Saw the new Fellini documentary this weekend, Fellini: I’m a Born Liar. The film didn’t adequately celebrate the maestro’s life or work. Nor did it offer any juicy details about Fellini’s personal life that lovers of his films would be superficially interested in, since he was very much about the eclectic and the façade. Instead we’re exposed to Fellini through clips of a 1993 interview and from the films we already know. If his films stand on their own, why create a documentary at all? Give us the peeps.
Liar is nothing more than a series of interview clips and film clips, fluctuating back and forth for two hours without any real investigation. Interesting bits included juxtaposed quotes of Fellini contradicting others, like when he says he got along great with the actors, then cuts to Donald Sutherland claiming he was a tyrant with the actors. Misquoting Fellini, “The actors don’t mind being puppets as long as they have a good puppeteer.”
Another amusing clip was Terence Stamp talking about the shooting of Spirits of the Dead (which, after seeing the clips, is next on my Netflix list), on his first day in Rome, his first day on the set, his first scene in front of the camera, he got up there and demanded some direction from Fellini. Fellini took him aside and said something close to: “Imagine you were at a party last night where you had whiskey, marijuana, cocaina, whiskey, and you had a whorgy, fucking everyone—it was a whorgy. A black man comes and caresses your hair and you fuck him. You did this all night and right as you get here, someone puts a tab of LSD on your tongue, and then you walk on stage.” They roll the clip, and that was it, exactly.
On today’s flight to San Jose we were joined by Washington Governor Gary Locke, who hopped on the plane right before takeoff. Interesting to note that now that the state’s in a budget crisis and he’s taken away a voter-mandated teacher’s raise, he’s gone the extra step to fly commercial first class instead of chartered luxury jets. Self-sacrificing, our governor.
So here’s what it looks like when a page from your brand new measly weblog that normally receives six or seven or zero visits per day is mentioned in a widely visited newsfeed:
Our analysts are still tracking this trend and will report back with any concrete findings. Preliminary reports indicate an increase in traffic.
Now back to those regular 4 visitors from Fargo..
In the May/June issue of Communication Arts, the Letters section includes this diatribe:
Someone please tell Joel Nakamura (or better yet, CA’s snoozing editors) that it’s “dual,” meaning two counters, and not “duel” [January/February, p. 54].
Good God, nothing ruins a writer’s or professional journal’s credibility for me more than simple, third-grade-level word usage. Let’s get it together, people, you’re supposed to be better than this.
Steve Dreyer
Freddie Mac Design Studio
McLean, Virginia
Normally I find this kind of armchair grammatical nit-picking akin to comments overheard in art museums about the frames instead of the paintings within. If the written or spoken message gets across, then communication is achieved. Mr. Dreyer, in a letter that could lend a lesson from a good style guide itself, unintentionally points out that there are more than mechanics to good writing.
Be sure it’s clear to the person to whom you are talking that the conversation is finished. Then replace the receiver gently. A receiver banged down may seem like slamming the door in someone’s face.
When my grandparents did some housecleaning a few years ago, they offered me this instructional booklet entitled How to make friends by Telephone and asked if I’d be interested in it. I estimate it to be from the 1940’s — it’s from an era when it was still proper to capitalize Telephone, much like the capitalization of Internet today, which will cease when it’s finally seen as a common utility (there’s already a crusade underway).
It has scribbles on some of the pages, probably from a relative of mine, maybe my mother when she was learning the etiquette of proper phone usage.
Click on the image to advance through the pages.
And remember: speak to the person at the other end of the line — not to the telephone — then you’re more apt to be pleasant and understanding.
I rebuilt the fence that blew over on Christmas Day. Merry Christmas.
Now all those snot-nosed BRATS will stay off MY LAND.
STITCHES did amazing things for me. After using STITCHES for just ten days, my insides are staying in and protected from the elements!
STITCHES come in:
- STAINLESS STEEL WIRE: is inerted and maintains strength for a long time. It does not harbor bacteria.
- SILK: animal protein, relatively inert for human tissue, loses strength over long periods. Silk sutures are multifilament and provide a potential haven for bacteria.
- CATGUT: from the submucosa of the bovine intestine, eventually resorb. It excites considerable inflammatory reaction and tends to potenciate infections. It loses strength rapidly and it’s of little use in modern surgery.
- SYNTHETIC NONABSORBABLE SUTURES: generally inert and retain strength longer than wire. They must usually be knotted at least four times because of their poor handling characteristics, resulting in retained foreign bodies.
- SYNTHETIC ABSORBABLE SUTURES: strong, with predictable rates of loss of tensile strength, incite a minimal inflammatory response and may have special usefulness in gastrointestinal urologic and gynecological surgeries.
- TAPE: skin closure of choice for clean or contaminated wounds, with minimal probability of infections. They cannot be used in actively bleeding or complex surface wounds.
Try STITCHES for your open wounds today!
Her: I hope I didn’t embarrass Matt [by giving him a spontaneous lapdance in front of 25 coworkers and their signficant others at a company dinner party]. I think I’m in trouble with my husband—he doesn’t know Matt’s gay.
Him: Oh, really? Matt’s comment about how could you think about wearing white shoes before Memorial Day didn’t tip him off?
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
—Mark Twain
Jason Kottke talks about advertising in books as a way to lower the price of books. He also makes the claim that:
I believe the world is a better place without advertising absolutely everywhere. But if advertising makes books more affordable — and in some cases absolutely free — and therefore accessible to more people, it’s hard to argue that it wouldn’t be a good idea.
Dare I say, go to the library for free? (Unless you live in Seattle, of course)
Going one ludicrous step further and following the Hollywood paradigm, there could be paid product placement in novels:
Dickens:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. You can have even better times with Fritos® brand corn chips!”
Melville:
“There she blows!- there she blows! A hump as graceful as the new Volkswagen Beetle®! It is Moby-Dick! Drivers wanted.®”
Shakespeare:
“Sleep seldom visits sorrow; when it doth, it is a comforter. Sorrow getting the best of you? Try Paxil®, because your life is waiting!”
Emily Dickinson:
“Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality and my Nokia® 6800 cell phone.”
From a NY Times story entitled Free to Protest, Iraqis Complain About the U.S., Iraqis are free to speak out against the American presence in their country without the worry of being jailed for protesting, as was the case before the U.S. invasion.
Since I’m a daily reader, I also noted that NY Times articles no longer have the left nav—the pages look cleaner and instead they have a breadcrumb strip at the top and a dropdown to jump to sections of the newspaper. This move puts less visual noise down by the article you’re reading, and the entire article pages are completely void of ads—nice while it lasts.
UPDATE: That lasted about 8 minutes before ads started appearing on every article page.
Here’s an amusing version of the Quark 6 press release translated for longtime Xpress users.
UPDATED
If you’re not familiar with design software tools (and even if you are), here’s a brief history and commentary of Quark, Pagemaker and other design programs throughout the years.
And more on the innovation and stagnation of Quark XPress and why InDesign hasn’t gained more marketshare.
The Choice Deli on the corner of 8th and 65th St NW is evidently known for carrying smut magazines:
Most convenience stores only stock well-known adult publications like Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler. Then there are a few more daring spots that also offer titles like Barely Legal and that magazine with naked women on motorcycles. But the grand prize for convenient smut has to go to Ballard’s Choice Deli and Grocery. Choice carries over 25 titles—like Big Butt, D-Cup, Fox, Cuddles, and Young and Tight—and they don’t hide them behind the counter. Such free commingling of porn with milk, bread, and jerky may signal a significant slip in civilization’s decline or may be seen as a welcome rebuke to our nation’s puritanical mores.
But what I know about them is from their marquee that I drive by each day. Let’s follow the evolution of the sign since my first days of living in Ballard (all dates are from memory):
Spring 2001
The was the innocent beginning, with a Henry Weinard’s 6 pack on special.
HENRY WEINHARDS 6 PACK $4.99
June 2001 - October 2001
I’m not sure if this was the doing of a disgruntled employee taking advantage of a non-native English speaking storekeeper, or whether some high school kids rearranged the letters that just weren’t changed for months. The store is right next to the Ballard High School. This message was up there for the entire summer.
HARD WEINER 69 PACK
November 2001
After a short hiatus we were given this much more direct communication.
ME PENI HARD
March 2003
I don’t know what was on the sign between November 2001 and February 2003, but it was nothing memorable. Maybe it was the length of time between the wait that made this sign so great as a reference to earlier eras, or the short amount of time that it was up (1 day), but I giggled for hours after driving by.
ME PENI STILL HARD
March 2003 - Present
The day after the aforementioned title, it was suddenly changed to this, probably on the request of an upset neighbor. I can only wait and hope that the legend of the sign will continue to brighten my days.
ME STILL OPEN
The same week the LA Times was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes, they talk about their photographer assigned to Iraq who altered a photograph to improve the photograph’s composition. The photoshop-happy photographer was dismissed.
This raises an interesting question for the Times Rights and Permissions FAQ that I stumbled across regarding the licensing of Times’ articles, photos and graphics:
Q: May I alter the photograph or graphic illustration?
A: No, photographs and graphics must be used as published.
Must the licensee use the altered photograph “as published” even though it was altered? You see where I’m going…
Free access to articles on the New York Times web site used to expire after 30 days. After that time you were required to pay $2.95 to read an article if you used NYT’s search to find it. But if you had the original URL to the month-old content, the one that appeared in their index pages when the article was current, you could still access it freely for an unlimited period of time. This allowed sites to link to NYT articles without forcing those users to pay for the specific article referred, while people who used the NYT’s own search for research would have to pay the fee.
I often wanted to take another look at articles I’d read in the printed edition after their free period expired and would be irritated by the $2.95 fee after already paying them $46/month for the daily subscription. But I didn’t want to keep stacks of old newspapers lying around in the chance that I might want to read something again, so I duped the NYT by creating a daily cron job that would capture each day’s HTML of each major section of the newspaper. I also stripped out the advertisements and other repetitive junk to get each day’s HTML grab down to ~1MB. The cron’d Perl script would then save the HTML according to date/month/year/section so I could do a search for an article on the NYT web site and then access the original link from my archives with a few clicks.
But today I noticed the NYT shut down free access for ALL URLs! By denying those with original links access to the articles it means that linking to NY Times will be worthless after seven days (unless the casual reader wants to pony up $2.95), so they can expect an enormous drop in incoming traffic. They’ve even reeled back the free period from 30 days to 7 days, without providing any special leeway for daily subscribers.
I’m bummed that my favorite major newspaper is shutting out folks like me who subscribe to the daily newspaper but prefer to preserve articles in a digital format. I assume they’re getting pressure to make the web site financially sustainable and, since the amount of growth the free online edition has provided for the paid printed version is not quantifyable and disregarded, this was the knee-jerk reaction to increase revenue before management had a reasonable, thought-out plan for subscribers.
I’m not planning on further subverting the NYT by grabbing every single page of each day’s news—that seems a bit extreme and would gobble up more HD space than would be worth. Instead I’ve written to feedback@nytimes.com and am hoping they’ll come up with a better solution, especially for paid subscribers.
Last night I was checking domain names (a habit I can’t kick) and lo and behold, contactsheet.org was available. Contact Sheet is an appropriate name for the site because, in addition to the obvoius photo reference which will become more apparent in coming weeks, the writing and image logging is unfiltered and in a very unrefined (pure?) state. Grab-everything and make sense of it later. Blogs are just that—the raw materials that others can mine, examine, organize, reshape, harvest, etc. Contact Sheet is born.
That, and the site’s previous name, what i know, is too close to the popular, nice looking and well-written blog site What do i know.
I am subscribed to the CNN Breaking News list, and I periodically get messages like this:
U.S. troops launch assault on Baghdad international airport, wire services report. CNN is working to confirm.
So, they’re saying We don’t know if it’s true or not, but being first to deliver the news is more important than being right, so here’s our hunch.
These emails are also flawed because they link to the CNN home page.. so if you don’t read them until the next day, any relevance to that particular news flash is long gone from the home page.
The Seattle Monorail Project has released the Green Line Preferred Alternative Report today. This is important to us because our house is two blocks from the proposed line—close enough to be convenient, hopefully far enough away to be silent. The corner fruit & vegetable market, The Top Banana, looks like it will be saved and instead they’re planning on building the station where the brand new ugly Quiznos box curently sits (the box with diagonal lines on the map).
The vegetable stand is literally right out our back door, and now it look as though the Monorail station will be, too. As noted above, you can make out what appears to be our kitchen and garage on this map from page 27 of the report.
I finally read through this comprehensive document detailing the BBC redesign last year.
Perhaps the most interesting part is the “digital patina” where hot areas (as defined by more click-throughs) actually get darker and “wear a path” through certain areas of the homepage over the course of the day. This is reminiscent of a sculpture I saw in Portland by Cian where each person who walked by made a small electrical etching in this metal cube. Lo-fi collaborative art. BBC could give its users bumper stickers that read I’m changing the web site! Ask me how!
This kind of real life example of what the BBC put into its redesign is more valuable than most web design how-to guides.
From Decoding Visual Language in News Content
News delivery in this country is increasingly comprised of carefully crafted displays of visual information. As consumers of information, however, most of us have never been taught to critically read or decode images and other graphic displays of information in the same ways that we have been taught to analyze verbal communication. We are taught reading comprehension and writing skills throughout most of our educational experience, but not visual language comprehension. Yet, if we wish to remain critical viewers of the news media in the midst of this imagedriven, converging media landscape, we must develop equally sophisticated visual literacy skills.
He’s either putting a curse on Saddam or about to play a demonic tune on the piano. Either way, he’s pissed that the military’s taking so long to win the war already.
Note: For those counting, this is already the second time I’ve made fun of Donald Rumsfeld in the short life of my blog.
Watched UNDER THE SAND tonight, a French film that would have never been made in the US because it portrays the romantic life of a 50 year old woman.. a subject that no US studio would touch (bet you can’t name one movie where the leading role is a 50-something woman). Women’s roles (despite the actual age of the actor) in US movies either have to be under 40 and “still” sexy or over 60 and grandmotherly.
The movie stars Charlotte Rampling, who played a vividly schizophrenic woman in Woody Allen’s STARDUST MEMORIES.