greg.org

You need movie ideas? Julian Dibbell writes in Wired about the physical world economies of online games like Ultima Online and Everquest.

The messy complex of characters and possessions that had been Troy Stolle’s virtual identity was broken down into parts far more valuable than the whole. The priciest items were listed on eBay within a day or two, and one by one they went off to the highest bidder.
But the most valuable of all was the last to go. Not that Kiblinger lacked for house buyers in the month that Stolle’s tower stood at auction. He sold one property to a single mom in Colorado, another to a manager for a database company in California. Yet another went to a woman in Virginia, who bought the house for her mother, an Alzheimer’s sufferer whose last link to reality was her Ultima sessions with her daughter…
At first he thought the previous owner was a character named Blossom. She handed off the deed. But Blossom turned out to be one of Kiblinger’s avatars – and not even Kiblinger at the keyboard but his cousin Eugene, who gets $10 an hour to run around Britannia doing the deliveries that used to take up most of Kiblinger’s workday.

Wired must have a news bureau in Britannia. They also report on virtual Christmas parties and spontaneous post-Sept. 11 candlelight vigils. [party on, Travelers Diagram]

Steven Johnson writes about an idea he’s had, how to do a movie about nanotechnology right. Turns out Michael Crichton had wondered the same thing, and wrote a book about it. Turns out that book, at least the good parts, are similar to ideas Johnson has been mulling over (and writing and publishing on) for a while, too.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, “how’d that be as a movie?” is a question I’m always asking myself, too. Tonight on Dublog, was this sentence which captured one idea I’ve been wrestling with lately. From Jennifer 8. Lee’s NY Times article about Google’s Live Query display:

people who shouldn’t marry
“she smoked a cigar”
mr. potatoheads in long island
pickup lines to get women
auto theft fraud how to.
Stare at Live Query long enough, and you feel that you are watching the collective consciousness of the world stream by.

You want to come up with some movie ideas, too? See how many movies you can make from this: The Weekly Standard‘s engrossing report from a Christian retailers’ convention. There’s a lot more to Church Merch than just the Prayer of Jabez brand family, after all. (You thought it was just the best-selling book of 2001? You need to repent, brother.)

The enlarge-my-territory prayer [of Jabez] also appears on wristwatches, bumper stickers, pens, candy bars, Jabez: A Novel, and much else. “It’s from the Bible, so I guess they couldn’t copyright it,” muses one CBA exhibitor. Several others tell me that editors are scouring the Bible in search of another nobody with star quality.

In The Guardian, Jonathan Jones takes a while to get to an interesting story of Mark Rothko’s masterful series of paintings, originally commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant. It seems Rothko painted them in contempt and withdrew them in disgust after checking out the Cafeteria of Power and deciding the moguls would be insufficiently cowed by the art. Two of Rothko’s overt influences: the “bricked up windows” of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library vestibule, and Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries (“strange,” “luxurious and hellish,” a Dionysian attack on Mies/Johnson’s rational order ) [12/12 update: The Times reports Vivendi Universal is preparing to sell the Seagram collection, which would have included the Rothkos in the Four Seasons.]
On another note, Laura Winters, long the NYT‘s and Washington Post‘s go-to journalist for a new generation of independent and foreign filmmakers (and Harvard alum), gives Vogue‘s celebrity coverage an upgrade with a profile of plays-a-writer-in-Adaptation Meryl Streep. Problematically, Ms Streep and the two actresses I’d pick to play Laura in the movie–Ms. Danes and Ms Foster–all went to Yale.

Doing the family thing in Hawaii for a while. greg.org implications:

I wrote a script on the plane, a new short tentatively titled Souvenir January 2003, which’ll be a one-day shoot when I’m at Sundance.

(No, that’s not an early indication of anything, but I figure it’s high time to go anyway. And besides, the snow prospects in January are already pretty good.)

The third act of the Animated Musical gets attention in the mornings, 5-7:00, thanks to jet lag. Made real progress on one of the characters, who makes his crucial appearance at the end. It’s very interesting, in a Hayao Miyazaki demon boar (Princess Mononoke)/bathhouse demon (Spirited Away) animation tour-de-force kind of way. Miyazaki portal, Nausicaa.net

Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki, image Nausicaa.net

Reading Scorsese on Scorsese collected interviews published in the wake of Last Temptation of Christ, the scandal for which sets too much of the editorial tone of the book. Also in the queue: Thucydides (as soon as I finish Gravity’s Rainbow). That reading list not pretentious-sounding enough for you? Wait till I do the animated musical version of Finnegan’s Wake.

Gauging which north shore hike to go on, my wife said, “That’s like walking from Columbia to Times Square and back,” which amused the locals.

Posting will be a little spotty for a few days.

Poetry was the reportage or weblogging medium of choice for the British in WWI. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” is an exhibit of 12 WWI poets at the Imperial War Museum in London. [Alan Riding wrote about it in today’s NY Times.]
From Siegfried Sassoon’s “Prelude: The Troops”:

DIM, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom
Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals
Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots
And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky
Haggard and hopeless…

BOING BOING HAS A LONG ARTICLE ABOUT “MOBLOGGING.” I DOUBT THEY WROTE IT ON A CELPHONE…

Video Still, 1997, Guy Richards Smit, Team Gallery
Just got back from a screening of Guy Richards Smit‘s video works at MoMA Gramercy. Guy’s been making funny Fassbinder-esque musical-esque shorts. He also showed a trailer from his current work in progress, an imaginary Sartres sequel, Nausea 2. Very smart, entertaining stuff. Small worlds being, well, small, Nausea 2 co-stars Rebecca Chamberlain, who stars in Souvenir November 2001. (She sings, which isn’t surprising, because she’s a performer, and she’s quite good.) And I was also surprised to see Souvenir‘s DP, Jonah Freeman turned up on a boat in one of Guy’s earlier works. Hey, sailor!
A very promising gig for those interested in the editorial and creative process: James Danziger, former 20th-century photography dealer and current editor of the cool culture zine The Mixture, is speaking December 3 at the Apple Store in Soho as part of their “Made on a Mac” series. We’re in Hawaii on the 3rd, so I hope someone will patch me in via mobile. Anyone want to burn through your Cingular minutes for me?
And apparently never coming to a theater near you, if you live in the USA, that is: 11′ 09″01, the compilation of short films related to September 11. I wrote about the Toronto screening in September. Now in Salon, Sarah Coleman writes about a recent screening of the film at Columbia. Coleman: “By not listening to what the rest of the world has to say about [Sept. 11], Americans run the risk of isolating themselves in a cocoon of self-righteousness and arrogance.”
A negative example of precisely one of my main motives for making Souvenir November 2001, which follows characters from a city that’s habitually open to the world at a time when it seemed like America could suddenly relate to a suddenly sympathetic world. When we could transcend a chronic exceptionalism and connect, realize that terrible things have happened before, and that we can learn from the horrors and tragedies that others have gone through. I’m sorry, but I refuse to believe that the only way to read and process and remember September 11th is as a sympathy-shaped cudgel a self-righteous US swings to clear a path for itself.