highindustrial.september.2001

9/30/2001 01:50:33 AM 0 comments

I'm finally making a dent in my email backlog. Scrolling through the hundreds of partially-read and indefinitely deferred messages, I can see the fissure: the "before and after" of various skeins of conversation -- threads of thought, once taut, snapped at precisely the same moment. So I must go back, take up those lapsed cords, bring them forward, mend the seam.

When I think of the recent past, and what my foremost concerns were a mere three weeks ago, I'm reminded of Miss Havisham's wedding tableau from Great Expectations, entombed in its own festivity.

And when I think of New York, I think of A.I.'s final scenes. I think of the city, many centuries hence, locked in ice, in an embrace so cold as to defy even the fiercest inferno. A stasis beyond human folly, below the threshold of sentimentality, beautiful and inviolable and remote.

It's been seven years since I read Gibson's Virtual Light, but I remember some business about "Godzilla," a cataclysmic tectonic event that more or less levels Tokyo in the early twenty-first century. And I remember reading about the new Tokyo rising from the rubble of the old, nanotech-assembled skyscrapers shimmering biomechanically beneath their mimetic-polymer skins.

I hope whatever form the WTC reconstruction takes challenges us, offends our postmodern sensibilities. I hope it's a great leap forward, a kick in the teeth, a reach. I hope it inspires us. Floors us.
9/28/2001 04:39:16 AM 0 comments

As my buddy J might say, "those nerds" are having a field day with the latest heir to Paramount's Star Trek fortune. I, too, managed to catch the bulk of Enterprise's premiere. A few observations:

The show itself is not horrible, although Russel Watson's singing over the opening credits is. I know this is a bold new "enterprise," so I can understand the desire to deviate from the usual, intrepid, full-orchestral Trek fare. But tepid Eighties-sitcom devotional pap is not a suitable substitute. If the producers had any real gumption, they woulda hired the likes of Marius De Vries or Paul Oakenfold or Nellee Hooper to score the titles. Alas.

As a Vulcan, Jolene Blalock is ridiculously hot; as a human being, she's just ridiculous. Jeri Ryan she's not. Meanwhile, Linda Park is slightly sassy in the Ming Na mode, but not annoying like Maggie Cho; a suitable Token Asian, by and by -- and by no means guilty of the bad acting holocaust that was Garret Wang's participation in Voyager.

Also, in this show, when characters recite the Trek riot act -- "To boldly go where no man has gone before" -- they apparently mean the gym, because this is the first Trek series in memory where all the dudes aren't ludicrously outta shape. Whether this portends more callisthenic action sequences (versus the usual shaky-camera fake-outs) remains to be seen.

It's all moot anyway. Enterprise will be around for seven years. I mean, somebody's gotta pay UPN's bills.
9/27/2001 03:21:02 AM 0 comments

I've always thought the Empire State Building is pretty blah (the Chrysler Building has more of a Wim Wenders Wings of Desire metropolitan dream-feel), but this picture makes me realize how amazing it must have seemed when it was first constructed, towering above the contemporaneous capitalism like some deco sepulcher, a perfect artifact in a world of zeppelins and rocketeers. Emblematic.
9/26/2001 03:39:26 PM 0 comments

I'm surprised the current climate hasn't precipitated a Norman Rockwell resurgence. His "Four Freedoms" series, positively tricolor with sentimentality, would seem particularly to fit the bill, although I'm somewhat partial to his darker stuff. And this painting straddles the line between hokiness and pointedness rather delicately.
9/26/2001 03:28:15 AM 0 comments

God bless The Onion for maintaining its composure through all this. After Jon Stewart's moist ululations on The Daily Show the other night, I thought we'd officially become a humorless society.

Don't get me wrong -- seriousness in times of tragedy is very important; but when the grief becomes telegraphed, dictated to us by dancing, tuxedo-clad media monkeys -- jacked up, peeled and "spun" -- I start to worry.
9/25/2001 08:40:36 PM 0 comments

Gleaned from the "News in Brief" sidebar ("Casting Couch") on today's Mr. Showbiz News: "He's already tangled with a pie, so an affair with an older woman should be no big deal for American Pie 2's Jason Biggs, who's headed for Broadway to star in The Graduate opposite Kathleen Turner and Alicia Silverstone."

Short of actually hurling raw sewage at the audience, I don't know how much more that cast could stink.
9/25/2001 02:48:28 PM 0 comments

Today I had Pop-Tarts and ice cream for breakfast. In case it doesn't follow, I'm not really a breakfast person. I'm not even really a morning person anymore -- not since, well, you know. But I'm getting back into the swing of things.

So, um. It's fall. Fall is swell. I have a weeks-strong pile of leafy emails oxidizing in my inbox, thoughts and tangents and exchanges I've yet to resume. Occasionally I'll compose a response, only to delete it at the point of transmission. It's as if it were enough that my thoughts were transcribed, however briefly -- that they existed momentarily outside my head, in front of me; and actual conveyance would be overkill.
9/24/2001 01:35:29 PM 0 comments

"There is nothing worse than the recent past." - Karl Lagerfeld (of all people).

I gleaned that insight from the cheaply glossy and instantly irrelevant pages of October's Talk Magazine. The rag was lying on the living room coffee table; and since I was thoroughly Clockwork Oranged-out on OBL, WTC, GWB, and WW3, I hunkered ("junkered") down in bed and partook hungrily of Lara Flynn Boyle's obnoxious interview emissions ("'I'm high-maintenance and I'm worth it ... I'm smart, I'm rich, I'm pretty, I'm funny. I think that's pretty much worth it,' she says coolly.") and Maria Carey's mental meltdown. On the horizon: in-depth (or in-flight, rather) profiles of TMV and BBT. OGG.
9/24/2001 01:20:01 AM 0 comments

I've been a fan of Psychic TV's "Roman P" ever since I heard the track in one of Volkswagen's early "Drivers Wanted" commercials, way back in 1996. I didn't know the name of the song, however, and was therefore unable to track it down ... until I received this in the mail today. Happiness is an old song rediscovered.
9/21/2001 03:03:03 AM 0 comments

Silence here. Discussion there.
9/20/2001 05:13:53 PM 0 comments

A snowglobe suspension in a column of light: an airplane permanently in thrall just before its matter becomes energy; the two towers, not to scale, astride a cartoon-candy earth-globe; a backdrop of cotton cloud-puffs, frozen stars.

My curio-fetishism continues to sublime and abstract what happened, even as my throat constricts and my breathing becomes shallow. Television, magazines, friends, family -- there's no escaping it. It's the vapor in everyone's breath, the prayer on everyone's lips.

Something about this Martin Amis piece in The Guardian captures my perception: the alien fatalism of it, the visual incongruity, the invisible lines of consequence casting a pall over the future. Allegories about apocalypses have always been just that -- figurative, arch, more critical than prophetic. But now I'm fearful. It's a feeling I can't shake. And I hate that.
9/19/2001 02:27:10 AM 0 comments

Lately my personality's felt like the cold skin on steamed milk. Crezappy.
9/18/2001 11:41:26 PM 0 comments

I can tell you what I won't be watching on Friday. I don't think I can take anymore off-the-shelf, insta-shrink-wrapped television coverage of last week's events. Everything's bleeding together like a Simpsons spoof. (For some reason I keep picturing Robin Williams and Billy Crystal performing a nebulously -- and painfully -- unfunny musical skit.) I'm curious to see how much they'll rake in, though.
9/18/2001 02:26:02 PM 0 comments

Leslie writes evocatively and well about her recent patronage of an Afghan restaurant. Favorite line: "Dinner, by the way, was delicious. Afghan food, much more widely available in America than Afghanistan...." Nice use of irony there. Good stuff. [via megnut]
9/18/2001 01:37:38 PM 0 comments

"Tech pros and cons revealed: Last week's events were a useful reminder of high technology's limits."
9/18/2001 01:09:07 PM 0 comments

The horrible coincidences described herein remind me of the prologue from Magnolia. I'm further reminded, curiously, of the Marx quote about history cycling through tragedy and farce.
9/17/2001 01:40:33 AM 0 comments

"[People] are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men." - Line from Anthony Minghella's English Patient screenplay.
9/16/2001 02:52:53 AM 0 comments

This past week's events have renewed interest in some of the great stuff that's appeared in The Atlantic in recent years. Two articles in particular are choice -- illuminating and fascinating. Read. Discuss.
9/16/2001 12:47:53 AM 0 comments

The Most Essential Mariah Carey CDs. Um, isn't that an oxymoron?

I don't even understand why Amazon barfed that up. I was browsing for The Art of War and 1984 (topical! au courant!), and there it was in the sidebar, like a sudden outbreak of herpes. Their server must be suffering from cognitive dissonance. Or the aforementioned herpes. It's viral, you know. "I Love You," and all that.
9/15/2001 10:49:12 PM 0 comments

Ed Zwick's suddenly-relevant Siege may have been a pretty mediocre film, but the director makes a good point here. It's been said often lately, but I like his succinctness: "There is only one defense, really, on the part of a free society, and that is to continue its freedoms."
9/14/2001 08:00:03 PM 0 comments

Jeffrey Wells has been posting some interesting commentary on the WTC disaster from an entertainment writer's perspective. From September 12th:

Those hundreds (more likely thousands) of bodies lying under the rubble in New York and Washington, D.C., have pulverized everyone's consciousness, and there just isn't room to let anyone's particular cinematic vision of life into our heads. Reality has taken over completely. Reality is all. What happened yesterday was beyond horrific, beyond sadistic, beyond the most spectacular Jerry Bruckheimer CGI fireball.

Commentators and editorialists are saying everywhere that America will never be the same in the wake of those jets smashing into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, and are describing what happened as Pearl Harbor times 10. That's true in more ways than one.

Those camcorder shots of the buildings crashing down were terrible but awesome. I watched them over and over yesterday and into the night. We all did, I'm sure. It sounds insensitive to even think this, but one result of that footage is that special-effects companies are going to have to get a lot better very quickly. Because any huge, computer-created explosion in any new movie is suddenly going to look a lot faker. Reality has raised the bar.

It's terrible but true: reality has raised the bar. My roommates and I popped Armageddon* into the DVD player yesterday, just to look at the opening sequence, where NYC is bombarded by meteor fragments. The way some of the images overlapped with recent events was disturbing. And while some shots in particular were just eerie (the WTC towers aflame, looking very much like they did before they collapsed), others no longer felt accurate. There's a snippet where a dust cloud rushes down a street as pedestrians flee. The particle dynamics were all wrong -- too much fuzz, not enough grain.

And from today's column:

I was standing yesterday a few blocks away from Toronto's CN (Canadian National) tower, which stands about six or seven blocks south of Roy Thomson Hall. The tallness of it vaguely reminded me of the World Trade Center, and a two- or three-year-old memory of standing on the WTC's observation floor with my kids and looking out at Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Roger Ebert wrote a day or two ago that the World Trade Center towers shouldn't be rebuilt, and that the city of New York should just create a park of some kind, with a pond for kids to skate on during the winter. A nice thought, but I can see the argument for rebuilding as well. Doing so would obviously amount to a kind of renunciation of the forces that tore them down. And it would serve as a great spiritual redeemer for everyone, everywhere.

I can see certain movies -- violent ones, especially -- holding up their release dates so people can heal a bit, but Paramount Classics delaying the opening of Ed Burns' Sidewalks of New York seems silly. What is it about this thing, a second-tier remake of Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives, that they think will trigger memories of last Tuesday? Because some scenes are shot downtown?

A guy named Steve O'Keefe sent this to me yesterday: "I feel it might be worthwhile suggesting that upcoming major studio films using New York City as a backdrop should insert the World Trade Center with CGI, until the area is reconstructed. Certainly not to deny the history or the tragedy, but more to establish a silent anti-terrorism message from American filmmakers."

That's the spirit. Don't shrink from what happened; face it and use it as a source of energy, if not to build from then at least to remember and re-imagine. We are all New Yorkers right now, and there should be no allowances for any wreckage anywhere, especially in our minds. I can't recall if there's a brief shot of the World Trade Center towers in Sidewalks of New York or not, but if I were Ed Burns I'd want to put one in. Burns is a New Yorker from way back; he knows what I'm talking about.

Call me hokey, but I really like the idea of "repairing" the Manhattan skyline in upcoming films until actual reconstruction has commenced. For some, it may seem like a form of digital denial, but I see any such gesture as striking a promissory note: we will regroup, we will rebuild. We will not let this infect us. Art as aspiration.

Incidentally, I hope no one's offended by my focus on the reality-unreality nexus of recent events. Cinematic comparisons are totally trivial in a lot of ways, but processing stuff like this is how I cope. I hope that's okay.
9/14/2001 03:37:28 PM 0 comments

On second thought....
9/14/2001 12:13:13 PM 0 comments

Moby puts his journal on hiatus.

I think I know how he feels. Everything is wrong, odd. I've had this sensation in my chest, behind my sternum -- and behind my eyes, in my sinuses. I know that feeling, although it hasn't visited me in years: it's depression. And it's not an adolescent depression, it's not even necessarily private. It's borne of the knowledge that a lot of things won't be "the same" for quite some time. And some things will just stay changed, stay different. And the only course of action is to wait it out.

Unlike Moby's, this entry isn't meant to announce a leave of absence. I'm around, I'm staying put ... although part of me wishes I were living on some obscure island in the Pacific, away from civilization, away from metal birds and silicon towers and flaming death.

No, I'm not going anywhere. I just wanted to confess how I felt, and how I really feel. I tend to internalize like crazy when I'm sad, until the sadness passes. This time I thought I'd throw it out there a little. Maybe it'll be therapeutic. I dunno. Or maybe I'll just bore the hell out of everyone. What I do know is that I don't have any answers whatsoever, and that bothers the hell out of me. Escalation is a dirty, dirty word -- and that's what I see going on around me. Abatement seems so very distant, like something that made me smile on a specific afternoon four years ago. Or even three days ago.

Tuesday night, I saw replays of that second plane sailing into the South Tower with what I can only describe as fatal grace. I remember seeing it over and over, as I nodded off. It played out beneath my eyelids, a movie where every third frame was just a black matte, so that everything seemed to flicker a little, to be slightly ephemeral. And even now, watching those ubiquitous news tickers track across the bottom of my television screen -- little concertina-wire lengths of information, barbed with tragedy and mistrust: it's painful.

I want to take a nap; and when I wake up, I want to be twenty years older, with vines breaking through all the walls in all the buildings in all the cities. Would that everyone could just sleep now, and wake up twenty years older, somehow informed with all the wisdom of the intervening years.

I've been dreadfully earnest lately. That's conspicuous. But life goes on.
9/14/2001 02:05:21 AM 0 comments

More perspective. [again, via underachievers]
9/13/2001 06:25:18 PM 0 comments

"Powerful indeed is the empire of habit." - Publius Syrus , Maxim 305.

It's oddly reassuring to note that even in the midst of recent atrocities, we haven't lost our penchant for, nor appreciation of, the absurd.

And while I'm harping on the ridiculous: Is it just me, or is Brittany Murphy's little catchphrase (the sing-songy "I'll never tell") at the end of the Don't Say a Word trailer one of the most enervating turns of phrase in recent cinema? For your neurotic pleasure, I've isolated said sound bite here. Download it and annoy someone you love.
9/13/2001 01:03:44 PM 0 comments

"They created a desolation and called it peace." - Tacitus
9/13/2001 03:01:20 AM 0 comments

I'm tired. And sad. There's a lot of shit being said, and going down, all over the country, and I don't even feel like linking to any of it just now. I'm anxious, exhausted, depleted and tense. The amount of very specific information I've absorbed in the last thirty-six hours exceeds the aggregate of my usual surveys and meanderings over the past few months. At least it feels that way.

Words are coming strangely. I feel taciturn. I haven't been returning phone calls. It's as if vocal communication hogs too much bandwidth. My sentiments, for all their polyvalence and ambivalence, are too compressed right now. My thoughts feel like liquid being forced through a syringe.

And I'm surfing the web as if for the first time -- checking links I'd usually ignore; waiting for pages to finish loading, and scrolling all the way down; traversing skeins at odd angles, even angles; being generally itinerant, and yet so very constricted. Everything tunnels down to what took place yesterday. Blastwave, shockwave, aftershock, aftermath. Words combine like molecules, atomize like vapor. The writing's on the wall, the wall is crumbling, the writing's in blood, the blood will be avenged with more blood.

Just one link, after all. By far the strangest, most pedestrian, most mundane thing I've seen all day. It has nothing to do with anything. And maybe that's the point. I look forward to the day when something will have nothing to do with anything again. Right now, everything's a conspiracy, and everyone's implicated to varying degrees. That's what the talking heads tell me, the ones I see in the box that lights up, paints moving pictures with an electron gun.

Gun. Bomb. Sad. Cry.
9/13/2001 01:53:38 AM 0 comments

A little context, courtesy of Michael Moore. [via underachievers]
9/12/2001 03:09:24 PM 0 comments

These are some great images -- particularly this one, because of the juxtaposition of various elements, all the stuff going on simultaneously.
9/12/2001 01:29:54 PM 0 comments

This is the most lucid chronological depiction I've seen of what exactly happened yesterday, even though I don't understand a stitch of Spanish. [via kottke]
9/12/2001 01:01:59 PM 0 comments

Something my friends and I have been wondering about is the cultural fallout from what happened in Manhattan yesterday. The drastic modification of the city's skyline, to say nothing of the calamity's effect on the citizenry, is likely to reverberate throughout the film and television industries in the months to come -- particularly where NYC-based productions are concerned. More broadly, the very notion of dramatized terrorism will also likely be reexamined. Dark Horizons provides a very preliminary rundown of some expected changes. (I've taken the liberty of reformatting the text, as well as correcting various syntax errors. It was easier than sprinkling sic everywhere.)

"TV World Reaction: Sunday's Emmy awards have been indefinitely postponed, while most TV shows in production on their upcoming fall seasons have been shut down. The incident comes at a time when three of the most highly anticipated shows of the new TV season -- Alias, The Agency and 24 -- focus on the CIA's crime-fighting efforts against terrorists. As a result, promotional spots for these new series have been pulled from their respective networks, and while the premieres for these shows are still scheduled, content may be changed; the pilot for 24 (due to air late October), for example, includes a sequence where a terrorist blows up a plane.... Other productions, like Friends, are being looked over with a fine-tooth comb, and any shot with the Twin Towers in the background will either be removed or have the Towers digitally erased.

"Film World Reaction: In film news, there's been some drastic last-minute shuffling. Tim Allen's black comedy Big Trouble, about events surrounding a group of people who interact with a suitcase bomb, has been pulled from a September 21st release and is now scheduled for sometime next year. Ed Burns' romantic flick Sidewalks of New York has also been pulled from an opening next Friday and will probably come out late November. Arnold Schwarzenegger's terrorist thriller Collateral Damage is having its trailers destroyed and looks likely to be pushed back. Spider-Man is also going to be changing its marketing -- the teaser poster and trailer are being pulled from theaters and the Net."
9/12/2001 12:59:46 AM 0 comments

I've been disoriented. After all, you're supposed to wake up from nightmares, not to them. The day's events have increasingly acquired the texture and timbre of a terrible dream. The same images, cycled, looped -- updated slightly with each revolution. The same horrible act in all its multiplicity, presented from new angles, with increasing resolution. The urban landscape coated with ash. The peculiar sensation of being force-fed the very reality we've devoured as junk food for years.

It's all I can do to process these images. I can't even begin to comment on the wherefores and whys, the politics, the history, the pettiness, the heroism. I see and hear a lot of anger, rhetoric and misinformation from a lot of armchair observers, not unlike myself, and all I can say is: wait. Wait for the facts to emerge.

Am I wrong?
9/11/2001 04:58:59 PM 0 comments

For some reason, this image is going to stay with me. The first of many from today, I'm sure.
9/11/2001 09:22:11 AM 0 comments

"All circuits are busy."
"The page cannot be displayed."

On CNN, I just watched the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapse in a flourish of inertia and dust. The familiar Manhattan skyline is different and dark, a small wound in the side of the planet, radiating shockwaves across time zones and through the years to come.

"It's like something out of a movie," people keep saying. "It's like science fiction." But it's not. It just happened. We just crossed that line.
9/11/2001 08:53:26 AM 0 comments

Maybe it's not the best time after all. Maybe it's the worst time. You already know what I'm talking about. I just found out. This is beyond the pale, below the baseline for bad things that should happen. I don't know what to say. And it's not even over yet. I just dont' know what to say.
9/11/2001 08:04:18 AM 0 comments

It's that time of year again. The time between summer and winter. The best time.

I like the word autumn. It's formal, elegant, somehow symmetrical about the u's and the mn. Its consonance evokes a piano chord for me: which one, and why, I couldn't tell you -- I only know it implicitly, like intuition. Fall is also a good word, summoning the rush of wings and water, bearing the weight of various creation myths. Colors cascade, temperatures recede, and memory rushes in to fill the void.

This is my first fall on this coast, and for all the beauty of the bay, I'm going to miss the eastern seaboard. I'm going to miss the smell I like to call slate, and the friends who now live three hours in the future. This is the first fall that's truly different from the preceding five, and perhaps I won't grasp the significance of this for another five falls. The viscosity of memory varies directly with our proximity to it. The hard-candy impressions I hold in my hand today will be syrup in a few years, more readily mixed in and applied to whatever dainty dish I've set before myself by then.

Once upon a time, Joan Didion wrote about being young in New York. My time and place may be different, but I appreciate her sentiment:

"Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots -- the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young." (p.208)

All beginnings are informed with the foreknowledge of other beginnings.
9/11/2001 12:51:43 AM 0 comments

With the release of The Musketeer, 2001's trend of terrible filmmaking has officially bottomed out ... for the time being, anyway. Peter Hyams' squalid, lethargic exercise in period action is poorly executed in every possible way, from its mannequin dramatics to David Arnold's pathetically "rousing" score. In terms of camp value, the film occupies a Rabelais-meets-Monty Python limbo: in other words, it's a Muppet movie. The dialog is really that cheesy, the humor is really that noxious, and the production values are really that nil. The editing is by turns incoherent (serving largely to shine a klieg light on cuts between the actors and the actual stuntmen) and narcoleptic (scenes inexplicably fading to black within themselves). Similarly, the cinematography is about as lambent as mud.

In the lead roles, Justin Chambers and Mena Suvari spend an inordinate amount of time staring blankly at each other -- the former struggling with a Continental lilt that falls somewhere between the Brad Pitt and Keanu Reeves schools of elocution, and the latter presumably struggling with whatever she ate from the craft services table in between takes. And for connoisseurs of bad-movie drinking games, let me suggest the following: take a shot every time Suvari shares the frame with Catherine Deneuve. For the sequence where Deneuve is forced to negotiate an underground sewer, down a bottle of whatever window cleaner you have handy.

Reportedly, this mess was budgeted at $50 million, but I'm thinking somebody got a nice Tuscan villa out of it, because I'd be hard-pressed to locate more than $12 million onscreen. Just look at the title sequence and you'll know what I mean: it's an almost hauntingly amateurish slide show of the various actors, their images Photoshopped to resemble embroidery -- the kind of thing you'd expect from one of those Z-list "all star" television miniseries from the Eighties. Or a PowerPoint presentation.

And the hyped Hong Kong fight choreography? There's maybe ten minutes of it in the entire fucking movie -- and the aforementioned terrible cinematography renders it inscrutable. And and and! -- I counted at least four separate sequences involving the all-too-common peril of runaway wine barrels. That's Donkey Kong Country ... albeit without Donkey Kong's comparatively fleshed-out characters and cogent narrative.

I could go on, but I think I'll let Charles Taylor finish off the slice 'n' dice. I have to go suture my eyes shut.
9/10/2001 01:53:48 AM 0 comments

9/8/2001 01:05:56 AM 0 comments

Mariah Carey's, um, voice log is a study in circuitous banality. There's something sinisterly repetitive about her lite personal affirmations and perfunctory oaths of love, sympathy and affection -- to say nothing of her expressions of love, sympathy and affection. And did I mention love, sympathy and affection? She's thisclose to quoting Dylan Thomas. I'd like to think it's the Depakote talking, but I suspect her shallowness runs deep.
9/5/2001 12:49:54 PM 0 comments

This Onion interview with Joss Whedon is extremely choice: smart, informative, hilarious.* I especially enjoy how liberally he pisses on various people he's collaborated with over the years. And while there's a whiff of petulance to some of his laments -- an acrid David Eggers enfant terrible scent, if you will -- his remarks are generally canny and very much on target. In the particular case of Alien: Resurrection, I feel his pain explicitly. Whedon's original script was clever, dark and exciting. The movie that Twentieth Century Fox and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet brought to the screen was dank and desultory -- redeemed solely and marginally by Sigourney Weaver's faultless performance and some interesting lenswork from Darius Khondji ... slim pickings overall. It never ceases to amaze me that an industry that spends so much time and money on incidentals often can't be bothered to shore up its core competencies. But I guess everyone's on the take.
9/5/2001 03:27:00 AM 0 comments

New layout. I aimed for something that "uses the screen" no matter what your resolution is. I've checked it in all the Mac browsers, but Windoze/*Nix users will have to let me know if it looks like shit. Thoughts? (I intend to implement more functionality down the line, but I wanna be feng shui about it.)
9/4/2001 01:44:40 PM 0 comments

After immoderate procrastination, I've finally put some photos (back) online. The thought of homebrewing an interface was beginning to chafe, so I gave in and availed of Apple's solution. The picture-frame motif is somewhat cheesy, and customization is minimal; but the mechanism for adding new images is ridiculously simple (i.e., more or less built into the Mac OS) -- and I'd sooner hog their bandwidth than mine.

So far, I've only gotten last year's photos up -- which some of you have already seen, probably. I'll add more as I remember to develop the rolls I have lying around.
9/2/2001 01:59:54 AM 0 comments