The Groucho Letters
The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx was featured recently in one of the four million e-mail newsletters I receive. I think it was Very Short List. I'm so behind on personal e-mail right now it's silly.
Anyhow, I checked out a page or two via Amazon's Look Inside the Book feature and found this book to be a delight. Here's one famous excerpt, from a letter Groucho wrote to Warner Bros. when they came after him and his brothers for attempting to make a movie called A Night in Casablanca because Warner Bros. had made Casablanca five years earlier:
You claim to own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without your permission. What about "Warner Brothers?" Do you own that, too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. We were touring the sticks as The Marx Brothers when Vitaphone was still a gleam in the inventor's eye, and even before us there had been other brothers--the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with Detroit; and "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" (This was originally "Brothers, Can You Spare a Dime?" but this was spreading a dime pretty thin, so they threw out one brother gave all the money to the other one and whittled it down to, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"
The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx
Heima
Here's the trailer for the Sigur Ros movie Heima. I have no idea what it's about, but if ever there was a band whose music could inspire a new Qatsi trilogy for this age, it's Sigur Ros.
Seven soldiers
7 soldiers just back from a tour of duty in Iraq write an op-ed in the NYTimes about the state of the counterinsurgency. Their assessment:
To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)
And more:
In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.
Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.
We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.
D3...serious hotness
Workaround for sending MMS messages using your iPhone. The iPhone camera isn't that hot, but sometimes you just want to send a photo to someone on the spot. Being able to send a photo of decent quality to someone instantaneously using whatever you used to snap the photo is one of those things I would have thought would be commonplace by now, but it's not. Some people have camera phones, but the photo quality is terrible. Others have decent phone cameras, but then the recipient can't view the photo in high resolution. Or you have a digital camera that doesn't have wireless access and a keyboard for typing in contacts.
Speaking of cameras, Nikon and Canon continue to pound the living daylights out of each other on the digital SLR cage fight. Canon introduced the EOS 1DS Mark III, with a 21-megapixel full frame sensor. Today, Nikon came back with the D3, with a near full-frame sensor (a first for Nikon in its digital SLR line), but more importantly, a max ISO rating of 25,600, or "64X what was commonly regarded as high-speed film." It shoots up to 9 frames per second with Autofocus tracking and up to 11fps without.
ISO 25,600? Criminy, that thing will see in the dark. 11 fps? HDMI video output? A virtual horizon function which lets you know when the camera is perfectly level? a 920K dot LCD?!
Once you start collecting some lenses by either Nikon or Canon, it's tough to justify switching, and both are close enough in performance that there's no reason to. But I'd been jealous of Canon's full-frame sensors on its digital SLRs. When Canon announced the 21MP 1DS MKIII, I was a bit envious, but the features on the D3 are much more exciting to me than the 21MP's. That ISO setting, if it's actually usable, may mean leaving your flash at home for so many more situations. Even if it relies on some digital voodoo like the D2X required to reach ISO 1600, the D3 has a still impressive 6,400 top end ISO if you don't resort to digital shenanigans.
Also, the Canon 1DS MKIII costs a jaw-dropping $8,000. Yes, it may perform at medium format quality levels, but at that price you could just buy a medium format camera.
Check out the DPReview preview of the D3 which streets in November. Here's Ken Rockwell's preview.
I wet my pants reading about the D3. All I can say is me...want...now. If I get one, I'm going to set it next to my iPhone in the hopes they mate and spawn some of the sexiest gadgets ever.
Also among the Nikon announcements: an AF-S 14-24mm f2.8 lens. I want one of those, too, as Nikon has really been lacking in the wide-angle lens category for its digital SLRs because of the multiplication factor on its previous sensors.
Shine a Light trailer
Martin Scorsese has a Rolling Stones documentary called Shine a Light coming out, well, I think in 2008 sometime. Here's the trailer in Quicktime 480p and smaller if you're scared to see the crevices in Keith Richards' face with too much clarity. The trailer is good, energetic.
I've always been partial to Scorsese's musical docs. The Last Waltz is fantastic.
UPDATE: Ken asked that I add a warning about the graphic footage of Mick Jagger grinding up against "young-enough-to-be-his-grandaughter (or at least a fifth girlfriend)" Christina Aguilera. Instead of a May-December, this is more March-December. I was just surprised to discover the two had sung together in concert.
A new pair of glasses for the web
Adobe announces Moviestar, a new version their web video Adobe Flash Player 9, with support for H.264. It also includes a new audio codec called High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC).
So we may not have to put up with the low quality Flash video at YouTube for much longer. Though it is one of the better codecs for producing high quality video at low file sizes, H.264 is not a magic bullet. But used well, it can offer "good enough" quality for full-screen viewing on a computer without crazy download times.
Adobe has posted one demo. Viewed at full screen, i wouldn't call it high def, but it's sufficient for standard def for today's bandwidths. You can retain the minimal latency of today's Flash video while adding a welcome boost in video quality.
I used to think such intermediate forms of video quality wouldn't be needed for long if Internet bandwidth to homes continued to increase at the rates predicted by Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth. But I feel like Internet bandwidth to the home hasn't improved much for me in the past several years. I'm actually putting up with slower bandwidth here in LA (DSL) than I had a few years ago in Seattle through a cable modem.
True streaming high def over the web is not yet a reality. Someday, but not today.
Silver Lining
I didn't get a chance to listen to all of Rilo Kiley's new album Under the Blacklight at their MySpace page before they pulled most of the tracks down. What tracks I did hear are sure to elicit some gagging from a subset of their diehard fans upset with their move over to a major label and a more mainstream pop sound.
I like "Silver Lining" a lot, though--it's a sweet little tune (that one is still up at their MySpace page). And since I, like many in the indie music world, heart Jenny Lewis, I'll be trying to catch them on their new album tour.
A good place to start, if you want to delve into the Rilo Kiley most of us have known and dug up until now, is with their earlier album Execution of All Things.
Field Notes brand notebooks available for order
Those Field Notes Brand notebooks I mentioned a while back are available for pre-order. I ordered two sets to test out as companions to my Moleskines for note-taking.
I filled about 7 Moleskines taking notes for class last year, and I was refining my system for using them as I went, adding page numbers and an index to important content in the front.
For sheer portability and durability, a paper notebook still bests a laptop. I'm getting old and need to write down more and more.
The Big Parade and Born to Be Bad
I caught up with a film school classmate last night by attending a double bill of King Vidor's The Big Parade (2nd highest grossing silent film of all time after The Birth of a Nation) and Nicholas Ray's Born to Be Bad (a sort of All About Eve starring the lovely Joan Fontaine). You might ask what links these two movies (shortly after asking "What movies?"). You might ask because I did, shortly after my friend suggested the double bill.
It turns out that the what links the two movies is that they are rare pieces from the UCLA Film Archive, not to be found on DVD or at your local megaplex or as a torrent on the high seas of Internet piracy, and both are black and white.
Together they loomed as a formidable opponent to my attention span on a Friday night after a long week at work. I laugh now to think that I initially asked if I should leave work earlier than normal in order to buy tickets in advance. I must have been thinking of Superbad, that movie showcasing those new film technologies known as color and sync sound. No, even in the most ardent film appreciation city in the world, I doubt a back-to-back showing of a 2 hr 20 min silent film and a 1 hr 30 minute black and white from the 1950's would sell out.
When we strolled into the very new Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, I spied a die-hard audience of about 8 people, most of them old enough to have been Billy Wilder contemporaries. I was no longer nervous that I'd pass out and start snoring loudly as it was likely that a few of the other filmgoers might do so as well, out of sheer age. One seat in the theater, right on the aisle, is a different color than all the others. Supposedly it was actually Billy Wilder's chair from some long gone age; unfortunately they chose to model all the other seats in the theater on that one instead of opting for more comfortable and modern furnishings. I felt like I was sitting in a coach seat of a 737. My friend's knees were wedged against the seat in front of her. Not a promising sign for what promised to be about four hours of viewing.
Some man had the audacity to sit in Billy Wilder's chair despite the preponderance of empty seats. I thought of approaching and reproaching him on his impudence, but a second glance gave rise to a second plausible theory that perhaps he was simply too old to notice which seat he had occupied.
A pianist played en electronic keyboard to accompany the entirety of King Vidor's silent film. That guy had a good memory and a good sense of timing. In part because I'd just finished Discover Your Inner Economist, I had promised myself that if at any time the movie bored me I'd walk out and do something more productive with my time, like play keep away from the dozens of hobos wandering the streets of Westwood.
After a somewhat disturbing first act, the movie increased in watchability, and I found myself unexpectedly moved by several moments in the movie. Spanning the period from just before the start of WWI to just after its conclusion, the movie follows the story of Jim Apperson, a lazy son of a wealthy businessman who comes of age when he enlists in the army. His character arc mirrors that of the nation, from idleness to patriotic fervor to disillusionment with the war, and his personal triumphs and tragedies are those of America.
While in France, he falls in love with a French woman named Melisande, and their first date is a staple of that romantic comedy genre classic, the meeting between two people who are in love but don't speak the same language. They trade a French-English dictionary back and forth, and their resulting meet-cute dialogue is genuinely touching and romantic.
Many people think of silent film and think of Chaplin or Keaton and keystone cops and those sorts of physical capers, but many of them, like Intolerance and this Vidor film, work in modes other than comedy and offer great depth and complexity. The acting may not impress a modern audience, but there's stronger story and heaps more emotional heft in The Big Parade than in The Transformers.
Born to Be Bad is some good melodrama. You'll either laugh at that old school sass (that the movie is hard to find on video is the only explanation I'll accept for why IMDb has no memorable quotes listed) or chuckle at the old school syrup, with Joan Fontaine being pulled into about twenty to twenty-five passionate kisses to the accompaniment of strings soaring to a crescendo.
I'll also confess to thinking Joan Fontaine is a stone cold fox who looks ravishing in this movie. Younger sister of Olivia de Havilland, Joan was not just a pretty face. According to her IMDb bio, "Joan Fontaine has been a licensed pilot, a champion ballonist, an expert rider, a prize-winning tuna fisherman, and a hole-in-one golfer, a Cordon Bleu chef and is also a licensed interior decorator." She's the only actor to win an Oscar in a Hitchcock film, and "Howard Hughes, who dated her sister Olivia de Havilland for awhile, proposed to Joan many times." And that, as we all know, is as foolproof an endorsement of a woman's hotness as existed in that age.
Oddly worded insult
Finally, Marco Materazi reveals what he said to Zidane to provoke the most famous head-butt in sports history: "I prefer the whore that is your sister."
Is that a translation of what Materazzi said on television in Italian or is that what he actually said in English? If he said that to me in English I'd have to pause for a second to contemplate the bizarre syntax before head-butting him in the face.
Technorati Tags: football, soccer, sports
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
In this summer of one mind-numbing sequel after another, one which hasn't gotten much attention but which I have been waiting for a long time is the sequel to Elizabeth titled Elizabeth, Part Deux. Or actually Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
Here's the oh-so-pretty Quicktime trailer. Featuring the contrasting acting styles of Cate Blanchett, method actor, and Clive Owen, "I'm Clive Owen, you're not" actor.
Technorati Tags: film, movies, trailer
TGIS
An unlikely hand of no-limit hold-em poker.
Trailer for Judd Apatow's next movie (he's kinda prolific right now) Walk Hard, a spoof of musical biopics like Walk the Line and Ray. It's a genre deserving of a comic jab, but the trailer is long. It should either be shorter or much longer. When I watch spoof movies I usually wish I could fast forward through the dead spots in between jokes. The ideal would be to watch a half hour version of the movie with that dead space all edited out.
A dream team creates a new transfer for the upcoming Criterion Collection DVD for Days of Heaven. They tried to achieve a more natural look for the landscape. I'm really curious to see how it will look compared to the previous DVD.
The Atlantic identifies quirk as the "ruling sensibility of today's Gen-X indie culture", putting in the suspect lineup, among others, This American Life, Arrested Development, the movies of Wes Anderson, anything Miranda July, Napoleon Dynamite, and Flight of the Conchords. The Atlantic is tired of quirk for quirk's sake; I don't think quirk ages well. But if the quirk has a spine to hang its hat on, then it can serve as the parmesan cheese and pepper.
Guilt by Association: Indie bands cover guilty pleasures. Guilt By Association the album comes out in September. Related: Mandy Moore covers Rihanna's ridiculously catchy "Umbrella":
George Saunders interviews himself at Amazon.com. If you don't know who he is, just buy his book Civil War Land in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella and read it. Brilliant.
Technorati Tags: book, dvd, film, movies, music, poker, video
Some links, some involving Jason Bourne
Ben Affleck hoping Jason Bourne has sidekick in next movie.
Trailer for Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling. Clever premise.
Scary view into the C.I.A.'s interrogation techniques. Scary stuff, especially the details on the interrogation technique called waterboarding. I'd say we need to call Jason Bourne to expose these practices, but the public already knows what's going on.
Gruesome death: man bitten by his pet black widow spider and then eaten by his other pet lizards and insects. Is this story true? Those generic photos make me skeptical.
A poster of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, produced entirely using the text of the script. From a company called L.A. Pop Art which specializes in using this technique called micrography to produce such prints. The pieces they have for sale don't interest me as consumer products, but I'd love to see the technique generalized so that you could order a custom print of any picture generated entirely from the text of your choice.
A popular article that circulated among the technorati a few weeks ago: In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich. Hard to feel sorry for people who have a couple million and still feel poor.
Technorati Tags: film, humor, movies, newyorker, tech, trailer
More on Bergman and Antonioni
Woody Allen pays tribute to Bergman. Martin Scorsese pays tribute to Antonioni.
Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that in hindsight, Bergman's star may be inflated (article locked behind NYTimes pay-wall, which is too bad considering how much discussion it has generated; there's no better way to attract lightning than to stand on a tall building and wave a metal flagpole over your head, though I think he was sincere in his feelings). A full summary of Bergman coverage at the NYTimes is here. David Bordwell re-examines both Bergman and Antonioni in light of all the autopsies of their careers and theorizes that perhaps one's feelings towards each may be influenced by when one came of age.
Connor nearly dozing off
Here's a short Quicktime clip (I had to remove the embedded link because of the bandwidth hit anytime this page loaded) of my nephew Connor nearly dozing off while Joannie burps him. I guess feeding requires a ton of energy at his age (4 weeks old) so usually after a feeding Connor teeters on the edge of food coma. His eyes roll back, his eyelids start to sag, and if Joannie wasn't holding his head up he'd probably topple over like a drunk.
In this case, we laughed and woke him up again.
Technorati Tags: connor, video
Concept art from Ratatouille, Imogen Heap
Hmm, an old post I forgot to post from a few weeks back...
You can see the goodness here. At the time I wrote this, I hadn't seen Ratatouille yet. Every one seemed to have seen it by the time I decided I couldn't wait any longer, so one night I just drank a Coke and caught the late showing one night after work. It was all that and then some. The animation was stunning.
***
Via FreshArrival, here's a WMV file of a live performance by Imogen Heap at the studios of Indie 103.1 here in LA back a . A friend from Starbucks got my a pass to go see her perform at the Starbucks music lounge at Sundance in 2006. Watching her work was intriguing because she used a series of gadgets, including a Macbook Pro, all of which she demonstrated to us before she played her set. She's one person but with all that gear she can sing with herself. The video gives you an idea of how she creates that big sound. Here are a few of my pics from the show at Sundance.
Technorati Tags: animation, art, music
Nephews and birthdays
Happy birthday to my little sis Karen. She left LA and went to Chicago just before I headed to LA from NYC, and now she's making the move to NYC. I suspect she's avoiding me. The other possibility is that the country isn't big enough for all of us Wei kids so we're constantly whirling around the country in a geographic pas de trois.
I flew out to DC this past weekend to visit my nephew Connor. My timing was good as my flights out and in were sandwiched around an air-traffic-crippling computer outage at LAX.
Connor was just over 3 weeks old when I met him. He's a tiny thing, between 7 and 8 pounds. My iPhone is taller than his head right now.
His mode of communication is binary at this point. He's either crying or he isn't, and our goal at all times was to get simple: if he was crying, we did everything in our power to get him to a state of non-crying, and if he wasn't crying, we tried to keep him in that state. He likes to be patted on the back all the time. If I so much as stopped doing so for a few seconds, usually because I'd fallen asleep, he'd let me know with an ear-splitting wail.
Until his belly button is healed up, he can't be immersed in water, so for now he has wipedowns instead of baths, like army baby-wipe showers. He's really not a fan. He's highly sensitive to how he's being held. Sometimes he wants to bee lying facedown on your chest. At other times, he prefers to on his back, cradled in your arms. At other times he wants to be held against your shoulder and walked around. Finding which position was preferred at any point in time was a matter of trial and error. He'd let us know when we were off.
After eating, he loves to crane his head back and throw his arms up in a cat stretch. In general, he loves to tilt his head back or to the side as far as possible. Mike is worried he'll develop some strange reverse hunchback posture; I think it's adorable.
When he was well-fed, I'd try and burp him, and then I'd sit on the sofa and rest him on my chest. It's the greatest. His little arms flail around, his motor skills being fairly limited for now. He has that fresh new baby smell, which ranks above new car smell on the list of magical, transitory scents. His little body is a furnace, and feeling his body heat against your chest is pure magic. When awake and excited, he pants or breathes heavily, and he strains to swing his head from side to side as if in search of something. Holding him is like cradling a hummingbird.
He can't quite seem to focus his eyes on anything yet, but I think we made momentary eye contact a handful of times over the weekend. And while his facial expressions are still a cipher when he's not crying, I remember three times when it appeared he was smiling. Joannie thinks he just had gas, but I like to imagine that he thought of something funny, like "boy are you in for a surprise the next time you change my diaper."
It's a good thing newborns are so cute, because they're so helpless. Or maybe they're cute because they're so helpless? I'm exhausted from just the short visit--I have no idea how Joannie or new mothers deal with sleeping a few hours at a time--but I'd trade sleep for some quality time with Connor anytime.
I shot a bit of video of Connor and will post a short clip as soon as I have a moment to digitize and transcode.
Technorati Tags: connor
Esquire's 2007 Sexiest Woman Alive
UPDATE: A reader writes in with a convincing case that the below is wrong, and I think the reader's right. Spoiler alert still applies, but it applies to the name you see in the first comment on this post.
Spoiler alert--don't read on if you don't want to know the identity of Esquire's Sexiest Woman Alive. It's an annual ritual to guess who has earned the honor before several issues of photographic and textual clues are released.
Mike was the one who nailed it. We were sitting around playing with Connor, and I asked if they had any ideas. Neither he nor Ken had seen the first photo clue, so we pulled it up and perused it like forensic scientists. This, by the way, is a pose that I myself often strike for the camera.
All we knew was that it was some blond that's likely in the news (as past winners Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson, and Jessica Biel haven't exactly been anonymous).
The clue that gave it away for Mike was the hint that she's often mistaken for Ashley Judd (all the first installment clues are here).
Katherine Heigl.
The person giving the clues in the interview must be her Grey's Anatomy co-star T.R. Knight. Another clue that fits the bill, according to a Google search, is the fact that she's an animal lover. Having come off a lead in Knocked Up, she fulfills the requirement for being somewhat in the entertainment zeitgeist.
Technorati Tags: esquire, magazine, woman