Having been so heavily involved in the scene, what artist do you believe are pushing the boundaries of music in NY?

I would say anyone playing to a crowd of 5 people in a city of millions is on the other side of the fence.

What straw2gold releases do we have to look forward to in the near future?

There are literally about a thousand recordings ready to be produced into DVDs…let me know when you have time to edit them.~

Find out More!

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Image Search Hits Puberty

Posted on April 28, 2008

During the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, Google announced a new algorithm for merging image recognition and user provided ratings to improve their image search. This is big news for the human race, as it looks like researching online is about to get a lot more precise.

Questions should be popping in your mind. How does the nature of online fame change when the rules of the game start to make sense? YouTube, for example, has had an appalling search engine. With such a large audience already tuned in, how will the numbers change with new search software?

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Web Squared

Posted on April 28, 2008

Web 2.0 has a certain mystique to it. Such a humble title, simply the second generation, but the progress of the internet is too organic to categorize in a single sequence. If you ask me, the 2.0 is no number at all, but suggestive of a powerful variable, something exponential. So we might as well call it Web Squared.

What does web squared mean for you? Well to start it means a whole new shopping experience. The most powerful nerds in the world are gathering in San-Francisco and discussing ways in which to improve our mass communication system. From my view point, big business is looking for new ways in which to keep their advertising budgets. This means owning their own networking sites, blogs, etc. in order to control traffic and divide it into consumer demographics.

Either way it’s gonna be wicked cool.

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Critics and Cans

Posted on April 23, 2008

Jean-Luc Godard interview (1964)

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Mashup Politics

Posted on April 22, 2008

Humanitainment

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Рукокрылый

Posted on April 20, 2008

Music of Franz Schubert

ВГИК (VGIK) studio, 2006.
Director: Vadim Oborvalov.

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Jazz and Film

Posted on April 19, 2008

Jazz and film were lovers, because they were growing through a lot of the same experiences. Jazz had trouble making friends in gym class, and Film lacked a sense of family history. The country itself was an accordion pulsating from puritanism to Id-tastic anarchy like a pubescent teenager on a field trip to the Hershey’s Factory.

A lot of folks picture Armstrong smiling on that big screen, or others might imagine the long flowing hair of Rippington’s finest Yanni playing on daytime talk television, but for me it was Gene Kruppa who gave an animated face to the music. He had already managed to push the drum set to the forefront of the big band, but he continued to contribute to the genre with his physical performance and overt expression. He did no less in Great Ball of Fire.

The movie follows a number of lexicographers finishing up their historic volume of encyclopedias, but after a trip to the speak easy they find that they have far from completed their project. At one point Gene steps away from his kit, and leads a chorus of drum boogie with a single matchbook.

Fantastic.

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Now Gene was something else, but far as cool factors, Cab Calloway has no match. Not even the Bill Cosby shuffle or the Fred Astaire anything holds a candle to the Calloway stroll. Just as incredible, Max Fleischer was able to catch that flow in perfect step.
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And in This Corner!

Posted on April 16, 2008

“Aside from my family, I have two great loves in my life: acting and the fight for social justice,” he said. “Oh yes, we are very serious.”

The New York Times has done a nice piece on Alan Rosenberg, probably the most feared man in Hollywood this spring. Even the Governator will have to tip his crew-cut when he hears those spurs ring through the dust.

The offers have hit the table to the sound of aluminum thunder and I am on the edge of my seat. From my perspective in the Big Apple I can tell you that there are many media artisans on the cusp of going union, and that over the next few years there will be a tidal wave in new members. Due to the high costs of living in the city to get this work, it’s very important that we are creating a middle class income. This is about getting a fair shake and supporting a family. It’s just American.

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Goodbye Ollie

Posted on April 16, 2008

One of the “Nine Old Men”, Ollie Johnston has died at the age of 95. He is a classic animator responsible for films like Cinderella and Fantasia. He was a master of movement, and he will be missed.

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Film History: Chris Marker

Posted on April 14, 2008

La Jetee, Chris Marker 1963

SCRIPT: (for my non-French viewers, if I have any)

This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood. The
violent scene that upsets him, and whose meaning he was to grasp only years
later, happened on the main jetty at Orly, the Paris airport, sometime
before the outbreak of World War III.

Orly, Sunday. Parents used to take their children there to watch the
departing planes.

On this particular Sunday, the child whose story we are telling was bound
to remember the frozen sun, the setting at the end of the jetty, and a
woman’s face.

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. Later on they do claim
remembrance when they show their scars. That face he had seen was to be the
only peacetime image to survive the war. Had he really seen it? Or had he
invented that tender moment to prop up the madness to come?

The sudden roar, the woman’s gesture, the crumpling body, and the cries of
the crowd on the jetty blurred by fear.

Later, he knew he had seen a man die.

And sometime after came the destruction of Paris.

Many died. Some believed themselves to be victors. Others were taken
prisoner. The survivors settled beneath Chaillot, in an underground network
of galleries.

Above ground, Paris, as most of the world, was uninhabitable, riddled with
radioactivity.

The victors stood guard over an empire of rats.

The prisoners were subjected to experiments, apparently of great concern to
those who conducted them.

The outcome was a disappointment for some - death for others - and for
others yet, madness.

One day they came to select a new guinea pig from among the prisoners.

He was the man whose story we are telling.

He was frightened. He had heard about the Head Experimenter. He was
prepared to meet Dr. Frankenstein, or the Mad Scientist. Instead, he met a
reasonable man who explained calmly that the human race was doomed. Space
was off-limits. The only hope for survival lay in Time. A loophole in Time,
and then maybe it would be possible to reach food, medicine, sources of
energy.

This was the aim of the experiments: to send emissaries into Time, to
summon the Past and Future to the aid of the Present.

But the human mind balked at the idea. To wake up in another age meant to
be born again as an adult. The shock would be too great.

Having only sent lifeless or insentient bodies through different zones of
Time, the inventors where now concentrating on men given to very strong
mental images. If they were able to conceive or dream another time, perhaps
they would be able to live in it.

The camp police spied even on dreams.

This man was selected from among a thousand for his obsession with an image
from the past.

Nothing else, at first, put stripping out the present, and its racks.

They begin again.

The man doesn’t die, nor does he go mad. He suffers.

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Catching Wally West

Posted on April 12, 2008

At the turn of the century (not this weekend but last weekend) Americans and Europeans alike still had some incredible misconceptions about lightning. Thanks to Franklin and others, they knew they were dealing with electricity, but they didn’t know how it traveled, or what caused that epic thunder we have all come to love and occasionally sacrifice virgins to.

One prominent theory was that electricity needed a vacuum through which to travel, and that thunder could be the sound of air rushing out of a path from cloud to ground. Another theory was that thunder was caused by they very impact of electricity on the point of contact. Turns out thunder is the sound of air molecules inflating from incredible heat like condoms in a high school health class.

Lightning moves at incredible speeds and reaches temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun which makes it a difficult subject to study. So a man named Sir Charles Vernon Boys designed his own camera in an effort to learn more.

“The scheme was to use a pair of identical camera lenses (specially selected for stereoscopic photography) and to mount these on a disc which could be rotated by hand through gearing at any desired speed. In the apparatus I then made I could drive them at any speed up to about 40 turns a second. The lenses were four inches apart, center to center; the two images of a lightning flash would then be carried in opposite directions up to about fourty feet per second,and if the flash in each part of its length should be “instantaneous,” a difference in time between the two ends of the flash of about 1/40,000 seconds would be observable. If, for example, the flash were a vertical line and the lenses at the moment were one above the other, one image would be tilted in one direction while the other would be tilted in the other direction, and the more so the greater the duration.”

Sir Charles Vernon Boys: Progressive Lightning, Nature, 1926.

He finally succeeded in 1928, offering a print like the one above.

What does this have to do with film? Simply this: one must use extraordinary means for capturing the extraordinary. Film is the perfect medium to capture the metaphor and the associative workings of human social interaction. A lot of people get swept with the argument that the American public only wants to consume familiar things, but this is an age where imitation and innovation are not segregated. To claim we have already exhausted techniques with the tools we have presumes far too much.

“One must free the cinema as an expressive medium in order to make it the ideal instrument of a new art, immensely vaster and lighter than all the existing arts. We are convinced that only in this way can one reach that polyexpressiveness towards which all the most modern artistic researches are moving. Today the Futurist cinema creates precisely the polyexpressive symphony that just a year ago we announced in our manifesto “Weights, Measures, and Prices of Artistic Genius”. The most varied elements will enter into the Futurist film as expressive means: from the slice of life to the streak of color, from the conventional line to words-in-freedom, from chromatic and plastic music to the music of objects. In other words it will be painting, architecture, sculpture, words-in-freedom, music of colors, lines, and forms, a jumble of objects and reality thrown together at random. We shall offer new inspirations for the researches of painters, which will tend to break out of the limits of the frame. We shall set in motion the words-in-freedom that smash the boundaries of literature as they march towards painting, music, noise-art, and throw a marvelous bridge between the word and the real object.”

“Our films will be:

Cinematic analogies that use reality directly as one of the two elements of the analogy. Example: If we should want to express the anguished state of one of our protagonists, instead of describing it in its various phases of suffering, we would give an equivalent impression with the sight of a jagged and cavernous mountain. The mountains, seas, woods, cities, crowds, armies, squadrons, aeroplanes will often be our formidable expressive words: the universe will be our vocabulary. Example: We want to give a sensation of strange cheerfulness: we show a chair cover flying comically around an enormous coat stand until they decide to join. We want to give the sensation of anger: we fracture the angry man into a whirlwind of little yellow balls. We want to give the anguish of a hero who has lost his faith and lapsed into a dead neutral skepticism: we show the hero in the act of making an inspired speech to a great crowd; suddenly we bring on Giovanni Giolitti who treasonably stuffs a thick forkful of macaroni into the hero’s mouth, drowning his winged words in tomato sauce.

We shall add color to the dialogue by swiftly, simultaneously showing every image that passes through the actors’ brains. Example: representing a man who will say to his woman: “You’re as lovely as a gazelle,” we shall show the gazelle. Example: if a character says, “I contemplate your fresh and luminous smile as a traveler after a long rough trip contemplates the sea from high on a mountain,” we shall show traveler, sea, mountain.

This is how we shall make our characters as understandable as if they talked.”

- F.T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra Emilo Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, Remo Chiti: Futurist Cinema

Connotations move quickly like the steps of electric ladders. Following a character’s arc from a to b takes a lot more than a cold still image of its physical path.