The biggest problem with videos these days is that they’re made by people used to directing commericals……not former (or current) art students.
The videos are glossy, the singers toned, the clothing predictable risqu?e….
Art student directors loved playing with light, or shadow, or costume, lasers or letting the singers be unattractive and passionate.
Bah.
I like shows that involve tight dialog with quirky people in small towns….
BUT there is one caveat, if the work rests on the lazy screenwriter’s crutch of “put them in the South” I will reject the work like B+ kidney in an A- bloodstream.
The archetype of a show of this type is “Northern Exposure”. Tight dialog, interesting plots, quirky characters - not in the South.
GG: Tight dialog, interesting plots, quirky characters - not in the South.
It just seemed that everytime some Hollywood grass chewer wanted to make characters quirky and justify why they were quirky he put them in the South.
“Hm, these women are concerned about their hair and makeup a lot, let’s put them in the South (Steel Magnolias)”
“Hm, these quirky women are going through menopause, let’s put them in the South (Fried Green Tomatoes)”
“Hm, I’m a talentless hack whose feeble attempt at inflammatory, ill-timed tongue-in-cheek comedy is sloppily used to get me airtime on CNN” — oh wait, sorry Tucker Carlson worked his way into this diatribe. Sorry. ahem
Where was I?
“Hm, let’s make the old lady indomitably proud for no apparent reason — but she’s also really sensitive — especially to — black people (Driving Miss Daisy)”
It’s much easier to say “she’s Suthun, that’s why” than explain the character, or better yet as a screenwriter, to create scenes which explain the character to the audience visually.
All that said, it makes me realize just how ahead of its time “Northern Exposure” was. Remember when CBS had dramas, not just forensics. Yesterday…
If you don’t get it, you’re better off.
If you’re a glutton for punishment then you can do the lookup at urbandictionary.com
If, in the course of your holiday celebrations you should get coffee making devices (a new brew-pot, French press, bean grinder, etc.) - pace yourself on putting it to good use. While your relatives certainly want you to enjoy your gift, they don’t want you passing the yuletide day like a speed-freak
I love Found Magazine. The found objects are lovely, mysterious, and transcendental.
I must be thinking of Found Magazine because I found some software I had lost last night. It’s not very fancy, but the CSS generator is handy and something I had wanted for from time to time.
I listened to Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” on salon.com. I love Welsh accentation and that thick voice that says “kets” for “cats”.
And here’s a funny little thought…
Today while flushing the toilet my mind wandered away, I was returned to my small linoleum covered bathroom by the sound of the seat falling down, making a loud clap.
I really like Coheed and Cambria. Having a Rush-fan pedigree I have a soft-spot for singers that sing like helium drowned banshees. Co&Ca are consumate musicians and Claudio’s controlled supersonic stylings are unique and well….cool.
Their video for “Blood Red Summer” features Claudio hammering together a shack in the woods (very Unabomber) against his co-band mates who have been seized with the disease from “28 Days later” that has made their eyes turn big and bloody and scary!
It’s a lot of fun and is a fun song featuring the evocative lyrics, storytelling, and mystering that one hears all through their album “In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth” (what a title, eh?!)
I added some old programs I wrote a looooong time ago. I keep getting Google hits requesting this material, so, visit the “programming” link above.
Today I’ve been watching all sorts of religious material (in line with the holiday) on the History channel: angels, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, comparative religion, etc. Material like this, WWII history, ancient egyptian/roman history, or The Godfather will pretty much glue me to the TV (even with Tivo!).
Here’s something I want to remember: Auhra Mazda, this is the supreme God of Zoroastrianism. He’s the good guy.
I’ve been very interested in Zoroastrianism lately because I’ve been thinking a lot about the Greek / Persian collaboration (uhm, conquest) when Alexander colonized Persia. Another interesting side-effect was the birth of Mithraism - a re-importation of Zoroastrianism into a Roman warrior-cult. One more thing. Coptic text. What a cool looking text. It’s Greek with a few more symbols. It’s very interesting to me. It’s actually to be added to the next iteration of the Unicode standard.
I love early Christianity - fresh, Mystical, Gnostic, Greek, the power of the Name of The Word was in the air. It was pretty intense stuff.
Merry Christmas, remember Christianity is a lot crazier than we’re told we should remember - but it all starts with a birthday in Bethlehem.
Yesterday my sister and I, freshly returned from our Tahoe adventure, went to the local cinema to see A Series of Unfortunate Events . I like the series quite a lot. If Ed Gorey and HP Lovecraft got together you’d get a style similar to “Lemony Snicket” ‘s - investigative with a heavy dose of black humor.
Watching the previews for movies coming up both my sister and I were struck by the fact that NONE of the previews were original. The preview (note the singular) that was not a direct remake or conversion of a sitcom, it was a pastiche of several other movies we’ve seen oh-too-many-times.
It seems that the only bit of new it this derivative crap will be that the parents actually seem to want social promotion and their kids to pursue basketball as a career.
Bad parents, I have bad news. There are more jobs for people who can add than for people with a great fade-away jump shot.
Or will it be a sit-come remake in that send-up style (A la “A very Brady Movie”) in which they try to be more Bewitched than “Bewitched” ever was? Either way, it won’t be new.
War of The Worlds. This is enough to inspire weeping. The original, a Cold War filming of HG Wells’ master plot [link] is nearly perfect. Why must this be remade. Tom Cruise, please, stop. Spielberg, go back to making predictable Oscar rakers. The only thing you can add would be Independence Day grade shit-blowing-up.
Willy Wonka. A movie that didn’t need to be remade damn you Tim Burton. Depp, I love you, cat but your strangely purse lipped nutjob is hardly anywhere in the scale of the alternatingly paternal and psychotic Gene Wilder. Tim Burton’s strange-ass visuals are hardly enough to justify re-making a movie for.
Anyway. I guess this is the reason I find myself not going to the movies very often.
Oh, and a quick thought on great visuals, the sets for “A Series of Unfortunate Events” were absolutely amazing. Loved the sets.
It’s true, if ever you’ve had to debug someone else’s Perl code it’s …. daunting, irritating, despondence-inducing, isolating, baffling, frustrating.
Perl is a great language wherewith to get something done and forget it.
“I need to slurp all the pics of Marilyn on this site” “I need to edit one line in 30 files”
Perl is your buddy.
If you have to come back to this or a task later, this flexibility and permissiveness will make even your own code seem….beyond easy comprehension. Granted one can leave some breadcrumbs to make this process easier…yet still it’s inherently Not Easy (tm).
Furthermore, Perl is a great language for creativity, it’s motto “There’s more than one way to do it” allows each writer to follow his muse and get his work done — and this is very important to Great Hackers (tm).
Yet this permissiveness and wide latitude for expression make debugging someone else’s creative caprice a colossal pain in the keester. Some people write their Perl in a C or C++-ish style. Others have learned the more Perl-ish style, and yet some others write in an arcane lexicon of Perl-gurudom that make it as comprehensible as looking at the periodic table through a glass sphere.
A certain friend of mine wiseley summed this up as:
it’s like some autistic kid came in with a crayon and scribbled some shit out on a napkin…
Yep, I watch it. It never takes itself too seriously and unapologetically looks for cliffhangers. Yay!
I love Marcia Cross, she’s my favorite actress on the show. Her tightly controlled, purse lipped Bree van de Kamp is just such a tense psychological study in repression and control.
Ms. Cross is a very bright woman as well, graduate of Julliard, masters in psychology. I like her style.
I hated her on Melrose Place, then again, I hated Melrose Place.
I think it must be Republican 8-years - Dynasty was to Reagan as DH is to Bush?