The roadkill cooked slowly, only gradually charring enough to allow one to easily slough the charred skin. Once that material patched off, an unsightly orange tone was observed in the yet-underdone flesh of the item.
Later, we were set upon by a night nibbler.
As we drove south on Chuckanut Drive, overlooking the waters that hold the San Juans, we came across this lovely militarian art car, lableled in stencil on the trunk “54 Buick Special P-40.”
The car also featured what I’d have to describe as ‘tail art,‘ and a front-facing fifty-caliber machine gun in the back seat, not clearly visible in my picture. Also not visible in my pix are the detailed additional rivets added to the skin of the car to make it look more like a vintage warbird.
Oddly, a year ago, on Chuckanut, I also photographed an extreme militarian conversion of a Porsche 911 4×4, this one without apparent armament, although shrunken heads were noted.
The New York Times > Movies > The Political ‘Fahrenheit’ Sets Record at Box Office, notes the NYT. The film is set to take first place in grosses this weekend, an amazing feat when one notes that the number of theaters involved, and consequently the number of possible screenings, is about a third of a large-scale Hollywood opening weekend.
As we came in from a weekend out of town last night, we crested the hill at 45th near the Ave. This is where Seattle’s Neptune Theater is showing the film, and I uttered the ejaculation which titles this entry. It came upon seeing the line, a huge crowd that stretched around the block. I have certainly never seen such a thing before at the Neptune, which generally houses offbeat films rather than blockumentaries, as Fahrenheit appears set to be.
It will be especially interesting to see if in the coming week theater owners rush to add screens, something that I’m not calling – the weekend’s rush could simply be the result of Move On’s push to get people in the theaters this weekend.
I could be totally wrong, though. Daymented was getting a posse together for Friday, I know.
Other Seattle-area bloggers appear to be writing about it, too, though, so who knows.
I pointed this out a few times early in the festival run, but I want to prompt Seattle-area readers or ex-locals to stroll through the amusing doings the various Tableteers got up to over at the Siffblog.
I still need to fix an IE display bug which centers everything, but on the whole I think the experiment worked out well. I think it would be interesting to see Tablet implement something like this as a regular part of their main site design.
A very interesting aspect of getting the blog, um, rolling for them was the relative lack of internet-oriented thinking my friends there have. I asked if they knew what the base traffic of the main site was. This proved to be data that had not ever been sought previously. While I think most of the folks on the Siffblog had a vague idea what a blog was, I don’t believe that they had ever committed their own time to either reading or writing one on a regular basis.
As it happens, yesterday was the one-month anniversary of the blog, and I’m pleased with how it worked out. Never a high traffic site, it still enabled direct, personal writing about the experience of the festival per se.
A few other folks were blogging SIFF as well. Since SIFF draws a dedicated core of pass-holders who can be quite competitive about numbers of films seen, I think next year it would be a really great idea to set up a collaborative blog for passholders as well, possibly scraping film listings from the main SIFF site and allowing the pass holders to riff on that material.
Spatula vs. SIFF runs through June 9, and is (oddly) an audio blog. Being constitutionally averse to multimedia, the content will remain obscure to me for the nonce. But don’t let me stop you!
Artdish did some blog-form previewing, but steers clear of lengthy personal reactions, alas.
Eric at Of Charm and Strange wrote up Sky Blue, Buddy, Open Water, The Five Obstructions, Doppelganger, Touch of Pink, Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space, and Torremolinos ’73. He may have reviewd more, but it’s time for me to move on.
MoviePie has a nice listing, with about 64 films reviewed – just eyeballing, I’d say that they rate films more or less as I did, although I have quibbles with a perfect score for Hero, which I predictably view as imperialist running dog propaganda, if beautiful (that’s a mild joke there folks, and yes I do hope to write about it).
Cinecultist weighed in every now and then with dispatches from one Seattle Maggie, and last but not least, Mena and Me, at a not-long-for this-world radio.weblogs.com URL, took the time to drop some lines on SIFF as well.
In other news, I just shipped a review of SIFF Golden Space Needle Best Film winner Facing Windows – look for it in this Wednesday’s Stranger. More than that I dassen’t say. I did take the opportunity to interview director Ferzan Ozpetek when he was in town. It was my first-ever interview with a non-native English speaker. It included the services of a translator. I think it went well enough, but of course, I can imagine how to improve the experience next time. I don’t have an assignment to use the material yet and thus will keep mum about what we discussed.
Last week’s library visit involved a couple-few pix. Here ya go.
The World of Ricky Gervais’ The Office: Series 1 Trivia helps to tie some things together.
By some odd coincidence, my long-reserved copy of The Office came in on Friday, and Saturday was when we had time to watch it. What should be on Bravo in the ealry evening, just prior to our planned DVDathon?
Viv and I watched all of this back to back – somehow it’s appropriate to my return to the world of the working, er, stiff. Sadly, the other wise admirable trivia guide to The Office series 1 fails to ID the obvious Demotivators poster outside David’s office door visible in episode six. I don’t think I’m linking to the correct poster, but it is a long-wise poster with a red main slogan.
On the other hand, Peter Gibbons is mentioned by name in episode six and cited in the trivia guide.
Click the closeup to see the whole map. Scanning this, I noticed some killer engraved illustrations in the book. But I really must move on today.
UPDATE: Hmm, I had noticed this as I was working on the prior entry, but there’s an odd chiming between this new look of mine and the recent redesig over at Josh’s Communications from Elsewhere. I know I was not thinking of his design as I assembled this skin, but the similarity of the name of News from Nowhere and the even more unsettling visual echo that occurs with the addition of a map element in this entry is downright weird.
Jason says to draw him a map, send him a postcard. I like the idea of relabeling the Treasure Island map with refferences to his songs. Hm. that suggests an interactive project, does it not?
As a part of my ill-advised development of a virtual book look for this site, I dug out some of the older books I have here and there about the house. The pages that made it into the final product came from an 1894 copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island published by Charles Scribner’s Sons as pat of a multivolume compendium of the man’s work. I didn’t notice as I scanned the book, but there is a two-color facsimile of young Jim’s map just prior to the frontmatter. Maybe I’ll share that here too.
One of the other books I found is an intriguing edition of William Morris’ unreadable utopian fantasy, News from Nowhere. As I flipped through it, I didn’t see a page or type worth cribbing from, but then I remembered that I’d purchased it because of the very faded, illegible reproductions of four agitprop drawings, presumably by Morris, probably from the 1880s. The drawings are intriguingly hard to see in the book, when held in the hand and peered at. They appear to have been printed in yellow ink on what may have been at one time faintly lavender paper. The inexpensive stock has faded to the familiar manila of old paper, nearly exactly the same shade as the yellow ink. I recall thinking as I bought the book that it would be an interesting challenge to work on scans of the endpapers.
Well, I’ve done so, and you may view the results by clicking on the banner at the top of his entry. The drawings are interesting because Morris is such a gifted draftsman; they are also somewhat odd to our post-Soviet eyes in the manner in which they idealize and fuss over images familiar from both later patriotic art and socialist poster design.
[crosspost from the Siffblog]
This is the first year that I had the opportunity to take as full an advantage of my SIFF press pass as I have wanted to, and for the first two weeks of screenings, I was very diligent about seeing every film shown, about three a day for two weeks.
I had been warned by others that when one is viewing films for review in volume, it becomes crucial to take extensive notes, something that I try to avoid when viewing films one at a time for review. I’ve found that If I’m taking notes as the film screens, I’m much less likely to experience the film like a casual viewer and therefore may miss the quality of emotional involvement in the film which is part of he aim of many commercial films.
The reason it’s important to take good notes in viewing lots of films for review is that after a couple of days, your memory breaks down, and you’ll inadvertently find yourself mixing up characters, scenes, and situations. The notes help ensure that what you turn in represents what you saw.
Despite this, not only do the films blend together in one’s mind, to a certain extent the memories become dissociated: you may find yourself recalling how nice it was to sit by the river with James Garner, or what a pretty girl that French chick is that you met the other day, or how good that food looked in that Chinese family’s roadside lunch counter. The films’ depictions of experiences begin to occupy the places that are normally used to store personal experience.
This effect renders everything slightly dreamlike, because you learn to distrust your memory.
Adding to the strangeness is the emotional effect of being absorbed by the narratives that you’re being presented with. Generally, filmmakers aim for the maximum emotional and visual persuasiveness that they can accomplish. They’ll do anything to involve you in the emotional rhythm of the story, and that means there are certain tricks that are used over and over again. Over swelling strings, the actor’s eyes widen as her head tilts back, mouth opening, and a gentle rain spatters her face. The camera pulls back, swooping away, and the rain becomes a torrential downpour as brasses enter the soundtrack.
Despite the recognizable and mechanical nature of many of these tricks, they remain effective rhetorical tropes, even after sitting through many movies. It’s possible that they become even more effective over time through repetition. As audience members, we’re conditioned to respond to these gestures, slavering when the bell sounds.
This operant-conditioning effect (the reward is produced within our bodies as endorphins are released in response to the emotive cues) has a cumulative effect. After achieving that critical mass of film-viewing where one’s memories break down, the emotional pummeling has a stronger effect, rendering even hack films capable of carrying a wallop. It’s like being slightly drunk all the time, off balance and easily swayed.
Last week, and this week, I am numbing my butt at nearly every single press screening for the Seattle International Film Festival out of some masochistic curiosity.
I have learned that there are clearly more bad and so-so films made than good or great ones, so far. I have also learned that watching three movies in a day in a theater environment tends to produce very strange, dreamlike memory effects.
I had been warned about this by other toilers in the critical trenches and have been seeking to stave off the dreaded mental movie mashup by taking copious notes.
Of course, the notes are taken in the dark.