John Menick

Slavoj Zizek criticizes Time’s 2006 “Person of the Year,” and then suffers death by a thousand comments. Whether the flaming he undergoes unwittingly justifies his posting about the nature of online interaction is anyone’s guess.

Henry Jenkins — MIT director, professor and blogger — has a wild blog entry about his trip to Poland that documents, among other things, Polish Reggae, stadium markets, and a Fotoplastikon. Bruce Sterling points to the entry this week, and focuses on the Fotoplastikon, but what caught my eye was the amazing cultural collision that is Polish Reggae:

Keep in mind: There are almost no Jamaicans living in Poland. This is not a case of emigrant populations porting music to another part of the world. Poland is an incredibly homogeneous country with very limited immigrant populations and clearly, there are no cultural reasons for Jamaicans to want to relocate to this part of the world. Reggae emerged here because it served Polish interests and reflected Polish tastes and thus it has taken some distinctly Polish shapes… A group called Izrael was the first to introduce the sound into Poland in 193. [sic] Some members of Izrael heard a few songs and were so fascinated that they started to produce music in this style (at least as they understood it). I gather there’s a good deal of reinvention going on here given how limited their initial exposure to the music was. The name created confusion in Poland with some people assuming this was a Christian Rock group. Indeed, my hosts shared with me stories of older people storming out of the concert, confused and angry, having hoped for a more conventional religious experience.

For more on the Fotoplastikon (aka the Kaiserpanorama), see Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception, which also features praxinoscopes, stereoscopes, and tachistoscopes. The Kaiserpanorama is actually on its cover.

The Apollo 11 moon landing was one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind. And engineering a video setup that could capture the event and beam it back to Earth so that half a billion people could watch it — that was pretty impressive, too. But the version of the footage that the world saw on TV was muddied and degraded. Luckily, a pristine version of the raw footage was recorded onto 14 inch magnetic tape reels and sent to NASA for safekeeping. One snag — NASA now has no idea where that tape is.

An excerpt from from Digital Content Producer’s article on the tapeless HD workflow of David Fincher‘s upcoming Zodiac:

“There is the danger, of course, of technology getting obsolete, but we’re better off, certainly, than movies done many years ago because, at the end of the day, we are creating so many high-quality masters,” Mavromates says. “We will have about six original digital negatives for this movie, the original data, different HD versions, a film master, and all those HD DVDs out there. They’ll be able to re-master this movie some day, if they want to — they won’t have to piece it all together from scratch. To me, this is the future of how movies will be made. Digital cinematography is still in its adolescence, and it will mature very quickly, so our workflow will only improve along with it.”

That is certainly Fincher’s firm conviction.

“We could lose data some day, but let’s be honest — that’s always been the case with film, as well,” Fincher says. “Somebody find me a good print of Lawrence of Arabia, or a decent restored print of Rear Window. Everyone says we won’t have the resolution of 35mm, but the truth is, 35mm is maybe 4K, and that’s before they do things to it. You have all this color space with film, but you don’t ever use all that color space. As soon as you drop an orange filter over [the lens], you have suddenly limited your blue and green color space, for instance. And by the time you dupe it to inter-positive, then to inter-negative, and go to three dupe negs or six dupe negs, and make 3,000 release prints, then you are looking at something, in most cases, just over 1K. So I think it’s silly to get attached to [film] like that.”

In this month’s Artforum, Tom Vanderbilt has an article on Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s documentary, Our Daily Bread, a fairly graphic study of “globalized factory food.” I haven’t seen the film yet, but I’m already thinking of it as a post-industrial update to Franju’s harrowing Blood of the Beasts.

From The Guardian:

An era in amateur film-making is coming to an end. The factory in Lausanne, Switzerland, that processes Europe’s supplies of Kodachrome – grainy, colour-saturated frames of 8mm film that have convinced a generation that their 60s and 70s childhood and adolescence was spent leaping through flowers in a Technicolor haze – is shutting its doors on Saturday. The ritual of shooting a three-minute masterpiece on your Super 8 camera, sending off the film in a little yellow envelope and waiting with barely contained excitement for the ready-to-project reel to drop on to the doormat is over. If you want to get your Kodachrome film developed now, you are going to have to get in touch with an outfit in Kansas called Dwayne’s Photo, and hope for the best.

A Princeton study of Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machines. Scroll down for the video.