Archive for December, 2004
Thursday, December 30th, 2004
“Adam and Eve” files, darknets, curries, topsites — no, I’m not referring to some kinky download website but rather the topics discussed in Wired Magazine’s essential January cover story by Jeff Howe referred to in the post below, which has just been posted online. It’s a look at how pirated material winds up on the web and for those who imagine it’s via teenagers sharing files with their friends, think again. The pirate internet distribution system is as rigidly controlled and hierarchical as the studio system except it boasts an entirely different group of players competing not for dollars but for prestige and “credits,” sort of cyber-chits that can be used to rack up free downloads and tradeable digital media.
It’s a breathlessly written piece. Here’s a section in which a teen races to be the first to “seed” a pre-release audio CD by A Perfect Circle”
Finally Kevin checks a site telling him that a rip of Thirteenth Step has just been uploaded to a secure FTP site — a week before it hits the stores. He curses under his breath. More than two minutes have elapsed since the file first appeared. The race is on, and Kevin is already at the back of the pack. He opens FlashFXP– a program that allows him to directly transfer files — and begins copying the CD to as many sites as he can. Then he sits back to watch the race. Everything now depends on the whimsy of Internet traffic and the speed of the server farms whose bandwidth he is pirating.
With his quick, eager intelligence and, more important, a high degree of focus, Kevin spends hours at a stretch performing the minute tasks of copying and transferring files, usually to networks in the middle levels of the pyramid. It’s through grunts like him that a song proliferates from 10,000 copies to 1 million. The night A Perfect Circle’s CD was posted, Kevin stayed up late spreading the file around the Net. The curries competing against him must have gotten stuck behind some double-wide trailer of a packet, because Kevin’s … Read the rest
Wednesday, December 29th, 2004
Via Defamer comes this odd L.A. Craig’s List talent call which I’m not quite sure speaks for itself:
We are looking for the new Vincent Gallo & Chloe Sevigny!!!
Independent Feature Film Production Company is casting adult male and female actors as well as experienced traditional actors for a new narrative film that has explicit scenes of sexuality.
The film is a cross between “The Brown Bunny” and “Reservoir Dogs.” It’s the romantic and thrilling story of two professional hitmen who fall in love one night and the woman who comes between them.
We finished a very successful narrative feature film which has gotten lots of festival and press praise and secured distribution in the US and Canada (with deals pending overseas). We are becoming known for producing very unconventional and compelling stories for a very hip and ‘indie-focused’ market.
Our new film is not the traditional porn film w/o story and production values but is reminiscent to story-based films of the 70s but updated to reflect the new wave of indie gangster films.
Click on the link above if you think you qualify!
… Read the rest
Wednesday, December 29th, 2004
Former Filmmaker editor Chuck Stephens penned this engaging report from Soi Thonglor, the street he lives on “deep in the heart of Bangkok… where intellectual property rights aren’t exactly chief among local law enforcement’s concerns.” His “Ten Best” list (Number 1: Tropical Malady) includes a number of titles seen on bootleg DVDs Stephens picked up at his local grocery store. In the article, Stephens points out that apathetic distributors worldwide are causing dedicated cineates to rely on cheap black market DVDs just to keep up with the artform.
Also great reading, although not on the web, unfortunately, is Wired‘s cover story on “darknet” distribution of bootlegged media, the pyramid-like structure that causes the latest CD or DVD to show up on Kazaa or Limewire or the recent busted BitTorrent, which Wired does write about.… Read the rest
Tuesday, December 28th, 2004
Susan Sontag, author, activist, and critic, died in New York today at 71.
A tremendously influential figure in post-war American culture, and one of the last remaining people for whom the term “public intellectual” might apply, Sontag had a special relationship with cinema, occasionally directing experimental films but more often influencing films, filmmakers and other critics with her writing. Essays such as “Notes on Camp,” which found an alternative and politically transgressive means of valuing culture through gay aesthetics, “Against Interpretation,” which argued against the critical reduction of art to easily identifiable themes and messages, and “On Photography” which examined how the medium of photography and its particular poetics affects the way we look at a picture (“All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or things) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”) were major cultural statements that artists in all disciplines reacted in some way too.
A major supporter of European and Asian art cinema, Sontag wrote, in 1995, an essay, “The Decay of Cinema,” in which she bemoaned the passing of what she dubbed “cinephelia”: “Cinephelia is the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other; quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral — all at the same time.”
Arguing that globalization was destroying the values of cinema as art, Sontag went on to write that great films could only be “heroic violations of the norms and practices which now govern movie-making everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world — which is to say, everywhere”. She particularly supported the work of Bela Tarr, helping organize screenings of his The Werckmeister Harmonies to garner stateside interest, and over the years wrote provocatively about the work of, among many others, Robert Bresson (“He has worked out a form that perfectly expresses and accompanies what … Read the rest
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2004
I’ve long been a fan of Dennis Cooper’s, the author of such formally audacious, heartbreakingly terrifying and sexually transgressive novels as Closer, Frisk and My Loose Thread. He has a new novel, God, Jr., a “PG-13″ one, coming out this spring, but in the meantime Cooper has chosen the small Void Books to publish a “side project,” The Sluts, he considers too much for his regular publisher, Grove. Considering that Cooper has spent his entire literary career living outside the envelope, it does make me a little afraid to contemplate this new one. Says the press release:
Set largely on the pages of a Web site where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, emails, and conversations of several dozen unreliable narrators, The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort’s date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author’s signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper’s most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date. The Sluts is scheduled for publication by Void Books in December 2004 in a limited edition of 550 numbered and signed copies, with illustrations by Todd James.
From an interview with Cooper at the Void Press Web site:
There’s always been pressure on me from certain quarters to write something more accessible and less troublesome. There’s this whole idea that’s always been floated at me that there are all these critics and publishing big wigs who think I’m a great writer and would jump at the chance to hail me if my work wasn’t so difficult. I don’t buy it for a second, but it’s out there and it’s been a particularly loud wall of sound since I finished the cycle. So The Sluts was the last thing these people wanted, and I happened to write this more accessible novel God Jr., and that’s what people were interested in. So I said, fine, and … Read the rest
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2004
Film Comment editor Gavin Smith is always kind enough to send me the ballot for the magazine’s annual “50 Best” rundown (actually, two rundowns — the “50 Best Released” and “Unreleased” Films of the Year), but as a reader of the magazine I’m always a bit intimidated by how much I don’t manage to see in a given year — especially this one, in which I spent about six months out of town, five of them in a arthouse-deprived place where Anchorman was my top viewing experience. So, I sit on the ballot rather than skew the results due to my foreign film slacking. And then, I look at the two lists online and realize, oh yeah, I saw that film… and that one too. Before Sunrise, Crimson Gold, Keane, Eternal Sunshine, Notre Musique, Tarnation, Distant, Hero, The Return, Primer, The Motorcycle Diaries, Old Boy, and Mondovino all would have made my lists, along with a few others — Greendale, Coffee and Cigarettes, and, yes, honestly, Anchorman — that the Film Comment crew didn’t go for.
Anyway, for a good critical survey of the past year, click on the link above.
… Read the rest
Saturday, December 11th, 2004
I’m curious to see the New Museum’s new East Village USA exhibition, which memorializes the downtown art world of the early to mid 1980s, a time in which art, fashion, film, hip-hop, and rock all jostled and congealed into a movement that can now be encapuslated into something like, well, a museum exhibition. (That it was also a time when AIDS rampaged through the New York arts community gives the show its measure of sadness for those who lived in New York at the time and knew many of these people.)
Writes curator Dan Cameron, “Imagine a village where everybody is an artist, nobody has or needs a steady job, and anyone can be the art world’s Next Big Thing. Such was the myth (and occasionally the reality) of the East Village in the mid-1980s, when glamour and sleaze were nearly indistinguishable, and the boy next door was an androgynous, foot-high-peroxide-pompadour-sporting singer named John Sex. It was the height of the Reagan era, with its Cold War paranoia, intensified by growing nuclear fears, and inner cities and civic institutions in a state of increased upheaval and decay. Meanwhile, the East Village was busy inverting the values of trickle-down economics and gunboat diplomacy by transforming itself into the American dream’s dark underside, its evil twin, its inner child run amok.”
Unfortunately, despite the use of the word “film” in the New Museum’s promo material, a quick glance at the artist’s roster indicates that the scene’s vital underground filmmaking is unrepresented. Richard Kern pops up as does Charlie Ahearn, but where are Eric Mitchell, Beth and Scott B, Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch, Sara Driver, and the many others whose film work was as much a part of this scene as the visual art?
Anyway, I’ll check out the show nonetheless but while doing some web surfing to find out what’s in it, I came across this great piece by novelist and former art critic Gary Indiana published in New York magazine. It’s his own personal and opinionated history of the period, one that winds through tales like buying gin-and-tonics for depressed serial … Read the rest
Friday, December 10th, 2004
Kudos to Indiewire for nabbing the text of Dan Talbot’s engagingly long-winded speech at last week’s Gotham Awards. Personally, I found Talbot’s trip down memory lane kind of a blast, sitting as I was before the teleprompter which kept flashing “Please wrap it up!” Anyway, for notes on how it used to be in NYC art film exhibition, click on the above.
… Read the rest
Thursday, December 9th, 2004
Via Green Cine Daily comes a link to the following posting at Chuck Olson’s Blogumentary:
“It’s happening.
“What blogging does for print journalism, podcasting does for radio and videoblogging does for [film and video]. It’s rough around the edges, it’s unpredictable, it’s real. And it’s putting the means of media production into the hands of the people.”
The Videoblogging.info site includes a small but growing list of pioneering videobloggers.
And the new genre is already developing its own alternative media: As Shannon Noble writes in a recent posting at Vlog:tacit: By clicking on the image above you can see “an example/suggestion for an alternative vlog style in response to the kind of work that one can see on a vlog site called Rocketboom. Purely suggestive. WARNING: the images I’ve used in this piece are from military footage of a violent nature.”
… Read the rest
Wednesday, December 8th, 2004
On Nov. 18, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation quietly convened a hearing in order to decide whether to establish Congressional financing for the study of “porn addiction.”
Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS), chairman of the Science, Technology, and Space Subcommittee, and a right-wing Christian, arranged for the hearing.
Four “experts,” all with ties to conservative organizations, presented testimony. No one from the adult entertainment industry was invited to contribute.
The hearing represents an interesting tactic by the religious right in their ongoing war on adult entertainment. The First Amendment Free Speech provisions of the U.S. Constitution have frustrated efforts to supress porn in the United States. By presenting pseudo-scientific theories that pornography has a drug-like effect on viewers, anti-porn activists hope to pull an end-run around the Constitution.
Dr. Judith Reisman, Ph.D, testified, “Thanks to the latest advances in neuroscience, we now know that pornographic visual images imprint and alter the brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory trail, arguably, subverting the First Amendment by overriding the cognitive speech process.” [emphasis added]
… Read the rest
