Of Mice and Muhammad

by Drew Martin
The other day I watched Of Mice and Men with John Malkovich, and I also watched two recent films: Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. Of Mice of Men is a classic story by John Steinbeck removed from distractions of civilization. In the movie version there is electricity in the shack where the workers sleep but not much else: a deck of cards, and a gun. When Lennie crushes Curley's hand in a fight, the witnesses cover up the incident by blaming "the machine." Of Mice and Men is timeless and metaphorical. It can be apply to any time and place. Argo and Zero Dark Thirty are the opposite; these films are really specific stories, and determined with their political agendas, which take sides, and piss off the Muslim cultures they attack.

Zero Dark Thirty is a superior film to Argo, and although it shows a much more gruesome side of the United States, I found Argo much more offensive, as a preemptive cultural strike against Iran. That being said, looking at these two films with a eye on media, they are both really interesting because they are loaded with layers of media with themes of espionage, government intelligence and special missions.

I love how the cartoon story board cards are used in Argo to legitimize the cover story of the escaping Americans, especially since story boards are such an essential part of how many films are realized. When I first heard of the killing of Osama bin Laden, I was really interested in seeing how the operation was possible. Kathryn Bigelow did a fantastic job detailing the events. I was amazed by the technology shown, such as the laser scopes on the guns that are only visible with the night vision goggles. What was most interesting was how the commandos called out the names of their targets, with soft hushed voices.

My favorite part of Zero Dark Thirty was when the special forces returning from Osama's compound with a bounty of hard drives and other Al-Qaeda information, were calling out for Sharpies to tag everything. Beyond product placement, the Sharpie is just part of our culture.

Click to watch trailers for:
Of Mice and Men
Argo
Zero Dark Thirty

Call Me Maybe: Social Media Soldiers

by Drew Martin
It is amazing to look the relationship of modern wars and new media of the respective eras: WWI and photography, WWII and film, Vietnam War and television, Gulf War and video (from smart bombs), and the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Internet. In the beginning of the Iraq war, leaked photos showed US soldiers torturing Iraqis. The private performance went viral and changed how images and stories reach the public. A decade later, the most talked about media event from the front lines is the military tribute to the Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders' version of Carly Rae's Call Me Maybe. The Internet has replaced the USO's wartime tour of female entertainers for male troops in the trenches, and the soldiers' YouTube post has turned the tables. Unlike the Abu Ghraib soldiers (men and women) who were caught with their pants down, these "social media soldiers" not only know they are being watched but put on quite a show. The video is entertaining but it is a sugar coating to the fact that these men are trained killers who flaunt their weapons, which must be the ultimate insult to the families and friends of the people who they target. I think the weirdest thing in this new wave is that this will be the first time soldiers will return from war and be greeted not for their heroism but for their popular celebrity, which will continue when they go on the late night talk show tour.

Call Me Maybe:
Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders' version
Soldiers in Afghanistan version

Side by side comparison

Apple is for Apple

by Drew Martin
When Chip Kidd discusses design in front of an audience, he usually recalls a priceless lesson he learned in art school. His graphic arts teacher drew an apple on the board and then wrote the word apple. He vehemently told his students that you can either show the apple or use the word apple but never do both, never combine them. This lesson goes a long way, and should be grasped by filmmakers as well. I started watching a low budget film the other day but had to turn it off because of this problem. The narrator would say “My husband’s friends did not like me,” and the scene would show a group of people frowning at her. Redundancy works really well if the reiteration is ironic and the director has fun with it, but unfortunately this was more the case of someone who was glued to the screenplay and lacked imagination.

Recently, I was convinced by the DVD cover of Sleepwalk with Me to check this movie out of my local New York Public Library. “From the producers of This American Life” crowns the title. It has endorsements from Judd Apatow and Robert Ebert, and the jacket is decorated with laurel leaves from seven film festivals including Sundance where it was a winner of the Best of NEXT Audience Award. Lauren Ambrose, who I really liked in Starting Out in the Evening, played one of the lead roles. The clincher was, this is “the first movie from Ira Glass,” What could go wrong? Glass is such a talented radio personality and Mike Birbiglia, the lead actor works as a standup comic. The problem is that the visual narrative of the film never takes more than baby steps from the script. That being said, there is a poignant monologue in the end when Birbiglia concludes his tale of his decade-long relationship that was rattled by his fear of getting hitched. He explains that he and his girlfriend almost made a life-long commitment of marriage simply because they were afraid of hurting each other's feeling by splitting.

It is interesting to note that the last three films I watched over the past week were independent films with performances by Alex Karpovsky. This week’s New Yorker devotes nearly a full page to him. Tad Friend writes, “Yet, even as he shows promise of becoming his generation’s Woody Allen, a deadpan notice of indignity, Karpovsky remains in the milk-crate-décor stage of his life.” Karpovsky is certainly jockeying to be the next Allen-type man-child. This actually set off my redundancy alarm in Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture. In a couple scenes Karpovsky is shown reading from a book of short stories by Allen.

Changing Cat Litter in Low Budget Films

by Drew Martin
I watched two low budget films this weekend, Tiny Furniture and Uncle Kent, in which each of the leading characters is shown changing cat litter. This works for many reasons. For one, no animal is actually in the scene, so it is less involved than a dog pooping in the street and you can shoot it as many times as you want, but it functions as a dog walking scene in an interior space. The main thing is that it shows a character in a compromising position. I wonder if there is an industry-trick for the prop; perhaps a wad of modeling clay.

Tiny Furniture is a neo-slacker film, which functions off-screen as a modern day debutante ball for its writer, director and lead Lena Dunham, daughter of two well-off New York City artists, Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons. The less nepotistic Uncle Kent stars Kent Osborne, who has been a writer and storyboard artist for Sponge Bob Square Pants. The difference is just that; having a litterbox scene is meant to show the humility of the main character but even so, one is shot in a fancy TriBeCa apartment while the other is in a messy LA bachelor pad.

In Tiny Furniture the litter box scene is catty and territorial. Dunham is lectured by her younger sister who tells her to clean the litter box. On the way out the door the sister says "Deep scoops," as Dunham fills a plastic bag from Murray's Cheese shop with cat feces.

In Uncle Kent, Osborne likes his cat as much as he likes smoking pot. Even though changing litter is a labor of love, the scene gets under your skin. While smell is a really hard sense to stir up in film, the director Joe Swanberg is able to rub it in your nose. What works really well in this shot is that it is sandwiched between a scene where Osborne's best friend tells him that his life is a wreck and just before a scene where he greets a young woman, played by Jennifer Prediger, who he is interested and has come to stay with him for the weekend. She calls him from outside his house while he is crouching in a small space shared by his washer, dryer, and mountain bike, with his t-shirt over his face.

While Tiny Furniture is a much slicker film and a little easier to watch, it's main fault is its privilege. Uncle Kent takes more risks on an even lower budget and is more in touch with reality.

Click here to watch the trailer for Tiny Furniture.

Click here to watch the trailer for Uncle Kent.

His First Voyage: A Picture Book

by Drew Martin

The nice thing about having my own gallery, even if it is only the size of a closet, and especially because it is a place that nobody would care to visit, is that I can do whatever I want, whenever I want without any silly promotion or liquored opening.

Tonight I took down Letters from the Past, archived the contents as I had intended, and then I put up a new show První Plavba (First Voyage). The title comes from the Czech translation of Herman Melville's Redburn: His First Voyage, which he published in 1849, two years and two books before Moby Dick. I bought a 1965 edition of the Czech translation for one dollar ten years ago in the unfrequented used-book back room at Barnes and Noble on Route 17 in Paramus, New Jersey. I was shocked to find a collection of Czech books there and I am sure that I had the best intentions to actually read it but that is not going to happen in this lifetime.

The incentive for this show came from an urge I have always had to take such a book and strip out and display all the pages with drawings. První Plavba has 62 black and white ink illustrations drawn by Josef Novák. Even if another viewer could read Czech, the story is now fragmented but the narrative is maintained in the pictures.

Alamar

by Drew Martin

I watched a beautiful film the other day called Alamar, which documents the time a five year old boy spends with his Mexican father in a sea world around Banco Chinchorro, the largest coral reef in Mexico, before he returns to live with his Italian mother in Rome. There is a lot of sunshine, crystal clear water, fresh fish, flawless tan skin, and carefree days.

The story is real; the “characters” play themselves, but the movie exceeds the boundaries of documentary filmmaking. This is a film about the stages of man in a timeless world.

I experienced the movie not as a romantic view of a fisherman’s life in a pristine environment, but as a kind of future recollection of the boy’s memory of the time. We witness scenes that are innocent without being sentimental, and the beauty of the location is never gratuitously framed; we are immersed in it.

Click here to watch the trailer.

Numbing Numbers

by Drew Martin

There is no numb in numbers; the words are not related in English, but it is a curious overlap, and perhaps a factor in viewing numbers as something impersonal in our culture, although this seems to be a common thought around the world. The definition of numb is being deprived of physical sensation, and lacking emotion or feeling. Numbers might identify with this if they had a mind of their own, or do they?

I recently read the Adweek article, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, which is about quants (quantitative analysts) taking the adworld scene by storm.

The number of ad campaigns based on algorithms doubled last year versus 2011. In the coming years, they are expected to account for nearly half of all campaigns, according to Forrester Research. Meanwhile, this year the world’s catalog of digital data is expected to reach some 2.7 zettabytes—an amount of information so large it would take 700 billion discs to store it all. By itself, all that data is useless, naturally. That’s why numbers people are in such high demand—not just any numbers people, but creative quants who can keep pushing online ads to the next, more sophisticated level.

The thing is, we really love numbers even though we often dismiss their true meaning and importance. I watched Moneyball last night, in which Jonah Hill plays a young statistician who changes the game of baseball by using quantitative analysis as the brains behind scouting for the Oakland A's. Moneyball is really a look at how numbers and statistics are culturally received. It is not just a computer-age phenomenon, but something in the fabric of our history and time itself. It is the story of Arabic numbers with their decimal place and the introduction of zero. It is the explanation of the cosmos as Kepler mathematically worked out Brahe's renewed observations of the stars and planets, and it is also the story behind the greatest misstep in the history of science; Charles Darwin's snub of Gregor Mendel's theory of genetics. Darwin was a brilliant thinker who created a world wide web of information through his extensive travels and species collection, as well as through his thousands of correspondences to scientists around the globe, and yet he barely looked at Mendel's work.

If there is a lesson here, it is that instead of waiting for the mathematical structure to be teased out, an approach through math is a worthy pursuit. I am sure there is an algorithm, which would explain the cultural resistance to a quantitative approach that would reveal the fundamentals of something first cracked open by the human mind.

Chip Kidd Insights

by Drew Martin

Last year, at the beginning of January, I wrote a post about the Princeton University online lecture SIGNALS GraphicChipDesignKidd. I wrote:

Chip Kidd is an author, editor and graphic designer, best known for his book covers for Knopf where he has worked in design since 1986 and is now the associate art director. Kidd is a captivating, colorful and articulate speaker. This lecture is a must-see for graphic designers; he speaks about time and sequence, color crescendo, making typography" look like it is in denial," the fine line between minimalism and boredom, and most importantly figuring out your idea and concept before trying to make it look good or leading the project with style in mind.

I was discussing design films last night with someone and suggested Helvetica, and Milton Glaser, To Inform and Delight. I also mentioned the Kidd lecture. Today I looked to see what other lectures Kidd has out there, and I found this one on YouTube from a few years ago of a presentation at Mineapolis' Walker Art Center: Chip Kidd Insights Lecture. A couple things are repeated, but it is still worth watching, just skip over the introductions.

Man on Wire

by Drew Martin
I just finished watching Man on Wire, a 2008 British documentary about the French high-wire artist, Philippe Petit. On August 7, 1974 (my mom's 34th birthday), Petit performed on a high-wire between the top of the Twin Towers. Petit and a small team installed the 450-pound cable during the night without permission or detection. Petit and the support crew snuck into both of the 110-story buildings of the World Trade Center, shot an arrow with a lead wire from one building to the other and stretched the cable between their roofs. That morning, he spent more than 45 minutes on the wire with a 26-foot-long, 55-pound balancing pole before he was forced off by the alarmed police, who called in a helicopter. It was a moment that entwined grace, fearlessness, absurdity, stupidity, brilliance, six years of diligent planning, Mission Impossible logistics, extreme focus and steel athleticism. In a post 9/11 world, the film is as much an homage to the Twin Towers as it is a documentary about Petit. While his guerrilla-style high-wire stunts are a kind of performance art, and a metaphor for life and death, much of his planning was very sculptural and photographic. Petit made scale models of the tops of the World Trade Center and extensively photographed the site from the roof, and also from a helicopter. My favorite “art” scene of Man on Wire is when Petit first visits the observation deck of the World Trade Center and thinks the challenge is impossible. He retreats to the stairs and draws a "fresco" on a sheetrock wall of the unfinished stairwell. It depicts Notre Dame Cathedral and Sydney Harbour Bridge, which he had already conquered, and added a prescient drawing of him walking between the Twin Towers. He sketched the image because it was important for Petit to imagine himself realizing his dream.

Click here to watch the trailer.

Margin Call: Engineers without Borders

by Drew Martin
I watched Margin Call yesterday, which is a film set in 2008 that dramatically summarizes the fall of the investment bank (a thinly guised Lehman Brothers) that triggered the financial crisis and led to our recent recession. Not only is the acting good but the hierarchy of the company is aligned with the quality of the acting: Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci.

Tucci plays the head of the firm’s risk management department, but is let go at the beginning of the film. He hands off a flash drive, with something he was working on, to a senior risk analyst, played by Zachary Quinto (the new Spock). Quinto’s work, based on Tucci’s calculations project the downfall of the company, and its snowball effect on the market. What is interesting is that both of these characters are former engineers. Quinto’s character was a mechanical engineer with an advanced degree in propulsion from MIT, and Tucci’s character was a civil engineer. While Quinto responds to a “rocket scientist” remark that engineering and finance are all about numbers, Tucci reflects on a bridge he “made” between Dilles Bottom, Ohio and Moundsville, West Virginia. He speaks about the positive effect the bridge had on the people who use it and runs through a series of calculations about how many miles and years of time he saved them from having to spend in their cars.

Pictured here is the Moundsville Bridge.

Click here to watch the trailer.

Click here to watch the scene about the bridge.

Letters from the Past

by Drew Martin

In the beginning of 1992 I walked away from my trailer on my aunt and uncle's property in the mountains of Santa Barbara and started traveling; first up and down the West coast and then to Europe, where I stayed for five years. In this time, writing letters was still the predominant way to keep in touch over long distances. The letters I was most prolific and diligent in writing were to my aunt and uncle in California. A few years ago, they returned to me all of the letters and post cards that I had sent to them during my five years abroad.

Most of the letters are decorated with designs and drawings. I wrote on doilies, the inside of envelopes, and on hand-crafted papers. Many of the postcards are altered in some way. On one, I rubbed off the coat of a horse and drew its digestive system. On another I added to the image of a placid lake to make it look like an elephant was walking on water. Some of the writing is incoherent rambling, which is painful to read, but a couple of the letters are really interesting reflections at milestones in my life.

I recently reclaimed a space in my house and returned it to a tiny gallery, where I had a show for a friend a couple years ago, His Girlfriend is Wack!. With friends coming over last night, I decided to put up the letters and have a small show for them.

I have not read through the letters so the show will stay up until I read the correspondences that I want to keep before I archive them in some manner and throw out everything else. I have already ripped up many of the letters and disposed of them.

My favorite notes include lines such as,

I am waiting for a ferry in Algeciras, España to travel to Tangier, Morocco, where we will travel to Fez tonight.

I never made it to Fez because a young woman (who I met on the train and was traveling with) and I decided to stop in Asilah and observe Ramadan with a local we met. She ended up having problems with him and other Moroccan men so we returned to Spain.

These are the most interesting letters for me because they teeter on the edge of the unknown future, which is now a definite past.

Das Fräulein

by Drew Martin
It was very simple when I was a kid; Yugoslavia was one country, and it exported a cheap car to America, the Yugo. By the 1990s this country, which lumped together more than twenty ethnic groups after World War I, had raging wars and entered the 21st century as seven new states: Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I was living in the Czech Republic at the time the war was exploding. The only time I stepped foot in Yugoslavia was when I returned to Prague from Istanbul. The soldiers stopped the train in the middle of the night and made all the Americans stand out in the snow under guard as they moved through the train cars.

I recently became interested in visiting this region, mainly because of a familiarity with their languages. This weekend I watched a Swiss film, Das Fräulein, set in Zurich, which focuses on the lives of three women, a Serb, a Croat, and a Bosniak. The Serb and the Croat are older women who have made new lives in Switzerland. The Serb has no interest in returning home; the Croat dreams of it. The young Bosniak is the life of the film and it is through her character that issues of generational differences and expatriatism are stirred up. Her waywardness and recklessness are pinned to her youth, when in fact is the way she reacts to battling leukemia. It is a good film, which I recommend watching, but the viewer should know something about the region and the complex ethnic conflicts that led to more than 100,000 deaths and tens of thousands of rapes.

Click here to watch the trailer

Grappling with the International Olympic Committee's Decision to Drop Wrestling

by Drew Martin
Wrestling is the most disciplined sport. You know who I used to hear say that all the time? – the tough guys in high school who played football in the fall and then wrestled in the winter. I wrestled for eight years; from second grade through my sophomore year in high school before I switched to winter track for that season. If you ask me about running, I will start by talking about wrestling, which is what turned me into a runner. I used to run after practice with plastic wrap around my waist to stay in my weight class. I hated the sport at times. It was pure torture some years, especially my last year when I had to drop thirty pounds (because I gained forty pounds between seasons). The workouts were grueling. Some kids wore rubber suits to sweat even more than we naturally did in that windowless, brick-oven-of-a-room where "No Pain No Gain" was painted on the wall. The backs of my hands are still covered with little scars from when they got caught on kids’ braces. Punishment was tough. Once my brother and I left a meet in order to have dinner with our parents; we each got a 100 crabs. A crab meant to scurry back and forth across the wrestling room floor on your hands and feet (like a crab) while the rest of the team watched during a break from practice.

Despite anything negative I have to say about the wrestling, I still think of it as one of the most classic sports. It is all about core strength, which is ironic because it has been dropped from the list of 25 core sports for the 2020 Olympics. The LA Times wrote this in reaction to the announcement:

The sport many people believed should have been dropped, modern pentathlon, survived. How could this be? Well, this might be a clue: Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., the son of the former IOC president, is vice president of the International Modern Pentathlon Union and a member of the IOC board….Many of the unhappy people don't even know what events make up the modern pentathlon. The sport was created because it features, get this, the skills required of a cavalry officer….in the 19th century!….At the London Games, athletes from 71 countries competed in wrestling. Athletes from 26 countries competed in modern pentathlon. Isn't worldwide appeal supposed to be one of the factors considered by the IOC?

It is hard to imagine that one of the sports which was central to the original Olympics and has been in the modern Olympics for more than 100 years is going to sit on the sidelines while "Olympians" compete in events such as canoeing, speed walking, synchronized swimming, golf, and ping-pong.

The World Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats

by Drew Martin

There is an interesting "Techwise Conversation" on IEEE Spectrum, Is Micropublishing the Death of Publishing – or Its Salvation? It is conducted by Steven Cherry with Thad McIlroy, James Morrison, and Philip Parker. McIlroy is an analyst and consultant for the electronic publishing industry. Morrison is a writer/editor/designer, and the brilliant Australian behind The Caustic Cover Critic blog. Parker is a professor of marketing at INSEAD, and author of hundreds of thousands of titles by way of his patent (7266727), which supports his invention for,

“Automatic authoring, marketing, and/or distributing of title material. A computer automatically authors the material."

 At first (the first few times I listened to his part of the interview) I could not wrap my head around what he was talking about. It seemed so post-human. Parker creates algorithms that create books from cover to cover in a matter of minutes, including a table of contents and supporting charts for the relevant information. The algorithms mimic the process of how an economist would gather and compile data. Cherry questions Parker whether his books with titles such as Webster’s Slovak-English Dictionary and 2007-2012 World Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats (which sounds totally absurd) are typical. Parker replies,

"Yeah, actually they are pretty typical. The publications are going after the long tail, or niche, topics that the publishing industry would normally not cover. And so for the toilet seat cover one, the inspiration for those reports came from microenterprises, mostly based on projects I was doing in Haiti and other countries, where small enterprises literally make very, very specific items. So if they want high-end market research or anything analytic, they would have to literally be down to that specific level. People don’t make products; they make very specific products. So the reports cover minutiae topics because that’s what importers and exporters generally sell."

Parker actually makes more and more sense the deeper you look into his projects. In Africa, he created 24/7 automated weather reports for people who had never heard a broadcast of the weather in their native language.

The most interesting part of the interview was Parker's insight on genre,

"Yeah. The basic idea, this is kind of the thought process of automation, is that you don’t create a software to write books or videos or PC games. We do all formats, by the way; it’s not just books. But you do it by genre, so you have to say, well, fiction versus nonfiction, and you could say, well, let’s do nonfiction. And then within nonfiction, well, there’s different types. There’s genres, there’s bibliography, there’s biographies, there’s crossword puzzles, there’s dictionaries. And then what you have to do is you say, no, that’s not really true. There’s no such thing as a bibliography; there’s an annotated bibliography. And then you say, no, there’s not really an annotated bibliography; there’s a sub-subgenre called Cambridge-formatted annotated bibliography, etc., etc.

And as you drill down within a genre and you can no longer find a subgenre, typically at that level you’ll discover that authors, the people who do them manually, actually follow very formulaic patterns. And that’s true for poetry and other types of writing styles as well. And so that’s what I meant by “genre,” is that you drill down to the point at which there’s a formulaic approach to authoring in that domain."

This leads to a conversation about poetry, with Parker commenting,

"Right. Within literature, of course, there’s subgenres of literature, poetry being one of them. And then you say, well, there’s no such thing as poetry; there are subgenres of poetry. And you could say sonnet, and you can say, no, no, no, there’s subgenres of sonnets. There’s metasonnets, there’s—etc. And when you get down to the very finite level, even within poetry, you have highly formulaic approaches. Like as in a sonnet we know that it has a rhyming pattern of AB, AB, CD, CD, EF, EF, and then GG in the final couplet. The first line is a question. The ninth line is a turn, which usually has the word but or yet or since, something like that. They’re somatic, and we decided to do metapoetry, where the poem is about the poem itself or about the author of the poem.

Shakespeare wrote a sonnet, No. 76, which was a type of metapoem, where he kind of complained a little bit that he was stuck using the same formula in writing his own poems. So it’s a metapoem because it’s about himself and the poem itself. We took that concept and created algorithms of a computer program writing sonnets, stating it cannot write a sonnet properly, but doing so, it writes a sonnet properly. So it follows the iambic pentameter formulation, has the exact correct number of lines. It’s highly constrained writing once you get down to that level."

Click here to listen to the interview or read the entire transcript

Click here to see a YouTube about Parker's Automated Content Authorship and examples of his projects