June 13, 2007
New Location
My blog has moved. Please change bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc. We're working on making sure that old links re-direct to the new site, but I'll keep you posted.
Posted by chuck at 12:14 PM | TrackBack
Transitions
Hey, the Wordherders are in the process of moving over to WordPress. URLs may change slightly, but I'll keep you posted. Please pardon the dust. But hopefully this will mean that I'll have functioning comments again soon.
Posted by chuck at 10:04 AM | TrackBack
Nuts
My Curator's Note on the fan campaign to save Jericho is now available on MediaCommons. I originally wrote the short commentary before I knew that the show would be renewed, but I found the use of internet video in rallying the show's fans to be worth exploring.
Comments are still broken here, but you can comment over at MediaCommons if you're interested.
Posted by chuck at 9:08 AM | TrackBack
June 11, 2007
The Sense of an Ending
Sopranos spoilers galore here. You've been warned. I've been fascinated by the reactions to the final episode of The Sopranos. Most of the people on the discussion boards I've skimmed have expressed disappointment at what has been described as the show's "life goes on" final scene, but I think the ending is fitting, not simply because life goes on--that's obvious--but because of the life that Tony finds himself living during that final scene. Because of all of the suspense cues--Meadow can't parallel park her car, the mysterious guy at the counter in the diner--we become acutely aware of Tony's situation, the fact that he's constantly aware of potential threats. But also the scene suggests that everything he's done to provide for his nuclear family has also potentially put them at risk. The denial of closure during that final sequence--I believe--worked really well.
But what I really wanted to mention, at least for now, is my fascination with a couple of YouTube clips that I discovered while skimming Sopranos spoiler sites last night before the show. One clip was actually recorded outside the Holstein's diner as Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) struggles to parallel park her car before running into the diner to meet her family. The person who recorded this clip correctly predicted that it was from the final scene of the show and claims that it was the last scene ever shot for the series (a claim that I can't confirm). A similar clip depicts someone from the show being thrown from a third story window. But I'm wondering how or if these clips will fit within the micro-histories of The Sopranos, especially given that show's rich cultural roots in the state of New Jersey, and how YouTube and other video sharing sites might be able to contribute to a richer history of media production.
I'll post a somewhat revised version of this entry on Newcritics because I'm curious to get your comments.
Posted by chuck at 11:04 AM | TrackBack
June 9, 2007
Jesus is My Prozac
Went to the Blue Ridge Barbecue Festival with George, where I discovered not only that Jesus is my Prozac but also that there is an entire film society named after me. Okay, so maybe the film society isn't named after me, but Tryon, NC, is actually a pretty cool little town, and the barbecue fest featured some delicious barbecue. Thanks to George for the pix.
Update: A picture of me on the set of David Lynch's NASCAR movie.
Posted by chuck at 5:09 PM | TrackBack
Bringing the War Back Home
My Flow article on the Iraq Veterans Against the War street theater performance, "Operation First Casualty," is now available. Worth noting: in the comments, Elliott, one of the editors of the meerkat video discusses the ways in which the street theater performances "make people aware that a vast gulf may exist between their understanding of their own public space and those of people in, say, Baghdad–where things have been completely reordered without consent." The video remains one of the more interesting forms of anti-war protest that I've seen in some time, and while the video itself cannot quite capture the immediacy of witnessing the performance live, I think it does depict the distinction between the public space of Times Square and Baghdad rather effectively.
Posted by chuck at 12:02 PM | TrackBack
June 7, 2007
Travel Day Links
Getting ready to drive over to hang out with George for a couple of days, but before I leave, here are a few of my late morning coffee reads and viewing tips:
Via David, a short film about time travel! The Timebox Twins! is a fun short video directed by Tipper Newton and starring Newton and Ice Cream Floats bandmate and LOL director Joe Swanberg. In the vid, a brother and sister discover the "timeboxes" that keep schools on schedule. Steal four of them and you can build a time machine. Fun stuff.
Jason and Nikki both comment on the recent appeals court ruling that states that the FCC overreached in its excessive fines for "fleeting obscenities." As Jason points out, the harsh punishments are a product of the post-nipplegate era and focused on unscripted content (Bono's off-the-cuff remark that winning a Golden Globe was "fucking brilliant!"), which the appeals court ruled does not fit into the category of obscenity. Jason's post has the added bonus of an audio version of George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" routine.
Finally, via the comments to Sam's post on self-Googling, I learned about a new documentary on the topic called Google Me, which judging by the Google iconography was made with Google's cooperation. I'm certainly intrigued by the topic of naming and identity--as my post on Alan Berliner's The Sweetest Sound indicates--but I do have some questions about what it means to identify Google as a stand in for community or unity as this film seems to do (as the trailer and the film's description imply).
Comments are still broken. Hopefully they'll be running soon.
Posted by chuck at 1:13 PM | TrackBack
June 6, 2007
Wednesday Links
Via Ted Z: A Variety article on Regal Cinemas' decision to equip one patron per theater with a pager to alert theater management to problems. The pager will have four buttons, with one each for picture and sound quality. The other buttons are for piracy and for "other disturbances," which presumably is a way of regulating unruly theatrical audiences, including, I'd imagine, viewers who are texting too conspicuously.
Via Filmmaker Magazine, a VideoNation web documentary on the Iraq Veterans Against the War street performance, :Operation First Casualty" (OFC), over Memorial Day weekend. This mini-doc was made by producer Laura Hanna and Zizek! director Astra Taylor. Taylor reports that she will have a second clip, on industrial food pollution, posted soon. My Flow column on OFC should appear over the next few days.
And, it's official: the fan campaign to convince CBS to renew the post-apocalyptic TV series Jericho has succeeded. After hearing that the show had been canceled, fans sent over 50,000 pounds of nuts to CBS headquarters in New York and Los Angeles. I'll have a short commentary on this topic on MediaCommons sometime next week.
Posted by chuck at 6:40 PM | TrackBack
Subpoenas, Now with Immunity
From the folks behind Godfather 4, a new video suggesting how we might be able to deal with the sudden memory loss of so many members of the Department of Justice. Really good riff on the DOJ scandal and those truly awful drug ads.
Cheap transition, but speaking of health care, here's the YouTube page for Michael Moore's Sicko, including the film's trailer and an interview with two of the 9/11 workers who traveled with Moore to Cuba to get health care.
Posted by chuck at 10:48 AM | TrackBack
June 4, 2007
Operation First Casualty
Thanks to Jason Mittell, I just came across the Iraq Veterans Against the War video, Operation First Casualty, available on YouTube and on the meerkat media blog. In the video Iraq War veterans simulate sniper fire and mass detentions on the streets of New York, bringing home the experience of the war in an interesting way.
Like Jason, I'm wondering whether YouTube and other video sharing sites can be used to engage new kinds of audiences politically. Certainly, street theater has a long precedent--including the flash mob performances that became briefly popular a few years ago. The video also reminds me, in other ways, of the construction of authenticity established in so many "grunts' eye" documentaries (such as Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland).
Still working through my thoughts on the video, so hopefully will have more to say about it later.
Update: Via Rez Dog, news that at least one of the soldiers involved is now under investigation by the military and could receive a less than honorable discharge, which would potentially threaten "educational and other benefits."
Posted by chuck at 12:24 PM | TrackBack
June 2, 2007
The Public Living Room Experience
Via Jim Emerson's Scanners blog, Christopher Hawthorne's architectural review of the new 12-screen flagship Landmark Theatre at the Westside Pavilion. The theater is clearly designed to compete with LA's other art houses, including the ArcLight and the Bridge, but as Hawthorne observes, what is significant about the new Landmark is its desire to reproduce the home theater experience:
But it is also designed to compete directly with your living room--with your sofa, your flat screen and your ability to pause, rewind, turn on the lights or just give up on the movie idea altogether and switch over to "The Daily Show."Of course, it's easy to point out that the Landmark has targeted a very specific niche audience (or taste culture) with this new architectural design, which Hawthorne, perhaps correctly, reads as "congratulating" that small segment of the population.As if to acknowledge how tough it's becoming to drag people out of their houses for a night at the movies, with home-theater technology getting better and traffic getting worse, the Landmark includes a number of domestic architectural touches. The most striking are three "Living Room" theaters on the top floor that hold between 30 and 50 people each. They include sofas and side tables as well as overstuffed love seats and ottomans by the high-end French furniture company Ligne Roset.
Like Hawthorne, I'm intrigued by what these "Living Room" theaters say about attitudes towards moviegoing in a digital era, but I'm curious about how the use of couches and overstuffed loveseats will work out. As Emerson points out, many of the screening rooms only accommodate 30-50 people, making it reasonable to ask whether they will generate enough revenue to be profitable, but perhaps the bigger question, at least for me, is how these screening rooms will negotiate the boundaries between public and private represented by bringing a certain version of the domestic screening experience into the more public space of the movie theater (keeping in mind that theaters have always only been "semipublic spaces" as Isabel Cristina Pinedo argues in Recreational Terror). Given that moviegoing is often a solitary act for me, I'm wondering how couches and loveseats--rather than individual seats--will shape how strangers share this semipublic space (if at all). Ideally, it could contribute to the public film cultures discussed by Barbara Klinger in Beyond the Multiplex. At the very least, I'm fascinated by the desire to re-create the home theater system at the movie theater and the continued characterization of the 1980s-era multiplex as the bad object against which contemporary screening experiences, whether at home or in the art house, are defined.
Update: Here's a second LA Times article on the new art house theater at Westside Pavilion. Not sure it adds much to what I've already written, but the discussion of movie theaters and public space or movie theaters and their relationship to the local community is interesting. It also gives me a chance to complain about Landmark's annoying decision to refer to themselves as Landmark Theatres rather than using the standard American spelling of "theater."
Posted by chuck at 2:32 PM | TrackBack