Colin Marshall

Linkage

• Strictly Film School, with its smart capsule summaries of a well-curated selection of movies, has become my cinematic reference site of choice. Check out their directors list if you don't believe me. (And yes, I've seen that Kitano isn't on there — I'm totally mystified.)

• Just as I was pondering re-reading — and, er, reading — the transcendentalists, Ben Casnocha distilled two of 'em on his blog. He first assembled his favorite lines from Emerson, such as:

  Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character. If you act you show character; if you sit still, if you sleep, you show it. You think because you have spoken nothing when others spoke, and have given no opinion on the times, on the church, on slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret societies, on the college, on parties and persons, that your verdict is still expected with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far otherwise; your silence answers very loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have learned that you cannot help them; for oracles speak. Doth not Wisdom cry and Understanding put forth her voice?

  And then came Thoreau:

  I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

  I've come to find myself asking only two qualities of a writer: honesty and clarity. The rest is window dressing.

• I recently found out that a certain Livejournalist known to frequent these parts has a "real" blog, and it's pretty damn cool. My favorite post is an improved 'n revised iteration of his earlier-posted thoughts on the extreme relevance of gambling and financial metaphors to life in general:

  When you come to appreciate the fact that life inherently involves randomness and gambling, you can start taking risks that make sense. The casino is a great metaphor for life; potentially filled with fun and games, but random and with a mean expectation of zero. Once you understand that your life is governed by the laws of probability rather than Cartesian determinism, it becomes easier to accept the vicissitudes of fate. Once you realize that most decisions in life involve significant risk and uncertainty, you can start making intelligent decisions about your life. Once you understand the applications of [the capital asset pricing model] to your life, you can realize your own efficient frontier. People may think I’m some sort of mad scientist for advocating treating your life as a gambling game, but you can see this at work in many individual lives.
  
  [ ... ]
  
  If life worked according to Cartesian determinism, you’d expect chess players to do very well in life, and gamblers to do poorly. What we observe in life is the exact opposite. Great chess players who are capable of calculating complex moves many steps ahead have horrible chaotic lives. They think they can plan things and understand the world using determinism, and this world view fails them. Poor Bobby Fischer, one of the greatest chess wizards who ever lived, had a miserable life. His belief in determinism turned him into a raving madman, hardly capable of the simplest of human interactions. Gary Kasparov, a man capable of beating supercomputers at chess, tried his hand at Russian politics and failed miserably.

• Ubuweb hosts four videos at a rare intersection of my interests: the great Peter Greenaway's series of documentaries on four American experimental composers. You've got your John Cage, your Philip Glass, your Meredith Monk and your Robert Ashley. Though sadly devoid of most of the formal boldness we've come to expect and love from the director, they nevertheless work with impeccably fascinating subject matter.

• Via csn, a Chinese meal on VHS (and in any case, I'm always happy to see anything longer than ten minutes on the 'Tube)

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.

Linkage

• The New Yorker's book club is now reading Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. My own writeup from last fall is here. I look forward to how they'll handle such an oddball novel, especially when the midget in the sheep suit shows up. Would that they follow up with a communal read of Dance Dance Dance.

• I knew nothing of broadcaster/food critic/television essayist/architecture writer Jonathan Meades until imomus penned a post about him, but now I feel the need to dig deeper. All (!) his unconventionally-composed television documentary sorta things — on buildings, travel, cities, food, surrealism, etc. — reside, free for the watchin', on YouTube's MeadesShrine.

• (Former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Daniel Menaker on the pleasures and sorrows (and randomness) of editing:

  Genuine literary discernment is often a liability in editors. And it should be — at least when it is unaccompanied by a broader, more popular sensibility it should be. When you are trying to acquire books that hundreds of thousands of people will buy, read, and like, you have to have some of the eclectic and demotic taste of the reading public. I have this completely unfounded theory that there are a million very good — engaged, smart, enthusiastic — generalist readers in America. There are five hundred thousand extremely good such readers. There are two hundred and fifty thousand excellent readers. There are a hundred and twenty-five thousand alert, active, demanding, well-educated (sometimes self-well-educated), and thoughtful — that is, literarily superb — readers in America. More than half of those people will happen not to have the time or taste for the book you are publishing. So, if these numbers are anything remotely like plausible, refined taste, no matter how interesting it may be, will limit your success as an acquiring editor. It's not enough for you to be willing to publish "The Long Sad Summer of Our Hot Forsaken Love," by Lachryma Duct, or "Nuke Anbar Province, and I Mean Now!," by Genralissimo Macho Picchu — you have to actually like them, or somehow make yourself like them, or at least make yourself believe that you like them, in order to be able to see them through the publishing process.

• Dept. of nihil est sanctum: the trayless college cafeterias. (See also Cushing Academy's bookless library.)

• Brian Eno's newest installation hits CSU Long Beach:

  Eno's restless endeavors often produce oases of calm reflection for his listeners and viewers. Exhibit A is one of his most recent projects, "77 Million Paintings," a multimedia installation that will be unveiled today at the University Art Museum of Cal State Long Beach.

  It consists of a wall of 12 computer-operated monitors of varying dimensions, displaying a procession of constantly mutating images that group and regroup into a virtually limitless series of configurations. The protean "paintings" are accompanied by Eno's ambient original score.

  Eno also designed the installation's computer software and hand-drew the interchangeable images on slides, using etching tools and paintbrushes. Most of the configurations are abstract, but Eno occasionally added variety by tossing in found art culled from magazines and elsewhere.

  The idea of making art that links one sensory or cognitive process to another — for example, hearing with seeing — has roots in the concept of synesthesia, which has been employed by such artists as the Russian painter-theorist Wassily Kandinksy and elaborated on by the likes of Matthew Barney, in his "Cremaster Cycle." Eno's overall intent with "77 Million Paintings" was to create what he calls "generative art," a random flow of visuals patterned after the "generative music" he has created using synthesizers and other computerized instruments.

  He hopes that those experiencing the installation will be inspired to consider different notions of time, a goal that he's been pursuing as one of the founders of The Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco-based institution that aims (in its website's words) to "provide counterpoint to today's 'faster/cheaper' mind set and promote 'slower/better' thinking."

  "The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation," Eno says. "I point to this work as a counter-problem. I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked."

  Needless to say, I'll be seeing it this weekend, just as I'll be seeing Eno's talk at the Carpenter Center, just as I'll be attending LACMA's Sang-soo Hong quadruple feature. As always, if I succumb to awesomeness intoxication, avenge me.

Linkage

• paradoxdruid hooks me up with Indexed, a web comic somehow simpler than xkcd and thus even more conceptually elegant. Each morning, author Jessica Hagy posts a graph drawn on an index card. Two favorites:
  
  
  
  
• Gourmet takes Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies into the kitchen:

  "What wouldn't you do?"

  "I had an idea to make mussels with basil and garlic," he told me. "I was going to call the dish 'pesto mussels' or something, but as I was getting ready to cook, Melissa pointed out that two months prior she made a mussel dish with a watercress cream, which, of course, would look exactly the same as 'pesto mussels.'"

  The mussels and basil were already ordered and on their way, so Ian asked Melissa for advice; she suggested pasta. Ian cooked the mussels and pasta and tossed them with the basil, and that's when the strategy came into play: "There's an Italian no-no when it come to eating fish with cheese. It's rarely done. Because it's such a faux pas, I would never have gone there. But because the card said I should, I did." In the end, Parmigiano-Reggiano added depth with out strong-arming the more delicate flavours in the dish.

• Errol Morris names five favorite films on Current TV. Though thin on substance — it's Current, after all — the segment nevertheless piques my interest, and strongly, in Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, a documentary about a WWII veteran desperately, and angrily, trying to find out the fate of his army buddies.
  
  If you're looking for slightly more content, do check out Morris' list of favorite books as well. Curious line about Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: "I dare anyone to read it without an immediate and overwhelming desire to open up your veins in the tub."

• Tyler Cowen, who comes from a somewhat libertarian perspective, defines "progressivism" as reasonably as possible, to the best of his ability in eleven points. Selections:

  1. There exists a better way and that is shown by the very successful polities of northwestern Europe and near-Europe. We know that way can work, even if it is sometimes hard to implement.

  6. Limiting inequality will do more to check bad governance than will the quixotic libertarian attempt to limit the size of government.

  10. The United States has to struggle mightily to meet the progressive standards of western Europe and we should not equate the two regions in terms of their operation or capabilities. Yet there is an alternative strand in American history, if not always a dominant one, showing that progressive change is possible. Think Upton Sinclair and Martin Luther King and the organizers of early labor unions.

  And he defines "conservatism" as reasonably as possible, to the best of his ability in ten points. Selections:

  1. Evil is real and there exist evil nations in the world; the relatively virtuous Western powers require strong states to fend off such evils. This distinct from "big government" in the sense advocated by modern liberals.

  2. In international affairs, in the twentieth century, the United States in particular has been unselfish to a remarkable degree. We therefore should trust the United States with unprecedented power. In fact we have no alternative. Some cultures really are better than others.

  7. We do not have either the resources or the norms to remake society in the direction of a fully-comfortable-for-everyone social democracy. We do need welfare states to keep a polity in running order, but we should be modest about what such regimes can accomplish. They cannot overcome a fundamental lack of proper values as found in many poor or disadvantaged communities.

• Dick Cavett and Jimmy Fallon talk shop about talk shows in New York. I've never seen Fallon in action, though I routinely look to Cavett's back pages for examples of How It's Done. (It would not be entirely inaccurate to say that I aim to perform a slight bit of re-Cavettization on the media scene.) I assure you, based on my limited experience, that when Cavett speaks the following about preparation, he speaks the truth:

  You can be inhibited by the notes, and then there’s that awful moment where you think, “Oh shit, his lips have stopped moving, and I’m not quite exactly sure what he said, because I was thinking what I might say next.” Jack Paar said to me, “Kid, don’t do interviews. That’s clipboards, and David Frost, and what’s your pet peeve and favorite movie. Make it a conversation.” And I didn’t get it immediately. And then I realized, well, that’s what Jack did. He didn’t ever, “I’ve got one more I want to ask you, okay, let’s move on to geography.” It’s a lesson that has not been learned by enough people in the world.

  Listen rather than formulate. Don't ask about peeves and favorites. Make it a conversation.

Linkage

• listenlive.eu streams a whole bunch of radio stations from around the world. I enjoy its Icelandic offerings, though I'm always down for radio in any language I don't understand. Especially talk radio, which, like any sound that does not correspond to a set state in the listener's brain, essentially becomes music.
• A Guardian profile reveals Douglas Coupland as the end point of a journey I suppose I'm trying to take:

  Nothing seems to trouble him terribly; he expresses limitless curiosity rather than opinions, and when I suggest it's a value-free kind of curiosity, he agrees at once. "Yes, it is apolitical, that's it. Adding judgment, I've always thought, will muddy my ability to see the things I enjoy looking at. I'm not a monster," he adds quickly, grinning. "I'm sure we pretty much agree on everything, but my new curiosity is, will judgment cloud my view?"

  Apoliticality, judgment-unclouded viewpoint, opinions displaced by curiosity: why, this fellow has nearly achieved shoshin. Pity he had to buy a second house just to hold his clutter overspill, though.
• (Former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Alain de Botton's Channel 4 television series Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness has found a home on Google Video, for my money the net's prime purveyor of choice watchin'. In the first few minutes, he rides a Vespa. I've read a number of philosophers' blog posts trashing de Botton's inclination to use the whole of philosophy as a happiness generator, but we mustn't forget that philosophers have, as a rule, been deeply embittered by academia.
• While I admit to boosting nearly everything Paul Graham posts, his new essay "The Anatomy of Determination" links up, almost uncannily, with the lines of thought I've been following here and elsewhere:

  Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. We probably spend more time thinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest. Prediction is usually all we have to rely on.

  We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is determination. At first we thought it might be intelligence. Everyone likes to believe that's what makes startups succeed. It makes a better story that a company won because its founders were so smart. The PR people and reporters who spread such stories probably believe them themselves. But while it certainly helps to be smart, it's not the deciding factor. There are plenty of people as smart as Bill Gates who achieve nothing.

  In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.

  He digs quite a bit deeper than I've seen this topic dug before, and in service of that task he whips up a doozy of a metaphor as well.
• Congratulations to (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Michael Silverblatt, king of the L.A. literary conversation, on recording 1000 Bookworm interviews. He's profiled in Oprah magazine — yes, Oprah magazine. What's also neat, at least for me, is that the profile quotes my MOI interview, though not by name. It also contains perhaps the most daming thing I've ever read about large-scale American public radio's state of mind:

  National Public Radio and Public Radio International have declined to distribute Bookworm. Critics say the half-hour format is a hard sell, and that the show lacks objectivity — Michael Silverblatt covers only books he likes.

  "Oh, we could never distribute your program, Mr. Silverblatt — you talk for an entire half hour about books you consider good!" Next they'll say he shares too much passion for the written word.

Linkage

• csn somehow knew to recommend me the exact site I wanted at the exact moment I wanted it. SoundTransit aggregates and organizes field recordings from around the world, submitted by field recordists — some well known — from around the world. All free for the download, the recordings have made more than their fair share of appearances on Soundforum, I can tell you. They've also provided inspiration and example, seeing as I plan to make my own field recording debut in New Zealand later this year.
• "SOBERING THOUGHT: What if God hates Pascal's wager and the people who believe in Him based on those sorts of calculations?" "DISAPPOINTMENT WITH SELF: How come I have nothing to say about the Teen Choice Awards? (Or have I already said something?)" "SELF-HELP: Every day in every way try to avoid meeting people who are similar to the ones you already know." "WORD TO THE WISE: If you're not careful shooting the Guggenheim it can end up looking like a parking garage." Errol Morris, one of my very favorite documentarians, tweets.
• "In a matter of minutes you can go from an idyllic view of palm trees, shifting effortlessly in the wind like in the movies, to observing a wrapped assortment of Botox-enhanced, intellectually vacuous women coughing on dirty air. You drive on a 10-lane freeway with a Caltech egghead to your left and Britney Spears to your right. It's bizarre, it's insane, it's confusing, it's complicated, it defies attempts to capture its essence. Perhaps it is essence-free." That's Ben Casnocha on The Complicatedness of Los Angeles. L.A.'s near-total void of poltical, aesthetic, ideological or stylistic orthodoxy strongly appeals to me. Many complain about the city's size, traffic and/or alleged anti-intellectuality, to which I respond: you're doing it wrong.
• An old friend recommended I watch the films of Chantal Akerman, which I will do, though only after I get to all of Michael Haneke's stuff that I've left unseen. (Which he also recommended to me.) In the LAT, Sam Adams praises Criteron's new release of Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles:

  Shot by cinematographer Babette Mangolte as a series of static, rectilinear tableaux, Jeanne's routines elapse in what feels like real time, but repeat viewings reveal the care with which Akerman modulates the film's tempo, both within shots and between them.

  The fascinating on-set documentary included with the new "Jeanne Dielman" double-disc DVD released by Criterion this week shows Akerman, then 25 and looking younger, walking her veteran actress through each step of procedures that seem utterly unstudied on screen. The very mundanity of her tasks lends them a kind of purity: It's domestic ritual as abstract art.

  I'm terribly intrigued; if all of Akerman's work is like this, I may need to de-prioritize Haneke for a little while and devour it.
• Virginia Heffernan chronicles the decline of and mass exodus from Facebook in the NYT. I often wonder myself where and when Facebook went wrong. While no one step seems to have sealed the site's fate of winding up an hideous, tacky mess, I can't help but pin a healthy share of the trouble on the company's decision to just hand out accounts to all comers. What probably sounded like the value-addingest move ever at the time — expanding one's user base to, uh, all humanity will always appeal — might well have actually destroyed much of the value — i.e., the all-important value of filtration — that that it added in the first place.

Linkage

I plan to follow the standard accrete-and-deploy method with interesting links, but with one notable departure: trying to control, to some degree, for the recency bias that dominates link-sharing. I'll link you up with new stuff, no doubt, but my interest is more to the stuff that's stood the test of time — which, on Internet, means like three to twelve years.

• High-quality text interviews of sound curator David Toop and WFMU manager Ken Freedman from Perfect Sound Forever. They've got many others in the archive, including Teo Macero, Ikue Mori and John Lurie (who's popped up in much of what I've read/watched/heard lately).
  
• I'll occasionally spend a stretch of time searching for solid philosophy blogs to read, usually in vain. The ones I do find are usually long-abandoned or too obscurantist to be relevant. Katja Grace's Meteuphoric seems different, so different that I'm about to take the near-unprecedented step of adding it to my RSS reader right away. Grace discusses philosophical issues both accessible and nontrivial — a rare feat indeed. This passage sold me:

  If something complicated is obvious, such as anything that anybody seriously studies, then for it to be simple you must be abstracting it a lot. When people find such things obvious, what they often mean is that the abstraction is so clear and simple its implications are unarguable. This is answering the wrong question. Most of the reasons such conclusions might be false are hidden in what you abstracted away. The question is whether you have the right abstraction for reality, not whether the abstraction has the implications it seems to.

• Victim of the Brain, a Dutch television docudrama on "the ideas of Douglas R. Hofstadter." (It's loosely based on The Mind's I.)
  
• "What do I need to do in daily life that I don't realize I need to be doing?", one of the most popular (and practical) Ask MetaFilter threads in recorded human history.
  
• Anthony Lane, probably my favorite film critic on pure style points despite the fact that I rarely look to his work for viewing direction, wrote a fine profile of Leica cameras and the enthusiasts who worship them. While I admit the silliness of any sort of purism, the fact remains that, were I to break down and finally buy a camera, it's Leica or nothing; using such a work of art of a tool would disincentivize my further pollution of the photographic world with badly-framed me-standing-in-front-of-monuments shots.