John Menick

Since I was a teenager, I’ve been more than slightly obsessed with John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’ve probably seen the film a dozen times or more. I’ve read, and highly recommend, the Anne Billson’s BFI study. I’ve defended it to fellow film buffs as one of the best films of the 1980s, period. I even worked at a place called The Thing, gleeful noting on a daily basis the secret connection between my employer and my not-so-guilty pleasure. But this goes way beyond any kind of fandom I’ve ever seen. Way beyond.

For more Thing insanity please see outpost31.com.

Got to love the little greenscreen demo in the article’s photo. I guess those two lamps behind the talking head help matte in the background. It also looks as if here background is not a physical place at all, but an info-graphic.

One of the things that is interesting about the article, at least from a US perspective, is that most of the cameras-in-the-courtroom anxieties rehash what was debated about Court TV years ago. For example: ” And in California, a judge said on Friday that he would allow full television coverage of the rock producer Phil Spector’s murder trial, declaring that it was time to discard ‘fear of cameras in the courtroom.’”

Unconsciously mimicking Court TV Primetime’s “Seriously Entertaining” tagline a representative from Datadiar, the tech company hosting the video, claims: “It may be difficult to understand why we do this for free,” she said. “We are objective. We are in the middle. We are only lawyers and professionals, and offering information. It’s not like television.”

Granted, Datadiar is online, and may be able to claim it is literally not television. (Even though the rep is making a qualitative claim as well.) But can this coverage ever be objective? Will it devolve into entertainment? Sure, it may not literally be TV, but is it worse, i.e. … YouTube?

A fascinating archive of (mostly) abandoned US airfields compiled by Paul Freeman. The above photo is the first helicopter flight simulator, also featured on the site.

Morbid Victorian theatrical effects, phantasmagoria, television before television, and the women of the Moulin Rouge.

Amazing.

Previews of 40 films.

Also on Expanded Cinema: Marker, Farocki, and Kubelka. Curated by Joao Ribas.

From Expanded Cinema:

Chilean expatriate director Raul Ruiz weaves a lurid, circular tale of murder and fate in this 20 minute film, comprised mostly of still photos.

Taking its title from the series of barking dogs interspersed throughout the film, the narrative centers on Monique, a woman who descends into a world of exploitation, betrayal, and eventually, murder. Told through a combination of voice-over narration, still images, and passages of 35mm film, it makes deft use of repetition, humor, deadpan narration, and visual economy to create a sense of fatal recurrence in this tabloid-inspired melodrama.

In the fall of 2002, Emily Jacir asked me to help her organize a video festival in Palestine. As I remember, Emily had sent out an email to a group of artist friends requesting they send videos to show in a class she was teaching at Birzeit University that winter. Evidently, she meant the request to be private, but that wasn’t explicitly stated anywhere in the email, and many of the people began forwarding it on. The emails spread quickly, and weeks later she was inundated with videos.

I watched and helped select many of the videos with Emily, at first just because I was around, and then as a co-organizer. A video festival grew out of those initial subissions. Actually, Emily did most of the hard work in Palestine, and I mostly managed the New York end. The response to the project was quite good, and despite the fact that there was almost no press on the fest outside of Palestine, I get occasional emails about the project. There have been several film and video festivals since, but none focusing on videos art or experimental cinema.

The old domain for the festival’s Web site expired (impossible to renew since it was gobbled up by some porn company) and the only records of the festival left were the local PHP files I had backed up in an ancient computer in my apartment. At Emily’s request I dug them out and will keep them archived here until we find a better place for them.

Apple and Amazon will open their video download services this month, but the British Film Institute has done something better. The BBC reports:

Short films by Stephen Frears, the late John Schlesinger and brothers Tony and Ridley Scott can now be downloaded from the British Film Institute’s website.

The initiative allows users to watch rarely shown early works from some of Britain’s leading film-makers.

Six features are also available, among them 1974′s Pressure – regarded as one of Britain’s first black feature films.

There are 230,000 films and 675,000 TV programmes in the BFI archive. Download costs range from £5 to £12.50.

It appears that the service is only available to viewers in the UK, but as US World Cup fans know, a proxy server can probably fix that.

This morning while researching ham radio Web sites I happened across ClandestineRadio.com…

…the only online portal dedicated to the study of clandestine and subversive radio – a field where politics, diplomacy, espionage and broadcast media collide. Clandestine broadcasting is a highly effective weapon in the arsenal of psychological warfare, which, when analyzed, can assist observers to cut through the fog of war and ascertain the strength and capabilities of opposition groups as well as actual on-the-ground military strategies. For the casual Web surfer this site may seem exotic and, at times, conspiratorial. Regular and “professional” users, however, will find an intelligence bonanza.

I can’t wait until they get their “Sound Library” up and running.

No (American) movie buff would be complete without IMDb, and the Times today gives a glimpse of the site’s founder, Col Needham. Although the writer of the article finds Needham’s work situation enviable (he works from home, wow), what is more enviable is that his site is still useful and relatively add-free after more than a decade of existence. Even taking into account the Amazon purchase, the ‘IMDb pro’ version, and the bells and whistles, IMDb still feels like a fan site. Following a pattern that Google also enjoys, IMDb nailed one service really well, and has been trying to add something reasonably as good ever since. What the article fails to mentioned is how exactly the site is maintained, because, after all, it wouldn’t be anything without accurate info.

But how accurate is IMDb? And does its ‘populist’ rating system work? The site has become notorious for its ludicrous flame wars among what seem to be two camps: those that would murder for the movie in question, and those that would murder those people in the first camp. Perhaps it’s a problem of fandom rather than technology, but wouldn’t it be impossible to institute a more accurate karma system at IMDb? After all, look at its parent company, Amazon. Reviews are often informative, and are somewhat objective as well. (Forgetting for a moment that the authors themselves usually write the rest of the rather glowing reviews.)

From sites like IMDb to Alternative Reality Gaming, online fan cultism has created a new, more energized form of audience participation, one severely lacking in the visual arts. It’s probable that the bar has been raised in general, and what, two decades ago, would have inspired a quarterly fanzine, now inspires thousands of hours devoted to puzzle deconstruction or amateur fan films. The gap between the relatively staid world of the arts and the frenzy of truly public culture widens even further.

Fine print: What is the most intriguing part of the article is the insinuation that Amazon might be moving to sell downloadable and burnable DVDs in the near future. Will they beat Apple to the punch and finally make DVD-quality films digitally distributable? (Albeit with some ludicrous, and instantly hackable DRM?)