What we respond to is not the gadget itself but its promise of some personal and highly specific gratification.
Category: uncategorized
The Economics of Social Status
Status as currency. The whole thing is worth a read. I liked this aside on public speaking, which also connects with live music and standup comedy and other types of performance, and why they’re scary:
“Bidding for status” is another activity with economic characteristics. The nature of a bid is that it sets a particular ‘price’ that can be accepted or rejected. Robin Hanson suspects that speaking in public is a way of bidding for status. The very act of standing in front of a group and speaking authoritatively represents a claim to relatively high status. If you speak on behalf of the group – i.e., making statements that summarize the group’s position or commit the group to a course of action — then you’re claiming even higher status. These bids can either be accepted by the group (if they show approval or rapt attention, and let you continue to speak) or rejected (if they show disapproval, interrupt you, ignore you, or boo you off stage).
Days of Heaven
Days of Heaven. Third viewing (first, second). I don’t typically use words like “rapturous” or “transfixed”, but I feel like I need to here. I just sit there slack-jawed for 90 minutes. I don’t know how you can make a biblical, romantic prairie drama have such momentum. This is the first Terrence Malick movie I ever saw, and I still think it’s his best. I have to keep it in my top three, up there with Out of the Past and Heat.
Savvy advertising is always trying to tell you something about yourself.
Michelle Orange, who continues:
It traffics only in different, better, more fulfilled versions of you. That’s why it’s so miserably effective: an ad can adopt the stance of leading you toward your own best interests. But a brand-centric movie is stuck pretending its purpose is to entertain, even if its job was done the moment it got you through the door, $13.50 lighter.
Upstream Color
Upstream Color. The speculative hook is a strange cycle of events driven by some sort of parasite, I guess. A microbe that seems to enhance empathy or connection in all of its hosts. And you can interpret the rest in about seven million ways. I’m thinking: identity and self-construction. The first half-hour or so, with the thief, is just perfectly tense. Interesting that the personal resolution at the end of the story is misplaced justice. We don’t always know better. Oh, and there’s one scene, when the heroine is waking up, where the image and sound are so well-executed you kinda want to yawn and stretch, too. I didn’t like this one as much as Primer, but I will continue to support and hold out hope for more good, weird movies. Shane Carruth knows his stuff.
So Jerry Seinfeld Called Us To Talk About Coffee : The Salt : NPR
I got married and I had a family and my entire day was not free for social interaction. And eating is annoying and difficult to arrange, [and it’s] hard to choose places. And meeting someone for coffee suddenly seemed like a wonderful, compact, accessible and portable social interaction. You don’t even really need a place. But you feel like you’re doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.
Shortly before reading this, I invited a friend to meet for coffee and not talking:
ELAINE: Come on, let’s go do something. I don’t want to just sit around here.
JERRY: Okay.
ELAINE: Want to go get something to eat?
JERRY: Where do you want to go?
ELAINE: I don’t care, I’m not hungry.
JERRY: We could go to one of those cappuccino places. They let you just sit there.
ELAINE: What are we gonna do there? Talk?
JERRY: We can talk.
ELAINE: I’ll go if I don’t have to talk.
So Jerry Seinfeld Called Us To Talk About Coffee : The Salt : NPR
It’s basically recursion. You start with a problem that spits out an answer. You feed the answer back into the problem and get another answer, which you put right back into the problem.
Shane Carruth talking about nonlinear dynamics and maybe the creative process? And though he said this 9 years ago, this is also relevant to Upstream Color.
Life Lessons with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar – 20 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 30 – Esquire.
Career is never as important as family. The better you are at your job, the more you’re rewarded, financially and spiritually, by doing it. You know how to solve problems for which you receive praise and money. Home life is more chaotic. Solving problems is less prescriptive and no one’s applauding or throwing money if you do it right. That’s why so many young professionals spend more time at work with the excuse, “I’m sacrificing for my family.” Bullshit. Learn to embrace the chaos of family life and enjoy the small victories.
I called around and managed to get a lot of expired stock donated. I also used tungsten-based 35mm slide film to storyboard the movie – this really helped me show the various labs what the final film would look like and thus negotiate prices with them. They are much more likely to give you a discount when they think you’re someone that might be back one day with a bigger budget.
Shane Carruth. Clever! Prepare like a professional, get professional treatment.
IllumiRoom: Peripheral Projected Illusions for Interactive Experiences. We are closer and closer to Infinite Jest. I haven’t read the book, so I’m not totally sure what that means. But this looks cool.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Tim Brando, Chris Broussard, and giving credit where credit is due – SBNation.com
Debate whether [Jason Collins] is a hero or not in your world, but he’s leading by example for a small subset of people who need examples, and doing so positively: with love, and work, and still more work. The two are ultimately indistinguishable when done right, and what they leave behind is the capacity to pass that work forward.
Tim Brando, Chris Broussard, and giving credit where credit is due – SBNation.com
It really got to me when someone asks what I did for a living and I realized I didn’t have a good answer. And it was just, I don’t know, it was like I’m in my apartment alone all day editing this thing that I’m calling a film but it wasn’t actually a film yet. So yeah, there’s a couple of times where I just gave up and decided I was going to go back and get a job and actually have a good answer to what I did for a living. That was going to be that.
The Taxman Cometh – The Daily Beast
There’s this dispute in Minnesota where an artist couple has been claiming tax deductions to keep doing their various art things. Trouble is, in the eye of the law, you can’t claim deductions unless you’re (on the way to) running a business that makes profit. Years and years of losses or minimal profit are just asking for an audit. Hilarity ensues.
It’s so hard with a word processor to know what a revision is.
Primer
Primer. It was early on in the film when I stopped trying to understand the technical details. Just let it ride for now and watch it again soon. Very cool movie. There’s a fine line in (many genres but especially in) science fiction where budgets force decisions about how you show crazy things. I love seeing the conservative work-arounds. You reduce the spectacle so you can preserve the speculative heart of the thing. This not all science fiction, though. There’s a good human core about invention, entrepreneurship, risk, paranoia, trust, etc. Looking forward to seeing Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color this week.
In a tone that grew more defiantly nonchalant with every update, the pilot advised us that some of our bags would arrive on a future flight. Even with routine debacles such as this it’s rare to be promised future bullshit while the current bullshit is still very much in progress. Sorry ‘bout that, folks.
Michelle Orange, on the joys of airline travel.
The Goonies
The Goonies. A friend had never seen it, so we had to correct that. I remember a period of my life where I watched this every afternoon for a couple weeks straight, and knew that, any day now, I’d have an adventure, too. It still holds up. I certainly miss the days before VFX when moviemakers would build ridiculous sets. A huge sailing ship, in a large pool of water, in a vaulted cave? That’s still amazing.
The Problem With Public Shaming | The Nation
Vigilante justice is a tricky thing.
Out in the Great Alone. Brian Phillips (@runofplay) makes feature writing look easy, somehow. Good stuff. Previously, at Wimbledon.
To the Wonder
To the Wonder. This is probably a Malick-fans-only affair, given that he’s brought all his Malickisms to expected highs/belabored lows. So I liked it, naturally. It’s very chopped and fragmented, both within scenes and through time, but there is a clear arc here. Yet maybe it’s understated enough that you get as much drama out of it as you put in. The thing starts with Kurylenko’s narration, her camera, her self-documentation, so there’s an interpretation that most of it is her record. Regardless, just that little bit of self-shot camerawork helps to set up the interiority of the rest.
Affleck is given almost nothing to say, and he’s muted repeatedly even when it looks like he’s saying something. And the voices we can hear from other characters, it’s often just barely. The dance analogy I’ve heard fits well. Where words are absent, gesture and music have to carry it. It’s also like, y’know… silent film. Great score, though you too may chuckle if you’re familiar with some of the music selected (e.g. Górecki, Rachmaninov, Wagner).
Ridiculous desktop wallpaper camera porn abounds. Malick needs to sell his b-roll for the TVs in waiting rooms and airports. I love the transition from the water shot of coastal France to the tall grass in the States. And another transition from the sunlit exteriors of the U.S. to the damp claustrophobic fluorescence of Paris at night. And that final shot. Man. That made it all worth it for me.
Themes. Taking it back to the early sequence at Mont Saint-Michel shows the two becoming one, a little island drawing off from the rest. And the first early versions of how the camera is drawn, again and again, to light, tracking toward windows and doors, trying to get up and out. So that’s love as a combinatory force, bringing two into one, making the inside the outside, drawing you out of yourself (note the barely furnished home). So there’s love as awesome, and there’s love as absent. Bardem carries this part. Note how he’s sequestered himself inside too much. By the end, maybe he’s trying a little harder. Or praying at least, girding himself to get out there again, narrating a common excerpt from St. Patrick’s Breastplate:
Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
I liked Pico Iyer’s review. Ebert’s take will continue to be good for extra-filmic reasons. And the Terrence Malick community blog has a nice blow-by-blow.
My Terrence Malick rankings and reviews:
- Days of Heaven
- The New World
- Badlands
- To the Wonder
- The Tree of Life
- The Thin Red Line
Mark Larson 