observando el cielo

This was my favorite movie at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. I thought it was extraordinary. Like some sort of terrorist imax movie, Jeanne Liotta filmed the night sky for six years and Peggy Ahwesh put together an amazing soundtrack of VLF (very low frequency) sound. The title is nice as well. It can mean a few things: watching or observing the sky or stars as well as the heavens or heaven. We've been in the same programs before at the 2005 NY Underground Film Festival and both made the Village Voice Year in Experimental Film last year. Glad to be on the same team.

knights assault not our fault

IPS news is reporting that the US military seriously underestimated the Mahdi Army and are now blaming it on Prime Minister Maliki:

...The Times quoted a "senior Western official in Baghdad" -- the term usually used for the ambassador or senior military commander -- as saying, "Maliki miscalculated," adding, "From all I hear, al-Maliki's trip was not intended to be the start of major combat operations right there, but a show of force."

The official claimed there were "some heated exchanges between him and the generals, who out of hurt pride or out of calculation or both then insisted on him taking responsibility."

These suggestions that it was al-Maliki who miscalculated in Basra are clearly false. No significant Iraqi military action can be planned without a range of military support functions being undertaken by the U.S. command. On Mar. 25, just as the operation was getting under way in Basra, U.S. military spokesman Col. Bill Buckner said "coalition forces" were providing intelligence, surveillance and support aircraft for the operation.

Furthermore, the embedded role of the U.S. Military Transition Teams (MTTs) makes it impossible that any Iraqi military operation could be planned without their full involvement...

bush booed on opening day

Will Leitch, Deadspin, on President Bush’s baseball knowledge: “It kind of creeped us out, actually, that Dubya was so well-versed in the world of baseball; he even knew that Jeff Francoeur had been hit in the face with a pitch in spring training. As cool as we might think it is for our President to love the great game so much, we’re still not sure we feel comfortable with the commander-in-chief having that much free time.”

Clinton/Nader

Politico is running a story about Ralph:
Senator Clinton:
Just read where Senator Patrick Leahy is calling on you to drop out of the Presidential race. Believe me. I know something about this. Here’s my advice: Don’t listen to people when they tell you not to run anymore. That’s just political bigotry.

Listen to your own inner citizen First Amendment voice. This is America. Just like every other citizen, you have a right to run. Whenever you like. For as long as you like. It’s up to you, Hillary. Just tell them — It’s democracy. Get used to it.

Yours truly, Ralph Nader

strangelets and tiny black holes

Science article in the New York Times:
...Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead...

alabama gov released from jail

The Birmingham News is breaking the story that the 11th Circuit Appeal Court is letting him out. The arch-republican attorney general is "disappointed". He's going to be even more disappointed when he gets to take over the cell. There was an amazing expose by 60 Minutes about the case. Karl Rove pressured a staffer to find some dirt on the guy (á la Spitzer) but he was clean. So they played dirty and got him charged on some trumped up corruption charges. The district attorney and judge are republican hacks. Another weird note: the 60 Minutes episode was mysteriously bumped from the air in a big chunk of Alabama. The station claimed there were transmission problems and later backtracked and made some other excuse. Unbelievable.
PART 1: PART 2:

rip: new york underground film festival

Sad that the New York Underground Film Festival is closing because it had a real reputation for taking chances on experimental programming while still getting people in the seats. This is the latest in a series of festivals going under like Cinematexas in Austin and the Thaw festival in Iowa City. All three were festivals that showed the breadth of new cinema in the US. They mixed satire and difficult conceptual work with personal docs and performative videos and really focused on film and video as a artistic expression without playing to the fantasy of modernist high art.

A number of things have happened in recent years to affect this. A lot of high quality video work is going to galleries now and a lot of funny and smart political videos are going right up to youtube so that takes a good chunk of the traditional material out. The underground and experimental festivals are getting squeezed out of the market to a certain degree. For me, these kinds of festivals are a safe venue to try different things. My first feature film Interkosmos got great reviews and played at lots of international festivals, but I followed it up with a more difficult film that had almost no plot and was politically very heavy. A number of programmers told me there was just no way they could find a place for it. But it showed at festivals like New York and Chicago Underground, which took a chance on it. I think there has to be options for films that do not fit into a market slot, whether its the independent market, straight political docs or the gallery scene, which is about collectors hoarding work in the hope that they can be buried with their 60-million-dollar DVD when they die like the Japanese businessman with the Van Gogh.

There's another school of thought, which is that everything dies eventually and new spaces and opportunities grow up and adapt. That's certainly true. There's a couple of newer experimental festivals that seem to be thriving like PDX in Portland and FLEX in Gainesville, Florida and the folks who ran NYUFF are now doing screening series (Light Industries and Migrating Forms). But it's nice to have a festival in the heart of the capitalism, which celebrates at one time over one long weekend work that really gets at what the hell is going on in our country and on our planet without playing by the rules set out for us by the folks that are running the show.

venezuela, si!

I just watched 5 Factories by Dario Azellinni and Oliver Ressler. The movie played with my movie La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo at the New Museum last month but I didn't get to see it. So we did a swap across the Atlantic. It jumps right in with the economics and reality of running a factory then goes to the next one. Aluminum, paper, cocoa, textile and ketchup factories. It's beautifully shot and gives a real revolutionary perspective. Not just a Chavez commercial, which I was afraid of. A lot of talk by the president of the aluminum factory about Soviet-style "state capitalism" masquerading as socialism. On the one hand, it's cool that workers really are controlling the factories and are not just ceding control to the state. On the other hand, his rhetoric sounds a lot like a pure Marxist denouncing revisionists. I wonder about some of the problems and how long this is feasible. It seems extraordinary and hopeful. I mean instead of just accepting the great movement of capital and markets, take control of the closing/closed factories and keep everyone at work. The people are inspiring. Have to get used to the Caribbean accent where everyone drops their s's.

defector

The Reluctant Communist was a must read for me since I am premiering my film about North Korea this month. It's worth the read. There's a co-author which saves us from the hard work of reading a bad writer. The details of life in North Korea are extraordinary, all the more so since his life was one of a certain privilege. Anyone living in Pyongyang has a certain degree of privilege. You have to be of good socialist stock to live in the city. But at times his role as a defector is more useful to the government than other times. The movie Crossing the Line tells the same story from the point of view of one of the other U.S. army defectors (four in all). In the movie, you definitely get the idea of the unreliable narrator both from the fact that the defector in that case is still in North Korea so how much can he really say and because the guy comes off as kind of an ass. Jenkins, the protagonist of the book was allowed after years of pressure from Japan to move to Japan with his kidnapped Japanese wife and two daughters. Here is where the problem comes in. To get out of going to U.S. jail as a traitor, he basically has to denounce his entire existence in North Korea (except for his wife and daughters). He goes to a five-star hotel in Indonesia and is amazed at the opulence. Blah blah. Ends the book by thanking God i think. I wonder what he left out to save himself. Nevertheless, he talked a bit about playing American imperialists in films and becoming famous there. That and other great details.

holiday reading

I got Torture and Democracy for Christmas. Finished it last month. Really extraordinary. It explains why waterboarding is not simulated drowning and how so-called clean tortures do all sorts of damage. Plus it clears up misconceptions both from the right on the efficacy of torture and from the left about the U.S. dissemination of torture. One favorite anecdote was from a British officer in the thirties talking about how lazy torturers are. How they'd rather sit in the shade and torture someone for any information rather than go out in the hot sun and do the difficult work of police investigation. The other awesome point is that the so-called intelligence gathered from torture victims is never or rarely corroborated by the torturers themselves but rather by some other department who then round up more people who give more information which is investigated again by different people. The end result is that the torturers never know what is reliable and what isn't. He also takes on myths like the Battle of Algiers, in which the French successfully broke the Algerian resistance for a time supposedly with the aid of torture. But he explains the difference between that and Iraq: 1. There was a French population there that was totally loyal to the French occupying army; and 2. there was a systematic lockdown of the medinas and infiltration through informers of the resistance. It's a tome but a great read.

pulpy

I read about The Big Book of Pulps in Book Forum and decided to get it. My favorite character so far is a tubby, middle-aged detective named Sarah who solves crimes for rewards with the help of a bungling but charming skinny redhead boy. There's some corrupt detectives, gangster molls and the usual riffraff but the editor gives some history and introductions to why certain writers and stories were chosen and after a while you start to really get a feel for the whole pulp scene in the 20s, 30s and 40s. So far my favorite character's name is Porky Grout—a roadhouse owner in a Dashiell Hammett story.

terrorists defeated the world last night

Paolo the Italian New Media Artist is playing War on Terror Board Game. He is the Evil Empire, which means you have to wear the evil balaclava and get to draw two terrorist cards. Note Hugo Chavez poster in the background. The game is a lot like Risk and takes just as long. The weird part is the cheap terrorists you can buy and place anywhere you want on the board, i.e., to harass opponents. Once they are on the board, anyone can use them for any purpose. And you can become a terrorist empire at any time and win by clearing others off their continents to get points for the continent. If you do that too early then you are stuck as a terrorist and get very little money and anyone can join your team at any time and become a terrorist. It's more fun than Risk but I think you should have to wear the balaclava (which is made for little hobbit heads) until you are done.

student response to rpi censorship

Controversy on campus at the RPI "town meeting" peopled mainly with college bureaucrats as well as some faculty and students. Dr. Jackson and her surrogate both used the analogy to child pornography when discussing the banning of Wafaa Bilal's Virtual Jihadi video game.

artist wafaa bilal interviewed shortly after "virtual jihadi" is shut down at R.P.I.

Iraqi-born Chicago-based artist Wafaa Bilal interviewed after his show called Virtual Jihadi at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was "suspended" and he was shut out of the arts building. The art piece consists of a hacked video Al Qaeda video game called Night of Bush Hunting. The artist inserted himself as a virtual suicide bomber as a way of referencing his own anger and despair over his brother and father's death during the American occupation as well as the anger and despair of Iraqis who have lost control of their lives.