My first shooting test: An abandoned prison near my home. I really wanted to jump the fence and go inside until a security guard spotted me snapping photos and suspiciously mulling about.
9/23/07
New Nikon D40 - Trip to Prison
I purchased a digital SLR about a month ago, but haven't actually had a chance to take it outside until this weekend.
My first shooting test: An abandoned prison near my home. I really wanted to jump the fence and go inside until a security guard spotted me snapping photos and suspiciously mulling about.
My first shooting test: An abandoned prison near my home. I really wanted to jump the fence and go inside until a security guard spotted me snapping photos and suspiciously mulling about.
Film Update
Velvet Goldmine - 1998Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Christian Bale, and Ewan McGregor in what is essentially a 124-min Glam Rock Music video detailing the rise and fall of David Bow... errrr Brian Slade. Captivating evocation of the period.
IMDB
SCUM - 1979British Juvie is one rough ticket. These kids aren't acting.
IMDB
23 "Nichts ist so wie es scheint" - 1998
German Hacker/Espionage film with several references to Robert Anton Wilson's book Illuminatus (and even a guest appearance!) I read the book about a year ago- quite tickled to see its use in cinema.
Although far from perfect, 23 has a level of sophistication that makes Hackers look like it was scripted by someone that doesn't know the difference between a backslash and its opposite. The story is based on true events.
IMDB
Transformers - 2007Occasionally I'll see a mega-budget Hollywood "blockbuster" just to remind myself of how shallow, repetitive and profit-driven the American film industry is.
In this case I was pleasantly surprised- what a fun movie. Cleverly scripted and excellent CG action make for a damn entertaining experience.
IMDB
9/11/07
Quick Update Part 2..
Time for another quick update (lacking time + energy today)--
The Singing Detective (BBC TV) - 1986
I'm so glad I stumbled across this series. Most of the time I've got the typical filmsnob frown when it comes to the merits of television, but this one is completely different. It's like a 415min epic film (yes- I watched most of it in 1 sitting.. just like I spent an entire weekend once watching all of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz!) The Singing Detective is extraordinarily well written; full of dry, witty humor and the typical noir-ish love of quick snappy dialog. Surreal flourishes abound and the plot interchangeably weaves between present + future, fact + fiction with effortless ease. Often these very boundaries become blurred, just as the mind of Phillip Marlow is blurred in his bed-ridden state. The music is also fantastic- mostly songs from the 30s and 40s full of wonderfully subtle lyricism.
IMDB
Pasolini prossimo nostro (Pasolini next to us) - 2006
This documentary is mostly composed of audio interviews and still photos from the filming of one of the most controversial films in cinematic history - Salò or the 120 days of Sodom. Not only does it provide insight into the purpose behind Salò and his own Marxist critique of modernity, but it also contains some of his last recorded thoughts before his brutal murder shortly after he completed its filming.
As an aside, Pasolini is one of my favorite directors, period. I hope to write a bit about his work in the future, when time permits.
IMDB
Cross of Iron - Sam Peckinpah - 1977
Often considered a minor work in Peckinpah's oeuvre-- I'd tend to agree. Unconventional (hasty?) editing along with the director's trademark slow-motion scenes of balletic violence played out on the German side of the Eastern front. Throw in a nonconformist, grizzled veteran hero and a careerist commanding officer as his arch-rival and you've got this film in a nutshell.
IMDB
The Singing Detective (BBC TV) - 1986I'm so glad I stumbled across this series. Most of the time I've got the typical filmsnob frown when it comes to the merits of television, but this one is completely different. It's like a 415min epic film (yes- I watched most of it in 1 sitting.. just like I spent an entire weekend once watching all of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz!) The Singing Detective is extraordinarily well written; full of dry, witty humor and the typical noir-ish love of quick snappy dialog. Surreal flourishes abound and the plot interchangeably weaves between present + future, fact + fiction with effortless ease. Often these very boundaries become blurred, just as the mind of Phillip Marlow is blurred in his bed-ridden state. The music is also fantastic- mostly songs from the 30s and 40s full of wonderfully subtle lyricism.
IMDB
Pasolini prossimo nostro (Pasolini next to us) - 2006This documentary is mostly composed of audio interviews and still photos from the filming of one of the most controversial films in cinematic history - Salò or the 120 days of Sodom. Not only does it provide insight into the purpose behind Salò and his own Marxist critique of modernity, but it also contains some of his last recorded thoughts before his brutal murder shortly after he completed its filming.
As an aside, Pasolini is one of my favorite directors, period. I hope to write a bit about his work in the future, when time permits.
IMDB
Cross of Iron - Sam Peckinpah - 1977Often considered a minor work in Peckinpah's oeuvre-- I'd tend to agree. Unconventional (hasty?) editing along with the director's trademark slow-motion scenes of balletic violence played out on the German side of the Eastern front. Throw in a nonconformist, grizzled veteran hero and a careerist commanding officer as his arch-rival and you've got this film in a nutshell.
IMDB
9/4/07
Quick Update
The following films were viewed in the past week, only time for quick impressions today.
Short Night of the Glass Dolls - 1971
An early giallo set in stunning Prague with soundtrack by Ennio Morricone.
Sadly dubbed in English, though a feast for the eyes. Plot can be described as Sunset Boulevard meets Eyes Wide Shut. IMDB
Sex and Fury - 1973
Classic "Pink" revenge flick. Mostly unimpressive in terms of both sex and violence. Lady Snowblood does it far more stylishly and actually manages to be sexier without nude swordsmanship.
IMDB
The Baby Of Macon - Peter Greenaway - 1993
I've been looking out for a chance to see this for years. A true aesthetic experience from beginning to end. Elaborate, bombastic set design. Tear-inducingly beautiful medieval music. Haltingly gorgeous framings captured by Sascha Vierny's lens. Here Greenaway completely lives up to his reputation as a true cinematic stylist. Passion, chaos, and brutality in all of its wonderful Baroque excess.
IMDB
Vernon, Florida - 1982
Errol Morris' early documentary on the strange inhabitants of a rural 1-stoplight town is alternately hilarious and strangely depressing.
These people seem to be leading full, meaningful lives in the blissful ignorance of their own constructed reality. Are we any different?
IMDB
Short Night of the Glass Dolls - 1971An early giallo set in stunning Prague with soundtrack by Ennio Morricone.
Sadly dubbed in English, though a feast for the eyes. Plot can be described as Sunset Boulevard meets Eyes Wide Shut. IMDB
Sex and Fury - 1973Classic "Pink" revenge flick. Mostly unimpressive in terms of both sex and violence. Lady Snowblood does it far more stylishly and actually manages to be sexier without nude swordsmanship.
IMDB
The Baby Of Macon - Peter Greenaway - 1993I've been looking out for a chance to see this for years. A true aesthetic experience from beginning to end. Elaborate, bombastic set design. Tear-inducingly beautiful medieval music. Haltingly gorgeous framings captured by Sascha Vierny's lens. Here Greenaway completely lives up to his reputation as a true cinematic stylist. Passion, chaos, and brutality in all of its wonderful Baroque excess.
IMDB
Vernon, Florida - 1982Errol Morris' early documentary on the strange inhabitants of a rural 1-stoplight town is alternately hilarious and strangely depressing.
These people seem to be leading full, meaningful lives in the blissful ignorance of their own constructed reality. Are we any different?
IMDB
9/1/07
Infinite Jest Excerpts
I recently finished David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" and made a few markups along the way.
The book itself is tremendous, both in size and in quality. I'll read it at least once more in my life.
Self-Transcendence:
The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.
Anhedonia:
Some psychiatric patients — plus a certain percentage of people who've gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul's core systems — these persons know firsthand that there's more than one kind of so-called 'depression.' One kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia or simple melancholy. It's a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It's a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it's not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and . .. well, depressing. Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy — happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love — are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et ah, but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.
Wisdom of the Moms:
'My point here is that certain types of persons are terrified even to poke a big toe into genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to get angry. This means they are afraid to live. They are imprisoned in something, I think. Frozen inside, emotionally. Why is this. No one knows, Love-o. It's sometimes called "suppression," ' with the fingers out to the sides again. 'Dolores believes it derives from childhood trauma, but I suspect not always. There may be some persons who are born imprisoned. The irony, of course, being that the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness's expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful...
...'People, then, who are sad, but who can't let themselves feel sad, or ex¬press it, the sadness, I'm trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who's sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she'd so very carefully repaired after the last incident.'
What is the Infinite Jest? A Hint:
The wraith feels along his long jaw and says he spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse. To concoct something the gifted boy couldn't simply master and move on from to a new plateau. Something the boy would love enough to induce him to open his mouth and come out — even if it was only to ask for more. Games hadn't done it, professionals hadn't done it, impersonation of professionals hadn't done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solipsism, an-hedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him 'out of himself,' as they say. The womb could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard. A life-long dream. The scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was: to entertain.
The Plunge:
It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give one¬self away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way. Modern German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions than is its mongrel cousin. The orig¬inal sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one's life, plunge in. I had researched this.
The book itself is tremendous, both in size and in quality. I'll read it at least once more in my life.
Self-Transcendence:
The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.
Anhedonia:
Some psychiatric patients — plus a certain percentage of people who've gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul's core systems — these persons know firsthand that there's more than one kind of so-called 'depression.' One kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia or simple melancholy. It's a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It's a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it's not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and . .. well, depressing. Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy — happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love — are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et ah, but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.
Wisdom of the Moms:
'My point here is that certain types of persons are terrified even to poke a big toe into genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to get angry. This means they are afraid to live. They are imprisoned in something, I think. Frozen inside, emotionally. Why is this. No one knows, Love-o. It's sometimes called "suppression," ' with the fingers out to the sides again. 'Dolores believes it derives from childhood trauma, but I suspect not always. There may be some persons who are born imprisoned. The irony, of course, being that the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness's expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful...
...'People, then, who are sad, but who can't let themselves feel sad, or ex¬press it, the sadness, I'm trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who's sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she'd so very carefully repaired after the last incident.'
What is the Infinite Jest? A Hint:
The wraith feels along his long jaw and says he spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse. To concoct something the gifted boy couldn't simply master and move on from to a new plateau. Something the boy would love enough to induce him to open his mouth and come out — even if it was only to ask for more. Games hadn't done it, professionals hadn't done it, impersonation of professionals hadn't done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solipsism, an-hedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him 'out of himself,' as they say. The womb could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard. A life-long dream. The scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was: to entertain.
The Plunge:
It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give one¬self away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way. Modern German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions than is its mongrel cousin. The orig¬inal sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one's life, plunge in. I had researched this.
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