Play the music, light the lights, it's time

So here's the thing,

I have this annoying tendency to put a great deal of effort into writing things for this blog and then, having done all the hard work of actually writing close to 10,000 words, never actually posting the thing because the comparatively easy work of rereading my writing, formatting it, and adding pictures and links, just seems like too much work. (Witness the way I always wait an entire year before posting my reflections on the previous year's film festival films, even though those are literally just reposts of Facebook posts that I had already written.)

So this is a post that I finished writing over a year ago, about an event that took place in April 2018. But, having written it all that time ago, I'm only getting around to sharing it now. In posting this I've proofread it, and tweaked a couple of confusing sentences to clarify my point, but otherwise this is exactly the post I would have shared a year ago, had I gone to the effort of sharing this post a year ago. Sorry about the delay.

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So here’s the thing,

A couple of months ago we had a fantastic event running in Wellington – The Jim Henson Retrospectacle, a celebration of the work of Jim Henson with cinema screenings, talks and panel discussions, all centred around a big concert. I was always going to go to the concert (I bought my ticket at the earliest opportunity), and as a movie person I was definitely looking forward to the movie screenings, but I never really considered going to any of the panel discussions until after the screening of The Muppet Movie. Original Muppet Show performer Dave Goelz (who most notably originated and still plays The Great Gonzo) was there, and after the movie he gave a Q&A with the actual Gonzo puppet. As someone whose favourite muppet was Gonzo it was a thrill to actually see this character I’ve loved for as long as I can remember, but I also found Goelz himself to be a fascinating and engaging speaker, and I suddenly realised what a fantastic opportunity this was and how much I would kick myself if I missed out on it. Which is how I found myself unexpectedly spending hundreds of dollars buying tickets to every panel discussion possible. And it was worth every cent.

On the last day, a friend asked if I was going to write a blog post about my experiences. I hadn’t planned to, but the more I thought about it the more I thought it was a good idea – if only to try to capture some of my memories of the event for myself before they fade away into time. So to be clear, these are my recollections. I wasn’t taking notes during the talks, so if I say that someone said something, I mean that I’m paraphrasing what I remember them saying, but memory is unreliable and I could certainly be wrong about what they said. But, to the best of my ability, here is a incomplete record of the Jim Henson Retrospectacle as I experienced it.

You might want to sing it note for note

So here's the thing.

I came across this video this morning and, it's pretty cool. Bobby McFerrin, who to be honest I've only ever heard of in connection with the "Don't Worry, Be Happy" song that he released back when I was 10, enlists the audience at the World Science Festival in a pretty enjoyable demonstration of our instictive understanding of the pentatonic musical scale. It's fun to watch.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

"Ashley, it's just that I love you so much, it scares me!"

So here's the thing.

I love Amazon. I generally try not to think how many thousands of dollars I have spent there over the past decade because the thought of all that money actually makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Why, just this week, I've received a package from them containing season 2, season 3, and season 4 of Saturday Night Live, as well as a non-fiction book, The Corner, by David Simon and Ed Burns (who created the "I didn't realise television could be this good" TV series The Wire), as well as the HBO miniseries adaptation of that book. Meanwhile, from Amazon UK, a seperate package arrived containing a Marx Brothers DVD box set and the Blu-Ray of Persepolis.

And to me, that's the type of shop Amazon is. I remember first shopping at Amazon back when it just sold books, CDs, and VHS tapes. And other than the fact that we're now two generations later for prerecorded movies (purchasing DVDs and Blu-Ray discs these days instead of VHS tapes) there's no change in my purchasing patterns. Amazon is a place to buy books, music, and movies, and in my mind that's all.

But the interesting thing about Amazon is that that's not all there is. In fact, it seems they're not content until you can buy everything from there. Mattresses, groceries, lingerie, televisions, drum kits, refrigerators, whatever you want, apparently Amazon will sell it.

So the other day, out of curiosity I found myself exploring the site, trying to find out exactly how wide the site's range is. And best as I can work out, they don't sell houses or cars, and I think that's all. Pretty much anything else I could think of was available. And then I stumbled across one product that truly surprised me, a product that I had never really even thought about even needing to be purchased, and certainly not from Amazon. But there it was, listed almost for the sole purpose of stating "Yes, you really can buy anything from Amazon".

I'm just disappointed they won't ship it to New Zealand.

Sailing on the wide accountant-sea

So here be t' thing.

Today, ye should all be awarr, be the internartionally recognised Talk Like A Pirate Day. It's all very simple. Ye just stop tarking like a landlubber, and starrt tarking like a grog-swilling terror of the high seas. You say things like "Shiver me timbers", or "Aye Aye", or "Ye bilge rat".

For more infarrrmation, see this 'ere interrnet site, or this arrrticle by one David Barry, by which first I heard of this 'ere event.

Avast!

Apocalypse Now

So here's the thing.

It seems Paris Hilton has successfully turned on the Large Hadron Collider, and so right now, right at this very instant, there are large hadrons running around very fast and bumping into each other. And as they do so, they generate black holes that will grow to consume the Earth, then the solar system, the galaxy, and finally the universe. At which point the scientists responsible will feel very embarrassed.

In the meantime, if you are wondering what the progress has been on the annihilation of of all existance, there is a website dedicated to answering the question:
"Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the Earth yet?"
It's a very useful resource, and I plan to check the site regularly to determine whether I still exist. So should you.

Dustbustering at the Olympics

So here's the thing.

It turns out that it's really hard to write a blog during the Olympics, because you generally end up spending all of your time watching the Olympics, hour upom hour upon hour.

The Olympics gets so completely ingrained into your life at this time, you even find yourself dreaming about the Olympics. For example, last night, I had a dream where there was this really weird nonsensical cycling event. There were maybe 25 or 30 people in this race, cycling around the track where they stage the pursuit events. It was a long race, about 160 laps, and people didn't win by having the fastest time, or being the first to complete all the laps. They won by accumulating points, somehow. They could collect something like 20 points for lapping the field, or they could get points by coming 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th in the sprint events. The sprint events seemed to happen every 10 or so laps, although who really knew, and I think a sprint may have involved only one lap of the track, but I'm not really sure. Most times it wasn't even clear that there was a sprint until it had finished and they were telling us who had won, nor was it clear what it was that triggered the sprint. It certainly wasn't the person who was in the lead, since there were people winning the sprints who hadn't yet lapped the field although there were others who had, so the person who won certainly wasn't "in the lead" to the degree that having the lead in this race meant anything (which it didn't seem to). It was also possible somehow to lose points - I remember that one guy in my dream was on -20 points, although what he did to lose points was unclear (did he lose points for having been lapped? for going too slowly? for making obscene gestures? what?). Also, it was an individual game but people were in a strange way working at teams, even though they were from different countries, although quite why they were doing this or how these teams were forming and disbanding was not immediately evident. The whole event just seemed like one great big game of Calvinball on bicycles.

Still, that's the good thing about dreams. They don't have to make sense. And it's not like they'll ever include anything that insane and incomprehensible in the real Olympics.

On the other hand, I would never have dreamed that anything as cool as the white water canoe/kayak slalom event could even exist, let alone be in the Olympics. How is it possible that this event has been at every Olympics since 1992 and I've never heard of it? Am I the only person that didn't know about it? Absolutely gripping event, with people going down man-made rapids, fighting against the current to the next gate, rowing around the next post sometimes millimetres away from the post, all the time fighting a torrent of water. Or they'll suddely surge forward, using the phenomenal flow of water to power their incredible speed. Or there will be points in the track where competing currents mean the contestant is literally held in place and must fight for a good few seconds just to break free and move ahead. It's an incredible event, and it was sad to see on the television coverage last night that all the whitewater events have finished and the track has now been drained. Which means I'll have to wait another four years until I can watch it again. I can't wait.

Rosebud

So here's the thing.

I just wanted to write a brief post about a couple of things I'm excited about.

Firstly, possibly the most important discovery in film history. I first saw Metropolis about five or six years ago, when the Film Festival showed the recently restored version. And the film, an extraordinary silent film from 1927 about a futuristic society, class divide, a worker uprising, and one of the most famous robots in cinematic history, just blew me away. Not only is it an enjoyable story, but the design and look of the film is incredible, and there is a scope and size to the film that is quite mindblowing, with some effect sequences that still hold up today.

The sad thing is that the film only played briefly in its complete version, before having cuts. The restored version that I first saw was still missing nearly a quarter of the original footage - they covered the gaps with cards detailing what happened in the missing scenes. It was an elegant solution that worked well - especially since, being a silent film, we're already watching cards for any dialogue, so no real adjustment is needed. But still, some of the scenes described sounded interesting, and so it was frustrating whenever one of those cards appeared because you would just find yourself thinking "I want to see that."

So you can understand why I'm excited. It was announced yesterday that a copy of the complete film with all the missing scenes has been discovered in a film museum in Buenos Aires. From the pictures available of the footage, it looks like it is badly scratched (and although there will obviously be restoration efforts, who knows how clean they'll be able to get it), and it is from a 16mm print (so there will be an obvious quality drop from the 35mm footage), but who cares. We'll be able to see Metropolis complete for the first time in 80 years. And that is exciting. Plus, Kino have since confirmed that they will be including the new footage in their already-announced Blu-Ray release, scheduled for next year. That's one release I'm really looking forward to.

(EDIT: It now seems it may not quite be complete. It seems there is still one scene missing - apparently it was at the end of a reel and was badly torn. But otherwise, complete!)

Now, did anyone check whether the Museo del Cine had a copy of The Magnificant Ambersons?

The other thing I'm excited by is just something cool I came across on on the Guardian website. It seems Channel 4 in the UK is having a season of showing Stanley Kubrick films. As a fan of Kubrick, I'm in favour of anything that allows people to discover the man's work. And they're clearly going all out to promote the season. Witness this ad, purporting to present Kubrick's point-of-view as he walks through the set of The Shining, past the twins, past someone painting REDRUM on a door, dodging extras practicing their ballroom dancing, through the snow-covered hedge-maze, to finally sit down at his chair, about to direct the very scary Danny-on-a-tricycle scene. And the recreation, to my eye at least, looks perfect. The attention to detail is stunning, the look-alike actors seem convincing, and the presentation of the behind-the-scenes world seems faithful to how it was presented in the documentary shot by Kubrick's daughter on the Shining set. It's a brilliant ad, and I hope it succeeds in bringing attention to the season, introducing Stanley Kubrick to many people who have never seen his films.

By the way, apparently they're starting with a new documentary, Citizen Kubrick. This interested me, and when I Googled the title for information, it seems it's based on this Guardian article from 2004. I've read the article a few times in the past, but it's always a delight to reread. Two years after Kubrick died, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick house, and the story reveals Kubrick's obsessive attention to detail. (In my favourite part of the article, we discover that Kubrick keeps an archive of fan letters arranged by city, so that if one of his films is shown somewhere, Kubrick can arrange for one of those people to check the quality of the movie screen.) It's a fascinating insight into who Kubrick was, and the idea of a documentary based on that article is rather exciting.

Babette Ate Oatmeal

So here's the thing.

I'm looking at the New York Times website, and they had an article about how you can now buy T-shirts with headlines from the CNN website.

I'm not joking. CNN.com actually has a T-shirt store on the site, where you can currently buy T-shirts announcing things like "Teen calls prom 'most wasteful event'" or "Bo Derek battles illegal wildlife trade". But you need to be in quick, because you can apparently only buy a headline T-shirt for as long as it's in the "Latest News" list.

The T-shirts (available in black, white, or grey) carry the headline, as well as a date-and-time-stamp and the statement "I just saw it at CNN.com".

Here's what I want to know. Who on earth came up with this idea? How on earth do you come up with an idea like this? And why on earth would you spend money on something like that? The point of a headline is to tantalise the reader, make them think "I want to know what that article is about". But many of these headlines make no sense away from the actual article. You need to actually read the article to know that "Spike to Clint: We're not on a plantation" is about Spike Lee criticising Clint Eastwood for the lack of African-American characters in his Iwo Jima movies. But you can't read the article because it's not on the T-shirt, so the title just stays there, existing with no reason for being there. Most of the headlines are neither witty enough to be amusing, or sufficiently self-explanatory to work once they're off the website and onto a T-shirt. And in any case - it's a news headline. It gets out-of-date or irrelevant pretty fast, and within a week you're wearing last night's fish-and-chips paper.

Now on the other hand, if The Onion produced T-shirts, that would actually make sense, because Onion headlines are intended to be funny on their own - the accompanying article is just an extension of the joke. You don't need to actually read on to find headlines like "Way Too Much Raised For Bronchitis Research", "Museum Of Television And Radio Acquires Rare 'Caroline In The City' Episode", or "FCC Okays Nudity On TV If It’s Alyson Hannigan" funny. Because they're funny in and of themselves. Plus, since they're fake news, you never need to worry about being out of date. You see, these would work on a T-shirt. CNN headlines just do not.

Bright light. Bright light.

So here's the thing.

I love the Gremlins movies. The first film is a brilliantly-executed work. The screenplay is tight, Joe Dante's direction imbues the early scenes with a strong sense of threat and danger, and when the gremlins finally break out of their cocoons and attack, the film just gets terrifying. While I'm not a big horror fan, I will happily sit through some of the great horror films - Halloween, The Shining, The Exorcist, and the like - generally pretty unfazed. But Gremlins, no matter how many times I see it, still actually kinda scares me. Pehaps it's just that I saw the film at a young age, and can still recall how those scenes made me feel, but I don't think so. The gremlins really were menacing and dangerous - and the fact that they viewed killing people and causing mayhem as being just as entertaining as watching Snow White really added to that menace. It is a genuine horror film, that gets away with so much just because they just barely lighten the mood with a few comedy scenes.

The second film is not as good, mostly because it largely abandons the horror element and focuses on the comedy - the mutated gremlins im particular lose their focus on killing and destroying, and just running around pretending to be Carmen Miranda or whatever. And there are a few too many nods to the film's existence as a film - from the shadow puppet scene to Leonard Maltin being attacked while giving a negative review of the first film (which, if I remember correctly, he genuinely disliked in real life). Plus, Gizmo as Rambo? Still, it's definitely a fun film that I do enjoy. I seem to remember hearing a few years ago that Terry Jones wrote a supposedly good script for a third Gremlins film that was well-received, but abandoned because it would have been impossible to make with puppets, and I've always thought they should think about revisiting that script using CGI to create the gremlins. I would like to see that.

And that is why I wanted to post the link to this new ad. Because it is always nice to see new footage of the Gremlins, causing collosal problems and generally being scary. (The final shot is a killer - imagine sitting at your desk at work and having that happen to you. Scary, right?)

My only problem with the ad is the music. I love the Gremlins Rag that was the theme for the films - it's a brilliant composition by Jerry Goldsmith, and is perfectly suited both to the sense of mayhem, and the fun, of the films. It's an enjoyable piece to listen to, even though it has this insane feel of mischief-making to it. And so I love that the ad makers used Goldsnith's theme, but the pacing of the track seems a little too slow, and the arrangement feels subtlely off. The end result is that the music sounds like it should be right, but it's just not.

Still, it's a cool ad, a lot of fun, and worth checking out.

This is the single greatest invention ever

So here's the thing.

I’m looking at the New York Times website, and I see this article about a cool new pen that has been invented.

If I understand it correctly, it’s a perfectly functional ballpoint pen. You can use it to write on any piece of paper you find. But it only becomes cool if you use special paper that has millions of almost-invisible microdots printed on each sheet. Because, in addition to writing on these sheets of paper like any other writing device, the pen also used the microdots to track the pen’s movement, so that it is able to actually download the handwritten information onto the computer and have handwriting recognition. Plus, you can apparently then do a normal CTRL+F search to find a particular word in your handwritten notes.

It will also record audio as you write – so you can find a particular point or word in your handwritten notes, tap the word on the page, and the pen will play the audio from the time that the words were written – very handy for notes from meetings or presentation, since you can go back and listen to exactly what was said. And you can still record audio if you don’t have any paper handy.

But the thing that pushed this device from “that could be handy” to “this is the single greatest thing ever”? The pen apparently comes with a number of sample programs, including “a music program that prompts you to draw a one-octave piano keyboard, which you can then play by tapping”.

It looks like there are quite a few problems with the pen from the review, but all of these are countered by the fact that you can draw a keyboard by hand and then play it. I can't think of anything cooler than that.

The greatest piece of writing ever

So here's the thing:

I'm watching The Daily Show tonight, and the interview was with someone called Robert Schlesinger, who has just written a book called White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters. Given the sub-title of the book, it's unsurprising to learn that its about the way various presidents over history have used speechwriters to craft and communicate their message. And it seemed like it could actually be an interesting book. I'd like to read it.

Anyway, my reason for writing a post about this was that, at one point in the episode, Jon Stewart read a brilliant piece of media criticism. This was written by H. L. Mencken, published in The Baltimore Evening Sun, regarding President Warren G. Harding's inaugural address in 1921.

"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

Wow. There is a lyricism, an elegance, a beauty to that writing. The underpinning intelligence of Mencken just shines through every word, every phrase. Damn, that is brilliant. If I was feeling insecure about writing my blog before, wondering whether I am making a fool of myself, it's amplified ten-fold now. Because everything I attempt to write pales when compared to "the dark abysm of pish" and "the topmost pinnacle of posh".

Anyway, I just wanted to share that quote with you, just because it was so great. (The interview itself was also really good, and worth watching.)