January 2008 Archives
Slate has a good update on how The Dark Knight will continue without Heath Ledger, who plays the Joker. There have been plenty of rumors lately that Ledger had not finished his work on the film, but Warner is insisting that they have everything they needed. Another reassuring note, Slate claims if they did need to hire a voice artist to fake a couple of voice loops for the Joker, the professional result would be completely unnoticeable.
Archer, a minty-sweet new slab serif from Hoefler & Frere Jones. Looks pretty delicious.
A Drum Buddy is a "custom-built light-activated analog drum-machine" created an used by the artist Quintron. See the demonstration here. A light activated synthesizer is definitely a new concept to me, but it does seem to have some haptic qualities similar to a theremin. It looks like it is a mini-game straight out of Mario Party.
Arcade Fire has released a new (and official) music video for the first track of Neon Bible, "Black Mirror". Nice quality and plenty epic. Also an interesting touch, on the website you can press keyboard keys to turn audio tracks on and off, offering some unexpected ways to hear it.
And now I realize I somehow missed another interactive video for the title track "Neon Bible". Click around.
Director of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan, writes an article in Newsweek remembering Heath Ledger and his dedication to playing the Joker:
I would visualize the screening where we'd have to show him the finished film—sitting three or four rows behind him, watching the movements of his head for clues to what he was thinking about what we'd done with all that he'd given us. Now that screening will never be real. I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly.
It has been over two weeks since I saw P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood. I still can't shake it. I have that rare impression that I get from a movie where I leave the theatre feeling like I was part of a great event. I actually saw something happen, and on some level, whether fully conscious or not, it will have an influence on my life. This only happens to me when a film is so well put together that you forget it's a film, therefore doesn't feel "put together" at all.
And though everyone seems to have something to say about it, not enough can be said for Daniel Day-Lewis's performance. That wasn't acting. Day-Lewis was a different person altogether. I have confidence that his portrayal of the power-sociopath and loving father Daniel Plainview should go down in the history books as possibly the greatest actor performance on film. Not to belittle all the great work there has been, but when honestly and objectively thinking about it, I can't for the life of me think of a work with this amount of nuance and depth. I was convinced this Daniel Plainview existed.
To complete this tryptic are Johnny Greenwood's sound poems. In an interview he said that he didn't create themes for characters or situations, but more it was all a study of Daniel Plainview's complicated mind—and it reads that way. It is shaped by the landscape he lives in, with the swells of hills and atonal hums of empty desert plains. It is shaped by the drumming labor within him, with all the clanking and pounding of a mind that never stops running. And it is shaped by the melodic peace he finds in the thought of his son. But throughout the score there's always the looming dissonance that says something is wrong—that something is coming.
And boy does it come.
Having some fun this morning looking at old book reviews in the NYTimes archives. Here's a snippet from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian review from 1985—a book I'm reading right now—which is as ambiguous as the story itself. If you enjoyed No Country for Old Men but are open to a lot more violence, and hazier plot, and according to this review, an ending that is even less resolved, you might try this one. It's the kind of book you spend a few chapters learning how to read, and once you figure it out you realize that the language is in complete control. You just have to give up, saddle up, and go along for the ride.
The horsemen cross the plain ''as if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality.'' That line, buried in the middle of the book, contains the heart of all Cormac McCarthy's fiction - its deep horror, the reality we are forced to witness, the qualifying ''as if'' throwing everything into doubt, and above all the brilliance of the work's conception.
Growing up, either you're a Star Wars kid, or a Trekkie. I was a Star Wars kid. But the three horrible Lucas prequels of the past few years, and an upcoming J.J. Abrams directed Star Trek film might finally convert me. What a handsome teaser trailer. Wow.
I'm not sure who Victor Taba is, but he has my attention. The Presstube-like animations are great, but the audio accompaniment is especially beautiful. Give it time, let it build up for a while.
Frodo cast the ring into Mordor…
And Microsoft is releasing an update on February 12 that will upgrade all
versions of Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7. Yes! I can't express how happy this makes me. For those of you that don't know the feeling of wondering through the vast, black depths of programming and debugging for IE6 let me tell you, this is big. Don't bother getting me a birthday present this year. I won't like it.
Install Mac OS X Leopard on your PC in just one step. I repeat, install Mac OS X Leopard on your PC in just one step. This is wonderful.
To accompany the post below, here is There Will Be Blood PT Anderson being interviewed on NPR. Don't listen if you haven't seen the film. Too many revealing audio clips.
NPR has a series of fantastic short interviews with Daniel Day-Lewis on his performance for There Will be Blood, and Johnny Greenwood's score for the film. If you have never heard Day-Lewis speak out of character before, brace yourself. It's a totally different person.
Six volunteers agreed to be shut inside a cell in a nuclear bunker, alone and in complete darkness for 48 hours for a BBC documentary. Easily the most potentially frightening part for me would be waking up:
Within half an hour of being locked up at the start of the experiment, all of the subjects lie down and go to sleep. But the real ordeal will begin when they wake up and find they have no idea what time it is.
The thought of that makes my skin crawl.
T26 "Print" shirt—designed by me—up for sale at the merch store. Grab a few for the family.
A gallery of vintage travel posters. From Quipsologies.
"Its huge skull, more than 20 inches long, suggested a beast more than eight feet long and weighing between 1,700 and 3,000 pounds." A new species of dinosaur perhaps? No, actually it's a rat. A rat the size of a bull.
Just want to share a couple simple and seriously useful apps I've found lately. Please feel free to contribute in the comments.
- Spanning Sync: Sync iCal and Google Calendar very easily. Been waiting for this for a long time.
- Anxiety: Ironic name. Simple to-do list that syncs with Mail and iCal.
- Fluid: Build site specific applications. Great concept. I tote my Backpack around with a little more confidence now. Google app users especially take note.
- iWork: Yeah, not too uncommon, but I can't tell you how useful I've found these apps lately. No Office ever again. Pages is a dream.
Just one photo and one paragraph, but a pretty nice idea: bookstores offer free bookjackets with each purchase, produced by publishing companies or used as advertising. Again, nice idea, but only in Japan could this be pulled off with enough class so that customers would actually want to use the thing.
“Modern architecture has become totally homogenized and uninteresting. We’re losing our sense of who we are, how we developed and where we’re going." Richard Driehaus loves neo-Classicism. He lives in Chicago. This concerns me. (Though from the sound of it, I wouldn't mind attending his annual "birthday extravaganza".)
Also linked in the Yahoo! article below, I feel compelled to post this excellent "fan made" video (I still don't know what to call these things… "mashup" sounds like a disgusting food) for a band called Health, with footage cut from Werner Herzog's documentary The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner. A great example of how such unrelated works can be made completely new when welded together.
Bodycage has been featured on Yahoo! News today in a story about fans making their own music videos. Best quote: "On his blog, Helms sounded amazed at the success of his fusion."
Leave it to nature to hush a war zone for a morning and actually make people stop and smile. On Friday, it snowed in Baghdad.
The Morning News has a portrait gallery of Psychics by Peter Ross.
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) announced in December that John Maeda, one of the few main reasons I decided to be a graphic designer, is going to become the school's new president in June. The announcement came as a real surprise to most people, including me. Heller gets some answers.
For the wizards out there, IGN has just opened up a new Retro section of their popular gaming site, starting with an article on their 10 year history. Kudos to them. 10 years is an achievement for any website. And I'm not ashamed to admit I've been going there for Zelda walkthroughs and Goldeneye cheats since the beginning, when the site looked like this.
My backup plan if the state doesn't pass the CTA funding bill: the world's cheapest car. Made for conditions in India. Looks fun.
"If you ask film composers — and I have — whether they feel there’s too much or too little music in the average film, they will all say too much." Carter Burwell is the composer for the Coen brothers' film No Country for Old Men. If that sounds strange to you, you're correct to think so… since the film has no music. Another remarkable thing about this for me is that I didn't notice the film had no music until the very end of the second time I saw it in theatres. An article about the sound design of No Country for Old Men.
Drawings by James Jean. Pretty incredible work. "Crayon Eater" is a favorite of mine.
An eye-opening article on Speakup about the subtle brilliance of Obama's design campaign.
For each segment of people, the logo changes accordingly, tip-toeing a fine line between cliché and clever, and never crossing to the former's dark side. The iterations are quickly identifiable and feel genuinely concerned with connecting to the people they are talking to, without pandering.
The Times breaks down PT Anderson's relationships with his family and his films. On a related note, There Will Be Blood finally hit wide release. Guess where I'll be tonight.
I've learned a few good things from other folks' Best of 2007 lists lately, so I decided to contribute some myself. My biggest surprise from the list is the lack of newcomers on the music front. There just weren't any great breakthrough groups for me this year—but plenty of veterans delivered some of their best work to date, so no matter.
Best Films
Best Albums
Best Games
Favorite Shows
Favorite Netflix Rentals
Favorite Albums Discovered this Year, Released Before 2007
Most Anticipated Coming in 2008
Great review on Pitchfork for Johnny Greenwood's orchestral music for There Will Be Blood—of which I'm still waiting to see. Come on wide release.
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