A Memorable Fancy

Safari is now available for the PC. How do I know this? Because I suddenly received a notification from Apple that my Safari needed updating to 3.1. I was really confuse for a sec, thinking I was on my iBook or something, but then I realized that they must be using the iTunes auto-update application to install Safari on my machine. How insidious! How brilliant! Of course, I won’t use it, as I love Firefox, but whatever.

With permission, I have copied Doug’s entire post about twitter, and why he thinks his friends and colleagues should use it. It is the perfect app for a particular type of messaging: real-time, short, broadcast. I like doug’s description: “a status message on steroids.”

A service you should use: Twitter

 

The background:

I have been using a service called Twitter for a while; looking to see if it is worthwhile. After several months I have concluded that it is a really cool way for people in my station in life to keep up with one another.

The product:

Twitter is a “micro-blogging” tool. Basically, it is like a status message on steroids. You can either IM to it, SMS to it, or log on to your account online and post what you are doing, how you feel or whatever else. Everyone that subscribes to you (add you as a friend) will get an update according to how they set up their account (either by IM, SMS, or whatever.). So, for instance you need help moving a friend and you have 20 friends on twitter–you send out a message to everyone and say “I need help this saturday from 9 to 11am moving a friend, please call me at XXX-XXXX for details” or “We are going to the Royal Kubo for Karaoke tonight at 6pm, all are welcome.” Everyone knows and anyone that wants to show up does so with minimal effort.

The Pitch:

I would like you to sign up for it at www.twitter.com and add me as your “friend.” THen we can be better friends and God will like you more. By the way, if you blog you can get one of the widgets on your blog, like I have (the grey box) pretty easily. So, please sign up right now. Now. Seriously.

I got to see a lot of good panels this year, although I felt a little off all weekend due to the long drive and overextended schedule. I never feel like I have enough time to see/talk to/engage with everyone I want to, but I guess that’s how it goes.

My panel went quite well. It was an open call, and I didn’t know my copanelists, but I was impressed with how well it cohered. Matthew Solomon gave an interesting paper on Melies, focusing in part on amusement rides and the interactive nature of early film. I imagine it is difficult to say anything new about someone like Melies, but he did an exemplary job, and made me rethink some things about my own research with regard to interactivity. David Parisi’s paper was also quite engaging. His work on tactility tries to rescue touch in film theory from what he sees as a conflation with vision and other senses, and he brought together some interesting texts and technologies.

Another panel that stood out was the workshop on cinephilia in the digital age, where  Bob Burgoyne gave an interesting take on some installation art that incoporates video game aesthetics The panel, consisting also of Edward Pigeon, Catherine Russell and Jason Sperb and chaired by Scott Balcerzak, was diverse and thought provoking.

I tried to catch as many of my fellow Wayne-Staters, of whom there were many , as possible this year, but if I missed you I apologize.

Overall, I saw a lot of interesting panels, to the point where I felt completely overhwelmed, but in a good way.

I don’t know if just the blogs and sites I read, or if there really is a strong movement toward open-access, online journals. IHE had an article a few days ago about a paper journal that has gone online. The article says that the site has had 20,000 visitors vs hundreds of subscribers, but I wonder how that number translates to actual readers. I  imagine a lot of poeple are going there just because of the buzz it has received. That said, though, it is a good move, and I don’t understand why more journals don’t do this. Many argue that the costs would be lower (although there is some debate about that in the comments section of the aritcle), a journal could publish more articles per issue, and, perhaps most importantly, articles can reach a much larger audience.  See also danah boyd’s call for a boycott of locked-down journals.

I’ve been thinking about why I hated Atonement so much, and why so many people don’t. Part of it is what I take to be its incompleteness. A thwarted love story turns into a meandering, half-done war movie, tied together or torn apart, apparently, by a little girl’s dishonesty, which I failed to bring myself to care about.

The cinematography, however, is superb in places, which at times seems completely out of place.It is as if the cinematographer was on set with these horrible actors working with a hopelessly convoluted screenplay, and decided maybe to try to make something beautiful out of it. Artistry from boredom, perhaps?

One particular shot strikes me as incredibly well done and so out of place that it comes off as pretentious. I’ve been trying to figure out why, and I think it has to do with its placement in the film. The shot comes near the end of an already-too-long movie,  when the soldiers reach the beach and there’s a mass of confusion about who belongs where, and how they will get home. It is a continuous shot, I don’t know how long, that is elaborately choreographed, and includes a ferris wheel, injured soldiers, camerawork moving from character to character, complicated dialogue. I get what it’s doing: it’s showing the confusion, disillusionment and surrealism that accompanies war. But it stands out almost too much, and it takes place after much crosscutting back to the hospital in England and after the story has become so convoluted that the shot seems to be a comment on the film itself.

It was while rewatching Children of Men that I figured out why that shot didn’t work. CoM also has a very long tracking shot during a battle, with much the same effect, but it works. Why? Because the film sets you up for it with handheld camera work, long takes, and fairly dismal mise-en-scene from the beginning. That tracking shot is a culmination of all that came before, both stylistically and narratively, whereas with Atonement it stands out, becomes obvious in a film that relies on trickery and tired narrative and cinematic techniques to pull at heartstrings in the widest possible way.