2012-01-30
post/16755128380
quote 10:24:05
“ Cars spend just 5 percent of their lives in motion. ”
A diverting statistic from Between the Lines, a feature on parking in that city from Los Angeles magazine.
2012-01-27
post/16596658651
quote 21:52:45
“ Twitter made an important announcement this week regarding their ability to filter content across jurisdictions. The ensuing conspiracy theories and hand-wringing in certain corners of the internet were depressingly predictable, and as I tweeted this morning:If you’re upset by twitter’s per-country filtering announcement, you know much less about doing business online than you think you do.
But posting such a thing without laying out “things you should know about doing business online” is, frankly, smug and irritating. So, here goes. ”
Simon Batistoni: What you need to know about Twitter’s new filters.
Well worth a read, because he knows what he’s talking about.
2012-01-24
post/16425008238
quote 21:48:05
“ We have to stop building cities as if everyone is 30 years-old and athletic. ”
post/16422264693
quote 21:01:18
“ Aren’t Oscarbatory films like The Artist, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris the high brow equivalent of the Transformers, easing the viewer into the same warm nostalgia bath, just with the particulars adjusted to reflect a different audience’s adolescent fixations? Might they even be even more meretricious because they rely on the borrowed auras from the canonical works/figures they reference (Méliès rather than Mégatron) to activate feelings of barely-earned recognition, which somehow invokes in the audience the false spirit of learning, or at very least, the smug satisfaction of the pub trivia warrior? ”
Todd Serencha, via perpetua.
I think this might be a more forceful statement of what I was nudging towards. (I’ve seen all three - but none of the Transformers films - and enjoyed them all, but I still take his point. They just happen to be catering to my tastes.)
Also, I have to remember “Oscarbatory” for next year.
post/16419615205
quote 20:09:05
“ I think TV is pushing ahead. It used to be we make TV on video and they remake it on 35mm. We all now work in high-def, we all have the same cameras. You can get things made the same year you think of it, rather than 12 years later. We can make three Sherlock films in the time it takes Hollywood to have lunch. ”
Steven Moffat, answering “Isn’t choosing British TV over Hollywood nuts, career-wise?” in an interview in the Guardian: ‘There is a clue everybody’s missed’: Sherlock writer interviewed.
post/16418780837
quote 19:51:06
“ A library is not simply the books and the computers and the resources, but it’s actually a place where there aren’t four or five conversations going on. It’s a place where children can read and be on their own, and that’s invaluable. But they want to turn our library into some sort of retail outlet. ”
Alan Bennett, quoted in the Paris Review: Alan Bennett on ‘Smut’, by Jonathan Gharraie.
2012-01-16
post/15976001965
quote 23:45:05
“ Uggie, the cute Jack Russell terrier in the movie, has been featured extensively, perhaps exhaustively, on TV chat shows. Why? Because like the two other principals, Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, he speaks no English, but is at least not expected to. Dujardin has nowhere near enough English to carry a TV interview, so he has been reduced to mugging and doing wacky animal impressions, and there have been rumours that producer Harvey Weinstein is worried that reminders of the film’s Frenchness will be a turn-off. Nonetheless, The Artist may well turn out to be the first French film to win best picture at the Academy Awards, but it will have achieved this triumph by keeping schtum, by being silent and reversing the talkie revolution. ”
Peter Bradshaw: Is The Artist’s awards momentum a dramatic comedy of errors?
post/15963051298
quote 20:16:06
“ This is exactly the kind of film I want to be making. I don’t want to be making big, silly films. ”
Carey Mulligan’s words to Steve McQueen when trying to win the part in Shame, from her interview in the Guardian: ‘I haven’t seen myself naked in the mirror for a decade’.
2012-01-10
post/15630130619
quote 20:13:05
“ Cities look to me to be our most characteristic technology. We didn’t really get interesting as a species until we became able to do cities—that’s when it all got really diverse, because you can’t do cities without a substrate of other technologies. ”
William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211 in the Paris Review.
My world seems to be a series of tightly-connected cities, separated by a series of scenery for viewing from trains or planes.
post/15603992043
quote 04:00:04
“ The Web is teeming with code because code is text and text is cheap, portable and searchable. Copying is encouraged, not frowned upon. The neophyte programmer never has to learn alone. ”
