the NYT outs brilliant parody blogger Fake Steve.
Commute
I heard about the bridge collapse on my car radio approximately two minutes after the event, in the midst of rush hour. At home, a reporter describes the traffic on the bridge as “four lanes, bumper to bumper” at the time of the collapse.
Flipping on the tube, helplessly, voyeuristically, sick of the drumbeat of catastrophe, the bridge displays the apparent traffic density of I-5 at 4am. Where are the cars? In the river? It’s to early to say.
Reports indicate that the bridge was undergoing repairs, but I haven’t been able to google up anything. I-5 will be undergoing major, joint-oriented repairs in about three weeks or so, if I recall correctly. I would say that’s what known as a ‘hook’ in the news biz. I expect to see stories on this from all three print news sources hereabouts, the P-I, the Times, and (maybe) the Stranger.
A few years ago I would have set aside time tonight to follow non-journalistic source spotting and integration on websites such as Metafilter. Approaching a decade beyond 9-11, participatory sites whose culture privileges decorum have begun to downplay such activity, and when I began this entry (at a tad before 5:30pm, my time, about 20 minutes after the event) MeFi was silent on the subject. In the interim, a thread has been posted, but I think I’ll sit this one out.
My thoughts are with the families of all the folks caught on that bridge, and, hell yes, with all of us that have to cross a freeway bridge on or way to, or in the act of, work.
The Mountains
Cut and Color
Childhood favorite Bellerophon Books. As a child I had a fantastic time with the Greg Irons-illustrated coloring book of the American revolution (no pic? a crime!) and the sensitive redrawings of Hokusai ukio-ye, and the many books featuring enlarged and simplified drawings originating with turn-of-the-century ethnographic texts were hypnotically beautiful to me.
Hm, the publisher’s disregard of the Irons book is utterly insane. the book is filled with scrupulously drawn images of key moments in the history of the colonial rebellion, and Irons (an influential underground cartoonist and tatto artist) employed fantastically rigorous putti banners (my coinage) to convey dialog and caption within the scenes. What is so fantastic about this, in my mind, that that these banners, occasionally lofted by swallws, are the old-school tattoist’s standard for including dedications and such like in tattoos, and are clearly derived from popular media dating to the late 1700s, the era of both the Revolution and Hogarth.
In this children’s book, Irons was drawing a line between tattooists of the twentieth century, America’s founding fathers, and most particularly the styles and modes of popular media at the hour of our nation’s birth. It is a national treasure.
Lit
Unexpectedly free on a Friday night, I rang Spence and we saw Sunshine (IMDB) at the Neptune last night. Directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later), the film’s narrative concerns a second and final attempt to reignite the dying hearth of Sol via nuclear injection.
I think the film is actually most concerned with three non-narrative filmic objectives. I’ll enumerate them in descending order of ambition.
The primary objective and possible inspiration appears to have been making a bleak, nihilist film about light and the exploration of light as religious metaphor and as the underlying, unifying basis of filmmaking itself. In this view, the narrative’s concern with reigniting the sun can be seen as an attempt to reignite the sources of western religion and/or the sources of western genre film making. The nihilism, however, undercuts the film’s apparent call for a rebirth of film.
Second, Boyle looks to have a goal of re-envisioning effects as the basis of sci-fi film and sublimating the effects shot to the camera effect. The film deploys effects shots to good order and suitably showed me things new to my eye. Two in particular stay with me. First, an image of a doomed spacewalker literally washed away in a solar wave, light imagined as a tsunami of flame which erases the suited figure, hanging in space. Second, a transit of Mercury viewed, apparently, from inside 36 million miles distance to the sun.
There are numerous exterior effects shots of both solar spark plug ships, even, improbably, a revisitation of the open-airlock sequence from 2001 which appears to have been the direct result of a classic studio-boardroom one-upsmanship meeting, and which may be notable in the history of sci-fi for it’s careful depiction of the consequences of improper tailoring.
Despite this, the film’s visual heart is in some seriously over-the-top optical effects, including single-frame drop-ins, crazy lens-stretches, focus pulls, camera rotations, lens-flare overlays, and so many shots that erode the image via quick cuts, overlaid imagery, and the like that one loses count of the moments when one is looking at a wholly abstract film image, no form, only light and color.
Finally, and in the end distractingly for me, the film is literally packed with direct references to a specific canon of science-fiction films, more or less beginning with the twin monoliths of 2001 and the originial Solaris, but also clearly nodding in direct sequences, plot elements, or dialog toward Darkstar, Silent Running, Blade Runner (listen for the Vangelis endtitle theme), Alien (in this case, excerpting several lines of dialog, possibly a crew-hat, and what must be the statutorily-required crew-dines-at-an-illuminated-table-surface scene), and the entire stalker-in-space subgenre that Alien accidentally summoned into being (The Abyss, The Sphere, etc.).
The density of reference can be justified within the framework of the film’s apparent call for a rebirth of sci-fi filmmaking. After all, a baroque period customarily precedes a scourging change of stylistic seasons. What’s odd about this film is that the baroque referentiality which might justify the film’s call for scourging and rebirth are not, to me, exemplified by the films it quotes with such reverence. Instead, the film’s impetus for rebirth seems to be exemplified by itself.
Granted, while we live in an age in which the well-funded, thematically ambitious men-in-space scifi film is far from the rarity it was when 2001 first hove into view. It’s also true that recent examples of the genre have had a mixed track record and tended to the obvious rather than the visionary, popcorn movies or clumsy franchise sequels instead of protean visions of transcendence or squalor.
What’s odd, in the end, about Sunshine is that it is, in fact, clearly out of the league of that herd of starships and space cowboys. Yet, by studiously displaying its unassailable heritage it gives its own game away. One wonders to what extent the retread elements in the script and plot emerged as a result of studio-mandated rework and which were there from the beginning. It seems to me the film’s visual splendor and direct interest in light-as-metaphor should have been enough to create a truly unique, intellectually and spiritually challenging SF film as successful as its antecedents. Instead, unfortunately, it falls prey to the referentiality which may have inspired it.
Despite this, I’d recommend the experience to any lover of the canon the film addresses itself to. There’s some serious eye-candy here.
Jasper is a kind of rock.
Coyotes kill friend’s cat.
Inexpressible.
Goonnne!
It is a good day to drink
.
Creaking dusk
This picture was snapped, so it seems, on or around July 8th of this year in the San Juans. Amazing.
Do it.
Spence republishes Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments for Guitarists. May I spend more time following these than I have in the past, as they are right-fucking-on.
(5) IF YOU’RE GUILTY OF THINKING, YOU’RE OUT
If your brain is part of the process, you’re missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.