Aaron Stewart-Ahn

It's Time for Ashes of Time again

2008-08-10T03:18:00.003-05:00

Upon In the Mood for Love's release in the UK I was lucky enough to stand in freezing cold winter weather for six hours, after which I got a standby ticket to watch Wong Kar Wai and Maggie Cheung present the premiere of said movie for the first time in the UK followed by a candid Q&A session. After the film I asked Wong if he had ever thought of reediting any of his films, given the infamous editorial periods that accompany his productions and the - at the time - new market for DVD which took the obscure Laserdisc into the mass market. Scary to think that at the time DVD was a new technology with an uncertain future. He genuinely paused for a long time, and said that he'd thought about it. And the only film he'd perhaps - lots of vagueness here - return to was Ashes of Time. Something that embedded itself in my Hong Kong cinema fanboy mind for nearly a decade now. Well here is the trailer for the rerelease of a beautifully reprinted Ashes of Time. Whether or not you found it too obtuse for a wuxia, there was never a production before or since in the golden age of Hong Kong filmmaking. Not only do they not make them like this any more, I doubt they ever will, again.

As far as that evening long ago, I remember Wong explaining why he did certain confusing things to Cheung that made her feel her character was very elusive. Right there on stage in front of everyone he explained his methodology of purposely affecting this dislocation of identity. Cheung was exasperated, "Why didn't you tell me this while we were shooting." As if she really had never heard this before. Wong paused hiding behind his sunglasses and said quietly "because then you wouldn't have done it that way."

Read everything you'd ever want to know about the rerelease including impressions from Cannes here.

Jetpacks and mantits

2008-08-07T19:31:00.003-05:00

From Joe Cornish, one half of Adam of Joe, one of Britain's greatest ever comedy duos. Ten years before Robot Chicken they were doing parodies of movies with toys. Adam has done this proposed song for the new James Bond film which is for my money the best Bond song since the 70s. Whatever happened to jetpacks?

Here's their parody of Seven:

The Assasination of an underrated movie

2008-08-05T17:08:00.005-05:00

How's this for underrated: a movie so unloved that the studio held back on it for two years and even critics could not appreciate. In retrospect, movies like Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey were not appreciated critically upon release. Sometimes there's a movie that's so singular in purpose and intention that it even confounds that establishment, which can only be a good thing. But like anything worth something, it has peculiarities, and its not for everyone.

That movie is The Asssassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford which to me is the greatest Western in nearly a decade. I avoided the movie for eons due to word of mouth and the suggestion that it was merely emulative of the worst aspects of Terence Malick. Given the absolute veneration I hold Malick with in my heart, it seemed like something doomed from the start.

What we have as released is an odd beast, an edit the result of two years bickering with a studio after a four hour cut was praised by those who saw it as a masterpiece. It does drag a little in places. There's some story compression in voiceover that's a little awkward. But it's a slow burn, and you have to give it a chance to wear down your defenses. It is not Malick lite, although interested in atmospheric cadences visually it isn't as lyrical as Malick and presents a more direct novelistic approach to theme.

What it is however is brilliant, a morally complicated investigation of an epic act of quintesstially mythic American values deconstructed into all its messy, vague, human bits and pieces. A single bullet revebrates through space and time in this movie, a single act becoming a part of the legend of America but the fallout in reality being eternal consequence. This is a movie that dares to show the silent clumsiness after a gunfight and linger upon it. That allows its characters to go to their darkest places willingly, but ultimately offers each the chance at some personal moments of true humanity. Casey Affleck is the true revelation here: the movie is his, and not Pitt's at all. At first his acting choices seem a little odd and disturbing. By the films' end however you see where it was all going and it's not exactly what you think. The film allows mercy and pity upon even the worst acts, but at the same time remaining a very lucid examination of the unconscious we've woven this country together from, collectively whether we'd like to or not.

This is a movie for those who don't mind lingering, or examining the sky or a field for what portents it might hold, for those who want to feel something complicated and uneasy when it strikes them. I think it's an absolutely ignored and shabby masterpiece, and it's a damn shame our own critical community would pillory an attempt to make art within the studio system, even if it isn't totally successful. Ultimately, the film cost next to nothing and features one of the world's biggest movie stars. And in the US, after sitting on a shelf for two years, was released only in major cities for a short period.

Grand Theft Auto IV in retrospect: it sucks, and a Pulitzer winning novelist agrees

2008-08-05T16:26:00.009-05:00

The first and perhaps last videogame I ever went to pick up at midnight was Grand Theft Auto IV. While it would appear that GTA's success has hinged on its unchecked id raging away in a world without consequence, the real reason the Grand Theft Auto games became bona fide successes was that it truly set a new paradigm, the sandbox style of gameplay. GTA drops you in an open ended world where you are left to do for the most part as you please, constrained only by the geography and physics of that world. It was just as fun wasting hours harassing pedestrians or trying to jump a motorcycle between two skyscrapers or even for that matter obsessively stalking the landscape learning what might be hidden on a rooftop or alleyway - or heck, sometimes just to get a great view - as it was to advance the narrative. That's the real heart of GTA's success: it essentially gave us a set of action figures and a limitless playset to wreak havoc with, urban spaces so well defined we learned them like real cities.

It's this limitless set of possibilities that truly remains the reason for GTA's success. The bad boy aspects, with all that oft reported maiming of hookers and driving down innocent pedestrians we could sort of excuse for such beautiful gameplay. The crime milieu the game was set in was so crude and the satirical veneer painted over its pseudo America so over the top that one didn't have to take it so seriously.The height of the GTA series remains for me Vice City. By transposing the gameplay to a ludicrous and stylized cartoon combination of Scarface and Miami Vice everything cohered: the mass murdering your protagonist must take part in made sense with all the excess of the 80s around him, and the soundtrack was a work of genius.

But the gaming press, still adfit, still writing about quality as a subset of numerical values, they were praising GTA IV to high heaven. This game, they said, finally combined those aspects of the GTA series with something truly meaningful. This was videogaming's Godfather II, its Sopranos. The story resonated and forced you into hard moral choices. And the thing truly was a work of art. Artist Tom Sachs even went so far as to call it the defining artwork of our time despite never having played it and showing a limited sense of what turning on a videogame entails. Now that's lofty hyperbole.

But I was a believer, because three previous installments ranked not as my favorite games of all time but definitely as some of the most fun; a good time in GTA makes you impose narrative, not the other way around, a random adventure contained within the game rules becoming a boring story for your mates. And the gaming press, again, was ecstatic.

Having now completed the game a few months later, or at least finally closed the narrative that grounds it, I can say easily that I am even more embarassed I picked it up at midnight than ever before. And thankfully more sanity abounds. In what I can only call the first truly great piece of games criticism, Junot Diaz, he of the incredible The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao sets everyone straight.

Grand Theft Auto IV is the most incredible creation of an urban environment ever witnessed by humankind grafted onto some of the shoddiest, most backwards, confused, hypocritical gameplay and narrative. Game creator Sam Houser likes to repeatedly talk about how he's come to realize his games do one better than the movies or television at telling these stories. While its hard to argue with the series' financial success let's be honest while admitting the games offer fun... The storytelling in GTAIV is so shoddy, with a such a ridiculously stupid notion of free will and player choice that it doesn't even come close to the moral complexity of a single episode of the Sopranos. This is a game to wit in which a melodramatic scene plays out where one gets to take part in that long standing movie cliche: the hero who has the villain finally in his sights and has every great motivation to pull the trigger on them, but can be a better man and walk away. And if one does, and really thinks this has consequence, guess again, because the story is going to put you right afterwards into your character having no choice but executing hundreds. Even better, the game purposely defeats your choice with personal tragedy immediately thereafter, as if to say that your choice had no consequence other than furthering the shoddy story. And what a pretentious stab at crime epic this is, which does start rather promisingly enough, with you from the Balkans having come to America to take part in the immigrant experience and seek revenge. That angle quickly devolves into cliche as you yet again deal with the Italian mafia. Yawn.

What's apparent is that this hubristic view of having conquered the cinema business means that the games' designers have spent most of their time writing and creating cutscenes that combine the expletives of a Martin Scorcese crime epic with the aesthetic of a Thunderbirds puppet show. Imagine Team America World Police as directed by one of Tarantino's lesser clones from the mid 90s. Because it feels like an awful lot of effort went into that silliness while a lot of gameplay from the previous chapters has been removed. The art direction is fantastic, for certain, but there's a great disconnect with the adult nature of things from the rather hilarious motion capture grafted onto what look like wax mannequins designed by Ron Mucek. At least they're clothed.

The hard part in writing all this is that the environment of Liberty City is truly stunning and no one has ever created from scratch such an involved, lucid simulacra of a city ever in any medium. It's astounding. But that spell is broken by things that were not problems in lower tech iterations of the previous games. Cabbies and pedestrians convincingly go about their lives, making small talk. Until you hear the cabbie say the same thing every five seconds, and every cabbie nearby doing the same. Or the time I entered a building and everyone within looked exactly the same, which was at least surreally funny. Every time you flick to a different radio station odds are vast that you're likely to hear the exact same dj banter you heard only minutes ago.

Stupid gameplay decisions abound. You still have to hit the A button to run anywhere with any sense of convenience, which leads to carpal tunnel syndrome. You still have a tendency in firefights to target innocent pedestrians half a mile away from you when a thug is shooting you point blank in the face. And for whatever insane reason for a game called Grand Theft Auto, car handling is a nightmare in this one - perhaps it was meant to be mastered, but its just not fun to drive in this game. Or the fact that the story need be furthered by phone calls after every mission, calls that can get disrupted by random traffic or doing something innocuous like getting out of a car. And for all the majesty of every corner of Liberty City being tremendous, the place feels emptier and less involving than ever before, because so much is inaccessible and there are no real rewards for your own initiative. For every homicidal fantasy acted out there were people who play GTA like good samaritans, doing things like driving ambulances to hospitals with sick people. All of that has been stripped from the game.

Worst of all is the so called element that was supposed to expand and surpass the emotional involvement of a movie: the friends system. You meet characters and befriend them. You spend the majority of your time now in GTA, if you want to keep these friends, answering their calls in the middle of drive bys, having to take them at inopportune moments to the same pool hall for the fortieth time. It is constant and neverending. Pretty soon GTA IV has turned you into an embittered social curmudgeon who wishes your phone would stop ringing, just so you can, you know, play a fucking video game.

GTAIV is imbued with the worst kind of pretension: it believes in its grandiosity when offering mere churlish, childish approximations of older, slower less interactive mediums. A debate rages as to whether games require less cinematic story bits than ever before. GTAIV actually for the first time makes me agree. Games will not surpass cinema by doing what it does on its own terms - it has to surpass cinema by doing things cinema cannot. And never before has the moral confusion of the GTA games been so clearer than when it tries to impose a character upon you with silly plays at sentimentality and sympathy for its lead character. It's a stupidly jarring thing to watch "you" question all this violence only moments later to have to become a homicidal maniac in order to further the story. It's another thing on a whole other level entirely to ask for a true love interest with tragic dimensions in a world where you can go beat women up in a strip club or a mission which has you beating a kidnapped woman. This is what the gaming press would have the mainstream press believe one ups the movie theater. There isn't a single moment in GTAIV with the clarity of moral confusion exhibited currently in a movie about a millionaire who dresses up as a bat.

Saddest of all, GTAs strength, its city, is the result of an unashamed one hundred million dollars in production costs, minimum. Trumpeted loudly by its developer. That will buy you one great city. But as with other mediums, a ton of cash never buys a better story. In praising GTAIV endlessly the gaming community has backed Rockstar's dominance with a vote of consumer confidence that I dearly hope does not affect games to their detriment. It's a staggering narrative, moral, gameplay leap backwards that I can say is not ultimately worth your time. One can only hope that Rockstar can see past the rapturous praise and piles of cash to offer us a next iteration that spends less time forcing us to do and be things and more time letting us play.

Wii will rock you...

2008-07-16T23:53:00.002-05:00

I'm guessing that most Giant Robot readers if they own a current games console, own a Nintendo Wii (or more likely, a DS). The Wii has been a juggernaut, still a difficult product to find that sells out everywhere it is stocked. It's success has been so staggering that it has created a new attitude in the business side of games, where expensive narrative heavy titles aimed at adults are now seen as hardcore and a niche market while it's much easier to make money off of what they call the casual gamer. Nintendo's success has bolstered this claim, and given that those niche titles cost a lot more money even in art development assets to create, one could say that their success is a staggering leap backwards. Grand Theft Auto IV cost admittedly around a hundred million dollars to develop, while Metal Gear Solid 4 was at least some 30 million. But there's an important distinction there, where Nintendo's vision has gaming something like playing with a toy, and those other titles aiming for a whole new medium.

Now, I know playing plastic instruments evokes in most people a response similar to what an episode of South Park did: that it makes you a total loser. But somehow Nintendo, with their aim at casual gamers, in which gaming is more like playing with a toy than becoming immersed in an experience, have made even playing Rock Band look cool if you ask me. From yesterday's E3 conference, a yearly event where games companies ply their wares to the media:

An event that most commentators flat out agree upon, Nintendo made the worst showing at.

I'll never skip posting about Kubrick

2008-07-16T23:42:00.004-05:00

You probably already caught this, but last night in the UK Channel 4 aired a new documentary about Kubrick's exhaustive archives, titled Stanley Kubrick's Boxes. They recreated in painstaking detail behind the scenes elements of The Shining to make this quite incredible promo to advertise the series. Funnily enough, one of the few genuine portraits we have of Mr. Kubrick is from his daughter Vivian's footage filmed during the Shining documenting the production...

...And this beautiful ad doesn't have the same atmosphere as that footage but it's interesting nonetheless.

Anyway, go to this link to find Youtube of the entire documentary, which isn't likely to be shown in the US any time soon.

Netflixbox360

2008-07-15T15:54:00.003-05:00

Pictured above is an interface for the Xbox 360 that's starting this fall that will enable you to display on your tv any of the videos that you can stream from the Netflix service - all it requires is a Netflix subscription and the standard yearly Xbox Live fee. That adds thousands of instant on demand videos to the Xbox 360. Granted, they'll be in standard definition, but for those of us who choose Macs or Linux and subscribe to Netflix (and therefore can't access the streaming library), and are wondering what games machine to buy, this is pretty killer.

The future of music, plastic toys no longer

2008-07-14T17:11:00.006-05:00

I spent long enough in the periphery of the music industry directing videos to get to know some people who are really well and truly part of the music business, and I've seen their dire prognostications, and I've also seen musicians laugh or mock... But the fact of the matter is the rhythm music game is here to stay, and not only that, it may be one of the true futures of the music industry.

Pictured above are the Ion drums for Rock Band 2. This time they're going beyond plastic toys to a whole other level. These are a stripped down electronic drum kit with an interface replacing the typical brain for a midi drum kit. It can be adapted and modified to do so and thus act as an actual electronic drum kit. The game also will feature drum lessons, a trainer to teach people the basic rhythmic patterns real drummers use. Fender are also modifying actual stratocaster bodies and replacing their electronics with Rock Band's. Rock Band 2 will also feature a new track from Guns N Roses Chinese Democracy.

At this point the lines become blurred. This morning it was announced that the next iteration of Guitar Hero (now completely upstaged by Rock Band to the point of Guitar Hero now copying what it can from Rock Band including a shabby drum kit) will feature the entirety of Metallica's next album day and date as the record release.

Most of the musicians I know don't care for these games, which I can understand on many levels. Other would say that the experience is beyond stupid and childish and for the time invested one could learn to play a real instrument. That's missing the point.

As Rock Band will have functionality with a close to low end electronic drum kit, and lessons, it's quite obvious that someday people will be plugging in their real instruments into their consoles. I think this is only a great thing: Rock Band is best when you play it with people, producing a communal experience that no other game has done before... It engages you and your friends into focusing on a piece of music together. Musicians should embrace this. It shares the joy of performance in an albeit stripped down format for the fans in a way, say, music videos never could. Who wouldn't want their fans to have an even deeper connection to music to the point where individual instrumentations are memorized? Anyone who's played Rock Band with friends knows exactly what I'm talking about - an exalted sensation of harmony that you share, not just with friends, but music you love. And to be proficient at Rock Band you don't need to invest the time necessary in a real instrument by any means. Dan-ah who claims no musical skill whatsoever moved up from easy to medium difficulty on the bass in a single day.

Anyway, here's the Rock Band 2 tracklist which now boasts AC/DC, Elvis Costello, Fleetwood Mac, Modest Mouse, Devo, and even freaking Bob Dylan. Did you know that the entirety of Pixies' Doolittle is now available?

Comeback, kid? A new focus for this blog.

2008-07-14T14:40:00.006-05:00

Being absent from this blog for so long I have to admit any excuse or words wouldn't be worthwhile. Needless to say, sometimes real life intervenes heavily. Other times I find blogging inimical to the subconscious process required to write something. I did manage to file a big story about a portion of my trip to Cambodia for issue 54 which you can check out now. Martin had to laboriously cut down my original 4500 word draft to a manageable thousand for which he deserves a lot of credit. If any of you are interested though maybe I'll run the longer version here?

I did get to hang out with Martin in L.A. a few weeks ago and I discussed doing one thing in particular with my blog going forward, which is focusing on one thing for the most part. I'll always be unable to avoid writing about movies on some level, especially when moved to (I can say that Wall-E deserves your time and money like few movies do, and if I were 8 years old it would probably be my favorite movie, and that Hellboy 2 contains the most outlandishly original production design and creature effects I've seen in years). For awhile I was really excited about sharing great clips, but look at the top videos on youtube any given day and it's fake porn, the same weird z axis non celebrities, and amateurish attempts at copying what tv already does. Music videos are so on the wane at this point that I've pretty much given up on them, so much so that I've left my production company as they aren't worth the psychic energy and investment of time and creativity I put into pursuing so many dead ends that won't even earn me a living.

I'm going to start writing here about video games. Before you flee, let me at least try to explain why I'd bother, given the amount of sheer text about said subject saturating the web.

Games are an ascendant, emerging art form, despite what wiser cultural commentaters would have you believe. All pop art, especially when it goes hand in hand with a technological advance, starts out being considered lowbrow junk for the masses. Movies started in county fairs with carnival hucksters.

But it took to some degree proper criticism to advance movies into true cultural legitimacy. That requires more than what constitutes game criticism today, which is either aimed at consumers and interested in attributes, or dry dissertation style papers on mechanics.

I am constantly arguing that what games need are a Lester Bangs, a Roger Ebert, a Griel Marcus, Denis Diderot, a Godard or a Truffaut. We need writers to start placing games within the context of culture - not just pop - as a whole. We have a few who are close, like the excellent N'gai Croal, but these are beat reporters. We need people who review games without the confines of consumer advice, who piss off or enlighten or give us a historical perspective to come, who suggest subtexts that may or not be there. And everyone in games talks about how they wish there was an arthouse cinema of games, freed from the financial pressures requied to make games today. That requires someone who can write about games in a way that any culturally invested person can read the review and come away with a thought about what gaming can be. We need writing about games, in other words, that's compelling to people who don't play games.

I do believe there's a very specific bit that's missing constantly in games criticism: discussing what it is about games that no other medium can do. That's a very important distinction, I believe. There are emotional depths and experiences to be plundered in games that have not yet been explored, while on the other hand I believe there are already games that show distinct auteurs at work, with themes, subtexts, and unique emotional properties.

I love ignored art, art on the margins, the bits of genius that get overlooked because of the medium its attempted in. Here's a great page from a never finished graphic novel by Alan Moore and the insanely underrated Bill Sienkiewicz (who is on a par with Ashley Wood in my book).

Click here to see the full page

I like to use this example a lot. Big Numbers has gone down in obscure comics lore as a lost mastepiece, but I believe that many overlooked what was so unyieldingly ambitious about the book which perhaps led to its dissolution... It did things with the arrangement of art and words that no other medium could do. Look at the panel with the people planning, an image as a whole that contains individual images that read left to right while telling the story. That's intrinsic to the medium, and despite our natural assumptions of adaptation in culture, I love this marginal stuff, the inherent bits and pieces that you couldn't do any other way.

I believe while playing games I've had similar experiences. Vastly dislocating, new emotional responses. They are far and few between, embedded in tiny little parcels of art on the margins, and no one seems to discuss them at large.

Games now earn equivalent sums in revenue and Nintendo have proven once and for all that games are not just for teenage boys, thankfully. When it comes to art direction I believe that games right now may be even more ambitious than the realm of films, as there are no physical production requirements and unifying aesthetic is easier to achieve. Several games have pushed at the boundaries of what that imagery is supposed to be, from stylized art deco ruin to graphically bold cel shading.

But again, it's that unique quality I hope to write about. And I'll still be discussing little bits of ephemera when it strikes me.

Where I've been

2008-04-11T20:59:00.006-05:00

Why was I in Cambodia? It was one of several locations around the globe for this video I just co-directed with Shawn Kim for Death Cab for Cutie's new album Narrow Stairs. Shawn is for my money the best working cinematographer in music videos and has been for the past few years. I mean he's worked with all the greats, but most people instantly know his work when you say that he shot the Maps video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Feist's 1234. When I wrote this treatment I saw in my head that the band were photographed the way Shawn Kim would, so it made sense to have him do it, not just as a photographer but a director.

My crew of 2, an actress, and myself covered some 27977 miles in 13 days shooting this. The defining statement was "let's wrap cause I want to get the next snowmobile out of here". The experience was the best I've had in my life, though incredibly challenging. I've always felt that travel is a defining human experience that changes you forever, and hope that this depiction of wanderlust, obsessiveness, repetition, and loneliness conveys some of that.

here kitty kitty, her.... MY GOD IM DYING

2008-04-04T16:31:00.001-05:00

Picture this: you're a terrorist guarding your warehouse like building full of blind alleys and crates and danger barrels. You've gotten word that a Jack Bauer style guy is coming to take you all out and defuse the bomb which you have put a LED timer ticking down on the front of just so you know it's going to be done soon. The next thing you know, a cute little kitty cat rounds the corner. As a terrorist, what do you do?

cambodia

2008-04-01T09:11:00.002-05:00

That's myself and Arrun. He is a hotel worker, translator, student, tour guide, and hoping to save enough money to get a tuk tuk. It's hard to tell but I think only a week and a half ago or so I was in Cambodia working on a project, my first visit to the country. My feelings about what I saw and experienced have yet to resolve themselves into total coherence and objectivity - it came in the middle of a whirlwind global trip. I do recall the number of young people we met who were tireless, firecely intelligent, self educated working as cooks, drivers, hotel receptionists. Working to get a leg up in the harsh realities of the new Cambodian economy, where first world luxury plays out for the tourists and those who work for the government in the dissolution of memory and history, secret history kept forever intangible.

Eric's already written about Dith Pran's death, but here's the New York Times obituary in which they recount his work with Schanberg for the paper. Read it here. Reading about him reminds me of the great people I met in Cambodia. I have to get back there.

Anyone under 20 in the US has only ever...

2008-02-18T03:44:00.003-05:00

lived during the presidency of either a Bush or a Clinton. I can genuinely say in my lifetime I have never seen someone running for President who has such command of inspiration in others. Nor oratory skills and delivery like this. I sometimes feel that the best leaders are not those who do the best; they're the ones that inspire the best in everyone else. I think this is the first absolute must see speech of the election; but do make your mind up. All I urge, as ever, is to not be apathetic. I did volunteer work for a presidential campaign that amounted to working a phone bank but it was absolutely worth it in every way. More on that story as my health improves.

Hot tickets and trigeminally yours

2008-01-24T17:17:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone. I'm still alive. I was directing an ad and then a new music video, which will be out in a few days. But the shoot for the video happened over the holidays so I spent the period around Christmas traveling between three cities and shooting which didn't leave me with much time for anything or any of the woolgathering that leads me to blog.

If you live in New York though, you still have time to buy tickets to a second Joanna Newsom show in which she'll be performing with the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

In the meantime I have to go on a little sabbatical as I have an illness to contend with; nothing threatening or permanent. I have to give myself a shot every day which is pretty horrible for someone who is afraid of needles. I've been through it before and it will pass. But it is very difficult at the moment to focus on much, even books or computer screens, so I'm bad Internet company. You don't need me anyway, you've got Tom Cruise and Primaries and Bird Flu in India and coming recession fears; all things that don't need my commentary or blog pleasing snark to go along with.

On that note of things that are in the news, I do want to say earnestly that Heath Ledger's death was immeasurably sad. I can only recall the deaths of Kurt Cobain or River Phoenix as having the same sort of heavy sadness. It's weird, the moment it became news it was something that everyone needed to remark to their friends about. But it obviously wasn't a national tragedy. I think it's just sad to realize that there was so much more promise and work to come from the guy. It's also sad to note the rapidity with which it all moves now. There was live streaming web of the removal of his body, for the sake of fuck. One thing I do want to say from the haze of non narcotic medication... And as it's looking like his death was merely accidental.. My trip to the pharmacist today was nightmarish. Getting accurate information about my medications was nightmarish - I had to correct the pharmacist on a dosage issue. The last time I was in hospital it was nightmarish. The one and only time I took Ambien it was nightmarish. Being ill can put you in a frame of mind that may not be capable of seeing the throwaway ease with which medications are thrown at people. No one knows what happened to the guy yet but if it was an accidental death - as it's looking like now - then it's an even greater tragedy. Take care.

This is a good music video

2007-12-10T08:17:00.000-05:00

It's been a really bad year for music videos, in general. This year the bottom of the floor on budgets finally dissolved and plunged everyone into less work with less resources. So when you see something really good and low budget these days you know the filmmakers gave it their all. Anyway, this video for LA's The Little Ones is the best marriage of film and song I've seen in awhile for the low fi indie world from the Bay Area's filmmakers Terri Timely. They're a duo who are criminally underrated, working on the smallest budgets imaginable but there's a hint of aspiration to perfection within that. It made me smile a lot.

Watch the beautiful Quicktime here.

Murakami and Kanye, Good Morning video

2007-11-30T20:56:00.000-05:00

This probably won't be up long, so see it while you can - from the MOCA show this is an animated video for a track off Graduation, and for my money one of the best Kanye videos ever. Embedded video after the break. Anyone have more info on this, like who the animation studio and animation director was? Have heard the MOCA show is amazing, but the Murakami show at the Gagosian was way underwhelming.

Fear, Loathing, Selling Things

2007-11-26T17:30:00.000-05:00

Didn't I see an ad like this in some 80s dystopian scifi movie on cable late one night? "Fear Up" and "Pride and Ego Down" are supposedly techniques used by torturers in our recent military actions. I guess the ad agency working for Hummer got the memo.

Here's a quote from a former head of Citigroup: "If plutonomy continues, which we think it will, if income inequality is allowed to persist and widen, the plutonomy basket should continue to do very well".

It's not all just argy bargy politics with me. Absences can only be explained by spending a lot of time shooting lately. I just directed my first ad, which went well. We're just finishing up in editorial now. Despite the gloom and doom I persistently write about, eating a Thanksgiving meal and then watching Ratatouille with your loved ones makes up for it. Hope you all had the same warmth and comfort this year. Promise to start blogging again...

Wong Kar Wai + Eva Green = Friday

2007-10-05T14:34:00.000-05:00

The world of perfume is obviously not my metier. But Wong Kar Wai and Eva Green together... I think I'd be really happy if WKW shot Eva Green for two hours reading a book. I don't even think it's that great of an ad. But Wong Kar Wai's gotta eat, right?

And here's a Vanity Fair article and photoshoot on the museworthy Eva Green, an actress so luminous - in our age of few classy ladies in pop culture - I doubt most filmmakers will know what to do with her. She reminds me of a sort of vague rememberance of what celebrity meant to our elders - I don't see paparazzi pictures of her, I know little about her and what foods and music she likes, I've never seen her wearing sweatpants in public, etc. As frustrating as it can be for straight males, feminine mystery is a righteous thing.

Tony Leung Chiu Wai

2007-10-04T13:17:00.000-05:00

Had to add this on for today - puzzling over Lust, Caution led me to this incredible interview with Leung done by Wong Kar Wai. What I like most is how it seems to make two people drop their guard who are usually so implacably reserved in public and all their little chatter about the rest of the Hong Kong film world. Stories of shooting amateur things on a Super 8mm camera that either him or Stephen Chow owned. There's some fairly bombshell sort of stuff in there, too, about how he perceives his character in 2046 that makes me sorta think about the movie differently.

Check out the Tony Leung interview at this link right here.

Oh no be careful it's libidinous excitement

2007-10-04T12:16:00.000-05:00

Or, Lust, Caution. I saw it this weekend and have to disagree with Martin. I think it's an exceptionally well made, intelligent film with much to savor. It's depiction of occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong for their period rings wonderfully true. The lead performances are ferociously amazing (and probably the best reason to see the film and further proof that Lee is one of the best director of actors around). But I think the film is muddled and ends on a completely sour note that left me with an uncomfortable feeling. Perhaps that's from it's origins as a novella, but on film what worked on paper might not on screen. The film isn't coldly objective enough to leave it's characters in such a statement of being unjudged, and hence at its denoument we are supposed to feel some sort of loss and sentimentality at something quite hideous. I wonder if perhaps it's in aid to a more modern moral; perhaps the ultimate lust on display isn't purely sexual but the class divisions that separate the characters and hidden complexities in our heroine. Perhaps it's a morality tale that has a thing or two to say about what we're willing to sacrifice for lust of all things material as well as sexual. But we're left with a Kundera-esque defined level of kitsch as we are supposed to feel sad for a moral coward. And it's quite impossible to discuss in detail without getting into the end of the film, which I won't do.

It's hard to write this because I have such unreserved respect for the movie as a whole and everyone's contribution to it. Tony Leung Chiu-Wai is my favorite male actor perhaps of all time; bravely skating (remember Tokyo Raiders - probably not) from genre to genre and always with the same relaxed charm. At 45 he's finally showing some age but he remains an actor who evokes something rare - when he smiles, I wonder what thought he's having that's making him smile, for instance. I can think of no other male actor who effortlessly displays sensitivty and vulnerability without giving an inch of his masculinity; even here he makes someone who is flat out deplorable interesting to observe and layered. Newcomer Wei Tang is unbelievably good and may have some of the most interesting eyes on actress I've seen in quite awhile - they go well with Lee's subjective camera scenes. And of course, the sex. Suffice it to say though that the sex scenes are not only important but integral and say something; when they aren't jaw dropping in their "how the hell did they shoot that" sort of way. I think the main thing is that they have emotion in them, and different kinds, which is how they are completely different than pornography. My friend who saw the movie and has seen far less porn than I agrees that it wouldn't be the same movie without them. So they are essential, and defining. But all the discussion of that obscures how far too many interesting thematic ideas begin and eddy away like little whirlpools in a draining tub by the time the film reaches this point.

It's definitely worth watching, and at times it's a note perfect depiction of time and place long lost; but I have to say that in the end Lust, Caution deserves discussion - not a bad thing at all - but to me it deserves discussing how wrong headed some of the choices are. Thoughts, Martin, anyone?

Here's the best interview I could turn up with the coy Ang Lee. And here's another good one that sticks out as Lee says: "When I think about it: Who’s occupying who? At the end of that scene, when she gives that wicked smile, she looks back at him, like, "Is that all you can deliver?" It’s very hard to tell who’s manipulating who in that position."

Here's a story about it playing the final show at the legendary Queen's Theater in Hong Kong, which I have a vague memory of seeing when I was 12.

When Halo freezes over

2007-10-03T16:08:00.000-05:00

Check out this video of a ninety five year old japanese woman playing Halo 3 - online in a deathmatch, no less. She's having more fun than I am, for now I am a victim of the Red Ring of Death. Xbox 360s are fairly vulnerable to completely failing months within purchase. Which seems all abstract and vague when you read about it since the company doesn't release figures, until it happens to you. Your $400 gaming console goes kaput and the company is writing off a billion dollar loss in expected maintenance to fix them. The picture above is what your Xbox shows you when it's dead. The Xbox 360 is really cool, but I don't think Microsoft is capable of launching a bottle rocket these days.

I spent last week helping someone move in New York, which is always such a pain in the ass in this city. My apartment is a disaster as they've had to break open the concrete floors in my living room to fix the perennial flooding issue. I've had a shoot delayed twice now. So I was looking forward to sitting around with a headset on a sniper rifle in hand tagging people with grenades and shooting EvilVader1137 through the eyes. But I must leave that to granny. My advice as far as gaming goes: get a Nintendo DS. I'm learning a valuable lesson right now with my dead Xbox: reading is fun and I'm more productive without one anyway.

All the fun of gaming didn't match for one second anyway the odd elation of sitting in a crammed moving van crossing the Williamsburg bridge on a nigh perfect New York day, helping a friend out - off FDR looking down upon the entire east side. I may be cursed when it comes to gadgets, but it's good to have reminders that my vices aren't as thrilling as wonderful prosaic life.

Disaster has its own rewards

2007-09-28T12:06:00.000-05:00

No, read this book. Read this book. And watch this short from Alfonso Cuaron and his son Jonas. Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is a concise, readable history of the effects of a certain ideological malaise affecting us all, or at least a diagnosis of the symptoms. She travels the globe and even spends time in Iraq with a heady thesis - that the now legalized (shakily) forms of torture that were researched and created by our government and now for the first time directly used thusly are the micro version of the macro: a larger form of shock therapy.

Its intentions are to capitalize upon disaster as the economic model of infinite growth cannot be sustained. So conversely we need blank slates to begiin again. The tsunami in Asia, Iraq, New Orleans, Sept 11th... All are opportunities for a certain type of capitalism, a chance to put into effect a great experiment that promises an economic utopia: an unrestrained free market. And then stretching further back to Latin America throughout the 60s, Indonesia and East Timor she finds earlier already well documented instances of the same and the missing, the imprisoned, the murdered who get in the way. Klein makes a convoluted history a page turner; a frightening, shocking and darkly funny thing. And she's right to say that there isn't an obvious conspiracy going on; rather it's a mindset, a philosophy, a tacit acceptance of reaping profit from misery.

It's a funny thing that in Europe and Canada Klein's book is a zeitgeist churning discussion in the public, it is examined and pilloried and praised and lauded and debated. Here it's a minor thing. It ought to be part of our national conversation, as it isn't an attack on liberals or conservatives. It's a damning indictment and litany of truths that need reflection. It may be the most galvanizing book in the post 9/11 world for those who want a better world where this won't happen again.

Check out her site here.

And here is an amazing article she did for Harper's earlier this year about her observations in Iraq.

Quirk plus Natalie Portman naked

2007-09-27T14:16:00.000-05:00

Wes Anderson's short film Hotel Chevalier, a sort of prologue for The Darjeeling Limited is available today on the iTunes store for free. It was screened at festivals before the film but won't be theatrically, so enjoy it at home. I haven't yet watched it. If you have iTunes installed click on this link here. I have yet to see it, but in an effort to have the most viewed giant robot blog entry ever I will say that everyone seems to be discussing Portman's nudity more than the film itself. For those who don't care, here's a very thorough article on Wes Anderson from nymag that addresses some of the prevailing common wisdom about his work - becoming too insular and self satisified.

I am alive, blogging to come - all sorts of things to share.

art shows, meetings, a kite, iced coffee, lack of sleep

2007-08-25T05:02:00.000-05:00

I'm in L.A. for meetings and I've been dropping by the group show GR is curating. This is a very late night post so forgive coherency. Some of the best days I've had in recent years have been simply hanging around GR while art comes together. There is a lot of physical labor involved in setting up a show, or last minute inspiration seizes an artist and something wholly new occurs. Last summer I helped bang nails into Souther's work and paper maiche final touches with Saelee's mom. One time I was in L.A. on work I came by GR2 and hung around with Martin and Eric as a group show came together. It's really heartening to see how excited those two get, infectious even.

After a full day of meetings in stuffy, coporate record company offices it was a much better kick to come down to the space and help paint wood walls and play with dogs and chat with everyone and try to ollie, which sadly in my advanced age and with a laptop hunchback I just can't do any longer. Please, please come by if you're in L.A. What I've seen go up on the walls is really amazing and to have so many artists from around the world converging is especially cool. All lovely people, even Eishi Takaoka despite the fact we can't communicate in language. Feric's pieces are insanely beautiful and have texture I think needs to be seen in person. French I just liked straight away as a person and wish I had his graphics on a deck. Brian is good cheer and there's a particular piece in this show of his that's priceless. I am not leaving L.A. without grabbing a t shirt with Kohei's design work. I've championed Dan-ah Kim here before and she never fails to amaze me. I stand in front of her stuff and invoke entire stories around each image in my head, or I fill in the empty faces with my own life and stories. Some of the others I haven't seen up.

And I want to give a shout out to Kenton and Edith who are helping out and making the artists feel at home. Good people.

I've taken a sabbatical from blogging as there was a tornado in Brooklyn that flooded my apartment again. And I've also been writing something long form, which seems to be inherently mutually exclusive from blogging. The things I'd blog about I need to scramble in my brain for something else right now.

Despite some people thinking it's funny, I went and flew a kite on a whim down on the beach while I'm here at sunset. When I was a kid I was obsessed with paper airplanes and balsa gliders and flying apparatuses. I had my brother bike down a local hill with me tied to the back on a plastic sled and a kite tied to my back. All I got for that was scabs and a mild thrill. But I still long to be so weightless.

I also did something oh so modern but oh so useful: I used an incredible blog all about Tacos in California to track down an authentic taqueria and hit up my favorite food west coast style. Here's what I got for less than ten bucks. Want more. I can haz.

Some quick notes:
Martin, your hair looks great.
Claudine, I've actually been listening to that Alice Smith album. The lead track is a fuckin minor masterpiece that deserves airplay and summertime slow jam status.
Eric has a sick hat right now.
Superbad is the only teen comedy I've ever been full tilt in love with. I think someone ought to curate a dick drawing exhibition now.
Border Collies and rescued dogs from the street are loverlies.

Come check out the show...

Tonight great Perseid meteor shower

2007-08-12T12:14:00.000-05:00

Tonight is lining up for an exceptional display of the Perseid meteor shower. Good weather across the country and a lack of moonlight should lead to extremely favorable viewing conditions, with forecasts for several meteors a minute. If you've never seen a meteor shower properly before, it's something that you either are into or not to begin with. If your heart will leap a beat at the thought of watching firey streaks of light emanating from the sky constantly, or you want to stock up on wishes... Either way there's somethng sublime about finding and making your eyes adjust to the night very intensely until all you see more stars than you usually can. Especially given how much light pollution we live under. Anyway here's some great viewing guides from NASA here and at Space.com over here. Enjoy. I'm headed out to Jones Beach on Long Island to watch.