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DePalma’s Redacted Gets Redacted

October 15, 2007 in Film and War Comments

Brian DePalma got into quite the public yelling match at the New York Film Festival this week. You see, the producers of Brian’s new film Redacted edited it against his will. Specifically, they put black bars over the eyes of folks in some very central, very real photographs presented therein, claiming the victims’ relatives could sue. DePalma accused them of being tools of the man. And that opened up the whole can of worms regarding use of war photography, stretching back to My Lai and beyond.

On The Media has a fascinating back-and-forth on the subject with legal scholar James Boyle. Discussion of the suppression of the JFK autopsy images and the Challenger space shuttle audio lead to the following exchange:

OTM: These were huge news stories. Why were they protected?

Boyle: Well, I think the argument was that hearing the pain and confusion and fear of people who were about to die adds nothing to the political debate.

OTM: But isn’t that the point of these photographs in DePalma’s case? Misery, fear, mayhem, horror — the very things that have been censored about this war. How can you on the one hand prevent that stuff on that basis and then permit it on the very same basis?

Boyle: If the whole NPR thing doesn’t work out, Brooke, you have a career as a lawyer. I would say that the answer there is that we knew the astronauts on the space shuttle, we knew that they died and it was an awful set of moments. I think that the answer here is that the pain of the Iraqis has not been making it to our screens, has not been making it to our newspapers. I think the claim here is Mr. DePalma is saying this is a necessary political comment.

Of course the question then becomes: what is relevant to the debate and what is just morbid curiosity and, well, what is just there for its entertainment value. Does DePalma’s film have more in common with JFK’s elaborate mythmaking or United 93′s meticulous fact checking? It seems the early critics are coming in right down the middle. Either way, it looks like Hollywood is going to take more than one high-profile stab at the Wag the Dog nightmare in Iraq. Surely we can all hope there is some way to honor the memories of those lost even as popular culture uses their images to raise awareness but, if the Redacted mess makes anything clear, it’s that balance sure ain’t easy.

Hear the whole Boyle interview (and Brian DePalma, too) at On The Media and visit the Redacted website.

image via toxicshock.tv

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Oddica: Clips from a Week Gone Strange

October 12, 2007 in Linked Comments

Rockwell Shocked

This week found us stumbling into all kinds of odd. But, then, we should have seen it coming after this first item out of India:

Flight to Nowhere – Indian entrepreneur sells virtual journeys on one-winged plane. Get all of the hassle of travel with none of the, well, travel.

Heavy Metal Collage – totally strange physical mashups of old school metal vinyl albums. Remix goes lo-fi. Playable, too. I bet it sounds like Jason Forrest.

Hazardous Future – three videos catalog bizarre future f*ckups. (First one is best, but give it a minute to get going.) And speaking of future strange, check these hysterical retro ads for modern products.

Cut Here – real streets turned into papercraft by a clever stencil

Innocence Industry – professor finds the dark side of Norman Rockwell and wonders why we feign shock over world events that shouldn’t be all that surprising

Night Refuge – unusually luminous wooden structure among the once supermodern, now decaying Shimodera Public Housing Complex in Osaka (click for enlargement)

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Tings Dey Happen: Finding the Real Nigeria

October 9, 2007 in Africa and Theater Comments

What do you think of when you think of Nigeria? If you’re like most Americans, odds are you think of the never ending flood of email scams or countless tales of kidnappings or the ever-present state department advisories. It certainly sounds like a dangerous place. Dangerous and so distant it disappears into faceless headlines.

That’s where Dan Hoyle’s virtuosic one man play Tings Dey Happen steps in. What his play does so expertly is show us the complexities of Africa’s most populous country through its people: “Media-savvy warlords, pacifist militants, Africanized Texas oilmen, and prostitutes turned anti-Chevron activists.” Having spent a year in Nigeria working to understand oil politics (10% of our oil comes from the country), he’s in a position to know a few characters, and he inhabits them with such passion that he damn near becomes them. The transformation is riveting.

Thankfully, the play balances tough issues with a sense of humor that’s just right — a sense of humor that, in many ways, seems to be the humor of the people portrayed rather than something bolted on to soften matters artificially. A central character, for example, explains Nigeria this way: “You know, in East Africa, South Africa the white people so much love to go there, there are so many animals there, there are so many whites… no, in Nigeria, we kill all the animals and the white people, they just die themselves.” Laughter, but biting at the same time.

Dan never plays himself, though nearly all the characters are talking to him. You’re left with the feeling that you’ve met so many of the people he has. And, ultimately, that’s what makes Tings Dey Happen special: it’s an act of journalism — profoundly humanizing journalism. Hoyle makes Nigeria’s people matter, their circumstances matter; he makes their dreams matter. And, in doing so, he makes Nigeria something you can’t just turn off like so many headlines. That’s what makes the play difficult and, at the same time, not to be missed.

Find an entertaining interview with Dan Hoyle at Story52 and visit the show page at CultureProject.org. Tings Dey Happen was just extended through December.

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Africa, India, Far East Photos Tell Stories

October 5, 2007 in Linked and Photography 2 Comments

This week we were overwhelmed by inspiring photos and video from around the world, and each one tells a story that made us want to learn more.

Hell From Heaven – stunning colors in this photo amidst the chaos of the Nigerian pipeline disaster

Twilight Zone – night glows in these luminous photos of Tokyo taken from an emergency staircase. Also love these in-the-trenches night photos of the streets of Tokyo and Osaka by the same photographer

Max Density – culture and technology overlap in an amazing train meets market video out of Bangkok

Real Toy Story – heartfelt portraits from the heart of China’s toy central: Guangdong province. See also Mike Wolf’s shots of Chinese-made toys alongside their makers

Colorful Crumbling India – lovely multilayered shot of weathered posters on the back streets of Mumbai leaves us with more questions than answers

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Vietnamese Rule Reality

October 4, 2007 in TV 2 Comments

Hung Huynh Chloe Dao

Vietnamese Americans are taking over, man! And last night was the latest salvo. Hung Huynh’s culinary prowess torpedoed all comers as he won Top Chef Miami, stunning some of the toughest taste buds in the industry with an impeccably produced, culturally infused four-courser.

And last year, Chloe Dao wowed us with her thoughtfully composed collection at the world famous Fashion Week in NYC and beat down two talented guys to win Project Runway season 2.

Seems like Bravo might as well hang it up and admit that .5% of the US population is going to be responsible for just about 100% of the wins on their talent-based reality shows, eh? I can tell you that’s a good thing. After all, my wife is Vietnamese… and “she approved this message.”

Find more on the good and bad of winning Bravo’s competitions at New York Magazine’s The Near-Fame Experience. And get more Hung and Chloe.

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Clementine’s Eclipse Machine

October 2, 2007 in Art/Design Comments

When you walk into Reel to Reel at the Clemetine Gallery, you walk into a mystery. Clicking, whirring machines are everywhere and, at the center, a video screen that’s somehow pulls them all together. But how?

And the machines are designed to afford just that kind of investigation, leaving tiny cracks just wide enough for curious eyes to peek in and see miniature rooms and cameras. Or a whirling cylinder that produces a panoramic flyover or a moving sandbox that creates cloud cover or a room full of turntables that work in tandem to generate the soundtrack. Or the machine that makes eclipses (excerpt). Then the realization hits you: it’s a sort of video Rube Goldberg machine — an interleaved bunch of contraptions that works together to produce a cleverly enigmatic short film, each time a little different.

Model rooms, staircases, and landscapes inside boxes with tiny moving cameras:

A camera skims the surface of this cylinder to generate panoramic flyovers:

Turntables provide music on-cue:

It’s a fascinating show not as much for the final product film as for the component parts: the intricate, artfully constructed boxes, cameras, and wires, and the extra clever, impeccably timed transitions between their outputs. The show’s title, Reel to Reel, then, nicely captures the harmony and hand-off on display — once, that is, you’ve figured out the mystery.

Find more on Reel to Reel at Clementine Gallery and other work by Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher at Shofish.

Also hot in Chelsea: David Fred’s Far From Equilibrium sound-driven kinetic sculptures, Dan Rozin’s interactive wooden mirrors in Fabrication, the group show She & I looking at socio-political change in China (particularly love Bang!), and Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s lovely The Ground, The Root, and The Air, a short film shot in Laos that artfully captures the cultural significance of the Bodhi Tree.

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Warping Real World Spaces

September 27, 2007 in Linked 2 Comments


Warped Wall – wallpaper reacts to objects hanging from it by warping beautifully

Unchained – typically oppressive chain link fences become objects of beauty in The Netherlands

Blown Up Living Room – living areas overtaken by inflatable tendrils

Vuitton Refused – irony abounds as high priced fashionista Louis Vuitton does garbage duty

Helios House – Keith shoots a gas station gone low poly just outside of Los Angeles (more)

images via demakersvan and surrealien

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Twisted Metal and Leaving Car Culture

September 25, 2007 in Activism and Introspect 4 Comments

I was in a spectacular car crash. Roads were deceptively slick from an overnight storm. A white Civic speeds alongside and darts suddenly in front of me, leaving inches. Then his brake lights come on. I cut right to avoid hitting him. My wheels go bald, my car skidding left into his with a sound like a crumpling tin can. His car careens left, slamming into the median. Mine slides right, out into the river — almost. A few pieces of well-placed wire keep me from going in face-first. (I guess we have Robert Moses to thank for something after all.) I walk away, but the car is totaled.

After the adrenaline of the accident wears off, panic sets in. I’m without a car for the first time since high school. Sure, I’ve taken public transit for long stretches before, but there was always the car out back just in case. Sayonara safety net.

And suddenly the amount of pro-car propaganda arriving by mail turns from a trickle to a flood. Since my car became a twisted heap, I’ve found myself awash in shiny brochures from everyone from Mercedes to Hummer to Hyundai. Heck, even my insurance company sent me a brochure with details of their “best rate” auto loans. Why were they all so sure I wanted a new car? That’s car culture. Even if you don’t need one, you want one.

Instead of running out to fill that auto void, though, I decided to go cold turkey. It wasn’t easy. My commute ballooned from 30 minutes to an hour thirty in each direction, and the up-front cost went from $15 a week to $30 a day. Going carless takes planning and cold hard cash. (Transit subsidy, anyone?) Plus, it just feels strange.

And it’s that lifelong programming that still has me subconsciously shopping for parking spaces a month later. What does that say about the creep of the almighty auto into our collective psyche? But things have gotten better, too. No more dealing with obnoxious drivers for an hour a day, no more traffic jams, no more worrying about the next car repair or getting a ticket. But my biggest worry driving a car has always been the ever looming possibility that you might seriously hurt or kill someone — someone who just happens to wander out into the street at the wrong moment: a kid chasing a ball, an adult who misreads a crosswalk sign. That anxiety is behind me, too.

As if to punctuate my first month of auto abstinence, World Car Free Day was this weekend. It’s nice to be on the right side of that equation for once, even if it started off against my will. And GM’s workers added their own inadvertent nod by walking off the job yesterday. Friday also saw the return of parking spaces to nature via Park(ing) Day. Signs from above, no? Well, at least I’ll take it that way.

image by jae lee

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Ukraine’s Floating Castle

September 20, 2007 in Art/Design and Film 9 Comments

Found object: floating castle. Photos of a mysterious levitated structure that looks straight out of a fantasy film showed up recently, and much speculation followed. Where was it? Was it a sculpture? Had the photoshop corps been at work again?

Some judicious automated translator banging (most of the conversation is in Russian, Spanish, and Ukranian) yielded a few tidbits. The photographer, for example, says it was dismantled in May of this year. And it was in Ukraine. Archinect says it’s the remains of “bunker for the overload of mineral fertilizers.”

But what I find most interesting are the connections people made between the structure and film worlds created by Terry Gilliam, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and, most often, Hayao Miyazaki — particularly Howl’s Moving Castle. I never quite understood what went on in that film. (A couple friends from Japan didn’t either, so I’m guessing it’s not a cultural thing.) Still, the characters and the world were so strong that it nearly didn’t matter.

And the fact that so many want to see Miyazaki’s world in the real one says something about the places his films create. Lots of animated films let us escape into wonderful imaginary places. But there’s something special about Miyazaki’s movies that makes the real world seem more wonderful, too.

Find alternate angles and multilingual conversation at panoramio. Thanks to ffffound.

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Fabulous Illustrated Octonauts Back in Action

September 18, 2007 in Art/Design and Books 1 Comment



See, there is something good about the end of summer after all. The second in Meomi’s gorgeously illustrated Octonauts book series is due out October 15. And, from the looks of it, creative duo Vicky Wong and Mike Murphy have outdone themselves as the supercute team of eight return to explore charming underwater vistas in a new story about saving the world’s shadows. Preorder it and get a autographed copy plus postcard.

Find more at Octonauts HQ and visit meomi.com for some behind the scenes goodies. Even more regular updates on the studio blog.

via k10k

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