Random Iterations: Sundance and thesixtyone

Author: admin

thesixtyone

All good things must come to an end, such is the case with this year’s Sundance Film Festival. I need to get back to doing other things. So it is with only a little further ado that I say goodbye to this year’s fest.

I had wanted to spend some time on: The Company Men, Wasteland and Freedom Riders (all good), and 3 Backyards (incomprehensible). Hopefully, I’ll get to them later in the year. On a kind note, my personal experience this time around was just absolutely fantastic. They have a new festival director and this may have been the cause, or it might have been a change in the general tone of film, or maybe I’m just getting better at the flick-picking. Almost all of the films I saw this year, documentary and dramatic, were hopeful and forward-looking, rather than the now slightly out-of-vogue 60-minutes style of nasty finger pointing. My wise mother has told me that America was that way (people looking for a cure rather than a cause) during the depression as well.

It began with an unfortunate mix of the first festival weekend (this is always a little crazy), a national snowboarding championship event, and a succession of the first real blizzards of the season. Things got funky.  Then everything opened up.  I’m enjoying Sundance much more now that the economy has slid and the hype (foregoing word should be capitalized, placed in a 30-point font and colored fluorescent pink) has died way-way down. All but one of the films I saw was either entirely sold out or close to it.

I started off with the tweet-seminar which was of greater value than I first gave it credit for, having allowed the concepts to sink in.  I also attended a “3D in film” workshop, which was excellent. It was kind of funny to watch many of the extraordinarily-attractive streaming out of the room when the filmmakers on the dais began discussing physics at length. We are entering an era where funny glasses will be necessary at almost every movie. That isn’t good. Avatar has established a direction, and everyone is going to be following it for a while. Avatar is only a meager beginning to something better and rather awesome when you think about it.

This is the first go-round where I can say that I didn’t see a bad film. A couple of the highlights included: being introduced to the audience (in the re-screening of the classic film Metropolitan) as the person who was sitting in the seat of Roger Ebert when the film was first screened in the early 90’s. Beforehand the director asked me to stand on cue. Everyone turned around, smiling, and then looked confused, thinking: “that isn’t Roger Ebert”.

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Tags: album art, Animal Kingdom, Freedom Riders, Metropolitan, music sites, Sundance 2010, Sundance Film Festival, thesixtyone
February 10th, 2010  |  Posted in 3D, Film, Illustration, Interactive Design, Sundance, javascript  |  No Comments »

Flash and the Ipad: Ensuing Twitastrophe

Author: admin

I need to both: wrap-up Sundance while I can still remember all of  it, and post my Vancouver images from last November. But I’m currently enthralled, although less and less every day, with the above-titled phenomena.  And I mean phenomena in the scientific sense of the term. I think business schools will be studying exactly what happened over the last week-and-a-half  for a long time to come.  My focus has shifted from the merits of Flash, which was the core of the debate, to Twitter, social marketing campaigns and how everything is very different these days.

My personal opinion about what happened is:  Apple, having opposing lines of business: selling gizmos and selling stuff that runs on gizmos, crossed something of a rubicon.  They were faced with either marketing their device with an obvious and important feature missing or giving up the ability to control and monetize all sorts of things that run on the device.

Apple chose a bold and aggressive path.  They targeted Flash as very bad for almost anything (or Adobe as lazy at any rate) and themselves as providers of a forward-looking salve to the badness in having excluded it. Once that sort of argument is made, retreat isn’t likely. None of this is good for Adobe, but I think, in many ways, it has turned out worse for Apple.

Fresh from a Sundance seminar on social-network marketing, I quickly installed my Tweetdeck when I first heard of the missing Flash content. With the search terms Flash and Ipad, I monitored, every now and then, as the tweetstream unfolded. This proceeded and has outlasted any conventional media coverage and, to me, was just incredible in both sheer volume and the varied directions of the content.

The tweets took three general forms:

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Tags: Apple, flash, Ipad, Twitter, web design
February 6th, 2010  |  Posted in Interactive Design, Social Media  |  No Comments »

Flash and the Ipad: The New Middle East

Author: admin

The second thing which just came up last week was the newly interminable issue of Flash vs the Ipad. This rhetorical phenomena has caused me to download tweetdeck and even tweet, if only a morsel or five. Six maybe. Seven. But I intend to put away the tweetdeck as soon as everything dies down. It is moments like these when the twittery is most hyperbolic. I think both sides are a bit full of it on this one.

The current status of the debate, per my little tweetdeck, is: “Flash is terribly buggy and an historical web practice already” vs” the internet will consist of vast holes filled with blue lego icons if Flash is excluded”.

Quietly, yesterday, Communications Arts selected a webpick of the day (26000 Vodka) that puts almost all four trillion of these tweet-rants, on both sides, to rest. The concept is degradation.  This, simply put, is: knowing that not everything can be supported on every platform, a developer can present the lowest common denominator technology first, determine if a more sophisticated technology is supported (either by asking the user to choose or directly evaluating which technologies are supported on the device), and then make use of the highest level of technology that will work or that the user finds most comfortable.

In the majority of cases, it’s not all that more difficult to build a site that will provide the best experience that the current technology can provide (using Flash, Silverlight or whatever) , and degrade to something that will offer a less vibrant and innovative, though stable, experience on devices which don’t support those technologies.

So neither the “Flash is dead”, nor the “myriad of lego boxes” arguments have merit. A lesser tier of content will make it’s way to the Ipad via the web.  The App Store will be the source of any sophisticated stuff which runs on the device, and this will be entirely preselected by Apple. Hulu likely will never be welcome.

This will be a good thing for Flash beyond the Ipad controversy because currently many netbooks and other gizmos are not well suited for running large Flash applications.

Beyond this relatively simple and elegant solution, here are a few of my thoughts:

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Tags: Apple, flash, Ipad, Twitter
February 2nd, 2010  |  Posted in Flash, Interactive Design  |  No Comments »

Random Iterations: The Sins of My Father

Author: admin

Well, what a week or so it has been. Sundance is officially over, but it isn’t over for me. I still have two more movies to see this evening and a few more posts to write. Writing so much about movies is fun, but it gets a bit difficult to fit into the spare moments of every day. That is, if you try to do it well. It is good to get it all out of one’s system while it’s fresh.

In the middle of my Sundance forays a couple of things, worthy of thought, came up and took me off track for a while. I’ll just touch on one of them now.

While doing my teeny chore of web-based research on the film Freedom Riders (an excellent documentary about groups of white and black students, primarily, who rode buses into the deep south in 1961 as a way of forcing desegregation of interstate commerce), I found myself sidetracked, at considerable length. The film got me thinking, for the first time, about how pro-integration whites were treated in the South. This has some import for me because I was, for my first six years which were spent in Arkansas, a pro-integration white boy in the South or, at least, the swaddled bundle that my pro-integration parents lugged around.

My father was a reporter for the anti-segregation Arkansas Gazette, then an editorial writer with the, also anti-segregation, Pine Bluff Commercial, then a Nieman fellow at Harvard for a year, then an editorial writer at the Arkansas Gazette. My mother was a part-time writer for smaller, largely union-owned, papers. She had the master’s in journalism from Columbia. He was, more or less, the Brad Pitt character in A River Runs Through It (without the Brad Pitt looks). It was the late fifties and early sixties and we all know about how that was for professional women in the “masculine” careers because we’ve seen the Madmen.

He was born on a proverbial dirt-scrabble farm in the proverbial tar-paper shack in northwestern Montana (between Kallispell and Libby) and ended up in journalism by ways and means that I’ve never understood. My parents met in Washington state where they were both reporters. He realized that the South was going to be the place to be for journalists of that era and sent clippings to the notorious Harry Ashmore.

I know a bit more about their (our) time in Arkansas than I did a few days ago because I found the University of Arkansas, Arkansas Gazette Project. Done for historical purposes, while most of the journalists of the civil-rights era were still alive, this is a collection of oral histories. There are around 130 interviews of most everyone who worked with my father at the Gazette, including a 78 page interview of him, done in 2001, a year before he died, which I didn’t know existed. Guess what I did all weekend.

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Tags: Freedom Riders, independent film, Patrick J. Owens, Sundance 2010, Sundance Film Festival
February 1st, 2010  |  Posted in Documentary, Family, Film, Sundance  |  4 Comments »

Sundance 2010: Jean-Michel Basquiat

Author: admin

What constitutes fine art, who’s in charge of the process wherein art is called art, and why do those who make it, so often, get damaged in the process?

In an unusual way, the film Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child is both conventional documentary and personal narrative.  Without hearing the filmmaker, Tamra Davis, speak before and after the film, one would assume it is entirely the former. Davis, who was a close friend of Basquiat, has structured the film to speak for her, in describing his short life and their shorter relationship, in a way that would be appropriate to both his and his family’s wishes.

Basquiat was a darling of the New York art world in the 1980’s. He became the most publicly recognized of several artists including Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel, and was a close friend and protege of Andy Warhol. A high school dropout, he began as a graffiti artist and entered the cultural elite via the New York club scene and the early icons of the era: Madonna, Blondie, and David Bowie.

His work is primitive in nature and refracts African, Haitian and Hispanic cultural influences. The most significant outgrowth of his work has been in graphic design where colorful, bold and childlike images are juxtaposed with text. This has developed, in part, as a response to the ubiquity of neat and predictable computer graphics. Basquiat died of complications related to heroin usage at age 27.

The film presents Basquiat in an almost identical way as Wikipedia. The major difference is that some of the negative aspects of his life are not present in the film. Throughout, I found myself wondering the extent to which the film, as a celebration of his life, excluded negative details. In the Q&A it became clear that, through control of the display of his work, the Basquiat family also approved and censored the film. Negative aspects of his family life, including his mother’s mental illness, went without exposition in any great detail.

Another thing which could have stood in the way of a complete depiction of the artist is the filmmaker’s involvement in the same community of artists, dealers, curators, and buyers that produced and, perhaps, destroyed the artist. Since reading Tom Wolfe’s (of the Bonfire of the Vanities variety) 1975 The Painted Word, I’ve regarded the art world with healthy skepticism.

In the case of much modern art, a prohibitive factor in the escalation in the value of work is the productivity of the artist. Because a lot of new work can be created very rapidly, it is difficult to value existing work highly. Wolfe argues somewhat convincingly that it is the traders in art who make the market for it by manufacturing demand. In other words, it’s all about the PR. He also infers, less convincingly, that this process is independent of the quality of the art.

At any rate, while watching the various art representatives, dealers and buyers speaking, I wondered about the extent to which they may have financially benefited from the artist’s early death. Basquiat fits an established model of artistic incandescence, associated with notoriety, followed rapidly by decline and demise. I think it is worth wondering why this occurs again and again, and questioning who benefits from it. The absence of these questions was the film’s greatest fault.

The film is well made and worth seeing. I found it much more compelling than the similar drama made about his life. Aspects I enjoyed most were the Filmmaker’s use of music (jazz and Ravel), the abundant use of his art, and the tenderness with which the childlike essence of Basquiat is portrayed. It is unfortunate that the entire story could not have been told.

Tags: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Park City, Radiant Child, Sundance 2010, Sundance Film Festival
January 29th, 2010  |  Posted in Art, Documentary, Film, Modern Art, Sundance  |  No Comments »

Sundance 2010: HOWL

Author: admin

I wanted badly to love HOWL. I’m a beat-era fanboy and have been for decades. This is derivative of my, more general, love for lyricism in literature and jazz which extends well beyond the beats and is not a celebration of beat lifestyle or philosophy.  Though I do find much of the later compelling.

HOWL is not considered a documentary by its producers or those that make the decisions about what goes in which category at Sundance.  It certainly seemed like one to me.  I found it unusual, but a documentary none the less.

I’m not at all sure why it matters. I think it may be similar to the tendency of authors to cast their work as non-fiction when it isn’t, because the market for fiction is so very very lousy. The market for documentaries is poor relative to their dramatic counterpoints, or so I’ve heard. That the circumstances in film are exactly the opposite of that in publishing is curious indeed.

The HOWL audience could be divided into two parts. The beat fanboys (and fangirls) and those, unknowing at the outset, who watched in wondrous trepidation of all those flying penises. Both groups had reason for some disappointment. It would have been impossible not to disappoint the first group because, as dedicated cultists, we are protective of our favorite facts or persons or theories. We are easily upset by perceived  misrepresentation or omission. We tend to squeal.  I suspect that the film left many of the later group just wondering why.

This is an odd movie.  It is the story of the poem and not the poet. There are three intermingled veins: a James Franco narrative which both presents and explains the poem, lengthy animation sequences which interpret the poem, and a courtroom simulation which portrays the obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, following publication of HOWL, in dramatic form.

I found the Franco narrative limited in that it dealt almost exclusively with the text of the poem. The animation left me thinking that time could have been better spent dealing with more context from the life of Allen Ginsberg and the other beats in a traditional documentary form. It was evident in the Q&A that some are upset with any animated interpretation of the poem. I disagree. Interpretation of literature in film is not exactly new.  It just didn’t fit with anything else. I enjoyed the trial simulation scenes most. David Strathairn and John Hamm are well cast and the dialogue which is taken directly from the trial transcripts is fascinating. If a drama was the goal than this should have been expanded to make up the core of a film along the lines of Good Night and Good Luck.

My personal complaint with most discussion of beat literature is the assumption that the style was born of jazz and  formed completely new in the minds of Kerouac and Ginsberg.  What about Thomas Wolfe? Of the Look Homeward Angel variety. Kerouac describes himself and Wolfe walking past one another on the Brooklyn bridge as a passing-of-the-baton sort of moment. He acknowledges Wolfe’s style as the predecessor to his own. And it so obviously is.

This is the problem with the beat fanboys. Impossible to satisfy.

Tags: Allen Ginsberg, HOWL, independent film, Park City, Sundance 2010, Sundance Film Festival
January 28th, 2010  |  Posted in Documentary, Film, Sundance  |  No Comments »

Sundance 2010: Welcome to the Rileys

Author: admin

What constitutes the family ideal in the America of 2010?

It was about who: mother, father, children. Now it’s more about what: love, tolerance, understanding. The what was always part of it, but everything fell into a system of well-defined roles which changed in a well-defined way over time. And there were societal consequences for any who lived outside of those roles.  There were also plenty of conventional families who made do without the what. There still are.

Welcome to the Rileys is a film that defines family in terms of what can work versus what is expected. It begins with three lost souls and ends with something different and better, but not something trite, obvious or well defined.  James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo fill the roles of parents who lived for a daughter who has died. With her death they have largely died as well. Leo more so than Gandolfini who continues to fight to find something approximating life in his world. Kristen Stewart plays an almost-homeless youth lost in the New Orlean’s sex trade. The three interact and something resembling family evolves.

The film is not a simple story of how a complicated man rescues a tough but innocent girl from the evils and perversions of the sex industry. That narrative relies on old-school moral offense to work and has been done several times before.

I found much more in Welcome to the Rileys.  It is a story about the family as an ill-defined relationship for a period of time.  It is the family loosely defined as a tacit agreement to honestly and fairly meet the needs of every member. So it is the opposite of those films which portray the man as the strong though confused rescuer and the girl as an irascible though weak victim.  This new sort of  family lessens the weaknesses and enhances the strengths of all. Participation is passive. Contribution is multi-directional. It has a certain magic.

Gandolfini makes the film, overcoming an unfortunate forced southern accent with his unique mixture of affability and reserve.  As Tony Soprano, his personal amalgam of strength and vulnerability allowed a likable character capable of the horrible. His running away from Soprano may be the source of the ill-chosen dialect.  But the best part, of what made Soprano work well, is present.  In this film he establishes himself as a contemporary John Wayne.  Sensitive in his toughness.  Attractive in his unattractiveness. Bold in his reticence.

Stewart plays the feral daughter of everyman, loosed into the harshness of the world, very well.  She is sensitive, vulnerable, tough, erratic, moody, and honest. There is little sadness in her character which is both good and surprising. Leo is a bit forced in her quiet role as modern housewife medicating life into an enabled form of oblivion.  She does have several humorous revelatory moments as she emerges back into the world. These are some of the best in the film.

The thing I liked best about Welcome to the Rileys is that it points no fingers.  It is a gentle film.  Things just happen. And things must be dealt with.  It is a step in the direction away from outrage (finding and contemplating a source for every woe) and takes the stance that, in just a moment, directions in life can be changed.  That with decisive action, right or wrong but well intentioned, paths can open and solutions can be found.  That ruminating on blame will do more harm than good and is more a way of avoiding action than solving problems.  It is refreshing after so many films that seek an audience by providing a villain that we’ve been trained collectively to hate.

Tags: independent film, James Gandolfini, Kristen Stewart, Melissa Leo, Sundance 2010, Sundance Film Festival, Welcome to the Rileys
January 27th, 2010  |  Posted in Film, Sundance  |  No Comments »

Sundance 2010: Animal Kingdom

Author: admin

Crime is punishment. Fear is the most of it. You can’t run but you can hide.

The only options are to leave that way of life.  Which, for socioeconomic reasons, can’t be done.  Or to build a shell around one’s self.  To become a zombie-like creature only capable of the most base emotions.  With this comes a myriad of coping strategies, addictions to the most base stimuli, complete isolation from everything. And almost everything outside the shell is fear. These are the makings of a criminal sociopath and the root story underlying a lot of good films.

Yesterday I saw Animal Kingdom, the first feature-length film of Australian David Michod.  WOW.  In the Q&A he said: “I just love American crime movies.”  This one is very good.  Perhaps one of the best of that genre and all done with a fraction of the budget. Not only does it completely enthrall, surprise, and shake-up our neat and tidy little worlds (if only for a couple of hours), it offers a believable glimpse into the makings of that unfortunate personae.

My experience with the World Cinema Competition films has not been particularly good.  I’m drawn to the Palestinian and other middle-eastern flicks which are quite common at Sundance.  They are largely invisible in the United States outside of the festival, so if you want to see them, it is good to see a bundle here in Park City.  But this year I found myself worn out with the topic and let “just what sounds interesting” be my guide. I’m glad I did.  Animal Kingdom is perverse in an awe-inspiring way.

With elements of Casino, Reservoir Dogs, The Usual Suspects and Mystic River, Michod does an enormous amount with an ensemble cast including two first-time actors.  The lower budget of the film relative to it’s American counterparts is apparent but not fatal. Insight into the criminal mind is clear and makes one wonder what Michod did for a living before the movie business.

It is always good to see Joel Edgerton, one of my favorite Australian actors. Keep an eye open for both Michod and Jacki Weaver, a theater actress, who plays the matriarch of this ultimate version of the dysfunctional brood.  She’s just creepy magic!

Tags: Animal Kingdom, independent film, Park City, Sundance 2010, Sundance Film Festival
January 26th, 2010  |  Posted in Film, Sundance  |  No Comments »

Sundance 2010: Night Catches Us

Author: admin

“The dogs bark and the caravan marches on.”

This is a very, very old phrase. North African in origin, it refers to the passage of camel caravans through Saharan villages. It became a stock phrase of Andre Gide and was  borrowed for American use by Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles. It can mean many things, one of which is that time passes and cultural trends change. Most people move with the changes, others stay behind, or are left behind.  The later tend to bark, whine, complain. The barking goes unheeded.  They become the haters. And are generally without consequence unless the hatred consumes entirely.

This is also the story of Night Catches Us, a film which premiered at Sundance last night and that I desperately hoped would be brilliant.  As a story about what is left behind when a revolutionary movement, the Black Panthers, is ground to dust, it is not, as one would expect, a film about race.  It is a film about my generation.  As children, we witnessed the turmoil.  We believed.  And then it suddenly ended and many were left behind, not really understanding why things had changed or, even, that things had changed.

I wanted this film to work because it is a subject that has been ignored, swept under the rug as a regrettable phase in American history. It is a “period piece”, set in the middle ’70s, concurrent with the end of the war in Vietnam, the end of Watergate, the beginnings of the Carter administration, and the cultural transition from Hanoi Jane Fonda to Sylvester Stallone. The subject is what happens when things settle down.  An ex-Black Panther returns to Philadelphia and finds the stains of his former life, although covered with new patterns, are still present and can not be ignored.  He must confront his past while a younger man, unbelieving in the extent of change, tries desperately to continue living it.

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Tags: independent film, Night Catches Us, Sundance 2010, Sundance Film Festival
January 24th, 2010  |  Posted in Film, Sundance  |  No Comments »

Sundance 2010: Peering Into the Twittisphere

Author: admin

Because Sundance constitutes an onslaught upon one’s thought capacity, I decided it might be good to post here and there throughout rather than wrapping things up at the end. By the end it is difficult to remember what one was thinking at the beginning.

My first day brought me to to a day-long seminar on the marketing of independent film via the various tools, social and otherwise, that constitute the “new media”.  With the exception of one gathering of the mega-webites, the seminar was not well attended which was a bit of a surprise.  The event, organized by Jigsaw Global, was nicely put-together and informative, if only skimming the surface, very lightly, of the subjects at hand.

Presenters included the director of i-Phone gaming for the Adult Swim Network (something to do with after hours programing on the Cartoon Network I think) on building film/television related aps for the i-Phone, a web consultant on the general makings of a new media marketing strategy, and the Microsoft queen of twitter who unveiled a new Windows 7 twitter utility called Look.

There were also two impressive panel discussions: the first was arbitrated by Kara Swisher, of the Wall Street Journal’s allThingsD.com, and involved the content potentates of most of the new media powerhouses including Oprah, Youtube, Facebook and mySpace as well as a token filmmaker and the fellow who did the social media marketing for last year’s Indy films’: “The Cove” and “Food Inc”.  The second panel involved what I would call a PR procurement chain that began with a filmmaker in this year’s festival extending through various obscure new media functionalities to a actual real-life new media designer at the bottom of the food chain.

A few thoughts:

Things are not well in the movie business.  This is not a surprise but things are particularly terrible in the Indy movie business.  This was made most cogent as one filmmaker shouted from the crowd: “People won’t finance our films if they can’t sell them”.  The malaise appears to extend even into the iPhone realm where downloads of film studio aps are falling far short of expectations, and the number of available aps is swamping the potential for any given ap to achieve profitability.  Throughout this presentation I kept thinking: wait until Flash hits the iPhone ap market in the middle of this year.

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Tags: Facebook, flash, independent film, mySpace, Park City, Social Media, Sundance 2010, Sundance Film Festival, Twitter, web design
January 23rd, 2010  |  Posted in Film, Interactive Design, Social Media, Sundance  |  No Comments »

Contrary to Ordinary: Botanical Illumination Phoenician Style

Author: admin

Things get strange on a Phoenix winter's evening.

I’ve encountered a few of the symptoms lately. I’m sure that, although unique, they are not unique to me. First there was the realization that a magpie had filled my ski boots with dog food. I wasn’t upset. It lives in the backyard of it’s own volition and had made it’s way into the garage every now and then. I’ve taken to calling it Frederick. Magpie’s have an historical Prussian aspect about them. I just threw out the old boots.

Then there was the time I saw the woman in the SUV in the Blockbuster Video parking lot and instantly recognized her as the wife of the American ambassador to China. (I think her husband may make a decent president some day; Just saying).

And, when given a choice between spending the week between Christmas and New Years skiing the finest snow on earth at my own doorstep, or venturing to a slightly chilly Phoenix, I chose Phoenix with only minimal hesitation.

Losing all regard for ski equipment, recognizing the local celebrities, skipping town during one of the best weeks of the year, I may have lived in Park City, Utah for too long.

Phoenix was a lot of fun.  My girls and I ascended all the requisite Phoenix promontories: Camel Back, Squaw Peak, South Mountain; visited the world’s first Windows Store (no big whup); did a little hiking around Tucson; visited the Sonoran Desert Museum and the University of Arizona (both girls want to apply to this one as well); and the whole family unit did the Tempe New Years Eve thing (the Doobie Brothers, absent one significant component).  It was in the low sixties most of the afternoons, so a  bit chilly.  But there was no snow.  And I think I’ve come to think of that as a good thing.

Two items, worthy of note, occurred.  First there was the marching band:

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Tags: Arizona, HDRI, Phoenix, Phoenix Botanical Gardens, Photography, Photomatrix, Photoshop
January 17th, 2010  |  Posted in HDRI, Medium Focal-length, Photography, Travel  |  No Comments »

Random Iterations: Sundance, Avatar, Windows 7, and Facebook

Author: admin

A flawed film that changes everything.

OOh OOh I am so excited.  I’ve lost some of my love for the concept of winter. We all fall prey to this moment at some point in life and my time came a while back.  So I could gladly toss my last shovel-full of driveway fluff  (although for some reason or another fluff is in extremely short supply in Park City this year). I’ve also never been much for the holidays. So the one thing that makes winter for me these days is the Sundance film festival and it is just around the corner.  I’ve lucked out again and landed a very high spot in the local’s ticket lottery, allowing me my choice of flicks.  And, there is to be a nice digital presence (seminars on the making of movie marketing with social networks and the new internet) which I intend to check out.  Fourteen films and as many seminars as I can get into should keep my mind whirling.  Which, of course, is my favorite condition of the human condition.

I’m especially interested in Howl (Ginsberg deserves more credit for his influence on everything that came after), Freedom Riders (my journalist parents were part of that whole scene), and films covering John Lennon as a pup and Jean-Michel Basquiat as … (well, you know).  My eldest daughter is forcing me to attend a 3D flick about toads that take over Australia.  Her taste in films is of notorious ill repute.

Since my last post I’ve seen Avatar in 3D and think that everyone who enjoys cinema owes James Cameron a good deal of thanks.  I’m not a Cameron fan per se, having seen only one of the Terminator movies and not having seen Titanic.  On many levels Avatar is bad film.  The plot is tired and clearly directed at reconsideration of American involvement in Iraq.  I have been against that particular war from the get-go, but think the standard progressive take on it (that we did it for the oil)  is almost as lame as the standard conservative take (that we did it because Sadam was a bad bad man and we are a moral country). The answer can be found in a quick gander at the French conflict in Algeria in the early sixties I suspect.  But that is a bit off topic.  Also the aliens are aesthetically lacking.  Many have compared them to smurfs, I think gumby is a better match.

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Tags: Allen Ginsberg, Avatar, Facebook, flash, Flex, Freedom Riders, James Cameron, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sundance Film Festival, web design, Windows 7
January 11th, 2010  |  Posted in 3D, Documentary, Film, Flash, Flex, Sundance  |  No Comments »

Chicago Colors of Winter: Round Two

Author: admin

The Sears Tower: Exemplar of American Ambition

Chicago has never looked better. I’m referring to the city and not my photography. I spent another couple weeks in the city; two days of which were given to wandering around the loop (the city’s lofty core) with a couple of cameras.  I had intended to spend five days photographing but found myself returning to Utah on short notice.  So the diversity of images isn’t as great as I would like. Everything, almost, is wide-angle HDRI of architecture.

I keep finding myself back there. So after another couple of winters I should have a good set of photographs.  The very urban provides a nice balance to the bulk of my nature-based work.

I’m fond of HDRI for a place like Chicago.  The world is crawling with images of the buildings of Chicago and HDRI offers a lot of artistic potential to make things weird when you want to go that way.  Also, the dynamic nature of a big metropolis, where people are of less significance relative to their environment, fits HDRI very well.  Walking people and moving cars on a city street become ghosted and part of the image in a way that suits the ephemeral reality well.

The images were all processed initially with photomatrix and then with camera raw and standard photoshop techniques.  The new photomatrix exposure fusion technique was used extensively (and I really like it).  Several images are blended composite panoramas.

Also I love it when it’s cold.  I think it is the low level of the sun in the sky and clarity of the air, in addition to the hard nature of the subject matter. Chicago photographs best when below freezing.

I’m not sure where the source of Chicago’s current good-looks lies.  The city may simply be all decked out for the Olympics that wasn’t.  Or it could be an artifact of the economy that shouldn’t have been.  Now, the general tone of the people I met, the conversations I overheard, and the chatter over the airwaves was decidedly down.  More so than when I was there this past summer or last winter.

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Tags: Architecture, Chicago, Photography, Photomatrix, Photoshop
December 17th, 2009  |  Posted in Architecture, HDRI, Landscape, Travel  |  No Comments »

Random Iterations: Canada and All Things After

Author: admin

I’ve been busy and haven’t gotten much posted lately.  I spent a bit of time in Vancouver, doing a little project stuff, meeting some mining  and design folks up there, and touring the University of British Columbia with both of my kids.  The plural “kids” was a surprise.  One appeared, as if by magic, at the Seattle airport where I had been directed to pick up the other.  It was a real pleasure to see the level of excitement on both of their faces while hanging about in a “real” city (their terminology not mine) in a country other than their own.

Another Vancouver surprise was the Canadian celebration of Remembrance day, which in America is called Veteran’s day.  This shouldn’t have been a surprise.  I’ve grown up thinking of Canada as a more sensible nation when it comes to wars, diplomacy and so forth. And so was fascinated to find myself in Vancouver during a holiday week with fighter planes flying in formation overhead while masses of folks saluted the Maple Leaf.  Also, the Canadians don’t push their holidays around in the American pragmatic manner.  So the day fell on a Wednesday.

Only afterward has it occurred to me that, as a member of the British Commonwealth, Canada was probably in for the duration of the First World War.  Hence the importance of the WWI armistice, which is also the provenance of the American Veteran’s day.  Now I understand.  I spent the day shooting the downtown section of the city and should have some of that good stuff posted in the next few days.  I was also baffled by a more or less constant cryptic reference to a woman resembling a horse which emanated from the radio airwaves.  Only during the trailers before the film, “Pirate Radio” which I and my daughters all enjoyed, did this mystery unlock itself.  All had something to do with the British royal family in one century or another.

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Tags: 2002 Olympics, 2010 Olympics, British Columbia, Canada, Pirate Radio, Silverlight, Vancouver
December 6th, 2009  |  Posted in Canada, Travel  |  No Comments »