September 03, 2008

i am legend

Traveling this and that way; having new conversations with old acquaintances; old conversations with new acquaintances; cold conversations somewhere in between; skimming the surface of sleep, skipping across it like a deranged pebble; that certain crook in the elbow of the year, late beginnings as the months stretch homeward: everything conspires to disorient my spatial reasoning and abstract my perception of time. The recent past turns to legend and the very people and places I visited only yesterday or the day before become primitives in some personal mythology, shadows animated by ancient fire, rumor and myth withdrawn to remote outposts of memory. The details are intimate on a cosmic scale. I've never felt less innocent or been more naïve.

Posted by R. at 05:21 PM | | Comments (0)

August 23, 2008

it almost doesn't matter

When it was just us, it was simple. Do people mean it when they say they don't remember? I mean it when I say I haven't forgotten.

Oh, look: there you are; and there you are; but it's not the same.

Posted by R. at 12:24 AM | | Comments (0)

August 09, 2008

brave new world

These shots of the 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony are (s)lavish and amazing.

Posted by R. at 11:20 PM | | Comments (0)

words to live by

"The only impulse Allen cops to is the one to work, maniacally, as if to stave off death. 'It's a way of coping with the world. You know, in the same way that somebody copes with it by being a stamp collector or a sports addict or a titan of industry or an alcoholic or something. My way of coping with the horrors of existence is to put my nose to the grindstone and work and not look up.'"

Posted by R. at 05:53 PM | | Comments (0)

August 07, 2008

sun king

There are days in the sun: focal-point afternoons, light exploding at right angles around casements, bathing the air in wave-like particles while machines manufacture atmosphere, emitting decibels and cold as fleetly as interiors can allow; and in these hours, after now but before later, I try to remember: what was I like when I was twenty-five? when I was seventeen?

Posted by R. at 05:21 PM | | Comments (0)

August 04, 2008

a face only a mother could have

"When I joke that Botox has created a market for a children's book that ought to be titled Why Does Mommy Look Weird?, she laughs. 'Babies learn facial expressions from their mothers, and if all these women are Botoxed, I wonder if we're going to see a generation of very flat-affect toddlers. You really do need to have expression.'"

Posted by R. at 06:22 PM | | Comments (0)

diablo coding

I don't know much about the Diablo video game franchise (I seem to recall it being popular among a certain contingent of shut-ins during my sophomore year of college; demons, dungeons: boring), but this discussion about the fan outcry over the latest entry's more vibrant aesthetic (versus the ashen tableaux of previous titles), and the trade-offs between atmospheric art direction and playability it highlights, are interesting.

I happen to agree with the lead designer: the grittier approach may have more integrity and present better on a one-off basis, but it's also visually monotonous when you factor in a variable like repetition during the course of the game—to say nothing of questions pertaining to its consistent, reliable execution across a wide variety of hardware configurations and the diminished visibility of interactive elements in murky environments.

Posted by R. at 01:58 PM | | Comments (2)

August 02, 2008

where childlike curiosity is the most adult response

"I am somewhat the opposite of Alan Moore, in that I regard screen adaptations of my work with little more than simple childlike curiosity."

Posted by R. at 01:57 AM | | Comments (0)

July 30, 2008

old dogs and new tales

The first teaser for The Princess and the Frog, Disney's fabled (ahem) return to "traditional" animation is live. I'm reserving judgment until more of the content becomes available, save to say I'm rooting for this project on principle. It's fucking retarded that some people within and without the industry think "2D" animation has been categorically superseded by full-blown CGI. I'm using quotation marks to acknowledge how problematic such distinctions are in the first place, since there's considerable overlap between modern cel and computer-generated features at the production level, and the contrast between the two approaches is best defined aesthetically rather than technologically. Kudos to the comparatively recently installed Pixar brain trust for seeing that.

Posted by R. at 06:39 PM | | Comments (0)

July 24, 2008

even that's too close for comfort

"Yet through the smoky haze of self-aggrandizement and fuzzy memories a few intriguing tidbits slip through. Chong asked Terence Malick to direct the follow-up to Up In Smoke. Malick very diplomatically said that since Chong had written the screenplay he should direct the film himself, which is a polite way of saying 'Are you fucking kidding me? I'm Terrence Malick! Oh God no! No, no, a thousand times no!' I guess Malick acolyte David Gordon Green directing Pineapple Express is as close as we're ever going to get to a Terence Malick-directed Cheech and Chong movie."

Posted by R. at 08:56 PM | | Comments (0)

July 18, 2008

fake it till you make it

"It's easy to deride celebrity perfumes. Writing about his friendship with Robert Redford in The New Yorker, James Salter said that 'when I went into restaurants with Redford, eyes turned to watch as we crossed the room—the glory seems to be yours as well.' But celebrity came with a cost; Salter remembered Redford’s saying of movies: 'My presence in something is enough to give it an aura of artificiality.' If people buy celebrity perfumes, it is precisely because the glory seems to be yours as well. Yet the celebrities don't make the perfumes; professional perfumers do. Celebrity inexorably lends an aura of artificiality, and not just to the celebrity scent; it extends to us as well."

Posted by R. at 02:43 PM | | Comments (0)

July 16, 2008

servo disobedience

Asimov's Third Law of Robotics is observed in the wild ... on Mars. (Okay, not really. But the strenuous anthropomorphism of the linked article's title speaks to our collective yearning for the robots we manufacture to become as kick-ass as the robots that haunt our android dreams.)

Posted by R. at 12:47 AM | | Comments (0)

July 15, 2008

you had me at 'ion drive'

No clue as to its feasibility (probably null-ish) but this suggestion that the International Space Station be boosted to a lunar orbit is, at the very least, intriguing.

Posted by R. at 01:39 PM | | Comments (0)

July 06, 2008

space ghost

There's a beat at the end of the Meet Dave trailer, where the Eddie Murphy robot-spaceship (seriously, who's coming up with this stuff—Steve Urkel?) emits the refrain from "Stayin' Alive" in a high-pitched alien squawk followed by a mechanically abrupt grimace that reminds me of something Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman once wrote about Murphy's similarly radioactive Adventures of Pluto Nash:

"A space-comedy bomb that would hardly be worth mentioning if not for the rictus grin at its center: Eddie Murphy, doing his zomboid impersonation of a Carefree, Spontaneous Comedy Star, an act of such terrifying falseness that it has become the single most joyless image in showbiz."

Those sharp words may have seemed ungenerous back in 2002, but in 2008 they're almost elegiac.

Posted by R. at 07:46 PM | | Comments (0)

June 26, 2008

2002 called

Multimedia messaging on the iPhone, finally? About fucking time, if true. In my current experience, when someone sends me a multimedia message from their philistine phone to my messiah phone, AT&T helpfully lets me know via SMS, supplying a link to a web page where I can view the goddamn picture ... after I log in with a randomly generated username and password ... as long as I have Flash installed ... which of course Mobile Safari does not. Which means I have to wait until I'm near a full-blown computer before I can painstakingly type in the alphanumeric URL, by which time that spontaneous shot of the neighbor's dog doing/eating something charming/revolting is as stale as yesterday's biscuits.

Posted by R. at 03:34 PM | | Comments (0)

controlled spiral

Something about David Fisher's somewhat sky-pie plan for an eighty-story "building in motion" in Dubai, comprised of independently rotating floors, reminds me of William Gibson's descriptions of a post-megaquake Tokyo in the Bridge novels, wherein the city's future-shock skyline is reconstructed at the molecular level by nanotechnology, shimmering skyscrapers literally pulsating biomechanically upward with what the author describes in Idoru as "a streamlined organicism." I would use that phrase to describe what Fisher is reaching for as well.

In all likelihood, given sundry engineering uncertainties about the proposed structure, and various factual inconsistencies in the architect's biography pertaining to his credentials, the sci-fi-worthy project is probably more fiction than science—but it's an intriguing idea.

Posted by R. at 01:45 AM | | Comments (0)

June 15, 2008

keeping it reel

In his review of The Incredible Hulk, Roger Ebert pauses to reflect on what is probably the movie's single most arresting visual—and it has nothing to do with the story or its characters:

"Banner's Brazilian sojourn begins with an astonishing shot: From an aerial viewpoint, we fly higher and higher above one of the hills of Rio, seeing hundreds, thousands, of tiny houses built on top of one another, all clawing for air.

"This is the City of God neighborhood, and as nearly as I could tell, we are looking at the real thing, not CGI. The director lets the shot run on longer than any reasonable requirement of the plot; my bet is, he was as astonished as I was, and let it run because it is so damned amazing."

Whatching that thrillingly vertiginous shot just go on—and on—and on—I was swept up in the when-will-it-end tension of the terrain and found myself reflexively reaching for a phantom TiVo remote whereby to review the footage in the hopes of discerning its hidden tesselations, its artfully concealed digital seams; but no: I imagine it was the most genuine thing in the whole film, more inherently dramatic in its fleeting seconds than the next two hours of CGI wrecks and effects.

Posted by R. at 01:27 PM | | Comments (0)

June 11, 2008

bottom dollar

An entire season of Top Chef shoots in less than three weeks? The way the contestants whinge (and occasionally sob) about missing their homes and families, I somehow always figured the show takes a couple of months to lens. Twenty days isn't even rehab.

Posted by R. at 01:59 PM | | Comments (0)

June 10, 2008

rousing rowling

A transcript of J.K. Rowling's remarks to graduating Harvard students on the occasion of the University's 357th Commencement.

While I've never been able to get into the Harry Potter books, perhaps due to a basic indifference toward most fantasy literature on my part, I've come to appreciate the author herself via various anecdotes, interviews and commentaries over the years. She generally comes across as level-headed and sensible as her work is fanciful and free-spirited.

Posted by R. at 12:13 AM | | Comments (2)

June 09, 2008

ihavetodowhatnow

Apparently the new iPhone will require physical in-store activation. This is a huge retrenchment from the disarmingly simple iTunes-centric activation process Apple pioneered with the original iPhone merely a year ago. It's even a regression from every other cell phone activation I've dealt with over the past decade—during which time I've owned roughly twenty handsets (yeah, I know), all of which have provided the option of activation from home via telephone or the web.

I guess I'll be donning my bolshevik best and waiting in line with the rest of the madding flashmob come July 11th.

Posted by R. at 04:35 PM | | Comments (0)

May 23, 2008

portrait of the author as a human being

There's something deeply gratifying about this account of C.S. Lewis' gracious, respectful attitude toward his young readers during his lifetime, regardless of what one may think of his writing*. Enduring kindness in the face of enormous success is a commendable accomplishment unto itself.

*And what is my attitude toward Lewis' works—chiefly the Narnia Chronicles? Ambivalence, I suppose. I devoured the seven volumes sometime around the age of nine, after my third grade teacher, Mrs. B___, began reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe aloud in class and I became impatient with her piecemeal pace. My innate completism impelled me through the series. I recall being childishly satisfied with, and unquestioning of, the literature at the time, and subsequently forgot most of the details during the following years. I didn't become reacquainted with the stories until Disney and Walden Media unleashed the first overproduced feature adaptation in 2005: which, while handsomely mounted, was also pretty corny in its Christmassy religiosity—a trait, it transpired, it had inherited directly from its source material.

I haven't caught Prince Caspian yet. I can't say I've much enthusiasm for it, but I suppose I'll have to sit down and watch it at some point—if for no other reason than to satisfy my still extant completism. Old habits die hard.

Posted by R. at 07:52 PM | | Comments (0)

May 13, 2008

somewhere, william gibson's ears are burning

"Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment."

Man, I'd certainly like to think so. In any case, "neural Buddhism" has a nice ring to it.

Posted by R. at 10:55 PM | | Comments (1)

May 06, 2008

me like•e

This impressively detailed and articulated toy WALL•E almost makes me wish I were five years old again and still really into robots in an uncomplicated way.

Posted by R. at 11:15 AM | | Comments (1)

May 01, 2008

self restarter

The Iron Giant begins. (I suppose this could also augur the T-1000, but I prefer to take the optimistic speculative-fictive view.) [via]

Posted by R. at 11:38 AM | | Comments (0)

April 27, 2008

doing lines

"Remember when we thought pinstripes were cool? Remember when we thought Members Only was cool? Man, what we were smoking?"

Posted by R. at 06:02 PM | | Comments (0)

seeing is believing

I find this commercial strangely charming.

Posted by R. at 01:16 PM | | Comments (0)

April 22, 2008

the geek shall inherit the earth

Wired #16.05, May 2008, p.20

It's an interesting suggestion. I don't know that much about actual autism, aside from mild kidding over the years concerning various friends or myself being "autistic" about certain things, or the occasional Aspergerian aroma wafting off the behavior of an acquaintance, but I could certainly foresee a corporate/industrial environment where such spectrum conditions, wherein some skills are lacking but others are markedly enhanced, find specialized applications. It could be argued that those opportunities and applications already exist, albeit not explicitly so labeled—for now.

Posted by R. at 10:40 PM | | Comments (0)

April 20, 2008

ain't that the truth and a kick in the head

"When a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to reestablish. Once the bloom is off the rose—once a social norm is trumped by a market norm—it will rarely return."

Posted by R. at 04:48 PM | | Comments (0)

April 14, 2008

the mountain will come to you

Long overdue: this site now has a unified RSS feed. The various subsections always had their own separate feeds, but now you can just subscribe to a single aggregation. Thanks, Yahoo! Pipes.

Posted by R. at 10:44 PM | | Comments (0)

iibook

Just plain sick.

Posted by R. at 05:24 PM | | Comments (0)

April 01, 2008

joshin' to mars

What pains me about this Google April Fool's wank is that I actually wish it were true.

Posted by R. at 10:21 PM | | Comments (0)

March 28, 2008

noted, dated

(I'm not really compelled/inclined to update STREAM much these days, but SCENE and SOURCE remain current. Just FYI. XYZ PDQ. ETC.)

Posted by R. at 07:43 PM | | Comments (0)

July 01, 2007

barfz

The trailer for Bratz makes me want to have an abortion, and that's not even physically possible.

Posted by R. at 03:21 PM | | Comments (1)

swine and dine

I like those new Trojan when-pigs-fly commercials, even though they sort of give off a creepy Looking for Mr. Goodbar-by-way-of-Jean-Pierre Jeunet vibe.

Posted by R. at 09:40 AM | | Comments (0)

June 29, 2007

isurrender

Yes I love my iPhone and want to merge with it and make cyborg babies.

Posted by R. at 09:09 PM | | Comments (3)

June 25, 2007

still cutting edge

"This is something I think Ridley Scott does better than almost any other director. Whether he's shooting a fantastical movie like Alien (1979), or a realistic one like Black Hawk Down (2001), you always know where you are in the movie's physical space. Blade Runner is unmatched by any other sci-fi film in terms of feeling like you're in an environment you understand."

Posted by R. at 07:49 PM | | Comments (0)

June 21, 2007

heavy flow

"From all appearances, there are only three reasons God produces a Great Flood here: 1. Because it's cute when animals gather two by two (though totally unnecessary, since the flood barely covers the Washington D.C. area). 2. Because he wants to a stop a piece of legislation that threatens to shave off federally protected parks for development purposes. 3. Because yet another upper-middle-class suburban dad needs to spend more time with his family."

Well, that pretty much answers my one question about Evan Almighty: namely, how the filmmakers worked around that whole pesky "Old Testament god wiping out most of humanity for having gay sex and stuff" issue. Not exactly the stuff of feel-good comedy.

Posted by R. at 09:32 PM | | Comments (0)

crappily ever after

John Lasseter (reportedly) finally puts the kibosh on Disney's direct-to-video sequel sausage factory.

Posted by R. at 01:41 PM | | Comments (0)

ican'twait

"To help pass the waiting time, I drew some pictures of me and my future iPhone!!!"

Posted by R. at 11:40 AM | | Comments (1)

much multitouch

"One day, your computer will be a big-ass table."

Posted by R. at 11:34 AM | | Comments (0)

June 20, 2007

but that's the only reason i went to penn

"A quarter-century ago, U.S. Snooze, as it was once known, devised a brilliant marketing strategy to escape its own somnolent reputation as the reading matter of choice in mid-western dental waiting rooms: it would become the premier ranker of the reputations of the nation's colleges and universities." Oh snap!

Posted by R. at 10:30 PM | | Comments (0)

istillwantone

Heh.

Posted by R. at 10:17 PM | | Comments (1)

if you love something, chuck it

This wonderful terrible squirrel catapult reminds me of the similarly kinetic flying death squirrel from this Vault commercial.

Posted by R. at 08:50 PM | | Comments (0)

June 19, 2007

summer's eve

"I think the part I remember most was that when she walked into the room, this burst of 'clean' just filled the room. It wasn't perfume or shampoo or a scented lotion. It was just 'clean.' Well-groomed, I guess."

That's what I like to hear. Especially after reading this.

Posted by R. at 01:38 AM | | Comments (0)

June 16, 2007

state of the art

The art of the tease.

Posted by R. at 06:40 PM | | Comments (0)

June 14, 2007

i'm neurotic

"Most people are surprisingly bad at spotting fake smiles. One possible explanation for this is that it may be easier for people to get along if they don't always know what others are really feeling."

I identified 16 of the 20 smiles correctly. Hmm.

Posted by R. at 10:56 AM | | Comments (0)

June 13, 2007

everything grates

In my college days I once made fun of this girl named K____ for being the type of person who always thought earnestly about her response when asked how she was doing, and answered honestly—as opposed to a flippant, insincere Tony-the-Tiger-rific "everything's great!"

Turns out, in the intervening years, I've become one of those earnest, honest answerers as well. I don't think people always know what to do with that.

Posted by R. at 10:50 PM | | Comments (0)

June 10, 2007

adorable! inedible!

Entertainment Weekly #939, June 15, 2007, p.71

Posted by R. at 11:59 AM | | Comments (0)

May 21, 2007

baby patrol-iam

Putting tuneful toon tots behind the wheel to shill gasoline sends all sorts of wrong messages but it's also frickin' adorable.

Posted by R. at 11:40 AM | | Comments (0)

May 16, 2007

rhett butt-pirate

"Concerned that the estate’s lawyers would impinge on his authorial freedom, Mr. Conroy joked publicly that he would open his sequel with this line: 'After they made love, Rhett turned to Ashley Wilkes and said, "Ashley, have I ever told you that my grandmother was black?"'"

Posted by R. at 11:35 AM | | Comments (0)

April 04, 2007

look away, baby

"Apparently when team Jolie-Pitt's pride is in the house other parents aren't allowed to take pics of their kids' birthday parties. 'Parents are instructed not to look at Angelina,' one source says."

Posted by R. at 06:46 PM | | Comments (0)

April 03, 2007

sneeze the day

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared.... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

Posted by R. at 12:58 PM | | Comments (0)

April 02, 2007

only of the week?

Heh.

Posted by R. at 08:52 AM | | Comments (0)

March 27, 2007

i'm a believer

"You can't rush creativity. Well, you can, but then you get broadcast television."

Posted by R. at 01:31 PM | | Comments (0)

March 24, 2007

when number one smells like number two

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the number one movie at the box office this weekend? Between this and 300 and Wild Hogs and Norbit, I haven't the f