July 2017

spudoogle video loop

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screenshot of spudoogle twitter video thumbnail -- with one small correction

giflikevideoloop

Have been enjoying Spudoogle's twitter account recently but still have a problem with the way the SVS (Silicon Valley scum) appropriated GIFs to their commercial platforms. It's like in the movie Barton Fink where the cigar-smoking producer tells the East Coast populist playwright he wants "movies with that 'Barton Fink' feeling," then later says "get out of my office, I can get 100 writers who can give me that 'Barton Fink' feeling."
One imagines an SVS getting a neck massage and saying, "we need something like those GIF things the kids are exchanging." And then the tech slaves come up with a typical, locked-in proprietary video format with the word "GIF" superimposed. 100 guys can give them that animated GIF feeling.

It's not spudoogle's fault, he accepts conditions the way they are and rolls with the shoddy resizing, rounded edges, and fake labeling. That's twitter's price for providing an audience for your GIFs.

jack reacher, you are no travis mcgee

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If you're stuck in an airport, Jack Reacher novels will kill a few hours but aren't otherwise recommended. Lee Child, the author, conceived the character as a way to make money after he was laid off from his TV job -- a dubious provenance that seems to impress some writers. The runaway success of the franchise gives a reading of the zeitgeist, at least: readers identify with a big tough guy who beats the sh*t out of people who don't ascribe to Hollywood ideals of liberal humanism. Think Billy Jack without the hippies.
Before leaving TV, Child wasn't much of a thriller reader, he admits in an introduction to one of the books, but he found a blueprint in John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Like Trav, Reacher is a single, rootless, white knight for hire, except Reacher doesn't do it for money, he just stumbles into these situations where wrongs need rightin'. MacDonald wrote pulp but he had convictions, expressed in long, precocious rants about economics and politics, so engaging they caused the action momentarily to stop dead until the author ran out of gas (MacDonald even joked about this). MacDonald also had a lifelong theme, which was the dark sexual undercurrent in Ozzie and Harriett America: the McGee books first appeared in the early 1960s, around the same time as his novel The Executioners, which became the movie Cape Fear. No pulpster beat MacDonald at describing a nymph or satyr sucking someone's fortune dry.
Child has opinions, too, and they are occasionally well-expressed, but it's hard to trust such a mercenary concoction as Jack Reacher. It all seems focus-grouped. If a villain is a hunter, he doesn't just hunt deer, he lazily picks off armadillos from a truck, justifying the character's eventual humiliation. A stalker of teenage illegal aliens won't simply kill them but must also behead and partially flay them. For a child molester, nothing less than a barn full of abused victims will do.
The karma of the market played an amusing prank on Child, though. In the books Reacher is a 6 foot 5 inch, musclebound, formidable guy in his thirties. In the movie versions he is played by a diminutive egomaniac in his mid-50s.

oculus bereft, or, one gimmick too far

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Possibly the most annoying feedback I've received to a written essay was from VRfan (not his or her real screenname) on the late Dump.fm.
I posted a link to The Stubborn Dream of Everyday Virtuality [Internet Archive], a thinkpiece on why we weren't living in The Matrix yet. VRfan apparently didn't read the essay but took the time to post a GIF of a screenshot of someone typing the word "Oculus" into a browser and getting "No Result," within the text of the essay. As if to say, "How could the writing possibly be any good if it doesn't mention Oculus Rift? I rest my case." I pointed out that it was posted in 2011, before Oculus was a thing, and VRfan replied, "Oh."
The date's right on there. If the piece were written today it might include a reference to Oculus as yet another example of the persistence of the virtual reality ideal in the face of public apathy, along with Second Life.
At any rate, VRfan thinks Oculus is important, and so do the curators of the Whitney Biennial (who showed some recent goggles art), despite articles such as Another Price Slash Suggests Oculus Is Dead in the Water, from MIT Technology Review. Read it and weep CGI tears.
(That's not to suggest any wisdom on the part of the marketplace. Likely if Rift is failing it's because people don't want to be torn away from their phones.)

linear regressionists (anti-CD, 1990)

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via Discogs:

linear_regressionists_cover

linear_regressionistsCD

The Linear Regressionists ‎– Living On The Regression Line
Label: Pursuit Of Market Share ‎– POMS ROI-001, RRRecords ‎– CD-002
Format: CD, Limited Edition, Anti-CD
Country: Germany
Released: 1990
Genre: Non-Music

Tracklist

1 Untitled

Credits

Concept By – Bernhard Assfalg, Don Hedeker, Franz Liebl, Lydia Tomkiw, RRR (2)

Notes
"The POMS Principles - applying violence to compact discs
The POMS Series in Anti-Cds Vol. 1"

(unplayable cd perforated by 10 holes)

the burglar, 1955-7

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photo via IMDb

Following up on a run of reading David Goodis novels, checked out his self-adapted film version of The Burglar (he wrote the screenplay, the director was Paul Wendkos). Made in '55, it sat on the shelf until '57, when the career of Jayne Mansfield took off with The Girl Can't Help It. She is physically miscast here but her acting is good. Dan Duryea plays Nat Harbin, a gloomy burglar who heads a small, dysfunctional crime family, consisting of himself, a fence, a heavy, and "Gladden," a girl he's looked after for years as a de facto sister. In an extended flashback (better in the book, too sketchy in the movie) we learn about Nat's past as a destitute orphan adopted and mentored by a professional thief named Gerald Gladden. Gerald dies during a botched robbery and tells Nat he must always look after his daughter, who is simply called Gladden. Nat wrestles throughout the story with his loyalty to a dead father-figure and the exploitation of Gladden as part of the burglary team (she cases potential locations).

Nat's angst is less compelling in the film than the book. We don't really get a feeling for the horrific grind of his youthful poverty before Gerald "rescued" him, as conveyed in Goodis' captivatingly anguished prose, nor do we really understand why Nat seems so conflicted about Gladden. We see Duryea resisting the advances of the ultra-sexy Mansfield, but in the film he looks twenty years older than she does. In the book the characters are close in age and Gladden isn't a bombshell, but a "thin" young woman who could be a sister, friend, or lover, if the two could only get their feelings straight and stop being haunted by Gerald's ghost. In both versions, Nat and Gladden separate and dally with other partners, leading to a dark conclusion.