Pierrot le Fou
What does it mean to entangle the characters in a criminal underworld that seems phoney? What does it mean for Marianne to betray Ferdinand when her act of betrayal is both non-sequitous and inconsequential? If you can’t believe in the plot, there is no framework of causality in the film. You stagger from image to image and event to event without being moved by anything.
But what is left are fragments of meaning that, though not logical or causal, are emotionally true.
A stagey party that is emblematic of a stagey life, the characters throwing shadows like actors.
Ferdinand lying in the bath and reading a passage of art criticism to his daughter:
“Velázquez, past the age of 50, no longer painted specific objects. He drifted around things like the air, like twilight, catching unawares in the shimmering shadows the nuances of color that he transformed into the invisible core of his silent symphony. Henceforth, he captured only those mysterious interpenetrations that united shape and tone.”
You have no idea what the critic is talking about, but you know exactly what she means.
A red tie against a blue door.
A romantic drive that is at once a rich, graded old Hollywood picture, and washed through every few seconds with primary colours.
The final shot. Just the sea, with Marianne and Ferdinand reunited in the voiceover above our heads. Le Mépris, too, is about the dissolution of a relationship, and it, too, ends with a shot of the sea.
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Pierrot le Fou
What does it mean to entangle the characters in a criminal underworld that seems phoney? What does it mean for Marianne to betray Ferdinand when her act of betrayal is both non-sequitous and inconsequential? If you can’t believe in the plot, there is no framework of causality in the film. You stagger from image to image and event to event without being moved by anything.
But what is left are fragments of meaning that, though not logical or causal, are emotionally true.
A stagey party that is emblematic of a stagey life, the characters throwing shadows like actors.
Ferdinand lying in the bath and reading a passage of art criticism to his daughter:
“Velázquez, past the age of 50, no longer painted specific objects. He drifted around things like the air, like twilight, catching unawares in the shimmering shadows the nuances of color that he transformed into the invisible core of his silent symphony. Henceforth, he captured only those mysterious interpenetrations that united shape and tone.”
You have no idea what the critic is talking about, but you know exactly what she means.
A red tie against a blue door.
A romantic drive that is at once a rich, graded old Hollywood picture, and washed through every few seconds with primary colours.
The final shot. Just the sea, with Marianne and Ferdinand reunited in the voiceover above our heads. Le Mépris, too, is about the dissolution of a relationship, and it, too, ends with a shot of the sea.
#notebook #medianotes
Functional programming for the rest of us
Functional programming for the rest of us
George Orwell
Good prose is like a window pane.
#notebook
George Orwell
Good prose is like a window pane.
#notebook
Climbing
Twice this week, I have been to Brooklyn Boulders to climb. So fun. My friends, Zach and Dave, have helped me with tips, spots and a dizzying array of climbing terminology, and I have managed to do a V0, a V1 and a V1+.
Bump. Smear. Flag.
#notebook
Climbing
Twice this week, I have been to Brooklyn Boulders to climb. So fun. My friends, Zach and Dave, have helped me with tips, spots and a dizzying array of climbing terminology, and I have managed to do a V0, a V1 and a V1+.
Bump. Smear. Flag.
#notebook
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
A film about the man who is regarded as the best sushi chef in the world.
“You have to fall in love with your work.”
“You must immerse yourself in your work.”
“The rest is how hard you work.”
“After about ten years, they let you cook the eggs. I had been practicing making the egg sushi for a long time. I thought I would be good at it. I kept messing up. I was making up to four a day. But they kept saying ‘No good, no good, no good.’ I felt like it was impossible to satisfy them. After three or four months, I had made over 200 that were all rejected. When I finally did make a good one, Jiro said, 'Now this is how it should be done.’ I was so happy I cried.”
#notebook
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
A film about the man who is regarded as the best sushi chef in the world.
“You have to fall in love with your work.”
“You must immerse yourself in your work.”
“The rest is how hard you work.”
“After about ten years, they let you cook the eggs. I had been practicing making the egg sushi for a long time. I thought I would be good at it. I kept messing up. I was making up to four a day. But they kept saying ‘No good, no good, no good.’ I felt like it was impossible to satisfy them. After three or four months, I had made over 200 that were all rejected. When I finally did make a good one, Jiro said, 'Now this is how it should be done.’ I was so happy I cried.”
#notebook #medianotes
Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals at the Frick
Last Sunday, I got up early and went to the Frick. I stood outside and, after a couple of hours’ queuing, I went in.
The Girl with the Pearl Earring only really made me feel one thing: fearful radiance.
I very much liked Hals’s portrait of Jacob Pietersz Olycan. The hand is incredible. And his arrogant, slightly weary expression.
I spent a long time looking at Rembrant’s Tronie of Man With Feathered Cap. I found it fascinating that, the more I stared at the area around the right eye, the side of the nose and the nostril, the more realistic it became. It just seemed to come more and more into focus.
But my favourite, by a long chalk, was Rembrandt’s Susana. He has done two paintings of the subject. In this one, the lustful Babylonian elders are not pictured, because, as Susana’s gaze makes clear, we are them.
Her eyes are horrified, which makes it all the more awful. The whole moment seems to be paused like a memory, everything stopped: her hand wringing out her hair, her jewellery glinting hyperreal, the half-contorted thumb of the hand that is moving to cover her body.
#notebook
Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals at the Frick
Last Sunday, I got up early and went to the Frick. I stood outside and, after a couple of hours’ queuing, I went in.
The Girl with the Pearl Earring only really made me feel one thing: fearful radiance.
I very much liked Hals’s portrait of Jacob Pietersz Olycan. The hand is incredible. And his arrogant, slightly weary expression.
I spent a long time looking at Rembrant’s Tronie of Man With Feathered Cap. I found it fascinating that, the more I stared at the area around the right eye, the side of the nose and the nostril, the more realistic it became. It just seemed to come more and more into focus.
But my favourite, by a long chalk, was Rembrandt’s Susana. He has done two paintings of the subject. In this one, the lustful Babylonian elders are not pictured, because, as Susana’s gaze makes clear, we are them.
Her eyes are horrified, which makes it all the more awful. The whole moment seems to be paused like a memory, everything stopped: her hand wringing out her hair, her jewellery glinting hyperreal, the half-contorted thumb of the hand that is moving to cover her body.
#notebook #medianotes
The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark
Production Designer, Norman Reynolds: “I just wonder if it’s just a little bit convenient that everything happens in [the same town square].”
Steven Spielberg: “But you see, what it does is gives it a geography. And I think sometimes a geography makes an audience more secure with a story.”
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Steven Spielberg: “Every actor needs a different director for each moment. And I think I have to be a different director for each actor, moment to moment.”
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It was surprising to me how much Spielberg guided the actors. For example, he showed Karen Allen the exact facial expression he wanted for a scene.
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Spielberg storyboarded the entire film himself in advance.
#notebook
The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark
Production Designer, Norman Reynolds: “I just wonder if it’s just a little bit convenient that everything happens in [the same town square].”
Steven Spielberg: “But you see, what it does is gives it a geography. And I think sometimes a geography makes an audience more secure with a story.”
-
Steven Spielberg: “Every actor needs a different director for each moment. And I think I have to be a different director for each actor, moment to moment.”
-
It was surprising to me how much Spielberg guided the actors. For example, he showed Karen Allen the exact facial expression he wanted for a scene.
-
Spielberg storyboarded the entire film himself in advance.
#notebook
Why do some fields of enquiry - physics, maths - only advance, producing increasingly accurate views of the world, while others - politics, history - oscillate between being closer to and further from the truth?
Why do some fields of enquiry - physics, maths - only advance, producing increasingly accurate views of the world, while others - politics, history - oscillate between being closer to and further from the truth?
Seymour Papert, Mindstorms
[But there are cases where] the conflict [between reality and our expectations] remains obstinately in place however much we ponder the problem. These are the cases where we are tempted to conclude that "intuition cannot be trusted”. In these situations we need to improve our intuition, to debug it, but the pressure on us is to to abandon intuition and rely on equations instead. Usually when a student in this plight goes to the physics teacher saying, “I think the gyroscope should fall instead of standing upright,” the teacher responds by writing an equation to prove that that the thing stands upright. But this is not what the student needed. He already knew that it would stay upright, and this knowledge hurt by conflicting with intuition. By proving that it will stand upright the teacher rubs salt in the wound but does nothing to heal it. What the student needs is something quite different: better understanding of himself, not of the gyroscope. He wants to know why his intuition gave him a wrong expectation. He needs to know how to work on his intuitions in order to change them.
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Seymour Papert, Mindstorms
GAL’s idea [that looking at one two-pound object as made up of two one-pound objects, that a whole can be seen as additively made up of whatever parts we care to divide it up into] is powerful and is part of the intellectual toolkit of every modern mathematician, physicist or engineer. But one would not know this from looking at textbooks. GAL’s idea is not given a name, it is not attributed to a historical scientist, it is passed over in silence by teachers
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A game based on forced perspective
A game based on forced perspective
Blindness: Ludum Dare 28 innovation winner
http://shaunew.github.io/bl1nd-ld28/
I found this very tender. And I love the idea of only seeing having to infer the size and location of objects by changing your vantage point.
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Blindness: Ludum Dare 28 innovation winner
http://shaunew.github.io/bl1nd-ld28/
I found this very tender. And I love the idea of only seeing having to infer the size and location of objects by changing your vantage point.
#notebook
Wynne Greenwood, image from Peas
Wynne Greenwood, image from Peas
My niece likes to have many straws in her drink
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My niece likes to have many straws in her drink
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At Berkeley
A four hour documentary about UC Berkeley. It mostly covered administrative decision-making. The best parts, and the most convincing arguments for the film’s main thesis on the value of a public university, were the recordings of interesting lectures on science, history, psychology, English literature.
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At Berkeley
A four hour documentary about UC Berkeley. It mostly covered administrative decision-making. The best parts, and the most convincing arguments for the film’s main thesis on the value of a public university, were the recordings of interesting lectures on science, history, psychology, English literature.
#notebook
A present for my nephew
Can you guess what it is?
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A present for my nephew
Can you guess what it is?
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On the subway. Taken by Vera.
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On the subway. Taken by Vera.
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Wynne Greenwood
Wynne Greenwood
Richard Feynman
It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are truly appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing — atoms with curiosity — that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders.
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Richard Feynman
It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are truly appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing — atoms with curiosity — that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders.
#notebook
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
I saw this with my friend, Dave, a couple of weeks ago. The thrust was that every film tries to push an ideology, usually implicitly and sometimes covertly. Most of the ideologies that Slavoj Žižek cites are ones of control and subjugation.
It was interesting to hear his thoughts on the imagery, metaphor, scripting and construction of great films. Which is to say, it was great to hear his thoughts on how interesting films achieve their effects. It made me want to see Jaws, Taxi Driver, If and The Sound of Music again. It made me want to see Brief Encounter, The Searchers, West Side Story, Zabriskie Point and The Last Temptation of Christ for the first time.
But his central thesis, that popular films are pushers of ideologies of control, was like all grand unified theses of popular culture: it has so much material to choose from, and that material is so subjective, it is possible to find evidence for any argument. One can often even see a way to take the same material and argue the precise opposite.
Even less rigorous, he cited The Last Temptation of Christ as the only film that escapes the ideology of control and evangelises for individual freedom. Which sounds suspiciously like another ideology.
#notebook
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
I saw this with my friend, Dave, a couple of weeks ago. The thrust was that every film tries to push an ideology, usually implicitly and sometimes covertly. Most of the ideologies that Slavoj Žižek cites are ones of control and subjugation.
It was interesting to hear his thoughts on the imagery, metaphor, scripting and construction of great films. Which is to say, it was great to hear his thoughts on how interesting films achieve their effects. It made me want to see Jaws, Taxi Driver, If and The Sound of Music again. It made me want to see Brief Encounter, The Searchers, West Side Story, Zabriskie Point and The Last Temptation of Christ for the first time.
But his central thesis, that popular films are pushers of ideologies of control, was like all grand unified theses of popular culture: it has so much material to choose from, and that material is so subjective, it is possible to find evidence for any argument. One can often even see a way to take the same material and argue the precise opposite.
Even less rigorous, he cited The Last Temptation of Christ as the only film that escapes the ideology of control and evangelises for individual freedom. Which sounds suspiciously like another ideology.
#notebook
La Grande Bellezza
It’s fascinating to me when someone makes something that talks about something they find important, and I find it completely inconsequential.
#notebook
La Grande Bellezza
It’s fascinating to me when someone makes something that talks about something they find important, and I find it completely inconsequential.
#notebook
John Carmack talking about functional programming
John Carmack's keynote at Quakecon 2013 part 4 - YouTube
I found this talk fascinating.
He talks about how to enforce purity. Only let game objects access the state of other objects by passing them a memory protected copy. That way, any attempts to cheat and mutate data are quashed.
He talks about changing state in a functionally pure environment. If one object wants to mutate another, it just passes it a message. It is up to the receiver to apply the message in the next tick.
#notebook
John Carmack talking about functional programming
John Carmack's keynote at Quakecon 2013 part 4 - YouTube
I found this talk fascinating.
He talks about how to enforce purity. Only let game objects access the state of other objects by passing them a memory protected copy. That way, any attempts to cheat and mutate data are quashed.
He talks about changing state in a functionally pure environment. If one object wants to mutate another, it just passes it a message. It is up to the receiver to apply the message in the next tick.
#notebook
Antonioni
L'avventura
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Antonioni
L'avventura
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Symmetrical. Kind of.
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Symmetrical. Kind of.
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200 BC in The Met
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200 BC in The Met
#notebook #medianotes
Back to basics
Back to basics
