Results tagged “art”
Art Not Artifact Dept.
You never realize just how much stuff you own until you try to sift through it and prune it down. I'm in the process of a major housecleaning, which includes slimming down the book and movie collections. It's nowhere nearly as much a packrat's paradise as it used to be — there was a time when I had a pile of unopened DVDs as high as my waist — but there's a lot in here I could live without, and so it's 'bout time I decluttered.
Among the first things to get sorted out were what I call the "ubiquities" — things that you can find in any public library or movie rental place, most of which I've watched once and really don't need to revisit anytime soon. Many of them were movies which have since been reissued on BD in far superior transfers anyway; if I ever get the urge to put them back into my library, it'll be trivially easy to do so. The out-of-print stuff, the titles which have slipped through the cracks or fallen out of licensing — e.g., my Criterion edition of Ran — those stay.
Read moreTags: art literature media reification
Raw Shock Blot Dept.
What the Brain Can Tell Us About Art - NYTimes.com
... the brain is a creativity machine, which obtains incomplete information from the outside world and completes it. We can see this with illusions and ambiguous figures that trick our brain into thinking that we see things that are not there. In this sense, a task of figurative painting is to convince the beholder that an illusion is true.
It's been said (via Scott McCloud) that people who start reading comics when they are young train their brains to recognize artistic patterns a little differently than people who don't. Not to say that comics are the only way to do this, but that's one example of an effect that can be manifested multiple ways. The more we train ourselves to suspend disbelief and allow the imagination to do its own thing in different ways, the easier it becomes to enter the world someone else has created.
Read moreTags: art comics creativity creators imagination neuroscience Scott McCloud suspension of disbelief
Movie Reviews: Gate of Hell
Few things in the movies excite and enthrall me more than a lost masterpiece, found once again. Last year a nearly-complete version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, believed lost to history forever, was located (it was hidden inside the wall of a movie theater, no less!) and restored. For film buffs, it was akin to unearthing the Ark of the Covenant. Gate of Hell might not come trailing the same level of name recognition or film-history pedigree, but having it restored to its original beauty and then some is no less exciting to me. This was not the first Japanese movie I saw, but it lodged so profoundly in my memory — not just for its blazing visuals, but its emotionally turbulent story — that it might as well have been.
As with Ugetsu, another film I saw early on in my self-education in Japanese cinema, I watched Gate of Hell courtesy of a VHS copy rented from the mom-‘n’-pop video store around the corner from my apartment. And as with Ugetsu, both the telecine and the print were in such lamentable shape that I wondered if that was because nothing better existed. I wasn’t far from wrong: Gate of Hell had been photographed via a single-strip Kodak process, Eastmancolor, that faded badly over time. Fortunately the studio, Daiei, had prepared a three-strip separation master — separate black-and-white negatives for each color channel — that preserved well. This process was later used by many others, e.g., MGM for their Metrocolor system (2001: a space odyssey), and when combined with digital technology, one could easily produce a remaster that outstripped the original. It also helped when the film being restored was something that had more than imagery in its favor.
Read moreTags: Criterion Japan Kazuo Hasegawa Machiko Kyo movies review samurai Technicolor Teinosuke Kinugasa
Hypocrisy Rules, OK? Dept.
Badass Interview: Kathleen Hanna And Sini Anderson On SXSW’s THE PUNK SINGER | Badass Digest
[Kathleen Hanna]: I believe in the power of failure, of public failure, I believe in changing your mind and being allowed to change your mind. It’s fine to be a fucking hypocrite. It’s fine to put out a record that everybody hates. ...
{Sini Anderson]: ... I think that what society would like us to believe, and people that make mainstream media and what they call art would like us to believe, is that we have to strive for some perfection. And if we sit around and strive for perfection before we put anything out, guess what? We’re not putting anything out.
Maybe "hypocrisy" is the wrong word here — or perhaps it's the right word, because it is seen as being hypocritical, especially in any politically-charged public space (and what public space isn't politically charged, especially today?), to change your mind.
Read moreTags: art creativity creators
The Thing In Itself Dept.
Another friend, another conversation.
Him: "I feel like too much of my creativity is transient and lost because it goes into games [that is, RPGs], though I'm reasonably certain that's just a matter grass, fences, and greenness."
Self: "I've been wrestling with this myself — whether creativity is something that's meant to create permanent artifacts or transient experiences."
A day after typing those words, the inherent false dichotomy of such a statement fairly hit me in the face. It's not that creativity has to result in one or the other: a book can be as transient an experience as it is a permanent thing, especially since you can only read a book for the first time once. Was it one of my English professors who said he would give anything to be able to read King Lear for the first time again? I think it was; I suggested to him that he should see Ran as a possible way to do that.
Every book I've written, or will write, is meant to exist in two incarnations: as a wad of paper with ink marks on it (and a digital file), and as an experience. I have a lot less control than I might think over how it unfolds as an experience, something hammered rather brutally home when a prospective reader found one of my books completely uninteresting. Not a thing I could do about it save nod and remind myself not everything is for everyone.
Is either one — artifact or experience — better than the other? I sided with the artifact, because I felt at least then I had something I could fall back on and point to as proof of my hard work. But I get just as jealous sometimes of those who do their work and go, and leave no traces except in the form of a good time that was had by all. I know, in the end, there shouldn't be a dichotomy — and I suspect there isn't one, except of course in my mind. But that in turn makes the challenge of pledging allegiance to the artifact, as it were, all the tougher.
Tags: art artwork creativity creators
The Stanislavsky Solution Dept.
From Professor Ian Johnston's Lecture on The Tempest:
Dreams may be the stuff of life, they may energize us, delight us, educate us, and reconcile us to each other, but we cannot live life as a dream. We may carry what we learn in the world of illusion with us into life, and perhaps we may be able, through art, to learn about how to deal with the evil in the world, including our own. But art is not a substitute for life, and it cannot alter the fundamental conditions of the human community. The magic island is not Milan, and human beings belong in Milan with all its dangers, if they are to be fully human. Life must be lived historically, not aesthetically.
The debate between art as the stuff of life at its highest (living aesthetically) and art as the "detergent of life" (to hijack Jacques Barzun's phrase) is only raging all the more furiously these days.
Read moreTags: aesthetics art culture sociology
April Showers Dept.
Criterion's new title announcements, that is. Among them: Gate of Hell, Repo Man, and Naked Lunch (the latter on Blu-ray for the first time).
Gate of Hell I'm particularly excited about, as up until now the only home video versions were either pricey imports or the prehistoric VHS edition ('pon which I cut my teeth as a wee one). The cover art for Repo Man is great; Gate of Hell, not so much so. Is it me or are Criterion's designs losing some of their savor? The last few months of releases haven't done much for me in that department. But I can forgive them a lot when they bring us the titles they do.
... and the Repo Man set includes the "melonfarmer" edit for TV. Wow.
ALSO: Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri, Kwaidan)'s films in Eclipse Series 38. (Say, Criterion, any chance of a Kwaidan Blu?)
Tags: Blu-ray Disc Criterion movies
Distrust That Particular Favorite Dept.
Snobbism time. I've learned not to trust the tastes of people who describe, say, a book as "the best book I've ever read", or a movie using the same sloppy language.
I don't trust such pronouncements because all too often they tell me nothing about why the book, movie, etc. in question is any good. Anyone can say something is the best ever, when what they really mean is that it's a favorite, and for reasons that are entirely personal.
But ... I don't hold this against people for the most part. Most folks are not critics and do not train themselves to be critics, and I'm not surprised that most people don't want that crap job in the first place. You express opinions which few, if any, people agree with in the first place, attempt to introduce worthy work to largely indifferent audiences, and in the end don't even get paid for it. (The number of people I know who do get paid for such work, apart from being paid in copies, I could count on one hand with enough fingers left over to flash a peace sign. I am the index finger.)
End result, most of what people say about "best" and "worst" are essentially well-meaning prejudices, not attempts at genuine criticism. The problem is they are too easily misinterpreted by others as forms of criticism. Me included, by the way: I've done this more times than I can count, and I've only recently started to school myself out of it.
There are a few things I know I like which are not defensible or explicable. I couldn't tell you why a movie like I Love Maria leaves me in stitches — it's some weird personal alchemy at work, for lack of a better way to put it. I know it isn't explicable, and so any talk of aesthetics on my part requires that I leave out mention of that outlier and many others in the same vein. And in the same vein, I could not tell you why other things just plain rub me the wrong way. (I "know" Heinlein is a valuable and important SF author, but something about most of his books just makes me not want to read them, and I have never figured out why.)
The business of separating your tastes from your powers of analysis is not something you can accomplish in a season, and there's good reason to believe it can only be done so far over the course of a lifetime. We all want to find reasons why our favorites are also the best, or why the things we call best are also our favorites. There may be no reason more complex than the fact that we make that connection on our own in the first place.
Tags: art criticism literature
Faster, Cinematographer! Kill! Kill! Dept.
Much foofaraw about the 48-frames-per-second footage exhibited from Peter Jackson's Hobbit production. One of the comments (by user "dreamfasting") has this magnificent statement: "Every pixel you take out of the imagination and put on the screen is a pixel you are taking responsibility for."
This applies to a lot more than just pixels.
Read moreTags: aesthetics art cinematography movies storytelling
Flight of the Vajra: Jean "Moebius" Giraud
Goodbye. Thank you.
Like so many other kids my age, I blundered into your work in the pages of Heavy Metal, then went on to discover you in anthologies and collected volumes, many of which are now out of print and change hands at collector's prices. (Let's do something about that, okay?)
I liked how you saw things. I don't mean to say I liked the way you made these lines thicker or these lines thinner, or that you used this kind of color wash. I mean I liked how you saw things. You did what any truly great artist did, from H.R. Giger to Andy Warhol: you taught me a whole new way to look at the world and see new things in it.
I hope I won't sound grubby for saying this, but if I had my pick of artist to create art for Vajra, no limts at all, you would have been the one. It's only now that I realize how much of what I wanted to let people see through the story in that book was inspired by all you did.
Tags: art in memoriam Moebius
Unimedia Dept.
I like to think that maybe someday there will no longer be such things as sculptors and composers and film-makers and playwrights and poets. There will only be artists.
— Tom Johnson
Johnson, a longtime music critic for the Village Voice, wrote that back in 1970-something, after being exposed to the then-burgeoning wave of multimedia artists. The impression he got was not of people who couldn't decide whether to work in film, music, sculpture or painting and so simply opted for "all of the above", but rather people who wanted to see what kinds of experiences could be produced by making different media share the same space.
I wonder what the Tom Johnson of 1970-something would have thought if he could have seen, say, today's video games. Those are multimedia experiences in a manner far more advanced than anyone of that period could have conceived of.
Read moreTags: art entertainment multimedia
Disappearing Act Dept.
First rumor dispelled: I haven't died.
I have, however, been dealing with some rather crazy personal-life stuff, the details of which I won't go into here. (Those of you who know me slightly better than casually, you know what I'm talking about; no need for me to repeat myself.) All this stuff, on top of the workload I found myself facing this month, conspired to make it difficult for me to do more than get up, work, go to the bathroom less often than I'd like, sleep every now and then, and maybe eat as well.
Not my idea of fun. Not my idea of work, or even existing. But I'm still here and twitching, so I guess that counts. I'll pick up my medal later.
So:
- I still don't know what's up with the Really Great Thing I Can't Talk About Yet. I would like to be able to say something one way or another before this month is out, but it isn't for me to say. Continue holding your breath for me, if you would.
- I've put Underground Sun aside for a little bit and will let my thoughts on the book continue to percolate through the rest of the summer. My current (revised) plan is to begin re-editing the book through the fall and winter, and maybe bring it back out sometime next spring or so. I might even shelve it entirely during November and work on Something Else during that time (no prizes for guessing in what capacity).
- A slew of fine books came in through the review pipeline: Chi's Sweet Home #1-2, Peepoo Choo (I remain convinced Ed Chavez @ Vertical, Inc. has one of the top three jobs in the world if even part of his work is to seek out this stuff and make it ours), the new Black Jack, a set of three-in-one reprints for Mushishi, and Criterion's issue of Nagisa Oshima's Pleasures of the Flesh, which whenever it is mentioned I am contractually bound to ask for an English translation of its source novel (by none other than ninja-mythology-maker Fūtaro Yamada), and ... crap, the pile next to the desk just fell over.
- There's allegedly going to be an Android 2.1 release for my Moto Cliq XT sometime later this year, which had damn well better fix these stupid "oh, I can't pick up the phone, I'm too busy spinlocking" issues. Among other things.
- I'd really like for a few shoes to drop, the sooner the better.
Tags: books Criterion Nagisa Oshima news Vertical Inc. writing
Et. Al. Dept.
I still can't talk publicly about the Potentially Great Thing that may or may not be happening — both because I'm not sure I can, and because I'm kinda anxious about jinxing a good thing. All I'll say s that if, if, this goes through, it'll mean I'll be getting paid cash moneys to do something fandom-related.
Again: if.
Some updates in the meanwhile.
- The Underground Sun is creeping very, very slowly to a close. I am astonished at how difficult it is to just get this thing put to bed, and that means it's growing increasingly unlikely I'll have it in anything like a readable form for AnimeFest 2010. That's a bad blow to me, because that's traditionally the place I've debuted all my new work. But, I have NYAF a month and change after that, so by that point it ought to be more than done. At the very, very least, I will have promotional material — cards, a chapter sampler — available for A'fest. I'm dead set on giving people something to read for the new book, which means getting the terrible traffic jam of those first few chapters sorted out is a priority in the editing process. I've never worked on a book that was this obstinate to simply declare itself and just let me write it already.
- The next book after this one is already taking shape. It is, tentatively, The Number of Magic, which like The Four-Day Weekend is based loosely on people I knew in real life but is an entirely different flavor of story. It's about a circle of folks who have markedly different belief systems — "conventional" religions, paganism/Wicca, and atheist/none of the above — but also have strong friendships because of, or maybe sometimes in spite of, all that. (If it all sounds like a bad TV show, please bear in mind the idea is not completely formed yet and it's hard to stump for something that's still taking shape. The idea is always more interesting when it's still up in your own head.)
- A really wonderful blog post by graphic designer Sam Smyth, about all the different iterations he did for the Criterion edition of Everlasting Moments. I went through a very similar toss-and-test operation for the covers for Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend, and Smyth does an excellent job of talking about finding just the right image to sum up the film.
Tags: AnimeFest books conventions Criterion links news writing
Between Tides Dept.
(Title is a Controlled Bleeding reference.)
- I just grabbed the new Windows Live Writer beta, released literally only minutes ago. So far it's pretty good — it uses the new Office 2007+ ribbon interface, something that's been trickling into the Live Essentials apps one by one. Still looking forward to the full release version for all that fit-and-finish stuff, but the beta's usable. MS's recent public betas have all been extremely stable, just not always feature-finished. Case in point: Windows 7 itself, which was stable enough in its first public beta that many people (me included) were using it on production systems within a month of its release, and haven't looked back since.
- Another movie I confess having a goony, adolescent fascination with, Ralph Bakshi's Wizards, has been released on the other side of the pond in a region-free Blu-ray. No word about a Stateside release, though, but I imagine the all-region BD market will be fruitful enough to dip into from time to time as taste and budget permit.
- Picked up a go app for my 'Droid phone and found to my utter humiliation that I cannot beat the machine even at the lowest setting on a 9×9 grid. Hikaru Shindo would laugh in my face. Obviously this problem must be rectified ... in time.
- The July issue of Sight & Sound does the Kurosawa thing. (Don't forget the upcoming Eclipse set!)
- Got the new Black Lagoon volume under my belt. Review coming shortly.
- Vertical has copies of Chi's Sweet Home out to reviewers but mine hasn't shown up. Cat lover that I am, this series is mandatory, but it wouldn't be the first time stuff got lost in the mail on its way to me.
- Something else really excellent is in the works but it's not a sure thing, so I can't talk about it yet.
Tags: Akira Kurosawa Criterion movies Ralph Bakshi software
Christmas Comes But Once A Year Dept.
I mentioned earlier that Criterion has a BD of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence in the works. Here's the skinny from The Digital Bits:
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence will include a new and restored high-definition master, The Oshima Gang (an original making-of featurette), new video interviews (with producer Jeremy Thomas, screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, actor Tom Conti and actor-composer Ryuichi Sakamoto), Hasten Slowly (an hour-long documentary about author and adventurer Laurens van der Post, whose autobiographical novel is the basis for the film), the film's original theatrical trailer and a booklet featuring an essay by film writer Chuck Stephens and a 1983 interview with director Nagisa Oshima by Japanese film writer Tadao Sato.
Follow the link in the movie title for my review. There's no Amazon product link yet but there should be before long.
Tags: Criterion Japan Laurens van der Post links movies Nagisa Oshima Ryuichi Sakamoto Takeshi Kitano Tom Conti
Outlaw's Art Dept.
On the eve of the release of that long-awaited Nagisa Oshima box set from Criterion, a long and marvelously detailed essay about the four films in the set.
Oshima’s forty-year career, beginning in 1959 and ending in 1999, was that of an outsider. A theorist and critic as much as a director, Oshima, writes scholar Maureen Turim, “saw film as an activist intervention.” Naturally, this iconolast found it difficult to function within a studio system, and the titles gathered in this set hail from the period, in the midsixties, when he had just broken away from those strictures and started producing his films independently.
I'm still jonesing for the possibility that the novel Pleasures of the Flesh was based on (by, of all people, ninja-action master Fūtaro Yamada) will be translated into English, although it's a long shot.
Tags: Criterion Fūtaro Yamada links movies Nagisa Oshima
Critical Criterion Dept.
Criterion's new wave of titles has been posted!
- First and most crucial: Early Kurosawa. A box set featuring both Sanshiro Sugata films, The Most Beautiful, and The Men Who Tread On The Tiger's Tail. These have not been available on DVD with English subs except in rather weak Hong Kong import editions, so to have them in good pressings here is a blessing.
- "Three Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg features the Oscar winners Underworld and The Last Command and the atmospheric masterpiece The Docks of New York, with new scores."
- "We also have a pair of documentaries from Terry Zwigoff (his delightful debut, Louie Bluie, and the landmark Crumb), the searing first film from Maurice Pialat (L’enfance nue), and Blu-ray and DVD editions of Black Orpheus..." The last one will be well worth seeing on BD; even the old DVD edition was dazzling to behold.
Tags: Akira Kurosawa Criterion links movies
Blu-deodrome Dept.
The next wave of Criterion Blu-rays is up for pre-order, and they're doozies.
The first two are mine, mine, mine. Antichrist I checked out courtesy of NetFlix streaming, and I can see why people think it's pretentious trash. I'm still sifting through my feelings about the movie, so I may end up posting something when the BD is finally out.
Seven Samurai requires no defense from me. I have an older review of it, but I'm not especially happy with it, and I'm probably going to revisit it from top-to-bottom. Criterion has apparently been busting king-sized hump to make this edition a for-the-ages piece of work, now that they have access to Toho's vaulted camera negatives for all Kurosawa's product.
I also plan to revisit Videodrome, which was either the first Cronenberg movie I ever watched or just felt like it was.
Tags: Akira Kurosawa Criterion David Cronenberg Lars von Trier links movies
All Aboard Dept.
Masatoshi Nagase has finally been recognized for his immortal contributions to the acting world!
As in: a Criterion version of Mystery Train!
On DVD and Blu-ray, no less!
(Youki Kudoh in a supporting role, too!)
(And the soundtrack is wonderful.)
Yup, it's new-release day at Criterion, and here's what else showed up:
- Carol Reed's Night Train to Munich
- Antonioni's Red Desert
- Kiarostami's Close-up
- Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments
... and a Blu-ray version of Luchino Visconti's The Leopard.
Tags: Blu-ray Disc Criterion links movies
High and Low Dept.
First, the bad news. Lionsgate/Canal+'s Blu-ray of Ran (affiliate link for reference only; I do not recommend the purchase of this disc) looks like a dud. Apart from some nice bonus features, which mostly likely would have shown up in a Criterion edition in the first place, the disc itself looks pretty wretched — like a 720p master created for broadcast that was blown up for 1080p.
The same sort of thing happened when Ran was released on DVD, come to think of it. The original Fox/Lorber version was nothing but a port of the LaserDisc D2 master; the subsequent reissue by Wellspring was heavily denoised (and looked like garbage as a result); but the Criterion disc was well worth the wait. Well, fine — if we have to wait for Criterion or someone else to renegotiate rights to get this thing issued in a decent edition, then I'll hang onto my DVD copy for now. The really cynical side of me thinks that this edition is just being hustled onto the market to take advantage of the change in the rights, and that we'll have to wait until someone has the wherewithal to actually work to get a good edition produced.
If I go on and on about this movie to the point of self-parody, it's only because it may well have been my big entry point into Japanese culture and art generally, and seeing it getting kicked about like some kind of cinematic soccer ball is downright painful.
But now the good news: some new Criterion titles. Some great new Criterion titles.
First and most striking: a Blu-ray edition of By Brakhage (as well as the second volume of same on DVD). Idiot that I am, I never did sit down with the DVD edition of this set and give it a proper look-see. This will give me a chance to rectify that. I feel immense kinship with filmmakers who work on their own and who use what few resources they have lying around — a fairly broad spectrum of people that includes Wong Kar-Wai, David Lynch and Brakhage himself.
Next: Stagecoach. The ultimate road picture, the ultimate Western, and maybe the John Ford film that most everyone can see and enjoy for being nothing more than what it is.
Next: M. No explanation needed.
And finally: Walkabout. Another movie I have learned to interpret differently in different stages of life, and which was also seen as being a much more optimistic film in its day than it probably was.
AND! A NAGISA OSHIMA BOXSET! Which includes the never-released-here Pleasures of the Flesh (based on a Fūtaro Yamada [Basilisk] novel, no less); Violence At Noon, Sing A Song of Sex, Japanese Summer: Double Suicide, and Three Resurrected Drunkards. Most of these have only been available as imports, or gray-area bootlegs for god knows how long.
Tags: Akira Kurosawa Blu-ray Disc Criterion Japan John Ford movies Nagisa Oshima Nicolas Roeg Stan Brakhage
