August 2007 Archives

has issues. still pretty cute. i love kid movies that arn't stupid. bonus points for sci-fi.

i heard if yr hands bigger than yr face, you have cancer.

Being the third week of August, it must almost be September which means it is almost time for Conflux Festival 2007 in Brooklyn + Manhattan. That means pogo sticks galore, chalk dust outlines in the street, graf and cell phone games. I am so psyched I just couldn't wait to post about it. This year features work from the awesome curatorial collective Metro Color Collision, the cool-as radio station collaborative free103point9 and everyone's favorite tech-art-fag-nerd organization Eyebeam, among many, many others. Check here for a totally dead-on wiki definition of psychogeography that rightfully mentions situationist Guy Debord and the organization I am interviewing with next month, iKatun. See you at the Conflux!

This video gave me chills. It's amazing. Thoughts?

Follow up article about the Harry Potter knock-offs that have flooded China in recent years.

In addition to my personal favorite, "Harry Potter and the Big Funnel," we also now have:

"Harry Potter and the Waterproof Pearl"

"Harry Potter and Platform Nine and Three-Quarters"

"Harry Potter and the Chinese Overseas Students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry"

United 0020 Depart: LAX 07:00 AM Arrive: JFK 03:11 PM Non-stop 5h 11m 757 2,475 miles traveled Fare basis code: LE21NR1 Booking class: L Economy 2,475 Award miles Food for Purchase 23D Download to calendar premium service Flight details --% On-time 2475 miles traveled [Food for Purchase] Economy 2475 Award miles Availability Mon, Sep 10, 2007 - New York, NY (JFK) to Los Angeles, CA (LAX) United 0033 Depart: JFK 08:45 PM Arrive: LAX 12:24 AM Next day Sep 11 Non-stop 6h 39m 757 2,475 miles traveled Fare basis code: LE21NR1 Booking class: L Economy 2,475 Award miles No Meal Service 23D Download to calendar premium service

I'm not much of a sports fan, but even I know that Barry Bonds, a roid-enhanced SF Giant, just beat former Brave and ATL hero Hank Aaron's home run record. Bonds' record: 756 homers.

Alas, we Japanophiles must note that, once again, the real record belongs to someone you've probably never heard of in Tokyo. Bonds' and Aaron's numbers are both impressive, but perhaps as or more impressive:

Oh Sadaharu has 868.

Says Mr. Oh, when asked about Aaron's/Bonds' record/s: “I’m just a man who happened to hit a lot of home runs in Japan.”

Touche, little dude. Touche.

Today I read an article about the Jhannet Sejas/ Regal Cinemas case that was published on August 2nd. It's kind of crazy. The story in a nutshell: a girl recorded a 20 second clip of the new Transformers movie on her camera to show her little brother, and is now facing up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine. I have signed on to the boycott against Regal Cinemas unless they drop all charges.

Anyway, I noticed a statistic in the story that drives me batshit crazy every time I read it: The worldwide motion picture industry lost $18 billion in 2005 as a result of piracy.

It's a very fishy statistic. For starters, that oft-quoted statistic encompasses the losses of "the worldwide motion picture industry, including foreign and domestic producers, distributors, theaters, video stores and pay-per-view operators."

According to the MPAA's own document, "the major motion picture studios represented by the MPAA" only lost $6.1 billion to piracy in 2005, a more accurate number since we're talking about a major motion picture shown in a nationwide theatre chain. But as for the US, it breaks down even further. Even the MPAA claims that US losses add up to only $1.3 billion, an even more appropriate number, as the crime was committed in the US and US law applies.

But I think that number may still be way too high. The MPAA calculates these losses not on any scientific study or research. They cite their source for these numbers only as this:
Piracy loss calculations are based on the number of legitimate movies – movie tickets and legitimate DVDs – consumers would have purchased if pirated versions were not available.

How can they calculate this number? Well, they can't. It's barely possible to count the number of people who have downloaded any given movie from a pirate site, and even then there are almost always multiple copies of the same movie available, and the numbers of downloaders shift from minute to minute.

Even still, let's say hypothetically you could count every illegal download and every illegal hard copy DVD sold. (You can't and they haven't.) It's quite a leap to go from that number to assume that each illegal download and sale is a loss for the companies. Not everyone that downloaded any given movie would have paid to see the film in question if a pirated version was available.

The essence of what I'm saying is this: the $18 billion figure so often quoted in the press is dreadfully misleading and wholly inaccurate - not because of bad science or lousy research, but because it is entirely made up.

How dem dere tornados?

the raw shark texts this book has a viral youtube marketting campaign. it's sort of a borges-cum-calvino with a dash of murakami book, but then he quotes both of them before two different sections, which is lame. there's a bad entity creaure man thing named Mycroft Ward that's into assimilating, and with my thoughts on Microsoft Word and shrinking language, and how strong language is a concrete thingy in the book makes me smiley. Also, the book has ascii art, and an ascii shark flip book section. and they make some sort of brian eno tape loop thing that's like a pent-o-gram of safety like from that Ghoulies movie. Lot's of cute science based on logic and not tech, and a lot of tech based on logic and not science. Enough cultural allusions to be annoying. viral youtube account, featuring lightbulbs and sharks

soon i will be invincible parody of super heroes and villians from alternating chapters from one Dr. Impossible (villian) and a new hero cyborg lady named Fatal ("Fuh. Tell. I should have chosen Cybergirl. It was on the list.") The parody is light, it really reads for the most part like any post modern comic, cept there's not pictures. So, it's still enjoyable and funny at points. The batman, hero with no powers, character is autistic, which I like. They touch on time travel and alien invasions, so it's full blown, which is also nice. There's also a 100 year old retired villian named Baron Ether who lives in New Haven, CT, which is like, right where I grew up. So cool. Author is a videogame consultant.

god jr. Dennis Cooper, the author, I've been told, usually writes about highly horrible gay punk action, with Venice beach runaways being fisted and murdered and then being discussed by a group of men who pick up said Venice beach runaways, who do fuck them, but don't murder them. I haven't read those books. This book is a short with a big font about a man who lost his son in a car accident. he also lost the use of his legs. Kinda. He's building a monument to his son, based on a drawing. Then he plays some GameCube for about 40% of the book, a faux Banjo Kazooie.......

......where his son spent a lot of time. But those last few sentences don't really sum it up at all. Its a tiny book about things beyond gried but still framed in rationale. It made me really sad. It also reminded me of Alpha Dog and why I dislike LA so much. And pot. Nintendo is still ok.

longitude 'popular account' of the guy who made the first chronometer that helped sailors navigate the seas and avoid pirates. some crazy shit, like what scurvy does after all your teath fall out. (your brain explodes.) also, an attempt to solve the longitude problem by wounding dogs and intellictual turf warfare with the clock tinkerers taking on the astronomers. also lots of archaic tech. i think there's a bbc miniseries about this with michael gambon.

then we came to the end this book is the 2nd person plural. its all We this and We that. And not the royal We. Its there for a purpose that accepts that shit crown at the last paragraph, but its still a pretty funny book about an office where everyone is getting laid off slowly, while the only work they have is an impossible pro bono case about making breast cancer funny. Increadibly nether clawings to 9/11 that are so faint, because, if they are there, they stand on quagmire. The one from hound of the baskervilles. the grimpen mire. That thing ate a horse. Great flashback when a co-workers daughter is kidnapped and they make a missing poster for her, and photoshop all the not-so-nice from the kidnappie. not so weird depature chapter in the middle that is revealed in the end. eh.

books by david mitchell
cloud atlas fucking brilliant. let's chase the modern human condition in a boutique of great language accross the horizon of time, and then trace it back. 6 stories, all tied to each other by their own narrative, interrupted in mid clause to pick it up on the end. missionary diaries, bisexual composers letters, movies, holograms, oral communication and collapsed down on itself on the way out. period peices smashed on omega level sci-fi capitalism, and all critqued by the next generation or ten. should have won the man booker thing prize.
black swan green wonder years in england with thatcher and the falklands. eh. gave it to my mom.
number9dreamhis second book. i didn't like it despite being set in tokyo with idiosynchric genre remixs. didn't finish it. rare for me.
ghostwritten his first book. very good. cloudatlas journey but bleak. follow a japanese cultist to a misplaced phonecall to runaway lovers to korea who ask an english man for the time who is embezzeling who in turn.... etc. There's a non corpral body and a radio dj who talks to a satelite. man made.

books not written by david mitchell

the keep i gave this book to sam. I liked it. I hope he read it.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics Good read. Its a mystery novel, but you don't know it, ever. Oh fuck I just said it. I guess its going to be a movie and people think the author is attractive. was listed as a top ten book in NYT book review for 06 and didn't sound boring. Its was ok, I guess.

Against The Day Is Pynchon parodying himself? Probably not. Still pretty great.

The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky is one killer piece of work. Snaky oboe lines give way to implosive, full orchestral chords of sheerly dissonant weight, flitting toothy flutes chomp into wavering tones and when you see it with Leonard Bernstein conducting, you get a sense of just how tres difficile the work is for the concert players. But in delving even further, as I did upon listening to WNYC last night, I found that the dissonant layers of this work are actually known to cause schizophrenic reactions! Yes, that's right. How does this happen? Well, the brain processes sounds that are consonant in a much more streamlined way than it does dissonant sounds. Because of this tim elapse, apparently a jumble of confusion occurs, as was evident the opening night of the Rite of Spring. On this evening, reportedly, old ladies with cane sbeat each other, boos, hisses and throwing of objects underscored the performance of the work. Now check this out: one year later they performed again. What happened? Well, Stravinsky was lifted out of the concert hall on the shoulders of audience members and critics alike as the sounds they heard were already familiar, the pathways for understanding them had been established. Kooky. Check this decent clip of Bernstein conducting a youth orchestra.

The names are blocked out for privacy reasons. Sort of...it just seemed like a good idea.)

Google doesn't need my help to continue on with their plans of world domination, and yet here I am about to give it to them. Because I have to say, I am really digging their iGoogle homepage thingy. I didn't hear much about it's rollout, google seems to kind of slip these things quietly into the market and let the strong survive. A good tactic if you ask me. Anyway, the google homepage is kind of like what I wanted from widgets, except widgets turned out to be slow, sort of annoying, and I eventually just stopped using them. But now, I have everything right there on my firefox page, which at this point is open pretty much 24/7. It takes a minute to get it the way you want it, and the visual "themes" are awful and seemingly aimed at 10 year old girls, so just stick with classic. But once you have it set up, I have my gmail, my google reader RSS feed, gchat, a dictionary, a wikipedia thingy, a youtube search (offscreen) a translator, all shit I actually use. It's tempting to overload your page with crap, but fight the instict and go with a your top 10 or 15 "gadgets" as the call them. It is pretty swank. (Dear Google, send the check to D-Rock, Budapest Lane.)

Do you ever worry that you've done something really bad, without meaning to? Caused some awful thing, but purely by accident? I'm getting a lot of that recently.

I'm a medical student. I'm working on the pediatric inpatient floor at an urban hospital right now. I've been there two and a half weeks. I see all kinds of interesting stuff: cellulitis, staph scalded skin syndrome, little babies with fevers, pneumonia.

Not surprisingly, I'm also sick. I woke up yesterday having trouble breathing. I started off with a bit of a cough. By this morning, I was coughing up icky nastiness... at the hospital. On call. Seeing kiddos. One of the patients admitted today was a little boy with a history of kidney problems. He was having stomach pain, and when you pushed on his belly, it was firm and knobby, and he groaned. The x-ray showed that he was all full of poop, all the way up his left colon, across, and down his right colon... you're not supposed to have solid poo that far into your gut. So we ordered him some enemas and some laxatives, and waited to see what happened.

I know what you're thinking: "I don't want to read a book about a twee British boy with a rad scar, but I would read that book if it were loaded with kung-fu fights and lessons about civic morality in a sprawling, hyperspastically-developing empire."

Well look no further.

China, purveyor of all things bootlegged, has been pumping out Harry Potter books for years - particularly "final" episodes, because waiting is for losers - and many of the books tack on China-tastic elements like kicking and speaking out of synch with your lips.

Here are just some of the sweet, sweet books about little boys with brooms between their legs that you've not only missed but will continue to miss, since (besides their titles) they've yet to be translated into English:

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince”
“Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon”
“Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire”
“Harry Potter and the Young Heroes”
“Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon”
“Harry Potter and the Big Funnel” (this is obviously the winner)
“Harry Potter and the Chinese Porcelain Doll”

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL. One man, eager to please his young, Potter-crazed son, wrote a 250,000-word (wtf) final episode with a no-nonsense title. From the New York Times:

The result was “Harry Potter and the Showdown,” a 250,000-word novel, the final version of which he placed recently on Web sites, followed by a notice saying he was looking for publishers. The book quickly logged 150,000 readers on a popular Chinese site, Baidu.com’s Harry Potter fan Web page.

“This is fantastic,” Gu Guaiguai, an admiring reader, wrote online about “Showdown.” “I wonder if Rowling would bother to continue to write if she had read it.”

Another reader was even more breathless. “You are the pride of our Harry Potter fans,” he wrote, adding, “We expect you to go on and write Harry Potter number eight,” which Mr. Li has in fact already begun.

[Disclaimer: I have not read any of the HP books; I think they're a scam by Hewlett-Packard to sell more non-working Ease-E Break printers. I have seen the movies and enjoyed watching scary demon-things continually punk British kids. I am, however, deeply entrenched in Harry Potter number nine, tentatively entitled "Harry Potter and the Crazy Bamboo Warriors," or perhaps "My Dinner With Harry Potter... and Andre... and Crazy Bamboo Warriors." It's complicated.]