Le Seigneur des Anneaux

They've been threatening to show The Two Towers on HBO again; for some reason, my friends and I follow the HBO schedules in our own way. Collectively, we own all the collector's sets of the Lord of the Rings trilogy; so we decided to make an evening of epic cinema in the living room of one of my friends, where his family has built, I swear, a small theater. We created a bag of Original Butter Flavor that turneby pressing a buttoon that turned a flat pouch into a bag of steaming buttery munchies (one of the few instances when the microwave produces better results than traditional cookery), and settled down to watch the trilogy in THX, Dolby, 7.1 sound.

One of the interesting problems that arise when you have an international collection of friends who have each lived all over the world is that there is PAL and NTSC; there are regions 1 to 7; and there are DVD players that refuse to play discs from the same country of original: this is what can only be called technological xenophobia. My friend actually had three DVD players, one of which, he promised was a 'DVD-slut' that would accept anything thrust into it. As it turned out, the collector's version of Fellowship of the Ring was unplayable, so we settled for the abridged version; my Le Retour du Roi would only play in French.

Interesting experience it was, to watch the culmination of the story (and the best of the films, if you want to take them individually) in French. First of all, one doesn't at first realize how vital the dialogue is to what most would classify as an action movie. For those like myself who could remember the English and understand the French, it served to keep my attention from following the story to staying at the level of the surface; specifically, the text of the dialogue (pace Derrida et al., si vous voulez). One admires the poetry of the dialogue, both in English and in the French; and I have to confess to a feeling of vindication/retribution for years of trying to read French novels or watch subtitled French films: ha, the tables were turned for once.

I have a friend who is a translation scholar; he pointed out that when the committee in Sweden gave Gabriel Garcia Marquez the Nobel prize for literature, were they giving it to his novels, or the translations. And as for Milan Kundera, I can't stand his early works, but everything from La Lenteur onwards I adore: this was the point when he started writing in French rather than in his native Czech.

One of the impetus for writing The Lord of the Rings for JRR Tolkien was actually his interest in languages, especially his make-believe ones that stemmed from his interest in early forms of English; Middle-Earth was born from its tongues, so to speak. I think they should, like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (filmed in Aramaic) or Philip Glass's Akhnaten (libretto in Ancient Egyptian) have filmed Le Seigneur des Anneaux (I remember trying to buy a ticket, in halting French, for the Lord of the Lambs) in the original tongues: V.O. for the world; subtitled variously, and, for heaven's sake, playable on all machines. The standards of video are so multifarious as it is; adding artificial restrictions is just downright silly.

The karaoke experience (PDF download)

Buffy in the West Wing, by Proust

A nice chap wrote in the other day about my blog and mentioned The West Wing, the American television series about the White House senior staff. Now, I feel fairly confident talking about The West Wing, even if it sounds pretentious for someone who also likes Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I hesitated and finally didn't put The Economist among my favorite reading material, because to be completely honest there's an element of trying to overreach a bit intellectually in subscribing to that magaazine (sorry, newspaper). Indeed, most weeks I rarely get past the obituary (I'm a back-flipper); so my week begins by finding out who died. If I'm really industrious by Wednesday or Thursday I can get past Books and Arts; on blue moon Sundays I actually get to News and find out what happened in the world two weeks ago.

But The West Wing I do love; and I'll say this just once, I love it the way I love Buffy. The thing is, I'm not really into vampires and goth, and rarely even watch horror movies; in the same way, I'm only marginally interested in American executive politics. But Buffy the Vampire Slayer was simply great television, hitting its high notes in Seasons Four and Five. The problem of initiating someone who wouldn't normally watch this sort of thing is that you have to fill in the cumulative mythology from Seasons One to Three, which are good television but not outstanding. What you get in Season Four is the sense of a creator who suddenly realized the possibilities of television. Continuing storylines aren't a new thing; the 80s had Dynasty and Falcon Crest. What suddenly seemed to happen with late Buffy, and eventually with The West Wing and especially with Alias, is that a new form of tightly-written, well-directed, visionary storytelling was attempted.

No single element taken alone is actually new, of course. Well-written doesn't get better than Joss Whedon's "Hush" (Buffy 4); for well-directed just about any of Thomas Schlamme's ten-scenes-in-one-take (including impossibly difficult steadicam shots and lots of backlighting) stuff; for demanding a lot of the audience, Alias 3 is mind-boggling if you didn't see the first two seasons. But the strange thing about anything written for television is that it is not end-oriented: in other words; the basic rule of writing a story, which is to have a beginning and work towards and end, doesn't apply here. The point of television is to have as many seasons as the networks will give you. At the same time, how do you get an audience involved in the story if there isn't a story? This sounds like making too much of a couple of good TV series. Appreciate, yes; but claim that there's something new going on there? Yes, I do.

If you really want to appreciate it, invest in the DVDs. Not for the commentary, but so that you can watch it sequentially rather than as a weekly snippet. I watched The West Wing's first four seasons in one week. Aside from the fact that you can see the sets evolve so that they're not obviously walking through a door into a different time of day, you get a sense of the broad canvas, the larger story. I suddenly remembered the last time I burned night into day by being so engrossed; it was JRR Tolkien (and, to a lesser extent, the Harry Potter novels).

I wrote about small being the new big and big the new small? Forget the size or shape of the screen. The new format is video come of age. Imagine that for years everyone had written novels and short stories; some novelists ran long: Dickens, Dostoyevsky (which Alias has been compared to, by the way); but Proust is long not just quantitatively. It's a long novel in a different way; and there's something "unending" about it as well; and I'm not talking about the experience of reading it. Okay, it's a stretch; but there's something new happening in the format of motion pictures, and it's not happening on the big screen; it's already taking shape in 4:3; in your living room.

And now back to intellectual pretense

Please read with both hands on the table

On the Dashboard of my Macintosh, the widget for the Encyclopaedia Britannica shares space with that for the Wikipedia, which, as a reference source, I find somewhat patchy, but I have a soft spot for that project. Actually, more often than not it triumphs over the Britannica as a reference source: when I need a comprehensive overview of the Battle of Stalingrad I'll use the Britannica; but if I need a quick reference to what XML is all about the Wikipedia's a lot more succinct. By its very nature it'll never actually be "finished"; but at a certain point I think it'll actually reach a watershed point as a reference tool in its own right.

I'm just a little bemused that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is trying to keep itself from obsolescence by putting itself online, and just a little bit sad that they've given up their lordly position on the shelves of every middle-class home; there was something comforting about the authoritativeness of the dark maroon spines with gilded lettering; when you looked up it was as though the full weight of the British Empire was staring back down at you, and the unspoken message wa: "Here is all the knowledge that is worth knowing"; and if you listened carefully, the grand pronouncement was followed by a sotto voce "...you little upstart..." So in the middle of a sentence I would would hesitate, unable to resist the authority of those rows of gilded spines with their arms akimbo behind me, and double-check what I was about to dash off. Strangely enough, now that the Britannica can be called by pressing F12 on the keyboard, I rarely bother.

Credit must be given, thus, to the Oxford English Dictionary, which has resisted the temptation to give up the fight and lurk in cyberspace. Which is a ironic, considering that you need a certain amount of time to get through a Britannica article; whereas you'd think that with the OED you just want to look up a word. (To be honest, what I used to do was take the appropriate volume of the Britannica to the loo with me; its laxative powers are vastly underrated.) But perhaps the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary know that the people who really use the OED for what it is aren't just looking up the meaning of a word, just as Jane Grigson's cookbooks aren't to be used to look up a recipe. No, the Oxford English Dictionary was written by madmen for madmen, and is meant to be read like a novel. (Yes, really: there's a book about the making of it called The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester.) This is why it runs twenty volumes long and has entries 60,000 words long on a single word. Now that's what I'd like to have behind me while I'm at my desk; though if I went to the loo to check out the proper usage of "go" I might never come back.

I'm somewhat ambivalent about all these resources being moved online. I'm an impatient person, and more often than not my more esoteric desires aren't to be found at the local bookstore or music shop. Music is less of a problem; there's always Limewire; but the books I want are always the ones that take a couple of weeks to arrive, so that by the time I get them I tend to open the package with faint surprise. I wanted this? Badly enough to order it? Instant gratification is to be had by downloading e-books; but that means keeping the household up all night with the printer chugging away. Audiobooks I like, but I have a special designation for them; they're for the books that I know I should read (and actually want to read) but I can't bring myself to, like keeping up to date with the latest mathematics and media theory stuff. Based on my own reading habits, I don't think the printed word is going out of date anytime soon, but that's a whole different issue from that of reference.

But while we're hovering around the topic, I'd like to put in a word about libraries. Most people have given up on future survivial of libraries; and I agree, if it's community libraries we're talking about, the kind with little old ladies shushing you and taking twenty minutes to look for a book which turns out to have been lost during the war. But the big libraries will always have their place in the world, and for the same reason that the OED exists in printed form: reference. Every single book published in Britain is required, by law, to send a copy to five libraries: the British Library, the Bodleian in Oxford, the University Library at Cambridge, and two others I can't remember (in Scotland and Wales). Just wandering around the Bodleian is an enthralling experience; it's the same feeling has having the Britannica staring down at you, but a thousand times over.

The University Library at Cambridge is less imposing, both inside and out; in fact, from a distance, there's something remotely phallic about its architecture. There's an urban myth (that might be true; who knows) that the library houses its private collection of pornography (after all, *every* book in Britain is sent there) at the very tip of the phallic protuberance; they purportedly have pornographic material dating from the time of Galileo. Although the University Library (unlike the Bodleian) is a lending library, the ponographic material must be read in that special room at the foreskin; there is a large window through which the curators can check on you and a sign that exhorts you to "Please Read With Both Hands On The Table".

Of course, there are also Newton's papers, some portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls that scholars are working on; and the Bodleiand and the Library of Congress have their own treasures. Not to mention the papers from the trial of Galileo at the Vatican. But if I had free access to all the libraries in the world; that's where I would head first. After all, that's what libraries are for. And that's what you won't find on the Internet.

This way to the phallus
The unfinished project

The Glory of Failure

If you must fail, then do so with aplomb. It's a time of renewed interest in Douglas Adams and his work again, now that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the movie, is being released around the world; the reviews have been mixed (I haven't seen it myself). The producers should have been more careful: it's a text almost as sacred as JRR Tolkien's; and boy, that was playing with fire. But the fact that Tolkien's fans are more than merely zealous but were trained inthe same desert camps as fundamentalist terrorists ia outweighed by the fact that Douglas Adams passed away much more recently. I have a soft spot in my heart for him, incidentally; he was one of the few persons I know of (okay, the only one, come to think of it) who died of writer's block. (Yes, really; check out his biographies.) Another trait that endears him to me is that he, too, understood how dear the Mac Powerbook is to a creative individual. At the time of his death they were able to excavate basically an entire book's worth of unfinished stuff from his hard drive. There aren't many people who are able to produce something by not producing, if you know what I mean.

The ultimate triumh of creating something by not being able to create is Terry Gilliam's attempt to make a film of Don Quixote, starring Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis. It was Gilliam's dream project, but just about everything went wrong from day one; but he pushed on; and let's not stretch the Quixotic metaphor of his doing so too far. He finally gave up, but there was supposed to be a "Making of..." featurette (the kind they stick in the DVD version) which went on to become a kind of cult hit. It's by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe; and, honestly, reading between the lines and gleaning the sort of film that Gilliam was going to make, it seems only fitting that Lost in La Mancha came out and the film didn't, and I dare say the documentary is a lot funnier than what the film would have been. Productivity, I think, is overrated; as long as you're a genius, as Terry Gilliam and Douglas Adams are and were, you can produce even when you didn't.


But I'm going to dig up my copy of HHGG (as Hitchhiker's... is affectionately known) and listen to his original radio serialization before the film comes out. As someone who is in both industries I have a personal rule of never comparing the film to the book; I mean, I do, but never on the basis of faithfulness; one of the reasons I say this is because someone once made a god-awful film from one of my works without my permission; I decided not to sue: but it brought me to the rumination that if the film had been a runaway success I might have decided to. Then again, copyright law is is a bit murky here: an idea can be copyrighted; the expression of an idea can't. Anyway, my research in that area finally led me to the conclusion that anyone is welcome to make a film, kabuki opera, a monologue for five voices, or an installation piece, or whatever, from any of my works; just please have the courtesy to invite me to the opening, eh?

The collaboration that could've been but didn't happen was the Hitchhiker's Guide to La Mancha, and that work, which was was never produced, but in its own way was, is a work that definitely eases a lot of the pressure of everyone's back. Posterity, after all, occasionally is kind enough to judge you on what you didn't manage to do. So I'm going to open a chilled ginger ale and catch up on The West Wing, which is a lot more fun than sitting in front of my editing console.

www.douglasadams.com
The first inception of HHGG was on audio

Small Is The New Big; Big The New Small

While browsing for Aimee Mann on the QuickTime site, I noticed that they now have technology that can let you play videos on on your mobile telephone. And mobiles have become so small these days that I keep opening my compact and holding it up to my hear after scrambling through my bag to answer an incoming call. I should either get a phone that doesn't have to flip open, or pressed powder that comes in a brick. As I tell everyone, I'm an old soul, and when I was at school I enjoyed all the parts that have nothing to do with my job in the media now, like taking movies on Super 8 and threading it through a projector. The videophones began their popularity in Japan, apparently, because they have long commutes to work on crowded subway compartments, and what better way to annoy your fellow travellers than to play an action movie on a little screen held up to their face while the person beside you is trying to compose a haiku? The space needed to set up a projector and play a flickering seven-minute reel would take up as much space as the entire compartment. I personally went through the transition from the whole plane of passengers on a transcontinental flight all craning their heads to watch the same movie and listening to the sound through stethoscopes, to everyone peering intently at the back of the seat in front of them surfing through various channels and having the film paused at a crucial point in the plot by an annoucement for turbulence.

On the same site, I downloaded the trailer for Kingdom of Heaven. Have you noticed that the more important the release is, the more elongated it gets? Really high-budget films seem to be shot in a strange format that requires you to swivel your head from one side to another if you're sitting in the cheap seats up front. Panavision now makes an 80mm format, which is ten times the width of the Kodachrome that I used in my father's Bolex. (I really should dig that up and shoot an epic-like script on it using sock puppets.)

Nothing is medium-sized anymore. Although, actually, they still are. We still are most accustomed to 4:3, the television format: count the number of hours you spend watching TV to watching extremely elongated movies about war and death in a theatre. Or staring at a computer monitor, for that matter. And when they shoot movies in various degrees of elongatedness, they still make sure that everything important happens in the middle, because at some point it's going to be on HBO. One theory is that a wide format is what we're more naturally inclined to, because our eyes are in roughly that proportion. Another theory is that we the wider the screen, the more we're in "surround" mode, and hence it's more real. Myself, I'd rather that it not be too wide so that I can use my peripheral vision to look out for pickpockets, stalkers, and shady would-be rapists lurking by the "Exit" signs.

The irony of it all was that when I finally managed to download the trailer and watch it (and I'm too impatient to click on the full-screen version to buffer), I had a gloriously large, wide-screen HD editing monitor in front of me, and it was completely black except for a a few dead pixels and a rectangle the size of a matchbox in the middle, on which was playing (with black bars above and below), the preview to the epic. I think that at some point in history, these were called peep-hole theatres.

What Filmed in Panavision Means

Morning for the Living

Every night, going to bed is an ordeal for me. Not that I don't want to day to end, but I'm usually afraid it never will and I'll toss and turn, making a terrible a day into an even longer one. So I take pills, sometimes as many as a dozen at a time, combinations of various over-the-counter remedies and "hacks" of medications for other things, like blood pressure suppressors. In continental Europe the pharmacies will cheerfully sell you, over the counter, ten packs of twenties of knockout pills, as long as you look reasonably cheerful while purchasing them, I suppose.

I never know how I'm going to wake up in the morning; what sort of mood I'll be in: cheerful or melancholy; energetic or lethargic; irritable or sated with an irresistible urge to contribute enormous sums of cash to Amensty International. That's why I'm convinced that while sleeping I'm actual up and about in another world living a parallel life, and stuff happens to me there.

But there are some mornings that are just special, and sometimes you just wake up to them like unexpected presents laid at the bedside. Possibilites are infinite, the world is huge and wonderful and worth exploring, and there are all sorts of exciting things to do and nothing that has to get done or else. Physically, you're starting to think about breakfast. This is especially true when travelling; after all, when I'm at home, I don't really think about breakfast so much as have it, as I usually know what I'm going to have for breakfast; but in a foreign hotel bedroom the room service menu suddenly doesn't look quite as exorbitant as it did the night before.

One of the essentials of a good hotel is a CD player in the room (these days, sometimes an iPod dock in the room). There's a limited amont of time to get dressed (sleeping in the buff is a pleasant habit from my years of promiscuity), and these mornings absolutely call for music. I used to play it on my Walkman, then iPod, now on the reasonably good speakers of my Powerbook. But a few hotels have particularly good sound systems: the Peninsula in Honkong; Claridge's in London; at the Ritz in Paris the acoustic aren't outstanding but they managed to hide a car stereo console within a gilded Louis XVI table. In the past I used to burn a disc on the spot, but now I travel with a couple of compilations. One day I decided to "master" a defintive collection to commemorate what I caled a "Morning for the Living" (a pun on mourning for the dead, but no one gets it...yes, this is the point when you say Aaah!...)

The picture I used for the album cover really was taken very early on a very beautiful morning with a Powershot S1, a vastly underrated camera which is the Leica M6 of our time.

1. Because the Night, from the 10,000 Maniacs MTV Unplugged album. Nothing like rock and roll to get the blood pumping.

2. No Ordinary Morning, by Chicane from his Behind the Sun album. Because.

3. I'm a Traveler, by Clem. Much effort was spent on my part to track down any more information about this artist. I found the song on an album called Correspondances, released by the RATP, the company that runs the Paris Metro. Apparently you can't just go and busk in the tunnels of the underground there; you have to audition for each line's Musical Director. At some point they released an album of the best of the music from the buskers, and this American girl was among them. Short of hoping to chance upon her in the Chatelet-Les Halles interchange, I've given up the search. The company's site makes no mention of the CD, and they aren't selling in stores.

4. Morning, by Karen Matheson, from the album Time to Fall. A morning song if there ever was one, although the title is misleading. Look under Celtic or Folk

5. The Rainbow Connection, performed by Sarah McLachlan from the album For the Kids.

6. Morning, also called Smile, from the film Modern Times by Charles Chaplin. He wrote it himself. It sounds melancholy at first, but if you have a mental reference to the moment in the film (when they decide to go on down the road together, and the film ends with them walking off intoa fade; cross-refernce, by the way, to the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

7. There She Goes, a cover by Sixpence None the Richer, when they apparently didn't know that the song was about heroin.

8. Nessun Dorma, from Turandot by Puccini, by Pavarotti of course. Who could sleep anyway if someone was singing at you like that? And who would want to sleep? There's a fresh new morning, washed and pressed, waiting for you to put it on.

Where you might find some real underground music

Going Through the Motions

That being the title of one of Aimee Mann's songs on her album that is posted, in its entirety, on her website. It also happens to be one of the funniest songs from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show's musical episode, written by the series' creator Joss Whedon and performed by the cast. It's brilliant. The Aimee Mann song has nothing to do with it; it's from her new album The Forgotten Arm; I stumbled across it when trying to figure out what QuickTime is all about.

Aimee Mann has always been one of my favorite artists since the days when music was to be found on CDs and opened eagerly (and with great endeavour to tear through the peoiple-proof packaging that it is shrink-wrapped in), in those prehistoric days just after records were invented as an afterthought to the wheel. I loved her voice and the poetry of her lyrics; her collaboration with the makers of the movie Magnolia; and also discovered she was tall and pretty to boot. She seems to be quite at ease with music in the digital age. Her website is one of those full of flash animations and complicated stuff that slide up and down; she has released an exclusive iTunes album; one of her videos was filmed in HD and is downloadable from the Quicktime 7 site; and finally there's The Forgotten Arm, the entire album, in a Quicktime stream on her site. A nifty window opens and presents rotating graphics along with the lyrics to every song as it streams. And I must say that this isn't Internet radio the way it used to be. You can skip through the songs, which just the slightest pause, look at the lyrics or do something else while it plays. And it's all for free.

Well, sort of. There are various ways to define "free" on the Internet these days, and here we run into the famous cultural distinction between the concepts of the public and the private and what is owned or not. Let's digress to the real world and compare American suburbia to a European city: the latter was conceived with a sense of public ownership; people live in cramped, not very comfortable or attractive flats; but outside they move about in well-designed public transportation; most museums are free; art is in the architecture, the spaces, the gardens, is free: as opposed to the American desire to capture, to own, to take home; they have a compulsive need to take snapshots or videotape experiences; they like to accumulate, to gather, to store; and isn't that what consumerism is about?

The thing about the Aimee Mann album as a Quicktime stream is that there is no way of capturing and storing it directly. As far as my brother is concerned, it can't be done; and I tend to trust him as the final arbiter of what the average netizen can or can't do. You can go to the website and click on it as many times as you wish, but you can't use one of the fiendish methods of capture to grab it. The only way would be to physically get another device and record the sound as it plays, which is like the old method of pirating movies (to hold a videocamera at the screen in a moviehouse for the entire film; this was before DVD cloning was the rage); it's like not being able to stop at admiring the painting in a free public museum and having a compulsive need to buy a postcard of it in the souvenir shop. True, nothing's permanent on the Internet, but chances are I'll enjoy listening to it enough before it gets taken down; and if it does and I really like it, I will go and buy a CD (which, incidentally, doesn't take up much space and is still an excellent medium for archiving, along with 78s. Incidentally, shopping at the online iTunes music store is rather like buying 78s, which was *the* standard for music distribution for a long span of time; each record held one song on each side (and some people even theorize that the technological limits of the 78 rpm shellac disc gave us the average length of the song as we know it today, about four minutes). At any flea market or attic you can buy these for just about a dollar; there was probably a time in its day when it cost about a dollar as well, though a dollar then isn't worth what it is today. I'd say that for a dollar a song we now get stereo sound processed by sound technicians and without a scratchy sound, so it's hard to say which dollar was really worth more.

So will I be going through the motions of trying to capture Aimee Mann's album to add to an already cluttered private space in the form of (god forbid! a tape)? For the sheer perversity of outwitting the system, perhaps; just as a sign saying "Do Not Tap On The Glass" makes you want to do just that. But in the long run, as long as she's not going hungry (and she doesn't look like she is), I'll stroll down the Internet the way one strolls along the streets of Paris, and enjoy the beauty that might or might not be there tomorrow (it's the city of light, after all, not the Eternal City). Here's to a beautiful woman who has just made the Internet landscape more beautiful by making her art public. Perhaps some regions of the Internet will look more like Milan or Prague and less like Deadtown suburbia.

www.aimeemann.com
Aimee Mann Video

The Girl in the Mirror

Girl

My reflection, the girl staring back at me, is changes from one day to another; this pretty girl is who I'd like to be or who I think I am on my best days.

It's an image I found on the Internet, of course, but I chose it because the girl seemed to be about the same age as I am. Of course she's probably in her teens and in makeup; but I'm led to believe that if I moisturize enough I can look that good.

She's dressed in baby blue, a color I would never wear; I've spent my life trying to look older by wearing black. But now that I look older not because of makeup but because of, er, time, there's something striking about the soft baby pastel and the sophistication in her face.

What she's wearing is deliberately androgynous, with the pert cap at an angle, like Eponine in Les Miserables. I might as well put forward that I'm understood to be like both genders, sometimes at the same time; I never came out with it but didn't attempt to hide it either.

If anyone stumbles across this weblog and thinks they recognize someone, that might have been me walking down the street with the same sparkle in my eyes. Our it might just have been my reflection.