April 2008 Archives
At Stamford Bridge on Saturday, just after halftime, Gary Neville and Paul Scholes were returning to their seats. Both were wearing suits; neither had been selected with Fergie casting a wary eye, at least in Scholes’ case, on Tuesday’s Champions League game against Barcelona. Predictably enough, great swathes of abuse rose up from the stands, from the big naked bellies of West London dads, from the well-spoken mouths of those with fathers’ rich enough to buy season tickets for their sons. But the abuse was aimed only at Neville, and mostly at his new moustache. Not a word could be heard of Scholes, save for the odd hushed whisper: “Great player, that fella,” or “nice if he played for us”…
This month, Adidas had two 15 foot Superstar trainers built: one for the left foot (of a giant) and another for the right. They then sent one to LA and one to NY and got an artist collective from East and West to represent their respective coastline: the East coast collective, Surface2Air, took care of the right shoe; and Upper Playground, from San Francisco, took care of the left. The whole process was recorded on film before the NY shoe was packed up and driven to Venice Beach where it was reunited with its long lost left-footed brother...
CHECK THE LINK BELOW FOR THE FULL VIDEO.
This fascinates me. Johnny Lee exposed his discovery on YouTube and the I.T world went crazy for it. He was then invited by the brilliant TED to deliver a talk, which thankfully breaks it down into slightly more basic terms for people like me (although it’s still quite nerdy). I admire Johnny for both his curious and creative mind, and also his attitude to knowledge sharing. He could have hidden away with his idea, or sold it to Nintendo or Apple. Instead, he made it available on his website for free.
In 2002, Canadian artist Melanie Coles won a trip to the U.S. with her high school courtesy of NASA, and, in a stadium filled with students, they watched a live photo of themselves beamed onto a big screen from a satellite camera in space. Now, though, those cameras won’t be looking for Melanie, but for Waldo, known here in the UK as the literary legend Wally of considerable Where’s Wally fame. From vinyl sheet, and with the help of her little team, she’s created a giant Wally that, when the Google cameras update, will show up on Google Earth. And so the whole planet becomes the latest update to the Wally books: Where’s Wally for the 21st Century.
Read more about it here or follow the link below for an interview with Wally himself.
In 1999, a leading designer with an international reputation was invited to a give a lecture near Detroit on behalf of AIGA, the professional association of design in America. He was also asked to design the poster for the event. How could he visualise for people the pain and suffering he put into every single design project, the kind of effort he believes to be part and parcel of the creative process? Simple: he got his assistant to carve the lecture details into his skin with a knife.
Such is the life of Stefan Sagmeister...
“I pressed the button, and suddenly we were floating. It was an incredible feeling to realise that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation." - Andreas Pavel
How far we have come. If your iPod is of the Nano persuasion, kudos to you. If you’re packing 6G’s, you rock. iTouch? Awesome. iPhone? Spectacular. Anything electronic that has pinching, flicking and caressing as standard operating procedures deserves all accolades.
What holds all that together though is an enduring idea. One that was laughed off by the likes of Grundig, Phillips and Yamaha. One that plays an integral part in many of our lives - rest, work, play, exercise - you name it. Quite simply, the idea that it is nice to add a soundtrack to real life.
Andreas Pavel created the original portable personal stereo player. He fought court battles for 25 years with Sony who called their dubiously similar version the ‘Walkman’. He was at one point indebted to the tune of $3m in legal expenses. Eventually Pavel was awarded $10m plus royalties on a variety of future Walkman sales. The imagination of a man who wanted to hear his music on the go, no matter how many weird looks he got, is to be honoured. The determination to never let his creation be swallowed up by the power of Sony is inspiring. Pavel’s Stereobelt of 1972, while devoid of MP3, JPEG, WiFi, YouTube and the rest of the gang, represents the official birth of an era defining icon. Surprisingly enough, we couldn't find a digital photo of one...
A few minutes of film can capture the imaginations of people from all walks of life. If you skate, you’ll know about this already. If you don’t, then fall in love with the intro to Lakai’s new film, Fully Flared. The risks they took to shoot it were pretty substantial - using napalm to blow things up will always incur some kind of risk - but the results speak for themselves. It's beautiful.
“You can’t handle the truth!”... “I’ll never let go, Jack.”... “I love you honey bunny.”... “Say hello to my little friend!”... “I’m... kind of a big deal”... “Do the chickens have large talons?”
You could never quote from, say, an Italian Neorealist film of the 1940’s (unless in the right crowd) because it would transport you to Ubergeek status. Quoting films is about shared experience. ‘We both saw that film, we both liked that bit, and now we are connected by something.’
Sometimes though, a little soundbite won’t cut it, and not even the most talented impressionist can do justice to the quote, especially when it is intrinsically linked with the film’s music, cinematography and narrative. Lengthy monologues must be a really exciting and probably quite daunting thing for an actor to see when first reading the script; a chance to really impress himself on the character. A chance, even, to define the film.
A quote becomes a speech when it can only fully exist in its lengthy entirety. The one I’m thinking of has been borrowed by a second-rate football team (Plymouth Argyle, I think) when they were managerless for a short period, and they won every game using it as motivation. Undoubtedly thousands of over-excited American high school kids have embraced it as part of their sporting ritual, and there are those of us who just love it for what it is: The perfect speech at the perfect moment in a very good (as far as sports stories go) film.
Without further ado and with a healthy disregard for whether you like the film or not, this is a speech that those involved should be very proud of. Take a bow, Oliver Stone and of course, Al Pacino.
Asked a few years ago what he thought of Liverpool FC, Pele, a global ambassador for football no less, said that, yes, Liverpool were a fine team indeed. They have great players, he continued, like Ryan Giggs.
In Brazil, “the greatest player that’s ever been” isn’t revered quite so much as he is in, say, FIFA HQ. He may be ‘The King’, but there’s a feeling of disassociation these days between the young man from the streets who left his mark on the game and the deity he has now become. He recently joked that he was more famous than God because people in Asia knew him, too. So no, in Brazil, they hold another player dearer to their hearts, a man born with a bent spine, one leg shorter than the other and each pointing in opposite directions. That man was Garrincha...
Vulgar? Ostentatious? Indulgent? Symbols of all that's wrong with high end fashion? All of these things ring true of these, we think. And rarely do we celebrate such things. In fact, we refuse to. But in this case, we were coaxed into it by those two cunning serpents of design, Gucci and Louis Vuitton. Yes, we know, these gas masks are meaningless and vile, but we couldn't resist. We succumbed to the surface allure of fashion, to the novelty and extravagance of it all, to temptation itself.
We hang our heads in shame. We deserve expulsion. We have sinned.
Alex Gibney’s father was a U.S. naval interrogator with experiences of Japanese prisoners during World War II. He and his fellow men learned that torture was an ineffective means of withdrawing information from enemy prisoners. Before his death, he begged his son to make a film about the U.S.’s use of torture on untried prisoners and, by definition, its disregard for the rules of democracy in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So Alex Gibney made that film, and this year, after his last project Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005, the film won Best Documentary at The Oscars.
Taxi To The Darkside is a film about the systematic attempts made by the Bush administration to sidestep the laws laid down in the Geneva Convention to safeguard against the maltreatment of war prisoners. At its most essential, it’s an exposé of their hypocrisy in the loosely defined war on terror. What exactly is terror, though? Many things, of course, among them the demolition of commercial buildings in a foreign country, but equally the imprisonment of an innocent civilian, removed from the taxi he worked hard to acquire and thrust into a hostile prison complex where he is beaten, abused, stripped naked, deprived of sleep, chained to the ceiling and generally tortured until his body can take no more and he dies. That someone was a young Afghan civilian named Diliwar, and it’s his story that provides the framework for Gibney’s work.
From the Bagram facility in Afghanistan where young Diliwar was held through the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad from where those famous leaked photos of prisoners abused emerged, to Guantanamo and Washington D.C., it’s a deeply disturbing look into the military's use of torture on prisoners of war, sanctioned, the film reveals, by those at the very top: Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush. A ‘few bad apples’ was the somewhat flippant explanation they gave for the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, but that doesn’t stand up once you’ve seen the film. And you should, if only to fully understand quite what's been going on.
I shan’t go into the politics of it right here because the film takes care of all that and more. Suffice to say I left the first Film Knights event last night feeling like I finally understood the sheer gravity of it all. We wanted Gibney to introduce the film, but he proved impossible to track down. He must have quite a story. What does it take to create a film like this exactly? Courage, surely, but also faith, and lots of it:
“All I had was faith. You have to go in with a sense of faith that you’ll find something, and you keep digging and digging and digging until you get it.”
No doubt his father would be proud.
Taxi To The Dark Side is officially released in the UK on May 30th, 2008.
Some people are really bad at table football. So bad, in fact, that they can barely muster enough power in their goalkeeper’s clearance to reach the opponent’s back line, let alone breach it. I know one such man. I came face to face with him not along ago and it was embarrassing to say the least. Mostly, though, people can play a bit. They partake once in a while and occasionally do something half decent on the pitch - a pass, say, or even a pass followed by a goal. There are also those who can play with their left hand only and still beat you hands down. They are few and far between, a rare breed indeed.
More rare, though, are those who love the game so dearly that they set out to design and build the most glorious ode to table football you could possibly imagine. That, dear friend, is what you see here.
Read more about it here.
LWLies and SUSO are proud to announce the first in our series of Film Knights, a new monthly event created to tell the tales and celebrate the stories of the courageous individuals, both sung and unsung, behind the best and the brave in cinema. In honour of imagination, creativity and determination in film, we kick things off with a screening of Taxi To The Darkside, preceded by a brief introduction from a representative from Reprieve, at 6.45pm on Tuesday April 8th at Curzon Soho.
And it’s free. All you need to pay is attention.
The event is guest-listed on a first come first served basis. RSVP to filmknights@littlewhitelies.co.uk
I like them - they are a three-quarter beat to the half and full beats of commas and full stops. Prose has its own musicality, and the more notation the better. WILL SELF
Talk has been raging of late about a much neglected friend of ours: the semicolon. Should it, as some believe, remain a secret weapon in a writer’s armoury, or should it, as others have argued, be removed from our keyboards? Hmmmm...
Would we be able to weave the same patterns in our lucid prose, or drum the same rhythms in our exquisitely crafted emails (yeah right), without it? Or do we sound like pretentious idiots even talking about it? This thorough examination of our humble little friend might help you decide: THE END OF THE LINE.
“Anyone who swims with the current will reach the big music steamship; whoever swims against the current will perhaps reach the source.” PAUL SCHNEIDER-ESLEBEN (Father to FLORIAN SCHNEIDER)
Florian Schneider, along with Ralf Hütter, was one of the founding members of Kraftwerk. If ever musicians swam against some kind of current, it was them. But so too did the other two long-standing members, Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos. I’m currently reading Flür’s book, I Was A Robot, because I hoped I might learn a little more about the enigmatic nature of Kraftwerk. And I have done so far, but in the process I’ve discovered a man that writes exquisitely about such things as the imagination, creativity and his own need for artistic freedom over everything else. What’s interesting is that he doesn’t talk quite so much about the music as the kind of human experiences that making music can create. I guess the same goes for any kind of pursuit, anything that takes you on a tangential journey to unpredictable places. Anyway, it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling reading it. Maybe it will for you:
“I had known for a long time how it felt to be on stage. I had also experienced what it was like to be applauded. During my amateur period I had been in many groups, and I had grown very fond of them, even if they were not particularly successful. They were all bands, groups that I had founded. However, with Kraftwerk, the whole world stood open to me, and that was the thing - apart from my discoveries and my minimalist drumming - that most enchanted me through all my years with the group. Human contacts in every nation, countless conversations and the flirtations that often emerged from them, the universal cultural worldview that I was able to form for myself without just getting it from books - all of these things gave me wonderful experiences which later, following my painful separation, also helped me to find a way to myself, to the love and sound of my new music.”
What if you took a bunch of famous films, condensed them down into thirty seconds, and reenacted them with animated bunnies? Why, you’d get ANGRY ALIEN PRODUCTIONS.
Prepare to waste the rest of today. Favourites include The Exorcist, Titanic, Brokeback Mountain, Jaws, March of the Penguins - all of them dammit.
