Darjeeling Limited and Hotel Cavalier

Darjeeling Limited

Hotel Cavalier

I watched Hotel Cavalier when it was first released on iTunes sometime in the middle of last year, on the urging of a friend who was amused by the dialogue between Natalie Portman and Luke Wilson’s characters:

Nat: Whatever happens in the end, I don’t wanna lose you as my friend.
Luke: I promise, I will never be your friend. No matter what. Ever.

He likened the scene to a particularly destructive relationship in his past. And who hasn’t felt that pull - whether or not it’s been acted upon? You care about someone… but they make you feel good and shitty at the same time?

In short, I really liked it. It’s short, poignant, the soundtrack is beautiful. The interplay between characters is both familiar and distant, punctuated by watching the sun from the balcony with the curtains billowing around them.

Darjeeling Limited

Darjeeling Limited unravels, like a thread pulled from a knit sweater. It’s a story about three brothers traveling on a train called “Darjeeling Limited”. Their father (Bill Murray) is killed by a taxi on the way to the train. Francis (Owen Wilson), injured in a motorcycle accident attempts to bring the family closer together persuades his brothers Peter (Adrian Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) to embark on a spiritual quest.

Francis puts together an entire itinerary of the most spiritual places in India. Like most journeys with a “plan”, things never turn out quite as expected. Unfortunately, they get kicked off the train. They meet and accidentally kill an Indian boy. They find their estranged mother, who skips off after they meet her at the convent where she was living.

Peter is running from his wife and unborn child. Jack is running from his ex-girlfriend. But somehow, their shared experiences allow them to establish a relationship beyond “family”. The journey itself and the search for a spiritual connection being the catalysis. The metaphor is pretty obvious, but established well - sentimental without being sappy, true to the Wes Anderson form.

I think the most compelling thing about Anderson’s work is his expression of the details that actually make up true to life interactions, the real and the mundane. Much in the same way that I appreciate about Murakami, he goes beyond the broad strokes of The Story into the components that make up The Story.

Fighting about petty things like who their father loved more. An affair on the train. Sharing prescription drugs procured in the Indian pharmacies. The special drink served to them on the train. The eldest choosing food for the others.

In short this is another gem from Wes Anderson. Like Hotel Cavalier, the soundtrack is beautiful, tying the movie together with the tunes introduced in Hotel Cavalier. My favorite is “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” by Peter Sarstedt.

I give it a solid - I like it. Go watch it. Enjoy. Damn it.

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On: *Camps and UnConferences

I’ve been hearing word around the campfire that *Camp(s) and unconferences have “jumped the shark”. The Reason? “Platinum Sponsors”, “no hCards”, and charging people to attend. This is a upsetting notion, not because I agree, but because I don’t.

The drive towards user generated content and organization has amazing appeal. As organizers you have to worry less about coming up with creative and innovative ideas for sessions and as attendees you have a place in contributing your ideas and ideals to the community. At this point, South by Southwest, at least the Interactive sessions contribute to the “paid unconference” conference.

In my opinion there are a few key notes to an unconferences>
which may have outgrown the original ideals of the FooCamp/BarCamp.

As much as the originators of AN Open Source Conference have a strong sense of community and freedom of information around the topics suggested… another IDEAL has presented itself. Larger organizations and corporations have adopted the idea that individuals in their field of expertise can contribute more to the content of a “conference” than an “expert” in the “respected field”.

The following criticisms have come to mind:

• Just because you have been a part of an emergent ideal from the beginning, it does not mean that the idea is a bad one - and since it has evolved to incorporate a larger audience *also* does not make it a bad idea.
• NOR does it give you the right to judge that adoption and incorporation of the method into negativity.
• If there is such a vehement irritation for large scale adoption of user driven conference… I guess you’d better come up with something new, exciting, and different. Because the IDEA that *your* style of “conference” has become mainstream *IS* validation that it was a good idea to begin with and that the concept has grown beyond the original “intention” and taken on a life of it’s own.
• If pride is an issue… be glad that you were at the forefront of a new way of sharing ideas, despite the corprorateization of said methodology. Enjoy that you are at the forefront of socio-communication. Paid or not paid, sponsored or not sponsored.

I suppose early adopters feel the most shafted by the invasion of their ideas.

Honestly, I do feel the sting… but not every *good* early idea is limited by it’s early adoption.

Points on Plurk.

Plurk.

Touted as an alternative to Twitter and gained a degree of popularity during a particularly horrendous Twitter-flakeage (along with friendfeed), and HOW can I blame people for pursuing alternatives?

The Interesting:
Plurk appears to take the “timeline” seriously, there is a scrolling hour display across the bottom edge of the plurkstream. The UI updates posts in a stream that spans the browser window places various individual’s updates in a left (older) to right (newer) fashion. In a way, it’s like stepping into the stream of someone’s updates.

The short “140 character” limit and a UI that taps into the expression of emotional state attached to an action give Plurk it’s micro-blog distinction.

However, there are some problematic elements:
a) The span is less than a day wide. You have to page back to see farther than 3-4 hours between posts.

b) User’s posts seem to be placed haphazardly in the “flow” - someone updates; and there’s no rhyme or reason as to where (vertically) it shows up in the plurkstream.

c) User responses attach to the original post - two things that are annoying about this… 1) you have to go back to the original post to find out what’s been said since the last post/comment… 2) you can tell *if* things have been updated, but “when” - since the overall “design” seems to convey ‘things in order’ - this does not make sense.

d) In order to update your plurkstream or see responses, you have to actually click an “update” link.

Intuitive UI improvements:
Complex or simple. It seems that Plurk has decided to take the “middle road” by making some features less accessible.

a) Just update the plurkstream. The backend is smart enough to figure out that there has been an update, so why not just post it?

Due to the nature of plurk-repsonses; requesting to view only plurks with responses makes sense, however, there is also a visual notification of a plurk-response in three ways - 1) comment number next to the plurk is updated, 2) the comment number is highlighted in red, and 3) the link in the lower left corner of the page indicating the number of responses.

b) Give users the ability to view the plurkstream via more than a couple of hours at a stretch. A single day view with an adjusted hour span would be an improvement over having to paginate backwards - even though there is a marker for “Yesterday”.

c) Vertical plurkstream… Make Sense. There does not appear to be a rhyme or reason for the location of various plurks in the vertical view. Not organized by user, not by time posted…

Usability notes:
a) Combine account and profile settings. It’s more intuitive to the user to modify aspects of their “plurk-sionality” in the same place.

b) You can scan all the way forward, but not all the way back in the timeline.

General comments:
It would be great to have more transparency between Plurk developers and the Plurk community. I’ve posted comments to the Plurk GetSatisfaction page.

Overall Plurk is an interesting little web service that allows you to view and post updates in realtime and consolidating responses to posts in a visually unique fashion. It’s got a number of other kitschy features, such as Karma - a unique bend on the Social Networking scene, time will tell if both Plurk and it’s features have sticking power.

The Number 23

I’ve been watching movies lately. The movie “number 23″ intrigued me from the moment I knew that it existed. Having a teenage relationship with numerology and The Principia Discordia. My number on the swim team was 23. Many of my best friend’s email addresses have the number 23 in them somehow. It’s an old obsession come to life… but back to the story.

I never saw it in the theater. It’s been years since movies on the big screen have moved me to actually make the trek out.

number 23 is a dark and bizarre unfolding of a life forgotten. Pulp Noir mixed in with something else, a strange form of quasi realism that seems to actually hold the film together and yet contribute to the pulpy-disjointed psychosis that takes hold of the main character Jim Carrey. Paranoia comes on slowly, noticing connections that evolve into a singular focus on the number.

What happens when who you *were* starts invading who you have become?

Personally, I love the delta between the hard-ass pulp detective and the mild mannered guy in the present. At all times in his narrative, he appears fearful of himself, timid.

His tragedy is that he has both a present and a distant past. Recent past has been forgotten.

How long can you hide the truth from yourself. Especially when you find a book that is your own confession. Yet the fragile reality unravels. The more a vague picture emerges, like astrology coaless into reality. Then, paranoia.

You see what you search for. Everywhere.

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The Orphanage

If you’ve seen and loved Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro brings you on another trip into the fantastic, the edge between what is possible and what is not. Reality and imagination - in a way that American’s haven’t really been able to portray in film. It doesn’t seem to be “the way”.

My appreciation of Magical Realism was born out of Gabriel Garcia’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, down the rabbit hole of imagery, that small place where your senses might lie to you.

del Toro takes you on a journey of an orphan, who adopts an orphan… then upon returning to her orphanage, perhaps to give back some of the care she received as an orphan herself. But winds up learning terrible truths about events that took place before she could understand them. The Orphanage itself becomes both her obsession and her prison, love for her son leads her on a chase that will change the way she looks at life, death, and the afterlife.

The film itself leaves clues as to the conclusion - as the children have left clues as to truths of their lives and deaths.

Is it possible to be touched and freaked out by the same movie? The truth unravels slowly, like pulling on the thread of crochet… and the finish is filled with love - the sweet and the sour, life and death, both vibrant, as real as the sun and the sea.

It seems that del Toro has a beautiful way of connecting life and death, making the vision whole and fluid, like waves, beating the shore, like the tide, marching in and marching out - like the rhythm of the world, in constant motion.

Edit: Side note - the DVD menu-ing system is awesome. Visuals cycle, but the sound does not. I approve!

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Beating a Dead Horse - Lacey/Zuckerburg, SxSW Keynote 2008

I ended up writing this long-a** response to this, regarding the majority response of “EPIC FAIL” to the Zuckerburg Keynote at South By Southwest 2008, defending Sarah Lacey’s handling of the interview.

Short version of the drama; Lacey handled the interview somewhat unprofessionally, Zuckerburg gave very short responses to ambiguous questions, the Twitter-verse had a field day, and then the heckling began.

Controversial? Possibly. Will be relevant in 5 years? Probably not…

The interview itself was mediocre at best, getting a 23 yr. old billionaire to open up to you onstage by twirling one’s hair and giggling like school girl must be hard work indeed for one of the Valley’s Smoking Foxes; however it’s actually her response that rubs me the wrong way.

If she honestly believes that there were things that she could have done better - saying that she’s one of the “one of the only women reporting on tech” and it’s “the price of being high profile”, don’t cut it. The way that she responded to the Keynote audience and post-interview… interviews do not speak to her ability as a Reporter and using her “unusual style” of (extremely flirtatious) interviewing? She could have handled all of the above with a bit more grace and professionalism.

Appealing to the sexual nature of a young gent who’s already been a tough nut to crack as an interviewee? As a member of the female gender myself, frankly, it was embarrassing. Like a high school cheerleader trying to get the star football player to ask her to the prom.

I appreciate the people (like yourself) who have gone out of their way to try and moderate the extremes, the people who’ve publicly gone to either Zuckerburg or Lacey and tried to get their opinion(s) on the matter. However, it doesn’t change the three major beefs I’ve had with both the interview and the aftermath -

a) Lacey didn’t know her audience - South by Southwest isn’t “Business Week” - while there are a number of people interested in the business implications of social networking; I doubt that makes up enough of the percentage to ONLY speak to that ends.

b) Interviews are about the Interviewee, not the Interviewer. Having gone back over the recordings more than once - it appears that Lacey’s “style” was to flirt with Zuckerburg; intertwine her personal feelings and experiences about new developments with Facebook and random anecdotes about herself. The ratio of content from Mark versus content from her was dismal.

- I will side note that last comment with; if Zuckerburg is really as shy as other reports indicated, his “comfortableness” with the interviewer taking more of the spotlight are probably valid -

c) the aftermath - Lacey’s comments to Omar Gallaga (Austin American-Statesman) were handled as badly as her response to the people heckling her onstage interview. She portrayed herself as a disgusted martyr saying that she’d “i made the mistake of coming to a developer conference” and that “the price of being high profile” is that she’d experienced “way worse shit on a much larger scale”

I guess the overall downside is that most people (both the judged and the judgmental) in question are going to walk away from this feeling like their sh*t doesn’t stink and they personally did nothing “wrong” to affect the situation.

Some of the questions that we really should be focusing on are: a) Do we want something like this in SxSW 2009? b) Should there be more coaching on Keynotes, Panels, “Core Conversations”, and Presentations for future SxSW(s)? c) How can we (as attendees and supporters of SxSWi) drive to make a better conference - one that’s accessible and interesting to “the high profile”, the budding (or veteran) web developer, and many people go to share in the energy and gain inspiration by simply showing up.

What, really, have we learned?

DVD gripes

I’m primarily a DVD watcher. Actually, on near-all accounts. [the only shows I will occasionally catch on TV straight are stuff on the Discovery Channel or maybe the Food Network...]

I’ve got a gripe, or several, in point of fact. Fraking DVD menus. In no particular order…

Gripe #1:  Ok, so if DVD menus NEED to stop looping the 20 seconds of music after a certain point. Almost all DVD menus suffer from this. I’m sure implementing this feature is an achievable goal. [WHY no one has figured this out yet is beyond me] If Blu-Ray is the new new thing, pls implement, kthxbai.

Gripe #2:  If the DVDs are of a television series… there has to be some way to play through the entire DVD without having to select which episode specifically, then choose to play it. [die Firefly menus, die]

Gripe #3:  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, it’s likely that I actually paid money for that little shiny piece of plastic… why $diety why in the hell do I have to sit through 20 minutes of previews? It’s like going to the theater! I paid at least 10 bucks to get in and then by the time the picture actually starts… I’ve forgotten what I intended to see!  …I’m exaggerating a bit here, but y’all get my meaning.

Thing is, most of you out there have already had some thought along these lines… yet the situation remains the same… I say rise up in the cafeteria and stab them with your plastic forks!

I think I might have to find a way to get into DVD production and fix it myself! Anyone out there got an IN?

*sigh* work. work. work…

i <3 unrealistic science fiction

Recently watched “The Day After Tomorrow”. Wow. There is a serious suspension of belief that has to occur before you can even begin to enjoy the film.

Synopsis:
So, there’s a bunch of scientists that say global warming is going to cause major climate change [big surprise there]. The polar ice caps melt. There are massive hailstorms within days. Giant tidal waves bury New York City - then the temperature drops below freezing. In days.

The touching part is that one of the scientists has a son who’s going to NYC to participate in this academic competition; but the scientist is generally absent as a father and nearly forgets to take his son to the airport. Everyone on the academic team gets stuck in a library on the way back from the competition. Forced to burn books to stay warm and eat snax out of the vending machines as to not starve.

Well; after many trials and tribulations, dad comes through to rescue son and co. out of the library.

If you can forgive all of the highly improbable factors… go ahead and give it a whirl. Unfortunately, I will never get that two hours of my life back…

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