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extremely varied lists

It seems like everybody and their dog is blogging about the Internet Movie Database's top 15 movies of the past 15 years. I turned 30 this month, so the past 15 years represent half of my life and nearly all of my experience as a movie-goer. Yet this project doesn't appeal to me for some reason. I think a lot of the picks are boring or pretentious (Eyes Wide Shut? Give me a break.) And what is up with people listing movies by director? Auteurism was totally over long before I was born. It seems like people are just buying into the entertainment-industrial complex' middlebrow marketing strategy.

Despite my reservations about this project, I think I'll go all bloggy on you and list 15 movies off the top of my head that I dug from the past 15 years.
Out of Sight
Lost Highway
Cecil B. Demented
Kicking and Screaming
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Three Kings
Velvet Goldmine
eXistenZ
Jesus' Son
To Die For
Songs for Cassavettes
L.A. Confidential
Barton Fink
Short Cuts
And, OK... Pulp Fiction

complete the experience

While it's still Halloween, I'll point readers to a lovely "Cat and Girl" cartoon with a potential costume idea. I do worry, that the joke might apply to me.

I don't particularly care for Halloween, and I have a hard time coming up with costume ideas. Last year, I went as a "binary opposition," wearing a black t-shirt with a zero ironed-on the front and a one on the back. I had to explain it to a bunch of people, even a communication professor. In 2000, I decided to dress as "a dot-com guy," wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt with a computer company logo. I didn't know the people at the party, and they just assumed I wasn't wearing a costume.

This year I decided to go as a LARPer. I made a foam-and-PVC-pipe "boffer" sword, plus a dorky felt hat. I chickened out before the big party Saturday, realizing that, yet again, no one would get my joke. I just went to party wearing a hoodie and shorts - normal McChris clothes - and I didn't feel out of place. One of my friends confronted me about my lack of costume. I explained that I had started a costume, saying, "I guess it's like conceptual art, making a costume, then leaving it home." My conceptual art costume was comfortable and unobtrusive, which suited me just fine.

half-forgotten echo

"Border Lord" is probably my favorite country song of all time, and Border Lord might be my favorite Kristofferson album, although The Silver-Tongued Devil and I is in close contention. Listening to my well-loved LP, I wondered if Border Lord was finally available on CD. I absent-mindedly checked Amazon, and, although I thought it had never been released on CD, third-party vendors had an old version of the out-of-print CD - for $110. Yikes, I wonder why CBS has never reissued this album if people are presumably willing to pay that much for a CD.

I dragged the needle back to the start of side one, and the chorus "How much did you lose/ between the laughter and the tears?" stuck out at me. "What a great line," I thought. I then remembered Lou Reed's line, "Between thought and expression/ lies a lifetime" from "Some Kinds of Love." Is this just a coincidence, or are "between" constructions particularly effective in songwriting?

Nigel recently expressed skepticism about The Velvet Underground's third, self-titled album. I'd say "Some Kinds of Love" alone is worth the price of the record, which isn't to mention "Jesus" and "I'm Set Free," which got me through plenty of stressful undergraduate evenings.

dismal and excellent

bOINGbOING points to an "Archie" comic, "She's Goth to Have It." In the comic, Betty is tired of being ignored by her friends, goes to a coffeeshop, and falls in with a group of goths. Considering this is a "native" text, it might even be better than this detournement of a Chick Tract. I wonder if the "Archie" writers knew of Austin sludge-rockers Black Lipstick.

dragging us down

Vice magazine has a muddled little video called "Do They Know It's Halloween" up on their Web site. Presumably playing off of Band Aid's 80s benefit single "Do They Know It's Christmas," the song is a benefit featuring "hipster" artists. (It features indie bands like Arcade Fire as well as corporate rockers like Beck and Rilo Kiley, so I don't know how else to categorize.) I wonder if this Unicef fund-raising is an effort by Vice to rehabilitate their image after a series of news stories pointed out the right-wing politics of the hip rag. The publisher of the site later said the politics were an elaborate hoax, but I've found so much offensive in the book, I find it hard to believe that it's all intentional. Regardless, I do applaud the magazine for bringing attention to suffering in the global South.

nacho of need

Today I'm guest lecturing in a couple of media literacy classes on blogs and blogging. I pointed to Robot Wisdom as an example of an early Web log. The class was intrigued by the statement "I am a guacamole of knowledge..." a pullquote from a post on Overheard at Work. I told the class if the instructor asks for a response paper, "Start your paper with 'Chris McConnell is a a guacamole of knowledge'."

Update: I was shocked - shocked! - that none of the students in the UTeach class were MySpace users. Or maybe some were users but wouldn't fess up to it. In the second class, which is composed of RTF majors and grad students, I wound up showing my profile on the screen to use as an example.

major cultural trends and inventions

As a kid, I got a lot of pleasure out of collecting stamps. When I was quite young, my dad worked as a computer technician at a credit card processing center, and he would bring home stacks of used envelopes. We'd cut out the right-hand corners of the envelopes, then soak them to pull off the cancelled stamps, which I'd dry and put into a book. Commemorative stamps were often dated back then, so I would organize them by year. If couldn't determine the year, I'd try to guess by the face value of the stamp, but I remember organizing a lot of stamps by subject matter. When I got older, my mom and I would go to the main post office in downtown Tulsa, and buy singles of the latest commemorative stamps. I liked the mint stamps better, but buying, rather than salvaging, stamps seem more like a habit than a hobby.

It might seem like pure marketing when the postal service says stamp collecting is an "educational hobby for all ages," but I learned quite a bit through collecting stamps. If I didn't know what a stamp was about, I'd research the topic until I understood it to my satisfaction. Although it was the hegemonic, government-approved culture - I don't think there have been any stamps of Emma Goldman - stamps catalyzed a lot of independent learning about American culture. You probably have to be a pretty bookish kid to get much out of collecting stamps, but it was a great experience for me.

When I was in middle school, I read a biography of Buckminster Fuller that mythologized him as a maverick inventor. Fuller instantly became my hero. His vision of a high-tech utopian future inspired my imagination. I even tried to make a role-playing game based on some of his designs and prescriptions for social organization, but eventually realized that utopian worlds don't offer much in the way of game-play. Yes, I was mind-bogglingly nerdy.

I'm out of stamps, and this morning was cruising the USPS Web site to see what commemorative stamps are available. I'm usually in a rush when I'm at the post office, and it's hard to see the stamps behind the counter. I smiled when I saw that the postal service has issued a commemorative stamp honoring Buckminster Fuller. While my opinion of Fuller may have diminished, maybe some nerdy kid will look him up after seeing the stamp.

behind stacking up

Nigel points to Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-Language novels from 1923 to the present. Nigel says he's read half of the books on the list, so I feel I've come up short having read only 33 of "All-Time 100 Novels." (A list of the books I've read is below.) Somewhat surprisingly, only about half I did read were books I read as an English undergrad. But many of the books like The Big Sleep, Neuromancer, and Snow Crash are wonderful popular works that my profs probably overlooked. The list also includes a fair number of works like Infinite Jest and The Recognitions that I found so tedious that I never finished them. Finally, there are a few choices that I would substitute another book by the same author. For example, I'd pick My Antonia over Death Comes for the Archbishop, and everyone probably has a different favorite Hemmingway. Regardless, these lists are for nitpicking and arguing over, so I guess I'm playing right into the Time-Warner media empire's hands.

Books I've read from Time's100 Best English Language Novels:
All the King's Men
Beloved
The Big Sleep
Blood Meridian
The Catcher in the Rye
The Crying of Lot 49
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Deliverance
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity's Rainbow
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Invisible Man
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
Lolita
Lord of the Flies
Mrs. Dalloway
Naked Lunch
Neuromancer
1984
On the Road
Pale Fire
A Passage to India
Portnoy's Complaint
The Sheltering Sky
Slaughterhouse-Five
Snow Crash
The Sound and the Fury
The Sun Also Rises
To Kill a Mockingbird
To the Lighthouse
Tropic of Cancer
White Noise
Wide Sargasso Sea

developing computerphiliac tendencies

Jon Lebkowsky has scanned some old black-and-white negatives from the early 70s and uploaded them to Flickr. I took a little time to look at them this afternoon, and it's really quite interesting to see images of an Austin I never knew - I was born in 1975 - and, well, a Jon I never knew. (I tried to add a "jonsoldaustinpix" tag to the appropriate photos, so I could just to all of them at once, but it seems it didn't work.) Some of the photos raise a few questions, like where was Inner Sanctum Records located? Or was $75 a month a lot for rent back in 1971?

limbo of nontime

At a post-conference party last night, I mentioned this Simon Reynolds article about Gang of Four to a friend who has written extensively about the band. The band's early records are full of anti-institutional rhetoric that invokes thinkers like leftist thinkers like Gramsci, yet the band was rarely political in the sense of street-level action. Reynold's discussion of their later career is enlightening.

The extent that some of the band members pull the levers of the culture industry really is strange.

On Wednesday, I ran into a former student asked, "Are you going to see Gang of Four tonight?" The band was playing at Emo's on their reunion tour. I told the student I thought the show was sold out, but, in reality, I've been too busy to go to shows. If I had planned ahead, I might have budgeted time to go, but Reynolds' lukewarm reception of the band's reunion cast out any thought of going. This seems like it was a good decision. My friend said the Austin show was terrible.

took their hacks

Over on Many 2 Many, there's an older post about how an Esquire writer posted an article about Wikipedia to the site itself for participants to edit. The final product will be published in the print version of the magazine. It's an interesting little experiment, and I can't say that some of the results surprise me. Andrew Lih says, "Let’s just say it can be hard to get “neutral point of view” encyclopaedists to liven up their writing style."

It is interesting to think about using Wikipedia articles in print - since Wikipedia articles should be read as a dynamic text in constant flux, what happens when the text is frozen? Some articles are often frozen in order to curb vandalism or maintain a known-good version, and I remember reading that Jimmy Wales had planned a frozen CD-ROM version of the encyclopedia. Regardless, I wonder if as Wikipedia scales, it will become standard for articles to become frozen, and as new information surfaces or errors are caught, the article is temporarily thawed to make changes. In this scheme, only stubs and new articles will be open as a matter of course.

cost-cutting payoff

It ran on Wednesday, but I didn't see this NYTimes story about online collaboration until this morning. The article promotes collaboration tools like Wikis as a means to improve communication within businesses, particularly distributed organizations. Much of this was familiar to me from Don's "Knowledge Management Systems" course, but I thought it was interesting the way that it applied the "open-source" label so easily to things that don't seem easily categorized as "open source".

I'm a little tired of seeing "open source" being applied to things that have little to do with compilers, but I've accepted that it's become a metaphor for particular types of information sharing and participation. This article seems pretty sloppy in general (I don't see how blogs are collaborative tools), but I do wish that authors would draw a distinction between "open source" as mode of production and "open source" as metaphor.

links for today's screen theory class

Without any explanation....

Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain"

Man Ray's "le violin de ingres", "Cadeau"

Richard Serra's "Torqued"

Echoplex tape delay

PXL-2000 product shot

PXL-2000 mods

William Wegman and the giant 20x24 Polaroid camera

Elsa Dorfman's 20x24 Polaroid (better pictures of the camera)

links for today's screen theory class

Without any explanation....

Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain"

Man Ray's "le violin de ingres", "Cadeau"

Richard Serra's "Torqued"

Echoplex tape delay

PXL-2000 product shot

PXL-2000 mods

William Wegman and the giant 20x24 Polaroid camera

Elsa Dorfman's 20x24 Polaroid (better pictures of the camera)

viable image acquisition

We screened Sadie Benning's short video "Girl Power" tonight in the film screen theory class I TA this semester. We're doing a week on TV, comparing ideas about the television form to film. For the screening, Janet put together a slate of experimental and art videos, including "Girl Power."

Before the screening, Janet warned the class that Benning's video would look strange because of the low-res PXL-2000 camera used to shoot the film. She was unsure about the technology, and I suddenly geeked out on the camera's technology. In 1987 when Fisher-Price released the camera, I was 12, going on 13, which was probably the sweet spot for the PXL-2000's market. I desperately wanted one, even though I knew my parents would never shell out $100 for something like a video camera.

When we watched the movie, it didn't seem strange at all. It reminded me of watching video off the Web, except I think I prefer the clarity of the pixels to the anti-aliased schmutz layered on to most lo-res video. I wondered if Janet's disclaimer was necessary, although it did have the effect of making me wonder if the dropouts on some of the videos was intentional or merely evidence of an old videotape. It seems like undergrads would also be accustomed to watching lo-res pixelated videos on the net, and the effect wouldn't seem so shocking.

After the screening, I checked a few RSS feeds on my laptop, and noticed that Chuck posted an entry on Benning and the PXL-2000 today In particular, he points to a Web page that outlines some of technical specs of the camera in detail. I think it's totally fascinating, The camera has a frame rate is only 15 frames per second, half of the NTSC television frame rate. (I suspect that the frame rate is actually half of 29.97, rather than a true 15fps) Like the pixelation, this was an engineering choice that allows the camera to record on a standard audio cassette. Other choices were presumably to keep the cost down, but interestingly nonetheless. The camera has a pinhole lens, which give the camera "amazing depth of field," according to the author. I'm not sure how important deep focus is for a camera that "represents the real" with giant pixels, but I imagine this is another quirk its fans enjoy.

The technology of the camera is also interesting in a way that relates to the class. Much of the work we read this week dealt with how television is different from film technically and how it might produce a different aesthetic. Since Pixelvision has half the frame rate - 15fps is nearly the minimum required to create the effect of motion - is Pixelvision distinct enough technologically that it doesn't belong in the category of television or "video"? Does watching something on a TV screen make it television? We watched "Girl Power" on a large screen with a fancy digital projection system. Does the PSL-2000 suggest the same intimacy as Super 8 home movies or does the unfamiliarity of the retro-tech distance the viewer?

I'm going to be leading the class discussion on Friday, and the students are a little reluctant to talk. If things get slow, I think I might do a little presentation on the PXL-2000's technology to explain the video a little more and perhaps the students will want to talk about the issues that I raise. Next week is our week on "new media," and, if nothing else, this will provide a lead-in for talking about an even more diverse range of technologies and practices.

tinker with complex hardware

I'm over at Mojo's coffeehouse catching up on some reading. When I sat down, I saw man working on a tiny IBM Thinkpad, and I thought, "Wow that guy sure looks like Eric Raymond." After a while, I looked over at him and wondered if it really was him. Another glance revealed he was wearing a "Unix is Sexy" t-shirt, and I decided that it really might be the open-source evangelist. After all, I've chatted with Bruce Sterling at this place before.

annoyance After a bit of apprehension, I walked over and asked in my chipper boy voice, "Are you Eric Raymond?"
He looked confused, and replied, "Yes I am Eric Raymond."
"Oh, wow."
"I do exist," he said, with a bit of awkwardness.

sound collages and primitive electronics

Nigel points to a neat resource online, The Krautrock Album Database, which purports to be an exhaustive reference to German experimental rock of the late 60s and 70s. The database includes mp3 clips from Krautrock albums.

Last Monday, I caught Metal Machine Musik a Krautrock documentary made especially for the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown. Student films and TV appearances comprised most of the movie, which was tied together with historical detail. I would have rather watched the music clips. I've read Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler several times, and I feel well informed about the music, and it seemed that most of the audience were also Krautrockgeeken. Some of the narration seemed factually wrong, and there were historiographic problems throughout. Despite the narrator verbally sprinting between clips, I enjoyed myself thoroughly.