Linkage

• Some guy who won $30m from Mega Millions by pure dumb luck now travels the world (including North Korea), collects Golden Age comic books, breeds custom weed and answers Reddit's questions about his experience and lifestyle:

  What is a typical day in any given city consist of for you? More so do you find yourself doing a lot of site seeing or is that a given and you mostly find yourself chilling and relaxing all cool.

  Try to find a nice section of a city, find a nice bar, enjoy a few beers, take in the sights, strike up a few conversations, and see if I can repeat the next day.

  I'm most fascinated by how the sob stories came out of the woodwork as soon as word of his wealth spread, and how friends have cut him off when he refused to give them money whenever they wanted. Also — and this is in line with every story I've heard — finding a respectable girlfriend becomes near-impossible as the tidal wave of gold diggers crashes down. If I ever came into a sudden, unexpected fortune, I feel as if I'd have to spend most of it concealing it.


• The first session of Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School happens over January 8-10, 2010, in Los Angeles:

  Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?

  Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

  Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

  The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.

  I'm unlikely to have put together the requires $1450 and 5-minute short film by the application deadline, but maybe when the east coast session rolls around...

• Unsurprisingly, James "Angry Video Game Nerd" Rolfe and Mike Matei of Cinemassacre Productions collect 16mm prints of vintage cartoons and horror films. In a three part series of videos, they get into the agony and esctasy of 16mm collectorhood and viewership. (One example of the agony is having to manually attach a strip of leader in order to watch the Rocky trailer.) Rolfe uses a two-camera setup to capture he and Matei watching, and commenting on, the various old-school Looney Toons they've accumulated.

• From 1992, Roger Ebert comments on the thill of breaking the 120-minute barrier:

  Modern audiences expect to enter a theater at 7 or 9 (or perhaps at 6, 8 or 10) and emerge promptly two hours later. Whenever a longer movie is released, a film like "Dances with Wolves" or "JFK," movie critics know the reaction they'll get if they recommend it to somebody. "But I heard it was really long," they'll say, as if they were contemplating an evening in the dentist's chair.

  There is an obvious answer to that statement: Bad movies are always too long, but good movies are either too short, or just right. Besides, with a longer movie, you get more for your money. I try that line on people, and they kind of squint their eyes, trying to imagine the thrill of breaking the 120-minute barrier.

  Of course there is another answer, harder to explain, and that is the particular appeal that longer movies have on you. They absorb you. They isolate you more completely from the real world that lurks at either end of a film. They create a world that you have the time to get to know.

  I happened upon the article while researching the 237-minute La Belle Noiseuse, the next Jacques Rivette I intend to see. I find that, in my own mind, films under 90m tend to ring up as "short," between 90m and 160m as "regular," and over 160m as "long." This, of course, is totally orthogonal to quality; I've seen excellent films short, regular and long, and crappy films short, regular and long. I buy Ebert's revised dictum that "every great film is the perfect length."

• At erstwords, well-known field recordist Toshiya Tsunoda — he of the wind in glass bottles and the ultra-limited-edition releases — reflects on field recording and the experimental music scene:

  We grasp a place or a space conceptually as a map or a model. But when we observe a vibration, every space is constantly trembling. If we pay attention to the behavior of the vibration, some new phenomenon different from the conceptual map will emerge. What kind of condition is ongoing at a metal fence, on the surface of pavement, in a narrow passage or inside a pipe? Is it a secondary incident that is like a by-product of the space, or is it considered to be a nature of the space itself? This question fascinated me and drove me into recordings. By fixing the vibration on a tape, I can make a catalog of phenomena that transmit the actual space. This is my field recording works.

Comments

[Judy Kingston-Smith]

Wish I could win that cool 30 Mil!! Would make a few things easier for me right now...

I guess that most people would LIKE to exchange their lives for something else if they could, but the question is would they if it involved a lot of work to get there first?

I think not.

Im always thinking about your qestion when Im working hard trying to get things done...

"What is a typical day in any given city consist of for you? More so do you find yourself doing a lot of site seeing or is that a given and you mostly find yourself chilling and relaxing all cool."

But when I do have the time to do so, I find something else that "needs doing" or I just don't feel like it anymore.

Go figure!...