tom moody

Finding Nemo was over-rendered treacle so this blog has no particular interest in seeing Wall-E, by the same director (Andrew Stanton) and over-hyped studio (Pixar). Unaccountably the movie received a 96% "Fresh" rating on the Tomato-Meter at Rottentomatoes, a review-crunching site, which means the critics are marching in lockstep. Look past the numbers, though, and here's what they're saying (the first of these crits, The Guardian's, was assigned a "Fresh" tag by Rottentomatoes' apparently biased staff):

For all that, faint doubts remain. WALL-E (the character) is eminently lovable, by far the film's most human inhabitant. And yet WALL-E (the movie) actually has more in common with EVE [the space probe that trash compactor WALL-E falls in love with --ed]. It is an exquisitely rendered piece of work; beautiful, flawless, serious in its intent and hermetically sealed. You can admire it to the skies and back. You can even learn to love it from a distance. But does Andrew Stanton's film amount to much more than a brilliant aesthetic exercise? I'm not convinced it does. (The Guardian)

And

But by the end, "WALL-E" has turned into something else again, a picture that's so adamant about ending on a feel-good note (or at least a feel-OK note) that it betrays the sad, subtle beauty of those early scenes. It must be that director Andrew Stanton -- the man behind the enormously successful Finding Nemo -- didn't want to make too much of a downer: Can't be sending all those tots home with the blues, can we? But the picture feels weirdly, and disappointingly, disjointed, something that starts out as poetry and ends as product. (Salon)

And

Though "WALL-E" is no thrill ride, it at least stays true to its core themes. Stanton is attempting no less than rabble-rousing prophecy, scolding the blinded populace into changing its ways (even as an all-consuming mega-corporation partners with the film, spawning toys and wrappers that will end up in landfills).
The film poses as thinking-fans animation, but there's little room for wonder or interpretation in the on-the-nose presentation. (Arizona Star)

Silent Running and Grave of the Fireflies (two films this is compared to) at least had the guts to end on downbeat notes. For those who prefer the chaotic expressionism of El Greco's paintings to the boring control of Raphael's, Pixar's hyper-Renaissance perfection is generally the wrong way to go as filmic art, but there is something especially awry with using this kind of futuristic, memory-intensive, render-farm computer animation to make a movie about entropy. That's probably why it has to end happy--assumptions about the scientific future of entertainment must ultimately be preserved at all costs.

1. I do not believe this cute puppy is "yelping for Elmo" [video]. I believe he is practicing avant garde Sprechgesang for an upcoming Stockhausen recital. The videography also "breaks rules," at one point overshooting its subject to light briefly on a resting, much quieter animal.

2. Steve Ballmer egg attack. Some people in Hungary are mad about the government's Microsoft contract. [YouTube] (Read the comments, too.)

3. Frank Zappa debates Novacula (Robert Novak) and other conservatives on Crossfire, 1986. The topic is "dirty rock lyrics" and free speech. [YouTube]. The articulate musician mops the floor with all of them, particularly John Lofton, who at the time was writing for the Moonie-owned Washington Times but scoffs when Zappa says the biggest threat to America is "fascist theocracy." Lofton has since "recovered from" the Republican party (because it is not Christian enough). In 2004 he was writing against Bush's Iraq war and was as appalled by the bullying of Fox TV thug Sean Hannity as the rest of us.

[all video links from Singe's Journal]

This is a "cubicle drawing" from 2005, oriented portrait rather than landscape and posted actual size. A printed version of this was shown at And/Or Gallery in Dallas.

Maureen Dowd, a national columnist of amazing emptiness, believes that Obama should have more of a sense of humor about the right's attempts to swift boat him using race. From her column of July 16 about the New Yorker cover:

John McCain’s Don Rickles routines — “Thanks for the question, you little jerk” — can fall flat. But he seems like a guy who can be teased harmlessly. If Obama offers only eat-your-arugula chiding and chilly earnestness, he becomes an otherworldly type, not the regular guy he needs to be.

This is what the New York Times and Dowd think are important enough to devote Op Ed space to:

Many of the late-night comics and their writers — nearly all white — now admit to The New York Times’s Bill Carter that because of race and because there is nothing “buffoonish” about Obama — and because many in their audiences are intoxicated by him and resistant to seeing him skewered — he has not been flayed by the sort of ridicule that diminished Dukakis, Gore and Kerry.

“There’s a weird reverse racism going on,” Jimmy Kimmel said.

Let's not forget that Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry (and before them Carter and Mondale) were all brought low by the endless lampooning of millionaire media/entertainment people, ostensible liberals in bed with Reagan and the Bushes. When they didn't have any comedic hooks they just made them up. They haven't found the way to destroy Obama yet (Dowd's frustration is palpable) but they are trying, trying.

All of them. Batman Begins may be one of the worst movies of all time. Gravitas in an aerosol spray can. Ooooh, Batman's "origin" was that he trained with a league of kung fu assassins. Liam Neeson has a fu manchu beard so bad you can see the adhesive. Then the "twist"--Liam Neeson didn't go away after the opening flashback sequence, he's still actively plotting the destruction of all humankind. Christian Bale's sexy whisper--terrible. Katie Holmes--comatose. Michael Caine as the cockney determined to protect his aristo boss at all costs--embarrassing. Plus gratuitous Morgan Freeman, being...gratuitous. We want to see a sequel to that?

tag design from from lu bear's page

drawn freehand in Microsoft Paintbrush, bricks added

Miss using my twitter account because it was a place to dump media references that I don't have the energy to explain here. (I also miss the weird real time passive interaction with friends.) But since Twitter Central can't store more than 10 pages of posts, fuck'em.

Traversers in Brian Aldiss's Hothouse:

Millions of years in the future. The moon slows the earth's rotation to a stop. The moon also stops rotating. Earth continues to revolve around the sun. The moon leaves earth's orbit and trails earth at a "trojan point" in its solar orbit.
Only one side of earth and moon face the sun. Plant life dominates the daylit earth. Also descendants of wasps, termites, and humans.
Traversers are giant free-floating spider-like plants that went higher and higher in the atmosphere to escape wasps.
Eventually they adapted to space and live on radiation.
They use their webs as space elevators to climb out of earth's gravity well, then eject oxygen*, grow considerably in size and "traverse" space between earth and the moon, using their web ejection as propulsion.
Earth and moon have a permanent network of silky cables connecting them, and the traversers go back and forth.
On earth, traversers descend because they still need soil to live.
On the moon, they have brought plant life with them and the moon's day side acquires soil (from the decaying corpses of the giant spiders, initially) and an atmosphere.
Humans (much smaller, greener, and more primitive than us) also go back between the worlds using the traversers as space ships.

*in "globes" attached to the cables that are used later for descent to earth.

My condolences to Aron Namenwirth for the loss of his mother, Cynthia Bloom Namenwirth. She was a prolific painter and Aron has written a tribute to her on his blog. Some of her work can be seen on the walls of artMovingProjects, the gallery Aron runs in Brooklyn with Nancy Horowitz, at a recent musical event there. My thoughts are with Aron and Nancy.

screenshot from lu bear's page

Recently found Kevin Saunderson's Faces and Phases on beatport and d/l'ed it. He is one of the "Belleville Three" (Detroit Techno) guys along with Juan Atkins and Derrick May.

Gritty, direct, occasionally straight-up acid house-sounding, but where it's diverging into techno is the use of noise and potentially grating samples. Percussive sounds such as hats and claps rarely vary. It's just pow-pow-pow-pow while low-res samples growl and wail (well, not really, it's more musical than that). Nowadays software makes it so easy to add randomization and subtle filtering to the percussion so these hits sound deliberately minimal, when it was really probably the best the machines could do. (Am guessing it's mostly the 909 drum computer since the hats sound like samples of hats rather than synthesized hats.)

Was searching around online for the Virgin (sublabel) disc from 1988, Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit that introduced the Belleville Three and others to Europe. Surprisingly it seems not to have been reissued. Would love to hear that time capsule and imagine how it sounded to ears unfamiliar with these musical strategies. I actually know people who think electronic pop music innovation started and stopped with Kraftwerk but that's just wrong.

[Related: Pitchfork interview with some of the innovators.]

[Unrelated: Philip Sherburne on the malaise in the current dance scene. I am not feeling this because I am not producing tracks for the dance floor. It's still fun for me because I have no rules to obey.]