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Flashmob Freeze

Thanks to Ian Smith for bringing my attention back to flashmob like activities. He is the one of the first people to get me interested in complicated computing by imagining the models you could create to analyze fish swarming, or bird flocking. I know, only geeks think that is cool. but it was 1990 and things were different then.

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Tweeters from Denmark

don’t like the twitter per post thing. So, I’ve manually created a weekly digest. Need to ask alex to add that as an option. I don’t twitter enough for a daily digest, but weekly might be cool. Anyway, I’ll unpost those tweets and here they are for reference. If you tweet in a forest and no one is following you, does Twitter still crash?”doing it l8r”

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Blood Love

Rock Bottom Riser – By Smog, Bill Callahan

I was listening to this song as I wrote this post, so you should too when you read it.  Bill Callahan aka Smog, if you like it you should buy it.  There is Christ Love. And their is the love of Man, the kind that Gandhi was preaching about. These have their place in the universe, but their is also a place, a very elemental place for Blood Love.So I was thinking about love and family and what is all about. I feel really lucky to have the kind of family I do. The parents that raised me. The talk when I was growing up, especially as a teen, was about how other families worked…and how we’d never be like them. That maybe they seemed kind of Ozzie and Harriet but what we had was better for us. We had real dialouge. The good, the bad, and lots of the ugly kind of dialouge. The thing about is, that we knew you couldn’t change who you were and who your family was. Continue reading “Blood Love”

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Danish Film Festival in Austin

So we watched Reconstruction last night. It had my second favorite Danish actor – Nikolaj Lie Kaas as the main character. It was avant-garde and romantic. Very non-linear narrative, like a dramatic romantic version of Stranger than Fiction.Still. One of the major problems I had actually “loving’ this film was the score. They used the “Adagio for Strings” composition by Samuel Barber that was made famous from Platoon. First off, this song has been used in at least 24 Films or Television shows! Secondly, even it had never been used before, the song is clearly evoking of Big Panoramic images and epic scale. Like Bombs falling on villages or Climbing a mountain while remembering a dead wife in flashback.

 

I mean it does have an aural subtext that is intimate and personal (which is why it worked so well in Platoon) but its major theme is epic.This film is not epic, it’s quirky and clever but mostly its personal. The music should have followed that line of themes. So that pretty much ruined any chance of me Loving it.Other than that complaint, it was good. It reminded me a lot of Godard, and I really enjoyed how different it was from other Danish films we’ve seen lately. It didn’t follow the Dogme Manifesto but it’s not a Zentropa film – not all Danish films are!! Speaking of which, I am not sure I will love the Zentropa stuff after they were bought by Nordisk. I suppose it was inevitable, but really how could something created by the maniac von Trier end up moving towards commercialist art forms.