Crystal-Embellished Skull Ring
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After Christmas and The Robber
Radu Muntean"s Tuesday, After Christmas is the director"s fourth feature, the first to see theatrical release (scheduled for the indefinite future) and the fifth sample of the Romanian New Wave that"ll have a chance to be seen by more Americans than just 300 New Yorkers. (This list includes The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective.) Fairly or not, they form a coherent portrait of Romanian society, despite their directors" varying formal agendas. In them, Romania is a land of fluorescent lighting and charmless Soviet‐bloc architecture, populated by the drunk and dispossessed, the obese and weary, built on top of a collapsing infrastructure combining bureaucratic officiousness with minimal health care, where everyone is rude to everyone else for no good reason at all.
As it happens, there"s a late‐breaking shout‐out to 12:08 East of Bucharest in Tuesday, After Christmas. At the NYFF press conference, Muntean said it was nothing more than a tip of the hat to a friend and movie he admires, but there"s more to it than that. By the expectations of Romanian films seen here (fair or not), we"re in a whole new world here socially: conversations are conducted by iPhone, holiday shopping takes place in warmly lit department stores, and cosmetic dental care is available. We know this because Paul (Mimi Branescu) is having an affair with dentist Raluca (Maria Popistasu), who thrives on talk of modifying arches and speaks of overbites (and the weird cheekbones they might bring) in the same grave fashion a normal person would use to speak of a root canal.
Gaspar Noe
Irreversible provocateur Gaspar Noe unleashes another avant-garde assault upon audiences in this deliriously wicked, undeniably daring acid trip through Tokyo"s neon-splattered underworld. After young American stripper Paz de la Huerta"s drug-dealing brother (Nathaniel Brown) is gunned down by cops, the camera takes the p.o.v. of his disembodied spirit as it floats over buildings, through walls, down sewers, and even inside a fallopian tube. If you"re prone to seizures, anxiety, or staying in your comfort zone, might we instead recommend Kings of Pastry?
In New York, I sat down with Noe to discuss the afterlife, bad drug trips he"s had, timeless movies, and why the 17-minute-longer version of his film (originally seen at Cannes) is not a "director"s cut." Also, why oh why did I reference Eat Pray Love to a man who clearly wouldn"t know what I meant?
To listen to the podcast, click here. (13:32)
Podcast Music
INTRO: LFO: "Freak"
OUTRO: Thomas Bangalter: "Rectum"
[Enter the Void opens in limited release today and is playing this week at Fantastic Fest. For more info, please visit the official website.]
A Bright Future Measured in Lumens
When permanent technological changes are predicted to rev from 0 to 60mph in the next five years, it"s best not to hold your breath. With digital projection, things haven"t just progressed but apexed in record time. In 2005, early adopter theaters would tout their brand-new digital projectors as a special attraction. Now, seeing a movie in 35mm in Manhattan-if you want to be a super-purist-requires considerable cunning and advance planning for mainstream films, and may not even be possible. (That goes double for 3D movies: if you don"t want to pay extra and want to watch the flat version, you had better act fast.) The rest of the country hasn"t quite upgraded yet (and the arthouses are even slower), but just wait: the digital revolution, after years of excitable hype, is finally on the ground, with 16,000 screens worldwide (15% and counting, but far more noticeable in metropolitan areas).
For the most part, this is a welcome development since technological process-for once-hasn"t been a bummer fraught with complications. This is the first year digital projection has not just been up to speed, but ahead of the game. If, for example, you were interested in seeing Sherlock Holmes, The Informant! or any other digitally-shot movie released in 2009 by Warner Bros., you"d have been well-advised to make sure your theater was projecting it digitally: their 35mm prints, for whatever reason, have been prone to undesired artifacts (the glossily shot Sherlock Holmes became overly dark and muddy, while The Informant! lapsed into unfortunate video blotchiness). In these cases, film was an active downgrade.
Full circle
When I’ve pondered why some of my rocks are not round the way most of them are, I’ve quickly began to ponder why any of them would be round at all. Why wouldn’t gravity, for example, have distorted the shape of all of them? Sure, they formed in a chemical soup and were effectively “suspended” there as they grew, but doesn’t it seem a bit unlikely that rocks would be free of the influence of gravity? Well, I don’t know enuf about ancient geology to be able to doubt the word of the experts. (Common sense being, after all, the thing that tells you the world is flat.)
So I sit in my comfy chair and ponder my round rocks. There is so much yet to be learned. So much discovery I have yet to make in my 80+ acres. That gives me a warm feeling for the future.
Missouri calendar:
- Watch for lightning bugs on warm evenings.
Electric Light-Cycle Orchestras
To considerable Internet excitement, cues from Daft Punk"s soundtrack to the forthcoming Tron: Legacy were finally unveiled last week for public inspection. [UPDATE: fake leaks?] Out of context, they didn"t necessarily add up to much: it"s not quite the Hans Zimmer Inception drone that has had people geeking out for weeks, but the rising minimalistic motifs-cut off and restarted just as they"re reaching maximal tension, perpetually delaying payoff-confirmed the musical future is way simpler than it was nearly 30 years ago. The cues don"t really "work" without context, although if you turn them up loud enough, even the simple act of making coffee can seem immortally heroic. Despite their vague reserve, they"re totally melodic, a regression from Wendy Carlos" analog-cum-digital score in 1982"s Tron.
The original film"s a blast for the nostalgically inclined, but the Jungian symbolism"s a bore, the visuals wonky (colors were rotoscoped after-the-fact) and the whole thing"s more a time capsule than watchable entertainment. The music is fantastic, however, arguably the culmination of Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos" most intensely productive period. From 1968-82, she basically invented one version of how the future might sound, traveling 400 years through one instrument. 1968"s Switched-On Bach translated (yes!) Bach to the Moog synthesizer and quickly went platinum. For the next 15 years, Carlos would arguably be the highest-profile Moog exponent (not exactly a high-competition position), elevating its status further in public consciousness more than her mentor Vladimir Ussachevsky.
Styrax tonkinensis
UBC Botanical Garden"s collection of Asian Styracaceae includes two species of Rehderodendron, three of Sinojackia, one Melliodendron, three Pterostyrax, one Halesia and eight species of Styrax, including this one.
From what we"ve seen, virtually all Styrax species are attractive plants and certainly worth growing for their small stature, fragrant, star-shaped flowers and hanging, nut-like drupes; however, some of the more obscure, recently collected taxa are problematic in terms of their identification. This has been helped enormously with the on-line availability of the Flora of China keys and illustrations, and the suberb new book, New Trees; Recent Introductions to Cultivation by Grimshaw and Bayton (2009), where many recently collected species are described.
This particular plant was grown from seed collected in the Huaping Cathaya Reserve, in northern Guangxi, China by Tom Hudson, plant explorer and manager of the Tregrehan Estate in Cornwall. Styrax tonkinensis is native to mixed forests at between 100 and 2000 metres elevation in southern China and adjacent Indochina. Our plant refuses to flower when it"s supposed to (the printed descriptions all say May to June), waiting instead until the last week of July to open its blooms.
Digital Photos to Create Fine Art Pictures
This way when the weather, health, or just a need to stay home for anything arises, you'll have something to do if some spare time comes your way.
For we fans of digital photography all the bases are covered, indoors and outdoors, so we need never be bored or have to call a halt to our creative efforts.
One of the things I like doing is printing on surfaces that were not intended to be used with an inkjet printer, such as artist's watercolor paper.
But you can take this "mixed media" approach to much higher levels if you're willing to experiment with paints and other artist's materials.
Check out what is being done by professional photographer and fiber artist Wen Redmond and be inspired.
Take a camera with you whenever possible, and look around, you'll find a picture somewhere.
Photo Source:www.citizen.com
Fun With These Digital Photography
We've all cropped photos, added a bit of contrast, adjusted the lightness and darkness, the color, etc. but there are many more tricks and tips you can use to make your pictures truly stand out.
Besides that these tips contain extensive instructions on how to "fix" or repair many of the common problems encountered in digital photographs such as pixilation.
Be sure to give the links that are in this article a good look because they lead to more and more valuable advice.
Get the 10 coolest digital photography tips here..
Take a camera with you whenever possible, and look around, you'll find a picture somewhere.
Photo Source:www.lifehacker.com
US president and the Internet
But as reported here, it gives President Obama the power to shut down the Internet.
Joe Lieberman, primary sponsor of the Bill and chair of the Homeland Security Committee, has defended this extraordinary measure. Lieberman said: "For all of its 'user-friendly' allure, the internet can also be a dangerous place with electronic pipelines that run directly into everything from our personal bank accounts to key infrastructure to government and industrial secrets," he said. "Our economic security, national security and public safety are now all at risk from new kinds of enemies - cyber-warriors, cyber-spies, cyber-terrorists and cyber-criminals."
Of course, if any US president was to pull the switch, it would create economic disaster. Companies and the economy would implode. This is paranoia at its worst. Where is the evidence of any country under attack from cyber-warriors, cyber-spies, cyber-terrorists and cyber-criminals? When has that ever happened?
Alarmingly, this also mirrors plans by the Australian Government to bring in a law that would to require Internet Service Providers to document and save subscriber's web browsing history and keep records of what sites their customers visit online and these browsing histories can be examined by law enforcement agencies if or when requested later on. It would also apply to their emails. It's a subject I have looked at in my Management Line blog.
A clear trend is happening. Governments around the world are cracking down on the Internet. France has moved into Internet censorship and then of course, there are the Chinese. If the US and Australia are moving into this space, how many more can we expect?
Watch this space.
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