Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince looks to be destroyed. The people need more doctors. I’ve heard about one major hospital that was destroyed, so it must be very bad.
Doctors Without Borders is in Haiti to set up clinics for treating the injured. You can donate now for that.
Most of the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, has been destroyed by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake that hit yesterday. Bodies are lying in the streets. The death toll is expected to be enormous and the survivors need immediate help. The Red Cross is taking donations and sending teams to Haiti. You can donate to the Red Cross International Response Fund. Also, giving blood is always one of the very best things you can do because it fills the blood banks and can be used almost anywhere.
You can also donate to Doctors Without Borders, which is putting medical personnel on the ground in Haiti to assist in saving lives.
Hack n Mod has a fascinating DIY instruction manual for building a Star Trek phaser that shoots Blue Ray laser light. I’m not interested in actually building a Star Trek phaser that shoots real laser light at all. But I’m interested in the whole idea of posting about how one would do such a thing. The images are interesting. I like phasers and would probably use one to take over the entire world. If you build one of these things, please do not shoot yourself or anyone else in the eye with it.
Polaroid has used the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to announce a new line of classic instant film cameras! Called the Polaroid PIC-1000, the camera will work with 10-packs of instant film just like the great old Polaroid cameras of the past. This is a very smart move by a company that looked supremely dumb a few years ago when it canceled the best product it had ever created. It was almost as dumb as Volkswagen canceling the Bug.
But no worries, we will have our instant pictures back. Not even digital cameras are instant. Not really. You have to plug them into your computer or printer or something and get your files sorted out and then you may need to do a some digital color correction on them. But with a Polaroid, you point click and enjoy the little whirring sound for a few seconds. Then you hold your picture and watch it come to life! There’s absolutely no good reason why digital should not coexist with analog technologies. The main difference between working with film and working with digital, as I see it, is this – with digital you know pretty much exactly what you are going to get when you take a picture. With analog film you never know what you are going to get. There’s a wonderful fuzzy zone filled with error and chance that Polaroids allow you to enjoy. Each picture is a little surprise.
This is a clip from a documentary film, Meanwhile, a butterfly flies, about filmmaker Jonas Mekas. He shares a few thoughts about culture, country, poetry and what those things really are.
Jonas Mekas is one of our great independent filmmakers. He spent years writing a film column in the Village Voice. He founded the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. He makes lots of films with small cameras that he can carry almost anywhere he goes. That is, by the way, how filmmakers should be working today. If a filmmaker needs a truck, he or she is making a commercial. I found this via the exceptionally brilliant underground film site, Bad Lit.
I love Bob Dylan’s recent album, Christmas in the Heart. Listened to it many times on Christmas day. This is his video for Little Drummer Boy. The people do seem awfully pink but maybe it’s just my eyes playing tricks on me.
I spend a lot of my very limited brain capacity wondering why Hollywood directors don’t run around with small cameras making their own little movies for YouTube. Scarlett Johansson has made an excellent short film called These Vagabond Shoes which puts on display her obvious interest in and love for true cinema. The person who has uploaded it to YouTube has somehow squeezed the image from widescreen to standard, but the film shines nevertheless. I’m not sure why there’s a Russian overdub either, but just ignore it. I think Ms. Johansson should upload the film herself properly and if she does, I’ll change the video link. She has made a film that I’m certain is exactly what she wanted to make. It’s her personal expression of a fleeting and elusive subject. The film’s about being alone and damn well liking it. Kevin Bacon plays the film’s main character who gets dressed at just past 4:00 pm to leave his apartment and take a trip to a nearly empty Coney Island. The film contains only small incidental sounds and very minimal dialog. Its beauty lies in the attention to tiny details of behavior. The multiple clocks in Mr. Bacon’s tiny apartment, all precisely set. His careful re-tying of his shoe. His placement of a hat upon his head and his hesitation when locking his door behind him. These are the details of the lone person who sets out upon a small but important voyage through the terrifying public space. Mr. Bacon’s character puts on the armor of his attire with a resolute dread that I can remember from my own time alone. Ms. Johansson knows exactly what she’s doing. Her character’s trip to Coney Island where he will purchase a hot dog and sit on a bench by the sea is a seeking out of the pleasure of being alone with one’s very own self and the not knowing what will come of that. The uncertainty and the wide open strangeness of possibility when one is all alone in a very busy and enormous world is too much for most people to face.
E.T.A. was directed by Henrik Bjerregaard Clausen, with character modeling and animation by Søren Andersen and Michael la-Cour. The production company is called Junk. The film gets the whole thing with the orbiting spaceship and the cockpit just perfectly. It’s short and sweet and funny. I love sci-fi with grungy control rooms and crap lying around. And of course I bet GM built the poor guy’s ship. Definitely. It’s a junker.
Many airports in the United States and the United Kingdom have installed new full body scanners. They are easy to spot. You walk in and a security guard tells you to raise your arms out to the side. Then what happens is they take a naked photograph of you. Naked. Nude. Bare-assed. Birthday suit. Free as the wind blows. Exposed. Porno.
Why porno? Because they take naked pictures and look at them. They want to do it to children too. And guess what? In the U.K. it has suddenly been noticed that taking naked pictures of children in airports violates anti-child porn laws. You bet. Think about it. Your kid in the machine. Arms up in the air. Being photographed naked through his or her clothes. The TSA claims that a single operator in a booth will view the naked photos of boarding passengers and children. Fine. So think about that. A little fat guy sitting in there with his sandwich and his can of Coke watching you and your kids naked. Enjoy that image? Still want to fly? Or would you rather just drive now?
No one anywhere has the right to look at our naked bodies just because we are getting on an airplane. No one. I certainly will not enter one of these invasive machines under any circumstances. I think that airline passengers wherever they might be should absolutely refuse to walk into these things. That will create chaos and slow things down until these hysterical security people back off with the nude photos. Causing an uproar about this is probably the one thing that will stop the roll-out of these machines. President Obama may in fact expedite the increased use of these things. Well, he’s the bright bulb who’s hiding photos of U.S. military torture practices and now he wants nude photos of us and our kids. Cool guy, huh?
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) calls these things the ‘naked machines.’
In many airports the machines are voluntary and offered as an option to avoid a pat-down. Not for long. The TSA wants these naked photos and they want them really bad. Have you met some of these TSA agents by any chance? My god! They are as dumb as posts. I met one a year ago at Los Angeles International Airport in the parking lot. She said she was lost. Lost! She couldn’t find the terminal building. I had to literally walk her through the airport to find her work station. I was just a passenger on my way somewhere. She was totally lost and completely at my mercy. I could have led her anywhere and stolen her badge. Trust me, if you can’t find the terminal at LAX, there’s something seriously wrong with you. That is the level of training these people are receiving. Another time, just months ago, I gave the finger to a TSA agent who tried to jump in front of me while boarding a crowded shuttle bus. He got on his phone and called airport police, saying that he had a dangerous passenger who had given him and his officers the finger. Four police cars showed up. Guess what happened when the officer in charge listened to the irate TSA guy. He smiled at him, then turned to me and said, “Sir, would you be interested in pressing any charges against the TSA?” I said, “No thanks, but it’s nice to know that a cop understands I’m allowed to give the finger to the TSA.” He said, “If you change your mind call me at this number.” Then he handed me a card! He said there were lots of complaints about the TSA people and that his officers were sick and tired of dealing with them because they didn’t understand any of the laws. And now we are asked to trust these TSA nitwits with naked photographs of ourselves and our children? Are you kidding? Seriously?
Courtesy of Cold Hard Flash comes yet another wonderful cartoon from Russia’s Toonbox Animation Studio. It’s part of a new web animation series called Shaman’s Quest.
I found this Amnesty International video over at Silliman’s Blog today. It’s about the power of words to help defend freedom of expression around the world. I’m all for that. But can you take me seriously as a wealthy member of the Western world’s corporate structure? The Amnesty video mentions a journalist jailed for ten years in China simply for sending an email. So let’s stop and think for a bit about this ‘freedom of expression.’ Take China as an example. The Chinese are essentially slave labor for the entire Western world. They make our shirts, pants, toys, radios, shoes, dinnerware, jackets, telephones, etc. They produce almost every single solid object you will touch during your day. Everything. They take their instructions from our corporations and they build these things for pennies a day. They are slaves. No doubt about it. Their government is simply middle-management working for us. So, while we may pretend to be interested in freedom of expression, we most certainly do not want our slaves talking freely. Slaves who can speak their minds will gain their freedom and their hourly wages will increase. They will no longer be our cheap labor – our slaves. They will become expensive free thinkers just like us. Our corporations and our politicians do not want freedom of expression for China under any circumstances whatsoever. Morgan Freeman’s blazer was quite possibly made by a Chinese slave making 30 cents an hour. When the Chinese decide that they want to fight for their freedom, they will be fighting us. The world will change when the Chinese people shoot their leaders and lift their wages. You think you’ve seen a global economic crash? Just wait until our corporations can’t pay for their slaves in China anymore. The bottom line has not changed for at least three hundred years: the world economy cannot function without slavery.
So the Amnesty video asks us for our words to help in the cause of freedom. I’ve just written some.
When Russians make animations they do it better than anyone else. Toonbox is an animation studio in Russia and they’ve made this little New Year greeting that illustrates the Chinese year of the ox giving way to the new year of the tiger. It’s beautiful. I like Russian animation above all others. They seem to maintain a lovely, rough, hand-drawn, physical connection to what they are doing. They are an antidote to the completely lifeless injection-molded work of Disney and Pixar.
I found this via Cold Hard Flash
Muzorama is a short surrealist animation made by students at Supinfocom Arles. Elsa Brehin, Raphaël Calamote, Mauro Carraro, Maxime Cazaux, Emilien Davaud, Laurent Monneron and Axel Tillement directed the film which took only six weeks to complete. It reminds me of surrealist painting and film work being done in Europe during the twenties and thirties. I will not link to the Supinfocom web site because it is the most inexcusable mess I have ever seen on the web. Their animations are wonderful, but they need to immediately terminate whoever builds their web sites. Seriously.
Read the following remarks at your own risk. The post begins one way and finishes in another.
The online film journal Senses of Cinema has an excellent essay by Pedro Blas Gonzalez called Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: An Existential Odyssey. He examines 2001: A Space Odyssey from an existential viewpoint. He focuses primarily on astronaut Dave Bowman’s journey in the film toward not only a far-flung physical destination, but also his journey as a human being on a path toward knowledge, an unknown future and ultimate change or evolution. I’ve always viewed the Bowman character as being exceedingly emotional and noble in spite of the fact that he barely moves a facial muscle or changes his vocal tone. He seems on the surface to be little more than another machine on board the giant Jupiter-bound space ship. But he is in fact full of tiny, barely perceptible emotions and concerns that make him perhaps the greatest representative character for the human species in film history. The Bowman character completes his mission of discovery by surmounting incredible obstacles, included the most powerful example of artificial intelligence ever devised by humankind. But he does this without ever losing his capacity for anger, despair, love, fear, or wonder.
We’ve lived through what I consider to be the single worst decade in the history of the United States, including the time of the Civil War. In 2000, the country willfully elected to the presidency the most uneducated, unintelligent, disgusting, drunken, irresponsible, uncaring, warlike, criminal and religious fanatic in its history. The damage done to our own self-image, to our sense of wonder in the face of the magnificent unknown, to our drive forward technically, scientifically, artistically, and morally, to our own self-respect and our dignity in a world teeming with slavery and murder and starvation – well this damage is going to be exceedingly difficult to repair. We’ve seen the drive for knowledge turned into something that is suspect, something that religion should argue with and fight at every turn. This is the legacy of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The tragic crime committed by half of the population of the United States to elect – twice-over – the closest thing to an authoritarian leader we’ve ever had will not be wiped clean by voting for new candidates. These awful people are among us. They work with us in offices, in grocery stores, on farms, selling insurance, selling cars, investing on Wall Street. They are all around us and they are waiting to destroy again. They want us to be dumb and mute. They want us worshiping in their churches. They want women to answer to them for how they use their bodies. They want us to ignore the greatest scientific thoughts ever had and to replace them with tall-tales from an ancient book of children’s stories called The Bible. It has been my mission over the past year to fight these people and to rid this web site of them (thousands and thousands of them, by the way), and to break their web links by using aggressive and insulting language at every possible turn. I freely mix children’s stories and games with brutal assaults on this ignorant and dangerous population within our nation. After 15 years of experience with children’s web sites, I have decided that they are rubbish. They serve little purpose and make a pretense at wholesomeness and clean language which only does a disservice to our children who must grow up with the strength and knowledge to eradicate the foolishness that has prevailed over the past decade. I have no concern for who I may insult, including my own authors who may or may not want their content removed because of my strong views. My candle is a blowtorch and I turn it on barbarians with joy. The only effective way to fight them is to get excited about discovery and knowledge again – to do what Star Trek says we should do:
…to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before
Yes. We won’t get there by watching imbeciles like James Cameron film tales about white guys invading blue guys. 50-some-year-old adolescents pretending to be great directors don’t give us anything worth knowing. Artists like Kubrick do. Films like 2001: A Space Odyssey do. We need to take this next decade and use it to elevate ourselves beyond and out of reach of the poor lost savages we see around us driving their pick-ups, their SUVs, thumbing through their Bibles and Korans, and going to movies like Avatar. Let’s try thinking again. Go rent 2001. Watch it. Wonder. Think.