this is my Book Cover assignment for illustrator...
i like it...its blu
jess3 blogs,
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PIMPIN !
http://www.jamiroquai.co.uk
this is my new favorate site... check out ther bee hive interactive flash menu.... pimpin !!!!
Jay-Z, surrounded by security, is escorted to the auditorium at Cass Tech High School, in Detroit Thursday, Nov. 21, 2002 where he was principal for a day. The students won the visit, sponsored by 105.9FM Jamz radio station, due to the school's good attendance record. About 1200 students who earned a 3.0 or better were allowed to attend the rally.
Jay-Z And His Mom To Appear On '60 Minutes'
Jay-Z will appear on CBS's news magazine program 60 Minutes Wednesday (November 13). The segment, hosted by correspondent Bob Simon, will capture the rap mogul (born Shawn Carter) in his old neighborhood in New York's Marcy Projects, on tour, with his mother, and during a meeting with leading music retail company TransWorld.
In related news, Jay-Z recently released the video for his song "'03 Bonnie & Clyde," a duet with Destiny's Child member Beyonce Knowles who is also featured in the video.
"'03 Bonnie & Clyde" is the first single from Jay's album, The Blueprint 2: The Gift And The Curse, released Tuesday (November 12), that also has tracks with Lenny Kravitz, Latoiya Williams, Faith Evans, Notorious B.I.G., OutKast's Big Boi, Killer Mike, M.O.P., and other Roc-A-Fella acts.
http://www.BuildingTheWeb.com/html/flash/flsh_gallery.htm
Tari's Fabulous Flash Adventure
- A Gallery of Great Sites -
[ - prepare to be amazed and astounded - ]
http://www.BuildingTheWeb.com/html/colour/216color.htm
The Official 216 Cross-Platform
Browser-Safe Colour Chart
Creating A Blurred Background
The trick is to shoot a subject with a distant background. We are going to create the effect of focusing on the subject.
http://www.planetphotoshop.com/tutorials_effects.html
Creating A Blurred Background
by Josh Spivey
Let's just do something really simple this week. I have had the task of taking a number of photos for work these past few weeks as we ramp up the launch of our new web site. I wanted to take photos without a ton of work, so I worked this simple little trick to make it look as though I know what I am doing.
Now I am by no means a skilled photographer. In fact, I would say I am terrible at it. However, with Photoshop, that's just fine with me. I can often make things look much better inside the computer than I ever could with a camera alone.
The trick is to shoot a subject (a person, a dog, a car etc…) with a distant background. We are going to create the effect of focusing on the subject, but having the background be blurry as though we were taking it with a real SLR camera. I have a Nikon Coolpix 995 that I am in love with, but any old camera will probably do.
Take a shot of something you like with a nice distant background. See the image below as an example.
Now you should take out your blur tool. See the image below if you don't know what that is. It is the object on the top that is shaped like a drop of water. It is in a flyout menu that is on the middle left of your tool palette.
With a decent size brush and the pressure set to about 50%, brush the blur tool in the areas around your subject.
Now I have to admit that this is not the best example I have ever done, but for simplicity's sake, it will do. Basically I just brush a bit and then if it looks bad go back in your history palette a bit and try again. It always pays to go back and do things over again. That's part of the fun of Photoshop.
Try a few. You can probably find tons of photos around the house that you can use. Hopefully you have a scanner around, but if not, stop by a Kinkos or something and have them run them for you. You probably have a friend that can help you, or maybe you have a scanner at the office. Or you can use the old digital camera to do all the work for you. That's my personal approach and I like the instant satisfaction.
The trick is to shoot a subject with a distant background. We are going to create the effect of focusing on the subject.
http://www.planetphotoshop.com/tutorials_effects.html
Creating A Blurred Background
by Josh Spivey
Let's just do something really simple this week. I have had the task of taking a number of photos for work these past few weeks as we ramp up the launch of our new web site. I wanted to take photos without a ton of work, so I worked this simple little trick to make it look as though I know what I am doing.
Now I am by no means a skilled photographer. In fact, I would say I am terrible at it. However, with Photoshop, that's just fine with me. I can often make things look much better inside the computer than I ever could with a camera alone.
The trick is to shoot a subject (a person, a dog, a car etc…) with a distant background. We are going to create the effect of focusing on the subject, but having the background be blurry as though we were taking it with a real SLR camera. I have a Nikon Coolpix 995 that I am in love with, but any old camera will probably do.
Take a shot of something you like with a nice distant background. See the image below as an example.
Now you should take out your blur tool. See the image below if you don't know what that is. It is the object on the top that is shaped like a drop of water. It is in a flyout menu that is on the middle left of your tool palette.
With a decent size brush and the pressure set to about 50%, brush the blur tool in the areas around your subject.
Now I have to admit that this is not the best example I have ever done, but for simplicity's sake, it will do. Basically I just brush a bit and then if it looks bad go back in your history palette a bit and try again. It always pays to go back and do things over again. That's part of the fun of Photoshop.
Try a few. You can probably find tons of photos around the house that you can use. Hopefully you have a scanner around, but if not, stop by a Kinkos or something and have them run them for you. You probably have a friend that can help you, or maybe you have a scanner at the office. Or you can use the old digital camera to do all the work for you. That's my personal approach and I like the instant satisfaction.
Windows Media Center Edition lets those of you in one-room apartments and dorms watch and record TV on your PC.
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition
Full review
Unless you're planning to spring for a whole PC, don't start jonesing for Windows Media Center Edition (better known by its former code name, Freestyle). This new build of Windows XP Professional, which delivers remote-controlled audio, video, live TV, and the ability to record live TV to the PC, can be found only preinstalled on select PCs--at least, for the moment. You'll love Media Center if you need one of these new all-in-one PCs for your tiny dorm room, say, but Microsoft needs to work out a few rough edges before this edition is good for everyone.
PC turned TV
In practice, Media Center Edition (MCE) lets you use an infrared remote control to play TV, music, DVDs, and photo slide shows on your PC. Technically, the OS augmentations include just a set of application controls and interface elements built on the core of Windows XP Professional, with simpler navigation conventions and--more important--the potential for your PC to use networking features such as Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to distribute music and video to other systems in your home and to handheld devices.
As first-generation software, MCE delivers about what you'd expect: it adds no new capabilities to Windows, just a different way of accessing the old ones. And currently, it's tightly tied to hardware, too. In order to get the full experience, you must have a PC equipped with a personal video recorder (PVR) card and a remote control. That package is available now in only one PC: the HP Media Center PC.
My, my, my
Media Center Edition is part enhanced operating system, like the XP Tablet Edition, part application that runs under Windows XP. Media Center opens as a separate window where you control the various entertainment components of your hardware. When the Media Center window is maximized, it looks little like Windows; you don't see the Windows Start menu or desktop, for example. MCE provides a start menu when you first launch it (on its so-called splash screen) that you use to access its main functions: My TV, My Music, My Pictures, My Videos, Play DVD, and Settings. You can navigate through each module with the mouse if you want or just use the remote. If you minimize MCE, you're in plain old Windows. It's a bit disorienting to have different interfaces running on a single system, but it makes sense if you divide your tasks clearly between computing and potato couching.
The My TV module is certainly the most interesting of the modules. Through it, you can watch live TV, either full screen or in a window; look through the Program Guide of available shows; schedule shows to record; and play back recorded shows, (á la TiVo). You can also hook up your cable descrambler to your PC through this module, and setup takes about as long as setting up a satellite dish--30 to 45 minutes, if you're adept. MCE walks you through selecting the right remote settings for controlling your cable box, then finding the appropriate cable lineup to download into the Program Guide.
Program Guide info is supplied for free--no subscription necessary--by Tribune Media Services, but it's less detailed than some guides, such as the Time-Warner digital cable guide that's available in New York City. As with the digital cable guide, Program Guide lets you surf the listings while a show plays in a corner of the screen. However, in our tests, scaled-down video stuttered quite a bit; Microsoft claims that this is a hardware problem, not a software issue. Regardless, My TV is very easy to use; for example, to schedule the recording of an entire season of a show takes about two button presses on the remote. The software also allows you to pause live TV, then fast-forward through the buffered file. As a personal video recorder solution, My TV is less buggy than alternatives such as SnapStream but is also less feature-rich than standalone players such as TiVo.
For couch yo-yos
The rest of Media Center's applications are extremely basic, and that's fine when you're navigating via remote. But these simple-Simon programs also make it difficult to simply sit down across the room and vegetate, the whole goal of passive entertainment. Every time you drop in a disc, for example, be it DVD or audio, you get the standard Windows "What would you like me to do with this disc?" dialog, which you have to deal with at your PC. You'll have to run back and forth unless you tell Windows to launch everything in MCE, but that, in turn, becomes annoying when you're working within Windows because nothing will launch within Windows itself.
Even playing music becomes overly complicated under MCE. For instance, My Music lets you use your remote to choose music to play, which sounds great on the surface. But first, you'll have to complete the laborious task of adding all of your digital files to the Windows Media Player library and making sure that the track tags are clean. For example, all folk music must be labeled as Folk, not folk acoustic or folk rock, or you'll end up with many different playlists, because MCE can't aggregate them the way WMP can. Even once you've added all the music correctly, MCE won't let you create playlists using your remote--no queuing up Beethoven, Mozart, and Prokofiev unless they're the only classical artists in your collection, for instance. You have to build playlists in Media Player first. Worse, if you use your remote to click, say, the Buy CD link in My Music, you'll be tossed out of the MCE environment and into your browser--so you can't keep shopping from your couch since your remote won't work in the normal Windows interface.
Future potential
We think that Microsoft might fix these awkward corners in the future--indeed, much of the benefit of MCE lies in its potential. For example, we're waiting for purchase links that stay within the MCE environment, for eventual couch-potato shopping. Third parties can add applications to the MCE start menu, and we're hoping they will because that would mean more robust versions of the basic apps at some point. Furthermore, some of the value of MCE rests in the ability to upgrade an existing system to use it, which you can't do at the moment.
Right now, MCE comes with a lot of hardware attached. For one-room apartments and dorms, kids' playrooms, or even as a lobby kiosk, a system with MCE makes sense only if the live and recorded TV support are essential to you; that's currently the only real value over Windows XP. Keep your eye on MCE, though. Future versions can only get better.
Media Center Edition's My TV module lets you record and save live television, à la TiVo or Snapstream.
Virginia beats Maryland 48-13
By HANK KURZ Jr., AP Sports Writer
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) - Matt Schaub threw three touchdown passes and Wali Lundy scored three times Saturday as Virginia stunned No. 18 Maryland 48-13, ending the Terrapins' eight-game winning streak.
Virginia (8-4, 6-2 Atlantic Coast Conference), picked to finish eighth in the league in the preseason, instead wrapped up second place and likely enhanced its bowl stake with Peach and Tangerine bowl officials watching.
Schaub was 23-for-27 for 249 yards, becoming the Cavaliers' single-season yardage leader with 2,751 yards and extending his TD pass record to 26. Billy McMullen caught seven passes for 92 yards, becoming only the third player in ACC history to get 200 career receptions. He has 205.
Maryland (9-3, 5-2), which drove easily downfield on its opening possession and took a 7-0 lead, trailed 34-7 before it scored again.
The defending ACC champions arrived hoping that North Carolina State could beat No. 14 Florida State and allow the Terps a chance to share the league title. The Wolfpack won 17-7, but Maryland couldn't do its part.
A 20-point second quarter by Virginia set the tone, and two touchdown drives in the first half of the third quarter gave Virginia a 34-7 lead.
The first touchdown of the quarter was bizarre in its execution. On a second-and-7 play from the Maryland 37, McMullen got the handoff on a double reverse and ran right into the face of Terps lineman Durrand Roundtree.
McMullen somehow spun away from Roundtree, saw Michael McGrew all alone downfield and threw a leaping 37-yard touchdown pass.
On the extra point, Connor Hughes' kick banged off the left upright, just inside the right upright and hit the official, who signaled good.
The Cavaliers forced Maryland to punt but soon faced third-and-21 from the Terps' 24. They escaped when Schaub hit Lundy, who ran in for the score.
Virginia, which has won five games after trailing at halftime, used its big second quarter to take a lead into the break.
Hughes started Virginia's scoring with a 47-yard field goal, the first of his career, on the opening play of the second quarter to make it 7-3.
Then, the momentum changed in a hurry.
First, Scooter Monroe let what would have been an 80-yard touchdown pass go through his hands and off his knees. Two plays later, Jermaine Hardy intercepted McBrien's pass and returned it to the Terps' 27.
On the first play, Schaub hit Jason Snelling in the left flat and the fullback dodged tacklers and dove for the TD.
That gave the Cavaliers a 10-7 lead — and Schaub set a school record with scoring passes in 12 consecutive games.
The Cavaliers forced Maryland to go three-and-out and then drove 69 yards in 13 plays to set up a 27-yard field goal by Hughes.
Angelo Crowell forced Chris Downs to fumble three plays later and Chris Canty recovered for Virginia at the Terps' 22. Schaub then hit Lundy with a 7-yard scoring pass.
President Bush, top, looks out at reporters and photographers as he departs St. John's Protestant Episcopal Church, with a uniformed Secret Service agent keeping watch, Sunday, Nov. 24, 2002, in Washington. (AP Photo/Ken Lambert)
Harman Kardon T2587LL/A SoundSticks USB 3-Piece Computer Speakers
Created for USB-equipped Macintosh computers, Harman Kardon's three-piece SoundSticks speaker system produces high-quality stereo sound for music, movies, and gaming sessions. The 40-watt self-powered system includes two 10-watt satellite speakers and a 6-inch 20-watt subwoofer. Designed for easy plug-and-play, the SoundSticks speaker system includes a power adapter to power the subwoofer and a plug that connects to the USB port of your Mac computer. A blue LED indicator lets you know that the subwoofer is properly powered. You can adjust the volume onscreen through your computer's Control Panel. A physical control knob for adjusting the bass is on the back of the subwoofer.
The SoundSticks USB three-piece computer speaker system comes with a one-year warranty.
When the temperature drops, music lovers are often forced to choose between unzipping their jacket, thus exposing themselves to arctic blasts, and listening to the same set of songs over and over until they pray for frostbite. With the Burton AG Clone MD Jacket, you don't have to choose. Designed for snowboarders, the jacket is made with a Sony Mini-Disc and digital music player sewn right into its fabric. The player's controls are touch-sensitive fabric patches on the jacket's sleeve, so you can control the music just by pressing your arm.
Availability: December, $999
To Learn More: burton.com
The Magic Eye mosaic designed by Beatles legend John Lennon for his swimming pool, on display in Liverpool, in this August 22, 2002 file photo. A number of significant John Lennon relics failed to sell at an auction of Beatles memorabilia in London, Tuesday Nov.19, 2002, including this one
There are so many coincidences between MGM's *The Wizard of Oz© and the album **The Dark Side of the Moon© it's just plain eerie -- and as fun as all get out. All you need is a factory copy of the film (a home made copy from TV will not do unless you copied it from a channel like the American Movie Channel® or Turner Classic Movies® with NO commercial interruptions and it will need the 3 roars of the black & white MGM® lion at the beginning of the film) and CD by Pink Floyd HOW TO SET IT ALL UP
Firstly if you aren't familiar with Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon© then SHAME ON YOU! Jes kiddin' . . . For your penance you must now purchase the CD, even if you never do this synchronicity experiment, and listen to it several times and read the lyrics along with it to acquaint yourself with possibly the greatest contemporary music album ever made!
It will probably take you a few tries to get the sync lined up just right so be patient. First load the Dark Side of the Moon (DSOTM) CD into your CD player and hit PLAY (>) and then immediately hit PAUSE (II) so it is cued up and ready to roll. Be sure also to set your CD player to continuous replay. This in most CD players is done by hitting the "REPEAT" button twice. Hitting it once will usually repeat only the presently playing track so hit the button two (2) times and it will replay the CD over and over. The CD will play roughly two and a quarter times through the entire length of the movie.
Now start the video and fast forward past all the preview junk (about five minutes worth on the THX version) at the beginning and watch for the THX Digital logo to pop up. Now get the tape to the very beginning where the BLACK & WHITE MGM lion roars. After the BLACK &WHITE MGM Lion roars for the THIRD (3rd) time IMMEDIATELY hit the play button on the CD player.
Be sure to turn down the sound on the TV because the dialogue and original soundtrack are not necessary for this experiment -- neither should they even be considered. The DSOTM CD will provide all the sound you need.
T h e D e f i n i t i v e L i s t
1) The first indicator that everything is going right is the change from Speak to Me to Breathe which coincides exactly with the fade-in appearance of the name of producer Mervyn LeRoy.
Note: In the prologue the word "Time" (one of the songs on the CD) is written with a capital letter even though it isn't at the start of the sentence. Also you will find the word "Heart" capitalized in the middle of a sentence (a sound particular to The Dark Side of the Moon).
Note: (OO) As the camera is panning across the landscape and following the path of Dorothy, a large tree is seen and from the lower, main bough of the tree hangs a triangle. The position of it hanging and the horizontal slats of the fence lining up beside it is strangely similar to the cover of DSOTM.
2) "Leave, but don't leave me ..." Auntie Em appears to say "... Leave ..." to Dorothy and then Dorothy turns to leave looking a bit down in the mouth.
3) Right after the words "... Look around ..." Dorothy looks around.
4) "... Smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry ..." Two men above (Cowardly Lion and Tin Woodsman) are smiling and the man below (Scarecrow) is crying. This one is sort of not on time but worth the mention.
5) "... All you touch ..." Dorothy touches the man (Cowardly Lion) holding a bucket on his arm.
Note: "All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be" Dorothy's life will only really be all she touches and all she sees in her Kansas home because Oz exists only in her pretty little head.
6) "... When at last the work is done ..." the farmhand (Scarecrow) hits his finger with the hammer (to the beat of the drum no less) and is done with his work.
7) (Y) Right after "... Dig that hole ..." the farm hand (Scarecrow) points to the ground as if telling Dorothy to dig a hole.
8) "... Balanced on the biggest wave ..." Dorothy is balancing herself on the fence.
9) "... Race towards an early grave." is said at the moment just before Dorothy falls off the fence rail. ["... Down in the pig-pen sayin' 'keep on diggin' ..." Lyrics from Pigs (Three Different Ones) by Roger Waters on the Animals CD]
Note: "... Race towards an early grave ..." Perhaps a reference to Judy Garland's untimely death?
Note: (E) Judy Garland died in 1969, the same year we put a man on the moon ... "I'll see you on the dark side of the moon."
10) (C) Song shifts from Breathe to On the Run at the same time (actually just slightly before) Dorothy falls off the fence.
Note: (D) At the moment Dorothy falls off the fence rail and the switch to On the Run occurs, the music in that song has an allure of danger as it matches to the mood of the scene and emotion of the other characters as they are concerned with Dorothy's well being and it matches the scene very well.
11) Auntie Em shows up and starts talking exactly at the same time as the woman's voice begins talking during On the Run. I wonder if anyone knows just what the heck that female voice is saying on the album. It sort of sounds like the overhead voice in an airport to me. I also wonder what kind of cookies Auntie Em has on that plate? "I've got a clan of ginger-bread man. Here a man, there a man, lot's of ginger bread, man. Take a couple of you wish. They're on the dish ..." (Syd Barrett/Pink Floyd from Bike)
Note: (EE) The voice heard in the background of this portion is indeed someone in an airport (I don't know what the proper title of that person would be -- any help out there?) and can be heard giving flight information. This audio footage was apparently taken from stock reels in the Abbey Road Studios which Roger rifled through and felt useful. More information on this and the entire creative process of the DSOTM album which started as a free-form jam and developed into the slick and fabulous album we all know and love. For a song-by-song description and more see the March 1998 special edition of the Biritish music magazine MOJO in which extensive interviews are given with band members as well as Alan Parsons for the 25th Anniversary of The Dark Side of the Moon. I haven't read it myself but have a sneaky suspicion it may be the exact same interview I have on MP3. If I had the room I'd add that interview to this web page but the thing is 33MB! However I have included some valuable clips from the interview in MP3 format which you may download and listen to by clicking here and then clicking on the article Planned or Coincidence?.
12) (C) During the On the Run sequence as Dorothy is singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, the effects sound sort of like helicopters and airplanes are flying overhead & Dorothy's gaze seems to follow one across the screen.
Note : Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Well, we all know what is found on the infamous cover of DSOTM (a rainbow!) and here Dorothy is singing about one. Also there are a few fun little rhythm syncs during this piece such as Toto wagging his tail in time to the clicking sound effect and Dorothy pulling her head towards Toto's during another sound effect and swinging around to another, etc. And then the sort of rumbling sound at the end of the song that for some reason goes along with the sun piercing the clouds in the sky scene. It gives the feel of a passing thunderstorm. For more thoughts on the relation to the cover read Deep Thoughts - Section A.
Note: (II) Just before Dorothy begins to sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow she is talking about a place where there is no trouble. She says ". . . You can't get there by boat or train, it's far, far away, BEHIND THE MOON . . . " and of course that would be the DARK side of the moon!
Note: (VV) Somewhere Over the Rainbow as compared to the lyrics, "... Over the rainbow, he is crazy", from The Trial on Pink Floyd's The Wall. The Dark Side of the Moon evolved into a concept album centering on the subject of madness, and being "over the rainbow" is synonymous with going crazy.
13) (AA) At the end of On the Run it looks like Toto is laughing at Dorothy.
14) (ZZ) The rumbling sound at the end of On the Run lends itself nicely, as thunder, to the clouds in the sky and the shafts of sunlight piercing them.
15) The chimes in Time go off at the appearance of Elvira Gulch (Wicked Witch of the West) on the bicycle and the chimes stop when she gets off the bike. >>>> "I've got a bike. You can ride it if you like. It's got a basket, a bell that rings and things to make it look good ..." (Syd Barrett /Pink Floyd from Bike)
16) (WW) Notice the paint brush that Uncle Henry is holding and that he raises it and drops it as if he is ringing a bell and with each movement, a bell indeed rings.
17) At the first bass chord of Time the scene changes to inside Auntie Em's house -- really cool!
18) (C) Dorothy and the rest of the cast appear to move and react to the rhythm and mood in particular of the music.
19) "... You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way ..." Seems to describe the kind of frittered away life that the old maid /witch, Ms. Gulch has if getting rid of poor little Toto is what it takes to make her day.
20) "Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town", This is said just a little before Toto jumps out of the basket and onto the ground where he kicks off to go back to Dorothy in his hometown. So it's not exact but worth the mention.
21) "... Waiting for someone or something to show you the way ..." Toto pops up in the window (perhaps to show Dorothy the way?).
22) (Q) "... Tired of lying in the sunshine ..." as Toto is lying on the bed with the sun shining in on him wittle fuzzy body.
23) "... You are young and life is long ..." a reference to Dorothy's youth?
24) "... and there is time to kill today ..." There certainly is time to kill and Dorothy will be present at the death of not one but two people (witches).
25) "... Ten years have got behind you ..." You see Dorothy's back. (Hence, you are behind Dorothy).
26) "... No one told you when to run ..." Dorothy is running away from home.
27) Guitar solo in Time begins as scene changes (It's so cool when that happens).
Note: (YY) Dorothy and Toto cross a bridge shaped like a triangle which of course is reminiscent of the cover of The Dark Side of the Moon.
28) During the guitar solo of Time the words "Past, Present and Future" are seen on the sign of Professor Marvel.
29) (D) "And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking; Racing around to come up behind you again!" First think about this: "Time is a predator which stalks us all our lives." --Star Trek: Generations . . . Now take a look above the door mantle as Dorothy enters Professor Marvel's wagon. What do we see but a skull . . . a reminder of time and the shortness thereof indeed. Kinda funky eh?
30) (X)+(BB)"... to come up behind you again ..." as Professor Marvel is coming up behind Dorothy.
31) "... But you're older ..." referring to Professor Marvel's old age?
32) "... Or half a page of scribbled lines ..." referring to perhaps the photo that Professor Marvel sneaks out of Dorothy's basket? Ok so it's not scribbled lines, but it's a page.
33) "... Hanging on in quiet desperation ..." as Dorothy quietly and desperately listens to the words of Professor Marvel.
34) "... Home, home again ..." as Professor Marvel tells Dorothy that she needs to go back home.
35) (G) "... Hear the softly spoken magic spell ..." as Dorothy is leaving the "magic" wagon of Professor Marvel.
36) Song changes to The Great Gig In the Sky the moment Dorothy reaches down and grabs her bag. This begins what is probably my favourite scene in the whole sync -- with the tornado and all.
37) (voice says) "... And I am not frightened of dying ..." as the tornado heads towards a house.
Note: (U) At the scene of the tornado there is a sound (slide guitar) strangely reminiscent of the old air raid sirens during wartime -- perhaps warning of impending doom via twister (and we ain't talking about a Milton-Bradley® game either)?
38) The drums kick in as a tree is uprooted by the winds of the tornado.
Note : Right after the tree is uprooted, Clare Torry begins her operatic style wailing which keeps time with the mood and intensity of the tornado scene. Nifty rhythm syncs are seen during this piece such as the door flying off its hinges and the piece of furniture or appliance falling over on the porch as Dorothy enters the house, etc.
Note : (QQ) During this turbulent scene, the vocals of Clare Torry at times match the emotional gestures of Dorothy especially when she is screaming in hopes that her folks in the underground storm shelter will let her in.
39) After Dorothy gets bonked on the head with the window Clare Torry's wailing calms down and Dorothy begins dreaming.
Note: The song playing during the entire tornado scene and especially while the house is up in the air via the tornado is The Great Gig in the Sky (TGGITS). Get it?
Note: (PP) During TGGITS the instrument being played in the foreground is a Hammond B3 Organ which uses a Leslie speaker. Coincidently, the Leslie speaker makes the sound that it does by spinning inside it's box, using the "Doppler Effect" to make it sound so cool. So we have a spinning speaker inside an organ playing music to a tornado scene. Funkadelic man!
40) The "cha-ching !" of Money is heard as Dorothy steps out into colourful, and wealthy looking Munchkin Land. Money would be associated with colour and better living as is apparent to Dorothy.
Note: (BBB) Cryptic language in the song Money? Take a look at this bit of interesting word work:
M oney, get away.
G et a good job with good pay and you're okay.
M oney, it's a gas.
41) (V) "New car, caviar, four star daydream; I think I'll buy me a football team" Now granted that what an Englishman like Roger would call "football" is what we in the States call "soccer" but bear with me a second and notice that the yellow brick road bears a striking resemblance to the spiraling helmet symbol of the NFL Ram's (Los Angeles, Anaheim or St Louis depending on what time warp you are in).
42) (A) "Don't give me that do-goody-good bull___." as Glinda the (do-goody) good witch (!?) comes a-floating like an angel in her big bubble. Roger just has to throw in a dirty word on each album, now doesn't he?
Note: (UU) Take a gander at this (the orb from the "Welcome to the Machine" cartoon by Gerald Scarfe played in Pink Floyd concerts on the big round screen behind the band) and note the similarity to both Glinda's bubble and the Wicked Witch's crystal ball.
43) "... I think I need a Lear Jet ..." as Glinda appears from the bubble. Maybe she'd prefer a jet over traveling in a bubble? "Big Bubbles . . . No Troubles." (Hubba-Bubba® Bubblegum)
Note : (H) The way Glinda is holding her wand it looks like she's playing electric air guitar during Dave's solo. (Just for a second ... sort of)
Note: During the guitar solo of Money the Munchkins appear to move somewhat to the music. When the solo is sort of "plucky" they move about in a halting and almost cautious manner -- but after the Munchkin with the tall, gray hat jumps out the solo goes wild again and all the Munchkins start dancing away. The soldiers also appear to march in time with the music.
44) (CC) "... Share it, fairly ..." As one of the Munchkins shares some flowers with Dorothy.
45) During the beginning of Us and Them it sounds like funeral parlour music and the Munchkin Coroner shows the Certificate of Death.
Note : (N) A little before the Munchkin Coroner comes up some officials come out of one of the buildings and are talking back and forth about their new arrival and in the background you can hear a man say "... I was really drunk at the time ..." which could be a reference to the drunken and carousing little people who played the Munchkins. Then you can hear a woman say "... He was cruisin' for a bruisin'..." which according to rumor Judy Garland said the little actors got drunk and at least one tried to hit her up for a date. So the latter voice could be considered as Dorothy saying that particular Munchkin was "Cruisin' for a bruisin' ".
46) (DD) At the beginning of Us and Them voices of assorted people talking can be heard and at times it appears that the Munchkin officials are the ones doing the talking.
47) During Us and Them the ballerinas from the Lullaby League enter to "Us ... Us .... Us ...".
Note: (F) Just think about this for a sec ; "Us, and them . . . And after all we're only ordinary men. Me, and you . . . God only knows it's not what we would choose to do." Perhaps the little people actors playing the roles of the Munchkins prefer NOT being exploited for their stature by the folks at MGM i.e. it's not the kind of thing they would prefer to do. After all they are only ordinary men. Well, they're not really ordinary now are they? Realistically speaking though they could be glad since there aren't that many movie roles for little people -- so the money's nice when it's rollin' eh?
48) (XX) The fellows from the Lollypop Guild kick and jerk their little dance to the rhythm of the music.
49) (S) "Forward he cried ..." It looks like the Munchkins all shout "Forward!" to Dorothy.
50) (R) "... and the lines on the map moved from side to side ..." as the munchkins move to two separate sides at the appearance of the Wicked Witch.
51) "Black and blue ..." as it shows the witch who is wearing black , and "blue" when it shows Dorothy who is wearing blue.
52) "... And who knows which is which ..." (Witch is Witch ... or ... Which is Witch)?
53) "... Up and Down ..." On "up", the Wicked Witch of the West is holding her broomstick up high and on "down" she lowers it down.
54) (RR) Also on "down", the Wicked Witch of the West is bending down to retrieve the ruby slippers from her dead sister's now curling and retreating feet.
55) (D) "Haven't you heard? It's a battle of words ..." as Glinda is whispering in Dorothy's ear and then returns to her battle of words with the Wicked Witch.
56) "... And in the end it's only 'round and 'round..." As Glinda points to Dorothy's feet which are now turning 'round.
57) (W) Then it says "... and 'round ..." as there is yet another shot of the ruby slippers.
58) (X) "... said the man with the gun ..." as the Wicked Witch points her long finger at Dorothy in the shape of a gun!
59) "Down and out ... " as Glinda leaves in her bubble (she's out of here).
60) (L) "... But there's a lot of it about ..." Oy! There certainly seems to be a lot of coming and going in the Land of Oz with the house and the Wicked Witch going under the house and the other Wicked Witch coming and going and the good witch coming and going .
61) (LL) "...With ... Without ..." Dorothy starts on the Yellow Brick Road with Toto in her arms and then puts him down and he is walking beside her but without her. And after all, at least twice in the film Toto is what the fighting's all about.
62) (J) "... Get out of the way, it's a busy day, I've got things on my mind ..." as Dorothy passes through the Munchkins and leaves Munchkin Land.
63) Scene changes at the same time that Us and Them changes to Any Colour You Like
64) "... The lunatic is on the grass ..." The Scarecrow isn't on the grass but he is made of grass and he is certainly dancing around like a lunatic.
Note: ( A) The song Brain Damage is playing as the Scarecrow is singing If I Only Had a Brain.
Note: Check out these lyrics from The Scarecrow by Syd Barrett with The Pink Floyd on their album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, " The black and green scarecrow as everyone knows, Stood with a bird on his hat and straw everywhere. He didn't care. He stood in a field where barley grows. His head did no thinking, His arms didn't move except when the wind cut up rough and mice ran around on the ground. He stood in a field where barley grows." Notice what colour Scarecrow is in the movie?
65) (M) "... Got to keep the loonies on the path ..." Dorothy and Scarecrow are the "loonies" on the Yellow Brick Road (path).
66) "... You raise the blade ..." as the Toucan in the tree raises his bill which resembles the blade of a knife.
67) (I) "... There's someone in my head but it's not me ..." The Appletrees have someone inside who makes them move around and look alive.
68) "... Thunder in your ear ..." as the Appletrees are thundering in Dorothy's ear for snatching an apple.
69) "... And everyone you meet..." As Dorothy meets yet another interesting character in this Land of Oz, the Tin Woodsman.
70) (CC) "... all that you touch and all that you see ..." Once again Dorothy is holding a man's arm at the word "touch" as it was at the beginning of the movie (see #5) but then she and Scarecrow look up to "see" the oil can which is something that Tin Woodsman would like a "taste" of in order to "feel" better.
71) Dorothy listens for a heartbeat (or lack of one) in the Tin Woodsman's chest as the heartbeat goes on to the end of the album.
Note : When the CD starts back with the heartbeat, the Tin Woodsman is singing If I Only Had a Heart still in keeping with the idea of the heartbeat.
Nothing is quite as good as the first play-through of the CD but the subsequent play-through and partial are rather fun. Results as this point will vary due to return speeds on your particular CD players. So with that said, on we go . . .
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Second Play-through
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72) (MM) At the transition from Speak to Me to Breathe the Tin Woodsman gets his leg straightened out and begins dancing -- dancing to the music.
73) "... and high you fly ..." As the Wicked Witch stands on top of the house with her flying broom.
74) "... Run, rabbit , run ..." as the Wicked Witch throws a fireball at Scarecrow.
75) During the second play-through of On the Run it works out pretty well with the Cowardly Lion scene in several instances which lose something in the translation so you will have to see them for yourself.
(TT) Possibly one of the most profound of them is where there is a sort of scary sounding laugh and Dorothy, Scarecrow and Tin Woodsman jump back as if scared out of their wits.
Side Note: If you have a slower return response on your CD player (which I don't but have seen it on friend's CD players that do), during the scene where Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman and Cowardly Lion are walk/skipping to the Wizard, they do so to the drum score at the beginning of Time . . . really cool even though I can no longer achieve this effect with my CD player!
76) "... And there is time to kill today ..." as the Wicked Witch seeks to kill Dorothy with the deadly Poppies.
77) "... Shorter of breath and one day closer to death..." as Dorothy and Cowardly Lion appear to be dead.
78) During this segment the little cries from Clair Torrey seem to go along with the sad hopelessness that Scarecrow is experiencing with Dorothy and Cowardly Lion asleep or dead in the Poppies.
79) (G) "... Home, home again ..." As Tin Woodsman is once at home in being frozen in his rusted state from the snow just as he was when Dorothy found him in the first place.
80) (DD) "Far away across the field ..." As the Fearless Foursome are in a poppy field and can see, far away, the Emerald City across it.
81) (AAA) "... The tolling of the iron bell ..." This one is actually a reverse. As will be seen later in the sync, there is indeed a bell in the direction whence Dorothy and the gang are being called, although it is out of order and so they have to knock. It seems to have a silent toll which draws the Fearless Four to its great greenness.
82) "...Calls the faithful to their knees ..." as Scarecrow falls to his knee upon exiting the poppy field.
83) (NN) "...To hear the softly spoken magic spell." Not really on time, but after the magic spell is softly spoken by Glinda, Dorothy and Cowardly Lion are awakened from their deadly slumber.
84) "Cha - ching !" when the message SURRENDER DOROTHY is seen in the sky written in the Wicked Witch's smoke.
85) (GG) Money is playing while in the Emerald City -- a reference to the colour of money (American at least) and to the higher standard of living (once again as in Munchkin Land) than that Dorothy is accustomed.
Note: During the scene where the Fearless Four (and Toto too) are entering the Temple of the Wizard of Oz there is "religious" sounding music playing. In fact the working title to this portion of the album, later titled The Great Gig in the Sky was called the "religious track" by the members of the band while recording DSOTM.
86) (G) "Black and blue ..." The Wizard is seen in the midst of the smoke and in this instance the smoke appears blue.
87) "... round and round ..." as we read the sign pointing to the home of the Wicked Witch that says "If I were you I'd turn back". Maybe they should turn 'round (?).
88) (B) "Listen son, said the man with the gun ..." Scarecrow is carrying a gun.
89) "... Down and out ..." the flying monkeys swoop down to capture Dorothy, and then fly out of the woods with her in their hands.
90) "... With ... without ..." Dorothy is with the flying monkeys, but Tin Woodsman, Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow are without Dorothy. . . And who'll deny she's what the fighting's all about?
91) "... You raise the blade ... You make the change..." as the blade of the Lance is raised by Scarecrow, Lion and Tin Woodsman after they have changed into the uniforms of the three unlucky witch's guardsmen.
92) "... All that you hate and all you mistrust ..." during which the face of the wicked witch is seen. Certainly a mistrustful face if ever there was one.
93) (J) "... And everyone you fight ..." as Tin Woodsman drops the chandelier on the Guardsmen.
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Third Play-through
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94) (voice says) ..."Live for today, gone tomorrow ..." as the Wizard hands Tin Woodsman his clockwork heart, and then we hear a strange noise that sounds like a rusted metal hinge. Perhaps a prophetic utterance of Tin Woodsman's ultimate demise?
Note: (E) During this "rewards" scene when Cowardly Lion receives his badge of courage, it sounds like military helicopters and war planes flying about. (sort of)
Note: (SS) After Scarecrow is handed his "Doctorate of Thinkology" he says "The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles TRIANGLE is equal to the square root of the remaining side." Of course the triangle being a recurring theme in this synchronicity as well as the image we find on the cover of DSOTM.
95) (JJ) Just as Glinda appears in her bubble the lyrics to the song Time are sung. It's not necessarily a thematic synchronicity but rather a dramatic one with no "hidden meaning".
96) (WW) "... Waiting for someone or something to show you the way ..." Glinda is there to show Dorothy the way back home.
97) "... Home, home again ..." after Dorothy has awakened back in her home in Kansas.
98) (P) "... Calls the faithful to their knees ..." as Auntie Em comes to Dorothy with water and is on bent knee.
99) (Z) "... To hear the softly spoken magic spell." and then Dorothy speaks the magic spell that brought her back home which is "There's no place like home".
MYSTERY MUSIC??? (HH) Chris Hart reminded me of the music at the end of DSOTM CD. After you hear "There is no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact it's all dark ..." you can faintly hear some music playing. Strangely enough it's an orchestral version of The Beatles' Ticket to Ride. Both Pink Floyd and The Beatles recorded at Abbey Roads Studios, and at times, contributed to each other in one fashion or another. According to interviews that I've seen of George Martin concerning tapes, quite often the tapes would have been erased and reused. I just can't figure out what the heck an orchestral (it sounds more like MUZAK [elevator music] to me) rendition of Ticket to Ride would even be for -- unless there is some part of one of the Beatles movies that has this music in it. Does anyone have a clue as the to true use of this music? If so it would be nice to know. Meanwhile for your convenience ol' Chris recorded the mystery music so you don't have to mess around with reducing the bass on your stereo to avoid blowing your speakers from the heartbeats. Click here to Listen To The Music (MP3 Format).
NEWS FLASH ON THE MYSTERY MUSIC!!!
Now, this is not the official reason as to what the music was made for, which was the question that I asked above, but for purely entertainment reasons -- a reason suitable for The Definitive List -- and one which helps to add to the whole mystique, we have one that comes from Daniel Benke (danielb@cits.br) who suggests that Ticket to Ride alludes to Dorothy's ticket to ride back to Kansas from Oz -- namely her Ruby Slippers. And while that is a very good and fun answer, the truth be known concerning Oz stories, Dorothy would have a "ticket to ride" back and forth between Kansas and Oz as she would have many other adventures in the Oz novels by Frank Baum and by many subsequent authors as well, to this very day.
Just a little something to think about:
Didja ever notice that Dorothy's Uncle Henry plays absolutely no part in the Land of Oz? Everybody else gets some sort of appearance in the Land of Oz but not ol' Uncle Henry. Not that this has anything to do with the sync . . . just a casual observance.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=573&ncid=757&e=10&u=/nm/20021115/od_nm/life_sweden_seat_dc
Fast-Food Customer Loses Appetite Over Toilets
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A customer in an international hamburger chain outlet in western Sweden lost his appetite when he discovered the restaurant's toilet seats were being washed in its dishwasher alongside the kitchen utensils.
The man noticed on a visit to the bathroom in the restaurant in Arvika, Sweden, that all the toilet seats had been removed.
When he asked staff about the missing seats, an employee took them out of a dishwasher where they had been cleaned together with trays and kitchen utensils, the Swedish TT news agency reported on Thursday, quoting the regional newspaper Nya Wermlands-Tidningen.
The employee tried to reassure the customer by saying that the freshly washed toilet seat would be warm and pleasant to sit on.
A senior representative of the restaurant chain said the incident was a mistake and not standard company procedure. Arvika's environmental and health inspector later visited the restaurant.
You're looking at the future of data storage—the Sonnet Piccolo™ USB flash drive. No cables to connect, no drivers, software or adapters—just plug it in. Your computer sees Piccolo as a drive, but you'll view it as a small wonder. Portable and reliable, it's about the size of a car key, and has no moving parts, making this product a great medium for moving files between system or for keeping projects secure. Offered in four capacities—32MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB
Dark Side of The Rainbow
"Every audience member will be given 'Special Synchronicity Sheets' ..."
WAY BEFORE 'SYNCHRONICITY' was an album by The Police, it was a phenomenon defined by Carl Gustav Jung as "The acasual relationship between interconnecting events."
It happens all the time, whenever a New Zealand politician opens their mouth to speak, simultaneously somewhere in the world a sheep drops its guts. However strangely synchronicity seems to occur more frequently to those under the influence of certain mind-altering substances.
The apocryphal legend behind the eerie interconnecting events that occur in this special presentation are shrouded in a thick cloud of ganja. A far time ago, in a galaxy a long long away, a stoned Pink Floyd fan slowly and carefully placed the stylus on his quadraphonic vinyl LP of DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, melted into his leatherette beanbag as THE WIZARD OF OZ played silently on his 14" TV.
"Whooooa dude ... this is heavy!"
The album and the movie became one, a cosmic connection of lyrics and images that could only be the result of karma or chaos ... or .. "Whoooa dude my head hurts just thinking about it."
It's like when two great works of Art meet, they join hands across the universe and give birth to the DARK SIDE OF THE RAINBOW. Don't take our word for it; the synchronicity is spun throughout by the hands of an invisible dream weaver. A stoner secret for ages, now it's your turn to experience this one-of-a-kind never to be repeated supercalisyncronistic treat on the BIG screen in decibelicious digital stereo.
Every audience member will be given 'Special Synchronicity Sheets' that help you to follow and witness all the hundred odd incredible coincidences.
It's impossible to describe in print the incredible fusion that results, when two masterpieces separated by time and space meet as one. So join us for this unique experience where you, the audience become one with the cosmos, holding hands and skipping along the galactic yellow brick road with the distant strains of a song replaced but not forgotten ... "Somewhere over the rainbow, way up HIGH ..."
useit.com
Nielsen, whose weekly musings on the Web can be found at www.useit.com, is a usability engineer and Web-design consultant given to strongly held ideas and sweeping statements, like "fast response times are the most important criterion for Web pages." His certitude might be insufferable if he weren't right so much of the time.
The basic principles of good design, according to Nielsen, are very simple: If your pages don't load quickly, your customers won't wait. If customers can't find what they want, they won't buy it. If your pages are confusing or hard to read, customers will look elsewhere
just think...this could be you...
Available exclusively at Amazon.com
Segway Human Transporter
Price: $4,950.00
How much does shipping cost? Are there any other costs?
The Segway company will charge $99 for shipping to the continental United States. For customers in Hawaii and Alaska, shipping will cost $150. The Segway company takes responsibility for damage during shipping. Also, you will be charged applicable sales taxes on the entire purchase price. Training is included at no additional cost.
Who can ride the Segway HT?
The Segway HT is designed to be operated by a wide range of people and no special skills are required. The rider must be able to step on and off the Segway HT without assistance, which requires physical abilities similar to climbing and descending stairs without assistance. The rider's weight must not exceed 250 pounds and the rider must be able to operate the steering control with his or her left hand. Segway recommends that riders be 16 years or older. It is important to note that the Segway HT has not been designed, tested, or approved as a medical device.
How safe is the Segway HT?
The utmost care and research has gone into ensuring that the Segway HT is safe and fun to ride. The Segway HT's balancing technology is truly revolutionary and provides an exceptional riding experience. The Segway HT has redundant systems and sophisticated alerts built into its design and many thousands of hours of use have demonstrated that the Segway HT is safe when used appropriately. It is important that Segway HT riders understand the responsibility to ride safely. Proper skill level and understanding of the Segway HT prevents injuries caused by loss of control or misuse. Keep in mind that the Segway HT has not been designed, tested, or approved as a medical device.
How will I learn how to use the Segway HT?
The Segway company will provide training for each purchaser. The Segway HT is engineered to be easy to ride, but, in order to ensure that you are prepared for safe and enjoyable riding, a Segway specialist will show you how to properly operate the Segway HT. You may bring one friend to the training session for no extra charge. Your friend must be 16 years or older to receive the training from the Segway company. Between February 1 and July 31, 2003, the Segway company will host training at least once each week in Bedford, New Hampshire, and Los Angeles, and at least once each month in Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Atlanta, New York City, Baltimore, and Orlando, Florida. The Segway company will e-mail you a training schedule approximately 30 days before your Segway HT is scheduled to ship. You will be responsible for scheduling your attendance as well as for arranging transportation to and from your training session. If you don't attend scheduled training within 30 days after you receive the first notice, the Segway company will send you a second e-mail notice and you must attend by the date you are required to complete your purchase. (See "When will I get my Segway HT after I place my deposit?" above). Note: You must complete a Segway HT training session before Segway will ship your Segway HT.
Where can I safely and legally ride the Segway HT?
The Segway HT will transport you over any surface on which the wheels can gain traction, such as pavement, sidewalks, grass, and dirt. Remember, you must step off the Segway HT and use the power assist mode to go up and down stairs (and elsewhere where riding would not be safe or appropriate). In many cities you'll be able to take the Segway HT any place you are allowed to walk. Some areas, however, have restrictions on where you can take the Segway HT and some areas require that you wear protective gear.
Eminem Wins Big at MTV Europe Awards
Eminem was the big winner at the MTV Europe Music Awards, taking trophies for best album, best male singer and best hip-hop artist.
Kylie Minogue, Linkin Park and the Red Hot Chili Peppers each won two prizes Thursday night. MTV Europe said the ninth annual show was broadcast to a billion people around the world.
Some 13,000 fans gathered in Barcelona's Palau Sant Jordi arena to see live performances by Eminem, Pink, Christina Aguilera, Robbie Williams and other musicians.
The ceremony offered few surprises because Eminem was the clear pre-show favorite. He performed a selection of his most popular songs to a screaming crowd, but left out the expletives.
Visibly moved, the rapper thanked the audience and fans for their support, saying: "Thanks a lot. I couldn't do it without you guys."
American singer Pink won in the best song category for "Get the Party Started."
Australia's Minogue won best pop and best dance.
Aguilera performed a dance-intensive version of her song "Dirrty," wearing a revealing, skintight leather outfit.
Sean "P. Ditty" Combs was the master of ceremonies, displaying an extensive wardrobe including several three-piece suits. He was nominated in the best hip-hop category but lost to Eminem.
Winners were decided by fans voting online, by mobile phone and at special MTV voting booths.
___
On the Net:
MTV Europe Music Awards: http://www.mtv.com/onair/ema/2002/
Uncle sells a piece of Eminem's past
One of the Detroit-area homes that helped spawn rap star Eminem's famed alter ego Slim Shady was sold Thursday and likely will turn up on eBay.
"This is a very emotional thing for me, because this house has been in our family for 50 years," said Todd Nelson, whose sister, Debbie Nelson, is Eminem's mother. "I didn't want to sell it, but I had to because my finances won't allow me to live here any more."
The cash-strapped Nelson said his nephew, who lives in Macomb County and is preparing for the release of his film, "8 Mile," was upset when he learned two months ago that the house in south Warren was up for sale.
The home is where Eminem first began writing the gritty rhymes that would later make him famous in the hip-hop world.
Nelson would not reveal the sale price, but St. Clair Shores lawyer Sebastian Lucido said he and his partner, Macomb County commissioner and real estate developer Roland Fraschetti, bought it for $45,000.
"We'd like to put the house up for sale on eBay sometime in January," Lucido said. "I think we'll have a minimum bid of around $120,000 -- the house appraised for $91,000 -- and go from there. If we don't get any bids, we can just rent it out."
The two-family home in the 8400 block of Timken -- not far from the real 8 Mile Road -- was purchased by Eminem's great-grandmother, Bessi Viola Whitaker, in 1952, Nelson said. The five-bedroom house has sheltered members of the clan ever since, he said.
Nelson said Eminem, also known as Marshall Mathers III, lived there off and on as a young child and when he attended Lincoln High School in Warren.
Eminem liked to draw while sitting at the table that still sits in the kitchen, Nelson recalled.
Detroit Free Press
The Ball Chair - or Globe Chair as it's called sometimes - was designed by using one of the most simple geometric forms - the ball. Cutting of a part and fixing it at one point Eero Aarnio comes to a remarkable result - a completely unconventional shaped chair:
A Ball Chair is a "room within a room" with a cozy and calm athmosphere, protecting outside noises and giving a private space for relaxing or having a phonecall. Turning around its own axis on the base the view to the outer space is variable for the user and thus he is not completely excluded from world outside.
http://www.naqoy.com/
Na-qoy-qatsi: (nah koy' kahtsee) N. From the Hopi Language.
A motion picture experience beyond words, NAQOYQATSI merges the power of image and music to plunge into the heart of the hyper-accelerated, globally wired 21st century. Mesmerizing images plucked from everyday reality, then visually altered with state-of-the-art digital techniques, stream across the screen in synch with a hypnotic score by Philip Glass, featuring the passionate cello work of Yo-Yo Ma. Despite the film's nonverbal nature, the ultimate effect of its starkly futuristic, computer-enhanced visual fabric is to get people talking about how technology is altering everything: media, art, entertainment, sports, politics, medicine, warfare, ethics, nature, culture and the very face of the human future.
NAQOYQATSI is presented by Academy Award winner Steven Soderbergh, who was drawn to the film's vision of a brave new globalized world in which the coming battles include humans versus computers, money versus values and life versus its simulation. "Godfrey Reggio has created yet another landmark film," says Soderbergh. "NAQOYQATSI is an explosion of ideas and imagery; a riveting, rigorous, provocative, and breathtaking exploration of how we've allowed technology to infiltrate our everyday lives."
Nearly every image in NAQOYQATSI is a special visual effect. Some 80 percent of the film's footage is culled from stock footage (from such sources as scientific and military films, newsreels, corporate videos, sports documentaries, cartoons, television shows and commercials), most of which has been radically altered with digital technology. Images have been colorized or de-colorized, stretched, slowed or speeded up, re-patterned, re-textured and "re-animated," turning the familiar into something startlingly new. By using the cutting edge in filmmaking technology, NAQOYQATSI provides a dizzying view of today's world as seen through the lens of the very machinery that has created it.
NAQOYQATSI is the third and final feature film in "The Qatsi Trilogy" which began with the groundbreaking "KOYAANISQATSI," a revelatory, kaleidoscopic view of clashing urban and natural landscapes in North America, and continued with "POWAQQATSI," a journey around the world unfolding primal traditions and the influx of new technology. The films have been described as cinematic "head trips" that take audiences into a realm of pure sensory experience. Together, they have also become a rare artistic chronicle of the turbulent transition between the 20th and 21st centuries and its as-yet-unseen consequences. NAQOYQATSI now leaps ahead to capture the essence of globalization as barrier-breaking advances in robotics, quantization and digital communications spread like wildfire across the planet. This final part of the "Qatsi" series presents one man's vision of what we are hurtling towards in a world where technology reigns: unprecedented extremes of promise, spectacle, tragedy and finally, hope.
Like a concert, NAQOYQATSI unfolds in three movements. MOVEMENT ONE explores the newly wired world and the ongoing evolution from human language to numerical code. MOVEMENT TWO delves into the realms of sports, competition and gaming, which have become worldwide addictions. MOVEMENT THREE takes off on a journey into sheer speed and the breakneck acceleration of 21st century life -- pondering what it is like to remember the future and truly experience the present.
NAQOYQATSI is written and directed by Godfrey Reggio, with an original score by Philip Glass featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Jon Kane is the editor and visual designer. The executive producer is Steven Soderbergh and the producers are Lawrence Taub and Joe Beirne. The co-producer is Mel Lawrence, and the director of photography is Russell Lee Fine.
THE MAKING OF NAQOYQATSI
"To the degree that he masters his tools, [man] can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image." --Ivan Illich
With the third film of The Qatsi Trilogy, director Godfrey Reggio turns his attention to the explosive phenomenon of globalization - a world held in unity through the vice of technological homogenization. While his acclaimed films "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaaqatsi" revealed the final battles of nature and native cultures, with NAQOYQATSI, Reggio acknowledges that globalization and lightning-paced technological change are remaking the world in their own image and likeness. In a conscious embrace of contradiction, he has chosen to use cutting-edge filmmaking techniques to pose powerful new questions about the global order: what does our ultra high-tech future look like now that it is inevitably approaching? To respond to this question, Reggio offers his viewers the themes of technological happiness, civilized violence with war as ordinary daily living and sanctioned aggression against the forces of life. From the point of view of NAQOYQATSI he stands with Illich in saying that freedom is the ability to say no to technological necessity.
NAQOYQATSI presents Reggio's essential vision of the newly wired world: of human beings on the brink of a shift that will bring us closer to the melding of mind and machine, language and numbers, pleasure and simulacra, meaning and marketing, life and war -- and asks questions about what it will mean for the human experience.
Alternately breathtaking and shocking, digitally "re-animated" images from the hum and roar of modern life - from psychedelic fractals to athletes shattering the limits, from roiling tidal waves to frenetic riots, from primal infant smiles to G-force grins - stream across the screen set to and against the rhythms of Philip Glass's hauntingly melodic score. The result is a sound-and-image adventure that goes somewhere unexpected: into a direct experience of this high-tech moment in history, with all of its potential for both breaking new barriers and accelerating out of control.
"In NAQOYQATSI, technology is not so much something that we use any longer as something that we live, that we breathe like the very oxygen around us, that is transforming us without our awareness," says Reggio. "But what price do we pay for the pursuit of this technological happiness? I see NAQOYQATSI as a film about an event that is unnamable. It is my deep feeling that we no longer have the language to describe the world in which we live. So this film without words is an attempt to re-animate that old adage 'a picture is worth a thousand words.' Only in this case, hundreds upon hundreds of images add up to its meaning."
Adds producer/technologist Joe Beirne who collaborated with Reggio and editor Jon Kane on the film's extreme look: "I feel that NAQOYQATSI reveals how the material of our globalized culture might look to an alien being, to someone with a completely different set of criteria for evaluating it. Godfrey uses the means of our hyper-image-oriented culture to reflect the strangeness and awesome wonder of that culture back to us."
* * *
Godfrey Reggio has thought deeply about the nature of image and spectacle in contemporary society. "The image is approaching the point of omnipresence," he says. "It is reality, it is location, it is idea. And now, with digital technology, image has become pure illusion. There are no limits to the images we can create. But images become iconic to culture in that they become so familiar, and so resonant they're not even seen. They have enormous control and power over our lives. What we see without question we become. But there is ample reason to question each image in NAQOYQATSI."
Reggio has also long been concerned about the impact of technology not only upon the environment but also on human happiness, and has researched a wide variety of philosophical and scientific viewpoints on the subject. Among the inspirations for NAQOYQATSI are two seminal books about the future of the technocratic society: Ivan Illich's Tools of Conviviality, in which Illich critiques modern industrial society and suggests rethinking technology on a human scale; and French sociologist Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society, in which Ellul explores how human beings sacrifice their humanity to efficiency, the ultimate law of technology. Both Illich and Ellul express concerns that technology has become our master, rather than the other way around.
But NAQOYQATSI is not about theories. It's about experience. So Reggio asked the question: "If we are so bound up inside this 24-hour, non-stop, all-pervasive technological life, how can we see what it looks like or what its effect is upon us?" To get a better look at things, he began assembling a catalogue of images from everyday reality in our millennial times - images which, removed from their everyday context, become exotic, alien and surprisingly impactful.
For his previous films, Reggio traveled throughout the world, capturing original images. But this time, he decided to picture our world in a different way. Instead of going to locations, he made the decision to "use images as locations," giving stock footage entirely new meanings by manipulating and dissecting them in startling and emotionally provocative ways.
Reggio: "The iconic images of today are images of consumption, of the good life, images that are like wallpaper of the world we live in, images that we see everyday and that blend into the background of life itself. So the idea of this film is to take these iconic images and make them the 'location' for this film. We didn't so much 'shoot' this film, as 'create images' that are re-contextualized from the way you normally see them."
Reggio began by creating a most unusual "script," which was more of an outline of the images he would seek than anything resembling scenic directions and story line. The script provides insight into the themes behind each of the three movements. Briefly stated (in Reggio's words) they are:
MOVEMENT ONE/NUMERICA.COM: Human language, real place gives way to numerical code and virtual reality; metaphor is consumed by metamorphosis; body to disembodiment; natural to supernatural; many to one.
MOVEMENT TWO/CIRCUS MAXIMUS: Competition, winning, records, fame, "fair play" and the love of money are elevated to the prime values of life. Life becomes a game.
MOVEMENT THREE/ROCKETSHIP 20th CENTURY: Electronic acceleration can best be described as 'exit velocity,' an event that blurs all perception, shatters all meaning, drains all content, breaks the bonds to earth, producing a world that our language can no longer describe. The resulting explosive tempo of technology is war, is civilized violence.
Reggio: "My films have no screenplay per se because there are no spoken words in the film. Instead, I write the equivalent of a dramaturgical shaping of the film that serves as the point of view of the project, which serves as a way to get us off the platform. From there, each person involved in the film brings their own creativity to the event."
For Reggio, intense creative collaboration is part and parcel of the style of his films, especially NAQOYQATSI. "This project was predicated on a collaborative mode wherein each person was considered an artistic player," says Reggio. "I brought a feeling, a motivation, a point of view and intention but NAQOYQATSI was way too complex to be realized by just myself. Only collaborative energy could pull it off." * * *
The creative process of NAQOYQATSI began over a decade ago when Godfrey Reggio first began discussing the idea of a third and final "Qatsi" film with his friends and colleagues, including composer Philip Glass, who provided the acclaimed scores for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi." For a long time, the project existed only in discussions and in lists of ideas, images and sounds - and these lists and discussions constantly evolved.
Recalls Philip Glass: "For years, I was absorbing the concepts, intuitions and visions that Godfrey had. I wasn't writing, I was just listening. And over time, our idea of the film changed because Godfrey changed, I changed and the whole texture of the world changed."
Meanwhile, through all these changes, bringing the film to life at times seemed a far-off dream. Desperate for the funds to make the film a reality, the filmmakers began seeking what they called "an angel." After the New York Times ran an article about Reggio's quest to make NAQOYQATSI, Academy Award-winning director, writer and producer Steven Soderbergh stepped forward. "Soderbergh said he was astonished that we couldn't find funding for the project. He had one word for us," remembers producer Larry Taub, "and it was start."
Once production began, Reggio brought the entire NAQOYQATSI team, many of them like himself and his long-time producer Lawrence Taub natives of New Mexico, to a small studio in Lower Manhattan where they could be close to Philip Glass and respond to his creative process while providing him with images and research to inform his score. Here, a close-knit team of researchers, animators and technicians, together with editor/visual designer Jon Kane, spent two intensive years searching out and culling images from stock houses and film archives across the world, evolving a distinct vocabulary of digital manipulation while weaving picture with sound.
It was difficult, seemingly endless, sequestered work. Then, in the midst of the process, the September 11th, 2001 attack struck a few blocks from their studio. "I think the events of 9/11 certainly had an impact on this film," says Reggio. "When the crew returned to work, I think everyone was in a deep state of shock, but I found that within one week many people, in particular Jon Kane, ended up totally revved, because now more than ever the importance of the film's subject was crystallized."
* * *
To bring a bracingly unfamiliar view of the images that surround us to NAQOYQATSI, Reggio brought on board media technologist and co-producer Joe Beirne, who creating the production's state-of-the-art digital production facility and oversaw the film's extensive array of computer-generated effects and visual manipulations. More than mere eye candy, these experiments with visual effects led to some of Reggio's most emotional, otherworldly and uplifting images.
Producer Joe Beirne estimates that about 20% of NAQOYQATSI is made up of original photography (including much of the prologue). The rest of the images were culled from scientific laboratory and military films, old newsreels, recent news coverage, commercials, television programs and documentaries - then digitally transformed in myriad ways.
Explains Beirne: "We broke down the scope of potential visual transformation of every image into color, contrast, image layering, grain structure and resolution, pattern and texture, aspect ratio, scale, speed and transition dynamics and used a comprehensive battery of these techniques in the film. Most of the images in NAQOYQATSI are presented in a transformed state, but it is the dynamic interaction of images that is most transformed. The fluid character of this transformation was achieved through manipulating the degree of image-upon-image across the screen and over the duration of the shot or sequence of shots. This was often achieved by masking parts of the image and then evolving those masks to change with the internal structure of the image. Editor/visual designer Jon Kane is fluent in this visual language, and it evolved into the basic visual vocabulary of the film."
Even the original footage shot for the film utilized transformational techniques, including an extensive use of slow motion and other techniques such as thermal photography.
Beirne describes NAQOYQATSI this way: "This is a film made of everything except pure motion picture film. Even the portion of 35mm film that was shot for NAQOYQATSI was super high-speed, making it very different from the normal elements you knit a movie out of. I've never worked on a film before where you had 90 minutes of opticals; where the whole movie is a visual effect from beginning to end, but that was Godfrey's challenge to us."
Despite the fact that Reggio massively distrusts technology and feels it is the most misunderstood reality in our world, Beirne found the director had a vast and open-minded curiosity and creativity when it came to experimenting with new techniques. "Sometimes I think you respect your enemies more than your friends, and Godfrey has tremendous respect for technology," explains Beirne. "Godfrey's innocence when it came to how these technologies work might actually have been an advantage, because he has far fewer prejudices about what to expect than someone who is obsessed with technology. For him, this film became a genuinely open experiment, and experiment is not a word I think can be seriously used about filmmaking very often."
It was Beirne who was responsible for finding ways to achieve the look Reggio envisioned for NAQOYATSI. "When Godfrey described this project to me for the first time, he brought with him a stack of cards done in Photoshop that had been distorted and re-colored…altered so as to make them distinct from their original source. He wanted to explore a similar style, of what he called re-animation," explains Beirne, "by which he meant 're-vivify' rather than 'animate again.' It seemed to me that what Godfrey was describing was a kind of false color image of our culture, to give us new tools to evaluate what we see."
One of the biggest technical challenges of making NAQOYQATSI was the sheer volume of information collected - it has been estimated that NAQOYATSI utilized some 3.5 terabytes of information (3500 gigabytes). Explains Joe Beirne: "NAQOYQATSI is unique in that in order to find out what the final product would be we had to preview virtually every possibility in its final form. And then since the film is a mixture of imagery, not only did the individual frame have to be perfected, but the combination of those images had to be taken to a certain level. The practical result of that is that we had an enormous amount of media - and very large files - at play at any given time. What we wound up doing is effectively making 25 different feature films from which we then selected our favorite ten percent. Then we began editing."
* * *
From the beginnings of the "Qatsi" trilogy, Godfrey Reggio felt that the images in his films should flow almost like music and share equal weight with an equally emotional musical soundtrack. It was for this reason that he originally approached one of America's best known serious composers: Philip Glass. Glass' rhythmic, hypnotic lyricism seemed to be the musical equivalent of Reggio's visual style.
Although Glass has become an indispensable collaborator in the entire "Qatsi" series, he notes that he originally tried to evade Godfrey Reggio when the two first met in the 1970s. "I didn't consider myself a film composer then," says Glass, "so I avoided him as long as I could, but he wouldn't go away."
Glass could not have predicted then that their first film together, "Koyaanisqatsi," would become one of his most beloved and acclaimed musical works, noted for its vast breadth of instrumental colors, for its broad global influences and for its hauntingly cyclical refrains of chanting, reeds and keyboards. It was the very first film score Glass ever composed, but he went on to compose dozens of acclaimed and award-winning soundtracks afterwards. Now, for NAQOYQATSI, Glass has created a score in an entirely new vein: perhaps his most distinctly melodic and lushly orchestral piece.
Glass and Reggio talked at length about the making of NAQOYQATSI for over at least ten years, discussing the sensory and aural equivalents for the image lists Godfrey was simultaneously preparing. But, when at last Reggio began collecting, editing and re-animating the film's imagery, the music flowed from Glass. "When I finally sat down to write the music, the pieces came very fast, boom, boom, boom, one after the other. It just came out," he says.
Glass knew that this score would be palpably different from his other "Qatsi" scores - because the images were also so startlingly new. "The visual language of this film is radically different from anything else," says Glass. "Working from digital images changes the essence of everything because these are images that don't exist in the real world. The world of NAQOYQATSI had to be created, envisioned and revisioned and that is a big change from 'Koyaanisqatsi' and 'Powaqqatsi.'"
Glass hopes that the score will provide a kind of touchstone for the audience as they make their way into the alien world Reggio creates visually. He continues: "Godfrey and I surmised early on that the best musical complement to the images would be something more in the traditional orchestral vein since the images are so disconnected from the familiar world. The orchestra provides some kind of entrance, like a doorway, into the film. I feared that if the piece were too abstract people wouldn't connect with it. For that reason I went with a very acoustic, symphonic piece that could be played by a real human orchestra."
Glass and Reggio also decided early on to use one instrument, in this case the passionate voice of the cello, to play a single line running through the entire piece. But neither man realized that Glass's soundtrack would become a de facto 21st century cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma.
Glass wrote the piece before Yo-Yo Ma became involved, but as serendipity would have it, the piece spoke to Ma almost magically. "When I showed the music to Yo-Yo, he said 'oh, you wrote it for me,'" recalls Glass. "And, it really appears that it was. It was one of those strange coincidences where the music really seemed to become his music. We didn't want the cello to become an over-powering presence, but we wanted it to be woven in as a kind of voice and unifying force, and I think that's what Yo-Yo has done."
In addition to using traditional classical instruments, Glass added out-of-this-world touches by melding in such folk instruments as the Australian didgeridoo, noted for its eerie, droning wind sound, and an electronically-created Jew's Harp. In the end, Glass found his music adding a lightness and an accessibility to some of the film's darkest images and themes - and for the film's finale, he composed an exhilarating denouement. Says Glass: "The idea from the beginning, Godfrey said, was to not let things be as dark as they seem. When it came to the ending, my problem, if you can put it that way, was to write something that would step away from the rest of the piece and open up a door we didn't even know was there."
Glass' ecstatic musical climax reflects some of Reggio's most open-ended and provocative image-making to date. In fact, Reggio says that he himself maintains an unexpected optimism about humanity's future -so much so that the final act of NAQOYQATSI is indeed labeled in his script: "Startling Hope." He explains: "To me the hopefulness of NAQOYQATSI is that we had the freedom to make this commentary on what to me, not necessarily to the crew or the audience, is a tragic event: the transition out of our basic human state into what I call the vivid unknown. We find ourselves in an environment of acceleration that is causing complete annihilation of many life forms. Yet, my own life is suffused with hope. I don't see this as a contradictory. I feel that we should embrace things that are contradictory. I don't believe in black and white or good and evil. I believe in this and that."
Ultimately everyone involved with the project agrees that NAQOYQATSI is best experienced rather than described. Sums ups Joe Beirne: "I think as a cinematic experience, NAQOYQATSI is quite unique in that it demands more of the viewer emotionally than retinally. It requires active involvement from the viewer. You aren't being led in a specific direction; the film leaves you at a fork in the road."
TECHNICAL NOTES: Q&A With NAQOYQATSI technologist Joe Beirne
Q: NAQOYQATSI offers up images that have been radically altered from their original nature - what was your visual mandate from Godfrey Reggio?
Godfrey's earlier films had managed to show the world as no one had shown it before so the challenge was to continue in that vein. Our task with NAQOYQATSI was to show very familiar images from our high-tech existence - but to show them as no one has ever seen them before. We become explorers - exploring each image with a variety of visual manipulations involving color, speed, aspect ratio, contrast, grain resolution and more. As Godfrey told us when we began: "The image is our location."
I don't think there has been another film in which the digital process was used as freely or as broadly to affect the nature of the picture as it was on NAQOYQATSI. This is a movie that was made almost as a painting is made, in layers.
Q: NAQOYQATSI used some 3 1/2 terabytes of storage space - isn't this unusual for a film of this nature? It's not unusual for the most complex digitally animated films but it's certainly the first time that a film that is essentially a documentary has done anything like this. The reason so much media was necessary has to do with our fluid working method: we essentially needed to "reshoot" the film many times in post-production to assess how the images would best unify in the final product.
We had no "rough-cut." All the images were assembled in their more-or-less fully realized form: effected, filtered, color-corrected, composited and developed into complexly layered sub-sequences. This material was for NAQOYQATSI analogous to what "original photography" is for a conventional feature. Only then did the process of editing the film in the conventional sense begin.
Because the visual and textural character of the evolving material was only evident when working in a reasonably high resolution, we used enormous amounts of disk space. It was not uncommon for us to purge the rendered files of tried-but-discarded events every few weeks and in doing so delete 100 gigabytes of media at the push of a button.
Once the elements had been re-edited, all the spatial, chromatic, temporal, textural and transitional effects were further refined, particularly in response to Philip Glass' music, which itself was evolving in response to the imagery.
Q: What were some of the biggest technical challenges on NAQOYQATSI?
The film was first finished at 30 frames per second (fps) but then was entirely reconstructed at 24 fps for output to film. This was an enormous technical challenge, requiring the use of custom-built software and long weeks of intricate manual adjustment of complex, many-layered sequences. Many low-budget digital cinema projects are converted en masse to 24 fps film for projection, but ours was completely converted in all its component elements: shot by shot, effect by effect, layer by layer.
However, like many technically significant achievements, this one is completely invisible to the layperson. Something that is very visible in the film is the extensive use of slow motion. Godfrey's earlier films made groundbreaking use of variable frame-rate photography, and while those techniques were also used for NAQOYQATSI, we also took footage shot at normal "sound" speed and slowed it down significantly.
This required interpolating new "in-between" frames from the existing frames of the footage. Fortunately, powerful tools have been developed lately for this purpose. We used several of these tools, including a not-then-released version of temporal blending software from Avid called "FluidMotion," which had the advantage of working directly within the interface that we used to cut the film. Some shots were slowed down with FluidMotion to as little as 5% of their original speed, with dramatic and sometimes unexpected results.
Q: Can you talk about your set-up - both in terms of hardware and software -- at the NAQOYQATSI studio?
NAQOYQATSI required very flexible tools and a way of working that combined spontaneity with control. I attempted to address this by creating a highly networked facility that encouraged and enhanced a very elliptical workflow. Specifically, we used Avid Symphony as our primary editing platform. Rather than use stand-alone visual effects workstations, and in order to preserve the organic, content-specific character of the work, we made extensive use of VFX plug-ins, notably Boris RED, within Symphony. Without these the multi-layered look of the film would not be possible.
Most of the work was done with off-the-shelf software: we used Alias Maya for most of the 3D animation, and AfterEffects for compositing and procedural 2D animation. This was all done on ordinary PCs, albeit PCs networked via very fast, multi-layered networks and tied to very fast, shared storage. We did some of our most complex animation and biggest renders on groups of no-name PC's that we bought new for $500 a pop.
We had custom software written for the 30 frame to 24 frame conversions, and also up-converted some PAL and NTSC interlaced video source footage to 24P HD using TeraNex hardware. After 80% of the film was conformed at ITU-R 601 (D1) resolution at 24 fps (progressive) in Symphony, we then conformed the remaining 20% at 1080/24P on Quantel's iQ. Quantel's iQ allows seamless manipulation of 2K data, HDTV and 601 in the same sequence, which was extremely useful. My original intention was to build the entire program at HDTV resolution and then record that HD intermediate to film. What we discovered was that, in many instances, the product of the algorithm that we used to "up-rez" the NTSC images to film resolution was visually indistinguishable from an image that originated at HD or even at film resolution. Some material did need to be handled entirely at film resolution. This footage was either acquired as HDTV tape, was transferred from 35mm to HD or was rendered as original 2K resolution animation, where required.
We had done some image manipulation tests very early in the process, and saw that certain treatments of native low-resolution sources could be made to hold up beautifully on 35mm. Jon Kane and Godfrey used these experiments as a general guide when refining the visual language of the film. Jon also responded to the peculiarities and flaws in the sources to create compensatory or enhancing techniques that developed a life of their own: in the end we wound up "distressing" some very clean footage and then re-enhancing it to allow it to compete with low-quality footage that had itself been enhanced.
Tape House Digital Film used the data captured from our digital intermediate to output to film using an ArriLaser film recorder. David Kuttner from Tape House has written a scaling algorithm for film output that was ideally suited to our process. We also experimented with different print stocks to find one that delivered the greatest fidelity to our intermediate: Fuji High Contrast wound up giving us the best result overall. In general we found that the transformation from a digital master to an optical/chemical transparency gave a specific materiality to the projected image that is very pleasing.
Q: What are some of your favorite sequences in NAQOYQATSI?
Manuel Gaulot built a couple of animated sequences that use complex chains of source-triggered macros to produce "flocks" of swirling, cascading graphic icons. Although this was an elegant technical solution, and his work always interests me very much, I mostly responded to it because I think it is breathtakingly beautiful as used in the movie.
Similarly, I was quite moved when I saw the extreme color effects used on one series of 'natural world' images. This very simple technique that at once charges, unites and abstracts this imagery in a way that I feel is very powerful.
These effects gain their power not so much from what they do as from the context in which they are used: from the mise-en-scene, and from the emotional character of the music and the edit.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE "QATSI" TRILOGY
In 1975, Godfrey Reggio, a man who had spent 14 years in silence and prayer as a member of a contemplative religious order and then devoted his life to community service, latched onto an idea for a film that would create an entirely new motion picture style. His idea was to grab images from real life - emotional, raw, honest images - and present them in a non-verbal, non-linear fashion, forging a kind of concert cinema.
Seven years later, Reggio's first film, "Koyaanisqatsi" was released to critical acclaim. The film's Hopi-language title translates roughly as "Life Out of Balance," and this was Reggio's simple but searing theme as the film unveiled a vision of an urban society moving at a frenetic pace, detached from the natural environment and overwhelmed by technology. In images at once stark and beautiful, assaulting and hypnotizing, the film worked as a kind of visual aperitif to conversations that could last for days or weeks.
During filmmaking, Reggio had invited the daring experimental composer Philip Glass to create a score for "Koyaanisqatsi" that was also to have a great influence on the film's reception -- and to spark a continuing collaboration between the two artists. Glass became an integral part of the film's creation, sitting in on editing sessions to help meld his trademark syncopated rhythms and rapid arpeggios to the images seamlessly.
The film won passionate fans around the world, including Francis Ford Coppola, who lent his name to the film as a presenter. In the 1980s, "Koyaanisqatsi" joined "A Clockwork Orange" and "Eraserhead" at the top of rentals on U.S. college campuses. When broadcast on PBS' "Great Performances" it drew the second-highest over-night rating in the history of the series. The film is also part of the permanent collections of 7 international art institutions including The National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, The Museum of Modern Art and the British Film Institute. The artistic influence of Reggio's style has also been seen extensively in music videos, motion picture cinematography and effects and the IMAX film phenomenon.
Fellow filmmaker George Lucas joined Francis Ford Coppola in presenting the second film in the "Qatsi" series: "Powaqqatsi," which translates to "Life in Transformation." For this new film, Reggio chose to go out into the world, into parts of developing nations rarely seen on screen in any format, and capture the impact of technological progress on native cultures. Over six months, he and his crew journeyed to twelve countries, including India, Egypt, Brazil, Peru, Kenya, Nepal and Nigeria, capturing ordinary people at work and play and revealing their complicated relationship with such new additions to their lives as cars and high-rises. The film drew a wide-range of critical and even political responses - attesting to its ability to touch audiences strongly. In Europe, the film received the 1988 Leonardo de Vinci Award for Best Film and Best Musical Score.
Since their initial release, "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi" have been in theatrical release in over 60 countries, televised and on home video in over 30 countries, invited to over 70 worldwide film festivals and performed live with the Philip Glass Ensemble. The films have been seen by over 35 million people worldwide.
Each of the "Qatsi" films have utilized their own unique style: "Koyaanisqatsi" used time-lapse photography to bend the mind around its images, while "Powaqqatsi" turned to slow motion to focus on the visceral details of native life. With NAQOYQATSI the series again enters new visual territory, delving into images of advanced technology and digital manipulation with what Godfrey Reggio terms a "re-animated look." Unlike the previous two films, NAQOYQATSI features little location work, but instead uses a method described by Godfrey Reggio as "image as location."
ABOUT THE NAQOYQATSI WEB PROJECT
Godrey Reggio always intended for his "Qatsi" series to provoke ongoing debate, discussion and artistic participation. For NAQOYQATSI, he and his team have created a unique online forum where leading artists, designers, innovators and experts are invited to present their own visions of how technology will impact the future.
Located at www.qatsi.org, the forum is intended to use the tools of the Internet creatively and critically to reflect or comment upon technology itself (including the technology of the Internet itself). Projects can involve interactivity, animation, photography, text, sound or other digital media and will focus on such areas as media, politics, sports, weather, religion, warfare, medicine, food and culture.
The site is not intended to directly discuss NAQOYQATSI as a film - rather it is expected to be a dynamic forum presenting original work on the subject of the technological future.
For more information, see www.qatsi.org.
"NAQOYQATSI" the reviews, one good one bad
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/movies/reviews/A53971-2002Nov14.html
the good
A Mind-Blowing, In-Body Experience
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 15, 2002; Page WE43
"NAQOYQATSI" is filmmaking at its purest and most visceral – a tale full of sound and visual fury, signifying, if not exactly nothing, then something not so readily articulated in words.
Like writer-director Godfrey Reggio's earlier two entries in the now complete "Qatsi" trilogy – 1983's stunning and dialogue-free "Koyaanisqatsi" (Hopi for "Life Out of Balance") and the 1988 follow-up "Powaqqatsi" ("Life in Transformation") – "Naqoyqatsi" works upon the retina and the eardrum like deep-tissue massage. At times painful to watch, at times as gentle as an Eskimo kiss, the film slowly softens your resistance to its lack of narrative by means of a nonstop barrage of often surreal imagery accompanied only by composer Philip Glass's chanting, swirling, droning, pounding score. What it wants to do is not so much make a point, but to leave you drooling into your popcorn from the corner of your mouth.
And like the two earlier films, which addressed issues of the environment and the assimilation of so-called primitive cultures into "civilized" society through a montage of nature footage and shots of Third World life sped up and slowed down, "Naqoyqatsi" consists entirely of sometimes random-seeming shots – a decrepit, ruined building, cloned sheep, athletes, stock traders, a mushroom cloud, wax celebrities and old advertisements. It's a high-tech pastiche of appropriated pictures: part animated graffiti, part smart-ass music video and part alien opera.
What Reggio has done here is to take mostly stock footage and digitally alter it, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly, heightening what we see until a kind of eye fatigue sets in. You want to look away but you can't, not because the images are so seductive necessarily but because they browbeat us into a kind of submission that feels, ironically, voluntary. It hurts so good, in other words.
In essence, the director and his team of technological whiz kids (led by editor and visual designer Jon Kane and technologist Joe Beirne) have themselves done a kind of violence to their material, but it is one that brilliantly, and effectively, underscores the film's central theme of "war as a way of life" (a more fluid interpretation of the Hopi title, translated literally, but not very helpfully, in the press kit as "each other kill many life").
This is not to say that "Naqoyqatsi" is anti-military. Although scenes of soldiers figure prominently here, and the film's pacifist politics are pretty clear, the violence in question is more metaphorical, a kind of poetic allusion to the desecration that technology itself has inflicted on, well, pretty much everything, from our quality of life to the creation of life itself.
In the end, writing (or, for that matter, reading) a review of "Naqoyqatsi" seems beside the point. If Reggio had wanted to put something about the impermanence of material things, our own interconnectivity and the dangerous allure of the uses of science into words, he would have. Instead, he has given us something far greater: a work of art whose meaning, while obscure, enters our heads and our hearts through strangely beautiful, yet unintelligible channels.
NAQOYQATSI (PG, 89 minutes) – Contains shots of naked babies and images of violence and destruction. At the Cineplex Odeon Inner Circle 3.
© 2002 The Washington Post
the bad
What's Hopi for 'Trite, Boring Film'?
By Ann Hornaday
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, November 15, 2002; Page C08
Director Godfrey Reggio wraps up a metaphysical cinematic trilogy with "Naqoyqatsi," the third installment of a series that began in 1983 with "Koyaanisqatsi." Back then, Reggio's film montage – which owed much to experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner and his peers – seemed like a major breakthrough, attracting a surprisingly large audience to experience a series of images of modern life set to a hypnotic score by Philip Glass.
Twenty years later, the project is beginning to wear thin, not only because so much of what Reggio did in 1983 has wormed its way into advertising, music videos and other artifacts of American pop culture, but because reality is so quickly outstripping the director's points. "Naqoyqatsi" is Hopi for "life as war" ("Koyaanisqatsi" means "life out of balance," and its 1988 follow-up, "Powaqqatsi," means "life in transformation"), but as relevant as the topic is, Reggio's linkage of binary thinking, capitalism, natural selection and mass media with human aggression seems merely pretentious, ponderous and redundant.
Set to another Glass score, this time performed by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, "Naqoyqatsi" opens with long shots of crumbling architecture, somber black-and-white portraits of urban aspiration and decay. Reggio clearly means for the images to be cautionary, and the next 80 minutes are spent inveighing against the hubris of Western civilization. Using mostly stock footage that has been digitally colored, enhanced and animated, Reggio encourages viewers to ruminate on the connections among Cartesian rationality, genetics, technology, nationalism, consumerism, celebrity, sports, religion and politics, and how their various impulses lead to aggression and war. He does this by editing together vignettes of familiar images, from a baby floating in space to random numbers dancing across the screen, from wax figures of world leaders and celebrities to wartime murders, bombings and strafings.
The net effect is a numbing one. Rather than inspire reflection and the radical synthesis of ideas, Reggio effectively shuts them down by assaulting viewers with cliched, simplistic visual jargon. You may not need linear narrative to create a great movie, but you do need some original ideas.
NAQOYQATSI (PG, 89 minutes) – Contains violent and disturbing images, and for brief nudity. At Cineplex Odeon Inner Circle.
© 2002 The Washington Post
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/0,1113,2-13_1191748,00.html
Home of the future
Elinor Mills Abreu
Redmond - Welcome to the home of the future - at least the Microsoft version.
It has a front door that unlocks using biometrics instead of keys and a kitchen that reads recipes aloud, but no whiz-bang gadgetry in the bathroom.
In fact there's no bathroom at all. At least not yet.
Featuring technologies that are five to eight years away from being offered to the public, the prototype "Microsoft Home" at the company's Redmond, Washington, campus allows researchers to test concepts surrounding how people will use technology in their everyday lives in the future.
The home doesn't have a bathroom because it is housed in Microsoft's Executive Briefing Centre, which is a public facility. Its restroom would have to be built according to industrial building standards, Jonathan Cluts, director of consumer prototyping and strategy at Microsoft, said in a recent interview.
"We didn't build a real [bathroom] because it wouldn't be like the one you would have in your home," he said.
"The idea is to show how software can enhance peoples' lives in the future," Cluts said of the home, which was originally created in 1994 but moved to a new location in 2000.
Some people may not be ready for those enhancements, though. A recent survey from consulting firm Accenture found that more than half of some 5 000 consumers polled said they did not want a wired home network.
But Cluts wasn't too concerned about the survey.
"We are committed to building technology that adapts to people, not people having to adapt to technology and being controlled by technology," he said. "We believe that people will embrace any future technology because of its usefulness to their lives, not because it may have some specific network or protocol."
Modern-day Montecello
Except for the lack of a bathroom, or a master bedroom - which an earlier version had - the prototype is realistic, depending on your income bracket.
Outside the front entry, there are the sounds of birds twittering and a Japanese-inspired waterfall sculpture generates negative ions. An iris scanner next to the front door enables residents to get inside without fumbling for keys or disarming a home alarm system.
Visitors use a touch screen to ring the door "bell" and leave text or voice messages, while a smart card can provide access to a chute for leaving packages and mail in a secured area.
After a resident enters, the computer system can set the lights, blinds, temperature, music and TV to the individual's preferences automatically or upon voice commands.
The home computer system featured a female voice that sounded less personable than the cunning HAL spaceship computer from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
To summon the system, Cluts spoke aloud the letters "M-C", which he said stood for "Monticello", the Virginia home built by Thomas Jefferson in the late 18th century that was one of the first to feature indoor plumbing.
During a recent tour, Cluts demonstrated how telephone, front door, e-mail and other messages can be retrieved and read aloud through a control panel by the front door, or through televisions and PCs in other rooms. Residents can even see who is at the door without getting off the couch by viewing a video camera display on the TV or PC.
Control panels, various video screens and portable tablets scattered throughout the house, as well as vocal commands, can be used not only for setting preferences, but also for accessing household information, such as family member calendars, to-do lists, address books and messages.
Inside, the prototype home was decorated in a modern style with art from around the world, a computerised piano, Japanese thin-paper blinds, lighting that changes colour and cherry wood everywhere, including the furniture, walls and cabinets.
Mother's little helper
Not surprisingly, it was the kitchen, with most of its appliances networked, and Starbucks coffee jars, that turned out to be the most functional room.
A bar-code reader on the microwave oven picks up the vital information about the food and automatically configures the time and other cooking settings. A TV or PC in another room can be set to alert a cook who has stepped away.
Microsoft anticipates that small radio frequency identification stickers will replace bar codes on products and will also be used on other things, like personal items to identify an individual, for example, as they arrive home on their doorstep, Cluts said.
Radio frequency tags on refrigerator items will allow the appliance to easily inventory food and help create shopping lists.
The tags also enable the home system to help with mundane tasks like cooking. Placing food items and appliances on top of a large marble counter may trigger a ceiling projector to display in text on the counter a list of ingredients for a particular recipe.
As new items are added to the pile, they are checked off from the displayed list. The computer system can even read cooking instructions aloud.
Also in the kitchen, a resident can answer a call from a cell phone via a telephone or PC and translate one side of the conversation to text or have text e-mail read aloud.
In the office, which sports a trendy Aeron ergonomic desk chair, someone can log onto a PC using a corporate smart card and receive telephone calls placed to an outside office phone number without the caller knowing that the worker is actually working from home.
Keeping in touch
The room with the most atmosphere was the teenager's bedroom, with a loft bed, skateboard and snowboard, guitar, rock posters and jeans and T-shirts strewn about.
Cluts even got into character, pulling on a backward baseball cap to demonstrate a remote that allows teens to interact with their computers from 10 feet away.
The system can even be used to keep a pulse on happenings in other locations. For instance, it can provide information on the activities at a vacation home or elderly relative's home.
"A grandmother's home could notice that she turned on the coffee pot at the regular time," Cluts said. "It would use pattern matching with what she does on a normal day, without sharing specifics."
On the various TVs and PCs in the home, teens can see what TV shows or Internet radio stations their friends are watching and listening to and join live chats, or do text or voice instant messaging with them.
One technology that proved difficult to describe was the "Digital Memories Device," a lava lamp-like device that displays archived photographs that are catalogued based on time and place. A touch of the hand can shift the series being shown in what Cluts described as "an ethereal representation of things we might find in our past."
"That's a perfect example of a reason why we do the Home" - to create a tangible experience around a cool technology, Cluts said.
Home of the future
Elinor Mills Abreu
Redmond - Welcome to the home of the future - at least the Microsoft version.
It has a front door that unlocks using biometrics instead of keys and a kitchen that reads recipes aloud, but no whiz-bang gadgetry in the bathroom.
In fact there's no bathroom at all. At least not yet.
Featuring technologies that are five to eight years away from being offered to the public, the prototype "Microsoft Home" at the company's Redmond, Washington, campus allows researchers to test concepts surrounding how people will use technology in their everyday lives in the future.
The home doesn't have a bathroom because it is housed in Microsoft's Executive Briefing Centre, which is a public facility. Its restroom would have to be built according to industrial building standards, Jonathan Cluts, director of consumer prototyping and strategy at Microsoft, said in a recent interview.
"We didn't build a real [bathroom] because it wouldn't be like the one you would have in your home," he said.
"The idea is to show how software can enhance peoples' lives in the future," Cluts said of the home, which was originally created in 1994 but moved to a new location in 2000.
Some people may not be ready for those enhancements, though. A recent survey from consulting firm Accenture found that more than half of some 5 000 consumers polled said they did not want a wired home network.
But Cluts wasn't too concerned about the survey.
"We are committed to building technology that adapts to people, not people having to adapt to technology and being controlled by technology," he said. "We believe that people will embrace any future technology because of its usefulness to their lives, not because it may have some specific network or protocol."
Modern-day Montecello
Except for the lack of a bathroom, or a master bedroom - which an earlier version had - the prototype is realistic, depending on your income bracket.
Outside the front entry, there are the sounds of birds twittering and a Japanese-inspired waterfall sculpture generates negative ions. An iris scanner next to the front door enables residents to get inside without fumbling for keys or disarming a home alarm system.
Visitors use a touch screen to ring the door "bell" and leave text or voice messages, while a smart card can provide access to a chute for leaving packages and mail in a secured area.
After a resident enters, the computer system can set the lights, blinds, temperature, music and TV to the individual's preferences automatically or upon voice commands.
The home computer system featured a female voice that sounded less personable than the cunning HAL spaceship computer from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
To summon the system, Cluts spoke aloud the letters "M-C", which he said stood for "Monticello", the Virginia home built by Thomas Jefferson in the late 18th century that was one of the first to feature indoor plumbing.
During a recent tour, Cluts demonstrated how telephone, front door, e-mail and other messages can be retrieved and read aloud through a control panel by the front door, or through televisions and PCs in other rooms. Residents can even see who is at the door without getting off the couch by viewing a video camera display on the TV or PC.
Control panels, various video screens and portable tablets scattered throughout the house, as well as vocal commands, can be used not only for setting preferences, but also for accessing household information, such as family member calendars, to-do lists, address books and messages.
Inside, the prototype home was decorated in a modern style with art from around the world, a computerised piano, Japanese thin-paper blinds, lighting that changes colour and cherry wood everywhere, including the furniture, walls and cabinets.
Mother's little helper
Not surprisingly, it was the kitchen, with most of its appliances networked, and Starbucks coffee jars, that turned out to be the most functional room.
A bar-code reader on the microwave oven picks up the vital information about the food and automatically configures the time and other cooking settings. A TV or PC in another room can be set to alert a cook who has stepped away.
Microsoft anticipates that small radio frequency identification stickers will replace bar codes on products and will also be used on other things, like personal items to identify an individual, for example, as they arrive home on their doorstep, Cluts said.
Radio frequency tags on refrigerator items will allow the appliance to easily inventory food and help create shopping lists.
The tags also enable the home system to help with mundane tasks like cooking. Placing food items and appliances on top of a large marble counter may trigger a ceiling projector to display in text on the counter a list of ingredients for a particular recipe.
As new items are added to the pile, they are checked off from the displayed list. The computer system can even read cooking instructions aloud.
Also in the kitchen, a resident can answer a call from a cell phone via a telephone or PC and translate one side of the conversation to text or have text e-mail read aloud.
In the office, which sports a trendy Aeron ergonomic desk chair, someone can log onto a PC using a corporate smart card and receive telephone calls placed to an outside office phone number without the caller knowing that the worker is actually working from home.
Keeping in touch
The room with the most atmosphere was the teenager's bedroom, with a loft bed, skateboard and snowboard, guitar, rock posters and jeans and T-shirts strewn about.
Cluts even got into character, pulling on a backward baseball cap to demonstrate a remote that allows teens to interact with their computers from 10 feet away.
The system can even be used to keep a pulse on happenings in other locations. For instance, it can provide information on the activities at a vacation home or elderly relative's home.
"A grandmother's home could notice that she turned on the coffee pot at the regular time," Cluts said. "It would use pattern matching with what she does on a normal day, without sharing specifics."
On the various TVs and PCs in the home, teens can see what TV shows or Internet radio stations their friends are watching and listening to and join live chats, or do text or voice instant messaging with them.
One technology that proved difficult to describe was the "Digital Memories Device," a lava lamp-like device that displays archived photographs that are catalogued based on time and place. A touch of the hand can shift the series being shown in what Cluts described as "an ethereal representation of things we might find in our past."
"That's a perfect example of a reason why we do the Home" - to create a tangible experience around a cool technology, Cluts said.
cool photoshop style
PSfGD.asl
PSfGD.asl
illustrator class assignment... on information graphics- a weather map
click for enlarged version
click for enlarged version
i made this in Illustrator class...
click to see the big version...
click to see the big version...
BlogAmp is a free Winamp plugin that allows the user to keep in his personal web page a list with the last songs played in his Winamp. This list is update by FTP in real time.
Features:
Real time update of the songs list by FTP
Log of the time when the song was played, title, artist, quality, etc.
Basic configuration options.
Total flexibility in the display of the list with JavaScript.
John Lennon's dope box and pipe up for auction
John Lennon's old dope box and pipe go under the hammer in an auction of Beatles memorabilia later this month.
They are among the items up for sale at Cooper Owen's Beatles Sale on November 19.
The dope box, which was used by Lennon during the 1960s, is valued at £20,000 -25,000.
The pipe is valued at between £400 and 500.
Other items up for auction include two never before heard tapes of Lennon which were made in 1970 while he was staying at the home of Yoko Ono's ex-husband Tony Cox in Denmark.
Madonna's new film released straight to video
Madonna's new film will not be released in UK cinemas after it flopped in the US.
Swept Away, which was directed by Guy Ritchie, will go straight to video instead.
The film's distributors had initially said it would hit UK cinemas in March.
"Following the disappointing box office results in the US, Guy Ritchie's Swept Away will not be released theatrically in the UK," a Columbia Tristar spokesman said.
Swept Away took only $350,000 on its opening weekend and was a flop with critics.
Rolling Stone magazine called it "a shipwreck" and the Washington Post said the film was "as awful as you've heard and as bad as you've imagined".
A spokeswoman for Madonna said she had no comment on the announcement the film will go straight to video.
Eminem, portraying Jimmy 'Rabbit' Smith Jr., right, appears in a scene from '8 Mile,' with Nashawn Breedlove in the role of Lotto, in this undated publicity photo. Eminem's semi-autobiographical movie debut, took in $54.5 million in its first weekend to bump last weekend's No. 1 movie, ``The Santa Clause 2,'' into second place with $24.8 million, according to studio estimates Sunday, Nov. 10, 2002.
http://www.rocklands.com
It's no longer necessary to drive to Georgia for a barbecue menu that offers a long list of fresh vegetables as side dishes. Glover Park or Arlington will do.
That's where you'll find Rocklands, the small, in-town one with just a few seats and mostly carryout, or the barnlike spinoff in an ex-gas station near Ballston. I like the smaller place, with its bowls of peanuts in the shell to entertain you while you wait and its walls of hot sauces. But each has its funky charm, and both have top-notch ribs, smoked over real wood and just chewy enough, seasoned rather than just peppered.
The chopped pork sandwich is outstanding meat, with juicy and crunchy bits of meat piled high on a bun – though I prefer my sauce less tomatoey. The grilled leg of lamb is elegant, the grilled fish fillet – usually salmon – even more so. Only the chicken could use more attention to keeping it juicy. Among the side dishes, the macaroni and cheese is so zingy that it should star as a main course. There are fine corn pudding and mashed potatoes, baked beans and cooked greens, a mild and fresh corn salad and tart, thick, fresh apple compote. The potato salad has an unfortunate tendency to be undercooked, and some of the salads yearn for salt. In all, though, few places anywhere make available such satisfying, down-home, from-scratch American cooking at fast-food prices.
– Phyllis C. Richman
There is another Rocklands at 4000 Fairfax Dr., Arlington, Va., 703/528-9663.
http://eg.washingtonpost.com/profile/792185/?&flavor_id=2&context=restaurants
The Florida Avenue Grill
The Florida Avenue Grill is no ordinary greasy spoon. It's been paying homage to diner food, Southern style, since 1944. Although lunch and dinner are served, if you want a real treat, come for breakfast. And know right off the bat that this is no place to bring your diet.
Luxuriate in the pools of butter at the center of the mound of light and tasty grits (you can get them as part of the chef's special, $6.95, or as a side order, $1.50). Enjoy one -- or two -- of the many varieties of pork product available. While the country ham is a bit stringy, the Virginia ham is a thick, huge slice -- flavorful without being overcured or oversalty. And the scrapple here is a masterwork (an order of three pieces is $1.95). The cooks have achieved that elusive scrapple yin-yang: crispy on the outside, tender without being mushy on the inside. And the zing of spiciness on the tongue is just right.
There seems to be a temperature problem with eggs: Whether fried or scrambled, they tend to be cold. But you'll forget that in a second if you taste a forkful of scrumptious French toast, break off a bite of perfect corn muffin or scoop up a mouthful of heavenly fried apples (a side is $1.50; it's a must-taste).
If you come at the prime Saturday morning breakfast hour, expect a wait -- and in crowded, sardine-can circumstances. But it's more than worth it. And if you can get out of bed early enough, you may run into Janet Reno. The cashier says the A.G. comes in for breakfast nearly every Saturday morning she's in town. She's a woman of taste.
-- Anne Glusker
Florida Avenue Grill
1100 Florida Avenue, NW
Washington, DC
202-265-1586
http://eg.washingtonpost.com/profile/792153/?&flavor_id=2&context=restaurants
Ben's Chili Bowl
Since 1958, Ben's Chili Bowl has been a gathering place and focal point for black Washington. It has witnessed the rise, fall and resurrection of U Street and is probably the only business on this strip that survived both the 1968 riots and the construction phase of the Metro Green Line.
Chili is only one of the reasons people keep coming back year after year. The large neon "Home of the Famous Chili Dog" sign out front hearkens back to another time. So do the red 1950s-style bar stools and Formica counters. Even the music on the jukebox is retro (a mixture of Motown, Stax-Volt, reggae and a few modern soul tunes thrown in). The staff is cheerful and efficient, a rarity in such a high-volume, high-turnover place. Its kitchen is also extremely clean.
Ben's attracts a diverse cross-section of Washingtonians. Lawyers, college kids from nearby Howard, folks en route to a performance at the Lincoln Theater, musicians, you name it. Bill Cosby has been coming here for so long that he's even got a chili dog named after him. No special service for stars, however. Once at the counter, everyone is treated equally.
For a look at how the District was in the '50s (and how it should be in the '90s), check out Ben's Chili Bowl on a busy night. The place has an energy all its own. U Street has come back and Ben's is right there where it's always been. The chili's pretty good, too.
-- Neal Becton
Ben's Chili Bowl
1213 U Street, NW
Washington, DC
202-667-0909
my photoshop styles.... jessestyle.asl
8MILE premiere
http://www.8-mile.com
Rapper Eminem, right, the star of the film '8 Mile,' arrives to a screening of the film with fellow rapper, Obie Trice, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2002, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian)
Rapper Dr. Dre points to Brian Grazer, producer of the film '8 Mile' starring rapper Eminem at a screening of the film Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2002, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian)
Cast member Eminem arrives in Westwood Village for the world premiere of the film '8 Mile' November 6, 2002 in Los Angeles. The picture opens nationwide in the USA on November 8. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith
The Simpsons on the cover the Beatle's 'Abbey Road' albumn graces the upcoming cover of Rolling Stone magazine. The magazine pays homage to 'The Simpsons' 14th season with three covers designed by Matt Groening putting the Simpsons on famous album covers. On the premiere of show this Sunday, Nov. 10,2002. on Fox television, Homer goes to rock 'n' roll fantasy camp, where his instructors are Elvis Costello, Tom Petty, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. All three covers hit the stands on Friday, Nov.8,2002. (AP Photo/Rolling Stone)
http://www.the-streets.co.uk/
THE STREETS - "Original Pirate Material "
Reviewed by David Browne
STREETS IS WATCHING Britain's Skinner has an ''Original'' take on a familiar genre
If you are a white one-man band and want to establish yourself in the general vicinity of the hip-hop world, your first major mistake would be to call yourself the Streets. A transparent name like that cries out for a belittling, not to mention a pummeling. Your second mistake would be to record your album on relatively low-rent gear that makes it sound as if it were created in your bedroom, instead of in an expensive studio whose refrigerators are stocked with Cristal. Your third mistake would be to hail from England, a nation not exactly known for its contributions to rap.
Straight out of Birmingham -- the working-class burg that also gave us Ozzy -- Mike Skinner disregards such unwritten rules and somehow manages to get away with it. Skinner isn't a strict rapper per se; he comes from the world of U.K. garage, which blends two-step, reggae, and rap, among other genres. The scene's best-known export is Craig David, but comparisons to Skinner end right about there. Skinner's Original Pirate Material, released in the U.K. earlier this year and now finally arriving on these shores, doesn't just make David seem like the sleek pop star he yearns to be. By adding grit and gutter-savvy humor, Skinner also takes U.K. garage to a new level, making for the year's most striking debut.
His nom de studio, it turns out, isn't so inappropriate. British pop and rock have long been known for their excursions into class warfare and consciousness. The milieu of Skinner's songs is sex, pubs, and rock & roll -- a world of drug- and alcohol-besotted lads trying to make sense of the universe while avoiding confrontations with the older louts looking to beat them senseless. ''Same Old Thing'' is sung in the voice of the latter (''Seems the only difference between midweek s--- and weekend is how loud I speak,'' the character grouses); ''The Irony of It All'' is a sharp back-and-forth between an ale swiller and a stoner punk, the former growing increasingly agitated as the pothead taunts him into a brawl. Elsewhere, Skinner's characters settle for hazy lives fueled by Ecstasy (''Weak Become Heroes'') or resort to blotting everything out around them with heroin (the tough-love sermonette ''Stay Positive''). Small wonder that the project has been released here by Vice Records, a Brooklyn-based label recently launched by the people who brought us the clever, cheeky scuzz-culture magazine of the same name.
Skinner may not have spent a lot on his debut, but he makes the most of his setup. Like a kid trying his best to devise his own Dr. Dre sonics in the privacy of his home, he sprinkles the songs with doomy synths, percolating beats, guest vocalists, and melodic hooks. Some tracks, like the hopeful boast ''Turn the Page,'' are cinematic minisymphonies. You might even sing along with ''It's Too Late,'' a tale of a bloke who destroys a relationship by screwing up one time too many. Rather than detract from the music, the low-budget production lends the album an intimacy, as if Skinner just stumbled in from a particularly late night out and wants to recount his adventures. With their references to AltaVista, PlayStation, and a ''guaranteed, accuracy-enhanced CD,'' the songs are like intimacy-challenged communiques from the digital generation.
Thanks to a sense of looming violence and the stream of pop-culture imagery, Skinner's been compared to Eminem. That take isn't completely accurate, since Skinner isn't as smooth, dizzying, and consciously confrontational a rhymer as Eminem. If comparisons are to be made, in fact, the best would be to an earlier generation of Brits. From his choppy, rough-hewn voice to the ''oi! oi!'' phrases he tacks onto the end of his lines, Skinner comes off like a punk rocker, albeit a less angry one. He's the first rapper, white or otherwise, to sound as if he has stubs for teeth, and he makes you listen even when his rhymes don't make a whole lot of sense. Skinner may not be the voice of a generation -- his generation's probably too fragmented at this point to have such a thing -- but he's nonetheless a voice to be reckoned with.
Eminem: A well-respected man, now
Rapper takes on acting with '8 Mile'
NEW YORK (AP) --Until recently, it seemed only kids -- and music critics -- could love Eminem.
Politicians condemned his obscenity-laced and violent lyrics. Gay and women's groups blasted him as a homophobe and misogynist. The Grammy-winning Detroit rapper had millions in album sales, but little love from mainstream America.
Well, he's still not America's sweetheart. But some of the vitriol directed at Eminem has diminished -- replaced not just by grudging respect, but by downright enthusiasm from some unlikely quarters.
"The guy is funny, smart, and sometimes shocking," author Stephen King gushed on his Web site. "Those are all things I look for in rock and roll."
Randy Newman called Eminem a "kindred spirit."
Writer Paul Slansky, a self-described middle-aged white guy, penned a New York Observer column titled, "Guess Who Thinks Eminem's a Genius? Middle-Aged Me." (He recently sounded the same theme in an essay on NPR.)
Whether the 30-year-old rapper has softened or America has just grown more accepting, "he has started to interest serious, grownup audiences that would have dismissed him as a teenage hip-hop phenomenon," said New York Times critic Janet Maslin, who spent time with Eminem on the set of his upcoming movie, "8 Mile," for Premiere magazine.
"He's moved out of the youth ghetto."
Interest in Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers, should grow even more with the release November 8 of "8 Mile," loosely based on his own troubled youth. The movie, directed by "L.A. Confidential's" Curtis Hanson, and Eminem's performance in it have received early critical acclaim.
"I think he's just going to earn a lot of respect from people," said Sia Michel, editor in chief at Spin magazine, which has Eminem on its December cover. "They're going to see that he's clearly a talented guy."
Street cred and anger
Not that people doubted Eminem's talent. His first disc, 1999's "The Slim Shady LP," was praised by critics for its twisted, demented but humorous wit, and earned him the first two of his five Grammys. He was the first white rapper since the Beastie Boys to enjoy street credibility and admiration from both blacks and whites.
But there was anger over his lyrics, which included violent fantasies about his estranged mother and his wife and anti-gay slurs. The late Billboard editor Timothy White dedicated one of his influential music columns to excoriating Eminem.
The rapper's personal battles didn't help. He was arrested twice in 2000 for weapons violations (he received probation). He went through an ugly divorce and custody battle over his young daughter, and was sued by his mother for defamation.
When "The Marshall Mathers LP," which sold 8 million copies in the United States alone, was nominated for album of the year in 2001, there were howls of protest -- which were heightened when openly gay star Elton John agreed to perform with him at the Grammy ceremony.
Scott Seomin, entertainment director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said that controversy helped Eminem's career: "All of that attention has brought him more into the mainstream."
Slansky said that before the duet with Elton John, on the song "Stan," "I was aware of (Eminem), and I kind of thought, and most people my age probably thought, he's not for me.
"When I heard that song, I thought, this was one of the best songs I ever heard."
He hasn't been able to stop listening to the latest album, "The Eminem Show," which came out this spring. After his Observer column, Slansky said, "I've gotten tons of e-mails ... it was like a general sigh of relief, like, 'Oh, a smart person (understands).' "
A USA Today article earlier this year compared Eminem's lyricism to that of Bob Dylan and other rock greats.
Finding the context
Not everyone is raving, however. Star, a popular New York DJ on the hip-hop-R&B station Hot 97, speculated that many of Eminem's new fans have never listened to the same kind of clever, angst-driven rhymes from black rappers such as DMX or Jay-Z.
"He's not the best. That's an insult to black people who have created this art form. It's an insult to Spanish people ... He's just the Elvis Presley of hip-hop, and that's it."
Eminem himself has said he probably wouldn't have sold as many albums had he been black.
As for his lyrics, fans say Eminem has been misunderstood or misrepresented.
"When you quote his lyrics out of context, or you just paraphrase the songs ... it sounds pretty bad," said Maslin. "But if you listen in context to the rhymes, to the presentation of it and the things beyond just lyrics, there's a lot going on. It's not as raw as that. It's actually a lot more witty."
"The Eminem Show" is more introspective, barely has an offensive word against gays and -- although it still slams his mother and ex-wife -- explains more of the bitterness.
"I think he was very aware of trying to change his image a bit with his last record," said Spin's Michel. "He showed a wider range of emotions, and concerns than you hadn't seen from him in the past."
The soundtrack to "8 Mile" is expected to debut at the top spot on the charts next week -- its song "Lose Yourself" is already No. 1.
The movie appears likely to do the same.
"I've talked to lots of different people who are serious, book-reading older people with teenage kids, and they're going," said Maslin, chalking up a lot of that to "the curiosity factor."
Australian jockey Damien Oliver riding Irish galloper Media Puzzle wins the Melbourne Cup at Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2002. (AP Photo/Tony Feder)
GTA3 Playlist: Songs to Jack Cars to
playlist for crimewave MP3 listening pleasure:
"The Payback" by James Brown
"High Plains Drifter" by Beastie Boys
"The Mighty Stephen Hawking" by MC Hawking
"No Diggity" by Blackstreet
"Family Business" by Fugees
"Burn Hollywood Burn" by Public Enemy
"Wasted" by Black Flag
"Full Clip" by Gang Starr
"Bails of Cocaine" by Reverend Horton Heat
"Hard Knock Life" by Jay-Z
"Second Round KO" by Canibus
"Things Done Changed" by Notorious B.I.G.
"Cash Still Rules" by Wu-Tang Clan
http://www.amazon.com
New Tupac Tracks Roll Out On Another Posthumous Double Album
More than six years after the death of Tupac Shakur another posthumous double album from the influential rapper is being released.
Better Dayz, due November 26, follows on the heels of last year's triple platinum Until the End of Timeand finds a storm of rappers contributing additional vocals to tracks Tupac recorded just before his murder on September 13, 1996.
Anthony Hamilton sings on the first single, "Thugz Mansion," which hit the airwaves on Monday, according to a spokesperson for the project. Nas, Trick Daddy, Mya, Ronald "Mr. Biggs" Isley, Tyrese and the Outlawz are featured elsewhere on the 20-track collection, which features production work from 7 Aurelius (Ja Rule), Jazze Pha (Ludacris) and Frank Nitty (Big Punisher).
Suge Knight and Tupac's mother, Afeni Shakur, executive produced the album, some of the proceeds of which will benefit the Tupac Shakur foundation.
Tupac's music continues to have an incredible influence on popular music, as is evident by Jay-Z's and Toni Braxton's latest singles, which both sample "Me & My Girlfriend".
Better Dayz also comes at a time of peak interest over the rapper's murder, which was the subject of a recent controversial Los Angeles Times investigative report and a documentary.
Since his death, several albums by Tupac have been released, including Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory under the name Makaveli, a greatest-hits package and a collaboration album with the Outlawz.
The Tupac Shakur Foundation, which provides training to aspiring artists, is planning to open the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts (TASCA), which will include a museum of the rapper's work and artifacts, in 2003.
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Keanu, Bono and the Winona Trial
Winona Ryder keeps Keanu Reeves' phone number in her Filofax. Bono's, too.
Such were two of the educational revelations during an otherwise nasty day in the actress' non-uplifting shoplifting trial in Beverly Hills.
Day four of testimony saw Ryder's attorney rip into an ex-Saks Fifth Avenue security guard who testified Wednesday that she spied the two-time Oscar nominee "sucking on her finger" in a department-store dressing room after slicing herself with scissors deployed to snip sensor tags off merchandise.
On Thursday, defense legal eagle Mark Geragos accused the former guard of: (1) making up the story; (2) trying to sell said story (presumably titled "I Watched Winona Ryder through the Slats in the Dressing Room Door"); and (3) jotting down Keanu and Bono's respective digits from Ryder's datebook.
But Colleen Rainey, who left her job with Saks in August, remained firm and denied everything--including Geragos' assertions that she threw something at Ryder and called her "a bitch" after the actress was detained by store security guards at the Beverly Hills Saks last December 12.
Ryder, who marked her 31st birthday in court Tuesday, is accused of trying to walk off with a pair of $80 socks and 20 other designer doodads during an unauthorized $5,500-plus shopping spree. She faces charges of grand theft, burglary and vandalism.
Geragos' cross-examination of Rainey was so withering that Judge Elden S. Fox cautioned the attorney that he was bordering on contempt. While Ryder wasn't vocal like Geragos, she was dismissive in her own way. A Reuters report described the actress, usually stoic during the proceedings, as glaring at Rainey.
Rainey found a friend in prosecutor Ann Rundle who asked a series of questions designed to show the jury that the ex-guard was not the spotlight-hungry Hollywood wannabe that Geragos was trying to make her out to be. Under Rundle's querying, Rainey said she had not talked to tabloid TV shows, nor appeared on Larry King Live (unlike Geragos.)
For the record, Rainey is an MBA student--it's her husband who's the aspiring screenwriter. (And, yes, Geragos made sure jurors were aware of that last factoid.)
When Geragos was done attempting to slice and dice the ex-guard, the prosecution called its final witness to the stand. Police detective Mark Parker became the third witness to testify that Ryder, upon being detained, told authorities she was merely doing her job.
"At one point she was explaining that she was getting in character for a role as a kleptomaniac," Parker testified. "She wanted to see what it was like to shoplift."
According to Rainey's testimony on Wednesday, the upcoming movie was, alternately, Shopgirl, based on the Steve Martin novel, or White Jazz, based on the James Ellroy novel. Both movies are indeed being produced. Neither happens to star Ryder.
With the prosecution resting its case late Thursday, Team Winona will begin presenting its defense Friday afternoon. Per a TV report, Geragos was to decide Thursday night whether to call Ryder to the stand.
In his opening argument and subsequent cross-examinations, Geragos has argued his client was unfairly scrutinized by Saks security because of her star-ness. He also has claimed Ryder has receipts for everything she allegedly lifted.
Ryder, free on $20,000 bail, has pleaded innocent to all charges. If convicted on the three felony counts, she faces up to three years in prison.
Here's a rundown of the items Ryder is accused of stealing from Saks. For your reading ease, we've arranged them from the most expensive overpriced item to the least expensive overpriced item:
Gucci dress (white): $1,595
Marc Jacobs thermal top: $760
Yves Saint Laurent blouse: $750
Natori handbag: $540
Dolce & Gabbana handbag: $525
Eric Javitz hat: $350
Eric Javitz hat: $225
Rhinestone hair band (black): $140
Rhinestone ponytail holder (black): $120
Rhinestone hair clip (black): $110
Rhinestone hair bow (black): $110
Cashmere blend socks (beige): $80
Beaded purse, two (black): $55 each
Saks socks, two pair (cream): $38 each
Donna Karan socks, one pair (brown): $20
Calvin Klein socks, two pair (gray): $16.50 each
Calvin Klein socks, one pair (purple): $16.50
STREET PHOTOGRAPHY
editorial article by Pedro Meyer
July 99
It used to be that up to the 80's photographing on the street and walking around with a camera was a safe practice. If you respected people's privacy and were gentle in your approach towards the subjects, more often than not, people were either glad to participate in the ritual or at worst tolerated it.
I started to notice a gradual disappearance of what traditionally was called "street photography". I could not find a suitable explanation for that until I traveled extensively throughout the United States in pursuit of fulfilling a Guggenheim Fellowship that I had received; the subject of the project was to capture street life in the United States.
Two major issues came to my attention. One was the disappearance almost everywhere of any downtown life. Those parts of the city had become populated mostly by parking lots and empty streets, with whatever was left of "life" taking place inside tall buildings. What used to be a bustling environment around commerce, had now been displaced towards the "shopping mall" located in the suburbs. "Street life" changed from being in a public -city- space to that of a private -corporate- one, the mall. The malls usually forbid one to walk around taking pictures. I was personally evicted several times for doing so without permission: I was on private property,
I was told.
In this latter environment, any traditional "street life" worth photographing has practically evaporated anyway. The second issue that emerged was safety. In those areas of the city where indeed some life was worth photographing, it was not such a hot idea to walk around with a camera hanging from your shoulder or neck. Tough neighborhoods had lots of life, to be sure, but unless you BELONGED, you would be safer not making yourself present with such equipment.
In Mexico, which has always been a bastion for street photography, this practice also suffered, but here it was more safety related, than from "life" displaced to shopping malls. Although there are a number of such commercial centers which imitate the American shopping centers, street life is still pretty much prevalent throughout the rest of the city. However, walking around with a camera is not something you want to do so readily, that is, if you want to avoid being mugged and loose your equipment aside from any physical danger which might come your way in the process of such a holdup. Today, walking around Caracas, Rio de Janeiro or Bogota is not very different from the experience of Mexico City. It stands to reason that if you are walking around with a camera, amidst poverty, the provocation to be relieved of your possessions can be understood as some confused notion of distributing wealth.
All these realities are in marked contrast to the experience I've had in most of western Europe, where walking around in the street with a camera does not carry the same security connotations as in the Americas. In most of Western Europe they have better safety records as well as plenty of life going on in their downtown quarters. Compare downtown London or Milan, to Houston, Pittsburgh or Los Angeles, and you will think that life in such US cities had been extracted with a technique like liposuction. There is little life left on those city streets.
The question is then, given that the Europeans have ampler resources to create "street photography" images, why is it that not more Europeans have made it their tradition than what can be observed today. One line of thinking is that this tradition has been conceptually exhausted. Another is that such imagery does not sell very easily, it isn't decorative enough I would venture to guess, and therefore is discouraged as not sellable. A third possibility has to do with what is being published these days and therefore might have the possibility to generate income. In reality there is a close relationship between the decline of "street photography" with the downward spiral that has been experienced in the photographic marketplace during the late nineties by documentary photographers or photojournalists.
Today the images that sell well are those that depict stars, people that are either famous or nearly famous, the "wanabes" (want to be: famous). They come from the world of sports, film or music, or simply because of their wealth; mind you no teachers, poets, or farmers. The emphasis today IS on celebrity photographs. I believe this is the outcome of societies whose values have become more individualistic than ever before. The celebrity is, by definition, self-centered and narcissistic. The images of "life on the streets" had to do more with genuine concerns for the other, a sense of the collective, a more humanistic photography if you will. Today even those topics which would like to express a degree of humanity at large, tend to play to the most basic sentimentalism. Which together with "celebrity pictures" have become the other great topic of most publications and television presentations. Hard news which are very close to Soap Operas, that is what sells. And the distinction between them is ever smaller.
So where do we go from here? If I was forced to make some sort of prediction, I would venture to say that the Internet will play a major role in reviving both the interest and dedication to a more humanistic photography. The photographic community has always had a very healthy dedication to such imagery, and I am sure the Internet will provide ways and means to make such work more readily available again as the risks -from an economical point of view- will be diminished, and the niche markets will surely develop to give support to such work.
Digital technologies will play a major role in all of this happening. With photographers being able to spin off both video and still images from the same source, there is going to be a redeployment of what have been the traditional destinations for such work. Already there are film makers who are using modest camcorders to create films that are later being upgraded to 35mm for mainstream cinemas. In the process they can also document as would a still photographer with such images being used for other purposes than strictly a film.
Some digital cameras are today less obtrusive and visible, therefore can be carried around with less risk. They can be shot from angles that are usually not associated "with taking a picture". I have been surprised of how many times I have been able to photograph in situations where the expectations of me holding a camera to my eyes would have impeded me from taking the picture.
We can repurpose videos and pictures towards the Internet in new ways, to do so is obviously going to be a transition that depends more on the issues of bandwidth ( the speed at which you can access the information) than on the interest people have for certain topics. With these potential new markets, new possibilities will emerge for photographers, where content will be the driving force.
We have had some experiences at ZoneZero which are encouraging. The work that we show, as you well know if you are a frequent visitor to our site, is one of photography with content, all within a humanistic tradition. With the number of visitors continually on the rise, we sense there is indeed an interest for such work, in spite of all the opinions to the contrary.
We can imagine that at some point in the near future, we will be able to support the site both through advertising, commerce at our site ( the sale of books for instance is also on the rise) and contributions from sponsors. We will also be giving courses in everything related to photography, which we hope will also generate some income. We do not think it is too farfetched to make the operation self-sufficient, and to be able to support the work of photographers.
Maybe the tradition of "street photography", like all else in contemporary life, will have to find a new way of making images even though the intentions and the gaze might be similar. With new markets, will come new opportunities. What I am most confident about is that the need to comment on human nature and ordinary life, will not fade away, but rather come back with considerable strength.
What is 'Street Photography' ?
Over the last few decades the phrase 'Street Photography' has come to mean a great deal more than simply making exposures in a public place. Photographers like Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Joel Meyerowitz have forced a redefinition of the phrase that has many new implications.
Primarily Street Photography is not reportage, it is not a series of images displaying, together, the different facets of a subject or issue. For the Street Photographer there is no specific subject matter and only the issue of 'life' in general, he does not leave the house in the morning with an agenda and he doesn't visualise his photographs in advance of taking them. Street Photography is about seeing and reacting, almost by-passing thought altogether.
For many Street Photographers the process does not need 'unpacking', It is, for them, a simple 'Zen' like experience, they know what it feels like to take a great shot in the same way that the archer knows he has hit the bullseye before the arrow has fully left the bow. As an archer and Street Photographer myself, I can testify that, in either discipline, if I think about the shot too hard, it is gone.
If I were pushed to analyse further the characteristics of contemporary Street Photography it would have to include the following:
Firstly, a massive emphasis on the careful selection of those elements to include and exclude from the composition and an overwhelming obsession with the moment selected to make the exposure. These two decisions may at first seem obvious and universal to all kinds of photography, but it is with these two tools alone that the Street Photographer finds or creates the meaning in his images. He has no props or lighting, no time for selecting and changing lenses or filters, he has a split second to recognise and react to a happening.
Secondly, a high degree of empathy with the subject matter, Street Photographers often report a loss of 'self' when carefully watching the behavior of others, such is their emotional involvement.
Thirdly, many Street Photographers seem to be preoccupied with scenes that trigger an immediate emotional response, especially humour or a fascination with ambiguous or surreal happenings. A series of street photographs may show a 'crazy' world, perhaps 'dreamlike'. This is, for me, the most fascinating aspect of Street Photography, the fact that these 'crazy', 'unreal' images were all made in the most 'everyday' and 'real' location, the street. It was this paradox that fascinated me and kept me shooting in the 'everyday' streets of London when many of my colleagues were traveling to the worlds famines and war zones in search of exciting subject matter. Friends that I met for lunch would, just be back from the 'war in Bosnia' and I would declare proudly that I was just back from the 'sales in Oxford St'.
THE TUSCANY PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP
Whether you are an experienced photographer or a novice, there is nothing like 2 weeks in the beautiful Tuscan countryside to refresh your way of looking at the world. Join Joel Meyerowitz and a small group of American and European photographers for an intensive color workshop where you will explore and photograph street life in nearby villages as well as the Tuscan landscape. Nowhere are the charms of rural Tuscany more visible than in the piazzas, cafes and courtyards of these hilltop towns. Here we can observe the never-ending theater of daily ritual that offers us every variation of humor, gesture and drama, revealing, at times, the mystery and meaning of Italian life.
The Workshop's approach is designed to stimulate your sense of the photographic moment and to teach you how to be decisive when recognizing it. The world offers a stream of events unfolding before your eyes, only with the camera can you save that glimpse of it which carries meaning for you. Photographs reflect your instincts, perceptions and reactions to the world as you see it. This workshop is devoted to helping you clarify your gift.
To that end, time will be spent learning how to work quickly and invisibly in the streets, piazzas and markets of small Italian towns. Knowing what moves you will allow you to feel strongly about photography, whether it is people or poppy fields. In that regard we will hold several workshops in the landscape looking at ways in which you can claim it as your own.
Eminem did Carey
14 June 2002
Eminem has admitted he did date glitter girl, Mariah Carey according to reports today (Friday).
The affair was said to have taken place when her relationship with Latin crooner, Luis Miguel, was on the rocks despite denials from both camps at the time.
The rapper revealed:
"There is truth to the story. Now I respect her as a singer but on a personal level I'm not really feeling it."
"I just don't like her as a person. I learned a lesson from it, don't believe the hype. She doesn't really have it all together."
The rapper's lyrics on his number one album, 'The Eminem Show', give us a colourful display of his current feelings toward the singer.
On 'Superman' he raps:
"Bitch if you died, wouldn't buy you life/ What you tryin' to be, my new wife?/ What you Mariah? fly through twice/ But I do know one thing though/ Bitches they come, they go."
And in 'When The Music Stops' he says drugs are preferable to taking Mariah back:
"What the f*** you take me for? A joke? You smokin' crack?/ Before I do that, I beg Mariah to take me back."
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Party Animal Auction Raises $350,000
Lots of people paid a pretty penny for a "Party Animal."
An auction of some of the 200 decorated elephants and donkeys that decorated DC streets all summer brought in more than $350,000 for the DC Commission on the Arts.
Some businesses bought the animals that were nearest their buildings all summer and plan to display them again.
Others promise they'll give the animals a good home at their own homes. One Northwest doctor thinks his kids will get a kick out of the donkey he bought for $6,500.
Both the full-sized animals and miniature replicas were auctioned. There are a few animals still on sale via an online auction.
Organizers say the online sales will probably conclude sometime next week
Police Hold Nine over Alleged 'Posh Spice' Kidnap
Victoria Beckham, Spice Girl wife of England soccer captain David Beckham, said she was in shock on Sunday after police seized nine people suspected of plotting to kidnap her by knocking her out with a chemical spray.
Police said armed officers had arrested the nine in London after a tip-off from the News of the World tabloid newspaper whose reporters infiltrated a gang of Romanians and Albanians.
"I'm in absolute and total shock," Victoria told the Sunday newspaper. "It's clear these people were serious and that, of course, has scared the life out of me."
Her husband thanked the police for their professionalism and said he would review his family's security arrangements.
"The first role of a father and husband is to keep his family safe," David Beckham said in a statement.
Victoria shot to stardom in the 1990s as Posh Spice, part of the Spice Girls (news - web sites) band that has sold about 40 million albums worldwide. But her solo career failed to take off and these days her soccer star husband is the one making headlines.
The News of the World said the gang had planned to demand a ransom of about $7.8 million after seizing Victoria and, if necessary, her sons Brooklyn, three, and two-month-old Romeo some time before the year-end.
"Their plans were fairly well formed. They knew when, they knew where, they knew how," Andy Coulson, the paper's deputy editor, said.
Television showed footage released by the paper of heavily armed police arresting men at a rendezvous in a car park. Tapes, apparently recorded by under-cover journalists, showed alleged gang members discussing the plot.
"One week to bring this amount of money and then death. If it is not then they going to cut her in pieces. That's all," a man is heard saying with a heavy eastern European accent.
Scotland Yard said four men and one woman in London's Docklands and in Morden, south of the capital, were arrested on Saturday. Early on Sunday, a man and woman were held in Croydon, south of London. Two other men were arrested as part of a connected theft investigation.
"As a result of information from the News of the World, SO7 Kidnap Unit conducted an operation today to arrest a group of individuals who are suspected of having been involved in theft and a conspiracy to commit kidnap," said Detective Chief Superintendent John Coles, head of London's anti-kidnap unit.
The nine are being questioned at London police stations.
HIGH EARNER
The Sunday Times' annual "rich list" said David Beckham earned $24.18 million over the past year, making him the 45th highest-paid Briton, one place above Queen Elizabeth.
Victoria was at Manchester United's Old Trafford ground on Saturday afternoon to watch her husband and his team play. She had known of the threat but did not tell her husband until after the game, Sky News said.
She has been the target of a kidnap scare before. The Beckhams hired a bodyguard in 2000 after reports police had uncovered a plan to snatch Victoria and Brooklyn and hold them for a ransom of $1.56 million. No arrests were made.
Last July, a woman was detained under the Mental Health Act following allegations she broke into the hallway of the couple's Cheshire home, near Manchester, and stole their mail.
"We have good security. But if people want to do this to my family how can you be 100 percent sure you'll prevent it?" Victoria Beckham told the News of the World.
Rapper Eminem Gets More Respect
By NEKESA MUMBI MOODY, AP Music Writer
Until recently, it seemed only kids — and music critics — could love Eminem.
Politicians condemned his obscenity-laced and violent lyrics. Gay and women's groups blasted him as a homophobe and misogynist. The Grammy-winning Detroit rapper had millions in album sales, but little love from mainstream America.
Well, he's still not America's sweetheart. But some of the vitriol directed at Eminem has diminished — replaced not just by grudging respect, but by downright enthusiasm from some unlikely quarters.
"The guy is funny, smart, and sometimes shocking," author Stephen King gushed on his Web site. "Those are all things I look for in rock and roll."
Randy Newman called Eminem a "kindred spirit."
Writer Paul Slansky, a self-described middle-aged white guy, penned a New York Observer column titled, "Guess Who Thinks Eminem's a Genius? Middle-Aged Me." (He recently sounded the same theme in an essay on NPR.)
Whether the 30-year-old rapper has softened or America has just grown more accepting, "he has started to interest serious, grownup audiences that would have dismissed him as a teenage hip-hop phenomenon," said New York Times critic Janet Maslin, who spent time with Eminem on the set of his upcoming movie, "8 Mile," for Premiere magazine.
"He's moved out of the youth ghetto."
Interest in Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers, should grow even more with the release next Friday (Nov. 8) of "8 Mile," loosely based on his own troubled youth. The movie, directed by "L.A. Confidential's" Curtis Hanson, and Eminem's performance in it have received early critical acclaim.
"I think he's just going to earn a lot of respect from people," said Sia Michel, editor in chief at Spin magazine, which has Eminem on its December cover. "They're going to see that he's clearly a talented guy."
Not that people doubted Eminem's talent. His first disc, 1999's "The Slim Shady LP," was praised by critics for its twisted, demented but humorous wit, and earned him the first two of his five Grammys . He was the first white rapper since the Beastie Boys to enjoy street credibility and admiration from both blacks and whites.
But there was anger over his lyrics, which included violent fantasies about his estranged mother and his wife and anti-gay slurs. The late Billboard editor Timothy White dedicated one of his influential music columns to excoriating Eminem.
The rapper's personal battles didn't help. He was arrested twice in 2000 for weapons violations (he received probation). He went through an ugly divorce and custody battle over his young daughter, and was sued by his mother for defamation.
When "The Marshall Mathers LP," which sold 8 million copies in the United States alone, was nominated for album of the year in 2001, there were howls of protest — even moreso when openly gay star Elton John agreed to perform with him at the Grammy ceremony.
Scott Seomin, entertainment director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said that controversy helped Eminem's career: "All of that attention has brought him more into the mainstream."
Slansky said that before the duet with Elton John, on the song "Stan," "I was aware of (Eminem), and I kind of thought, and most people my age probably thought, he's not for me.
"When I heard that song, I thought, this was one of the best songs I ever heard."
He hasn't been able to stop listening to the latest album, "The Eminem Show," which came out this spring. After his Observer column, Slansky said, "I've gotten tons of e-mails ... it was like a general sigh of relief, like, 'Oh, a smart person (understands).'"
A USA Today article earlier this year compared Eminem's lyricism to that of Bob Dylan and other rock greats.
Not everyone is raving, however. Star, a popular New York DJ on the hip-hop-R&B station Hot 97, speculated that many of Eminem's new fans have never listened to the same kind of clever, angst-driven rhymes from black rappers such as DMX or Jay-Z.
"He's not the best. That's an insult to black people who have created this art form. It's an insult to Spanish people ... He's just the Elvis Presley of hip-hop, and that's it."
Eminem himself has said he probably wouldn't have sold as many albums had he been black.
As for his lyrics, fans say Eminem has been misunderstood or misrepresented.
"When you quote his lyrics out of context, or you just paraphrase the songs ... it sounds pretty bad," said Maslin. "But if you listen in context to the rhymes, to the presentation of it and the things beyond just lyrics, there's a lot going on. It's not as raw as that. It's actually a lot more witty."
"The Eminem Show" is more introspective, barely has an offensive word against gays and — although it still slams his mother and ex-wife — explains more of the bitterness.
"I think he was very aware of trying to change his image a bit with his last record," said Spin's Michel. "He showed a wider range of emotions, and concerns than you hadn't seen from him in the past."
The soundtrack to "8 Mile" is expected to debut at the top spot on the charts next week — its song "Lose Yourself" is already No. 1.
The movie appears likely to do the same.
"I've talked to lots of different people who are serious, book-reading older people with teenage kids, and they're going," said Maslin, chalking up a lot of that to "the curiosity factor."
___
On the Net:
http://www.eminem.com
http://www.8-mile.com
download this shit now ! KAZAA.com
The Streets
Original Pirate Material
Locked On / Vice
This is the debut album by the London garage (or in this case, bedroom) band, which consists solely of 21-year-old Mike Skinner. Whether or not this style of music (very English rapping over garage/house beats) will translate well overseas remains to be seen, but garage (and especially Skinner) is the current flavor of the month with the UK music press.
review from http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists/streets/originalpiratematerial
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