These were too good not to post.
http://gawker.com/5035209/bush-knows-how-to-enjoy-the-summer
and
http://deadspin.com/5035136/the-george-w-bush-female-athlete-inspection-continues
2 interesting things about the JUMBOTRON after seeing the Boss in concert last night.
It looked like they delay the image feed so that it perfectly matches the time the sound takes to echo throughout the stadium. Little Max Weinberg from a few thousand feet off consistently looked a half-beat off from the sound and his image up on the huge screen.
People behave completely differently when they know they’re on the jumbotron at arena shows than people at sporting events. At sporting events recognize themselves on the screen, scan the stadium for the camera, go nuts, wave signs. Last night at Bruce, people who happened to see themselves on screen (you could tell from the slight glance) would quickly snap their attention back on stage and act as if they didn’t know they were on camera, act as if they were in a famous live recording. Maybe this was something unique to this concert, or maybe the specific postures people take toward the insertion of a single video feed within a massive crowd says something about the different aesthetics of these events.
I’m sort of glad I was sitting in the back, because it seemed like I was the only one who didn’t know all the words to every single song.
Cory Doctorow has a recent article in Locus Magazine on why high definition is bad for science fiction films. Basically, the argument is: in the case of CGI special effects (SF films being the perfect genre for showcasing the next unimaginable spectacle), their quality–or at least definition–exponentially increases each year, as does the amount of money poured into such projects. While a film released five years ago might seem laughably outdated by today’s visual standards, a certain amount of longevity can be ensured by small-screen formats on which it may be harder to see the primitive blemishes of last year’s computer graphics. But with an attendant decline in the cost of bigger, high definition LCD screens, Doctorow says “Whatever longevity can be wrung from a movie by releasing it to smaller, more forgiving screens is cut short by the living-room behemoths that are being pushed on us today,” and the returns that can be anticipated by major studios for investing in $200 million SF blockbusters will be less and less. There is an inverse relationship between Moore’s law and the valuation of filmic SF spectacle.
But I think this argument might not consider the internal mechanics of SF’s reception and the increasingly small epicycles of nostalgia that we seem to be going through in popular culture, which becomes especially pronounced in the case of science fiction films. SF seems to have a different sort of half-life than other fictional modes, it ages much more quickly, in a way that I’m not sure how to talk about. Perhaps SF films draw off of a particular a mode of being in the world that is more easily forgotten, more fragile than the raw materials used in the construction of other types of (realistic) films? A mode of being with technologies that would otherwise be forgotten, but can only be recovered in any sense through some sort of patronizing nostalgia?
