Most likely you visit my site because you know me or because you have impeccable taste. If you also happen to be in New York, you’re invited to a gallery opening that includes the work of friends.
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Category Archives: Culture
Surfing report
The 70’s European motoring experience involved me sitting in the back of my (well, technically my parents’) rare 2-door Audi 100 LS as they sped me around Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Italy. One everpresent prop was Michelin marginalia–the red guide, the green guide, and wonderful yellow-jacketed maps that marked even the smallest roads in those bright optimistic colors that made you want to drive down them. Michelin has finally brought all these resources on-line, and the result is a slow site that nevertheless exhaustively lists all the best restaurants in all of Europe, and detailed maps of the entire European continent and its cities–www.viamichelin.com
One thing I freely admit sucks about New York is its music radio stations. Until recently, streaming internet music was not an alternative to the local hollering via radio waves, as throughput on the internet was just not high enough. 20kbps is AM quality, but being on a par with FM requires at least a 128kbps stream. URGent, the University Radio of Ghent (get it?) radio station in Belgium now has gone completely overboard, providing a 192kbps MP3 commercial-free stream of great edgy modern stuff to listen to via iTunes on your Mac (or somehow on your PC) while you’re doing the dishes. The sound quality is simply much higher than the best FM radio reception, as long as you have a T1, cable or DSL and great speakers.
Movie review: Amélie
Oh, look, another movie review. I’ll keep it short.
Go see Amélie.
More fun is discussing the minority of critics who chastise the film for not accurately portraying Paris circa 1997. I’m just baffled at the thought that realism should suddenly become a hallmark of a good film. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet uses all the special advantages of filmmaking precisely in order to bring us into the heroine’s subjective world and away from the strain of the constant reality check. I’d even go further: To Jeunet reality is a collective psychosis, and the symbol of this is the Lady Di hysteria to which Amélie is blissfully oblivious.
In that vein, here is what I like:
The taste of water when you’re really thirsty. A new city and a map. A clear dark sky. Beating people at Scrabble on the last turn. Bragging about it.
What I don’t like: Companies that misspell the words in their name and company names that are meaningless. The words “just kidding”. Badly poured beer.
Surf report
I resisted for over 5 years, but when I switched from DSL to cable-based internet access a few weeks ago the pricing was such that I succumbed to the serpent-headed lure of 100 channels for my TV. It seems the only thing I’ve missed all these year was the opportunity to buy ab-blasters in three easy installments.
I much prefer the internet–it promotes the active pursuit of useful information. A search on Google for a distinct entity that is known by only a few hundred people in the world still yields entire web pages devoted to it. I had in mind “Sechery”, a minuscule hamlet comprised of 15 houses or so in the backwaters of the Belgian Ardennes, where the Geens family bought an old farmhouse back in 1960. The web has bad art devoted to it, an automated “Sechery, Belgium Page” that includes a helpful map showing Sechery in relation to Greenland and Afghanistan, and it is even at the top of an exclusive list of places in Belgium starting with “Se”. (Be sure to check out the nearby village of Stefan Geens, Belgium… or make your own.)
I did end up learning something. The French and the Germans upheld their proud tradition of fighting on Belgian soil during World War I, and engaged in battle in the area around Sechery, especially in the village of Maissin on Aug 22, 1914. There is a mass grave of a few thousand people near the village today. It turns out the bodies were collected and buried by farmers from Sechery, among others. In the 60’s my parents would come home from walks with rusted WWI helmets they’d found at the edge of fields or in the forests.
Urban tribes
Felix alerted me to this New York Times Sunday Magazine article. It’s a very accurate description of the social life my friends and I lead these days. In our particular case there is a twist–many members of our “tribe” are scattered across the globe, and while we stay in touch virtually via email and through sites such as Sighs, we rely, perversely, on weddings as occasions for gathering. When we run out of weddings, we’ll need other excuses for international gatherings–birthdays? New Years?
I quit smoking a year ago
I almost forgot. September 26 was an anniversary of sorts: I quit smoking a year ago. To commemorate the occasion I unwittingly arranged to have my wisdom teeth “extracted”, in the parlance of dentists. I was promised mind-altering pain in the aftermath unless I took mind-altering drugs, but so far I’ve held out. Today I shopped for mashed potatoes, 6 cans of prechewed soup, and tubs of chocolate ice cream, and I rented some food movies: Chocolat, and Like Water for Chocolate. It’s called eating vicariously–I think there is a theme there somewhere.
While on the topic, I’d like to state for the record that some of the best movies ever are food movies: Babette’s Feast, Tampopo, Eat Drink Man Woman, La Grande Bouffe, Cook Thief Wife Lover, Big Night, Delicatessen (ahem)–these are the ones that come to mind immediately.
And if you’re looking for a respite from post-September 11 depression, you can’t do better than Together (Tillsammans), a generous, humane and funny movie about a hippie commune in 1970’s Sweden. It’s currently playing in New York and any other world capital near you.
photogenic abandoned buildings
There are many photogenic abandoned buildings in Belgium. Some of them are on a new favorite site.
Oslo
Two days in Oslo is an experience of the near future, if you’re an optimist. Everybody has a cell phone, debit/credit card use is ubiquitous, children are polite, the streets are clean, bikes rule, people are fat-free but not the food in the supermarkets… It’s a blond utopian society, where the positive-sum game of social interaction is played with a remarkable expertise that is handed down from one generation to the next. My Norwegian friend Mette mentioned a murder rate of 40 per year for 5 million odd people–compare that to New York’s 900+ murders a year spread over 10 million or so.
The honor guard at the Royal Palace certainly embodies this New Norwegian Way. At the changing of the guard, the officer on duty does not sheathe his sword or gesture with his rifle; instead, with deft, robot-like movements he hands his cell phone ceremoniously to his replacement, and marches off.
What is the secret that has turned Norwegians into the model world citizen after a well-publicized bad-boy phase around the turn of the first millenium? A homogeneous society? Centuries of plenty? A focus on rugged self-reliance and a consideration for nature? Perhaps it was the yolk of a rather stern brand of Christianity, the lasting legacy of which is mainly felt in the price of a drink around here. Add the genetic luck of the Norwegians to these prices and any Oslo bar could be a New York watering hole for the beautiful people.
Film review: Timecode, Memento
The possibilities for non-linear storytelling that DVD technology provides are obvious, but until now these have been squandered on the decidedly plot-free travails of porn actors. No longer. Two of the best recent movies are in fact better suited for DVD than for the mass sequential viewing provided by a cinema screening.
Timecode, directed by Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas), has just been released on DVD. The film consists of four cameras rolling without a single cut for 97 minutes, filming a troupe of actors as they interact within a loosely defined plot. All four views are synchronized and shown simultaneously on the screen. The sound, meanwhile, is gleaned from whichever camera happens to be documenting the most interesting action. In the cinema, this “director’s cut” sound edit is what everybody hears. On the DVD, all four sound streams are available, and they are accessible at the push of a button.
The result is a much fuller understanding of the plot—there are entire conversations now exposed that were previously silent. Switching sound from camera to camera is addictive, and it entices the viewer to replay scenes from different perspectives. But the lasting impression is one of appreciation for the virtuosity of the actors, who all stay in character for the duration of film, which really only took 97 minutes to shoot.
Of course, Timecode is a lot more than a bunch of actors and a few cameramen getting together for an afternoon. The version we see is in fact the 15th one shot. The DVD also includes, in its entirety, the first shoot, where the plot and characters develop completely differently.
Another film where seeing it on DVD will make all the difference is Memento. If you haven’t seen it already, do not read this Salon exposé of this murder mystery’s labyrinthine narrative structure. It suffices to know that Leonard, the main protagonist (Guy Pierce) suffers from the inability to make new memories, allowing the director (Christopher Nolan) to run the plot backwards in 5-minute increments as a means of simulating that effect for the audience. (Of course, it’s much more complicated than that).
When the DVD version is out (on September 4, 2001 in the US), we’ll finally be able to unscramble the scenes, piece them together in chronological order, and see the film the “traditional” way. This would be thankless and boring on video, but will only take the push of a button on my DVD. With a film as good as Memento, each version will validate the other.
Petra photos
The black-and-white photos from my trip to Petra in January 2001 are finally sorted, scanned and presented after a fashion. Feel free to use these pictures as an excuse to buy a larger monitor–there is just too much detail in them to justify smaller picture sizes. Evidently, it’s one of the more impressive sights I’ve seen. If I find a map of the site, I’ll add that later.