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Amy Sedaris fans will delight!
P.S. There is never a good excuse for wearing fur.
P.P.S. Amy Sedaris and Bjork are two of the most inspring women to me.
P.P.P.S. I will give my everlasting gratitude to the reader who get their paws on this poster and then gives it to me - I can't seem to find it anywhere:
In his review of Syriana, Ebert calls it a "hyperlink movie" [warning, some spoilers]:
A recent blog item coined a term like "hyperlink movie" to describe plots like this. (I would quote the exact term, but irony of ironies, I've lost the link.) The term describes movies in which the characters inhabit separate stories, but we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another. "Syriana" was written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for best screenplay adaptation for "Traffic," another hyperlink movie. A lot of Altman films like "Nashville" and "Short Cuts" use the technique. Also, recently, "Crash" and "Nine Lives."
In a hyperlink movie the motives of one character may have to be reinterpreted after we meet another one. Consider the Matt Damon character. His family is invited to a party at the luxurious Spanish villa of the Gulf oil sheik whose sons are Nasir and Meshal. At the party, Damon's son dies by accident. The sheik awards Damon's firm a $100 million contract. "How much for my other son?" he asks. This is a brutal line of dialogue and creates a moment trembling with tension. Later, Damon's wife (Amanda Peet) accuses him of trading on the life of his son. Well, he did take the deal. Should he have turned it down because his son died in an accident? What are Damon's real motives, anyway?
The blog item Ebert is referring to could be Mark Bernstein's post about Adaptation from January 2003:
Adaptation is strange, curious, improbable little film. It belongs in the all-time hypertext film festival. Interesting double-feature with Wonder Boys. Fascinating double-feature with Mullholland Drive. Ebert, like everyone else, loved it.
Mark also discusses the hypertext film festival in a post about Perfect Blue, which More Like This picks up on. As you can guess, I love hypertext films.
Update: In a review of Cape of Good Hope published subsequent to that of Syriana, Ebert reveals the source of the "hyperlink movie":
The movie belongs to a genre that has been named "hyperlink cinema" by the critic Alissa Quart, in Film Comment. She suggests the structure was invented by Robert Altman, and Altman certainly brought it into modern times and made it particularly useful for showing interlocking stories in a world where lives seem to crash into each other heedlessly. "Crash," indeed, is an example of the genre, as are Altman's "The Player" and "Short Cuts," and such films as "Traffic," "Syriana," "City of God," "Amores Perros" and "Nine Lives."
Quart's article isn't online, but here's a bit of it:
In fact, Happy Endings could serve as proof for the currently fashionable theory that we shouldn't worry that our web-based, video-game-loving culture is dumbing us down. Watching Happy Endings, you too can conclude, as some of our brightest young pundits have, that multi-task entertainment actually makes us sharper. If this is true, the new genre Happy Endings belongs to--hyperlink cinema--could be the most IQ-enhancing of all. Happy Endings, which Roos also scripted, joins his The Opposite of Sex (98) in the hyperlink canon, alongside the likes of Magnolia, Time Code, and, most recently, Crash (with a special mention for TV's 24). Of them all, Happy Endings is best in show...The best thing about Happy Endings is that, like hyperlinking itself, it's irremediably relativist. Information, character and action co-exist without hierarchy. And we are always one click away from a new life, a new story, and new meaning, all equally captivating but no better or worse than what we have just left behind.
Thanks for sending this along, Peter. Also, it occurs to me that Steven Johnson may have written about this at some point, perhaps in Everything Bad is Good for You.
(Rating: 4.5/5 stars)
First of all, very special thanks to everyone who posted comments on Zoe's last show. All you Boing Boing and WSJ readers and beyond...much appreciated. Everyone seems to want a track listing. We'll try to find time to do that for this show and the last show soon. But the artists featured are listen in order in each of the posts, so you can follow along and probably figure out which song is which. Also, if you have Yahoo! Music Engine you can see Zoe's playlist from this week here.
Zoe's two favorite bands, Built to Spill and Pretty Girls Make Graves, both have new albums coming out, and both get previewed on today's show!
This week's show is doubly long (nearly two hours) and features the likes of The Actual Tigers, Alison Krause, The Arctic Monkeys, Babyshambles, The Brakes, The Books, Built to Spill, Broken Social Scene, The Constantines, The Dandy Warhols, The Dresden Dolls, The Hold Steady, Joni Mitchell, The Joggers, Jens Lekman, Kelly Clarkson, Rogue Wave, The Like, Pretty Girls Make Graves, The New Pornographers, Okkervil River, and Sly and The Family Stone.
Download this week's show here.
Stream this week's show on Webjay.
Podcast Zoe Radio at Yahoo! Podcasts.
Enjoy!
ian, aka papa
So the bidding is over at the eBay auction for five days of ads on the Rocketboom video blog....and the final bid is $40,000.
The winning bid is from TRM, an ATM and photocopy services company. Andrew Baron, the co-founder of Rocketboom says they aren't saying more about the ads right now, but are "scrambling around to try and work another couple of deals from some of the other bidders."
He says he's amazed by how many major US brands stepped forward. But they couldn't get everything lined up in the short time Rocketboom wanted to do the ads (early next month) "So maybe today we will land another contract and maybe next week a couple."
I. Lewis Libby Jr. told a grand jury that he was authorized by his "superiors" to disclose classified information in June and July 2003.
Did I (kinda already yes) mention how Ray Fenwick has become my new academic hero? I'm still laughing.The Unique Gifts of Genius
Physical Gifts of Genius
Mental Gifts of Genius
Reborn! Genius!
Unexpected Exam
Exam Results
Cancelled III
Metaphor
topicnamewithheld
Today's Link:
Catch the Sperm: Soccer Edition
Since 1987, the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health and the Swiss Aids Association have been using the STOP AIDS campaign to provide regular information to everyone living in Switzerland about HIV/Aids and ways of protecting against it. The "Catch the Sperm" series of games designed to promote safe sex.
Regina Lynn has a new review up of a sex game for couples called Bliss - Play Together, Stay Together.
A previous Link of the Day here, Bliss bills itself as "the Game for Lovers" and can do "what no other romantic board game or computer game can do. It uses advanced computer technology to adapt itself to your personal romantic preferences."
I love this, that's all.
Here is the Mercury News story today (free registration) about MySpace, the hot social-networking Web site that is causing so much concern among Silicon Valley parents and schools that they are organizing to shut access to it entirely in some cases. At San Jose's Presentation High School, administrators banned MySpace after discovering some students were logging on from school -- and that some had posted photos of themselves scantily clad and partying. School officials told......
Pissed Brooklynites:
I pass by this building on the Q train everyday and I've gotten quite used to seeing this stark facade that is owned by Jehovah's Witnesses. But reports from CURB say that it is being turned into 450 luxury condos. But the developer is being sued for building residences on a building that sits on public park land. Hmm I suspect that city politics will allow the developer to win by rezoning the land.
"developer Robert Levine's plans for the 12-story Brooklyn waterfront building he
purchased from the Jehovah's Witnesses for $200 million. The 450 luxury condos at One Brooklyn Bridge Park (now with basic web presence !) will enjoy refrigerated storage for grocery delivery, a meditation room, an indoor driving range, private riverfront cabanas and one big fat lawsuit . The Daily News reports that opponents are going to file suit in an effort to block the private residences, which will sit on public park land once that whole thing gets built."
Condos a go? Foes say no [NYDN]
The Watchtower: Brooklyn Heights Real Estate Magnates [Curbed]
Brooklyn Bridge Park Gets Its Walking-Around Money [Curbed]
[360 Furman St. building photo from Brooklyn Papers ]
NASA's Spirit Mars rover has arrived at a site dubbed "Home Plate" within Gusev crater. But what the robot found has left scientists puzzled.
Warning: Rambling about work ahead.
I went off on MovableType’s atrocious performance while posting to Lifehacker awhile back. Turns out that one of MT’s biggest performance pain points is the huge number of possible post categories the Gawker sites (including Lifehacker) use - a number that goes well into the thousands. (Why, you ask? Well, narrow topic silos and focused category pages make for good sponsorship opportunities and highly-targeted text ads and great Google-fu, and we’re an advertising-supported business.)
Anyway, we use a plugin for MT that turns categories into “tags,” allowing you to enter categories in a del.icio.us style input box versus the clumsy category dropdown. “Go nuts with tags!” was the editorial edict. So we did, adding categories at a clip. Sadly, we were shooting ourselves in the foot. Rendering the interface with a list of hundreds of tags slowed things considerably, specifically, the “suggest a tag” Javascript on the New and Edit Entry pages. Apparently MT’s not built to handle more than
2502500 categories per site, and we’re the first to push this limit. (Buh?2500 is a lot more reasonable than 250. Tx Anil.) Also, apparently MT’s database interface makes what only needs to be one query for one recordset one query PER CATEGORY - thus, hundreds of queries per page request, hence the slowdown. (As a developer, can I just say - WTF, 6A? Anyway.)Gawker’s solution was to remove the helper Javascript from the MT interface and have us enter tags cold; for me and my co-editors this was unacceptable, given how prone we are to typos and crazy variations of the same tag (”Mac,” “OS X,” “Mac OS X”, “Stuff we like,” “Things we like,” “Books”, “book,” etc.)
Fortunately for Gawker, I don’t have any access to the MT installation or template editing/creation for Lifehacker, so I was a bit handcuffed, not able to do much except complain loudly. Finally, to stop the tag mess from getting worse editorially, I wrote a Greasemonkey script which includes the static category list Javascript from afar on those pages, which is super damn fast AND gives us back the past tag helper. I’d publish that script but it’s got a little too much information about our server setup and is specific to the tags plugin, so I won’t. But you get the idea.
If we can get a category template of that Javascript include publishing every few hours and including newly-created tags (the existing one doesn’t update with new tags, boooo), life will be good.
Now back to our regularly-scheduled programming. (Ha!)
more cliff notes
An easy way to turn already-online audio files into a podcast feed. Great for creating a "personal podcast queue" for sending files to your iPod.
No matter that the TV sets themselves are outdated, pre-revolution relics imported from America or sets from Russia over fifteen years old; green-hued beasts jimmy-rigged with ancient computer parts and fantastically adorned like religious altars.
Maggie Hennefeld and Thessaly La Force filmed a short documentary at last month's NYC Free Culture Summit. The short, available for download from the Internet Archive under a CC Attribution 2.5 License, features among others "retired activist and full time novelist" Cory Doctorow, CC staffers Francesca Rodriquez and Eric Steuer, and former CC intern Fred Benenson letting people on the street know about free culture.
Asian babies!
a very interesting chat interface which uses the 'mouse as a baton' for conducting a conversation. instead of simply pressing 'enter' to send a message, the interface allows the user to control the flow of text & the size of circles used to visualise their messages, much like gesturing in real life. [mit.edu & mit.edu]
Internet cafes and companies that install wireless networks and satellite dishes are thriving in Baghdad.
Missed the Rhizome Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel in Chelsea a couple of nights ago because I had to w*rk. Too bad--really wanted to go. MTAA has a report. The distinction between the early vernacular web and the current more "regulated" web laid out in in Olia Lialina's article here serves as a good background for understanding the shift from net art 1.0 to version 2.0. Essentially it's the world of home pages, links, and artist-scientists vs the world of blogs, Google, and fast delivery of every imaginable kind of content (except the gallerygoing kind), with artists, scientists, and artist-scientists struggling to make sense of it. I have also pontificated on it, though not in product release terms. Another distinction I would make is between the anecdotal ('70s conceptualism in web form--what Sally McKay has called "long-loading, find-the-place-to-click-me narratives packed with theoretically correct reference to the body or lack thereof") and the purely experiential (entertainingly transgressive images, music, and video produced in a collaboration-friendly, peer to peer, non-Industry environment; deliberate confusion between professional and amateur [the vernacular thankfully hasn't gone away]; better sound and pictures generally) that broadband and googling makes possible.
Update: Sal Randolph has a report on the panel at Rhizome.org.
The Bush administration was alerted to broken levees and flooding in New Orleans hours after their collapse, documents show.
