Category: The Arts
2001 space quip: You can’t polish a…
Toronto Star movie critic Peter Howell is a 2001: A Space Odyssey fanatic who claims to have seen the 1968 Stanley Kubrick sci-fi classic more than 40 times. For the second holiday season in a row, Bell Lightbox, the Toronto International Film Festival’s modernistic movie showcase, is featuring a 70MM version of the film.
Critic Howell marked last year’s screenings with a column titled, “21 cool things about 2001: A Spacey Odyssey.” He reprised the column yesterday with “21 more cool things.” In this year’s instalment, Howell reports that when Kubrick was editing Space Odyssey, the comedian and filmmaker Jerry Lewis was down the hall making final cuts to one of his low-brow comedies. Late one night, Kubrick watched a frustrated Lewis struggle to make a scene work.
“You cannot polish a turd,” Lewis moaned.
“You can if you freeze it,” Kubrick replied.
The original trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey is, of course, on YouTube.
H/T: Kendra Barnes.
Animation and the non-epidemic of ADHD
I don’t normally post videos that already have five million hits, but this animated version of a talk by educator and creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson underscores a point made by Sunni Brown in her TED talk about the merits of doodling. There is something about the combination of speech and visual note-taking that enhances comprehension, especially comprehension of irony and ideas in conflict.
Robinson’s talk is about education, but the animated nature of the talk the talk is as arresting as the content.
[Educators] are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past, and along the way they are alienating millions of kids who don’t see any purpose in going to school.
When we went to school, we were kept there with a story, which was that of you worked hard and did wel and got a college degree, you would have a job. Our kids don’t believe that, and they’re right not to, by the way. You’re better having a degree than not, but it’s not a guarantee any more, and particularly not if the route to it marginalizes most of the things you think are important about yourself….
[ADHD] is not an epidemic. These kids are being medicated as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out, and on the same whimsical basis, and for the same reason: medical fashion.
Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the Earth. They are being besieged with information and calls for their attention from every platform: Computers, from iPhones, from advertising hoardings, from hundreds of channels. And we’re penalizing them for getting distracted. From what? Boring stuff, at school, for the most part.
RSA Animate, produced by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, has a series of similar animated exhortational videos.
H/T: Doug MacKay
Coolest business card ever
The format of a standard business card is so inherently boring, it cries out for creative embellishment. In place of the usual 2×3-inch card, games inventer Will Wright (SimCity) hands out worthless paper currency stamped with his contact information.
This bill, which Wright recently gave The Atlantic’s technical editor Alexis Madrigal, happens to be from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Fittingly, it features electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla. (That’s the blurred-out stamp on the right-hand side.)
Why didn’t we think of that, dear reader?
H/T: Alexis Madrigal
Truculent photo subject
The most unusual Steve Jobs obituary this week might be the one that appeared in PDN Pulse, the blog of Photo District News. Jobs, it seems, was a legendarily truculent photo subject. PDN Pulse recounted some of the legends.
“It was the joke among photographers. He was like the nightmare subject,” said San Francisco photographer William Mercer McLeod, who photographed Jobs five times.
In 1986, Fortune magazine hired Doug Menuez to shoot a portrait of Jobs for the magazine’s cover. Menuez wanted to photograph him in the NeXT offices, on a staircase Jobs had commissioned from architect I.M Pei. Jobs arrived, looked over the setup, and leaned into Menuez’s face:
“This is the stupidest fucking idea that I’ve ever seen,” Jobs said.
“Right in my face, like 5 or 6 inches away,” Menuez says. “I felt like I was 10 years old. He went off on a tirade. He said, ‘You just want to sell magazines. ‘And I said, ‘And you want to sell computers.’
At that, Jobs said, ‘OK,’ and sat down.
Menuez concludes, “ I’ve been in war zones, but I like to say that I became a man learning how to stand my ground with Steve.”
When Albert Watson shot Jobs for a Fortune feature on CEOs, he insisted on having three hours to set up. PDN Pulse again:
“We were prepared,” Watson said. “We set up to make [every shoot] as greased lightning fast as possible for the [subject].” Watson had read “a massive amount of stuff” about Jobs to help him conceptualize the shoot, and converse intelligently with Jobs.
When Jobs walked in, his power, charisma, and genius were palpable.
“It was like when Clint Eastwood walks in to the room.”
Jobs didn’t look immediately at Watson, but looked instead at the set-up and then focused on Watson’s 4×5 camera “like it was something dinosauric,” Watson recalls, “and he said, ‘Wow, you’re shooting film.”
“I said, ‘I don’t feel like digital is quite here yet.’ And he said, ‘I agree,’ then he turned and looked at me and said, ‘But we’ll get there.’”
Jobs gave Watson an hour, much more time than he generally allowed for portrait sessions.
“I had wanted to do the shot in a minimalistic way because I knew that was going to suit him very well. He said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ I said I would like 95 percent, almost 100 percent of eye contact with the camera, and I said, ‘Think about the next project you have on the table,’ and I asked him also to think about instances where people have challenged him.
“If you look at that shot, you can see the intensity. It was my intention that by looking at him, that you knew this guy was smart,”
Apple cleared its home page Thursday to post that photograph, which, Watson heard, Jobs regarded as his his all-time favorite.”
H/T: Ashley Harding
I don’t know’s on third
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it’s playoff time.
H/T: Charlie Phillips
Another irrefutable argument for the serial comma
An anonymous cartoonist strikes a blow for virtuous punctuation:
When will newspaper style guides wake up to its obvious superiority?
H/T Lee Amme Gillan via David Rodenhiser. This has been cropping up on the net since mid-September. If anyone can devine the artist’s identity, I’ll update.
Shauntay Grant meets Gordon Kennedy
Halifax spoken word artist Shauntay Grant reads a series of poems inspired by North River iron artist Gordon Kennedy at the opening gala of this weekend’s Cabot Trail Writers’ Festivall in St. Anne’s Bay. The festival continues through Sunday at North River.
If you happen to be in Cape Breton this weekend – updated
[See update below.] Don’t miss the Cabot Trail Writers’ Festival in Tarbot and St. Anne’s. The creators of this annual event, now in its third year, have put together a fantastic program this year.
On Friday night, last year’s Halifax Poet Laureate, Shauntay Grant, will premiere five spoken word pieces, commissioned for the festival and inspired by five sculptures by North River blacksmith Gordon Kennedy.
Several of the festival participants will present workshops Saturday, and the evening program includes readings by Nova Scotia native and Giller-prize winner Johanna Skibsrud, Inverness-born short story writer Alexander MacLeod, and music by the jazz quartet The Synchronics.
A Sunday panel includes Skibsrud and the Nimbus editor who brought her Giller-winning The Sentimentalists to publication.
Hats off to Gary Walsh and his crew for making the festival a don’t-miss event.
[Update]
It’s a busy weekend in Cape Breton, to be sure. On Saturday night, there’s the island’s first nighttime arts festival, Lumière 2011:
Then at 3 p.m., Sunday, local song-stars RoSa, Alicia Penney, Flo Sampson, Debbie Mullins, Steve Fifield, Billie Yvette, and Maura Lea Moycott croon country ballads at Harmonies for Horses, a fundraiser for Rocking Horse Ranch, Rear Baddeck. Location: at the ranch.
[Update 2]
From 11 to 2 on Saturday, at 385 Alexandra Street in Sydney, CBC Cape Breton celebrates the broadcaster’s 75th year.
Texting on Lawrence Street
A lo-tech texter has been leaving messages in the Lawrence Street area of in West End Halifax. From simple labels…
To compliments…
To historic notes…
…social commentary…
… and quirky observations.
Earle at the Cohn
Country rock artist Steve Earle (center, in spotlight) played Dalhousie University’s Rebecca Cohn Auditorium last night with his current band, The Dukes (and Duchesses), featuring Allison Moorer. She is Earle’s sixth wife out of a total of seven marriages. The evening’s highlight was Moorer’s unusual rendition of the great Sam Cooke civil rights anthem, A Change is Gonna Come. The ensemble plays tonight at Membertou Trade and Convention Centre, Sydney.
