The Octopus and the Bee

The Way Home - 2011 In Review

2012-01-23T07:06:00.000-08:00

In January of 2011 I left my job of four years. Since I was a fixture of the company at the time (one of its four department supervisors) it was a messy lot to extract myself from, dragging on two painful additional weeks into the new year than I had originally planned. I trained people, documented all the software I had built over the years and gave multiple tutorials about how it was all set up. And then, like that- I was gone.

Unfortunately I had no break, save a very short weekend, in between the end date at my old job and the first day at my new one. The transition was rough, but I was excited to have a change of scenery. While I'd never worked there before, my new company has been a San Francisco Bay Area visual effects landmark since the late 1970s. Having expanded as large as it has since then, it had attracted many of the people that I'd worked with over the last 10 years of my career.

These friendly faces welcomed me as I ran into them in the halls, in the campus's gorgeous cafeteria and even on public transit going to and from the studio. It was like a giant vfx class reunion, which was really fun for me for those first few weeks as I got settled in. I also had the pleasure of working on a film that I actually had high hopes for- not a common thing in our business to be sure.

But the honeymoon was never meant to last. In March I was laid off, a few days after my birthday. I had prepared for this- my contract was up and I wouldn't be needed until the next round of projects, set to launch sometime in the summer. Truth be told, I was ecstatic to have a few months to myself, to catch up on the video lectures that I'd abandoned the year before and to continue work on my blog series, Becoming, that I'd started at the end of 2009.

Most importantly, I took this opportunity to pursue a trajectory that had been eating at me since I'd finished 2010's In Review post: the composition of electronic music. This was something I hadn't done since the mid-late 1990s, and those attempts were novice at best. Nevertheless, I jumped in and found myself surrounded by a strange and unfamiliar landscape.

When I'd made electronic music before, there were about three manufacturers of software for the endeavor which couldn't do very much. Decent synthesizers and samplers were rack-mounted hardware with tiny monochrome lcd screens. If there was a computer involved at all, it was assuredly a Mac and everything was REALLY expensive. You couldn't compile a decent setup for anything less than a few to several thousand dollars. But that had all become ancient history. Now high-powered equipment and software were ubiquitous and completely affordable to almost anyone who had the will to get their musical ideas recorded and distributed, with near-professional results.

Among the flood of new electronic music pioneers that had adopted these cheap and widely available technologies, many had taken it upon themselves to share their various workflows via screen-captured demos and tutorials on youtube- for free. I was blown away by the openness and camaraderie that had sprung up in support of contemporary electronic music composition, and I was even further inspired by the growth of the movement's online communities, which had exploded since the internet's infancy in the 90s.

I spent weeks researching and learning the new methods. I read message boards, blogs and reviews, watched the aforementioned youtube demos and downloaded trial software. I totally felt like a kid in a candy store- it was all so fascinating to me, but I had many questions, the most pertinent of which was: What was the minimum amount of funds and effort that I needed to get my own small electronic music studio up and running?

I learned pretty quickly that I already possessed most of the components that I would need, so I dusted off my old Roland keyboard and early 90s-era electronic drum pad and plugged them into my computer. I downloaded a program called Reaper, an ultra-cheap but powerful stand-in for more expensive professional audio/music creation programs like Protools and Cubase. I bought discounted synthesizer software from a company called Native Instruments using old credit card reward points I had laying around. I learned online how to connect everything up, and I was ready to ROLL.

I thought I'd start out by recording some drum tracks over an old A Capella Imogen Heap song that I'd always thought would sound better with a beat. The result was awful- not in concept but in my own personal execution of it, meaning that I couldn't keep the beat at all, even while using a metronome. For hours I tried to sync up, changing tempos, modifying drum pad configurations, changing sticking methods, but made no progress. I decided after much frustration that my high school era drum skills had been lost, and if I was going to continue to do this I needed to practice every day and get a lot better... or maybe I just needed to assume an alternate, perhaps more intimate method of composition than swinging sticks around.

It was around this time that I discovered Maschine, a complete hybrid hardware/software musical composition system. Initially I didn't feel like I was Maschine's target market. It seemed like it was more geared towards legendary hip hop producers and beat makers, with its grid of soft, square pads that triggered drum and keyboard samples, its design deliberately echoing the famous Akai MPC series drum machines used throughout the 1980s and 90s. I couldn't possibly be worthy of such an awesome tool... but it was SO DAMN COOL!!!

After much hemming and hawing I decided to get myself a Maschine, and since then, it has been my closest musical ally. I was looking for a completely fluid creative musical experience and Native Instruments nailed it. Finally I'd found a tool and workflow that was immediately satisfying and something I could look forward to using day after day. Music composition now stood in sharp contrast to the much larger, nebulous projects I'd habitually committed myself to in recent years. It was now conceivable that I could finish a whole song in just a few hours with Maschine, whereas if I were writing a screenplay or philosophical essay, the end product was inevitably months in the making before it saw the light of day, if it ever did.

Over the next few months I expanded my setup. I revived Sadie's old art shed that had sat idle by the side of our house for a year and a half, turning it into my own little hideaway and re-dedicating it exclusively to musical creation. In a slow evolution that took place over many months, financed through more credit card rewards points and some cash that I'd earmarked long ago for the purpose, I eventually constructed a respectable working studio where I could write my tunes in peace from the rest of the world. I now work regularly making music in my studio about 2-3 days a week. Thus far I've created seven finished tracks and started countless others. You can check out my latest work, if you are so inclined, at naturalrevenge.net.

nat ~ rev studio, dec 2011

In addition to making music I continued my studies in philosophy, read stacks of nonfiction books, marathon-watched Akira Kurosawa films and Anime and spent considerable amounts of time in libraries across San Francisco. As Sadie would say, I was the busiest unemployed person she'd ever seen.

In celebration of Sadie's 40th birthday, we spent the month of July in a medieval village along the Dordogne River in Southwest France. We ate, we drank, we attempted to speak French and had an incredible time with a procession of friends that stopped by and spent time with us along the path of their various summer travels throughout Europe. If there ever was a question of whether or not you can eat enough French food, the answer is unequivocally yes. In all honesty I had to take an entire week off from Foie Gras during the trip because just the thought of eating any more of it just made me sick to my stomach. However- one thing I never got sick of were Pommes de Terre Sarladaise (potatoes cooked in goose fat). These little buggers are, I imagine, a lot like what crack must be like. I believe I may have eaten some every single day. Yum.

When we returned from France I had expected to get right back to work, and in fact I was even given a job offer AND a start date from my most recent employer, which were, after a celebratory sushi dinner, quickly snatched away, leaving my unemployment status intact and without much of a clue what to do with myself. At that point I had been off for five months straight, and while I'd been enjoying myself, funds were running low and options in the Bay Area for alternative sources of income in my field were running out.

Outsourcing and relocation of vfx work for the benefit of studio tax breaks were now running rampant, effectively moving a lot of Hollywood's visual effects work to places like Vancouver, London and Singapore. Since I wasn't too keen on moving to any of these places, and with a new dog, three cats, my wife's painting career and a mortgage, we weren't exactly about to move to another country to chase the whims of Hollywood's bottom line. I needed to figure out something else.

I decided the best thing to do was to diversify skill-sets and to invest myself into a new career in computer programming, something I could easily pursue in the Bay Area when the vfx industry here finally evaporated. I started out with two months of intensive mathematics re-learning using one of my (now) most favorite sites on the internet, Khan Academy. Salman Khan did an excellent job setting up this fantastic site for educating kids and adults alike, with exercises as simple as 2+2, extending all the way to advanced calculus and beyond. And of course the entire thing is free of charge (though they do take donations).

After only a few months of practice I successfully got over the bastard math anxiety I had developed during my high school years. I had not only passed all of the exercises (there really is no "passing" on Khan Academy- you have to get 100 percent of the answers correct before you can move to the next subject!) but I absolutely dominated concepts that I never could understand back in high school (I dropped out of calculus my senior year). Now I'd actually begun to enjoy doing math, a turn of events that my high school self would not have been able to foresee in the slightest. I can see him now, sitting at a classroom desk, wrapped in a black trench coat, head in hands, muttering "It's not possible..."

In November, after nearly eight full months of unemployment, I was finally called back into work... for three weeks. I tried to figure out what exactly, in addition to refreshing and possibly having to re-learn the company's entire pipeline, I could get done in only three weeks, but I didn't argue- I needed the cash. I dusted off my spurs and jumped into the grinder. By the end of the three weeks I'd finished a whopping three shots for the movie I'd worked on, one of which would almost certainly never make the cut. It was an absolutely pathetic yield for a vfx veteran with 11 years of experience.

In addition to my job ineptitude, the social landscape of the company was much more tricky for me this time around. I found myself actively avoiding connecting with people I knew from my past period of employment there because I got sick of explaining that yes, I was only there for three weeks, and yes, I had actually been out of work all of that time since I'd wrapped in the spring. A lot of them figured I was just there the whole time, hiding out somewhere in the company's maze of real estate, and that they just hadn't happened to run into me since March.

But something heavier than damaged pride weighed on me during this particular vfx season that I'd never experienced before. I began to loathe little things, like the black paper covering the huge bay windows of the office, deliberately plastered up by artists who wanted to shut the daylight out in order to sustain the dark cave-like atmosphere that I'd known for so many years. Instead of being the cool, artsy environment it had been in years past, it was now just depressing. I couldn't bolster the enthusiasm and team spirit that was there before. My heart just wasn't in it. I ate lunch by myself at my desk with my headphones on, did my job and went home.

The whole experience was disheartening and sad. On my last day as I waited out in front of the building in the rain for Sadie to pick me up, I decided that I was done. I vowed that this year's vfx project cycle, even if it were to resume in the spring of 2012, would be my final dance with professional visual effects.

Having no solid job prospects for the rest of the year, in early December I figured it was a good time to lend my otherwise idle hands to Sadie, who was gearing up for a major expansion of her art studio and school. I quickly took over the administration of her business's operations, organizing class lists, dealing with finances and other simple tasks that would have (and have notoriously) taken away an entire studio day from her. Now she could just paint without having to worry about all of that stuff, and I was actually having fun doing all of it, because in addition to helping Sadie it allowed me to engage in day-to-day business that was active and exciting. Ordering supplies, dealing with banks, tax people and insurance brokers, making phone calls, setting up appointments- I think I may have become just a little bit addicted to the momentum of it all, of things actually happening!

Things went so well in fact, that in mid December, Sadie and I decided to incorporate and sign a lease for a much larger studio and teaching space for her- an 1800-square-foot industrial suite with huge north-light windows and 18 ft ceilings, located on the border of the Soma, Portrero Hill and Mission districts in San Francisco. Sadie's first class in the new space was January 14th of 2012. I remain actively involved in the studio's day to day operations.

I suppose it was inevitable that Sadie and I go into business together. Aside from my disenchantment with the visual effects industry and the increasing demand for her classes and paintings, the compulsion towards entrepreneurship in my family runs deep. My mom and dad have owned a manufacturing company together in Pennsylvania that has served the global semiconductor industry for over 25 years. My sister and brother-in-law own a real estate company in Florida, actually thriving in the markedly difficult real estate markets of recent years. If all goes well this year Sadie and I will add to the list of family business successes as the new owners of SJNV Creative Associates, a fast growing and powerful classical realist art school in the heart of one of the most cosmopolitan cities on the planet.

This year overall has been a trying but important journey for me, wherein I discovered what it was like to finally grow into my adult self. My success in establishing music as a viable creative outlet, the conquering of old mathematical demons and my realization as an independent businessperson each played a part in changing me into a much more confident human being than I had been only a year earlier. I had no idea it would turn out this way, yet at the same time I feel as though it was somehow inevitable. Regardless, it's nice to have finally found my way home.

Best to all of you for a great 2012!!!

Tribute to Little Girl: A Love Lost

2012-01-23T07:05:00.000-08:00

On the final day of 2011 our sweet kitty Simone (aka Little Girl) tragically passed on. She was only three and a half years old so her death came very unexpectedly. All signs point to an undiagnosed heart condition.

In her short time with us, her little presence filled our days with joy. I remember when we first got her and she hissed at me coming out of her cat carrier. For the first few days we kept her behind a closed door in our guest room so the other cats could get used having her smell in the house, but she was very timid- she would only come out for short stints and then scamper back under the bed every time we entered the room. But on the third day when I came in to feed her she was already out on top of the bed and instantly flopped over onto her back to greet me. I rubbed her belly, scratched her behind her ears, and she purred and purred. From then on we were pals, our bond growing ever stronger over the years.

My favorite memory of Little Girl is one particular bright sunny day while I was walking across the courtyard in front of our house when something out the corner of my eye caught my attention. It turned out to be Little Girl, playing in the grass in the neighbor's backyard. She hadn't noticed me walking by, so I stayed out of sight and crept up quietly, peering through the fence at her to get a better look. She was frolicking, in the purest sense of the world- chasing bugs or butterflies or whatever invisible playmate, running back and forth wildly, flipping and somersaulting and squirming around on her back in the grass, catching the sunlight in her orange fur. She was all by herself but completely in bliss, not a care in the world. I'd like to think of her still this way, frolicking in happy sunny days forever.

Little One, I loved you far more than you could have ever understood and it hurt so much to see you go so soon. I hope you had a good life with us and we will always remember how much happiness you filled our lives with. You will be dearly missed. Rest in peace, my little muffin.

Top 10 Things Learned or Reinforced in 2011

2012-01-23T07:04:00.000-08:00

10. When we lose a loved one, the amount of grief that comes from that experience is directly proportional to the strength of the bond that connected us to them.

9. There are two types of things we do in life: process-based and objective-based. They are very different animals.

8. Energy, Information and Language work in concert to construct everything we know as reality. (stay tuned for the conclusion of my Becoming blog series, coming in 2012)

7. The best way to get something done is to get down to the business of actually doing it. Then you will never have to wonder whether or not you can.

6. Enjoying and learning how to do many types of things is a blessing and not a curse. (Polymaths rejoice!)

5. Facebook has replaced television as the most addictive, brainless, time-sucking invention of our time. Repost this as your status for the next 24 hours if you agree.

4. Making music can be much more fun than consuming it.

3. Without a day job around to define you, you will soon discover who you really are.

2. A rainy day is a great day as long as it is spent around a big wooden table with fine wine, good food and great friends. (Viva la France!)

1. Working under someone doesn't bother me, as long as it is MY WIFE. (Hottest. Boss. Ever.)

Favorite Quotes of 2011

2012-01-23T07:03:00.000-08:00

"My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only recognise myself as a symphony." -Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

"Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle, but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting." -Sun Tzu, The Art of War

From Seven Samurai:

Villager: "How are we to feed samurai when we live on rice gruel?"

Elder: "Find hungry samurai. Even bears come down from the mountains when they are hungry."

From Ghostbusters:

Peter Venkman: "For whatever reason, Ray- call it fate, call it luck, call it karma... I believe everything happens for a reason. I believe that we were destined to get thrown out of this dump."

Ray Stantz: "For what purpose?"

Venkman: "To go into business for ourselves."

Favorite Movies of 2011

2012-01-23T07:02:00.000-08:00

Selected Films of Akira Kurosawa:
Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Seven Samurai

I can't believe it took me this long to set aside some time for Emperor Kurosawa, and soak in the Japanese cinematic masterpieces he bestowed upon the film-going public during his lifetime. I decided since his catalog was so vast that I would focus on his samurai films instead of a broader sampling of the whole gamut. The three films I chose were Rashomon (1950), Throne of Blood (1957) and Seven Samurai (1954), and they turned out to be a perfect variety.

Rashomon was one of Kurosawa's earlier films, and was much more raw production-wise than either Seven Samurai or Throne of Blood, but still had incredible cinematography and a dark, engrossing story, mixing quirky characters, the supernatural and a multi-level, twisted narrative structure that would have given current-day director Chris Nolan a run for his money had he and Kurosawa been contemporaries.

Throne of Blood is a complete adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. The characters are as intense, bloodthirsty, greedy and tragic as the players in the original story, but set in feudal Japan, on the slope of Mt. Fuji. It has been called the most successful adaptation of Macbeth ever made, and rightfully so. It is a near-perfect film.

Seven Samurai stands on its own, and defines the word "epic". The famous American Western "The Magnificent Seven" is direct remake of Seven Samurai, and the film was largely the inspiration for the now run-of-the-mill plot device where a motley crew of experts is gathered to accomplish a seemingly insurmountable task.

In the film a farming village is threatened by bandits who annually invade and steal a large portion of their crop. Many of the farmers go to the village elder to ask his advice of what to do and he recommends hiring samurai to defend the village (you can see this awesome line in my Favorite Quotes of 2011 section). Regardless of their inability to pay for their defense with anything but rice they grow, they slowly build up a crew of seven samurai, the perfect number according to their leader, Kambei Shimada. Toshiro Mifune (the go-to frontman of many of Kurosawa's films) stands out as the zany Kikuchiyo, who in the beginning isn't a trained samurai or even invited to join the group, but by the end of the film proves himself as one of the most fierce of them all. It's great to go back to this moody, fun and exhilarating piece of cinema to see where it all started.

One of the things I find most interesting about Kurosawa films is the resonance they have found with American audiences. In fact they've affected US directors like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg so deeply that, when Kurosawa's films fell out of favor in his home country of Japan, both directors (at different times in the 1970s and 80s) stepped in to bankroll his films. They couldn't stand the thought of their all-time cinematic hero as lacking the resources to commit his visions to film.

You can now consider me a hardcore Akira Kurosawa fan. This year I plan to continue my consumption of the Kurosawa catalog, with Kagemusha, Yojimbo, Hidden Fortress and as many others that I can get my hands on.

Buck

An incredibly touching documentary about the original Horse Whisperer. This guy is the real deal, able to tame seemingly wild animals and in the process revolutionize our understanding of the deep connections between us and our fellow mammals. What was most surprising to me was how closely his method unknowingly follows the principles of Tai Chi, which Sadie and I have been studying for a two and half years now. So many times in the film we looked at one another in disbelief at the uncanny similarities between the two.

Super 8

While I'm not a huge fan of movies trending towards out-and-out nostalgia, this one hit a soft spot with me. Set in the early 1980s, Super 8 tries to bring back the magic of the films like ET, Cocoon, The Goonies and Stand By Me, and does a pretty dang good job of it. It was also one of the extremely rare films that I've worked on, where I have a screen credit and I actually liked the film, so it gets a thumbs up simply for that reason.

The Tree of Life

Another masterpiece by Terence Malick that shifts between intense visuals of natural phenomena and a gradual narrative that chronicles the pains of a young boy growing up in 1950s Texas. Some viewers (including my wife) felt as though some of the more "eye-candy" visual sequences in the film dragged on too long but I found them stunning, poetic and meditative. Not a film for everyone to be sure, but definitely a repeat-watcher for me, maybe even qualifying an extremely rare household blu ray purchase (we stream or rent the majority of the films we see these days).

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

You knew I was going to give this one the nod- another Fincher/Reznor collaboration? Come on. But seriously, this one could have gone wrong in so many ways and it just didn't. Stieg Larsson's twisted murder mystery set in the snowy Swedish winterscape, featuring one of the most compelling female lead characters of all time- the hot-tempered, punk rock, kick ass genius computer hacker known as Lisbeth Salander (played impeccably by Rooney Mara) finds a perfect partner with the dark cinematic vision of David Fincher. The film is brutally violent, at some points beyond distasteful, but the story is electrifying as are all of the performances from its bulletproof cast. See it if you dare.

Favorite Music of 2011

2012-01-23T07:01:00.000-08:00

Adele - 21

I discovered Adele last year on Pandora, literally right before 21 was released and Rolling in the Deep EXPLODED. This album is expertly crafted and stunningly original yet with a sweet dose of American blues/soul nostalgia. Pretty incredible genre choice for a gal from Ol' Blighty (shocked when I heard her speaking to the audience on a live track with an English accent).

The lyrics on 21 are soaked in pain and longing, with sass and headstrong defiance riddled throughout. Adele's powerful voice can fill any venue to the brim, enveloping one's soul and rocking it back and forth like a sweet grandmother. The instrumentation on the album ranges from light acoustic guitar to solo piano to full-on blues/rock arrangements. It's a great listen in the car, on a turbulent, exhausting flight (had many of these this year) or in an amber lit lounge while sipping tea or a cocktail. Can't wait to see what she comes up with next. Bravo, Adele!

Florence and the Machine - Lungs

My good friend and premier musical resource Kyra K introduced me to this album back in the summer of 2010 but it wasn't until this year that I got Flo and the gang into heavy rotation. Since early 2011 I've listened to this album AT LEAST once every other day. It's one of those albums that gets deeper and more complex the more you listen to it. I daresay it is a masterpiece.

Moody and melodic with a fat dose of reverb, Lungs swings between delicate strings (harps, guitars, ukuleles) and pounding, merciless drums. I think my favorite thing about this album is its vastness, a product of all of the aforementioned elements, giving it an infectious, epic, even cinematic quality. Florence's lyrics are visceral and richly poetic, making a perfect pair with its backing instrumentation. My favorite tracks are Howl, Drumming Song, and Blinding, though the album is best consumed continuously from beginning to end, just like a great film.

Lungs has apparently been a hit in Europe for years now, unsurprisingly, as so many amazing musical acts are before they tend to fall on American ears. Florence, like Adele, is also a Brit, which begs the question: Why are the Europeans still making better American-sounding music than America? You'd think we'd have learned our lesson by now.

Katy Perry - Teenage Dream

Yeah, it was probably one of the most popular albums of the year worldwide, and for good reason. I LOVE this album, and I don't care who knows it. To my ears, Katy Perry far exceeds any other mainstream pop music act out there at the moment. She has six singles off of this album alone and they are ALL good.

While some will get all high and mighty condemning her work - she doesn't write her own stuff, her range isn't that great, the album's lyrics convey all the wrong messages for our youth and serve to reinforce the ever-lingering misogyny of American culture... Listen- Katy Perry is American pop music at its best, far better than the Britneys or Gagas who don't even try to pretend that they aren't blatantly ripping off Madonna. We want a new voice, not a sequel, and Katy Perry is that voice.

The production value of Teenage Dream is off the scale (awesome synth work!), and the songs are catchy and highly listenable on repeat. Of the songs on the album that didn't turn out so well (there are admittedly a few on there), the track "Who Am I Living For?" is one that, I swear to you, in 2012 I will remix into metal MAYHEM. The thought of Katy's voice singing those lyrics over searing guitar-distorted chaos gets me verrrry excited. Stay tuned.

Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972

I honestly have no idea how I came across this album but I am very glad I did. It was apparently recorded entirely in a church in Iceland. It's literally like nothing I've ever heard before, and I mean NOTHING. Well- I suppose it gets kind of close to the fuzzy atmospheric strangeness of Flying Lotus and maybe a teeny bit of Boards of Canada, but Hecker surpasses both in mood and texture.

The best way I can describe Tim Hecker's music is a perfect sampling of reality (the core instrument is the church's pipe organ) that has been manipulated to sound as though the instruments used on the album wouldn't be found anywhere on this planet. If I had to conjure up a specific image to represent the work, I would pick some sort of perpetual hazy desert sunset, with undulating dust flying through the air, flirting with the formation of patterns before disintegrating again into dancing particulate streams.

You certainly have to be in a specific state of mind to listen to the album but it is not at all challenging. If you are a fan of successful experimental electronic (yet not electronic-sounding) music projects, I can't recommend this release enough.

William Orbit - Pieces in a Modern Style 1 & 2

I enjoy William Orbit's work because he doesn't shy away from reinterpretation of the classics and he doesn't mask the electronic-ness of his orchestration. Pieces in a Modern Style has become a somewhat disparate but very successful catch-all collection that ranges from well-known Bach pieces (Prelude to Cello Suite #1) to the traditional requiem mass In Paradisum, to the time-honored one-act Mascagni opera known as Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry), used most famously in the opening credits of the film Raging Bull. If you enjoy bite-sized classical pieces and electronic/classical crossover you will absolutely love these two albums. Great for any situation, especially on headphones for relaxing during a long day at work.

Hans Zimmer - Inception (score)

Last year I crowned Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's The Social Network score as cinematic music champion, but that was only because I'd given Hans Zimmer's Inception score short shrift. As 2011 wore on, TSN quickly receded into the background of my musical favor, eclipsed by my near-obsessive diet of Inception.

While I did indeed love Inception as a film, I didn't fully appreciate the score, with its hybrid orchestral/modern/synthesized approach, nearly as much as it deserved until I'd given it a true, exhaustive headphone listen. Fluid airy guitars, perfectly warbly Blade Runner-esque synthesizer progressions, serene string harmonies and gripping, mammoth brass hits bring this intense work of genius beyond the silver screen to stand on its own as one of my favorite albums of all time. Listen and listen again. And check out this amazing short film that repurposes the cue from the Inception score known as "Time":

Favorite Books of 2011

2012-01-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

The Information - James Gleick

The best thing about James Gleick's books is that they hold so much for the lay reader, even though they are thoroughly technical, opening up doors to difficult scientific subjects without dumbing them down. His latest masterpiece on the history and implication of information and information theory is both relevant and fascinating.

I've been a fan of Gleick's since his landmark work Chaos, which explored the ins and outs of chaos theory and its modern applications. In this offering, Gleick goes all over the map, covering fully the historical roots of information technology, its major players and the philosophical implications of the movement's development. Along the way the book passes through lands of ancient African drumming (the earliest known form of long distance communication) through to the development of early mathematics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, the discovery of DNA, cybernetics and cryptography. It even spends a good chunk of time exploring Richard Dawkins's concept of memes, a fruitful discussion that rescued this subject for me from the dark haze of Dawkins's annoying modern-day media cult.

The star of the book is Claude Shannon, the too-often unsung "father of information theory", whose groundbreaking mid-20th century approach to "meaning agnostic" information transmission facilitated and inspired the architecture modern computer systems, from the first microprocessors to the internet. In the book's final chapters Gleick discusses the information "flood" that the internet has presented us with and discusses how we might navigate these very muddy waters in the future.

An authoritative, captivating work on the subject and a feast for any nonfiction science reader, not to mention my favorite book of the year which I will most likely be reading again very soon.

Refuse to Choose: A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything You Love - Barbara Sher

Barbara Sher's self-help-ish book guided me a lot this year while I figured out how my mind works. In this useful life manual she identifies what she calls "scanners" (a stand-in for the often misleading term "polymaths")- people who have many interests that pull them off in all different directions, often to a detriment. Modern society isn't properly equipped to deal with scanners, which seems to expect its constituents to follow a "diver" lifestyle, in which a person sinks themselves wholeheartedly into a life where they do one and only one single thing expertly, forever. Trying to apply this blanket standard to scanners like me has disastrous consequences, which can lead to disillusionment, isolation and depression.

While some of the coping solutions for scanners she concocts are a bit uncreative (such as adopting 40 hour a week "good-enough-job" and pursuing your passions in your spare time), other ideas Sher presents in the book were pivotal for me in remaking the landscape of my life, such as the multiple streams of income model and the LTTL (Learn, Try, Teach, Leave) approach to working professionally, which I had actually already done at my previous job- it just dragged on unnecessarily for 4 years. It's much more productive (in retrospect) to view these types of outcomes as strategies instead of things that just happened by default, which avoids unnecessary guilt or unease about the entire situation and using phrases like "If I only I had...", etc.

What struck me most about this work was that it gave me permission to be myself- to pursue my mountains of different interests without feeling like I was weird or silly or misguided in doing so. It also led me to realize that I am not alone out here in scanner/polymath land. We are strong in numbers, and we have a lot to offer this planet!

The Four Hour Body - Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss has a knack for mastering the business of getting shit done and making us happier people. In his latest work he sets out on an entirely different frontier than the one he explored in his last New York Times Bestseller, The Four Hour Work Week which I read and loved last year. In The Four Hour Body (4HB as Tim calls it on his blog) he dispels any notion of linear progression through the book and asks "Which 150 pages will YOU read?" Parts of the book are on diet, fitness and muscle tone, while other sections focus on hacking your circadian sleep cycles so you can have more productive hours per day and yet others focus on how to improve your sex life and induce massive orgasms in your partner.

While I didn't put too much of this book to practical use, of the things I DID try I found that the sleep cycle hack totally WORKS. For a few weeks I slept six hours a night with one 30 minute nap in the middle of the day (being unemployed allows these type of luxuries) and only quit because of digestive trouble, likely caused by the crazy increase in adrenaline and energy (no caffeine necessary!). I would definitely do it again if I had some kind of project crunch that required it. Despite the side effects it's an awesome method for procuring some very valuable extra free time when you need it.

Sadie also adopted this book as her guide for weight loss this year and lost 30 pounds using the book's "slow carb" diet, which is restricted to protein, vegetables and legumes, with one "cheat" day a week where you can eat anything you want (ice cream, pizza(s), a whole cheesecake, etc). I've largely adopted this diet since Sadie and I share many of the same meals and I've been having trouble staying ABOVE my all time low weight as an adult. Bottom line- this stuff works. Tim- you rock, sir.

The Art of War - Sun Tzu

I'm not going to lie and say that I read this cover to cover, but this book sat on my desk the whole year (within reach as I write this) as I explored my various interests. It gave me a lot of perspective about how to deal with life situations in a non-destructive, passive, but firm disposition, presented in an utterly poetic and beautiful but highly readable style.

2011 was also my second full year of Tai Chi classes, during the course of which many works of Eastern philosophy were quoted by our teacher. One maxim that we hear often repeated is this, from The Art of War:

"Know the enemy, know yourself, and victory is never in doubt, not in a hundred battles."

This passage is one of my favorites because it deals directly with the unpredictability of situations that come up in life. Knowing thyself was a high ideal of the Ancient Greeks as well, recommending this practice most famously with a carving in the Oracle's Temple at Delphi. But knowing yourself is only one side of the coin- Master Sun also professes that you must understand the forces you are battling against in order to interact with them effectively.

For example you generally wouldn't launch a nuclear missile at a hurricane to stop it- you'd probably choose a more practical option, like taking shelter and hunkering down until it passes. In other words, there is no single magic bullet that is going to work for all situations. There are consequences for overreacting and overextending, as well as there are for underestimating and under-preparing.

Of all the Ancient Chinese and Taoist works I studied this year (Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, et al), The Art of War provided by far the most practical and down to earth advice, directly applicable to modern life. Highly recommended- read it and please, spread it around. Our world will be a better place for it.

The Nicest Parts of Hell

2011-02-26T14:02:00.000-08:00

Nine Inch Nails is currently on an indefinite hiatus, so I figured it would be perfect timing for the release of a "Best Of Nine Inch Nails" compilation- not just one that includes just the band's hits and singles (of which most best-of albums often are commonly composed) but a much wider retrospective that includes work from all facets of NIN's catalogue, spanning all seven major albums as well as their massive library of remixes and b sides. In lieu of working on Nine Inch Nails material, the band's chief architect Trent Reznor is current working on various "smaller" projects such as film scores (see my review of the Social Network Soundrack) and How To Destroy Angels (with Reznor's wife Mariqueen Maandig).

Trent's also busy polishing his new Golden Globe and Oscar trophies, not to mention he just got married and had a kid. Given these obligations, how could I possibly expect Trent to have the time to undertake another massive project? He just doesn't have time for such things. When I realized all of this a few months back, I decided that the only way that such an ultimate NIN mix would appear... was if I made it myself.

Thus, The Nicest Parts of Hell was born. My vision was to have a seamless mix (where the songs more or less blend into one other), stretched out comfortably over several movements, or acts. The final version is approximately three acts and thirty-five individual tracks, clocking in at just under three hours. Yes- THREE HOURS of ceaseless Nine Inch Nails mayhem.

And so here it all is, for you to enjoy. There are several formats for your convenience. The first streams directly over the web to you via playlist:

iOS users - I couldn't find a decent html5 playlst app (suggestions are welcome), BUT you can download and play each of the three acts just as easily and directly within Safari (in mp3 format) right here:

The Nicest Parts of Hell (Act I)
The Nicest Parts of Hell (Act II)
The Nicest Parts of Hell (Act III)

If you want to download a version that has separate tracks for playback, I've posted a downloadable archive (357mb zip file) of the mp3 version of all three acts here. Otherwise if you are interested in an uncompressed (wav), aac or apple lossless version, each are available upon request.

One special note (which pertains to all versions)- all music from NIN's first album Pretty Hate Machine, with the exception of Sin (custom remix by yours truly) are the remastered versions that were released in November of 2010. And DAMN do they sound good! If you haven't already, I highly recommend you buy/re-buy the album, given that Pretty Hate Machine is now out of the hands of the evil TVT Records and (I imagine) the proceeds now go, in large part, directly back to Trent and Nine Inch Nails (as they should).

Additionally, I made a CD version of The Nicest Parts of Hell for a very select few of you, which have jackets that I designed and screen printed, with no small amount of help from by my good friend Mr. Jon Fischer, screen-printing extraordinaire. If you are interested in a physical copy of the mix, I may be able to accommodate, however the number of jackets Fischer and I print will depend heavily on interest.

Let me know what you think! I always appreciate any and all constructive feedback. Feel free to leave a comment, or you can email me at nin@nvaleri.com. You can also hit me up on Twitter at @nvaleri. Enjoy!

The Great Reset - 2010 In Review

2011-02-06T16:58:00.000-08:00

The year 2010 was eventful to say the least. It started in Times Square NYC and ended in a little one-room hideaway about 30 mins outside Santa Rosa, California. You can't get much more different than that, though my companion in both locations was the same- the amazing Sadie Jernigan Valeri, my life partner of now 7 years. I would be lying to you if I didn't tell you that 2010 was HER year.

In fact, over the course of this past year, Sadie has gone from a highly skilled painter with a tiny home studio, a fantastic artist blog and a respectable following to an award-winning still life painter who works out of a much larger studio and shows artwork in three major galleries across the US. She now teaches on the weekends at her studio, with a rapidly growing demand for her workshops and classes, while she paints full time during the week. In other words, her art career has totally blossomed.

For me it was just so much fun to ride in the passenger seat on this particular journey and bear witness to all of the incredible events that took place- to watch her go through each step and to help extinguish any number of the little happenstances that threatened to obstruct her veritable wave of success. I think the most fun part of the year was taking off time from work for a few last-minute jaunts to Florida, accompanying Sadie for her first major gallery showing and subsequent workshop, in February and March respectively. While I was there I got to hang out with some of the wonderful people of the classical-realist art world and drive around in the sunshine, listening to radio stations playing old 80s and 90s tunes all the way. It was fantastic. I also had the chance on one particular occasion to surprise the heck out of my parents who happened to be visiting Florida at the same time I was. Gotcha!

If you look back at the pure numbers of 2010 you could well conclude that I also did pretty darn well for myself, even outside of Sadie's great harvest. In one facet of my life I was busy revisiting my studies of the previous year- an activity that resulted in three heavily researched and meticulously executed philosophical/scientific essays for my epic blog series, Becoming. In another facet I was plugging along in my tenth year of work in the professional visual effects industry. It had gotten to the point where I could more or less do my job on automatic, filling the long work hours of almost effortless routine with podcasts and audiobooks. In other words, I was pretty much on Easy Street.

But there was something else that didn't show up in the stats that I was experiencing on a much deeper level, that I can only now describe as a slow, creative strangle. Day in and day out, weekend after weekend, in the aftermath of throwing in the towel on my long-sought career as a film director, I had no idea what to do with myself. I took down everything having to do with my abandoned feature film script Golden Gate from the walls and bulletin boards of my home office, packaging them up in boxes and putting them in the attic. I deleted files off of my computer en masse, took my personal website down and put the brakes on every other creative endeavor I had going. I had hit bottom in terms of my creative life. From here I would have to completely rebuild my creative self- if any of that part of me even existed anymore. It was a very dark and scary time for me.

As Spring sprung though, I enrolled in Sadie's Drawing for the Absolute Beginner class, which served as the first step to get me out of my rut. While I knew a single class wouldn't make me an amazing draftsperson overnight, I could see from the techniques that I learned that I DID have within me the capability to actually draw an object from life, in perspective and with some semblance of rendered lighting, on the surface of a piece of paper. This was an incredibly encouraging experience for me, and was a clear indicator that I COULD start over from ground zero creatively and make great things, with a little bit of effort and practice (and the right teacher, of course).

By Fall things had somewhat improved. I'd taken a few more intermediate drawing classes with Sadie and spent a full six months of work on my fourth Becoming essay before I finally posted it to my blog, Polyresonance. The essay turned out well and I was generally very pleased with it, but the pace of its execution had been absolutely excruciating. What was worse was that during the times when I didn't feel up for intense essay writing, I found myself squandering the time by cleaning/organizing the house, or whatever I could find to excuse myself from being creative.

I wasn't sketching anything from life as I now could given my new fledgling skillset, nor was I writing anything significant outside of Becoming. In fact I didn't try learning ANYTHING new as I had done habitually (by way of audio classes) over the past few years. And once my fourth Becoming essay had been completed and the formulation of the fifth was far off in the distance, I had nothing left to procrastinate about. I was forced to face the hard fact that beyond these huge nebulous projects like feature film scripts and 3500-word essays, I was deliberately undermining my own happiness by preventing myself from spending my free time on things I found creatively satisfying. I began to wonder exactly what the hell my problem was.

I even went as far as to hypothesize that it all might be a sham- that perhaps for all of these years since college I'd been faking being a truly creative person. Was the jig finally up- the curtain dropping to reveal that I'd fooled myself, my wife, my friends and family, and that I actually DON'T always have something interesting, important and cool in the works- that I'm really just another sap clicking computer keys, numbly motoring through my day to earn a paycheck that will be spent on expensive crap that I just ignore in my free time? And if so, what kind of a life is that?

These questions began to plague me on a daily basis, and as the last few months of the year began to melt away I slid into a bout of depression and anger that I carried with me everywhere I went, making me a generally miserable person to be around.

Then sometime in late November I was browsing Audible.com when I stumbled upon the audio version of the New York Times bestselling book, The 4-Hour Workweek. It sounded intriguing in an outrageous sort of way, and since I had finished Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness so many months earlier in the year, I felt it was about time I'd had a fresh dose of audacity.

After the first five minutes of the audiobook I was hooked. Here was a guy who managed to screw up pretty much every professional opportunity of his life and still somehow became successful enough selling sports supplements online to be able to travel the world while having only minimal involvement in the day-to-day operations of his business- in fact only about four hours a week.

Since author Tim Ferriss has figured out this little dance of setting up what he calls "muses" - self-sustaining niche businesses that operate with minimal human interaction and with as much as possible outsourced via online office assistants - he had won a gold medal in a martial arts competition in China, become a world champion in competitive tango dancing in Argentina, lived for several months in Japan and had seen more or less everything that the normal worker bee would have to diligently save for until a more traditional retirement age. Instead he recommends taking what he calls "mini retirements" in the frequency of about three PER YEAR. His motto is "don't save it all for the end."

While I'm not all that interested in traveling the world for large parts of the year, nor do I have aspirations to become a tango champion, this book made a huge impact on me because it created a clear distinction between living life with some false sense of obligation (i.e. slaving away for countless hours in front of a computer for one's entire young/middle adult life) and actually enjoying it along the way. Out of all the philosophy I'd read over the last several years, it was this book that finally pushed me to reevaluate things and to honestly ask myself what really mattered to me. Most importantly it set me on a path to make meaningful changes in my life that would in turn allow me to focus more on the things that I really cared about. In the first section of the book Ferriss asks- "How much is your time worth?" All I could think to myself was that it's simply amazing that we can never get up enough courage to ask ourselves these questions.

So in mid December of 2010 I gave notice to my job of four years that I would be leaving the company in January. It was sudden, yes, but it needed to be done, so when the opportunity arose, I took it. The truth is that I'd allowed myself to soak in the same destructive cycle for far too long, and in order to make any meaningful progression towards a better life I needed to start taking some drastic measures. And this is just the first step of many things that will be changing over the next several months. While it's certainly been a painstaking process to get to this point, it's mostly a relief to finally feel the momentum of moving on.

So far in 2011 I've begun to examine and slowly reconstitute each piece of the detritus that was my former creative self, while constantly referring to the wisdom of my past missteps in order to construct a new and better version of that self. I think the most valuable lesson I can draw from the more troublesome experiences of the past year is that mistakes are an important part of life. If we can't learn from them, than we can't possibly hope to progress as individuals or as a civilization.

Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." I'd like to append that statement to say that it also makes us smarter. The proper use of accumulated wisdom has the ability to turn potential misfortunes into a treasure trove of success. Thus my Great Reset of 2010, when viewed effectively, can only become the springboard for the Roaring Creative Renaissance that will be 2011. And I'm very much looking forward to that. ;-)

Have a great year everyone! -Nowell

Top Ten Things Learned or Reinforced in 2010

2011-02-06T15:35:00.000-08:00

10. Sometimes stability becomes stagnation and uncertainty becomes flexibility.
9. If you are a musician at heart, it will burn like fire unless you let it out.
8. Sometimes when you lose, you win.
7. Paradox is the fundamental nature of reality.
6. Reason and intuition are inseparable - you cannot have one without the other.
5. Motivation and discipline don't help. (thanks Sadie!)
4. Institutions, like biological organisms, will do anything they can to survive, even if that action undermines the reason they came to exist in the first place.
3. Any meaningful action is uncomfortable.
2. True harmony is imbalance- a constant give and take between opposites.
1. To live is to create, and to create is to live.

"Step Back and Ride the Tiger"
(Yang Style T'ai Chi Short Form Posture #35)

Favorite Music of 2010

2011-02-06T15:33:00.001-08:00

Massive Attack - Heligoland

Strange, beautiful and dark, Massive Attack's first full album after a seven year absence was worth the wait. The return of Daddy G and guest vocalists Martina Topley-Bird and Horace Andy makes Heligoland seem much more like the long sought sequel to Massive's landmark Mezzanine (1998) than the generally disappointing 100th Window (2003). Their latest album has a warmth and a texture to it that 100th Window lacked, and as many reviewers have pointed out, a fair bit of soul as well.

Standout tracks include Splitting the Atom, Girl I Love You with Horace Andy's signature Rastafarian vocal tremolos, Psyche with haunting guest vocals by Martina, and Paradise Circus with Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval. If you dig the album version of Paradise Circus as much as I did, you will LOVE the Gui Boratto remix. For me it ranks right alongside Angel and Teardrop (both from Mezzanine) as the best Massive tracks of all time.

While some of the tracks on Heligoland can be challenging (I'm looking at you Pray for Rain and Flat of the Blade), as a whole this album is a welcome triumph, and pushes far ahead of so many mediocre releases from other artists that I heard this year.

I was also fortunate enough to catch Massive Attack live in San Francisco this year, which was probably one of the top five best shows I've ever seen. It stands in stark contrast to the outdoor show they put on at the Greek Theater in Berkeley a few years back, which lacked Daddy G and a lot of the punch that a smaller venue like The Warfield could provide. All I can say is- see Massive Attack in a small venue if you can. It's the difference between decent and amazing for them. Plus the 1-2 punch of seeing Martina (in person) sing Psyche and Teardrop back to back... priceless, I tell you.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - The Social Network (soundtrack)

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have been working together behind the scenes for the past nine or so years on projects mostly outside Reznor's main musical endeavor, the electronic-soaked hard rock tour-de-force known as Nine Inch Nails. In 2008 Reznor and Ross collaborated on an experimental series of short instrumentals known as Ghosts under the NIN moniker, a decidedly different tone given NIN's past discography. After Trent publicly declared in early 2009 that he would be parking NIN for awhile after an exhausting few years of non-stop touring, he immediately began work on a new project called How To Destroy Angels, featuring the instrumentation of himself and Mr. Ross, as well as the vocals of Mariqueen Maandig formerly of West Indian Girl (and who is also incidentally Reznor's wife). The music of HTDA's self-titled EP (released earlier in 2010) presents listeners with a lo-fi electronic sound and downtempo structure that sets it far apart from the frenzied onslaught of NIN, but offers a fresh new approach to the realms of dark electronic music. While it didn't make any huge waves, this small offering was important in that it signified a distinct taste of things to come.

At some point back in 2009 after NIN's Lights in the Sky tour had come to a close and HTDA hadn't yet come into full swing, Trent was approached by filmmaker David Fincher, who asked for his help completing an upcoming film soundtrack. Naturally Trent jumped at the opportunity, but backpedaled when he realized how overwhelmed he was with his other projects and things going on in his personal life at the time. So Trent politely bowed out of the project to allow some time for things to calm down a bit. Once Trent had decompressed several months later, he called Fincher back to assure him that he was still interested in collaborating at some point, and to keep him in mind for future projects. Fincher replied by asking if he was still interested in working on The Social Network, the project he'd offered to Trent when they last spoke. Trent of course said yes, to which Fincher said- "Good! We've been waiting on you!"

So it seems as though this collaboration was inevitable, which was great news for me. As a devout NIN follower, I've especially clung to the small bits of Trent's film soundtrack work throughout the years, hoping someday that he would release something larger. In 1994 Trent produced the soundtrack for the Oliver Stone pic Natural Born Killers, a favorite of mine at the time, and then the following summer a remix of NIN's famous anthem "Closer" played over the opening credits of Seven, David Fincher's second major feature in the director's chair (and another favorite of mine). At this point I was convinced Trent was being drawn closer and closer to a full cinematic/electronic score, with further evidence stemming from his contributions to David Lynch's Lost Highway soundtrack in 1997.

But since then Trent hasn't really been involved in film scores per-se, even though many a Nine Inch Nails tune can be heard on any number of movie trailers in a given year. One of the most memorable of the last few years was Just Like You Imagined which played over the trailer for 300 in 2006. So NIN and Trent's relationship with movies has always been pretty strong, even if he wasn't actively involved. Kudos to Fincher for finally making my dream of a feature score by Trent Reznor a reality in 2010!

The soundtrack for The Social Network starts out very simply, with a slowly building crescendo and a soft-spoken piano lead, expanding into a bubbling arpeggio of layered analog synths, until finally propelling the piece forward into a searing electronic flight through hyperspace. By the end of the second track the listener is completely immersed in the unique yet somehow familiar soundscape. The score continues to dazzle as it progresses, growing with more and more complexity, though at the same time the clean synth instrumentation is deceptively simple. This can only be fully appreciated while wearing headphones, or at least by listening through a decent set of speakers, perhaps in a dark room with your favorite beverage. This is INDEED one of those albums.

And like all great movie soundtracks/scores, The Social Network's stands completely apart from the film, creating a narrative of its own, and taking the listener on an insider tour through the dark interactions of unseen characters and the obsessive persistence of a mad genius. All of this comes across without so much as a flicker of a single image, as was my experience having not seen the actual film until several weeks after the release of the soundtrack.

Perhaps needless to say, this release makes me very excited to contemplate where Reznor and Ross might go next with their work. Ross's technical wizardry combined with Reznor's pop/rock sensibilities combine to make an awesome new blend of musical intelligence that pushes me into indifference over the prospect that an official NIN release may never surface again. This partnership churns out an incredible amount of novelty and possesses qualities that much of the electronic music of today is missing, while providing a welcome and mature continuum of Reznor-influenced compositions. Bravo, I say! Keep em comin, gents!

Honorable Musical Mentions (via Pandora):

For the first time ever, this year I heavily supplemented my normal mode of musical consumption (Amoeba Records cd buying-sprees, rec's from friends, general word-of-mouth, random clicks in Rhapsody) by throttling my usage of Pandora 100-fold, listening nearly full time while at the office and at home. These were just a few of the great artists I came across this year, which are worth checking out:

Lily Allen - awesomely snarky British pop
BassNectar - complex, dubstep-infused electronic madness
Natalie Walker - female-driven pop with a sweet electronic twist and an even sweeter voice
Jem - Not an 80s cartoon- light, beat-driven pop/electronica
Mocean Worker - the evolution of acid jazz, with a bit of jungle flavor
E. S. Posthumus - adrenaline-rush-inducing classical/choral crossover (you've heard it in movie trailers)
Adele - Amy Winehouse without the drug problems

Favorite Movies of 2010

2011-02-06T15:32:00.001-08:00

Monsters

Sadie and I found Monsters randomly via Comcast On Demand one evening. We figured that if we didn't like it we'd just turn it off and do something else seeing as none of the other films on there looked remotely interesting. After killing our Netflix acct earlier this year, On Demand and the tiny video store down the street have been the primary vendors of our cinematic entertainment, which, in a given month is usually plenty for us. But on this particular night we picked Monsters and certainly were not expecting much.

Fortunately, it turned that this micro-budget, indie, one-man-show sci-fi pic was much more than we could have hoped for. The plot is simple but interesting, borrowing some tricks from District 9 to present the audience with a world post-alien invasion, where a large portion of northern Mexico is overrun by aliens, a place that the characters in the film call "The Infected Zone". Throughout this area the US military battles these tentacled creatures, most of which they have beaten back from a giant wall they've built along the US-Mexican border to keep them out. Yup- it's got a few political jabs in there for sure.

But this is all just the backdrop for - believe it or not - a love story between two people that have missed their boat (quite literally) back from Central America and must now return to the US by traveling directly through The Infected Zone on foot. As opposed to the wastelandish imagery you might expect from a lot of sci-fi genre pictures these days, and perhaps an array quirky characters the protagonists might meet during their travels over the length of the film, Monsters has a much more meditative ambiance, emphasizing the natural landscape and the symbiotic relationships that have formed between the alien creatures and the local vegetation (trees, plants, etc). Because of this narrative device, this film ends up a surprisingly nuanced piece that left us inspired (while a bit melancholy) and overall impressed with the storytelling and characters- much moreso than so many sci-fi pictures with a much larger budgets that we've seen over the last several years. Also some extremely well-done visual effects!

Inception

If you thought director Chris Nolan had disappeared into Bat-Land forever, Inception showed up just in time spin that notion out into oblivion. It's a breathless action/science-fiction extravaganza that borders on psychosis in terms of its narrative structure. It's nowhere near something like a David Lynch film mind you, but the subject of dreams and human consciousness in cinema leaves a lot of doors open which, assigned to the wrong creative mind, could easily turn a well-meaning narrative into utter crap in the span of 120 minutes.

There was a large faction of viewers that felt like Inception was a complete waste of time, as well as a percentage of others were just flat-out confused. Obviously my view of the film is largely positive. I'm a huge fan of psychological thrillers when they are done right, and am even more impressed when the story challenges the viewer to change their preconceptions of how movies are supposed to be presented. Nolan is no stranger to this territory, given his virtually flawless Memento and it's chronologically-reversed narrative. Who knew that such a storytelling device could work before he'd actually done it in a film? I feel as though Nolan has single-handedly changed the way that we watch films as a culture and Inception has only served to further that endeavor, with its nested structure and deft ability to shift from one level of reality to the next while not letting the overall pacing of the film become monotonous.

The aesthetics of this film are top notch. The costumes, the sets, the lighting, the cinematography and the visual effects are off the scale. The soundtrack is also excellent. Aesthetics are the first line of defense for me in terms of a Hollywood home run. If you're going to take me on a journey into new territory, everything else must be completely new as well, or at least seem like something we haven't seen in quite that way before. While Inception is certainly informed by the imagery of such visually striking predecessors as The Matrix, Dark City, Heat (Michael Mann) and some of the later James Bond films, I found Inception to be mostly unique in terms of its presentation, or at least enough so that I didn't find myself pointing and saying "yeah they totally ripped that off from ____." If there were nods to other films beyond those I listed, they were definitely subtle. But if I had to pick Inceptions most obvious influences, I'd lean more towards surrealist art, specifically that of M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali, both of whom I adore.

So it almost seems as though this movie was made just for me. It just hit all of my cinematic buttons- simple as that. One last note is that although Nolan didn't use her to her capacity, I was very excited to see Marion Cotillard on the screen again, having last seen her in the epic docudrama La Vie En Rose. It was also kind of ironic that the core of Inception's soundtrack was heavily supported by an Edith Piaf song, a role for which Cotillard won an Academy Award (for La Vie En Rose). In fact it wasn't until recently that I realized how heavily it was actually used...

The Social Network

I think the real Mark Zuckerberg was left a bit disappointed by this film- not just because it made him look like a bridge-burning, over-determined, power hungry, no holds barred Harvard dorm-room genius turned Silicon Valley master, but because he isn't nearly as cool as the character written by Aaron Sorkin and portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg in the film The Social Network. Same goes for pop star Justin Timberlake's firebrand portrayal of Sean Parker- co-founder of music download service Napster. Really nobody's that cool... except perhaps for Timberlake himself.

Like many of the more "artful" historical dramas that come out of Hollywood, the Social Network takes many artistic liberties with the actual facts of the genesis and evolution of the internet juggernaut known as Facebook- embellishing upon events, settings, and as I mentioned, the characters who took part in said events. This is necessary to create a decent drama out of an otherwise mundane story (the core narrative jumps between two separate legal depositions). Even with all of these narrative obstacles, Sorkin and Fincher did a fantastic job making this an adrenaline pumping, genuinely exciting film, with expertly-crafted dialogue and acting performances as well as coherent, albeit nonlinear storytelling. I'll admit, the rapid-fire exchanges between the college-era characters in the early scenes of the film left me a bit hazy at first, but once I got used to the accelerated pace, it only added to the film's enjoyable, unrelenting forward thrust.

I already discussed The Social Network's incredible soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross at length in my above review so I won't go into it again, but suffice it to say that it worked perfectly for the film. Jeff Cronenweth's cinematography was expectedly dark and moody, but consistent with the narrative- not repeating the utter blackness that Fight Club provided 10 years ago (Fincher and Cronenweth's last collaboration). Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall's supreme editing pulls the whole endeavor together flawlessly.

Beyond it's technical prowess, I feel as though this film will be remembered as a milestone achievement of modern historical fiction, an artful document of the Facebook era in which we currently live, as well as a mark of, hopefully, the last throes of the 20th century Hollywood Boys' Club misogyny. So yes, while I loved the film as a whole, we still have a long way to go as far as gender equality within film is concerned, as evidenced by this exchange of dialogue from The Social Network:

Girlfriends of Facebook founders: "What can we do?"
Facebook founders: (pause) "Nothing!"

Case in point. You hear me Fincher? Sorkin? Ya'll need some more quality time with the ladies, I'm afraid.

Black Swan

Natalie Portman is a great actress, but only when she is used correctly. So far I can count only three performances in her silver-screen past where she truly shined, those being The Professional, Garden State, and Black Swan. I never thought I'd see so much darkness in a single character pulled through her until I had seen her this film, so perhaps director Darren Aronofsky finally figured it out- because Natalie Portman IS the Black Swan.

Excruciating, abrasive, at times head-swimming but undeniably original, Black Swan is a stylistically-hybrid mix of many of Aronofsky's previous films, from the fantastical eye candy of The Fountain to the documentary-like grittiness of The Wrestler. If I had to guess, this is the genesis of many cinematic ventures that will built upon this new structure. I also think, a la Denzel Washington in Training Day, that this is only the first evidence on film of Natalie Portman's foray into the darker side of her personality. At least I hope so!

Black Swan is simply stunning and is not to be missed. While I could have probably done without the blatantly exploitative lesbian sex scene, this is the guy, after all, who made Requiem for a Dream. C'mon. What did I really expect?

How to Train Your Dragon

Ooooh. Sorry, Pixar. Toy Story 3 was great, but Dreamworks has got ya beat this time. All I can say is WOW. How to Train Your Dragon takes the cake this year as far as cross-audience-appealing animated films go. This sleeper hit is largely divergent from the run-of-the-mill, coming-of-age type of film that regularly saturates the big-budget landscape. If you look at the weekend box-office numbers on IMDB, it's the opposite of most Hollywood Films. It starts out with a relatively small return and steadily builds up the kind of popularity that can only occur via word of mouth through viewers. Not surprisingly I hadn't seen the film until well after its box office run, but even then I had already gotten more than a few firm recommendations before I finally saw it.

When I finally saw it I fell in love with it. The film is laced with oddball but endearing characters, fun dialogue and a well-honed characterization of the awkward trials of teenage life- the attempt to keep up some kind of backwards cultural tradition that you don't really believe in while trying desperately to fit in with your peers- and failing. This is the essence of essence of our teenage years that is generally missed on film. In real life of course, these things so rarely if ever happen- that an adolescent is somehow able to transform the mindset of an entire community progressing towards a better way of life. Usually what happens is the uphill battle becomes too much to bear, and the individual is either repressed or simply leaves the community, to peddle his ideas someplace where they are more likely to be heard. So in that way, this film is highly unrealistic- which is one of the reasons we like these kinds of films so much. They invite us to imagine a better future than the one we feel is so many times inevitable.

Even deeper within this film is the a structure of idealism that I recognize from my years of study as an adult- a call to use science and observation to improve our understanding of the world, while making no stalwart assumptions about the way that things "are" just because the old view is popular. So what's actually being presented by the plot of this film (and what is so intriguing to me) is not just a linear progression towards a more efficient way of dealing with long problems a community faces, but a complete revolution of thought in the face of a failing policy and the ability for us to learn from our past mistakes, which makes the film even more inspiring and in our present societal disposition.

But wait, now isn't this an animated movie about DRAGONS??? Yes, and it's probably the best movie about dragons that I've ever seen. But the breadth of issues that this film covers goes far beyond just another popcorn feature-length cartoon. How to Train Your Dragon pushes Dreamworks beyond their usual fart joke, pop-culture-lathered Shrek territory, well into the heart of Pixar-like genuineness. And wins.

Favorite Books of 2010

2011-02-06T15:24:00.000-08:00

I tore through many great books this year, however it should be noted that while I took a massive amount of written notes during my readings, most of the "reading" was done via audiobooks. I've found over the last few years that my brain is such that I can understand things much more clearly (especially philosophical and scientific concepts) through audio rather than via text on a page. Whether you agree that this is "reading" or not is up to you. Either way, these are the books I "read" this year.

Where Good Ideas Come From - Stephen Johnson

A few years back I borrowed Stephen Johnson's book Emergence from the library, and while it proved to be only a very broad introduction to the subject, I thoroughly enjoyed his writing style and the ease of his exposition. More importantly, the book was my gateway drug into popular nonfiction.

Where Good Ideas Come From continues this trend as a brief but succinct and accessible work concerning the nature of innovation in a time when we are in grave need of it, both in this country and around the world. Many of his positions rang true for me, especially those that made references to complexity researchers I'd studied in depth earlier this year. He refers to theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman's concept of the "adjacent possible" in terms of how certain innovations and technologies succeed only because of the distinct timing and environment in which they manifest.

Johnson also emphasizes the importance of nurturing and cultivating good ideas by resting and allowing them to grow slowly within your mind (what he calls the "slow hunch") rather than to sit alone in a dark room, steadily smacking your head against your desk. The most important aspects of such innovations are the connections we are able to make between seemingly disparate realms and disciplines. However, the only way to make these connections is by giving our minds a break and allowing ideas to swim around freely and interact with one another. This is why so many people have Eureka moments while in the shower or on long strolls through the park. Johnson argues that these seemingly recreational wanderings are just as crucial as the active crunching of numbers and concepts we perform within our official "work" zones. Amen, brother.

How We Decide - Jonah Lehrer

I can't believe how young this guy is for a writer that is so engaging, intelligent, and relevant. How We Decide happened to come out this year just as I was finishing up the excellent Proust Was A Neuroscientist, so I was able roll very naturally into it, offering me great continuity from one book to the other (yes, read both!). In one thread of How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer focuses on the human mind's tendency towards pattern recognition, and how our mistakes while trying to discern patterns in within an ultimately random chain of events can often get us into trouble. Take the phenomenon of a "hot" basketball player or a "hot" table at a Casino, and how each seems much more intentioned and meaningful than it actually is. Or how credit cards are specifically designed to take the pain out of purchases for consumers. I no longer use credit cards for this exact reason!!!

By contrast, the book also goes into great detail concerning the importance of intuition in making decisions, how the failure to answer strong intuitive insights and the deference to over-rationalization can often lead us to our peril. Lehrer uses the example of Royal Navy Lt. Cmdr. Michael Riley in the Persian Gulf War, who singled out a suspect radar blip to be shot down, with the looming possibility that it might be a friendly plane. After hours of agony, it was finally determined that the blip that was shot down had in fact been an enemy silkworm missile, which, had it hit its target, would have cost many lives and could very well have destroyed the USS Missouri. As Riley is quoted in the book: "There was something strange about this radar blip. It didn't feel like an A-6 [aircraft]."

Lehrer's conclusion is that both rationality and intuition are fundamental aspects of the human brain, and that without either we simply wouldn't function properly. HWD offers the reader a new middle ground that bridges the gap between these two aspects, providing substantial evidence for this argument by way of detailed case studies. A fascinating read.

The 4-Hour Workweek - Timothy Ferriss

This book changed my life, as it has so many others. I think the most striking thing about it is its simplicity. As you're reading, it makes you feel like you already know the things the book is telling you, as if this is the second time reading it. The difference is that this time you actually might act on the suggestions listed, as opposed to making up some excuse for why you can't be a happier person. "Oh, I love my job- the activity keeps me motivated." Really? Organizing files, writing emails that no one ever reads, holding epic company meetings that don't go anywhere? This motivates you? Ferriss likes to call this "professional wheel-spinning." I know quite a few of these types of people- in fact I used to be one of them. You say you are trying to make things more efficient? How about substituting efficiency for effectiveness? But in order to do this, you have to be very honest with yourself- something that we just aren't used to doing in this day and age.

We are so adept at creating false barriers to our own happiness- it's almost like a rite of passage in the United States. Well not anymore. 21st Century America is a different world than the one in which our parents grew up, with a focus that is shifting away from excessive financial bravado and the frantic emphasis on the delay of death, to one that values quality of life, human relationships, new experiences, multiculturalism, and living in the present, whatever it is you happen to be doing. The parable of The Investment Banker and the Mexican Fisherman says it all.

The Malcolm Gladwell Trilogy - The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers

Yep, I read all three this year. Gladwell is a genius, plain and simple. He's managed to approach several complex subjects and explain them in language that's understandable, eloquent and interesting. I think the more outrageous the claims he tries to make, the more I like him (he compares smoking to teen suicide in The Tipping Point). If I had to pick, I have to say that I liked The Tipping Point best, with Outliers as a close second. If you were to skip any of them, I'd probably skip Blink, reading Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide instead (reviewed above), but if you love the subject matter as much as I do, then Blink is an integral part of the equation. Overall this trilogy was very rewarding reading experience. I highly recommend the consecutive consumption of all three!

Mindsight - Daniel J. Siegel

Mindsight is a thorough account of the use of Eastern-influenced mindfulness meditation in Western psychological treatment. It focuses a substantial amount of attention on the human brain's amazing plasticity, which enables us to physically change its structure far into our lives through new experiences and its proper maintenance. Before Dr. Siegel's and other case studies (see also Norman Doidge's The Brain that Changes Itself) it was assumed that as we age, our brains actually lose their plasticity, and that the organ eventually becomes a kind of a read-only hard disk drive that we are unable to modify and so are permanently stuck in our ways. Siegel (and others) have proven otherwise in a this colossal breakthrough, pushing forward the cultural understanding of human psychology, while exhibiting the benefits of integrating Eastern philosophy into our everyday lives. He also wrote the best definition of mind that I have heard as yet in my studies: "Mind is a process that regulates the flow of energy and information throughout the body.” YES!!!

Other Notable Books I Read This Year:

The Nature of Technology - W. Brian Arthur
Cognitive Surplus - Clay Shirky
The Great Reset - Richard Florida
The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
The Virtue of Selfishness - Ayn Rand
The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria
On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins
The Brain that Changes Itself - Norman Doidge

Favorite Quotes of 2010

2011-02-06T15:16:00.001-08:00

"Intuition is a gift and reason its faithful servant. We have created a society that celebrates the servant but has forgotten the gift." -Albert Einstein

"If you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." -Friedrich Nietzsche

"A paradox is not a conflict within reality. It is a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality should be like." -Richard Feynmann

"The default state of the brain is indecisive disagreement." -Jonah Lehrer

"Chance favors the connected mind." -Steven Johnson

"Twitter is a raw, prismatic spray of novelty." -William Gibson (Booksmith Zero History signing, SF, Sep 2010)

Best of the Decade: 2000-2009

2010-01-17T02:18:00.000-08:00

Hello all. Just thought I would throw these out there. They're a bit more consumable than my Year in Review format, and hopefully they'll introduce you to some new favorites, or at least spark your interest enough to give some of them a second look/listen.

NOTE: The titles for each of the visual works (films/tv shows) links to a youtube video sampling of each, and in the music section, the titles link to Amazon.com, where you can sample each full album.

Enjoy!

The 15 Best Movies of the Decade
At first I struggled to come up with more than a few of these, but all it really required was digging further into the earlier part of the decade. So sadly less than half of these films occurred in the second part of the decade, and it seems the trend of cinematic entertainment is taking a turn for the worse. I can only hope that this is not the end of quality cinema, but is instead part of a reset process that will eventually spawn an entirely new crop of films in the years to come, resulting from the democratization of filmmaking technologies.

The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)

Whether or not people have forgotten (or tried to forget) about our Hobbit friends and their adventurous cohorts, this was easily the greatest sci-fi/fantasy trilogy as of yet in the 21st century, and has become a phenomena at the center of Western culture. Amazing how a strange, fantasy epic that is almost 80 years old, the writer of which has long since passed, holds up and thrives in modern cinema. The films were also pioneering for cg visual effects, especially the success of the large scale battle scenes and fully-integrated digital characters like Gollum.

Memento (2000)

Memento is one of those films I feel we will keep coming back to. The introduction of this film is the second time over the past few decades where the foundation of traditional linear storytelling is shaken to its core, the first being the haphazardly mis-ordered Pulp Fiction. In addition to the novelty of effectively reverse-time storytelling, the interesting subject matter (the world through the eyes of a man dealing with short-term memory loss) and the suspense of the narrative up until the very last scene makes Memento a winner for the ages.

Donnie Darko (2001)

While many are still shaking their heads trying to figure this one out, and still more have trouble even explaining why they like it, it's hard to deny the impact Donnie Darko has had on our cinematic psyche. As much as now-Superstar Jake Gyllennal gave the first great performance of his career, it can be said that the late Patrick Swayze, through this film, gave his last great performance (Thank you, Jim Cunningham). While Darko may have been director Richard Kelly's one-hit-wonder, the combination of psychological thriller, time travel themes, and a kick-ass 80s soundtrack created a film that will be borrowed from, copied, sourced, and referenced by other young directors for decades to come.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

David Lynch holds in Mulholland Drive a dreamlike, fractured masterpiece, that plays out in the darkest corners of Los Angeles. This film allowed Lynch to garner a Best Director Oscar nomination, while it sparked the new career of the full-ranged and fantastic Naomi Watts. Nevermind what you thought of the plot, if there was one at all, this is the pinnacle of semi-mainstream art cinema.

Moulin Rouge (2001)

Who knew we'd ever hear from the zany Baz Luhrmann again, after he transformed Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet into a drug-induced, alternate-reality, MTV-laden mess (which I loved, by the way). Moulin Rouge took him from teen magazines to the Oscars, and created a new, modern edge for the film-musical.

City of God (2002)

It's been almost seven years since it was released and I still can't get City of God out of my head. A deeply disturbing but exhilarating portrait of the slums of Rio (Brazil), City of God managed not only to create a memorable narrative (based on real events) with striking imagery and editing, but it's also hard to look back on it and not see the influence it's had on box office smashes like Slumdog Millionaire. Even if you only see it once, it is not to be missed.

Wall-E (2008)

Wall-E is the first of what I am hoping will be a long stream of mature multi-audience successes by Pixar. Funny and original, along with environmentally and culturally critical, the level of nuance reached through the utterly HUMAN relationships between ROBOTS in the film, is a first-ever for animated film. If future animated films follow Wall-E's example, I see only great things ahead for us.

Iron Man (2008)

After a few stumbles, our beloved Robert Downey Jr. is back, in by-far the most relevant, action packed, and well-executed superhero film to date. Where all other Marvel franchises have failed, Iron Man succeeds. Hopefully the upcoming sequels won't ruin its legacy.

Before Sunset (2004)

While Before Sunrise of 1994 you could have taken or left, Before Sunset, chronicling the rendezvous of two young lovers after a long ten years of seeing each other, is indispensible. In this rare instance where the sequel trumps the original, characters Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) walk through the streets of Paris and discuss how melancholy their lives have been without each other in the time since their last meeting. A masterpiece of longing and character nuance, this collaborative effort between Hawke and Delpy, along with director Richard Linklater is a must-see for all romantic filmgoers.

The Bourne Trilogy (2002-2007)

Matt Damon in a series of successful spy/action thrillers? Who would have thought? Interesting plots, gripping action sequences, and a hand-held, jolting, energetic style sets the pace for modern action-drama. Jason Bourne has essentially supplanted James Bond in the action psyche of America.

Amelie (2001)

This sweet modern tale of a cute young French girl finding romance in Paris, coupled with the rich style of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children) was enough to pull this foreign language film into the American mainstream, making even the surliest viewers smile, while seducing them into reading subtitles for two hours straight.

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Whether you loved or hated them, 2003 was the year of The Matrix Sequels. Reloaded, if you scrape away the extremely over-hyped marketing, poor pacing, misplaced scenes and weak character development, it rocked. If you watch the film on its own, and view it as less of an action film and more of large-scale work of in-depth philosophical inquiry, it's a masterpiece yet to be equaled. I highly recommend listening to the film critic and philosopher commentaries on the blu ray/dvd. I think this film is unfairly overlooked time and time again, and will hopefully be viewed by future filmmakers as a valuable resource for integrating philosophy into cinema.

Children of Men (2006)

Probably the most bleak vision of the demise of humanity to date, Children of Men also broke ground in cinematography, and set the bar for future post-societal dramas. Visceral and suspenseful, with a great cast.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

The only film by a former music video director that makes the "Decade" list, Michel Gondry and madman-screenwriter Charlie Kaufman are a match made in heaven. Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Tom Wilkenson, Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst all turn out great performances in this highly original, surrealistic romance-comedy-drama that ponders the implications of using memory-erasing technology, were they to exist. A beautiful film.

The Hours (2002)

Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep star in this stunning novel-to-screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham's The Hours. The movie steps back and forth through time to show portraits three different women in her own time. The most memorable performance is Nicole Kidman as the morose and mentally unstable Virginia Woolf. Julianne Moore plays a 50s era housewife dealing with the pressures of motherhood and the sad struggle for independence as a woman during that era. Meryl Streep is Mrs. Dalloway, the close friend of reclusive writer Robert Brown (Ed Harris). A thorough examination of the tragic circumstances that surround each of the female leads, The Hours is executed beautifully by ace director Stephen Daldry. The movie also has one of the best film scores I've ever heard, from composer Philip Glass.

The 7 Best TV Shows of the Decade

This past decade has taken TV to a new level, and far beyond the various horrible sitcoms and prime-time soaps of the 80s and 90s. This includes a select few network dramas, as well as quality offerings from cable channels such as HBO, Showtime, FX, and most recently, AMC.

24 (2001-)

Strangely enough, this series about a fictional counter-terrorism agency was conceived of several months before the 9/11 attacks, and was premiered in November 2001. Of course the attacks made the show all the more prescient, and set off a series of story points concerning real locations, and pondered real philosophical dilemmas in the face of an ever-present network of terrorist threats. For instance "Guantanamo" and "Homeland Security" references flooded into the second and third seasons, while the ethics of prisoner torture, public vs. private interests influencing government decisions, and the implications of corporate warfare became common themes in the later seasons.

24 was also the first television series to feature an African-American as the President of the US, in this case the heart-of-gold David Palmer (played by Dennis Haysbert). It also rekindled the career of one Kiefer Sutherland within Jack Bauer, 24's front man, who remains prime-time television's ass-kicker of choice. With a relatively weak 6th season, 24 was able to pull off a great 7th, while moving the show's location to Washington DC, and adding a new female American President Allison Taylor, played by the Emmy award-winning Cherry Jones. The 8th (and possibly final) season is set to take place in New York City, and will be what I'm hoping to be a stunning conclusion to this heart-pounding and thoroughly engrossing show.

Lost (2004-2010)

I probably would have given up on Lost a long time ago were I not completely addicted to it. JJ Abram's kinetic and mysterious series about a group of plane crash survivors who are marooned on a island in the South Pacific, has somehow managed to remain afloat while choosing out-there themes and exploring the ever expanding depths of its characters (and unfortunately killing many of my favorites). 2010 will see the final season of Lost and we viewers will decide whether or not the show is a complete mess, or a bona-fide triumph.

Mad Men (2007-)

While I've only caught the first season of Mad Men as of yet, color me impressed. I think the most interesting part of the show is the time period in which it takes place- the early 60s, after the haze of WW2 had cleared and when the women's and civil rights movements were fresh on the horizon. What better setting for a group of misogynistic young and middle-aged men to play out their individual existential crises? I look forward to future seasons, which as I've heard so far, are brilliant.

The Sopranos (1999-2007)

What started at the end of the 90s came to fruition over the entire past decade. While it probably went on for a few seasons too long, the now-famous psychological exploration of fictional modern mafia man Tony Soprano can't be denied as one of the most compelling and culturally-influencing dramas to date.

Six Feet Under (2001-2005)

A drama featuring a band of mostly no-name actors about a family-run funeral home sounds like a recipe for disaster. Instead, we get a series devised by American Beauty writer Alan Ball that thematically pushes the limits of television drama in its every step. At the same time psychologically deep and lighthearted, dramatic and funny, Six Feet Under easily sits among the greatest television series ever made.

The Wire (2002-2008)

The Wire simply IS the greatest television show ever made. Over its five seasons, it managed to remain fresh and interesting, while depicting in detail the dramatic reality that takes place every day throughout American cities. From the drug trade, to government politics, to our public school systems, to our prisons, to the media, it shows us how despite our best intentions, our systems are fundamentally broken and in dire need of reassessment. It tells its tales from all points of view, including drug traffickers, cops, lawyers and ordinary citizens, as well as the upper echelons of city government. With the nuance and integrity of fine literature, The Wire is a true classic as it is a historical document of early 21st century American society.

John Adams (miniseries, 2008)

Every American should see this series, if for no other reason to appreciate the history and struggle of our nation to establish itself, from the perspective of one of the US's most neglected forefathers. Paul Giamatti is excellent as John Adams, as is Laura Linney, who plays his no-nonsense wife and closest advisor, Abagail Adams. Tom Wilkenson also stars memorably as America's beloved quirky genius, Ben Franklin. This extremely well done seven-part miniseries should be required viewing for all Americans, so that we can see and appreciate how we've come to live in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

The 25 Best Albums/Artists of the Decade

Despite the dominance of single-song digital downloads over the past decade, which altogether threatened the album format, a great many musicians and bands still managed to turn out formidable, coherent full-length releases. These are they. Check out the GrooveShark Playlist directly below for a sampling of each of the albums I list.

Amon Tobin - Supermodified (2000)

Fluid and seamless, highly original electronic madness, Amon Tobin's catalog continues to grow, but this is (as of yet) his best.

Aphex Twin - Drukqs (2001)

Two-disc, uncompromising masterpiece from the man who invented IDM (whether he likes it or not). Richard D. James is insane, and his Drukqs, my constant companion.

Radiohead - Kid A & Hail to the Thief (2000 & 2003)

While Radiohead had a lot of solid releases this decade, 1997's Ok Computer was a hard act to follow. Kid A succeeds. Hail to the Thief is one of their more under-appreciated releases, but after many listens holds up to and even exceeds both Amnesiac and In Rainbows.

Dido - Life for Rent (2003)

Dido's sophomore release has some great tracks, and while it doesn't have quite the impact of 1999's No Angel, it's still highly replayable.

Eminem - The Eminem Show (2002)

Hard-hitting, witty and hilarious, self-reflective and self-deprecating but adept hip hop. While others might champion the Marshall Mathers LP, I would say instead that The Eminem Show is his crowning achievement.

Lamb - Between Darkness and Wonder (2003)

Seeing as the lyrics to Lamb's Cotton Wool were recited at my wedding, I hold this music close to my heart. It's sad that they've since broken up, because Darkness and Wonder was such an phenomenal album. I guess it was a good note to go out on?

Tiesto - In Search of Sunrise, v4-7 (2005-2008)

I read an interview with Tiesto recently, and he said that he's most influenced by film scores, so it makes total sense why I'm attracted to his dance mixes. The entire In Search of Sunrise series blossoms with lush, fast moving anthems. I'm not a huge trance fan, but this stuff is in a class of its own.

Sarah McLachlan - Remixed & Bloom (remix albums) (2001 & 2005)

Sarah McLachlan dance remixes are like salted caramel-chocolates- almost too good to be real. Equally catchy and energetic, and in its best moments, awe-inspiring. Mixes by Tiesto, Junkie XL, and Talvin Singh are among the highlights.

Kanye West - The College Dropout (2004)

His first remains the best, before he got all caught up in the tragic bullshit of being superstar. A classic.

Faithless - To All New Arrivals (2006)

The first time since Reverence they've pulled off such an ambitious album. Bombs, Music Matters, and Last This Day (feat. Dido) are my favorites.

Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero (2007)

The first full "narrative" album since The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor still has it after all these years. Easily my most listened-to album of the decade. Check out The Good Soldier, The Great Destroyer, and Zero Sum for a nice cross-section sampling.

Thievery Corporation - The Mirror Conspiracy (2000)

Super chill, post trip hop, this album almost requires a cocktail in hand. Indra and Lebanese Blonde are the best known tracks, and rightly so.

The Roots - Game Theory (2006)

Best release this decade from The Roots, bridging their original soulful anthems to their newer rock-laden sound. Just throw on Don't Feel Right or Here I Come and you'll hear what I'm talking about.

Tori Amos - Scarlet's Walk (2002)

Chronicles Tori Amos's eclectic road trip across the US, post 9/11. The best release from Tori in a long time.

Imogen Heap - Speak for Yourself & Ellipse (2006 & 2009)

Imogen Heap stole my heart this decade. While Frou Frou's Details was decent, Imogen's solo work is superior. Both Speak for Yourself and Ellipse are better consumed in their entirety, but if I had to pick choice tracks, Daylight Robbery & Just for Now on Speak for Yourself, 2-1 & Wait it Out on Ellipse. See a full review of Ellipse in my 2009 In Review post.

Melody Gardot - My One and Only Thrill (2009)

Another top pick for 2009. Two albums down, Melody is just getting started. She makes Norah Jones seem like a sad amateur. Brand new Jazz that has an instantly classic sound.

Tim Exile - The Listening Tree (2009)

Not sure how exactly to classify this album, but let's just say it's Depeche Mode meets Aphex Twin meets 8-bit Nintendo themes. The lyrics are super ironic but in a deadpan-serious way that makes them even funnier. Musically the album has only scratches the surface of Exile's live show, but it's definitely one that gets better with every listen. Ing tree.

Boards of Canada - The Campfire Headphase (2005)

70s classroom filmstrip on acid, and my most favorite BOC release yet.

Dj Shadow - The Private Press (2005)

The last great, definitively Shadow album. Almost sneaked by undetected when it was released... don't miss it!

Blackalicious - Blazing Arrow (2002)

Hard to top Nia, but Blazing Arrow manages to up the ante. Actually caught their show in LA, in support of this album. Great stuff.

Massive Attack - 100th Window & Danny the Dog (soundtrack) (2003 & 2004)

Massive Attack continues to make great music. A long way from Blue Lines, and bit more airy than Mezzanine, 100th Window is a highly original and impressive release (love the tracks with Sinead O'Connor). Danny the Dog (Jet Li film released in the US as "Unleashed) soundtrack is the best electronic score I've heard since The Dust Brother's Fight Club.

Madonna - Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005)

Some hits and some definite misses for Madonna this decade. The disco-infused "Confessions" is a definite hit, with a hybrid mix of analog synths and lush landscapes.

Portishead - Third (2008)

Portishead was somehow able to reform after 11 years of absence and create this astoundingly good follow up to their 1997 self-titled release. A decidedly different tone, cleanly breaking from its trip-hop roots, while at the same time remaining unquestionably Portishead.

Mr. Lif - I Phantom (2002)

One of my more obscure, politically active hip hop discoveries of the decade, Lif is an entry point into some of the more exciting threads coming out of a genre saturated with so much bullshit these days that it's difficult to wade through. A rising star with a lot of potential if I've ever seen one.

Juno Reactor - Labyrinth (2004)

I've been listening to the tribal/electronic hybrid of Juno Reactor for years now, and though their albums can sometimes stray into sappier territory, Labyrinth is as hard hitting as it gets for them. The album also features several tracks that were injected into the score for the Matrix Reloaded, including the pulse-pounding Mona Lisa Overdrive from the freeway chase scene. Love it.

Here's to a new decade, and hoping for new works behind our wildest dreams!

Embracing the Tiger - 2009 In Review

2010-01-10T10:09:00.000-08:00

For the majority of 2009, I felt very much like I was treading water. As in 2008, throughout the year I worked towards completing several Teaching Company classes, in the interest of forming a finite body of knowledge that would enable me to finish my screenplay, Golden Gate. And though I absorbed volumes of new knowledge, and read literally STACKS of books, I never felt quite prepared enough to complete the screenplay. It didn't make any sense.

It wasn't until the final third of the year that I realized my process of writing the screenplay was a microcosmic indicator for the momentum of my entire life. If I continued to use this model of exhaustive self-schooling to dictate the end of the script, it would never, in fact, get done. When I finally sorted this all out, and was able to disconnect the screenplay writing process from my other academic studies, the future immediately began to reveal itself, as something that I could have never predicted.

By November I had sold my professional HD video camera on ebay and renounced any future plans of becoming a career film director, a goal I had been holding onto since I was in high school. But while I expected to feel sad about this sudden break, I instead felt instantly better, the moment the camera was out the door, and I began to look upon my life with fresh eyes.

This whole academic endeavor I've taken on over the past few years, while I've welcomed and enjoyed it, was a unconscious attempt to stave off any creative projects, films or otherwise, in the interest of delaying a future that I didn't want anymore. By letting go of old, long burned out dreams, I freed myself from my own bounds, and I can now see the near infinite scope of my creative interests- things that have been smothered for close to 10 years. Admittedly reading existential philosophy like that of Nietzsche, examining the life Leonardo da Vinci, as well as beginning to study Tai Chi and Taoist thought, has helped me tremendously to get to this point.

What I see for the year 2010 is not the same, tired routine of "one day everything will be great", but an entirely new landscape waiting to be explored. As my friend Kyra K. says, it's The Year of Making it Happen. I'm equally terrified and excited to get started. But either way, here I go.

Top Ten Things Learned or Reinforced in 2009:

10. Less is more.

9. Seek stillness in motion.

8. True harmony is in opposites, and equilibrium, by definition, is death.

7. Greater comfort is found stretching beyond the bounds of your comfort zone.

6. In order to strike out towards new discoveries, you need a very good launch pad. (I love you Sadie!)

5. The world is more complex than we can and will ever possibly be able to conceive.

4. The daunting complexity of the world is no reason to give up trying to understand it.

3. Our conceptions of who we are will torment us if we don't allow them to change.

2. The proof is in the pudding, but things are not always as they seem.

1. Change is the only constant.

Best Movies of 2009:

Up

Add Up to the slowly growing list of emotionally complex but equally entertaining stream of animated film coming out of Pixar, standing right alongside last year's Wall-E. I first watched Up while stuck at home on a sick day, and it just made my day so much better. The first montage totally broke my heart- I found myself thinking- "Jesus... isn't this a cartoon???" No. It's far more than that. This is a tale of growing up and accepting the reality of change in one's life. It's about sons dealing with absent fathers and a rediscovered sense of adventure behind the guise of just another grumpy old man. It's about letting go of old bonds and making new ones. And on top of all that, it's hilarious!

Pixar continues to push beyond the bounds of the Disney, Looney Tunes-infected paradigm of animated films of the late 20th century and is creating entertainment that is continually able to touch and move us, young and old, in truly human ways. A must-see.

Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino has now thoroughly proven himself in tackling such a wide variety subject matter within his cadre of out-there cinema, rarely failing to please- whether it's hit men and cheeseburgers (Pulp fiction), sword-wielding samurai mommies (Kill Bill), demented homicidal stunt drivers (Death Proof), and in the case of his latest film, Inglourious Basterds... the demise of Nazi power in Europe. The film depicts an alternate ending of WW2, where a heavy southern drawl-bearing Brad Pitt leads a group of rag-tag Jewish-American special forces soldiers (appropriately called "The Basterds"- misspelling intentional) to decapitate the upper echelon of the Nazi regime and force an unconditional surrender, before the Allied Forces can step foot on the beaches of Normandy. Of course they have only one chance to get it right.

I think what I enjoyed the most about this film was not only Tarantino's to-be-expected formulation of truly memorable characters and great dialogue exchanges, but also his ability to make such a oft-visited cinematic subject matter his own. "Basterds" is something you haven't seen before. No heart-to-heart soldier trench-talks "first thing when I get home I'm going to..." here. No view of the day-to-day horror and struggle to stay alive inside the Nazi concentration camps. This has all been done before, and done well, by various directors. Instead, this is an insane, hilarious, brutally violent, Nazi-hating dark comedy, the likes of which Tarantino is alone capable of directing.

Up in the Air

I don't think I had ever really seen a movie where I've so thoroughly enjoyed a George Clooney performance before I saw Up in The Air. Helmed by Jason Reitman, director of last year's uber-popular "Juno", comes this well-crafted comedy/drama whose main character Ryan Bingham (Clooney) makes a living as a business "consultant" who flies all over the country, hired by different companies to assist in massive staff layoffs. Simultaneously he writes books and holds seminars which tout the triumphs of a transient, desire-less lifestyle, and how your personal "baggage", which contains all of your material belongings as well as the relationships you hold with others, is much easier to carry when it is "empty". Throughout the film, Bingham presents and reaffirms the commitment to his personal philosophy to everyone around him, including a fantastic scene where he lectures his young work-travel partner Natalie (Anna Kendrick) about how to most efficiently pack a suitcase, and to pass through an airport TSA checkpoint.

Bingham runs into a few snags when he is presented with some difficult family situations later in the film, as well as several encounters with an attractive fellow traveler (Vera Farmiga) who he meets on the road, calling into question his entire worldview. As in Juno, this is not your typical run-of-the-mill holiday Hollywood fodder. This is truly great filmmaking that will make you laugh, and will stick in your head while so many other films dribble out the other ear.

District 9

I wanted to hate this film. Everything from LOTR director Peter Jackson blessing the vision of a fanboy, to the hype and the annoying ad campaign, made me turn up my nose. Maybe I was just jealous. But after so many proof-positive recommendations from respected parties, I broke down and finally saw it.

Simply, it rocked. While there are plenty of action scenes and tons of visual effects, the story was what really got me engaged in this one. When I found out later that the treatment by humans of the refugee space aliens in the film was meant as an allegory for the South African Apartheid, I had an even deeper respect for D9's integrity. A great performance by Sharlto Copey as the idiot-bigot turned freedom-fighter Wikus, and some of the most creative creature animation I've seen in a long time in a live action film, married with the documentary style (but luckily not motion-sick inducing) cinematography puts this film in the running to become a sci-fi classic.

Avatar

When I saw the first trailer for James Cameron's Avatar, like many, I was extremely disappointed. You'd think that after working professionally in the motion picture industry for nine years, I wouldn't judge a movie by its trailer. Maybe it was because my expectations were so low was the reason I liked Avatar so much- but I really, really did.

Avatar takes place on a distant alien world, where a profit-hungry, high tech corporation is trying to exploit the indigenous population for the extraction of a rare element, humorously referred to as Unobtainium. This isn't the first time James Cameron has approached these types of themes, pulling from movies he directed almost 20 years ago, namely Aliens and Terminator 2. But this is a whole different ball of wax. In this film, an indigenous population of giant blue humanoid creatures known as the N'avi fight back against the human occupiers and certain humans they refer to as "dream walkers", who are able to inhabit a host body that looks and acts just like one of the N'avi. The humans refer to these surrogate bodies as Avatars.

The N'avi worship and have an intimate relationship with all of natural things that surround around them. As scientist Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) explains, not only is it a spiritual connection, it's a biological one, that connects the entire planet together as a single organism. I love this idea. Many books I've read over the last year on both complexity and holistic philosophy muse at this idea in their own ways- that all things in the universe are connected together in a meaningful way, and that this connection can and will be proved through science eventually. So it was rewarding to have this idea reflected in popular culture, in what very may well be the highest grossing film of all time. If not, certainly the highest grossing SCIENCE FICTION film of all time, which, being a huge science fiction fan, tickles me to think about.

Like most James Cameron films, the major conflict is the backdrop for a separate love story that runs throughout, this time a John Smith/Pocahontas relationship between one of the N'avi females and ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), one of the humans living connected to the N'avi world through an Avatar. Even with it's blatant retelling of classic hero myths and love stories, it still managed to remain engaging throughout its near three-hour running time. It's difficult to write a movie based on a "hero saves the world and gets the girl" concept and retain some kind of freshness these days, but Avatar seems to have done it. Likable (and hateable) characters along with exposition that was well-paced and seamlessly integrated with the action sequences are what truly made the film sing- a winning combination that Cameron is famous for.

While none of the acting performances stand out in particular (though having Sigourney Weaver back in a sci-fi film is enough to get me more than a little excited), the visual fx technology is, I can safely say, the most advanced ever seen by the human eye. Congratulations to Weta, ILM and the other houses that were able to participate in such a groundbreaking exercise. I'm kind of bummed I didn't get a chance to work on it, but then again most films I work on are hard to enjoy after having been directly involved. So in this case, I was happy to take the loss if it meant making the movie enjoyable.

I think the stereoscopic treatment of Avatar, or so-called "3D" that requires you to wear special glasses in the theater, was the least gimmicky in the films I've seen that feature it. That said, it's still a gimmick, no matter how hard they try to repackage it. I really didn't see this particular attribute as paradigm-changing, and it won't be, until filmmakers can create something you can experience without special glasses and present in a way that won't pull you out of the film. I do understand that in a modern technological landscape with high definition home theater experiences, that Hollywood needs something to keep people coming back to the theater, but 3D is just not that thing.

Overall, this was definitely a film to be experienced in the theater. If you missed it, catch it quick! IMAX it if you can. Though I think it will also look pretty amazing on blu ray. I'm not sure if you could quite call it a "classic" just yet, but I think it has all the indications that it might be. Only time will tell. There's talks of it becoming a trilogy, which is certainly a tantalizing idea, but only if James Cameron is in the director's chair. The man has yet to make a bad movie (post Terminator at least).

Favorite Albums of the Year:

Imogen Heap - Ellipse

I first heard Imogen Heap back in 2002 as part of a Frou Frou track on the independent radio station KCRW while I was driving through L.A. I remember grabbing a pen and writing down the name of the group on the back of my hand, and though I didn't know her by name at the time, and never went as far as to pick up the Frou Frou album, I always remembered the very distinct sound of the singer's voice. She reminded me of a contemporary version of Annie Lennox, whose work I highly respect and throw on once in a blue moon. In 2004 I heard the Frou Frou track Let Go over the credits of the movie Garden State and I instantly recognized it as them. But even though I liked the song, and I watched and rewatched Garden State in the years afterward, I still hadn't picked up the Frou Frou album.

It wasn't until this year, 2009, that I was surfing the net and a picture of a woman with wild dark hair flashed onto the front page of the subscription music service Rhapsody.com. The words below it declared: "Imogen Heap - Ellipse - New album just released! Click to hear it now!" "Image-who?", I thought. I of course didn't click to hear it now. It took me several more days, and visiting Rhapsody many more times and seeing Imogen's face over and over again before I finally I broke down and said, "Okay, who the HELL is Imogen Heap?!" I dumped Ellipse into my playlist to see what all the fuss was about.

I liked it right away. It was very much in the style of some of my favorite music: solid, female-driven pop/symphonic electronica, with great hooks, eclectic instrumentation and creative lyrics. It wasn't until the second track that I thought "Wait a minute- she sounds REALLY familiar." So I clicked on her bio page on Rhapsody and sure enough, this was the chick from Frou Frou, whose voice I'd always dug, and whose rise into the mainstream over the last few years I had somehow completely missed. And since then all of her work has been in constant rotation at work, at home, on the headphones... everywhere and all the time.

Ellipse is Imogen's third solo studio album, and starts out with the track First Train Home, a rather lighthearted but firm declaration of her constant urge to return and work in her home music studio, perhaps at the expense of whatever romantic interlude that happens to stand in the way. The album progresses with the soulful Wait it Out, which hearkens back to the style of her last album's global hit Hide and Seek. It's followed by a group of tracks that range in emotional complexity, from the sweet and gentle Little Bird, to the largely comedic Bad Body Double and Aha!, to the quietly sentimental and instrumental The Fire, to the heavy-hearted final track Half Life. My favorite track on the album by far is 2-1, whose odd lyrics I can't quite decipher, but whose epic nature and screaming emotional intensity leaves me breathless every time I hear it.

Ellipse, upon countless replays, is so full of nuance, emotion, and innovative musical prowess, that it has become not only my favorite album of the year, but has placed Imogen Heap among one of my favorite artists of all time. Listen and listen again. I can't recommend her highly enough.

I also had the distinct pleasure of catching Imogen live at The Fillmore here in SF (easily the best music venue in the city) back in October. Her stage presence is kind of hysterical, actually, or at least it was for our show. Whenever she used a new instrument or piece of equipment, she described and demonstrated it in detail. The highlights were the tiny wireless microphones she had glued to each of her wrists (so cool!). Throughout the show, like a mad scientist, she ran around the stage, fiddling with exotic instruments, tweaking knobs and pressing buttons, while mumbling to herself how nothing was quite working properly. It was fabulous.

She also described the creative process of Ellipse and the theme represented in each song she played. The album largely lays out the soundscape of her everyday life in her childhood house in England. As an adult she personally bought and moved back into the house, converting the basement into her new recording studio, where the creation of Ellipse took place. The house itself is actually elliptically shaped, hence the name for the album.

Overall the show at The Fillmore was among the most personable I've been to. Imogen had the audience feeling like we were old friends of hers, having perhaps come over for dinner and then for drinks in the studio afterwards, where she showed off her insane musical creations. This type of show may only be possible in intimate venues like The Fillmore, but I highly recommend the experience if she comes around again in the Spring of 2010.

Melody Gardot - My One and Only Thrill

Melody's story is one of tragedy and triumph. In 2003 she was riding her bicycle through Philadelphia, PA, when an SUV ran her off the road. She sustained several serious debilitating injuries, requiring her to spend the better part of a year in the hospital, and afterward that she walk assisted by a cane. She has also problems with her short term memory, and her eyes are so sensitive to light that she has to wear special tinted glasses at all times.

While she was in the hospital, not able to sit up in her hospital bed to play the piano as she was classically trained to do, she instead took the time to teach herself how to play guitar. When she emerged from the hospital she was a completely new being than when she entered. The cover of Melody's second album, My One and Only Thrill, pictures Melody, a striking woman with flowing long blond hair, wrapped in a dark jacket, with her dark rimmed glasses with a subtle smile. But it doesn't do her justice, as my wife Sadie and I found out when we caught Melody in concert at the Palace of Fine Arts this fall. And what a Thrill it was.

The show started out with the stage enveloped in dim red light, almost like a photographer's dark room, leaving only the outline of a microphone stand. Melody arrived onstage slowly, sauntered over to the microphone stand, gingerly wrapping her hand around the microphone, and began to hum a sweet, bluesy tune, accompanied only by finger snaps and the occasional pounding of her heel upon the stage. Several bars into this stellar A Capella rendition, she gestured to the audience to help her keep the rhythm going with our own finger snaps. You could still only make out her silhouette as she sang and swayed back and forth, soaking the hall in her ethereal voice.

Ms. Gardot's presence onstage throughout the show, though she eventually emerged into slightly more revealing light and was joined by several band members, continued as smoothly and serenely as she had arrived. In between her songs, she shared anecdotes and answered quips from the crowd with the language and sense of a mature, articulate, and veteran jazz musician- like someone on her 20th world tour; not someone who was just starting out. Sadie and I were shocked to find out later that Melody is in fact only twenty-four years old. Seeing her in concert, you would never know it. She purveys at once the charm of Nina Simone and the prestige of Billie Holliday, while at the same time remaining her very own.

Melody's musical repertoire is a mix of jazz standards and original compositions, ranging from symphonic ballads to Latin-laced lounge; from the care-free boisterousness of young love to the quiet pain of the blues. My One and Only Thrill covers this full range of emotion, and at its darker points calls to mind Billie Holliday's Lady in Satin, one my all-time favorites. Though it is a stellar accomplishment and is among my most favorite albums of the year, I think that one will have to look to future projects of Melody Gardot to see where she will go next, which I for one wait for, with eager anticipation.

Tim Exile - The Listening Tree

Tim Exile was one of the opening acts for Imogen Heap's show at The Fillmore that I caught in October. While The Listening Tree is a sarcastic and simultaneously complex electronic dance album, the real gem is Tim Exile's live performance setup. His use of technology, including Native Instruments "Reaktor" system, enables him to treat electronic music in a highly creative and organic format, that is a far cry from the "two dudes with a laptop" bands of the earlier part of the decade. When he opened up for Imogen, within his circa 20 minute set he managed to perform several songs from his albums, as well as to venture out into the crowd and take voice samples of various audience members, after which he returned to his console and was able to instantly whip together some great composition, based solely on the samples he had gathered. It was truly inspiring, the way he melded himself so seamlessly into his equipment. Hopefully Mr. Exile become a trend-setter for newer, subsequent live electronic acts.

Best Books I Read This Year

I can barely count the number of books I read parts of or in their entirety this year. The ones I list and review below are chosen because out of everything that I read, they were the ones that managed to completely change way I look at the world. I couldn't recommend them highly enough.

Wired for War by PW Singer

PW Singer, author of such books as (Corporate Warriors and Children at War) has a broad expert knowledge of the military, the current state of globalized conflict and how it relates to technology now and in the coming ages. You can tell by reading the interview-rich pages of Wired for War (not to mention its massive notes section and bibliography) that Singer has done his homework. From current uses of unmanned Predator air-drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the bomb-disarming Pack Bots used against Iraqi IEDs, to the future use of robotic surveillance against the fledgling terrorist networks that seek refuge in failed states like Yemen and Somalia, Singer covers it all. He also considers the asymmetrical counter-tactics of insurgent groups and the philosophy and ethical dilemmas behind the warfare of man versus machine, also known as the "distance problem" of technological warfare. An incredible portrait of a world addicted to technology and the resulting changes in the landscape of warfare, with deep insights into what the future may hold, Wired for War is a treasure trove of information, and by far the best book I read this year.

This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

Dr. Daniel J Levitin has a Phd from Stanford in Neuroscience, though he got his start as a session studio musician, engineer and producer for such acts as Blue Oyster Cult, Steely Dan, Santana and The Grateful Dead. So it makes perfect sense that he might choose to write a book that attempts to explain the strong emotional response we have to the veritable ocean of available music in our modern electronic lives. Dr. Levitin answers many of the long-sought questions regarding such a fascinating topic, and explains why music is such an essential part of the human experience- from to the ancient tribal rites of passage to our current culture of instant-gratification via internet downloads. With a thorough analysis of the most cutting-edge brain experiments to date, as well as entertaining anecdotes and a personable style, this lean but mean volume will leave you clamoring for more.

The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra

I covered this in depth in a previous post, Leonardo da Vinci: Scientific Revolutionary?. In the book Dr. Capra lays the groundwork for an ideology of holistic philosophy and champions the polymath sensibilities that spring forth from the life of the great Leondardo Da Vinci. The Science of Leonardo is an inspiring and enlightening call to arms for a new generation of possible Leonardos, that need only to know his path to begin follow in the footsteps of the original Renaissance Man.

Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio

While I'm not a math nerd per se, this was a book that came out just at the right time, when the direction of my personal studies pushed me to ask this very question. Dr. Livio, an astrophysicist heavily involved with the Hubble space telescope, covers this topic succinctly and exhaustively, taking the reader through the long history of mathematics while simultaneously representing the views of those skeptical to its usefulness and effectiveness. A truly enlightening read that puts into simple terms so many unnecessarily complicated ideas, and strips away the academic snobbery and illusory mystique of the "divine language" of mathematics to expose it for what it truly is- an extremely effective tool for interacting with the universe that surrounds us, and that deserves reverence and appreciation for what it has brought our civilization.

Happy 2010 Everyone!!! Best Wishes to you and yours.

-Nowell

Leonardo da Vinci: Scientific Revolutionary?

2009-09-27T12:31:00.000-07:00

Leonardo da Vinci was not only the most influential painter and draftsman of the Renaissance, he defined science in an age in which it couldn't be properly conceived of or appreciated. His meticulous analysis and understanding of natural phenomena is paralleled only by the most cutting edge fields of 21st century modern science. So it begs the question- if Leonardo was as prolific a scientist as he was an artist, why was his artistic influence felt so strongly throughout the last 500 years while his science was not? The fascinating book The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra (author of The Tao of Physics) attempts to answer these questions.

Leonardo was a polymath, or what came to be known as a "Renaissance Man". In fact, his legacy defined the word- if you go to Wikipedia, his famous self portrait (pictured above) adorns the top of the page. Being a polymath is less an aspiration or a mode of operation- it's more like a psychological condition, bordering on obsession. But unlike many obsessions, instead of fixating on one specific thing, the affected mind goes in a million different directions at once, almost to a detriment (oil became Leonardo's preferred painting medium because it was the only medium that could stay wet long enough to tolerate all of his long-term noodling) Fortunately, Leonardo had wealthy and powerful clients during his career as a painter- religious, political, even the royal elite- who would provide him with money, workspace, and resources to freely pursue his varied passions. He had an entourage that followed him everywhere he went, and a constant team of assistants, so that he could maximize the breadth of his activities.

Leonardo's approach to knowledge in general was a classical Aristotilean, empirical style- an exhaustive examination and documentation of natural phenomena. His experimentation within the widely varied disciplines of painting, architecture, engineering, mathematics, and the various sciences are evident to us through the detailed and comprehensive 6000 surviving pages of his original Notebooks. Sadly, an estimated 7000 additional pages have been lost. In the Notebooks, he muses, sketches, and intuits the science, above and beyond the age of the Enlightenment, at least a hundred years before René Descartes, Sir Issac Newton, and their contemporaries had stepped foot on the planet.

Capra writes regarding Leonardo's tutoring of King François I of France:

"He never tired of hearing Leonardo explain to him the subtleties of his science of living forms- the complexities of turbulent water and air, the formation of rocks and the origin of fossils, the intricacies of human movement and the flight of birds, the nature of light and perspective, the canons of beauty and proportion, the pathways of the senses and the vital spirits that sustain our life, and the origin of human will and power in the seat of the soul." (Capra, p. 127)

Just in this small cross section we can clearly identify Leonardo's knowledge in fields we would call (respectively) Fluid and Aerodynamics, Geology, Paleontology, Biomechanics, Optics, Aesthetics, Anatomy and Psychology. Keep in mind all of these studies subsisted with only the simplest of technology, without the tools that were available when they were popularly developed. The analysis of Fluid Dynamics was especially difficult without advanced equipment, but it was of such acute interest to Leonardo that it yielded an abundance of pages in the Notebooks. It wasn't seriously pursued by the greater scientific community until the 19th century.

Leonardo is of course best known for his artistic endeavors, including several pioneering master paintings (The Last Supper, John The Baptist, and Mona Lisa), as well as the detailed drawings that can be found throughout his notebooks. He discovered that a more pleasing and striking image could be composed using harmonic proportion and perspective, rather than idealizing human and natural forms. So the endless hours he spent studying the underlying structure of these forms were inordinately beneficial to his artwork, whether they were rocks, streams of running water, or systems of muscles and organs throughout the human body. He felt if an artist didn't have a thorough enough understanding of natural forms, there was no way he could make a true and accurate rendering of them. Dedication to this principle set Leonardo apart from the other artists of his day, and galvanized (while it was actually a revival of ancient techniques) a revolution in the naturalism of painting. Many of the drawings in his Notebooks are still considered impressively accurate portrayals of human anatomy.

So why wasn't he received as successfully in the scientific community as he was in the art world? As Capra explains it, Leonardo never had a formal education, and though he did eventually teach himself Latin, the text in his Notebooks were written in common Italian, making him unable to garner much respect from many of the academic communities of the time. Additionally, his Notebooks weren't properly published until hundreds of years after his death. At that point, the modern scientific method as we know it had been established. The purely reductionist science that emerged from the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries analyzed organisms and natural phenomena by deferring their causes to the activities of lower level, component parts (molecules, atoms, particles, etc).

This was much different than Leonardo's methods, which were more holistic. Holistic examination to Leonardo was to observe a subject as it existed in context, emphasizing the connectedness of each part to its fellow component parts. Those collections would interact and form a system- a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. For example, it wouldn't make sense to analyze a single muscle in the upper arm of a human subject; you would have to see how it fit in context with all of the other muscles surrounding it, as well as the tendons that connected them to the bones of the elbow and shoulder and made the arm operational. His drawing Vitruvian Man celebrates the symmetry, proportion, and beauty of the human body as a whole.

Concurrently Leonardo was one of the first figures of history who believed that the types of natural phenomena seen everywhere on Earth extended throughout the cosmos, and that the planets outside the bounds of Earth were just as imperfect, noisy and complex as the nature that surrounded us. This stood in stark contrast to the widely accepted, even religiously mandated Aristotelian vision, which professed that the celestial bodies were constructed from the flawless, idealized, and mathematically perfect geometric forms of his teacher, Plato. Leonardo went further to postulate that the human body, the planet Earth, and the cosmos as a whole were macro/microcosms of each other, meaning that each was its own complex natural organism that reflected the other. Had Leonardo access to a powerful microscope at that point and observed the various discrete cellular systems within the human body, he might have gone further to recognize them as the next step down in his picture of reality. His vision offers not only a more expansive view of reductionist science, but goes further to exemplify nonlinear, fractal-like geometry in self-similar complex systems. This type of research didn't become popular until the late 20th century, a full 500 years after Leonardo had passed away. In fact, this division of his studies could also easily be compared to systems biology, complexity, and cognitive science- some of the most cutting-edge fields of research today.

Leonardo's scientific endeavors were a product of his own vigorous, private self-education. However, exercising his polymathic sensibilities, he was able to meld art and science together as one, and include scientific inquiry as a fundamental part of the art-making process. That way he was never forced into a situation where the scientific work had to be separately approved, funded, or even known about by anyone but his closest associates. Without economic, social, or religious interests directly tied to it, Leonardo seized the opportunity to explore interests for their own sake, rather than having to cater to the desires of any particular patron. Most research scientists today have to constantly deal with these obstacles and keep the interests of their funders (drug companies, national defense departments, academic institutions) in mind at all times as they perform their experiments.

Of course Leonardo had a relatively stable, well-paying career, with a solid base of political and religious clients who happily praised and generously supported his artistry, allowing him the time and flexibility to employ such a thorough methodology. He never had to worry about having food to eat or a place to live. But while few of us in the modern day can revel in the types of luxuries he enjoyed, we can still view, understand and appreciate the value of independent scientific research and studying the wonders of the natural world, on our own, for it's own sake, the discoveries themselves becoming their own rewards.

Imagine what our world could have been like had Leonardo's Notebooks been the cornerstone of the Enlightenment. How would the world be different? What if we all stopped whatever we were doing every day, just to watch the sunset? What if everyone learned a musical instrument, and set aside time to play every day, just for themselves? What if we all spoke ten languages? What if every city building had a rooftop garden, that the residents of the building personally cared for and took pride in? What if math class was absolutely fascinating, because we actually understood the context of it and how it fit into our daily lives instead of being presented with steady streams of abstract concepts? What if each and every one of us was in constant awe and wonder at the simple idea of being alive?

If we followed a path inspired by Leonardo the Scientist, the Naturalist, the Polymath, the Self-Educated, tireless Seeker of Knowledge- the Visionary- all of these things might be possible. If we could only view the natural world through his eyes, with as much appreciation and sense of awe as he had for the sheer complexity of it all... we certainly wouldn't ever have to think twice about saving it.

The School of Athens

2009-03-22T21:34:00.000-07:00

I've taken quite a few detours over the last few months, for a variety of reasons. But now that I've committed myself wholeheartedly to following whatever philosophical or scientific whim blows through the room, I've ended up in some pretty mind blowing places. It's always nice to be surprised about the nature of things- things you had taken completely for granted, oftentimes through word of mouth. But when they are more closely scrutinized, the proverbial rug ends up being pulled out from under you.

Now that I've spent a lot of time with the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, I realize that it is possible to inquire on all things, and though it may be hard to stomach, there might not be an actual answer to said inquiry. For every "concrete" view, there is one that's set to the polar opposite, for a reason that could very well be more astounding than the first. Instead of painting the world with a black and white, good and evil, "with us or against us" brush, it's instead composed in shades of gray and uncertainty. The truth is therefore defined by the argument itself, in the absence of an actual conclusion. According to Plato, this kind of result, while wholly unsatisfying, works just fine.

Aristotle, the star pupil of Plato, felt this methodology was a cop out, and that it was his duty to put a cap on these types of inquiries, in order to make any kind of progress in what was then called "natural philosophy." Every question you could pose had an answer- you just had to go out into the world, study natural phenomena, and arrive at that answer, empirically as it were. Though you can look back and chuckle at what may seem like naive and voluminous writings on the nature of politics, ethics, the cosmos, biology, poetry, etc, Aristotle's method of inquiry for the most part remains the same accepted method that the scientific community uses today. Theories of hard science can't be proven through reason and discussion alone. Someone can't just publish a scientific paper in a major journal with no data to back up their claim. For example, someone could rationalize that clouds exist because little invisible gnomes with paint brushes shuttle across the sky and create them. If you were to claim something like this, contrary to every notion we accept about meteorology, you had better damn well have some strong empirical/collected data that proves such a claim. And even then, it's still just a "theory," right?

It's well substantiated throughout history that even a proven theory may well be refuted just because it isn't supported within the ideology of the common culture. Take heliocentrism, the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun rather than vice-versa, or atomic theory, postulating that all things in existence can be broken down into more basic, tiny components. Both were out and out rejected in their own times, over and over again, simply because the culture of the day refused to accept it. Even today's debates about evolution vs. intelligent design fall solidly into this category, though it's pretty obvious that the evolutionists have largely been accepted as the "winner" in this "contest". Through the mountains of data Charles Darwin and innumerable other scientists have collected, evolution is the accepted nature of existence of humankind- it's the ANSWER. Thus Aristotle lives on.

So what happens if the "answer" is eventually proven wrong? What about travesties of the the past like Witch Trials, where suspected citizens were subjected to the full gambit of "scientific tests" before they were convicted and burned alive? What about blood-letting as a method for suppressing disease or haphazard brain surgery in an attempt to cure mental disorders? How can we know that the things we hold as truths one moment won't vaporize in the next?

The truth: we can't. We can't account for the horrible things we've done in the past in the name of science. Technology only improves with time, and while one day we can't analyze a drop of blood at a murder scene, the next we have DNA testing, sending a convicted murderer with a 30 year prison sentence home after having been wrongly imprisoned for 13 years- for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Like it or not, this is just the nature of science in our world. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our lives, to become more efficient, to live longer, and to feel better- by fumbling through the darkness to find a more harmonious explanation for the things around us. We try to cobble these ideas and data together, and continually pretend that we can somehow grab nature by the horns using these flawed Aristotelian endeavors.

So why do we continue to rely on a 2300 year old method that's inherently riddled with error? Because the benefits of doing so largely outweigh the detriments. Through science, we can propose and live by these fake, temporary "universal truths" quite well, even if they turn out to cause major catastrophes later on. As my Superstring Theory professor said- "science is always right - until it's wrong."

Interestingly enough, the overarching method of battling scientific ideas returns to the form of a perpetual dialectic; an argument or conversation that goes back and forth endlessly, refining our body of scientific knowledge again and again. I can't help but see the irony of this- that the format is a lot like- a Platonic dialogue. So really our methods of scientific inquiry are a hybrid of the philosophies both of Plato AND Aristotle. Neither is mutually exclusive. Perhaps this is why in Rafael's painting, The School of Athens, standing in the center of of a collection of ancient Western philosophical figureheads, is both Plato and Aristotle, their respective doctrines tucked under one arm, while gesturing with the other their opposing viewpoints. Plato points up to the heavens, to indicate the source of universal truth, as if to say "Only God knows," while Aristotle holds his hand out in front of him, as if to say "Everything we can know is right here in front of us." I don't know about you, but I find it thoroughly amusing that the foundations of Western culture seem to rest entirely on these base opposing principles. Instead of agreeing completely with one or another viewpoint, we create harmony out of conflict, rather than out of equilibrium.

It doesn't seem quite right at face value, does it? Yet somehow it works. Maybe the philosopher Diogenes, who lived at the time of Plato and Aristotle, and who was a champion of the writings of my old pal Heraclitus, said it best:

"All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream."

The world and all that we know is just a river of chaos. Hope you wore your life vest.

This New Existence - 2008 In Review

2009-01-02T14:52:00.000-08:00

3:20 AM, 1/1/2009, top of Tank Hill, San Francisco, CA

Another year is behind us yet again. For me it was a year of introspection, education, travel, and personal growth. In January of 2008, I stumbled across an audio class on Ancient Greek Philosophy at the San Francisco Public Library. Since then I've adopted other classes in the same series into my every day routine. I feel that the classes overall have given me a new lease on life- made me interested in things I knew nothing about, while stories of the past enriched my own creative narratives. The dialogues and dialectic of Ancient Greek philosophers specifically made me examine more deeply the bigger questions we face as human beings, as well as to think more objectively about my relationships with other people. I am now more prone to listen to peoples opinions and discuss things with them, rather than devolve into the sophism and screaming matches most television programs and online forums have become as of late.

This was also especially helpful throughout the year to see through the smear campaigns of the most important US Presidential election of my life thus far. I have realized that our civilization is built on such a dialectic, and that the most negative effect on our growth as a species has been the conquer and destruction of other cultures- the reset to Year Zero. These include Roman dominance of the Hellenic (Greek) empire, the Barbarian destruction of the Roman Empire, and later The Mongolian destruction of early Baghdad. There is just so much we have lost because of this ugly historical cycle of domination.

In July of 2008, a paper was published in Nature (famous weekly science journal) about what's called the Antikythera Mechanism. The Antikythera was found in an old Roman shipwreck in the southern part of Mediterranean Sea, packed among statues and other items that were looted from the Greek Islands around the beginning of the first millennium CE. From its most current, exhaustive examination, it appears to be the oldest known complex scientific calculator, built by the Ancient Greeks and designed to calculate astronomical positions. This incredible archeological find is at least 2000 years old, and has metal miniaturized gears and pieces, much like those found in the clocks of 1800s Europe.

I am equally amazed and mournful at this discovery. It illustrates how much about the Greeks we do not know, and how much we might have learned had things not turned out as they did. Such is the nature of things, I suppose. The philosopher Heraclitus, who I've gotten to know quite well this year, believes that strife is the natural state of all things, and the constant push and pull in itself creates a worldly harmony, instead of opposing sides establishing some kind of collaborative equilibrium. Now this idea could have been influenced by the very turbulent times Heraclitus was going through in his hometown on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor (now Turkey) around 550 BCE, where wars between different factions of Ancient Greeks were commonplace. Or there might just be a stronger wisdom to the pre-Socratic philosopher's few surviving fragments; that whether or not it is of positive outcome, or whether or not we want them to, things will inevitably change.

It's hard not to feel the change in the world today. Our economy is seemingly correcting itself after a barrage of government missteps as well as some extremely foolish exercises in corporate and personal greed. We have been living above our means for a long time, and are only now beginning to realize the extent of what we've done. I hope that in this next year we can focus on the future, and rather than try so vehemently to exist in the past, we should take note of the things we have learned from it and move on. I am optimistic that the United States alongside the rest of the world will find the strength and innovation to carry us in to the next, truly great era of the human story. We are the children of the Greeks, the Romans, the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians and the Babylonians. If they were capable of building such a rich cultural past, then we are certainly capable of creating an equally rich cultural future.

My best wishes for a great 2009 to you and your loved ones!

Top Ten Things I Learned (or were reinforced)

in 2008

10. Your job is no replacement for the real life outside of it.

9. There are lots of people who have thought about the things you are struggling with, several hundred if not thousands of years before. At least listen to what they have to say.

8. There are so few honest, helpful physicians, especially in California. Hold on to the good ones.

7. Save, save, save for the dry times.

6. Cafes in Paris, to a foreigner at least, require a thicker skin than I can muster most days.

5. Great Art sometimes DOES need a guide, especially in the Pompidou.

4. "Reseau Sans Fil" means "Wireless Network" in French.

3. In regards to artistic endeavors, Concept and Execution must be balanced. They are not mutually exclusive.

2. Sadie is my rock, and I am hers. I love you baby!

1. Yes, we can.

Top Five Albums I Listened To This Year:

Portishead - Third

song - "Hunter" (.mp3 format) - 3m59s

Don't know where in the hell they have been for the last eleven years, but I am certainly glad they are back. Portishead on their new album somehow is able transcend their "trip hop" roots of the 1990s and reintegrate themselves purposefully into the sound of today, knocking most everything else I heard that was new this year into the gutter. Takes a few listens to get into, but after that Beth Gibbon's siren of melancholy will again resonate with you, whether it's in your car, on the train, or in a candlelit room at night. This is the Portishead I have known and loved all these years, and it has come home to roost once again.

Flying Lotus - Los Angeles

song - "RobertaFlack (Featuring Dolly)" (.mp3 format) - 3m8s

Bought this one on a whim at Amoeba Records from the Employee Picks rack. It has such a cool cover, reminiscent of the giant black beetle from Massive Attack's album Mezzanine. With a name like Los Angeles, this album could have gone so many different ways. It is a city whose name brings up feelings in me that I absolutely abhor, and represents a very dark time in my life. As soon as I popped it in I knew it was not of that place. This album is equally retro-lounge, ambient, melodic, softly rhythmic and noisescape. It makes me think of dust swirling within dimming sunlight, and the quirky, lovable creatures that bumble around in the shadows. It's not any bit shallow, plastic, cheesy, or snobbish, as its name might suggest. It is a work of art that is not quite like anything I've ever heard, and which after many back to back listens never quite gets old.

Dido - Safe Trip Home

song - "Look No Further" (.mp3 format) - 3m14s

Another artist whose return is very welcome in my musical world. This time she's teamed up with producer Jon Brion, well known for his previous collaborations with artists like Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann. An excellent addition to her discography. I really wonder what will happen to her music if she ever actually finds a man that treats her right. Regardless, I hope it doesn't take her six more years to come out with her next album. This is where she should take some notes from the Nine Inch Nails playbook: sometimes you hit the switch, sometimes you miss, but the bigger your catalog is the better (at least to the fans). Of course multi-platinum selling artists I am sure can do whatever they damn well want.

Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto (Hilary Hahn on violin)

song - "Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35 I. Allegro Moderato" (.mp3 format) - 18m6s

As I get more and more into classical - excuse me - ORCHESTRAL music, the more I am able to refine my tastes and pick out the stuff I really enjoy. I came across this magnificent piece within one of my "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" lectures. It is truly fabulous- and incredibly lucky that I was actually able to see it so deftly performed by the great Hilary Hahn with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Hall in late November. Truly an astounding performance and experience overall. The Violin Concerto of Tchaikovsky (his only one) is a triumphant masterpiece of the Romantic Era. At its more fully orchestrated parts it feels like flying on the back of a mythical creature over the expanse of some undiscovered green countryside, and when Hilary Hahn plays the violin solo interludes, it feels like she's conjuring up great undulating ribbons of fire from the Earth's core. Music doesn't get much more awe-inspiring than this, especially from the Left Side Terrace seats of Davies Hall.

Muslimgauze - United States of Islam, Vote Hezbollah, Sufiq,

and Jaal Ab Dullah

song - "United States of Islam (Pt 1)" (.mp3 format) - 9m46s

Muslimgauze is an old friend, who was first discovered, listed on the cover of the scarcely published Industrial Nation magazine in the summer of 1995, by my friend Dave Stoller. A British gentleman named Bryn Jones is the force behind Muslimgauze, who died mysteriously in 1998, leaving behind over 90 full length albums with 32 different record labels and over 2000 individual songs. With such inflammatory titles like "Vote Hezbollah", and labeled alongside such acts as Nine Inch Nails and KMFDM, one might expect some vocalist with distortion effects on their voice, shouting all kinds of hateful, anti-Western slogans. This couldn't be further from the truth.

Muslimgauze is instead an innovative and mindblowing collage of complex polyrhythms and Islamic chants, converging to make a mysterious blend of tones, drones and echoes. The music is actually very cinematic- it could easily be the soundtrack to a film about nomadic desert tribes who convene at night to display their amazing, hypnotic dances to one another. Beautiful, beautiful stuff. I've been trying more and more this year to introduce this supreme body of work to anyone I can. Don't be at all surprised if a Muslimgauze cut ends up on a yet-to-completed film of my own.

Top Eight Movies I Saw This Year:

The Conversation

clip - 3m56s

Sadie took a class earlier this year with well-respected classical realist painter, Michael Grimaldi. The Conversation is his favorite film, both narratively and compositionally, and the reason we came to watch it in the first place. Given Grimaldi's extraordinary body of work, I now understand why.

Overlooked, overshadowed, under appreciated, is Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 masterpiece, produced between Godfather I and II. Gene Hackman stars in this San Francisco drama about a man who struggles with the morality of his profession as an elite contract surveillance agent. Excellent acting performances all around, especially Hackman, and a surprisingly scary appearance by (a very young) Harrison Ford. Top-notch sound design and cinematography that will absolutely knock your socks off.

Paris, Texas

clip - 2m53s

This past November Sadie and I hosted a 3-film, Wim Wenders "Director's Festival Weekend." I had never seen any of Mr. Wenders' films previously, so it was a treat to watch them with no specific expectations, except for perhaps the knowledge that he is German, and a renowned independent filmmaker. We watched Wings of Desire (poorly remade in the US as City of Angels in 1998), Buena Vista Social Club (documentary on the making of the famous hit album), and Paris, Texas (1984).

Paris Texas is one of the most refreshingly original films you will ever see. It's startling to see how many filmmakers, including the great David Lynch, have borrowed so heavily from the narrative and visual style of Wim Wenders. The similarity between even the most current independent films and this one, now almost 25 years old, is undeniable. The story evolves slowly over its nearly three-hour running time. It begins by following the main character Travis (a spot-on performance by Harry Dean Stanton), who wanders silently over the plains of South Texas before collapsing from dehydration in a bar. In subsequent scenes we learn that Travis, over the last few years has experienced a severely traumatic personal incident- one that he himself has caused, and must now come to terms with. A wonderful, even historic film, that I can't recommend highly enough.

Iron Man

clip - 9m11s

I think many of us can agree that the superhero genre at this point resembles a dead horse, beaten so much that its body is near flush with the ground. Spider Man and X-Men rekindled this genre about six years ago, and the flood hasn't stopped since. The Batman and Superman reboots, Fantastic Four, several failed attempts to revive the Incredible Hulk- all movies I've unfortunately either directly worked on, or from which I was a mere one step removed. Iron Man was different, and that's for one very simple reason. Three words: Robert, Downey, and Jr. I don't know if you could call it his comeback role, but the man is a treasure trove of talent like few others in the business. It's great to see a him bring such humanity and more importantly HUMOR to what could have been an extremely dry, hollow role if it were played by anyone else.

Oh the actual movie? Yeah, that was decent too. Jeff Bridges plays a great villain even if his and Iron Man's "final fight" was pretty uninspired. The film also asks some interesting philosophical questions, about how much responsibility we should accept when the things that we create fall into the wrong hands. Is it the technology itself that is evil, and its user becomes naturally drunk on its power, or is the user inherently evil, and the way that the technology is put to use a reflection of their true character? Am I digging too deep here? If I am, oh well- at least it was a damn good action superhero film.

The Dark Knight

clip - 5m50s

Batman Returns of 2005 showed us a new, darker vision for the caped crusader, resuscitating a franchise that the public had flatly dismissed not 10 years prior. For the second installment of the reboot, Batman takes the back seat, as the infamous Joker gets his own makeover. Heath Ledger, rest his soul, brings a fire to the part that is at once hilarious, disgusting, moving, and wholly frightening, while starkly different from his predecessors.

When an actor plunges himself so deeply into such a dark existence for a part like this, I suppose he would naturally come across the character traits of this new version of The Joker. The Dark Knight's vision for the Clown Prince of Crime is not your traditional villain. Gone is the power hungry, scheming, shaking his fist at the good guys when he loses in the end villain. He is, as he himself says in the movie, "an agent of Chaos" who does as he pleases, without any kind of concrete plan or thought about the repercussions of his actions. If one of his diabolical exercises is foiled, he throws up his hands like "oh well" and just deals with the consequences. In fact, he LAUGHS at them.

Beyond all of the sociopsychological games The Joker plays throughout the movie as he terrorizes the residents of Gotham City- the bombs, the assassination attempts of city officials, even the nonchalant murder of his own criminal associates- I think we as moviegoers actually admire the Joker and what he symbolizes- true freedom. Freedom from emotional baggage, from moral obligation or regret, from all responsibility and loyalty, from fear of capture, and ultimately from pain or even death. He is truly a transcendent being, as ugly a thing as that may come to represent in this case. No wonder he laughs maniacally while he sets fire to a ten foot high pile of stacked $100 bills. He doesn't need it. He is completely free. Batman? He sits around and sulks all day. Who needs that?

Very pointed commentary about how much we actually are able to separate the dark side from ourselves, to become human beings of pure truth and justice, and the final answer that is revealed: we can't. Where so many superhero genre films try to answer this question- Spiderman 3, the Incredible Hulk... The Dark Knight succeeds at last.

Cloverfield

clip - 1m50s

I'm sorry to say it, but if you are prone to motion sickness, you do indeed need a Dramamine before watching this film. When Sadie and I went to see it on the last week of its theater run, that's exactly what I did, and let me tell you- it is SOOOO worth it. This movie rocked. You hear the premise - a giant anonymous monster comes to wreak havoc on New York City, and all of the sudden you're like me- having flashbacks to 1998, to Roland Emmerich's abysmal Godzilla, and how much the ads got you so excited and then the movie TOTALLY let you down. This is NOT that film. This is as visceral and raw an experience as you can ever get watching a movie. Simultaneously entertaining and terrifying, Cloverfield straight up delivers. I don't want to give away too much if you haven't seen it, but I can tell you that to me, this is the essence of what truly great film entertainment is. Producer JJ Abrams knows his shit.

Wall-E

clip - 1m43s

Perhaps I'm a bit biased on this one because I got to see it AT PIXAR STUDIOS in Emeryville, just across the Bay from San Francisco, courtesy of our good friend Neil Blevins who works there and worked on the film itself (he modeled many of the scavenged treasures in Wall-E's trailer). This film nullifies all previous Pixar films. It truly sets the bar for a whole new generation of animated movies; a movie whose computer generated characters are so full of subtlety and nuance, they resonate with even the deepest of human emotions. Don't get me wrong, this is not a ponderous, heavy film, but it does redefine what we believe animated films to be- not just kids' cartoons, but fully blooming works of art.

I commend director Andrew Stanton for understanding what it took to tell this story, and taking a big risk, allowing his main character (Wall-E) to be a robot that speaks with mostly electronic blips and squirks, and who is completely alone for the first large chunk of the film. His only interactions are with his surrounding environment, a desolate version of Earth made up completely out of trash, as well as a lone friendly cockroach. One day, a sleek and much more technologically advanced robot named Eve arrives from outer space, and everything changes- Wall-E falls in love. When Eve is suddenly forced to leave, Wall-E has no choice but to follow her, involving himself in a much bigger drama, which ends up being a pretty brash commentary on the way that we as consumers squander our natural resources, and waste our lives and bodies away with sugary food and mindless entertainment. The Wall-E vision of the future sees a human race, living together but driven apart by the technologies we ourselves create, while at the same time inspiring hope that some of those same technologies will be inadvertently what saves us in the end. Reminiscent of the great silent films of the early 20th century, before we became obsessed with hearing ourselves talk, Wall-E is somehow able to inspire far more wonder than Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny could ever have hoped to.

Juno

clip - 0m53s

Ellen Page has good things coming to her if she can play every role with as much charisma as her character in this film. Juno, a high school junior, gets unexpectedly pregnant. After giving it some thought she decides to carry her baby to term and give it up for adoption, and answers an ad from the classifieds section in the local paper. She meets Mark and Vanessa Loring, played brilliantly by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner, a young couple who is not exactly on the same page in regards to the genesis of their own nuclear family. Some phenomenal characters and performances in this, while brimming with great comedic situations. Definitely a feelgood movie, but luckily not one that requires you wash the cherry-bubblegum syrup out of your mouth afterward, if you get what I mean.

Synecdoche, New York

clip - 6m02s

Every time I see a movie with his name on it, I am increasingly more impressed with Mr. Charlie Kaufman. From Being John Malkovich to Adaptation, to the totally far out Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he's been writing completely original, insightful and thought provoking screenplays for awhile now. Synechdoche New York (say that five times fast) takes it to an even deeper level, where he explores themes of existence and the journey of Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) through the difficult times in his life. At first Cotard seems like just your run of the mill, over-emotional, over ambitious playwright on a mission to create the perfect stage play- one of realism, emotion, and authenticity. He's pleased with what he's made so far, but life takes a turn when he wins an award for his work as a playwright, and consequently a huge sum of money for him to further pursue his artistic endeavors. Meanwhile his family life is falling apart at home. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener), who seems wholly disconnected and disappointed in how her relationship with Cotard has turned out, abruptly packs up and leaves with their young daughter Olive to take a gig as a conceptual artist in Germany. As time wears on and he realizes they don't intend to come back, Cotard moves on with his life, as much as he can, never quite breaking his mind away from his relationship with his daughter.

What ensues borders on the absurd- a play within a play about Cotard's own life, where reality simulates reality simulates reality to an almost intolerable recess of informal narrative. This is a story about a man living out his life as though it were an elaborate theater piece. As an exuberant priest says to a simulated funeral procession late in the film, that as each and every person lives out their own drama, they couldn't care less about the individual narratives that others are carrying on. "So fuck everybody!" he quips. "Amen!" the crowd responds. Absolutely a brilliant, funny, and original piece of work, albeit a bit harrowing to someone who thinks seriously about the ideas of existence, what our lives on this Earth are, and what they mean. Certainly the most introspective film of the year, and where it hits the right notes, will make you belly-laugh and sob simultaneously.

Books I Read (at least parts of) This Year:

Thank you San Francisco Public Library!

Reconciliation - Benazir Bhutto (may she rest in peace)
Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Princples of Screenwriting - Robert McKee
The Art and Thought of Heraclitus - Charles H. Kahn
Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick
Emergence - Steven Johnson
Sync - Steven Strogatz
The City in History - Lewis Mumford
The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs
North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula - Paul French
The Music of Pythagoras - Kitty Ferguson
Republic - Plato

Audio Classes Completed:

This year I became addicted to The Teaching Company's Great Courses series. I HIGHLY recommend them if you are at all interested in cracking your mind wide open. Here are the classes that I completed this year.

Introduction to Greek Philosophy (24 lectures)
History of Science: Antiquity to 1700 (36 lectures)
The Great Ideas of Philosophy (60 lectures)
Chaos Theory (24 lectures)
How to Listen To and Understand Great Music (48 lectures)
No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life (24 lectures)
Ancient Greek Civilization (24 lectures)

Memorable Quotes of 2008:

"There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres."
"Everything is Number."

-Pythagoras

"Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if their souls do not understand the language."
"A man can never step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man."

-Heraclitus

"In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let's resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long."

-Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States

"Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow."

-T.S. Eliot

Favorite New San Francisco Restaurant: Shanghai Dumpling King

3319 Balboa St at 34th Ave, Outer Richmond

My friend Mr. Jon Fischer strolled by this place after a screening at The Balboa Theater, the Outer Richmond's only vintage independent movie theater. He later let me in on the secret, and it has since become my favorite cheap-but-amazing Chinese restaurant in the city.

Of the things I have tried, I recommend the Spicy Wontons with their punchy sauce, the soup-filled Shanghai Steamed Dumplings, and the Soy Braised Lion Head Meatballs, which comes in a portion of three huge pork meatballs. All of the dishes that I have tried have been excellent- even the standard hot tea that they serve is great. The SDK is a perfect choice if you want to stuff yourself with some of the best Chinese food in town, especially before or after you catch a flick at The Balboa.

Favorite New Drink of 2008: The Godmother

Equal parts vodka (the more premium vodka the better) and amaretto.

While many a bartender may give you a crooked look at first, if the weather is right you might just have half the bar drinking them by the end of the night, as happened many a time in bars throughout San Francisco and New York City this year. This drink was brought to Sadie's and my attention through our friend Kyra Kaszynski, as she explained to us that a friend of hers named Midge had passed a couple of years back, leaving behind the remembrance of her favorite cocktail, The Godmother, most popular in the 1930s. Kyra's speech at Midge's funeral, which explained the legacy of this fabulous drink, set off a contagion of drink orders at the funeral reception, and has since spread like wildfire.

This is not a drink to be taken lightly, as it is completely alcoholic, with perhaps the exception of melted ice. Three or four of these babies and you had better have pre-arranged transportation home, kid- something that doesn't require you to operate any kind of mechanical device at all, perhaps even a cell phone. Beware the Godfather also, which replaces the vodka with whiskey, and packs an even stronger punch- a few rounds of these set Sadie off into the spins on one particular occasion this year.

So order a Godmother and run the damn bar out of amaretto.

Thank you, Midge. Thank you, for my new favorite drink. Here's to you.

A safe and happy 2009 to you all!!!

-Nowell

Chasing Heraclitus - Act II Begins

2008-12-08T22:45:00.000-08:00

After a three month break from working on my film script, Golden Gate, the pedal has gone to the metal once again. During my hiatus, I completed the incredible How to Listen to and Understand Great Music audio class from The Great Courses series. The Music Listening lectures introduced to me many new characters of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic Eras, including Liszt, Haydn, and the more ethnically influenced works of Chopin and Brahms (Polish and Hungarian traditional). All great stuff, and for sure things I wouldn't have been able to seek out on my own, or at least would have had to stretch. Listening to the music of these composers, and learning about their lives has been of profound influence to me, in the way that one would read books on sculptors, painters, and yes, filmmakers.

Now I'm knee deep into a class on Ancient Greek Civilization, which I need under my belt for many reasons, but specifically for certain scenes and events within the narrative of Golden Gate's second Act. While the story already rests on a fair amount of mythology and philosophy, the basic tenets of ancient Greek culture are something that I've all along wanted to use to ornament, if not feed into the plot directly.

Well I think it's probably about time to shed a little light, without being too specific and giving away any plot points, on the philosophical underpinnings of Golden Gate so far. Are you ready? Okay then.

The first act is about Harmony, and finding the synchronicity of the individual with his/her environment through music and action. You could almost call it a ballet, at the risk of it sounding cheesy and pretentious. The philosopher, mathematician and ancient cult leader Pythagoras is its principal influence.

The second act is about Chaos, and the inevitability of Change- how sometimes it is a very good thing, while sometimes it is downright tragedy. I feel a rumination on this theme in today's day and age is inevitable given the current state of world affairs, though I began writing down the ideas for Act II back before any US presidential candidates even announced their exploratory committees. The fact is that this philosophy of change is at least 2500 years old, dating back to the time of Greek philosopher Heraclitus, one of the so-called "pre-Socratic" philosophers, meaning he formulated his philosophies before the time of Socrates.

Though very few of his works have survived, the works of Heraclitus have made a significant impact on our culture. He saw the world as made out of fire- always constantly changing. One of his most famous fragments, with its varying translations, goes something like this:

"No man can ever step into the same river twice, for it's not the same river, and he's not the same man."

While this may sound like a poetic and overly romantic notion to some, it's actually one of the few ancient philosophies that translates into our modern world scientifically. While in no way do I believe Heraclitus knew about or had the capacity to analyze our biology on a cellular level 2500 years ago, I see it as a striking coincidence that the cells in our bodies are dying and being remade constantly; so much so that in (on average) about seven years, none of our biological cells are the same as they were in the seven years previous. So we could not possibly be the same EXACT humans we were even a day before, possibly even hours or minutes before, because biologically we AREN'T the same self-aware collection of cells. It blows my mind to think that I am technically the fourth full version of myself, even though I can remember quite clearly large chunks of the lives of the first three.

The "river" part of the "same river twice" statement is a bit more obvious, and is reflected in other fragments of his texts, such as "all is flux." Liquid by nature flows constantly (unless it is frozen, of course), and this effect is amplified by the mechanics of a river, flowing from one large body of water to another. The smallest parts of the river, whatever units they chose to divide it up into during the time of Heraclitus, ceaselessly reconfigure themselves, so much so that, like the undulating cells of our bodies, it would never be the same river at any point you would analyze it. I find it quite amazing that something like Chaos or Complexity theory, scientific fields only a few hundred years old, can find their patron saint in an ancient Greek philosopher that lived a few THOUSAND years ago.

However, the fact that Heraclitus's philosophies are scientifically provable wouldn't have been much of a consolation to him. It would simply confirm what he feared- that solidity was impossible, even nonexistent. That we as humans base our way of life on false security, false stability. As much as we try to predict, we can't reliably know the outcome of anything of detrimental importance, or at least things that would effect us in the long term, in a world that is in constant flux. Our lives are built on a reality of liquid fire.

Heraclitus was known as "the weeping philosopher." and is depicted as such in paintings of him by Johannes Moreelse and Hendrik ter Brugghen circa the year 1600. Given his philosophies, pondering the nature of change, one can agree that his perpetually melancholy state of mind held no mystery as to the cause.

Heraclitus is represented in Act II of Golden Gate, most prominently within the "soul" or "essence" of the city- indeed the actual setting where the story takes place. The city itself becomes very much one of the main players in the narrative. It is a fully functioning character that must come to terms with its own identity.

This is not as abstract an idea as one might think at first glance. Every city has a personality- a way in which it interacts with other cities, its visitors, and its citizens. The city of Golden Gate is no exception. It's forced to redefine itself in function and purpose. How will it react to say... the seditious acts of some of its inhabitants? Or more importantly, how will it treat radical agents, introduced from outside the city, who threaten the harmony of the system? How can a city in itself make its own decisions? And how do these decisions affect its fellow characters?

I'm afraid you'll have to wait for Act III to find that out.

Chaos

2008-10-16T00:17:00.000-07:00

That word holds a lot of weight in this world of ours. To some, it means any American airport the Sunday after Thanksgiving. To others, the stock market over the last few weeks. To the Ancient Greeks, who invented the word, it simply meant "void" or "emptiness" - the essence of what was here before we were. To Chaos Theorists and Nonlinear Dynamicists it's the key to deciphering the undulating, seemingly nonsensical natural paths of phenomena in the universe, and exposing deterministic pockets of order hidden underneath. To me, it's a start down a very long road, full of potholes stuffed with large wads of old chewing gum. For awhile it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Here's what I can now discern from my vague understanding of it.

Chaos Theory, like most mainstream science, started at the fringe, with a man named Henri Poincare, who discovered unpredictable results while trying to solve the "three body problem", or the gravitational relationship between three celestial bodies (such as the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth), in the late 1800s. This discovery, which went largely underground until the 1960s, was not popular with the scientists of the time, who favored instead the restrictive but reliable results derived from differential calculus- mathematics that had been in play since the time of the great Sir Isaac Newton. In the 1960's, while running some experimental calculations for predicting weather, mathematician and meteorologist Ed Lorenz stumbled across what was later to be known as The Butterfly Effect. Drastic and unpredictable results spawned from small amounts of truncated calculations (dropping decimal places). As the old expression goes, "the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas."

It was becoming increasingly clear that Newton's laws had found their limits- all of the "noise" and "aberrations" that scientists had been ignoring for years came back to bite them in the ass, and as a result, their methods failed more extreme calculations. Thus modern Chaos Theory was born.

So why is this so interesting to me beyond a 10 minute conversation segue over coffee or a glass of wine? Well, the thing that held my attention in was the inherent ability of chaos to create order within itself, also known as self-symmetry. Remember all of those tie-dye shirts that the Hippies wore? Those images are known as Fractals, first defined in mathematical models by a man named Benoit Mandelbrot. The famous Mandelbrot Set is a computer image system that you can zoom in on many thousands of times to find that it repeats itself over and over again. The same structure can also be found in nature and biology, though in reality it stops after a certain number of repetitions (branches into leaves, blood vessels into capillaries, etc).

This is where I started to notice the limitations of Chaos Theory and Fractals, and what I was referring to earlier as "chewing gum-filled potholes." Chaos can only be reproduced in highly isolated mathematical models, created in what's called state space, to control variable influence. Only one variable influence on a system can be changed at a time to be able to observe and repeat behaviors. With more than one influence, outside of state space, it goes from Deterministic Chaos to something called Complexity Theory. Complexity Theory seems to me to be a catch-all definition for everything we don't understand about how different systems in nature work scientifically. The stock market, the weather, wars and social relationships between countries- none of this is calculable because of the complex nature of the system, the untold variable influences, and the inability to create an accurate portrayal of the system's "initial state." So Chaos Theory, while it tells us how on a base level how systems behave deterministically, barely scratches the surface of how these systems actually work, and is utterly simplistic compared to what we don't know.

While Complexity Theory continues on its own path of scientific research, not to mention fills out a whole mountain of books on the subject, this is where I divert my attention instead to the science of Emergence. Emergence is kind of the cousin of modern Chaos and Complexity Theory. It's more of a philosophy really- it takes into account the behavior of systems as a whole, how independently weak components of those systems relate to each other and "synchronize" to create something greater as a group than they could accomplish individually. For example a swarm of bees or a flock of birds, or even neurons in your brain, firing in unison to form a thought.

My academic foray into Chaos Theory in general came about after I'd heard an episode of WNYC's Radio Lab (partnered with NPR) that was specifically about Emergence. If you haven't heard Radio Lab and you have at least some interest in popular science, I can't recommend it highly enough. It's easy to understand and completely fascinating, with two exuberant hosts that make an extremely fun listen.

The first part of the Emergence episode featured a Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics professor from Cornell named Steven Strogatz, who describes how Malaysian fireflies are somehow able to synchronize their flashes- thousands and thousands of fireflies blinking in unison. I almost didn't believe it, but then I saw this video:

"Whoa!" I thought. I was hooked. The show proceeded to explain how this type of phenomena occurs in many places - behavior in ant colonies - in our brains - in crowds of people - in cities as a whole. The fundamental rule of an Emergent System is what's called "bottom-up organization", as opposed to the top-down systems we've relied on for so long, and do still throughout the world today. A group of alike entities self-organize through their relationships to each other, rather than having them defined by central leadership. Take the Queen in an ant colony for instance. Though she is called the "Queen", she serves the colony solely for reproductive purposes, and the population is overwhelmingly composed of sterile female workers. The Queen, unlike in the traditional Monarchical sense, does not hand down orders or help to organize the colony in any way. The worker ants use pheromones to communicate with each other, to warn against danger, to find food, etc.

Perhaps the most obvious example of Emergence in human culture is the World Wide Web itself- a decentralized, self-organizing network of websites and physical computer systems. This is why movies and television shows that talk about "Internet terrorist attacks" or "shutting down The Internet" like it's some server buried deep in the Pentagon are completely clueless. The Internet is just a term we use to describe the interconnectedness of alike entities, in this case, websites that are linked to one another. The Internet "emerges" from its own self-organized network.

If you dig a little deeper, in the age of the internet and a global economy, this phenomenon makes us fundamentally question the way we live our lives. Our systems of law, our education, Aristotle's Hierarchy of Being- even electing a President to "head" our country, begins to seem almost absurd. If you watch HBO's John Adams Miniseries (assuming it's historically accurate), it was the people of the American Colonies who cried out for a leader, resulting in George Washington's election to head of state. But for what, to fill the vacuum left by a British King??? Don't worry everybody- I still plan to vote in the November election. Still, it brings up a lot of very interesting questions...

So you're probably asking yourself by now, "what the HELL does all this have do to the screenplay you're writing, Nowell? This is your FILM weblog, after all." Oh my friends... that you will just have to wait and see. All I can say is that my path of research takes me in inevitably "chaotic" directions. Erratic, but ultimately to some end, yet to be defined. 60 pages in one book leads me to 180 pages from another, and so forth. I'm burning through a complete audio class (24-60 lectures) almost every month and a half. The method is an Emergent system in itself. By the way, thank GOD for the San Francisco Public Library, because otherwise I'd have a multi thousand $$ Amazon bill this year and counting- no joke.

As to the fate of writing Act II of Golden Gate: One day VERY SOON the pen will hit the page again (fingers will hit the keys), and such a frenzy will occur, that it will be difficult to stop. I will keep you posted!

Act I is Done!

2008-08-17T20:23:00.000-07:00

So it looks like I've finally gotten Golden Gate, my first feature film script, off the ground and running, with Act I successfully in the can. Though I'm afraid this won't be any kind of final draft.

Robert McKee, author of the excellent Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and Principles of Screenwriting says for a 2 hour movie, the standard structure is three acts or more, 40 to 60 scenes. Since one page of a script equals approximately one minute of actual screen time, a standard script size would be, for all three acts or more, approximately 120 pages.

What does that have to do with my film, Golden Gate? Well, it might have to do with the fact my first act is approximately 35 scenes and, um... 68 pages. If you do the calculations, and all three acts were of equal lengths, this would clock me in at a 204 pages and almost 3.5 hours of screen time. So I'm skipping my Boogie Nights and Titanic, and going straight for Gone With the Wind. Good luck to you and your bladder without an intermission :-).

Not being the kind of person with the audacity to write an epic his first time out, and barring the possibility for an HBO original series, a la The Wire and The Sopranos- it's a hard truth that there's going to be some serious cutting once the whole script is written. That said, it might be easier than it initially looks, since each act is almost NEVER of equal length, because of this little thing called "pacing." If every act were the same length, we'd all probably walk out of half of the movies we'd go to see in the theater.

With the exception of maybe Return of the King, generally the final act is the shortest, and the middle acts are the longest. There's also a very intricate science to pacing, not to mention average scene lengths- which could also make or break a movie. The average scene length for most movies (per Robert McKee) is somewhere around 2.5 minutes.

To test this principle, I went through some of my favorite DVDs and actually wrote down each of the scene lengths and took an average. Since the book was published (in 1997), and cites a lot of examples from the 80s, average scene lengths actually seem to have gotten longer, sometimes by half a minute and in some cases by a minute or more. For instance, the first Matrix has a 3.5 min average scene length, but it hardly feels like a slow movie. Movies themselves seem to be on average getting progressively longer, which helps explain this trend towards longer average scene length. That said, for movies that float around the 2 hour mark, McKee's rule still holds pretty accurately.

So where does Golden Gate clock in? Around 2.67 average minutes per scene for Act I. Not bad. Which can mean only one thing- my pacing is decent, but there are just too many scenes. Once the whole script is written I think it will become pretty clear which ones will end up on the proverbial cutting room floor, but only time will tell.

Mechanics, statistics, and principles of screenwriting aside, writing the first act has been one of the hardest things I've ever done, but simultaneously one of the most fun. All the story outlines and character descriptions I defined previously were only loosely followed, to be perfectly honest, ceding instead to something that's akin to chaos phenomena. It's an odd feeling, to put characters into a situation together and to see how they react to each other. It's almost as if they are living, breathing beings- the unpredictability of their actions comes out in their interactions with each other.

The script can eerily seem to write itself after a certain point. Scenes that I loosely define end up completely different, which causes ripple effects throughout the yet to be written subsequent acts. This is really exciting to me, because not only is the progression of the narrative becoming more interesting, but the climax of the narrative also becomes more and more clear, making my drive to finish the script even stronger.

So I'm going to take about a week or so off to reorganize, as things tend to fall into disarray during a project crunch like this. Also going to resume my Great Ideas of Philosophy (audio) Class, which I'm currently on lecture 45 of 60. I took a short hiatus from that for the last two weeks so I could finish Act I. Lots of interesting characters I'm meeting. I never thought I'd say it, but I ended up being a serious fan of Immanuel Kant. I battled him in college but never got very far. Now he and I are pals- go figure!

Chasing Pythagoras

2008-04-13T00:44:00.000-07:00

So here I am, smack dab in the middle of a nine-week mandatory hiatus from work, after a medium-grueling six-week final crunch on Speed Racer. I'm pretty happy with our work on the film, even though I probably would still never pay to see the actual movie in the theater. That's kind of a code I've developed over these last 8 years in this industry- if there's no company screening, it's Netflix or bust, I'm afraid. I suppose after working on 17 different feature films, it kind of loses its flair a bit. Oh well. Like I always tell Sadie- "It's one of those GOOD problems."

So yeah, nine weeks. I've got some time to kill. Of course, being me, I can't just sit and stare at the ceiling- I have to be occupied with work or a major project pretty much all of the time to stay sane, so I've been doing exactly that. What have I been up to then? Well, beyond a MOUNTAIN of house organization and maintenance... quite a lot actually. Let me elaborate.

Over the past few months I've, in my own way, gone back to school. I kind of invented my own grad school curriculum that I lovingly call "NVU". This past January, I came to the conclusion that I spent far too much money in 2007 on Amazon books (most of which I didn't read), so I decided to check out what the local San Francisco Public Library had to offer. I was pleasantly surprised at the great selection of books and online resources, with the ability to link it all together via their website. Best of all... it's all FREE! On one of my first visits to the new Mission Bay branch, I stumbled upon the Great Courses series, which are extremely high quality and in-depth audio classes on widely varying subjects. I decided to get my feet wet with a little Intro to Greek Philosophy, and it immediately just blew my mind wide open.

I couldn't believe for the last 29 years I'd been largely unaware of a whole universe of such interesting characters, like Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle... most of which are more or less the staple philosophical figures of history, science, and mathematics. But I'd neverstudied any of them in depth, beyond perhaps Plato's Cave metaphor or the Pythagorean theorem from my loathed 9th grade Geometry class. Nor did I ever learn about them in the context of their ancient time period, and how greatly they've influenced virtually all of Western thought- and if not, were at least cursed at by subsequent philosophers for being so foolish. Regardless, it's undeniable that many of the early philosophies, especially those of Plato and Aristotle, still hold pertinence in our lives today- concepts that were defined over 2300 years ago, are still talked about and studied heavily in academia and remain extremely important to almost every aspect of math and science, and beyond.

I quickly blazed through those 24 amazing lectures and ran immediately back to the library for more. I have since completed classes on Existentialism and The History of Science from Antiquity to 1700 (fascinating). I am currently in the middle of four additional classes- The History of Science 1700 to 1900, Power over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory, The Joy of Science, and The Joy of Mathematics.

On top of the audio classes, I've been teaching myself how to program in Python, the logical next step in my career as a visual effects artist and programmer. Next week I will also start a crash course in basic French for my three week Paris jaunt with Sadie in May. That's not to mention all of the different books I've been chewing into. I'm currently reading "Time: A Traveller's Guide" by Clifford Pickover, "The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library", Benazir Bhutto's "Reconciliation" (autobiography), and Plato's Republic.

In addition to my various classes and books, this week I will finally start grinding again on my feature script, Golden Gate, after some heavy revisions to my script outline and closing a few minor story gaps. I'm really happy with what I've come up with so far. The dialogue and images sing. I've also started to compile a list of songs that define each scene in the movie, which thus far includes music from The Roots, Chopin, Muslimgauze, Massive Attack, and Brian Eno. It's an excellent feeling to marry musical cues to the images in my head- it makes it so much more vivid for me.

So yeah, even with such a vast amount of time off, l'm not bored, to say the least. I'm really excited to learn new things and feel creative simultaneously. I feel like it's important to balance input and output- you can't make art in a vacuum, but you also can't exactly favor concept over execution, either. It is a balance I will have to struggle to maintain, but a struggle most enjoyed. Another one of those "good" problems I suppose. :-)

San Francisco Sunset Timelapse I

2008-03-02T17:33:00.000-08:00

Click to Watch

I brought the HVX200 to work this past week to shoot some 60fps reference during lunchtime, and I decided once I was done, it might be cool to set the camera up to capture a timelapse out of our office window. We've had some stellar sunsets out here in San Francisco as of late, and I thought I might just try and snag one.

What you see is 1 frame captured for every 10 seconds that went by, from approximately 3pm to 6:30pm. That's CA route 101 in the bottom of frame, and you can see right around rush hour how the frequency of cars increases dramatically.

All in all I would call it a success, but really in order to get the best exposure I'd have to ride the manual iris control, so that the sun doesn't completely blow out to white when it comes into frame. Perhaps in version II I can improve upon this. Aside from these few technical criticisms, I'm very pleased with the result.

SF Indie Film Festival

2008-02-08T10:12:00.000-08:00

Postcard #28 (previously "Postcard") was shown last night at the Opening Party for the 10th Annual San Francisco Independent Film Festival. While it wasn't on the schedule to screen theatrically, it was still fun to get some exposure, and be recognized by people outside of our general circle of friends. Jon and I are very proud, especially considering it's the only festival we've submitted Postcard #28 to so far.

Additionally, last month Jon and I were interviewed by the Haight Ashbury Beat, a neighborhood newspaper. What a great way to kick off 2008!

In other news, I'm still stuck in the second act of Golden Gate, my first feature film that I've been writing since late last year. Things are starting to shape up, though- the overly expository narrative has now been trimmed down in order to create a more mysterious feel. Though I threw out a lot of the exposition, it was still important to write that back story, so I could identify character motivations and build a strong base for the narrative. In other words, it wasn't a false start or waste of time in any way- simply... part of the journey.

I've also been experimenting with the Sanyo Xacti HD-1000 , an extremely compact, flash memory based hd camcorder. It's produced some interesting results. Currently, one David FX Stoller is supposed to throw me some music to give the "city sketch" format more structure, as I've found is important to that particular process. I'll post it as soon as it's done, and my thoughts on the format.

Quote of the Day

2008-02-02T23:41:00.000-08:00

"I would like to recall to everyone that the motion picture camera and the whole motion picture medium was developed at about the same period and in the same climate as so did the development of the telegraph, and the airplane and all of these other industrial expressions of something that was happening in the mind of man which wanted to break some kind of confines... it reflects in film. This is its fascination for me.

"It would be so much easier to be a painter or a writer- [As a Filmmaker] you not only have the creative problems- you have the financial problems that they don't have, you have technical problems that they don't have, you have machines that are breaking down in the way that paint brushes don't break down. It's just a terrible thing to be a filmmaker.

"And if you ARE a filmmaker it's because there's something in the sheer medium that seems to be able to make some sort of statement that you particularly want to make, in which no other medium to you seems capable of making in the same way."

-Maya Deren 1917-1961

The SF Postcard Project

2007-10-06T11:56:00.000-07:00

Click to Watch

Completed at long last. This endeavor was born out of a one-day camera rig test back in 2005, which turned into an city-wide, multi-day, multi-season shoot throughout the year. It was cut down from nearly 7 hours of raw footage and painstakingly edited over several months, to arrive at its current 3 1/2 minute form.

The reason this project extended beyond a simple camera test has a lot to do with the film's main protagonist Mr. Jonathan S. Fischer. Fischer co-directed, co-edited, and conceptualized the project as a whole, as well as composed the majority of the original music in the film. All in all, this is as close to a 50-50 split creatively as I have ever had on a project, so you will see a definite shift in style and tonality compared to my films where I was the sole creative force.

You might also notice a slight quality shift since this was entirely shot in the DV format (half the resolution of HD) with the Panasonic DVX100- my previous camera which I have since sold to a friend. The DVX100 is now a cult favorite among film students, sketch comedy groups, and documentary filmmakers alike, because of its film-like look and its relatively affordable price (you can get one on ebay fully loaded for around $2k). For standard definition DV, it looks pretty fantastic. Enjoy!

In other filmmaking news, over the last two months I shot footage for three other videos I may or may not cut together. One is a kind of a photographic tour through the amazing new Seattle Public library, that I shot last month, another involving model trains I shot in Pennsylvania around the same time, and finally a studio band practice for The Red Chapel, a NYC-based rock band whose drummer is a friend and cohort within the Symphonic Pictures universe, Mr. David FX Stoller. In addition to being a drummer and elite recording engineer, he is an electronic composer in his own right, and composed the score for Symphony last year.

In writing news, my San Francisco-based feature film script, (nicknamed Golden Gate for the interim) is coming along well. I finished a rough outline of the first and second acts, and am deep into the third. I also continued working on the script for The Dilated Cycle, and outlined several of the remaining 6 short films associated with that project. When I have more to share, you will be the first to know!

Please leave comments! I always appreciate any feedback you might have.

Art Class TimeLapses

2007-09-04T23:50:00.000-07:00

Click to Watch

While Sadie and I were in Seattle for her art workshop last week, I decided one of the days that it would be fun to set up the camera on a tripod in the corner of the room, out of everyone's way, and shoot a timelapse of the entire day's work. Timelapse sequences are nearly ubiquitous these days, found in documentaries and feature films alike. I am a big fan of time-distortions in film, but hadn't previously attempted any long-term sessions of my own.

For those of you who need an explanation of timelapse photography, it basically means recording an event using single frame exposures at regular intervals to produce an effect of moving quickly through time. In this case I used my camera, the Panasonic HVX200, in it's own "interval recording" mode. The HVX is a solid state memory camcorder, meaning that it records onto memory cards rather than digital tape. While limiting the space to the number of high definition images fitting on two 8gb cartridges, it's not as flexible as tape, which can just roll for an hour straight or more. The benefit lies in the transfer between the camera and the computer, bringing it into editing stage just that much sooner. Also, the HVX only shoots the frames it needs, so it's more conservative than tape would be performing the same operation. For this type of job, shooting in this format, the HVX acts much more like a digital still camera than a video camera.

For timelapses, depending on the type of effect you are going for, you can record with very short intervals (a few seconds) to very long intervals (a few minutes/hours/etc.) In this case, in order to keep the durations of the final pieces relatively short, I decided I would expose 1 frame every 30 seconds. After the first day I realized my math was a little off (not uncommon in my life) so the final film, with 7 hours worth of images, was only 30 seconds of playback- a little shorter than I was going for.

I decided it would be worth it to record the class for a second day at 1 frame for every 10 seconds. The result was a bit more fluid and interesting than day one, but watching it straight can be kind of tedious. I browsed through my iTunes and picked out a track from Amon Tobin, a song called "Bridge" from one of his earlier albums "Permutation" an era when much of his music still had a heavy jazz influence. It seemed to fit the mood perfectly.

So this is my first attempt at some real-deal timelapse. I hope you enjoy it. Maybe next time I can hook up some kind of motion control rig and add some motion while the camera is exposing. There's a motion control timelapse shot in Oliver Stone's U-Turn that blew me away back in my film school days, shot out in the desert in Arizona. Just one of many extremely cool shots in that film.

Stay tuned for more films shot during our Seattle trip- I shot a slew of footage inside the new Seattle Public Library, which, while it sounds like it could be mind-numbingly boring, is actually one of the most engrossing feats of architecture I have ever seen- well, for a library at least.

First Post - Symphonic Pictures Begins

2007-09-03T13:20:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to the new blog of Nowell Valeri. Here I will be posting commentary about my latest films and musical endeavors, as well as music and films by others that inspire me. I will share with you my ideas about filmmaking, what I've learned, technical tips, and will pose inane and rhetorical questions. Please feel free to comment.

-Nowell