Scottunder

Arcade Fire, "We Used To Wait"

Wow. This jaw-dropping new video for Arcade Fire's "We Used To Wait" (from The Suburbs) is billed as an "interactive film" by Chris Milk. It plays in multiple browser windows and uses Google Maps, an address you provide, and some deeply impressive HTML5 chops to deliver an experience I've never, um, experienced before. When it asks you to type or draw a message, I found drawing to have a more satisfactory result. Just, really, wow.

As it says, this film is processor intensive -- you should shut down other programs and close unnecessary browser tabs.

UPDATE: Google posted an informative page about the various technical aspects that went into this video, many that I didn't notice: "Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering... this Chrome Experiment has them all."

Escaping the Delta

Elijah Wald's 2004 book, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues begins like this:

There has probably been more romantic foolishness written about blues in general, and Robert Johnson in particular, than just about any other genre or performer in the twentieth century.

In a nutshell, Wald's goal is to help us see Robert Johnson and the pre-war blues as perceived in his time and by his audience. Because a lot of what we in our time think about both of them has been shaped by white intellectuals who came along thirty years later and "explained" the blues as part of a deeply spiritual, almost mystical expression -- a pure music made by naive but brilliant instrumental masters who bared their souls in the swamplands of the Mississippi Delta.

But the blues was pop music, and blues musicians were professionals who played a wide variety of music, not just blues. Whatever their audiences wanted to hear, whatever the girls wanted to dance to, they played. They aspired for the good life, dressing in high style and playing in nice clubs for big audiences in Chicago and New York, and their audiences liked that as well. Nobody wanted to stay in rundown honky-tonks on Southern backroads if they could help it.

But the white aficionados who discovered the music decades later turned it in to a kind of outsider art,the more obscure, the better. Just as now, critics avoided lauding music that appealed to the masses. They felt the popular blues musicians playing the stage in Chicago were too slick, too commercial. They wanted "the real thing," so they searched for the most obscure players and the rarest records. By the '50s and '60s, when white archivists reissued old country blues 78s on LP, everything was turned around: they championed musicians who most people had never heard back in the day, and the big stars -- the ones most in demand by black audiences of the '20s and '30s -- became obscure.

Thus, Robert Johnson, a talented professional musician who sold fewer than 5000 records and died at 27 (becoming a prototype of the tragic rock star), became emblematic of an entire genre. Stories grew up about his abilities and his history, though few people had any certainty about them. Wald makes it clear that Johnson was not a mystical figure in tune with a haunted muse with a skill inspired (figuratively or actually) by a deal with the Devil.

The truth about the blues, as Wald shows, is that white record producers weren't interested in travelling to Mississippi to record black artists crooning romantic ballads or playing upbeat jazz or swing tunes. It didn't matter that black musicians -- and audiences -- loved Guy Lombardo, Bing Crosby, and Lawrence Welk -- these were white-owned record labels making music to sell in Chicago and New York, and what sold were rural black performers playing the blues.

Another interesting reversal Wald describes is with dress. Even if black blues players were poor, they'd spend their money to buy a nice suit to wear onstage. But the white producers liked to promote them as penniless downtrodden ramblers, and the young white rock stars who idolized them adopted jeans and work shirts -- farm and laborer clothes -- in emulation. No contemporary of Robert Johnson would ever play a gig dressed like that! You can see this difference in the original LP cover on the left, and the CD cover on the right -- the CD used a photo of Johnson that hadn't been discovered in 1961, dressed in a sharp pinstriped suit and a jaunty hat.

As with Wald's subsequent book, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, he strips away decades of received wisdom about popular music and helps us see it -- especially music played by and inspired by African-Americans -- as it really was: a commercial art form played by practiced, talented performers making music that audiences loved.

O, Death

I watched Departures last night, a Japanese movie about death.

Well, that's not true. It's not really about death, though it's certainly about our attitudes toward death. The main character is a young man who has to give up his dream of world travel as a concert cellist and return to his late mother's home. Fate leads him into a job as a nokan or NK agent, a person who prepares bodies for the coffin.

This is a ritualized process of great dignity, as the respectful work of washing, dressing, and making up the body is performed in front of the grieving family. We see several times how witnessing this work helps change people's minds, not only about the NK agent (who would want to have such a job?) but about the deceased, as the preparation restores the body to a condition that revives happy memories or helps overcome emotional blocks.

The movie did not depress me, though I certainly see that death confronts others more strongly than me. I think we are too much removed from death, whether it is of the animals we consume ("the living eat the dead," as one scene in the movie memorably makes clear) or of the people who pass from our lives -- as they all will if we don't first. Yes, I cried, but that's a low bar for me when others are crying in the scene. (I also cry at comedies, so don't judge by me.)

As a movie, though it won the foreign picture Academy Award last year, some of it is predictable and some seems superfluous. His cello career, for instance, is both central to the plot and utterly disconnected from it, though it did give an excuse for some nice cinematic interludes -- and note that the US posters and DVD cover emphasize that instead of, you know, dead bodies. These are small complaints, though, and probably necessary compromises when presenting a film about such a taboo subject. I'm extremely glad I watched it and recommend it highly.

Face-blindness

In the recent New Yorker, I really enjoyed Face-Blind, an Oliver Sacks article on prosopagnosia, or "face-blindness." Mostly because it gave me a name for something I suffer from, though quite mildly, less than the depth Sacks describes in himself. (The entire article in not online, but you can hear an audio interview with Sacks.)

I have known for years that I have trouble placing faces, and I have also (as Sacks describes) been thought rude or stupid because I avoid guessing and immediately ask people, "I'm sorry, what's your name?" I'm afraid I insulted someone quite recently when I didn't recognize her, though I'd seen her just a week before. Once, I introduced myself to a new employee who, it turned out, had not only been there for months but had already had at least one substantive conversation with me. He seemed upset, as if I'd betrayed our new friendship.

I fall into this confusion during movies quite a lot, mixing up similar looking characters, especially if people all have identical hairstyles, like in military boot-camp scenes or historic Japanese films (Toshiro Mifune is almost always distinct, as in this scene from Sanjuro, but all the young nobles are frustratingly similar).

Also interesting in how this is related to the issue of "All _____ look the same to me," pick your ethnicity, because the ability to differentiate faces might get programmed, to a greater of lesser degree, in our first couple of years, depending on which kinds of faces surround us as infants.

Of course some people deviate in the other direction -- they are the "super-recognizers," and this trait may not be limited to faces. I have friends who are expert birders, and they have trained themselves to see subtle nuances that are lost on me. Which reminds me of Mark Bittner, the subject of the movie The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, who recognized and named individual birds in a flock of 80, something field ornithologists never get to do. On the other hand, Sacks mentions Jane Goodall's difficulty recognizing individual chimpanzees, which seems entirely understandable but it turns out she also suffered from mild face-blindness among her human colleagues.

Camping at Burney Falls

I've been gone for a few days, camping with my sons in northeastern California on Hat Creek and visiting McArthur-Burney Falls State Park. Most of the pictures have Ryan and Eric doing something, like swimming in 45-degree water, but there's usually some nature in the background, like in this panorama:

 

A 21 MB version is here. Here's another shot, just before they dived into the plunge pool.

 

Today's ephemera: Popular Sports (1935)

I haven't been able to learn much about this book or its illustrator. "Frank D. Collins" only seems to have been involved with this book. 

The whole page format and style is taken directly from Ripley's Believe It of Not, but no one by this name seems to have drawn for them.

That aside, it's a sort of treasure trove of 1930s sports trivia. In Auto Racing, we learn that only five men ever drove a car over 200 miles per hour. Their names aren't given, but below that is this statement:

"Speed demons" may come and go -- but such names as De Palma, Mulford, "Jimmie" Murphy, De Paola, Burman, George Robertson, Louis Chevrolet, Eddie Hearne, Armour, Joe Dawson, "Caley" Bragg, Tetzlaff, and Milton will live wherever "benzine jockeys" are gathered together.

Yes, indeed they will. One, anyway.

The book repeats the fictitious story of baseball, and includes such popular sports as cockfighting, dicing, falconry, and fox-hunting. But there are some interesting historical artifacts, such as a "Field and Track" blurb on Jesse Owens, "Ohio State colored athlete" who broke three world records and tied a fourth at a Big Ten track meet -- this was a year before the Berlin Olympics.

   

Duncan Jones's Moon

Moon is Duncan Jones's first full-length movie, a loving mashup of plot elements and visual influences from the adult science-fiction movies of the '70s and '80s, like (as he says) Silent Running, Outland, and Alien, plus bits of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Blade Runner, Asimov's Three Laws, and probably other precursors I'm missing.

This isn't to say it's a spot-the-reference exercise, though. Jones made a terrific and thoughtful science-fiction movie, and for only $5 million. As he says, that's a lot for an "independent" movie, but he made a visually sophisticated movie for that price; compared to Danny Boyle's $50 million Sunshine (another 2001/Solaris/Alien stew), it was a bargain. Jones used a lot of old-school effects -- e.g., miniature models pulled by fishing line across a studio moonscape -- and kept the CGI to a minimum, giving the film a look that's immediately familiar to fans of the old movies.

I won't say much about the plot. I watched it knowing only that Sam Rockwell is alone on the moon and somehow meets... another Sam Rockwell. He does an amazing job that especially reveals itself when you watch the DVD extras, which also includes a 30-minute short by Jones about a high-tech assassin, Whistle. Jones has just wrapped his next movie, Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

Today's ephemera: Outdoor Cooking with Reynolds Wrap

Another fine example of corporate largesse: we only want to make your camping experience better, and it's especially better if you use yards and yards of Reynolds Wrap!

This pamphlet is from 1950, with methods "field tested by recognized camping authorities." I like the dark green they use for cover and the two-color illustrations, the better to evoke that deep forest Scouting vibe. I especially love the black-and-white photos with green illustration behind.

The opening photo-illustration (see at bottom) is the best: two fun guys getting ready to eat... something, I don't know, over some furniture hewn from the living forest around them. No Coleman gear here, nor even a semblance of neatness or order. They're using what looks like paint cans and buckets, and Mr Serious on the left has his sleeves rolled up -- good thing, too, because his hands are filthy. Mr Clean and Smiley is preparing a cookpot, because "pots, pans, and dishes are no longer necessary on a camping trip."

You see, pure aluminum foil isn't just for wrapping food, ho no! You can make a quick drinking cup from a small piece while on the trail. You can wrap matches to keep them dry, and wrap film to avoid exposure, and wrap small objects to keep them from getting lost. You can wrap your hunting rifle for the off-season. Wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap.

Feeling more ambitious? We can make an aluminum foil cookpot from a bent sapling -- make sure you double the foil for extra strength! Or make a small, multilevel baking oven from sticks and foil.

Really, they only missed having us construct a canoe, a lean-to, or a suspension bridge.

The best part is the disposal advice: Used Reynolds Wrap MUST be buried as it will not deteriorate for many months if left above ground. So, put the used wrap in the fire to burn off the food, let it cool, and roll it into a small ball. Dig a hole with your boot and bury it! Voila, no more unsightly trash in the campsite. Brilliant.

A little company history: Reynolds was started by the nephew of the tobacco baron, R.J. Reynolds, who needed a lot of foil wrapping to wrap the suddenly popular of cigarettes he was pushing. Just before WWII, they expanded when they deduced that Germany had increased its aluminum capacity in preparation for war, but after the war they found lots of other exciting aluminum opportunities, including the aluminum can in 1963.

I haven't learned the origin of the terrific logo on the back cover, a stylized St George and the Dragon motif.

Some more scanned excerpts here:

Today's ephemera: Flowers of Kleenex

Have Fun with Flowers of Kleenex Tissues! From 1961 -- what, you think ReadyMade invented this stuff? This fine book tells you how to make all the popular flowers -- roses, tulips, poinsettias, and more -- as well as how to makes wreaths, tabletop trees, and even parade floats! 

I'm particularly fond of the Chevy logo among the suggested ideas. Won't your boss be pleased when you show up at the next all-hands meeting with your company logo made of Kleenex flowers? He'll probably walk it right into the next board meeting and take all the credit, and what will you have to show for your 30 hours of tissue manipulation and wire-mesh-forming? Bupkiss. 

And, what's more, now you don't even have any Kleenex brand tissues left to wipe your tears away. You'll have to use Scott brand paper towels (another fine Kimberly-Clark product), which will give you a rash if you rub too hard, so be careful.

It's probably best just to make a wreath of poinsettias for Aunt Clarissa, because she always loves those kind of things, even though it means you'll have to listen to her advice about your hair and clothes and weight. But, she's family, whaddyagonnado?

Below are some spreads from the book.

Before the war, in living color

Really enjoyed this big set of large, color photographs on the Denver Post site. They were taken 1939-1943 by the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information.

It's such a revelation to see the color of the clothes on farm workers (#9) or kids (#20), of signs on juke joints (#38) or posters on school rooms (#69). I liked the bright yellow airplane (#60) and the vivid red caboose (#50).

However, I was drawn to these photos, somehow more powerful for being in color though there's hardly any there.

Go see the whole collection and try to remember that the world didn't really look like back-and-white photos then, as beautiful as those are.