No Boundaries

I must admit that I’m getting more and more exasperated with the Apple v Adobe war that has been raging for about a half of a year now. I’m sure that I don’t have any idea as to the direction that the Internet may be taking in the near future and I’m equally sure that no-one else does either. I think that the original scheme was that the internet would become a set of pipes which delivered expensive curated content to a few walled-gardens where those loyal to the particular hotel-keep would consume in contented oblivion while shelling out a considerable sum on a monthly basis for devices, connections, apps, emags and eshows, bumpers and all other necessary appurtenances. Beyond the walled gardens would be a virus-ridden, porn-infested, aesthetically-unappealing hell that best be left alone by any of any common sense. The internet would be third-world in character, as if crafted by the likes of Joan Didion or Somerset Maugham.

Google and it’s Android have busted this all wide open, sending Palm into the arms of HP and everybody else back to the drawing board. Long live liberation.

This would be good and nice, were it true, but it is complicated by Apple’s success in widely distributing both the iPad and the iPhone, the failure to launch, thus far, of all but a few Android devices which can hope to rival Apple’s creations, and Adobe’s failure to fully grasp the true condition that it’s condition is in.

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Here we go. The calendar has rolled around again to the beginning of yet another baseball season. It is the all-too-often-way-too-brief period when those of us, who are faithful to the mighty Chicago Cubs, can truly believe that all will go well and that this year is, indeed, the year of Cubby Blue and not the Cubby blues. Those who can’t comprehend should contemplate Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”. He understood what it is to be a Cub’s fan: that there is an absurd pleasure in the act of rolling of the rock to the top of the hill, only to somehow find it at the bottom again, and begin the process anew. As a child of sunny summer places, he knew that: if you are under the open afternoon sky and it is summer and you are alive, things can’t really be all that bad.

This new year finds us in heady and important days for the late-middle parts of a rather nasty recession. Apple has, perhaps, forced an enormous change in the way we consume our, well, everything; a new iteration of Adobe’s Creative Suite is about to appear as if from nowhere; and, at least where I live, Spring has suffered an enormous setback. A whole passel of nasty storms, over a five-day period, has dumped 30 to 50 inches of fresh whiteness all over the Wasatch Mountains at the close of what had been a snow-depleted Winter. This results in a temporary suspension of belief in the concept of Spring which can only be relieved with the onset of televised baseball from distant lands.

The assault on Flash by Apple and the belief that this will result in a resurgence of an economically-viable old media in modified form is the really big story: a thing that may make a difference in the way people go about their lives five-years hence.  Whether this will all pan out remains to be seen. The success of the “magical device” and pending tablets of similar functionality is undeniable. That this will resuscitate old media is a much dicier question. The answer is probably no and this last hopeful emergence is a bit of a sad ghost-dance. It would be a very good thing if everyone who watches kittens-flushing-toilets on YouTube suddenly switched to reading lengthy articles, full of thought, complicated sentence structure and good design, on their portable devices. Unfortunately this great hope for a new world order relies on a certain sensibility on the part of the public which has, long ago, left the building. Free is difficult to beat as well. If the accumulators of others work could just disappear before those who actually do the work which is accumulated, that would be a small step in the right direction.

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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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