I just finished watching Flirting with Disaster, an early movie by David O. Russell, director/writer of I <3 Huckabees. Due to certain ideas we’ve been kicking around at work, I’m currently quite locked in to a specific way of looking at the world, which got me thinking about the story structures used to build this movie and how they are exploited to create and release tension.

Spoilers herein.

Here is an excellent example of a story being driven by its own restructuring.

It specifically draws attention to how people build a certain worldview, then try to fit new facts into this worldview until there are too many contradictions and the worldview has to be restructured.

There is even a character, herself a filmmaker, who is a student of this phenomenon. She arranges meetings between adopted children, now grown, and the parents they’ve never met, to see how this new piece of information (meeting their parents) affects the child’s worldview.

The paradigm for this restructuring theme is the “bumping” incident. The husband and filmmaker integrate the dad’s story about “bumping” into their worldview. Then when they are approached by a van on the highway, they try to fit this fact into their worldview, thinking the van is trying to rob them. When the contradiction arises that the van is not trying to rob them, they restructure their worldview to say that the dad is neurotic and his story was exaggerated or highly unlikely. The filmmaker character explicitly gives this explanation after the incident.

This worked well for me, because at this point in the movie, I was building a worldview where in this movie, being of the Ben Stiller romantic comedy genre, the things that can go wrong will go wrong, often in a situationally ironic way. So with the dad’s neurotic story, I thought that for sure this ridiculous scenario would actually happen to them. So then the “twist”, this restructuring, happened to my worldview at the same time as it happened to the husband and filmmaker characters.

The restructuring theme is used throughout the story at different scales. On two occasions, Ben Stiller’s character meets a person he presumes is his parent, and “fishes” for facts that reinforce this worldview (”we have the same forehead!”). Tension builds as contradictions between the actual situation and the expected parent-child situation arise. The tension releases when Ben’s (and our) worldview is restructured to say that the person is not Ben’s parent.

We also have the affair situations that set up tension. This tension is between the two possible worlds: one where the spouse is being faithful and the other where the spouse is having an affair. The movie sets up two affairs, complimentarily between the husband and wife. These tension threads span the entire movie and are exploited for all the strongest jokes. Specifically I’m thinking of the tension created around Ben breaking the glass display case, and him having to explain, that is, fit this fact into the worldview he projects to his wife, where his relationship with the other woman is innocent.

The huge tension release comes when Ben bursts into the room his wife is in. He sees her intimately involved with the other man, but is not surprised, showing that he has already integrated this information into his worldview. The next lines he exchanges with his wife reveal that he knows that she knows he’s been flirting with the other woman. Indeed all of the “he knows she knows” layers have collapsed. He and his wife share the same worldview. Trust. The big release.

In the same sweep, it is revealed through the mishaps each spouse has in his/her affair, that the two are really “meant for each other” (in the way prescribed by the date genre).

I saw this amazingly vibrant watercolor while visiting the Berkeley Art Museum with Lei yesterday.

It looked pretty cool from far away, but then when we got up close, Barack Obama just put it over the top. Unfortunately I can’t find the artist.

The other exhibit we both really liked was a little hut that you enter and you see all these medallions hanging from strings. Each medallion has a symbol on it that looks like some alien hieroglyphic. There’s a sign that says to pick your favorite and commit it to memory. When you walk out, there’s a station with pencils and small pieces of paper where you’re supposed to reproduce your symbol. You then hang it on the wall and look at what everyone else picked and remembered. Artist is Farley Gwazda.

My favorite though was Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Juggernaut. You first walk in and see a film that cuts between shots of an arm holding a color chart in various locales. The color will contrast the main event in that darker room further back with the droning Lynchian noise. You go in and sit down to watch the film on a large projection.

It starts with an expanse. Ground and sky as the camera slowly tracks right. What is on the ground? Is that snow? I would almost think it’s an aerial shot with clouds below, except there are clouds above.

Then a huge vehicle drives across the screen. The tire gives scale. Our camera is mere inches off the ground. The vehicle tows another vehicle behind it. And another one behind that. For about four minutes, you just see this massive thing on giant wheels drive across the alien landscape.

Turns out the place was a salt plain in Mexico.

Momus is one of my favorite songwriters. (He’s also a favorite of Belle & Sebastian, Of Montreal, and Vampire Weekend). I got into Momus through his connections with Cornelius and Kahimi Karie. He had a couple top tens in Japan with the songs he wrote for K.

Last night I saw Momus, accompanied by ipod, chronologically karaoke through a career-spanning retrospective. I knew about half the songs. All of the backing arrangements were completely fresh to me though.

Throughout the performance, Aki Sasamoto did interpretive dance dressed as a Kubuki stagehand. Aki is an amazing, intuitive dancer! I especially liked when she started taking all the spare mic stands in back and ceremoniously adjusting and arranging them on stage. She and Momus have a great dynamic together, playing with the fact that you know they’re making it up as they go long. They are fresh out of a long-running improvisational performance piece in New York.

I think what makes Momus special is that he can sustain an idea (usually a language-formal idea or literary-cultural comment) for several verses while consistently keeping the language pushed to its limit, never wasting a word. His melodies and arrangements always support the lyrics absolutely (he’s strongly words first, music second). And his choruses never disappoint (a problem with many other talented songwriters).

It always amazes me to see an artist present a singular concept while pulling all the stops constantly, effortlessly. Roman Polanski does this for me too. His movies are full of cinematic memes, like the creepy guy hiding in a private space glimpsed in a mirror and then he’s not there, the voyeuristic neighbor in the background who watches the main action until he’s spotted, or the camera following a character through a busy street with jazz in the soundtrack (all examples from Repulsion). But these effects are always done in service of the story, never for their own sake.

All too often in my own creative endeavors, I think of an effect and build a piece around that, whereas I should start with a concept and use effects to enable the concept to be born. I suppose the key is to internalize a repertoire through practice and experience, to make it intuitive.

A pleasant way to travel

The economy has collapsed. Among other things, all railroad travel has ceased, leaving miles of unused tracks.

You and your companion wander the land, scrounging for odd jobs and food.

But at least on your nomadic journeys you enjoy a gentle bobbing sensation and scrolling vistas. That’s because you travel using a railroad seesaw cart.

The railroad seesaw cart works by the same mechanism as an old railroad hand cart, except the hand pump has been replaced by a playground seesaw.

There was a time period where I had Resolume and Dan Jacobs going on in my room 24/7. I have so much footage like this of people wandering in and watching themselves through layers of Dan’s distortion. This video is footage from what must have been our final session.

Dan you should be a VJ!

Fast forward 1302 days.

I’m at this art show/club environment, and I notice that the VJing grammar is the same as it was 186 weeks ago. The standard filters. Random clips on loop.

Eventually a grammar will evolve for more multi-dimensionality.

The closest I’ve seen to this is Hifana performing live.

Too often VJing has a kind of consistency to the motion that strips it of all engagement. Unmoving moving images. Here the performance had percussive feedback, synchronizing our heartbeats, building and releasing tension. A shape.

Bonus!

Catherine as a redhead! I’m pretty sure this was shot in Jen Chia’s old room, when she had the double to herself. Date on the file is September 2003.

Open source framework for selling music online

The (my?) problem with the online music marketplace is that almost all transactions go through a few large players (iTunes or Amazon, for example).

This state of affairs–the premise that large, centralized resources were needed to distribute music–is a legacy of the pre-Internet era.

I propose an open source project that makes it super simple to set up a self-hosted online music store.

There’s no reason this needs to be hard. Musician loads the software onto her website, opens up the admin UI. Uploads mp3s, graphics, etc. Sets prices. Save Changes and presto music store.

Now when her fans go to her website, they buy music directly from her. None of the money gets sucked into the vortex.

Well, there are still a few costs but there’s reason to believe these are trending toward minimal:

- She has to pay for bandwidth and web hosting.

- Out of convenience, she opts to use a third-party credit card processor. There is, after all, a plugin framework and a community of developers who make add-ons that let your music store integrate with other services.

Oh, and our musician is multi-media-talented, she also sells videos and other digits.

I'm in a hotel room with Okie. We're recording bits of our conversation. Is it Wednesday. Yeah it's wednesday its not thursday. no it's not thursday until 15:33.

song about the seasons. that's the bomb divers. riled the men with every _ riled the women with every _.

here we go, here we go baby. here we go, here we go baby.

my room is in a completely different configuration.

that man, he's not who he pretends to be.

unidentified flying building lands on top of other building.

a word about the original building. has a courtyard filled with full-body statues of every president. but you can't get in through any of the doors in the courtyard. you're supposed to go in through the front. but the highways are really confusing and i can't get to the front. also i'm late for my plane. there's no way i could go around to the front. i climb over Warren Harding and find a door that is open. i'm too late though for my plane. this is the second plane i missed out of this place.

take the elevator to the top of the compound building, investigating.

discover alien plot. okie would know the rest.

Don’t auto-tune, auto-edit

Auto-tune is pretty cool. You give it a list of acceptable pitches (ie: the key of the song). It then does a pitch analysis of your (usually vocal) track and pitch shifts every note to the nearest acceptable pitch.

The pitch shifting is quite subtle, but you can still hear it (it sounds sort of phaser-y). Moreover, the pitch shift removes character from the original track.

Better would be if you could record several takes of the track (as is usually done anyway). Auto-edit would then dynamically cut between takes, always choosing the one that is most in tune. The result is an in tune track without any pitch shifting distortion.

While your at it, the algorithm could be given other criteria for auto-editing, for example giving negative weight to pops (sometimes happens when you say b’s or p’s). It could also take parameters for when it’s allowed to cut (moments of silence, for example).

You could essentially use the algorithm that scores your vocals in Rock Band (video game).

Heart Beats to Hot Beats

Maybe you forgot to turn your music player off. Maybe you forgot to plug it in when you got home (habits are for suckers). If your device is anything like mine, the battery indicator doesn’t warn you until it’s too late.

There you are, volume pumped to max, body moving to the rhythm, unaware that anything is amiss. Just as your cardiovascular system becomes one with the elliptical cross trainer, your music player dies. Not even the endorphins can offset the shock. Boredom sets in. You quit early.

Too bad your gym doesn’t have USB chargers built-in to each exercise machine.

In my experience, at least 90% of gym goers have portable media players and 90% of portable media players can charge their batteries through a USB interface (although the plethora of adapters might be a problem).

Of course it’s only a great idea if the USB charger is powered by the calories you burn exercising.

Sundialtone - Not Speaking Gibberish.mp3

For a blast of reality, use headphones to employ the space plan.