To Infinity and Beyond (1978)

  

A video I created as a summer student at NYU using 5-inch tape reels and a very heavy recorder with a bulky camera.  Editing resources were extremely crude.  I’ve cleaned it up a bit, but the quality suffers from thirty years of sitting in a crate.

Music by Saint-Saens.  My world.

Drainage – the musical

Michael Kupperman is a funny guy, and pretty weird.  His Tales Designed to Thrizzle carries on the madness, but without that vaudeville duo, Snake ‘n’ Bacon from the earlier numbers.  This one, however, rises to new heights with its appreciation of DRAINAGE!  At last, my voice in the wilderness is finding echoes!  The connection with 2001 is beautiful!

In this issue, Kupperman tells the story of a new Broadway show, all about that essential element of civilization, what makes the world go ’round, drainage.  The leading lady of the production finds out a little late that it has been reworked into a musical.  The show must flow on!

At the Metropolitan

Some images from my most recent visit, all taken in ambient light, so pardon the fuzziness.  Flashes are not allowed.  Some images are linked to others if you click them.

L) My kind of interior – dizzying, isn’t it?    R) Lombard tryptich – click for more info.

Back view of a Chinese  stele with multiple images of the Buddha.

Samurai daggers and sword, objects of incredible beauty and precision.  Click to enlarge.

From an altarpiece by Lorenzo Monaco, one of my favorite artists.  Note Abraham with the flaming sword, and Isaac, in the upper right.  Click for more info.

Those northern mannerists!  They’re weird, but I love them.    Oil on copper plate, for a piece of furniture.  Click for more info.

A favorite of mine, Antoine Lavoisier and his wife, Prima della rivoluzione by that propagandist for 1789, Jacques Louis David.  Carlyle had fun with him and his revolutionary fervor.  Antoine was not so lucky.  He, a liberal, was guillotined by the radicals – dare I call them terroristes? – just leave it at Jacobins.   His wife survived.  Madison Smartt Bell has written a nice capsule biography of him, his monumental contribution to the creation of modern chemistry, and his destruction in those chaotic times, Lavoisier in the Year One.

The imminence of the divine, by an artist in Verrochio’s worshop [full image], a teacher of Leonardo.  From here to 2001 is not such a stretch – click to see why.  And to the right, the floor, mundane, just for balance…

Spoke too soon!

In an earlier post on 2001, I wrote:

Some say we will know we have developoed intelligent machines not when they can speak, but when they can read our lips.

Not so fast!  Today’s article in the NYTimes on Google’s translator programs raises the possibility that we may get lip reading machines before intelligent ones.  Oh well, many people speak before they think already!

It seems that the translators, which are pretty darn good, I think, use models of language that are augmented with, among other things, huge amounts of multi-lingual transcripts from UN meetings.  The translators there are among the best – human – ones around, so their work is the gold standard.  The massive database of phrases and sentences is parsed and indexed a la Google, and that’s why they do a decent job with text that strays from textbook, factual propositions.  What’s to stop the Google folks from feeding in massive amounts of video of people’s mouths speaking words whcih the machine can already process with it’s voice-recognition software?  It would build a model of the relationship between mouth configurations and actual phonemes, which it already knows, lip reading.

The Christmas season is upon us…

click for original

…And unto us a child is born…

Background material to this picture here, and original source material here.   (Und auch hier..?]  And here’another star-baby:

Go where no man has gone before…

Yes, I love the movie, 2001, and as a boy I loved to build models of the moonshot rockets.  (This book is a really cool summary of the stunning images from that program.) But…in the end, I really think that manned space flight, at least right now, and as it’s being pursued, is a waste of effort. 

Let’s hear it for the unmanned space probes like Cassini, that have brought us marvelous pictures leading to new understanding of our solar system!  In the picture here, an old mystery about one of Saturn’s moons is resolved.

Man with a Movie Camera

Odessa, USSR, c. 1929 as shown to us by Dziga Vertov.  Another movie so famous, I’ve been hearing about it forever, and I finally watched it.  I expected a socialist agit-prop documentary film, mixed with self-conscious avante garde sensibility, but I found a dizzying and exuberant – and self-consciously avante garde - portrait of the people of the USSR.

The film uses just about every special effect available at the time:  freeze frames (I immediately thought of 2001, the final trip to Jupiter), split screens, double exposure, time-lapse photography, stop-action animation, slow motion, fast motion, unusual angles, and lots of clever editing.

I was struck by the playful self-referential nature of it all:  The man with the camera who is everywhere, recording all of Soviet life (supposedly in candid takes, despite the enormous machine he lugs around) but he himself is recorded.  We see him, walking around with his machine and setting up.  We see him, on a motorcycle, racing around a track with a camera mounted on the handlebars filming the scenes we were shown just before and will see just after…and then we see a theatre, full of people, seeing the film that we are seeing!  Don Quixote complaining about the stories he’s been reading about himself couldn’t do it better.

The film shows the Soviet man and woman at work, in factories and mines.  (In one crazy scene, our camera man is wedged into a narrow mining passageway filming a worker…but who is filming him?)  Most of the film, to my surprise and delight, is about life of the everyday.  Women having their hair done, athletic events, people drinking at a bar (and the camera man rises right out of their beer mug!), giving birth, watching horses, riding motor bikes, traffic in the city, playing chess (with some nice reverse footage of a board magically setting up from a pile of chess pieces) and listening to the radio.

This last scene comes a minute or so after a picture of Lenin is viewed on the outside of a worker’s club.  The only image of him I noticed in the whole film!  Stalin?? None.  How did this guy survive the 30′s and 40′s unscathed?  (He died of cancer in the 50′s.)

A favorite passage of mine shows children, then freeze frames of their faces, sewing machines, a woman at a workbench editing film, the film we are seeing.  She stitches the images together like a seamstress.

Some stills from throughout the film – click the images for enlargements:

the man with the camera

split-screens

the cameran goes everywhere

beautiful hydraulics

flying above the weir

beauty of machines

in a tight squeeze

slow motion

freeze frames

at the horse races

high dive

earthy pleasures

camera man cools off

Is this the Soviet worker?

He is everywhere, even in your beer!

Lenin

the media speak, and are heard

animated camera

animated tripod walks off

How self-referential can you get?

The Wages of Fear

A French melodrama from 1953.  Does it detract from film to classify it that way?  A long film that is one sustained gut-punch with a blow to the head thrown in for good measure.

Four guys trapped in a miserable fleabag town in South America somewhere accept the  job of trucking nitrogycerine over 300 miles to an oil field where it’s desparately needed to blow out a raging derrick fire.  The pay is darn good, but the chances of being blown sky-high are too.  You get the situation, existential in the extreme…

The pretty waitress, played by director Clouzot’s wife, is dimwitted and abused, but then, aren’t all the characters?  They know it too – When one remarks that some fellow looks like a “walking corpse,” Mario (Yves Montand) replies, “You think we aren’t?”

The setup to the fatal drive is very long, and has a weird character.  Strange juxtapositions:  naked Indian natives taking showers; brutal fights in the one lousey bar in town; actors playing representatives and employees of the American oil company, S.O.C. who sound like they’re from…anywhere; social comment; anti-Americanism; socialistic criticism offered up in the vulgar comments of the miserable crew of losers and underworld thugs who consider the company’s offer – it’s pretty odd.  The four drivers slowly take their cargo of jerry cans filled with nitro on their joy ride to death or escape.

The film is remarkable for its handling of suspense sequences.  Each one revolves around a specific incident in the journey – a boulder in the road that must be carefully blown up with some nitro; a rough stretch of road that must be traversed at either very low speed or very high speed – to go in between means vibration and KABOOM; and the final obstacle, a crater left by the explosion of the lead truck fills with oil from the broken pipeline and must be carefully traversed.

Along the way, Jo, the criminal tough guy who sets himself up as mentor and partner to Mario, descends into jibbering cowardice.  The supercool Bimby and the likable Luigi (already dying of grey lung, shown with Mario above) are blown to Kingdom Come without warning.  Crossing the oil pool, Mario, fed up with Jo, and fearful that if he slows down, he will be helplessly stuck in the oil, knowingly runs over the leg of his erstwhile hero and pal (below).  It’s a dog eat dog world in the wage slave economy.

While they are trying to get the truck out of the oil, they must swim around in it – two men, are they men? – covered in black goo, they look like demons.  See what men are!!  Mario cradles the dying Jo on his shoulder as they are just about to reach the oil field.  They talk of neighborhoods in Paris they know.  They both are from the same area!  What about that tobacco shop?  What was next to it?  A lot..?  Wasn’t there a fence?  What was behind that fence?  I never saw what was there, says Jo.  As he dies, he cries out, “The fence, there’s nothing!!“  Alas, God is dead, and so is Jo.  Heavy…

After sleeping for a day and gettng cleaned up, Mario, $4000 richer (he got his pay and Jo’s – the oil company guys play fair even if they are exploitive and brutal profiteers) and in a spanking new S.O.C. uniform, jubilantly begins to drive back to the fleabag town, contemplating his escape to civilization.  The waitress hears the news by phone – the whole bar erupts in celebration – it’s a miracle that he made it!  They begin to dance to The Blue Danube Waltz.  Mario is listening to the waltz on the radio in the truck and is transported by the music.  He is dancing with the truck.  Twirling the wheel about, he swerves from side to side of the road with the music, he’s getting a bit carried away.

Yes, well, it had to end that way.  The waitress is dizzy with spinning and falls to the floor – an oddly mystical note in an otherwise brutally hardboiled film.  Simultaneously, Mario looses control, and his truck plunges off a precipice in a spectacular crash.  His lifeless hand clutches a Metro ticket to la Pigalle (the Paris red light district) his talisman of home, lovingly carried everywhere.

I was struck by the extended use of The Blue Danube – how could it fail to  bring to mind Kubrick’s 2001?  Both are examples of man-machine interactions set to music, both with ominous overtones, although in Kubrick, it takes a lot longer for the irony to be revealed.  Is there something about the waltz, the spinning, the evokes mechanistic imagery, people reduced to whirling elements in a clockwork escapement..?

Eat the Book

In the Valley of the Loire, at Chateau d’Angers, the Apocalypse.  A tapistry, image thread by thread, fabric mosaic, here transferred to pixels, and come full circle.  Is it the true color?  L’envers & l’endroit:  I saw the front, faded, old, but now they have revealed the reverse, under the linen backing, and the nearly the full color is there.

The Angel gives the Book to Saint John and commands him to eat it.  The word is digested to flesh, after being fixed on parchment.  Is this why I read?  To eat the book and have it become my reality?  Calvino explains “Why we read the classics,” but why do I?  Escape, guilty pleasures.  Later freshened up with appreciation of literary art.  The Book is OF revelation.  I see it several times a year at the Cloisters.  I’d like to see it every day.

No one will let it go. The Revelation trails us everywhere.  The millenium is always being pursued.  Even in 1944, in Cat People. Revelation 13:2 “And the beast which I saw was like a leopard,” which, as the zookeeper says, pretty much describes the panther in the cage, or the woman who is the star?

Was 2001:  A Space Odyssey a revelation?  …and just what is the connection to Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite and the Negative Theology?

It is so much easier and safer to read, to flow down the river of words into the pseudo-reality, to avoid the stillness of now.  Reading keeps me afloat, with my head above water…otherwise, what to do with my time?  Aggghh!  I would have to be..here..how?