Tiger
Go Asimo!
Asimo, Honda’s backdoor robot, plays soccer to Walkin’ on Sunshine Lite. It’s the first video on this page, the Robo Cup shit. Skip to about 2 minutes in and marvel at slow-motion, expensive soccer-esque posing. (via Acts of Volition)
A Very Special Birthday
Please join ‘bags in toasting Mario Lopez.
Fireland Contest
Don’t forget to submit the sexiest sentence alive, should you know it.
Laugh at the Beautiful
The wisdom of supermodels. & Unrelatedly, what’s up, 24.130.248.43? Quit pingin’ my trackbacks with empty shit!
camera
Hooray… my camera is back, after a year abroad! Welcome back, little buddy, and say hi to your new pardner, d/photo. (not to imply there are any new pics there yet)
Free the Mouse
On October 9th, Lawrence Lessig goes to the Supreme Court to challenge the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, a.k.a. the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act. Basically, whenever Steamboat Willie’s copyright is due to expire, some magical pixie in the US government extends the term of copyright for everything, retroactively. Lessig is challenging the latest effort in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Read all about him here
, courtesy Wired mag.
Bruce Robinson
A pleasing 1995 interview with Bruce Robinson, director of Withnail & I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising, about writing, poverty, and other things.
Pax Americana
The U.S. National Security Strategy, published Sept. 20 2002, contains the phrase “the best defense is a good offense.” Here’s a good overview of its thrust, which is towards full-assed unapologetic global empire.
world's funniest
Mistaking mass appeal for excellence, researchers discover what they claim is the funniest joke in the world. (via MeFi)
Augh!
Ron MacLean and the CBC can’t agree on his contract, so he won’t return unless things get better. The online petition. And now Labatt’s is gravely concerned. Ron MacLean gets $400,000 a year and wanted a 10-15% raise this year. Don Cherry makes $700,000. In what world, tell me, is Cherry worth more than MacLean? The latter can manipulate the former with but a cock of the eyebrow. Although I am concerned over the future of Hockey Night in Canada, I can’t help but love the situation – Beer Baron calls the public broadcaster over concerns with the staffing of a hockey opinion show… only in Canadia, eh? Know what I’m talkin’ aboot? (thanks Jost)
Damn Sexy Powerbook, Part II
Assignment: kick writing ass at an old haunt, Tequila Bookworm. And it comes time to take a slash. Do I leave the gleaming supermodel on the table, trusting in my fellow human? Hell-ass no, I tuck it under my wing and bring it down with me. As I emerge, post-slash, machine pressed against my breast, I’ve creeped myself out. I feel like a pervert.
game neverending
Here’s something cool. The Game Neverending – I’m not sure if I’m allowed to talk about it too much, but go and sign up to alpha test and give it a spin. I had a real blast on the thing and am itching to get back on…
rhyming dictionary
My duties at work compelled me to compose some horror poetry, and I found this most handy. But I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of maniac would “add RhymeZone to your toolbar.”
what should I write about?
Should I write about my rockstar life? The oysters, the comped martinis, are those interesting? Should I write about films? Hey mama, I’ve done that plenty and I can’t even keep up (ten films this past week, something like that). Music? There’s more to be said, that’s for definite, but I like to keep the experience a few steps ahead of the commentary sometimes. The web? if I had the time, maybe I’d get my surf on. I hear there’s a world out there, and some kinda war thing, what’s up with that? Work? I like it, thanks. Love life? Shucks, now I’m blushing.
Hmm. Maybe I’ll write about not writing, that’s it. That’ll keep ‘em coming back for more. — Or maybe I’ll just make some shit up.
Tanganyikan Laugh Contagion
For something non-film-related, something one apparently can’t get here, go read ÿ‘s thing about a little-known laughing epidemic.
spirited away, grave of fireflies, anime
On sunday there was Spirited Away, Miyazake’s latest (the top-grossingest film in Japan!), and it was a thing of beauty. Flux and transformation everywhere, framed through the experience of a young girl, to whom everything indeed is going to change. Of course it’s fantastical – there are giant babies and radish spirits and dragons and eight-legged old men – but it’s great to see a film where the fantasy has a heart, and avoids typical pop sentiment, pap treacle, and all the usual cliches. Last night, then, there was Graveyard of the Fireflies (good article here). No giant babies, just bombs and hardship and hunger and pain, pain, pain. Quite an astounding film, really, and based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Akiyuki Nosaka.
The question of the moment, then: when will anime break through to the North American audience? I think it has already (Pokemon). Teens these days, I tells ya, watch a whole boatload of anime, whereas in my day we didn’t watch jack. But the real issue isn’t anime, it’s Asian culture, and its ascendance on these shores has only just begun. I’d love to see a stat regarding the percentage of videogame content consumed in North America that is of Japanese origin – 90%, maybe? And let us not forget Pocky, and bubble tea, and Hello Kitty, and the beautiful beautiful cars.
coercive inspections in Iraq
Shaolin Snow White
Holy living fuck, this must be a pack of lies. If not, aw shit, my life will be complete. I! love! Yuen Woo-Ping! (thanks, Mark)
adaptation trailer
The trailer for Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman‘s new film Adaptation is out. Let’s just hope lip-biting suckmaster Nick Cage doesn’t wreck it. (via kottke)
repurposed vagrancy narrative
Okay, consider this my weblog entry for the day. Er, for the last few days.
TIFF: Ken Park
Hot buttered Christ, Larry Clark has really kicked it up a notch. Ken Park powers past artsploitation into the realm of art porn.
We’ve discussed Clark here before, and in many ways he’s continuing his life’s work: showing teens fucking. I enjoyed Kids, although the ‘message’ was hammered home a touch hard; I disliked Bully because it didn’t seem to have a message, or any real reason for being. Ken Park may not have a message, but it asks questions. I prefer that anyway.
Ken Park follows four kids: Peaches (Tiffany Limos), Tate (James Ransone), Claude (Stephen Jasso) and Shawn (James Bullard). The focus this time around is on the kids’ relationship with the older generation. Peaches’ dad is a religious nut who can’t get over the death of his wife, who looked exactly like Peaches; Tate is an unsettled lad who lives with and terrorizes his grandparents; Claude gets smacked around by his weightlifting pappy; and Shawn is sleeping with his girlfriend’s mother. A love scene between Shawn and the mom comes early on and demonstrates that in this film, actors will actually be having sex with each other. Not until Tate practices auto-erotic self-asphyxiation, however, and erect cock and cumshot are presented full on, do we realize that in this film, anything can happen. This lends a great deal of weight to the otherwise traditional religious-daddy’s-coming-home-and-daughter’s-having-rough-sex scene, or the violent-daddy’s-coming-home-raging-drunk-and-son’s-dead-asleep scene.
Although this film counts as exploitation, and porn even, it probably also counts as art. The parental characters may sound like stereotypes, but they are humanized in various ways: Peaches’ dad is mostly gentle, and is clearly deeply in love with his dead wife. Claude’s dad has his tender moments, too. Tate is the villain in the relationship with his grandparents. And Shawn’s intergenerational love triangle is handled maturely and believably.
Ultimately, the film has more similarities to Happiness than to Kids. Clark explained after the screening that Korine wrote Ken Park shortly after he wrote Kids, and before Gummo, which would probably mean 1993 or 1994. Presumably it took them a while to find backers for their shockfest. I’m wondering whether the inclusion of a staged cumshot or two in Happiness (1998) made Clark opt for almost gratuitous realism in his own scene, thereby putting him out front in the jism race. But as much as I’d love to continue making light of it, we need people pushing the envelope in the arena of human sexuality on film. What’s wrong with a few cocks here and there, after all? I’m sure Russ Meyer would be pleased with the oneUp!manship, and maybe the Tom Cruise-alike of 2020 will routinely take his johnson out and slap it around in between action scenes. Or maybe he’ll partake in a threesome as explicit and beautiful as that in Ken Park, a scene which rivals Cherry, Harry & Racquel for simultaneous representation of love and sex.
But what does it all mean? Ken Park is the kids’ friend who shot himself. He’s a framing device, he appears at the beginning, not at all in the middle, and pops up again at the end, when the film’s central question is posed, literally and succinctly. Here’s hoping the scandal-seekers who rent the film (it would get an X rating if released) can see past the sex and marinate on that question for a while.
go sell
Go sell mournful somewhere else.
There’s a strong wind to-day. Even without the metaphor, it’s still there.
TIFF: Spider
In the first shot of Spider, Cronenberg’s latest, a train pulls up, and as the passengers detrain and hurry up-platform in a long line, the camera moves forward past them until it reaches Dennis ‘Spider’ Cleg (Ralph Fiennes), the last one off the train and the slowest moving by far. It’s a sign that this man moves at a different pace than everyone else. The film, likewise. It crawls and stalls for the first twenty minutes or so, lingering on Spider as he settles in to his new life in a halfway home and performs the arcane little rituals of the schizophrenic.
So twenty minutes in, the viewers are passing out in their seats, breathing noisily through their mouths. Twenty minutes in, I’m wondering what were those crazy French thinking? this is an unmitigated disaster, this is shot after shot of a guy sitting around smoking and muttering to himself. Twenty minutes in, however, Spider begins to reminisce.
[Spoilers ahead, now.]
He’s writing it all down in his carefully hidden little notebook, in his crunched-up scrawl. At first you think he’s turned stalker as he shuffles up to a kitchen window and stares in at a domestic scene. Before you know it, he’s right in there with them – eek! But of course it’s they who are right in there with him, in his jumbled-up web of a mind (excuse the Rick Groenism). The domestic scene is his own: loving mother (Miranda Richardson), boozer father (Gabriel Byrne) who ignores the good mom and takes up with a whore. But wait – the whore is also Miranda Richardson. Nothing is clear from the point of view of a schizophrenic, of course.
In the end, though, everything is clear. Every last detail is warranted. It’s a tangle, to be sure, a puzzle (another recurring image), but in the end the pieces fall into place. So much so that you blame yourself for not paying enough attention during the slow scenes. But not before a film packed with wizardly storytelling and powerhouse acting has run its course. And there’s one particular bit of magical crash-bang old-school cinematics that had us all jumping in our seats and tweaking our necks. It even woke up the mouth-breathers.
In the end, this picture has a very specific focus. It has no broad argument about technology, like eXistenZ or Videodrome or Crash. But what it sets out to do, it does ingeniously. And isn’t that what it’s all about, man?