woobiquity

An Obamarap

So, the Obama campaign has been placing 'real' ads in video games. Which is rather cool, though it made me wonder whether the young people they're targeting will remember that they have to leave virtual space in order to actually vote.

Maybe they will (quite nice graphics too):

The genius of necessity

A useful glimpse into the creative process. After this evening’s London Film Festival screening of the wonderful, beautiful and frankly utterly perfect film, Lake Tahoe, director Fernando Eimbcke was asked how he decided to go with one of the film’s signature effects.

Throughout, slow-moving scenes in a Yukatan coastal town are cut with long segments of black screen during which only sound is used to convey what’s happening. It’s experiential and, in a sense, very eye opening.

 

Eimbcke said (with a rare modesty and good humor, for a director) that the idea was the result of a financial reality. There wasn’t budget to buy the rights to show part of a Bruce Lee movie in a key cinema scene. So they decided to use a black screen instead, letting the Kung Fu sounds paint the picture. As an effect, it worked. It later became clear that other key scenes worked as well or better without imagery too. They'd found a pattern.

“There can be an explosion of creativity,” he said, “when there isn’t enough money, when you’re forced to be more creative.”

Lake Tahoe is due for eventual US and UK release. In the meantime, watch the trailer.

We are the world (don't forget it)

Do you ever get the feeling the cosmos are trying to tell you something? Yesterday afternoon I went to see Goodbye Solo at the London Film Festival. It’s a low-key, perfectly formed movie set in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, close to where I grew up.

It follows a Senegalese taxi driver as he develops an unlikely friendship with William (played by a wrinkled, watery-eyed Red West, who in real life was Elvis Presley's bodyguard), a man who wants to be driven to Blowing Rock, a natural platform that juts out like an arrow over the Blue Ridge Mountains. And he doesn't plan to come back.

In the Q&A afterward, the film’s charismatic African-born star, who now lives in New York, went out on a limb to explain his take on the underlying message. “It’s the global village,” he said. “I’m a citizen of the world and you are too.”

A couple of hours later (life is short) I was sat in the steel and neo-classical splendor of the converted St Lukes Church for this wonderful concert. The music was flawless, performed by two of today’s classical music giants (though Mitsuko Uchida couldn't be more petite). But the real star of the show was John Donne, the poet who died in 1631.

Donne’s poems formed the text for the evening’s program: lute songs by Anonymous and piano songs by Britten. A watery-eyed Corin Redgrave recited several poems with no accompaniment.

“Let us possess one world,” he read, “each hath one, and is one.”

Yesterday 100,000 people came out to hear Barack Obama give a speech in Missouri, a ‘red’ state. The Observer prepared an article about how an Obama victory could transform British politics. The New York Times prepared an article about the financial crisis reaching Hungary on its Around-the-World burn. 

Meanwhile (Donne: “watch not one another out of fear”) a spokesperson for the McCain campaign tried to drive the wedge between two Americas in a little deeper, to split the "real" America off from... something else. And thousands of Americans answered the phone to a voice equating Barack Obama with "welfare", a racially charged trope.

Two sets of facts. One of them is both extremely current and also echoes a timeless truth.

Read 'The Good Morrow' by John Donne in its entirety here.

The shape of things to come

Dry leaves in a drainage grate, near Marylebone Road, London, Thursday.

Woobiquitisn't?

"Anyone who thinks there are two Starbucks on every block in Manhattan," I huffed, "is severely deluded!" This after half an hour of weaving through streets near the hideously crowded Fifth Avenue last Saturday in dire need of reputable caffeine. And a muffin.

I have to say I wasn't exactly fumbling around at the time for a word to describe this thing that generally seems ubiquitous until you actually need it. (Whatever words I needed for it at the time came all too easily to mind.) But now that The Atlantic mentions it, I do think maybe there ought to be such a word. I'm just not sure any of these is it:

Neverywhere was probably the most popular suggestion. Runners-up include unbiquitous, ubiquitless, and fewbiquitous. Helen Reich, of West Melbourne, Australia, suggested ubi-quit-on-ous; and Sheila Tombe, of Lady’s Island, S.C., ubiquitisn’t. Brett Price, of Austin, Texas, proposed omnipresen’t; Patricia Peters, of East Norriton, Pa., omniabsent; and Glen Henderson, of Toronto, omnevanescent.

Clever though.

'Your own monumental kitchen'

"That's the American Dream: tear it down and build your own monumental kitchen."

- The novelist T.C. Boyle, talking at last weekend's forum on the American Dream at the New Yorker Festival. Boyle and his wife live in the oldest Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house in California. It sat empty and unwanted for six years, until they bought it. T.C. Boyle's next novel (out in early 2009) is about Frank Lloyd Wright, as seen through the eyes of the four women he loved.

Postcard from New York

What, you were expecting the Chrysler Building? Sculptor Rune Olson gestures toward his masking-tape sculpture of a bonobo ape bringing logs to a mate in exchange for sexual favors. It's part of a series he created for The Sex Lives of Animals, an exhibition at the Museum of Sex. Olson gave a tour of the exhibition last Saturday afternoon. He gives his animal creations German-made, human eyes, usually in the precise ice-blue shade of his own eyes.

If you're, um, into this sort of thing, then you'll definitely want to keep an eye out for the bonobo-sex-life guru extraordinaire (possibly all too extraordinaire wink wink), who could be making waves in this area of pertinent research over the coming months. 

Art is a performance(TM).