Paris like it’s never seen us

Tad Friend Segwayin' down the Champs Elysees, image:slate.com

Put this in the “seems so wrong, feels so right” category*. Tad Friend & some friends conquer Paris on some Segways. Sure, it’s a corporate boondoggle, but that just adds to the giddy, entertaining genius of American Empire.
I remember when a New York friend–who affected a bilingual answering machine message and pretended to forget words like “fork” (“Give me that, how you say, fourchette.”) after a measly three-week sejour, a three-week sejour–took the new, how you say, Roller Blades to Paris. She was not only an alien, she nearly killed herself ten times a day trying to skate over all the paving stones. Well, she should’ve waited. Segway sails over them and their crazy unpaved parks with American savoir faire, technologically superior, aloof, and head-and-shoulders above the shockin’ awed crowd.
* Nothing smacks the smugness right off your face like Googling for half-remembered “something so wrong/feels so right” lyrics. Let’s see, did I hear it from The Backstreet Boys, Bryan Adams, Taylor Daynes, Air Supply, or Tia Carrere in Wayne’s World? I’m now available for iTunes Music Store commercials.

ISO: Warner’s Little Brother (or Sister?)

In the the Observer’s “Satisfying Mr. Soderbergh”, Rebecca Traitser writes about Warner Brothers’ drawn out search for someone to head up their long-planned specialty film division. One of the key requirements of the job: make Steven Soderbergh happy by releasing his films properly.
One name that being bandied about was Elvis Mitchell, the aim-for-the-blurbing-bleachers NYTimes critic. But whoever the new studio head is, Traitser lays out a combination of director-sympathy and strategy-awareness that makes me think she’s gunning to succeed him.

The Guardian‘s Cannes-imatrix Freakout

1. Kudos to the Guardian for enlisting every film monkey who can type to produce their extensive Cannes coverage. (Granted, Brits::Cote d’Azur, fish::barrel, and it’s not exactly a hardship post, either.)
2. Or maybe it is. The Guardian crew seems to be suffering from serious alcohol-free delusion. The evidence is in the writing:

  • Trapped in the (presumably dry) media lounge, Matt Keating is forced to piece a story together using only quotes from his partying fellow journos.
  • The two main themes of Fiachra Gibbons’ Cannes diary are old stories of old British actors’ penchant for bluedarting (hint: there’s a Badass Buddy icon for it.) and complaints about being barred from the bar at the Matrix Reloaded party.
  • The result? A crazytalk-filled, sobriety-induced revenge piece, “Taliban Thinking”, where he draws a bizarrely Stryker/Wolfowitzian conclusion about Animatrix. “As with the Terminator, which uses the same thin philosophical veil of man versus machine, the message is simple. If the rebellious robots had been stamped out straight away, Zion would now be safe. [italics added]
  • Then, Gibbons’ colleague, Andrew Pulver, also slams Animatrix but for another, wrong-end-of-the-telescope reason. “Attempting to dress up the fictional man/machine conflicts with images from contemporary political protest (The Million Machine March and the like) was not a good idea. African-Americans, Chinese democracy activists, liberal demonstrators – the implication is that they will enslave us all. [Italics=kooky theory #2]”
    Am I high? Just check out Fiachra’s last report from France. Garcon, get these people a drink toute de suite.

    • Something about this iLoo thing still stinks

    iTunes, iPod, iMovie, iCal, iLife, I know what company all these brands come from. And I know what company immediately came to mind when I heard Microsoft was calling their “so stupid it must be a mistake, a hoax, or an Onion story” toilet an iLoo.
    What I don’t get is why, when Microsoft sidles up Apple’s brand, lets loose with this iLoo story, then walks away making a dumb face, trying to pretend they didn’t cut the cheese, no one calls them on it. Not even a “Dude!”
    It’s like Bush’s people planting a silent-but-deadly one about John Kerry, saying “He looks French.”

    Bloghdad.com/Contemplating_name_change_to_Bloggy_Arabia

    In a NY Times editorial, President Jimmy Carter warned that “the aftermath of a military invasion [of Iraq] will destabilize the region and prompt terrorists to further jeopardize our security at home.”
    But that was way back in March, ancient history. Just go ahead and ignore it…And anyway, he was so wrong, because it’s the terrorists who are destabilizing the region. The military invasion’s got its hands full destabilizing Iraq.

    From the Gawker Section of the NYTimes

    I have to admit, I was kinda bummin’ for a while. The week HBS’s most powerful alum decides he wants to fly in a fighter jet (n.b.: not the one he went AWOL from during Vietnam), my Wharton alumni magazine arrives in the mail with the cover story: “Wharton entrepreneurs capitalize on trends in the food industry” about a dude with a crepe stand.
    But then a boost to my alumni pride, via this exchange (in the article not about blogging):

    And then there was the tall, good-looking young blond woman holding a purse made out of a Mexican cigar box. She had on a sunburst-print minidress by Ms. [Benhaz] Sarafpour.
    I [fashion reporter Cathy Horyn] asked her if she worked for the designer. “I’m a student at Wharton,” she said. “At the University of Pennsylvania.”
    Adopting that tone of voice reserved for small children, I asked the woman what she wanted to be when she grew up.
    “Well, my dad’s in real estate, so I’m planning to go into that.”
    “And what’s your name?”
    “Ivanka Trump.”

    [Sidebar: Never mind that Ivanka’s been modeling for six years, since she was like 10, and that Horyn should’ve seen her in several shows, at least. I’m sure the NYT would never run a reporter’s so-good-you-can’t-bear-to-factcheck-it story.]

    Badass Buddy Icons and the Honda Element

    Thanks to a 13-year old niece of Boing Boing, I found Badass Buddy. It’s a site with 1,200 AIM free buddy icons, a collection which, over 2+ years, has evolved from simple riffs on the little AOL dude (you know, the one who hooked up with Sharon Stone) into a unique medium of its own.


    image:badassbuddy.comimage:badassbuddy.comimage:badassbuddy.com

    In addition to the predictable ones–Fart, Spongebob, Jackass, School Sucks– BAB has created little narratives that are HI-larious, timely, touching, and pretty damn cool. To tell these tiny stories, BAB sometimes treats the icon window as a screen, or as a camera. And they adapted some recognizably cinematic visual language, including “camera” angles and movement (e.g., pans, zooms), lighting effects, editing (shot/reverse-shot, establishing/close-up, jump cuts), even Bullet Time.

    image:badassbuddy.comimage:badassbuddy.com image:badassbuddy.comimage:badassbuddy.comimage:badassbuddy.com

    But they also play off the unique characteristics of the medium–a medium which was probably never intended as one, but which has been embraced and exploited to express the worldview of an IM generation.
    image:badassbuddy.comimage:badassbuddy.comimage:badassbuddy.comimage:badassbuddy.com

    But as soon as I try to decide which buddy icon I’m gonna use, an alarm sounds in my head, which brings me to the Honda Element. It’s ugly, I know, but I like it, and I kinda want one. The wife’s worried it might be Pontiac Aztek-ugly (i.e., lame and embarassing) but my gut tells me it’s Citroen 2CV-ugly (i.e., cool and if you just don’t get it, you’re lame). I’m almost always right about that kinda stuff, though; that’s not the problem.
    The problem is something new to me, age-appropriateness. According to Honda, the Element was designed as a “dorm room on wheels.” According to the auto industry’s demographic master strategy, I shouldn’t want a “dorm room on wheels” any more than I want a “living room on wheels.” But even if there were a “loft on wheels,” my indignation at being so target marketed would probably keep me from buying it. (It’s a Gen-X thing, you wouldn’t understand. Unless you read Newsweek.)
    old_dude_with_element.jpg

    But if I buy an Element, I worry about two equally bad scenarios: 1) it’s only marketed as designed for the under-30 demo, which means it appeals only to people over 35, who try too hard. I buy one and subsequently telegraph my aging wannabe-ness. Call this the Miata Scenario, and if you’re old enough to remember the launch of the Miata, give up. It’s already too late for you. 2) it’s actually designed for the under-30 demo, and they embrace it. I buy one and become as lame as when your dad starts saying he’s “down with that, yo” to you. Call this one the Badass Buddy Scenario.

    Photos–new & old–from off the Japanese Grid

    panawave and mirrors, image:mainichi.co.jp

    Unless I missed the evite, the world didn’t end Thursday. (And even if it did, Armageddon’s no reason to stop weblogging.)
    The Pana Wavers above are using mirrors to deflect scalar waves, not just to create wonderful photos. There are more in Mainichi Daily News‘s Pana Wave photo special. [It reminds me that our inaugural Netflix movie was, fittingly, Agnes Varda’s wonderful obsessed-with-death-in-long-lost-Paris film Cleo de 5 a 7, the Criterion edition. Varda uses mirrors beautifully through most of the film, at least until the superstitious Cleo breaks one. It’s 1960, B&W, and all the cars in Paris were Citroens. Heaven.
    Anyway, here are a couple of 1959 (!!) photos I said I’d post, from Yukio Futagawa’s stunning Nihon no Minka, a painfully rare book on Japan’s long-lost rural architecture. They’re old, but eerily topical: a rural road, a house with a powerline. Is it just me, or does reliving the 1950’s suddenly not seem like a bad thing, at least aesthetically?

    Nihon no Minka, 1962, by Yukio Futagawa, BSS
    Nihon no Minka, 1962, by Yukio Futagawa, BSS

    Have you heard of this movie, Matrix Reloaded?

    You know how Justin invented Shoutcast so he could listen to Loveline in Arizona? Well, if weblogs never existed, I’m sure they would’ve been invented yesterday as a way for everyone in the world to review Matrix Reloaded. [Warning: major spoilers and countless review links in Jason’s comments thread]. Until Nick and Meg figure out how to find me the good ones, though, I’m sticking with the pros. Like that Agent Smith of MR reviewers, David Edelstein, who first loves, then hates, the movie in Slate, The NY Times, and Fresh Air.
    Matrix Reloaded, I swear I had this idea before seeing the movie. Anyway, mine is completely different. image:slate.comSure, I could write how the rave reminds me of that annoying “let’s target the ‘urban’ demographic” Kahlua commercial a few years ago, or how I actually apologized to the people sitting next to me for laughing so hard at the Merovingian (who hangs around the corner at Bilboquet like all the time) how the unexpectedly Chicago-esque editing destroyed the lyricism of some of the fight scenes, or how righteous Trinity’s hack turns out to be.
    But forget the movie; what interests me, is, well, me. What does the Matrix mean for my Animated Musical, my Terminator-meets-West Side Story? There were a couple of “great minds think alike” points that made me cringe at first, until a bit of satisfaction kicked in, at my occasional avant la lettre similarity to the Wachowskis’ script. On others, I got what they missed. Eat my dust, Wachowskis. I mean– I mean, let’s have breakfast.
    Basically, then, I was fine about it, at least until I came home and read Joyce Wadler’s opening party pitch to Joel Silver for Matrix: The Musical. I’m typing this in the fetal position, btw.

    White House Stagecraft: Will this be on the DVD?

    on the set at the Waco Economic Forum, image:whitehouse.gov
    Shoot the conference title from this preset camera position;
    state seal and flowing flag when allowed to shoot head-on. images:whitehouse.gov

    Sforzian Backgrounds. So that’s what they’re called. At least that’s what Elizabeth Bumiller’s NYT article calls those glib slogan-filled, PowerPointy, made-for-TV backdrops that show up behind Bush whenever there’s a camera around. They’re named for Scott Sforza, a former TV producer, who is finally getting credit/scrutiny for his tireless work behind the scenes in this White House’s quantum leap in visual image control.
    Sforza spent days “embedded” on that aircraft carrier, prepping for Bush’s staged arrival. “Sforza and his aides choreographed every aspect of the event,” Bumiller writes. White House cinematographer (yes, there is one) Bob deServi gets credit for angling the ship just right and timing the spectacle so they can take advantage of “magic hour” lighting [a recurring subject here].
    It’s about damn time we get a Making Of piece. The best DVD’s now are full of this stuff. Hell, I just saw Making the Animatrix on MTV2, a meta-meta-program on a meta-meta network. (making of animated spinoffs of a movie; spinoff channel for videos for songs. Please keep up, people.)
    For the screamingly obvious manipulation/staging of these images, it’s pretty inexcusable that we’ve had to wait this long for someone to report on it. (OK, ABC buried one mention.) I mean, Scott Sforza only has 25 Google hits, and just one ancient credit on IMDb. If some premium cable channel offered a Sforza commentary track for all Bush’s appearances, I’d definitely subscribe.
    Seeing the errant boom mike in one shot of What's Up, Doc? was my first realization of the filmmaking process
    White House DP Bob deServi: “You want it, I’ll heat it up and make a picture.”

    Surprisingly, though, the White House website has tons of media-critique-ready photos which unintentionally (?) reveal the machinery behind these made-for-TV-and-only-for-TV images. The bird’s eye view of Bush’s Waco Forum shows the press getting their White House-designed shot, complete with Sforzian Backgrounds. And check out this photo from a beautifully lit deServi production of Bush and Putin in St Petersburg, which has a boom mike hovering in the foreground.
    DiServi's speed dial is mostly floodlight rental agencies
    To light this shot, deServi shipped floodlights from the UK

    And this pic captures the elaborate staging elements imported to Romania for White House Productions’ biggest (pre-tailhook incident) show, a 2002 Bush speech in Bucharest’s Revolution Square. (Sforza even put up a little “Romania” banner, just in case you didn’t recognize that other flag.)
    The sheer volume of photos on the White House site reveals another Sforza favorite, what Bumiller’d call the “men without ties” background, for those ops when a giant slogan just won’t do. He used it at Tailhook, when he put soldiers Skittles-colored turtlenecks in the background. Last month, in an uncrowded but well-draped Boeing factory, Sforza had Boeing workers perch on top of an F-18 to be seen listening to Bush’s Iraqi progress report. Looks a lot like last August at the fair, where he arrayed some farmers on tractors and bales of hay. But not so fast. Sometimes, he uses the “men without ties” wallpaper-style, and sometimes he actually puts them into the Sforzian Background. (Note: the last one has stock photos so nice, Sforza used them twice. Check out the SB in this elaborate 3D setup for conservative conservatism, which looks to mean “black people in front.”)
    So, with this media manipulation thing, just like with that whole neo-con American Empire thing, the “run by and for corporations” thing, the “we need and may use new nuclear weapons” thing, with this supposedly secretive administration, there’s actually plenty to see. It’s not that no one cares. It’s just that the White House makes it so easy to not report it.

    I [Heart] New York T-Shirt, by Maurizio Cattelan

    I [Heart] New York, in Arabic, Maurizio Cattelan, image:printedmatter.org

    I probably shouldn’t post this until I get mine, but the artist Maurizio Cattelan created this shirt in a limited edition of 48. It’s for sale at Printed Matter, the cool-since-a-long-time-ago artists’ bookstore in Chelsea.
    Update: Jeff Jarvis wondered, rightly, if the shirt actually said “I” and “New York” (the heart, I can read). An interesting question, and not. It wouldn’t be beyond Maurizio to use illegible/nonsensical script. As it turns out, at Social Design Notes, John recreated a flyer he saw in the EV around Sept. 11. To this unaccustomed eye, the scripts are, indeed, different. But whether it reads “New York,” “NY,” “Now Yak,” or “Newark,” I can’t say. FWIW, Japlish or Engrish, the Japanese mangling of English is a more powerful phenomenon than the corollary, Americans randomly tattooing themselves with Japanese characters they don’t understand.

    One Million Years (Future), on MP3

    Last year, I wrote about the utterly moving experience of On Kawara’s work, One Million Years (Past) at Documenta XI. Now, I find the brilliant art site, ubu has put out a 73-minute excerpt of One Million Years (Future) in mp3. (Heads up: it’s 105Mb.)

    On Kawara exhibition, image:diacenter.org
    On Kawara @ Dia, 1993, photo: Cathy Carver, image: diacenter.org

    Originally intoned for the first time in an exhibition at Dia in 1993, “with the CD the amount of time is limited, 74 minutes [sic], and contains a set number of years (1994 AD to 2613 AD), thus transforming the infinite time of the exhibition into the finite time of the CD.”
    From their About page:

    UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission; we rip full-length CDs into sound files; we scan as many books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. And not once have we been issued a cease and desist order. Instead, we receive glowing e-mails from artists, publishers and record labels finding their work on UbuWeb thanking us for taking an interest in what they do; in fact, most times they offer UbuWeb additional materials. We happily acquiesce and tell them that UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space for them to fill.

    On Kawara bonus: Dia: Beacon opens this weekend.

    Aum2: Electromagnetic Boogaloo — A Look at Pana Wave

    I’m busy with some offline writing (just wait and see), but in the mean time, I felt the gaijin‘s obligation to provide some context for the recent one-eyebrow-raising >> reach-for-the-doorlocks reports of that road-trippin’ Japanese cult, Pana Wave Laboratory. Their site is only in Japanese
    Panawave, image: rickross.comFirst the bad news: despite the promising name, the cult makes its money from herbal supplements and water purifiers. So no trip-hop CD is in the works.
    Now that that’s out of the way, the world will end tomorrow. “[Armageddon] will be caused when electromagnetic waves strike the Japanese archipelago and the delicate gravitational balance between the Andromeda nebula and other nebulas is altered,” warns Chino, Pana Wave’s leader. (from a great Mainichi Daily News article, with pictures. SMH has another caravan pic. Cult critic Rick Ross has a Panawave news page. This message board is for people waiting for Zeta Planet X to arrive and reverse the earth’s poles. It’s due tomorrow, too. Busy day.)
    Did I say tomorrow? Japan’s 12 hours ahead of the east coast right now, so it may end by lunch. Chino didn’t say what timezone she’s calculating from.
    TV Asahi screengrab of the Yamanashi-ken domeIn neighboring Yamanashi, Pana Wave built a complex of Armageddon-proofed Fuller domes (Erecta, the manufacturer, issued an online disclaimer.) and filled them with animals (13 dogs, 70 cats, crows, a mini-pig, and an iguana). But then they went on the road, MDN reports, to save Chino from deadly EM waves. These aren’t normal EM waves, though, they’re called scalar waves, theorized by Nikolai Tesla. They’re produced by power lines, which Pana Wave has painstakingly sketched out. In grand Japanese tradition, Pana Wave also created a simple, explanatory cartoon of friendly EM waves combining into evil scalar waves (the mean red one says, “I’m a scalar wave!”). Interestingly, at the April 2000 INET-Congress in Bregenz, Austria, one Prof. Konstantin Meyl announced he’d actually produced scalar waves using Tesla’s methods. (See a critique here.)

    grabbed from panawave.grp.jp grabbed from panawave.grp.jp

    Pana Wavers wear all white and drape white cloth all around them, deflecting scalar waves with mirrors. Chino et al are seeking a place, any place, where they can escape what they see as an ecologically disastrous paved, wired grid. Right now, they’re draped out in Hachiman, a tiny rural town in Gifu, an area of central Japan where I happened to live (another story). Here is an official Powers of Ten-style map of Gifu, which, coincidentally, places Hachiman at the center of the world.
    [The mountainous regions of Gifu have some of the last, best examples of classical Japanese farmhouses, known as minka. The greatest architecture photo book I know is Nihon no Minka, by GA’s Yukio Futagawa. Around 440 pages of gorgeous 1950’s B&W photos of traditional Japanese architecture, 99% of it gone by now. Remarkable images of unpaved roads, thatched roofs, and nearly power-line-free vistas. Published in 1962, and reworked in 1980 into Traditional Japanese Houses. I bought the only original I ever saw, at Roth Horowitz. When it was still on Thompson, Perimeter had the reissue. If anyone has the original, it’d be Book Cellar Amus in Osaka. That guy has everything. If the world doesn’t end, I’ll scan some images.]
    Tama-chan, from the Guardian

    Of course, no apocalyptic cult story would be complete without a media-darling seal. Tama-chan wandered into a polluted Tokyo river last August, and became a cuddly symbol of Japan’s need to face its environmental problems. Pana Wave revealed they were behind controversial failed attempts to capture Tama-chan, who, Chino warns, is the only one who can save us now. [hmm Leia wore white, too. Coincidence?]
    Wave UFO, Mariko Mori, image: kunsthaus-bregenz.at

    In the mean time, the art world’s own Tesla Girl, the heiress Mariko Mori, just opened Wave UFO at 56th & Madison. She’s collecting brainwaves and projecting a mind control video inside this pod. From the brochure: “Wave UFO seamlessly unites actual individual physical experiences with Mori’s singular vision of a cosmic dream world.” It was first exhibited at the Kunsthaus…in Bregenz.
    On a different (?) note: For an absolutely riveting collection of interviews with both survivors and attackers of the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo subway gassing, read Haruki Murakami’s Underground. One reviewer says, “Unlike a journalist, Murakami doesn’t force these searing narratives into tidy equations of cause and effect, good and evil, but rather allows contradictions and ambiguity to stand, thus presenting unadorned the shocking truth of the diabolical and brutal manner in which ordinary lives were derailed or destroyed.”