Lunar threepeat
Tom Hanks has a thing about the Apollo program. I suppose you could say I do too. I’ve been interested in NASA and spaceflight since I was young, but what really what set me on my current path of obsession was the Hanks-produced and -introduced HBO mini-series From The Earth To The Moon from 1998. It was extraordinary television, dramatic and intelligent. Only after that did I dive into Apollo 13 in earnest. It was one of the first DVD’s I ever owned and it still is the benchmark with which I test new AV gear at home. (Pay attention to the surround sound field as the camera pans along the fuel pipes just before liftoff.) I treated Apollo 13 as a kind of alternate chapter to From The Earth To The Moon, even though the film preceded the mini-series by three years.
So, Hanks is back at it with Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D, an IMAX 3D short film. Like most IMAX it is a temporary fun, not exactly satisfying after the fact. Add in the 3D glasses — something I have not worn since Jaws 3D in the 1980’s I’m pretty sure — and you have enough gimmicks to truly stack the deck against the show. You really can’t tell the story of Apollo in 55 minutes and you certainly don’t have elbow room for narrative arcs so what Magnificent Desolation aims for is merely to make you feel like you are walking on the moon. This it achieves. My four-year-old was reaching out to grab the moondust that was kicked out into the audience via 3D. The best effect was the now-typical pan way out (ala Titanic) from the lander to a very broad shot of just how alone the astronauts actually were, not a shot that any Apollo-era photo could ever provide. The only aspect of drama in the whole thing was a play off this loneliness where they enacted an emergency scenario, thankfully never used in six moon landings, where the astronauts were stranded after a rover malfunction kilometers from the lander. One of the astronaut’s oxygen was low and they had to hoof it back to home so they buddy-breathed their way back to spacecraft. It was very well done, but the whole time I was thinking that when we do go back to the moon (and by “we” I guess I mean the Chinese) it will be a hell of a lot easier to fake a moon landing than Capricorn One. We won’t even need O.J. Simpson.
In the end it was satisfying, but only in the way that an amusement park ride is. Cheap thrill, go home, forget about it — except to blog it. The show interspersed a bunch of actual footage of the landings, but because of the resolution difference — 1960’s-era film versus six stories of IMAX screen — meant that the footage was shown picture-in-picture as a small overlay. This will be the fate of so much pre-HD footage in the future, jarring you out of the experience merely because the effect is so low-res.
Magnifcent Desolation had a bit of an agenda too. They interviewed kids to see what they knew, mostly focusing on what they didn’t, about the Apollo program. One child, a young latina, said she’d love to go to the moon. Her story and her crayon drawing of how she would get there was dramatized at the very end in a future scenario where said child was the commander of an extensive moon base, making ample reference to the fact that humans have not stepped foot on our satellite in over thirty years. It won’t change the fact that there is no public will to do this any time soon, but it was powerful nonetheless.
So, I recommend this if you can see it in an IMAX theater. If not, the DVD will underwhelm. Sorta like saying, if you can buy a ride to orbit, do it. Otherwise, wait for the movie.
The always-ending story
My two-year-old refers to books as “the end”. Sing-songy, up-down. “The end.” If he wants a book he will point to it and say “the end”. Walking down the aisles of a bookstore a few weekends ago was an endless parade of “the end, the end, the end.”
In addition to being cute, this is also useful since ending a story — and being able to say “the end” — is the best part for him. So you never have to worry if you’re not up for reading a longish story. Just quickly proceed to “the end.”
However, I’m not sure he’ll be as interested in the looping, sometimes endless hypertext fiction as I am.
The end.
Reason: none
I have come to believe that the harder a company has to fight for customers the worse they treat those customers. Take cellular providers, a business with a high degree of customer turnover and which faces intense competition from rivals.
So I was screwing around with the data services on my Cingular phone yesterday. I noticed a thing called MobiTV which promised television broadcasts to the phone. Three day free trial. As is typical for non customer-focused initiatives like this, if you do not cancel in three days you will be billed. Oh and of course, unlike signing up, you cannot cancel via the phone. Well the service stunk. The video was jerky and pixellated as you’d expect for a non-3G network.
Great, so how do I cancel? Online, OK. First three tries, server error. When I finally got through I found that I was in fact charged $10 for the free trial. Now I’m not a linguist or an economist, but there’s something that seems, well, not free about a $10 charge. Anyway, there was a form to request a refund. Indignation rising — why the hell should I have to challenge a charge from a free trial? — I submitted the form, dutifully filling out the “Why are you requesting a refund?” text box. I refrained from using profanity.
That is, until the next screen informed me that my refund request had been denied because I had exceeded the refund limit and that I had to call customer service. Let the cursing begin! Actually I started the call composed, explaining that I thought it not terribly customer-friendly to make us jump through such hoops to cancel. The support representative, clearly a jaded, shrivelled, flourescently-tanned troll of a human being, informed me that I could not request a refund for a charge that had not yet hit my bill. She was, in essence, saying that I had to wait for the next billing cycle — which would clearly throw me over the three day “free” preiod — and then call in to ask for a refund. Insanity. I explained the illogic as clearly as I could and then she put me on hold for 15 minutes to run to a supervisor.
Do you know what she told me when she returned? I’m sorry, sir, the reason your refund request was rejected was because you need to select “none” in the “Why are you requesting a refund?” box. What the fuck?! Ah, yes, Cingular: where you only get a refund if you refuse to state why you want one. Makes perfect sense. GRRR!
Is there any cellular service provider that actually puts the customer experience first? No, really. I cannot continue to pay these people money.
Happy holidays
Rosh Hashanah, Ramadan, and the Chinese National Day holiday all overlapped this week. Interesting trivia, except that my three main projects — One Voice (in Israel), Eternal Egypt, and somethin’ somethin’ going on in China — are all on hiatus. Wonderful, really.
But why the hell am I still so busy? Answer: all the stuff I never get to because of “real” work. If I had another week then I would really be living the life of leisure, but of course all holidays come to an end.
Motorcycle Giger
Interesting figurines of sci-fi movie characters made completely from motorcyle parts. Alien, Predator, Robocop, and Dragonheart. Full size at Flickr.
(Shop near Lincoln and Newport.)
Brothers in knob-twiddling
Mike and Marcus of Boards of Canada recently gave a great interview to Pitchfork where they revealed that there is an unreleased acoustic version of Music Has The Right To Children and — after an off-the-record pause to debate the point — admitted that they are, in fact, brothers. The reason for not publicly admitting it? They wanted to avoid comparisons to Orbital, another fraternal British electronica band — one that happens to occupy the same stratum of respect that I have for BoC.
So that got me wondering. Is there something about a brotherly relationship that leads to exceptional musical collaboration? Certainly there are many bands composed of family members, but specifically two brothers?
I’m not convinced this isn’t coincidence, but perhaps — perhaps — this has to do with the bedroom-studio nature of electronic music. That is, like most electronic music neither bands’ music requires elaborate studio setups or live recording. It is compact, home-brewed, and easily something that you’d be able to yell “hey, brother, come listen to this!” from the other room. This, as opposed to the rock band evolutionary culture that normally includes rockin’ out in a friend’s garage or at a party down the block. It’s less conducive to experimentation in the home and, maybe, less conducive to collaboration between brothers.
Who knows?
A new word, a product idea, a hygiene request
mel·o·gram·mat·ic adj.
The deliberate, ostentatious use of non-standard grammar online to make it seem like you’re hip and casual but also smart enough to know better.
Idea: create Band-Aid type bandages that are pre-printed with arm or leg hairs on them, allowing a more seamless blending with the furrier individual.
Do beard trimmers with the little vacuum attachment actually work?
Happy birthday, Ascent Stage!
Plink! One year ago today I added a single drop to the ocean of blogs. 255 posts and 397 sidebar links later I ‘m still enjoying it. If reading this blog is 1/100th as pleasurable as writing it then maybe the audience will come back for year two.
In honor of this milestone I’m performing a few upgrades which I’ll roll out this week.
Thanks for reading, everybody!
Expelling freedom
Yesterday Governor Pataki killed the International Freedom Center, a project I have been working on for over a year. This facility, part of the original master plan for Ground Zero and once championed by Pataki, was intended as a complement to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum also to be built on the original parcel of land that the towers occupied.
The idea was simple and highly-regarded: to respond to great tragedy with great hope, to show the world that freedom is the opposite of the forces that led to the destruction of the World Trade Center. The IFC had wide bipartisan support. It was led by a personal friend of the President’s and advised by academics on both sides of the political spectrum as well as relatives of victims. The governor, the mayor, the LMDC, and everyone else directly involved in the rebuilding of Ground Zero was pleased with this approach.
Until a grieving a family member with a political agenda provided an argument that set the conversative blogosphere and news networks aflame. She claimed that presenting multiple perspectives on freedom — what it means to different people, how it is struggled for, how the ideal of freedom guides and misguides our nation and the world — that this multitude of voices would end up “blaming” America for 9/11. Her rhetorical trick (which the right lapped up and spewed out again and again) was to conflate a multiplicity of perspectives on freedom with a multiplicity of perspectives on what happened on that horrible day. These are fundamentally different things. Yet, the distinction was lost on the grass-roots bloggers who galvanized victim’s relatives and first responder organizations in NYC to their cause, pouring salt in the open wounds of these family members by telling them that the IFC would dishonor their deceased loved ones.
Soon the IFC was labelled as anti-American. And the press loved that. The screech of the media feedback loop made this falsehood louder and louder. The Bush Administration early on left it to NYC to decide on the IFC fate. Pataki waffled and made the IFC (and Drawing Center — a one-time tenant of the same space) promise never to do anything that would “denigrate America”. The IFC agreed to this. Yet, Pataki still killed the Center, apparently having made up his mind anyway.
If this has taught us anything it is that emotions are still extremely raw — too raw for reasoned, non-politicized discussion — when it comes to the terrorist acts of 9/11. (Even the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania finds itself embroiled in a controversy of dubious merit.) Though the wounds will never heal for many people, the passing of time will permit a critical distance from which to judge the various proposals for how to treat the space. But there is no time. Leaving Ground Zero unbuilt temporarily seems like a weak position to politicians. So Pataki has put an end to the IFC and suggested that the memorial museum, currently underground, will occupy the building once designed for it. Meanwhile, across the street, an additional 300,000 square feet of retail space has been approved.
The International Freedom Center would have been a noble response to the vile acts of people imprisoned by perverse conviction. Now, if the “Take Back The Memorial” groups have their way visitors to Ground Zero will be treated to the twin horrors of an oversized memorial devoted to graphically retelling the story of Sept. 11 and a monstrous retail mall begging for their tourist dollars.
Are crushed fire trucks festooned with American flags really an appropriate way to memorialize what happened that day? Wasn’t more assaulted that day than people and property?
Lingualism
Real time translation in a conference setting always amazes me. The translators in their claustrophobic boxes have to keep up with nervous, mumbly presenters whose language is often specialized or vague. I try to make it a point to thank whoever has the misfortune of translating me. But it is such a great service. Sometimes I think about how life-changing it would be to have this device all the time. I have, in fact, walked out of a conference hall with the headset on and momentarily forgotten that it is not a Universal Translator that will work anywhere. Darn.
The movie The Red Violin is the first I have seen that moves smoothly and rapidly between many different languages, five in this case. Just when you’ve disabled the subtitles in an English section you’re thrown back into German or Chinese and you have to turn them on again. Thankfully toggling DVD subtitling, especially on a laptop, is painless. (Though it would be nice to be able to say “if any language other than X is being spoken I need subtitles.”)
Which brings me to website design. Multilingual sites — which should be every site but for obvious practical reasons cannot be — must work just as the translator headset or as DVD subtitles work. There should be complete symmetry in all languages and minimal design variation so that a lateral flitting from one to the other is seamless in every regard, except that the language changes — just like switching channels or subtitles. Wikipedia famously achieves this. Eternal Egypt is based on this premise too. In effect what you create this way is a single site with multiple languages, rather than multiple language sites for the same content.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
