We’ve just received some really exciting news. “The Library of Burned Books” has been nominated for a Student Academy Award. Of the nine films in the foreign section, three will win awards of some kind. The judging is due to happen around 13th May, so we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed until then! More updates as they come.
Check the press release here.
After a second overquota problem from Portland, I’ve decided to cut my losses and change web hosts. I now have a ridiculous amount of webspace, and bandwidth limits I’m in no danger of exceeding.
And it’s a lovely sunny day in California. T-shirt weather already. Here’s a view from our balcony.
…than curse the darkness.
Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International, died on Friday evening.
Rev. Rehash on www.rehashinate.com has a little banner in support of two Iranian bloggers whose government has denied their right to freedom of expression and detained them without trial. Reading the story and doing a little research led me – as these things often do – to investigating the death penalty. Specifically, which countries have abolished the death penalty and when they did it.
The top five makes surprising reading. I never knew that Venezuela and Costa Rica were so progressive.
Hunter S. Thompson shot himself to death last night. Was it suicide? Was it a joke? Was it the drugs? Was it an accident? Who knows?
But looking at this picture it’s hard to be surprised by the method of self-erasure he chose.
I’ve been kind-of a fan for years, ever since I saw them in support of Radiohead in Oxford, but recently I’ve been getting more into Sigur Rós. Yes, yes, I know I’ve come to them fairly late, but I’ve not been buying quite as many CDs for the last couple of years and it’s not as if they get any airplay on US radio.
No, the reason I’m getting into them quite so much besides Jonsi’s voice, the bowed guitar, the lush arrangements and haunting melodies, is because they have a very sensible website. Rather against the norm, it’s extremely informative, doesn’t stream music at you unbidden and, best of all, offers a plethora of free high-quality mp3s for you to download. It’s enough to pique my interest, and it’s in keeping with the band’s ethos that they treat their fans as real human beings rather than cashcows.
I bought ágætis byrjun and thanks to the website I know how to pronounce it too. I expect I’ll be getting hold of () next. Being able to get hold of tunes for free has – shock – made me more likely to buy the band’s music. Big record companies are so not rock’n’roll. If they were they’d know the best business model is the heroin dealer’s: the first couple of fixes are free – after that you pay.
While I’m on the subject of music downloading, the restrictions programmed into files bought from iTunes, Napster, etc. make buying from them a real rip-off. Thankfully there are some sites that sell downloadable music without the DRM. One of them is run by Warp records and through it you can buy music from a cool (if small) selection of labels – including Ninja Tune. Oh yes. It’s called Bleep.
It’s not as good as having a CD with liner notes, but it is cheaper.
Finally, what could be more intriguing than a stone marimba made by a man in a hobbit hole? The story of a man who makes stone marimbas in hobbit holes badly translated from German, perhaps?
Picture this:
Sexy all-American girl (white skin, blonde hair, wide mouth) sitting astride a supersized bucking bronco machine, holding supersized burger. A bluesy rawk riff chugs and stomps in the background. The bronco bucks in gelatinous slo-mo. The girl sways atop, one hand in the air, the other still wrapped around the burger. Burger gets bitten, swallowed. Creamy oesophagus. Close-up of denim clad rump. Finally the girl, looking sultry to camera, pokes tongue from between glistening lips to lick grease from her fingers. Fade to black. Caption: "Eat right. Exercise more."
I wish I’d made up this cretinous conflation of bad food, bad music, patriotic schmaltz and cheap sexpolitation, but it was just on the telly. Another reason I don’t like the Superbowl, besides the fact that the sport itself is MONUMENTALLY boring. And of course, it’s being shown on "Faahx" this year so the opening ceremony was full of war veterans and a choir of wholesome young things in uniform. No boobs this year. No siree. We’re going to keep this thing wholesome.
This photo, from Norwich’s 3-2 victory over West Brom (only our third win this season) struck me as being very strange indeed. I love the way photography can make everyday life look utterly alien.
Welcome back, everyone! After about three weeks of downtime I’m able to post again. Bad news is, Portland have completely erased the contents of my website. And while Blogger (the thing which keeps everything organised) maintains an archive of all the text somewhere else, it does not do the same for the pictures. All the graphics are gone, gone, gone. Many of them will remain so because my backups are all over the place. Some stuff was on my Acorn back in Worcester, some stuff was on Courtney’s Dell laptop which got a new hard drive, and less essential stuff never got backed up at all.
Hopefully the bare bones look won’t last for long.
Vertigo (1958) is a film about a man who attempts to turn the clock back in pursuit of an image of a woman he loves. The Madeline he loves is not the Madeline who is Elster’s wife. Nor is she Judy, the woman who has been paid by Elster to act as his wife. The Madeline Scotty has fallen in love with is a fiction.
When he thinks she is dead he breaks down. When he recovers he sees Judy on the street. As he attempts to make her back into Madeline he is attempting to return to an impossible past. At the moment his vision is fully realised it is snatched away from him. Judy plummets to her death just as Madeline did before her.
Now, compare to La Jetée (1962). The protagonist of La Jetée lives in a post-apocalyptic Paris. He is sent into the past by evil experimenters. He is a better candidate for time travel than others because his memory is strongly marked by an image of his past, the image of a woman. He travels backwards in time and finds this woman. He makes several more trips back in time, and each time he meets her. They become friends, they fall in love.
Finally the experimenters are satisfied he can cope with being sent to whichever point in time they choose. He is sent into the future to bring back a power plant which will save the human race. Once he has fulfilled this task he is returned to his prison cell. The virtuous people of the future come to him in his cell and offer to accept him as one of their own. He declines. He doesn’t want to live in the future. He wants to return to the past and the woman he loves. They oblige. He is returned to the moment he remembers so vividly. He has achieved his return to an impossible past, and at the moment of its consummation it is snatched away from him, just like it is taken from Scotty.
Aside from these parallels in the storyline there are visual clues. The hairstyle of the woman in La Jetée is sometimes the same as Madeline’s in Vertigo, but most importantly, there is a brief scene in La Jetée where the man points to a point beyond a sequioa tree stump to show the woman where in time he comes from. The shot of their hands is very similar to Judy/Madeline’s in Vertigo.
Marker drops clues in Sans Soleil and on his CD-ROM Immemory. From the script of Sans Soleil:
The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared had disappeared itself; concrete had replaced it, at the corner of Eddy and Gough. On the other hand the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods. On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines that measured the age of the tree and said, “Here I was born… and here I died.â€
He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted. The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree, outside of time.
And now, writing about how San Francisco has changed since Vertigo was made in Immemory:
The Redwood round is still at the entry to Muir Woods on the other side of the bay, it has had more luck than its sister at the Jardin des Plantes, now relegated to a basement. (Vertigo could almost be shot in the same decors today, unlike its remake in Paris).
Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys is a remake of La Jetée, but that doesn’t mean it’s a re-remake of Vertigo. What Marker took from Hitchcock was the central relationship between the man and the woman and its exploration of the workings of memory and desire. What Gilliam took from Marker was the idea of sending people backwards and forwards in time to save the present. In fact, Gilliam didn’t develop the idea for Twelve Monkeys and he came to direct the film having never seen La Jetée. He watched it later. The screenwriters of Twelve Monkeys, it seems to me, missed the core of La Jetée – or maybe what they wanted to take from the film and make anew simply wasn’t what I think is vitally important about it.
Today, thanks to Courtney’s Mum’s Christmas generosity, I was reunited with one of my favourite films, Chris. Marker’s Sans Soleil. After five viewings and a very bad undergraduate thesis on time, memory and film, I still haven’t puzzled my way through all its layers of meaning, but it’s ever present in my mental film archive. I find myself trying to see places and events through Marker’s lens, to reach his level of understanding. Perhaps by doing so I will solve not just the mysteries of time, but also the movie.
Accompanying Sans Soleil on the DVD is another of Marker’s films, also one of my favourites, La Jetée. In Marker’s words, it is a remake of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (another of my favourites), and it is the movie which was remade as Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys. It is a film about time travel told (almost) entirely in still images. In the liner notes for the DVD, Marker writes that
…it’s rather in order to bring some comfort to young filmmakers in need that I mention these few technical details: the material for La Jetée has been created with a Pentax 24 x 36, and the only "cinema" part (the blinking of the eyes) with an Arriflex 35mm camera, borrowed for one hour. Sans Soleil was entirely shot with a 16mm Beaulieu silent film camera (not one synch take within the whole film) with 100ft reels – 2’44 autonomy! – and a small cassette recorder – not even a Walkman, they didn’t exist yet … No silly boasting here, just the conviction that today, with the advent of computer and small DV camera (unintentional homage to Dziga Vertov), would-be directors need no longer to submit their fate to the unpredictability of producers, or the arthritis of televisions, and that by following their whims or passions, they will perhaps see one day their tinkering elevated to DVD-status by honorable men.
Chris. Marker is one of my heroes.
I have just discovered a site, markertext.com which did not exist last time I looked, which offers a transcription of the narration of Sans Soleil complete with links explaining some of the references. I expect to spend quite some time poring over it. What a fantastic use of the educational possibilities of the internet!
"My personal problem is more specific: how to film the ladies of Bissau? Apparently, the magical function of the eye was working against me there. It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde that I could stare at them again with equality: I see her, she saw me, she knows that I see her, she drops me her glance, but just at an angle where it is still possible to act as though it was not addressed to me, and at the end the real glance, straightforward, that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second, the length of a film frame."
Once I have finished my Vertigo pilgrimage around San Francisco, I have a new destination. In the district of Shinjuku, Tokyo, there is a bar dedicated to La Jetée. When famous filmmakers drop in they draw a picture of a cat on their whisky bottle. Coppola, Scorsese, Wenders and Jarmusch have all paid homage.
The Human Clock is a lovely little project which anyone can contribute to. It displays a different photo of the current time every minute of the day. Many of the photos, which are sent in from all over the world, are charmingly unremarkable. A woman with short cropped hair points at the time written on a piece of paper on her car windscreen. Bored office workers in Virginia arrange pens and coffee cups to read 4:15. Time passes.
Forgive me for quoting George Monbiot again, but:
The US government has so far pledged $350m to the victims of the tsunami, and the UK government £50m ($96m). The US has spent $148 billion on the Iraq war (1) and the UK £6bn ($11.5bn).(2) The war has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a half days’ spending in Iraq. The money the UK has given equates to five and a half days of our involvement in the war.
The rest of his latest article is here. Read it.
I just opened my Christmas present from Frog! Thanks Frog! On the ball, City!
Courtney’s been marking end-of-term Shakespeare exams. She has one student who consistently takes very difficult buzzword theories which s/he doesn’t understand and tries to cram them into essays where they don’t belong. So far the student has tried to use Foucault to argue that King Lear is trapped in a Panopticon, and has invoked Edward Said’s theories on Orientalism to suggest that Caliban, the savage otherworldly son of the witch Sycorax apparently represents arabic culture. A recurring feature in the student’s essays is Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum.
I like simulacra. Here’s a literal simulacrum: it’s a little image of Rasputin in a kitten’s ear, see:
Image "borrowed" from Fortean Times’ Simulacra Corner.
A very cute juxtaposition of the innocent and the debased, I think you’ll agree. Another simulacra is the grilled cheese sandwich that was all over the net about a month ago, and eventually sold on ebay for $28,000. Quite how these instances of illusory resemblance tie into the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra is still a mystery to me. It’s probably still a mystery to Courtney’s student too.
Here is the ingredients list from a carton of Crystal Eggnog:
Milk, nonfat milk, nonfat milk solids, cream, high fructose corn syrup, egg yolks, sugar, corn syrup, nutmeg, natural and artificial flavour, disodium phosphate, annatto extract (colour), mono and diglycerides, turmeric (colour), whey, stabiliser (guar gum, carrageenan).
Imagine a drink with a consistency and flavour halfway between cream and custard. Add a hint of nutmeg and you’re just about there. If you drink it in America it’ll be chock full of horrible high fructose corn syrup rather than glucose, which is slightly more expensive and much better for you.
All hail the spirit of free enterprise!
I used to think that Absinthe was a pretty deadly drink – Baudelaire (and other artistically inclined Frenchies) destroyed themselves with it for years until the French authorities banned it. But I can’t help thinking that Baudelaire’s decline would have been much faster had he become hooked on everclear. Banned in the UK and several US states, it’s a very highly potent grain alcohol, similar to vodka but much, much stronger. The average bottle of Everclear is 95% proof.
Last night we had drinks with a couple Courtney recently became friends with. As we all know, drinks with me is rarely just a quick little snifter and home early to bed. We hit it pretty heavy. After a good number of empty beer bottles had been racked up our host nipped to the kitchen and rummaged in the freezer. “Have you ever had this?” he asked, holding up a bottle of Absolut. “Yes, of course” I replied. “No, this,” he said, holding up what was in his other hand, a bottle of Everclear.
I was sensible, or so I thought, and took only a couple of sips. It burnt like the first time I drank whisky. It felt like it was taking the enamel off my teeth and bleaching my guts, but other than that I manifested no ill effects. Not immediately, anyway.
I woke up at one this afternoon with a distinctly non-beer hangover. At about four I ate some granola and threw it back up. I slept awhile and then I had an omelette. It just about stayed down. It’s now twelve in the morning and I still feel like a pig shat in my head. Normally my hangovers recede midway through the afternoon and leave in their place an intense craving for fry-ups and pizzas. Not so this one; it has cruelly robbed me of my appetite.
Having undergone this important research, I feel it is my duty to warn you, dear readers, of the dangers of this noxious drink. Even if someone has a gun to your head, decline. A bullet would be less painful.
Of course, after I’d drunk my two sips my host told me what he uses it for when he’s not springing it on unsuspecting guests.
“Yeah, it’s really good for cleaning things.”
Actually, I think we do have Everclear in the UK, but not by that name. We call it methylated spirit. Excuse me, I have an overwhelming urge to retch.
Next time I find myself in Edinburgh I’m going to check out the Pornaoke Lounge! Ooooh yeeeesss!
Working in a coffee shop isn’t too bad. I get to eat and drink almost anything there for free. In the run up to Christmas we’ve been serving eggnog lattes. These are alright, but nowhere near as good as what I invented today.
The Festive Vanilla Nogshake
You will need:
3 big scoops or 0.6lbs or 270g of ice cream
1 cup or 240 ml of eggnog
50ml or a double shot of brandy
Throw ingredients into blender and pulse for 20-30 seconds; slightly longer than a normal milkshake because eggnog is so darned thick. Pour into a pint glass and top with whipped cream and a sprinkling of nutmeg, if you so desire. Suck through a straw until you can suck no more.
Make sure you have a friend on hand to help you finish it off. It’s very, very rich.
Variations: Chocolate ice cream gives and even richer flavour. Mint Choc Chip ice cream is wrong.
Dave has a weblog. It’s here. I’d have noted this phenomenon earlier, had I been paying attention to anything at all in the last couple of weeks/months.
Dave is remarkably likeable. Even I like him.
I returned to the empty apartment after my morning shift to find it dim and empty. A small black box sat in the corner of the kitchen. Leads trailed from it into the wall. There were vents along the top, a row of five lights on one side and a switch on the back. Where had this mysterious box come from? I opened a beer and sat staring at the box. In its presence time seemed distorted, sucked in and compressed. I stared and drank.
A cat wailed in the parking lot below. I took a slug from the beer and reached towards the box to flick its switch. It offered little resistance. There was a sudden flash like the return of a thousand distant memories and a sound which can only be transcribed as “fo’shizzle!” I was transported to a land of burning phosphor. I heard languages and music of many nations. I saw footballers punching the air, armies marching, face after face after face. I felt the presence of all the people I’d ever known edging inches closer.
For ever, it seemed, I whirled in distraction, watching the pictures, hearing the soundbytes, sucking it in greedily like an endless milkshake. And all of a sudden I was sated. In the blink of an eye I was back in the kitchen with an empty beer bottle in my hand? Where had I been? Would I ever go back there again? I hoped so.
We got broadband internet, DSL, call it what you will. It’s here, it’s turned on, and I’m connected again. Hurrah!
This completely boggles my mind. When I moved over to this side of the pond I thought long and hard about what to do with my mobile. It doesn’t work in the US, but it’s still dead handy when I’m back in the UK. Obviously, I don’t want to be paying twenty quid a month for something I’m not going to use for eleven months of the year, so I changed my service plan to one where there’s no line rental and you’re simply billed for the calls you make.
This worked fine, up until last month. Dad told me I had a bill for about three quid. This didn’t make sense. I’ve got the phone and it’s not been connected to the Orange network for a few months. I’m not paying insurance on it. What was this charge?
Orange think it’s in your best interests (and theirs) to pay your monthly bill by direct debit. In fact they’re so keen for you to do this that they charge you three quid a month on top of your bill if you don’t. My monthly bill is £0.00. So, to avoid paying the fee, I now need to ring my UK bank and ask them to set up a direct debit to pay Orange £0.00 per month, which is patently stupid – even more stupid than this, this, and this. Okay, maybe not the last one.
Oh, and who actually eats the back of a chicken? What does it matter if the back gets soggy?
It’s taken fourteen games. I’d almost given up. Funny how quickly things can look up in football. My fingers are already crossed for next week.
