I didn’t save many objects from childhood, but my Mother did box up some toys that she thought my kids might want someday. Turns out, I did in fact spawn, and now some objects I haven’t seen in decades are kicking around underfoot. Read the rest of this entry »
Cyberneticists see the world as composed of systems of information transfer; within this approach, all such systems tend not toward chaos but toward equilibrium. Given a limited number of inputs and outputs, any system will eventually settle into a routine where inputs are always dealt with in the same way. In these “homeostatic” systems, there are eventually no surprises. Only rarely will there be any unexpected outcomes - and if so, they appear as a sort of blessing, an autopoetic incarnation of some new outcome that no input could have ever produced. (Sometimes there appears a ghost in the machine.) Read the rest of this entry »
image from an advocacy site for poisoned Rocky Flats' nuclear workers
Here’s my offering to the media soup: (the Heene patriarch talking to the media last night, to the sweet sounds of Daphne Oram.)
Science Fiction, my favorite genre, has been wearing on me lately. Somehow the same moral universe keeps popping up, and it’s a tired tale that has no end. I have some suspicions about why this keeps happening.
I’ve got a new review up over at Third Way / Media Matters - that’s an Anabaptist/Mennonite site for people looking to remain intentional and conversational about their consumption of film, television, and other forms. You can catch my review of Bill Maher’s Religulous, as well as my contribution to their year-end lists.
Most of my friends were way ahead of me on watching The Wire. I finally caught up enough to post a review of the show for potential new viewers. It’s my first review for Third Way Cafe / Media Matters, a blog and weekly email aimed at stimulating discussion and informed consumption of popular media from an Anabaptist perspective. Check my review here.
There are more people around than usual in my home lately, so I’ve had to rethink the role of music in the house. My usual noisy stuff wouldn’t fly with the guests, and I couldn’t take myself out of the social mix with headphones. So I thought to turn to songs again, actual melodies with memorable words that are “safe” for a wide variety of people.
For that, I thought to turn to Gospel. This will be an ongoing effort, I’m sure, but as I’m trying not to spend money on music right now, I started my dive into Gospel music with the Urbana Free Library.
[Delivered as an introduction for La Jetee and Case of the Grinning Cat for the Annual French Film Festival, at Boardman's Art Theatre in Champaign, Illinois.]
Every artist starts with a set of assumptions about her medium. In conventional cinema, the artist assumes that camera will be used to record a passage of time, and then re-play that passage later to tell a story. In experimental cinema, sometimes it seems that the one assumption is that one avoids that very task.
I’m mostly procrastinating again. But here’s as good a place as any to record some thoughts on finally seeing Malick’s The New World. I need to see it again to really get it all, and I’ll probably wait for the DVD since it’s supposed to be longer anyway.