's enormous influence, hilarious prose, and rich descriptions of L.A. in the 30s

I pushed her to one side and put the key in the door and opened it and pushed her in through it. I shut the door again and stood there sniffing. The place was horrible by daylight. The Chinese junk on the walls, the rug, the fussy lamps, the teakwood stuff, the sticky riot of colors, the totem pole, the flagon of ether and laudanum -- all this in the daytime had a stealthy nastiness, like a fag party.

The girl and I stood looking at each other. She tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be bothered. It kept going blank on her. The smile would wash off like water off sand and her pale skin had a harsh granular texture under the stunned and stupid blankness of her eyes. A whitish tongue licked at the corners of her mouth. A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick. I rolled a cigarette in my fingers and pushed some books out of the way and sat on the end of the black desk. I lit my cigarette, puffed a plume of smoke and watched the thumb and tooth act for a while in silence.

10:16 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

new expose American Drug War: The Last White Hope premieres on Showtime next month [god is not an asshole]

6:37 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, February 01, 2008

vintage wack [neurasthenia]

10:54 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Make Sure They Leave [The Pinocchio Theory]

If Bush and Cheney were to declare that they were not going to relinquish the presidency, who would stop them? How would they be able to be stopped?

10:46 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

scary thought

Blair seeks EU presidency

10:37 PM - [Link] - Comments ()