Even Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's got an online diary. Of course, that doesn't make up for the fact that this blog was abandoned by yours truly for over a week. Who's Syberberg? Just some German filmmaker. I always wondered about his influence on the Danish Dogme-95 director, Lars von Trier. Zentropa and Hitler: ein Film aus Deutschland had similarly low production values and looks and feels.
How'd I get onto this? I was wondering about film adaptations of Heinrich Böll's novels and came across some slack-jawed yokel's ham-fisted review of a Straub and Huillet version of Billiard um Halbzehn. Well, what're you going to do?
"Qu'est-ce que c'est un film documentaire?" or some such. This weekend I began re-reading Sartre's Nausea: boy, howdy, could that one-eyed French philosopher write. "Hell is other people." In the introduction I gleaned two factoids: Sartre's mother was Albert Schweitzer's first cousin and Ireland had an existential philosopher, Percy Arland Ussher. "Humor is despair that doesn't take itself seriously," quotha. In keeping with all the angst, I went to see the new-old documentary about the French New Left's disintegration between 1967 and 1977: Chris Marker's Grin Without a Cat. Three hours of Fidel fidgeting with his microphones until stopped dead in a snow-caked Moscow with unmovable Soviet microphone technology.
"What is a documentary film?" Parts of Grin were engaging, but I guess I was just a tad bit too tired to sit through it all. I liked the strange de(con)structed Eistensteinian montage at the beginning with the Odessa steps sequence from Potemkin and shots of various state aparatuses and their henchmen police teargassing, clubbing, kicking, high pressure waterhosing, etc., demonstrators. The moral of the story? Something happened, the New Left never recovered, and the Old Right may have been envolved in the whole thing. Old politicos turn to conspiracy theory in their old, coupon-clipping, age.
Rhetoric and montage is all that's left to any filmmaker after the film has been exposed. Cinema Verite was neither. (I guess I'm just getting cranky in my dotage.) I enjoyed Marker's La Jetee and Letter from Siberia and found parts of Battle for Chile engaging, but Grin is my least favorite flick from this important director / bricoleur.
Missed a day. Dang and drat! Well, I've been trying to decide on an MP3 player since getting Ms Viki one (a Samsung Yepp that's tiny and which she can wear to the gym). Mine had to be different. I was also doing research on getting a small digital recorder to do two-system sync sound with my DV camera. (The pre-amp in the DV cam is not so good, and good sound does make a flick look better.)
First, I was looking at Minidisc players, but they have this silly copyright protection scheme that limits the number of times something can be copied, and none of the portable consumer Minidisc units have a digital out. Hop on over to the semi-pro and pro models and you're conservativey looking at $1K and up.
Looked into other solutions, including flash (SD and CF) memory models, which took me into a strange world where Phish concert bootleggers and Russian Israeli spy equipment dealers rubbed shoulders. Finally, today I settled on a Archos Jukebox 20 Recorder. Has S/PDIF (optical) digital in/out (plus analog, too). 20 GB hard disk, USB 2.0 port, CF slot, but only does MP3. Other choices were the Nomad Jukebox3 (firewire and WMA, WAV, etc), and Apple iPod. Now for a pre-amp. There's even some folks in Sweden hacking the firmware.
As I watched Peter Bogdanovich interviewing David Chase on the first season Sopranos DVD, I was a little irked by Bogdanovich constantly referring to his index card questions, but soon I just got into the answers and the explanations. Chase describes how he created the show, first as a pilot for Fox and then as an HBO series. At one point, Bogdanovich mentions something that Orson Welles had told him in response to something that John Ford had told Bogdanovich in another interview: "most of the good things [in filmmaking] happen by accident'. And I repeated this to Welles... I said 'is that true?' And Orson said, 'yes, you could say that the director is a man who presides over accidents'." He also mentions it here.
A fun quiz, but cultural biased. The questions and answers were humorous and slightly quirky. I must get around to reading McCullough's book on Adams.
Well, the gumint has called in my right to kvetch by issuing a summons for jury duty. At least they have a website where you can check to see if you need to report the next day, but the fact that I'm on a day by day call for the entire month of November probably means I'll meet my quota of a blog entry per day for a month. Yay! Unfortunately, the month of December will be a tougher ordeal as I'll be on the road in Europe for 17 days.
Finally getting back to the PDA I bought on the fourth of July: a Zaurus. Anyway, I've tried personal organizer of the paper and leather kind, but they just didn't take. So now I'm reading up on the open source Zaurus OS (oz) and Opie. I've been able to install and run Apache with a PHP module and MySQL, and I'm planning on writing a little web app that allows me to take structured notes for DVD titles, books, and other info.
Erling and I discussed the madness of mathematicians (e.g., Gödel, Cantor), and it seems this is common knowledge. I told him I was writing a story about a person who tries to extract meaningful texts from irrational numbers. We had a laugh. I've been reading Tor Nørretranders' book The User Illusion, more of which later. The information of information theory is a very strange concept to wrap one's noodle around.
Interestingly, I came across another blog because it mentioned Jesse Schoem. I don't know John, but he knows Jesse, so I guess we're just one degree of separation apart. A couple of months ago, when somebody was talking about the whole six degrees of Kevin Bacon meme, and as it turned out, there's only one degree of separation between me and Anne Frank and Adolf Hitler. What a depressing and surreal sandwich.
Reading John's blog -- and I've been looking at quite a few these days (rather than writing this one) -- I got the feeling that I knew him. Kind of superficial, eh? It's probably the same kind of feeling that you get with a favorite actor or some other celebrity. In the case of an actor, it's usally some character or the sum of many that you feel that you know. And so it is with blogs: read somebody's journal entries and instant understanding of some unknown, unseen person. I really wouldn't have thought of this, if it weren't for the fact that we have a mutual friend. That somehow made John more real than the usual blogger type.
I feel about this blog the same way I do about my new libretto project and my old film project: procrastinatory. We'll just have to see if I can make it through an entire month, without missing a daily entry.
I watched Insomnia on DVD last week and liked it in a guilty pleasure, Hollywoody sort of way. When I looked it up, I surprized that it was a remake of a Norwegian film. What is it about the American movie industry? They've been remaking films since the teens of last century. Shooting books, lensing plays, what have you. Oh, well.