Thursday, February 28, 2008
Savagery!
Oh my god. Oh my god oh my god oh my god. Dear internet: today I finally understand why you were invented.
I don't know if you guys read Ain't It Cool News at all, but they're a pretty great site for news on upcoming movies and for the past few weeks they've run a few stories about the very exciting adaptation coming up of... wait for it:
Where the Wild Things Are.
This was my favourite kids book. Maybe it was your favourite kids book? All I know is, October 31st 2006 found me at my friends Jen and Derek's place with giant safety pinned-on ears, pajamas, smeared-on whiskers and a stuffed tail I had to hold to keep from dragging. Oh, and a paper crown, of course. They're making it into a movie, Spike Jonze is directing and Dave Eggers is writing. If you've ever met me, you probably know my savage dislike of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but I am genuinely giddy about this movie. I'll just step out of the way and let you see the test clip that leaked a little while ago for yourself (kudos to Movieweb):
Spike Jonze has commented on the clip:
But... the reason he wrote in is because there are rumours that Warner Brothers is considering completely recasting, reshooting and rewriting this movie. It's breaking my heart. See this clip before it gets pulled down again. Read about it here.
I don't know if you guys read Ain't It Cool News at all, but they're a pretty great site for news on upcoming movies and for the past few weeks they've run a few stories about the very exciting adaptation coming up of... wait for it:
Where the Wild Things Are.
This was my favourite kids book. Maybe it was your favourite kids book? All I know is, October 31st 2006 found me at my friends Jen and Derek's place with giant safety pinned-on ears, pajamas, smeared-on whiskers and a stuffed tail I had to hold to keep from dragging. Oh, and a paper crown, of course. They're making it into a movie, Spike Jonze is directing and Dave Eggers is writing. If you've ever met me, you probably know my savage dislike of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but I am genuinely giddy about this movie. I'll just step out of the way and let you see the test clip that leaked a little while ago for yourself (kudos to Movieweb):
Spike Jonze has commented on the clip:
That was a very early test with the sole purpose of just getting some footage to Ben our vfx (visual effects) supervisor to see if our vfx plan for the faces would work. The clip doesn't look or feel anything like the movie, the Wild Thing suit is a very early cringy prototype, and the boy is a friend of ours Griffin who we had used in a Yeah Yeah Yeahs video we shot a few weeks before. We love him, but he is not in the actually film...Oh and that is not a wolf suit, its a lamb suit we bought on the internet. Talk to you later... - SpikeThe monster in the clip is apparently named Carroll, and is going to be voiced by flipping James Gandolfini. Someone working on the movie writing in to AICN this week and said, 'Even in its most incomplete form, WTWTA is startlingly dark, adult and deep, but it’s also the most accurate depiction of childhood and that moment where we begin to lose our naïve thoughtless innocence that I’ve ever seen.'
But... the reason he wrote in is because there are rumours that Warner Brothers is considering completely recasting, reshooting and rewriting this movie. It's breaking my heart. See this clip before it gets pulled down again. Read about it here.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
I turn my back for one minute...
What on earth has been happening in Alberta since I left?
A mediocre showing of candidates in Edmonton-Strathcona I am disappointed, but not surprised, about. It's nice to know Raj has a feisty successor in NDP candidate Rachel Notley, who actually seems to have thought carefully about what she would do in the legislature beyond thumbing through her party's platform. But the Liberal and Conservative candidates... Tim Vant really couldn't remember if the Liberals support putting a stopper on any new oil sands development immediately or not? And kudos the PCs for finding a sacrificial lamb after all, but TJ Keil sounds less and less informed every time I read about something he's said. Thank you to terahertz for blogging the all-candidates forum (minus Green candidate Adrian Cole) and making my decision very very easy.
What I did not anticipate in this election was the extent to which the PCs' shamefully lazy sense of entitlement would apparently lead them to think they could just rig this election anyway they please:
That's right. Half of the returning officers in the province have "strong ties with the Progressive Conservatives." If you're going to rig an election, do it with class, man! Does Stelmach really think the "optics" of this are going to get any better for having appointed Katherine Harris as Chief Returning Officer - Harris of Florida's cheery hanging chad fame? (Kudos to Calgary Grit and to Dave Cournoyer of daveberta, who is a very nice fellow and a decent tipper, which is an important thing)
My province, my province... I leave for one semester and suddenly we've got all the usual apathy of an Albertan election compounded with the absurd electoral shenanigans of Putin and the gang?
Fortunately one province out west doesn't seem to have completely lost their minds... BC has been moving to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by over 30% from 2007 levels by 2020, and they've actually got a plan to do it - starting with a carbon tax! Which is reasonable, since by 2006 their emissions had gone up by 30% over 1990 levels. Crazy. It's happening.
A mediocre showing of candidates in Edmonton-Strathcona I am disappointed, but not surprised, about. It's nice to know Raj has a feisty successor in NDP candidate Rachel Notley, who actually seems to have thought carefully about what she would do in the legislature beyond thumbing through her party's platform. But the Liberal and Conservative candidates... Tim Vant really couldn't remember if the Liberals support putting a stopper on any new oil sands development immediately or not? And kudos the PCs for finding a sacrificial lamb after all, but TJ Keil sounds less and less informed every time I read about something he's said. Thank you to terahertz for blogging the all-candidates forum (minus Green candidate Adrian Cole) and making my decision very very easy.
What I did not anticipate in this election was the extent to which the PCs' shamefully lazy sense of entitlement would apparently lead them to think they could just rig this election anyway they please:
That's right. Half of the returning officers in the province have "strong ties with the Progressive Conservatives." If you're going to rig an election, do it with class, man! Does Stelmach really think the "optics" of this are going to get any better for having appointed Katherine Harris as Chief Returning Officer - Harris of Florida's cheery hanging chad fame? (Kudos to Calgary Grit and to Dave Cournoyer of daveberta, who is a very nice fellow and a decent tipper, which is an important thing)
My province, my province... I leave for one semester and suddenly we've got all the usual apathy of an Albertan election compounded with the absurd electoral shenanigans of Putin and the gang?
Fortunately one province out west doesn't seem to have completely lost their minds... BC has been moving to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by over 30% from 2007 levels by 2020, and they've actually got a plan to do it - starting with a carbon tax! Which is reasonable, since by 2006 their emissions had gone up by 30% over 1990 levels. Crazy. It's happening.
Labels: alberta, bc, democracy, politics, sustainability
Friday, February 22, 2008
Brackish waters
I'M A BIG FAN OF THE WORD 'BRACKISH.' SOMETHING about it rings with this lovely connotation of water that's a little too messy, a little too churned-up to be really one thing or the other. Alexander Wilson's 1991 tome The Culture of Nature is a book that has done much to muddy my own understandings of the borders between the "natural" world and the human one.I had the good fortune of spending my New Year's Eve this last December with friends of mine in Toronto, and while I was there I was reading this book to try to finish it off before school started up again. It was freezing that week (as my grandpa called all the way from Alberta to remind me), but I decided to go outside and try to explore a few parts of the city I'd never seen before. Some quick digging through old Now Magazine archives gave me the intriguing idea of hiking in Scarborough, and with a granola bar and some tupperwared dal in my bag and thermal underwear snugly pulled up, I decided to give it a try. I attempted to explain where I was going to my friends, but to not much avail. I admit, I was a little bewildered by the concept too - hiking in the city? Isn't that something you do up in the mountains?
The Culture of Nature is sort of a manifesto that Wilson (a Torontonian himself) made of his ideas of where North American conceptions about nature come from. I was surprised to learn how historically recent many of the ideas and expectations about what "nature" means in our collective imagination are. To my mild embarrassment (at being enough of a keener to have accidentally read recommended reading material for one of my classes), our human geography professor quoted a passage from the book in her second lecture. Wilson says:
Our experience of the natural world – whether touring the Canadian Rockies, watching an animal show on TV, or working in our own gardens – is always mediated. It is always shaped by rhetorical constructs like photography, industry, advertising, and aesthetics, as well as by institutions like religion, tourism and education.
It's a surprisingly easy read at times. Wilson teases apart the history of the nature documentary over the 20th century and its connections to the dislocation experienced by new suburbanites feeling isolated from a "natural" world in the 1950s, investigates the contradictions of using tropical plants and flowers in malls to create spaces that feel semi-natural inside but leaving this impulse almost entirely out of the design of the mostly asphalt spaces around them, and takes you on a walk through Dollywood, Dolly Parton's "homage to the mountain culture of the southern Appalachians." Who here north of the border would have imagined this ever-so-slightly bizarre village theme park even existed?You can almost feel Wilson driving around the continent collecting stories for this book. At times it does get a bit textbook-y, but there are a lot of surprising anecdotes and not-very-well-known spaces and landscapes that crop up that give the bulk of it an almost Reader's Digest-like fun to pick up. Not to say Reader's Digest is my favourite - or least favourite - doctor's office reading material. I'm mostly just thinking of the guilty pleasure of skipping to the jokes at the back. Wilson clearly enjoyed writing about a curmudgeonly, anti-Semitic Walt Disney only partially deliberately giving an entire suburban generation their understanding of where we fit into the picture we call nature.
I'll let you read it for yourself to go through the way he pieces these preconceptions apart, because most of the experience of the book for me was having them deliberately disassembled one by one. It's a good book to leave in the bathroom or by the side of your bed to pick up and come back to.
One thing I felt I needed to do after reading this was to visit the community garden that was made in his memory after he died. Alex Wilson was a horticulturalist, a journo, and I think most of all a member of his community. He designed the Aids memorial garden downtown in Cawthra Park, and lost his own battle with Aids in 1993. After reading his ideas about the links between the ground we stand on, the places we come from, and the communities we build, I think it's a kind of pilgrimage I'll be making in the not-too distant future.
I know I fawn over books sometimes, but this one really left me with a feeling of hope after I'd set it down. Obama's not the only one who has something to say about optimism for the world we're building together.
Labels: books, environment
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Sound of the future
'You probably don't even know my middle name.'I've been thinking about starting a podcast. What do you guys think?
It would probably be about a half hour or so thing every week (certainly an improvement over the rather sparse smattering of postings I've been making lately on the blog). There would probably be a bit of me talking about something I've been reading lately and perhaps a conversation with a guest or two about some current-events types happenings slathered liberally between whatever I've been listening to that week - which today might include Rihanna, Feist, this Japanese dude Takagi Masakatsu, and Edmonton dance pop awesomeosity Shout Out Out Out Out.
If I get some good feedback on this, I'll be looking for help finding a microphone and knowing what kind of software I'd need to make it. My main inspiration for this idea is this fantastic music podcast I used to listen to called Vu d'ici by m-c in Montreal.
Also, if you like geeky jokes about arcane Canadia, you should read the Kate Beaton's comics. Right now.
It would probably be about a half hour or so thing every week (certainly an improvement over the rather sparse smattering of postings I've been making lately on the blog). There would probably be a bit of me talking about something I've been reading lately and perhaps a conversation with a guest or two about some current-events types happenings slathered liberally between whatever I've been listening to that week - which today might include Rihanna, Feist, this Japanese dude Takagi Masakatsu, and Edmonton dance pop awesomeosity Shout Out Out Out Out.
If I get some good feedback on this, I'll be looking for help finding a microphone and knowing what kind of software I'd need to make it. My main inspiration for this idea is this fantastic music podcast I used to listen to called Vu d'ici by m-c in Montreal.
Also, if you like geeky jokes about arcane Canadia, you should read the Kate Beaton's comics. Right now.
Labels: canada, podcasting
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
A heart collapsing
In the interest of keeping in mind that no story can ever be told as if it were the only one, here's a very different take on September 11th by Suheir Hammad, sent to me by my good friend Maria. It's decent to hear from someone who felt very differently about all those bodies that fell with all that steel and glass, dig.
Some things just stick in your mind
Sorry to have been incommunicado for a while. I've just started school out at Trent U in a little city halfway between Toronto and Kingston called Peterborough. If you've never heard of it, or have only heard someone's parents talking about how they met at a party there, it's okay.
Although I shred leaflets from Jack Layton with equal relish as those from Dion or my own Conservative MP, Rahim Jaffer (if I get one more pamphlet with a picture of him flipping pancakes...), it would be fair to say I share more than a few "lefty" views. So when I slowly began discovering I had landed myself at the mother of all hippie schools out here in Ontario, my reflex was to automatically start disagreeing with people. I don't know, I just can't let a room get too agree-y without wanted to stir it up a little.
For example. A perfectly well-spoken and reasonably thoughtful girl in one of my classes started talking about how "we" white feminists in the West needed to take into account the opinions of the locals before going over there and pushing our views on them. Putting aside anything I might have agreed with in her statement, I told her to take a longer look around the classroom before presuming we all fit into that "we" and essentially called her an unconscious racist. Things like that. Making friends.
It seemed appropriate to me, then, that I recently stumbled across a copy of Some People Push Back by Ward Churchill - a man whose extensive shit-disturbing demands respect, if not agreement - right here on the internet. You might not have heard of this essay by name, but this is the one his book on "chickens coming home to roost" is all about, the one where he says the people who died in the World Trade Centre in 2001 were essentially "little Eichmanns" who were simply reaping their just desserts for their complicity in the United States' imperial misadventures abroad. Yeah, that guy. If you're interested, it's available here.
And since I've outed myself as away from home again, I might as well ask if any of you live in the Edmonton-Strathcona provincial riding. I'm getting my absentee ballot sent to me soon I hope, but I have to admit ignorance about any of the candidates for this election but Rachel Notley. Anybody have an insights to offer?
Although I shred leaflets from Jack Layton with equal relish as those from Dion or my own Conservative MP, Rahim Jaffer (if I get one more pamphlet with a picture of him flipping pancakes...), it would be fair to say I share more than a few "lefty" views. So when I slowly began discovering I had landed myself at the mother of all hippie schools out here in Ontario, my reflex was to automatically start disagreeing with people. I don't know, I just can't let a room get too agree-y without wanted to stir it up a little.
For example. A perfectly well-spoken and reasonably thoughtful girl in one of my classes started talking about how "we" white feminists in the West needed to take into account the opinions of the locals before going over there and pushing our views on them. Putting aside anything I might have agreed with in her statement, I told her to take a longer look around the classroom before presuming we all fit into that "we" and essentially called her an unconscious racist. Things like that. Making friends.
It seemed appropriate to me, then, that I recently stumbled across a copy of Some People Push Back by Ward Churchill - a man whose extensive shit-disturbing demands respect, if not agreement - right here on the internet. You might not have heard of this essay by name, but this is the one his book on "chickens coming home to roost" is all about, the one where he says the people who died in the World Trade Centre in 2001 were essentially "little Eichmanns" who were simply reaping their just desserts for their complicity in the United States' imperial misadventures abroad. Yeah, that guy. If you're interested, it's available here.
And since I've outed myself as away from home again, I might as well ask if any of you live in the Edmonton-Strathcona provincial riding. I'm getting my absentee ballot sent to me soon I hope, but I have to admit ignorance about any of the candidates for this election but Rachel Notley. Anybody have an insights to offer?
Labels: alberta, politics, shit-disturbers, terrorism
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