[Savage Clone]

I was pretty underwhelmed by The Science of Sleep. I was hoping it would be much more surreal. Instead I got an art school educated romantic comedy. It is a little more than that, but really came off as a pablum date movie for twenty and thirty some things with memberships to Public Radio.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Savage Clone

I was pretty underwhelmed by The Science of Sleep. I was hoping it would be much more surreal. Instead I got an art school educated romantic comedy. It is a little more than that, but really came off as a pablum date movie for twenty and thirty some things with memberships to Public Radio.

i don't know that it was a romantic comedy as much as an actual farce.

[Savage Clone]

Either way, not my bag. I like Gael a lot, but couldn't love this movie.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Savage Clone

Either way, not my bag. I like Gael a lot, but couldn't love this movie.

it is in many ways a children's movie (overgrown children more exactly) so i can see why it disappointed you. i wasn't too crazy about the "drama" part either, except as an excuse for goofiness-- i like goofy shit.

my favorite parts were the animations and inventions and all the stuff he does with effects-- gondry has always been a special effects director, but he does the stuff manually instead of computers. e.g., the cellophane thing, or a city of toilet paper rolls (which his family collected ha ha ha). as i said before-- he's a very imaginative child. it's not really a movie for (or by) grownups.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

TREASURES IV: DISC 2

an unmitigated borefest. 11 minutes of fog moving off a hill "to teach us how to see" (thanks, professor). a fast-forward tour of new york in the 60s. some lady in a hammock, and jack smith making faces or giving a blow job to a balloon. the unlistenable "music" of angus maclise. a drag queen giving a blow job to a banana (more obvious please). 9 minutes of people in an escalator (clever-- but 9 minutes!?!?). 36 minutes of some other thing i decided to skip because no avant-garde anything should last 36 minutes (ha ha, no, i didn't have time to watch it and just wanted the next movie in the queue sent).

the singular wonderful exception to all this nonsense was george kuchar's I, AN ACTRESS, which had us laughing hard and we watched twice. george kuchar was indeed an amazing actress!

 

there was also the first segment of ken jacobs's "little stabs at happiness" featuring jack smith, which was pretty great and disturbing, but then he has to keep adding more and more segments and boring footage until you just want to kill him.

one thing i noticed in all or most of these people or at least a lot of them they were ivy league dropouts. correlation or causation?

Fair enough on that stuff but it's interesting that a few other people I know who really can't get into a lot of the Jack Smith kind of stuff don't just tolerate George Kuchar but really seem to like him.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Fair enough on that stuff but it's interesting that a few other people I know who really can't get into a lot of the Jack Smith kind of stuff don't just tolerate George Kuchar but really seem to like him.

kuchar is alive! his stuff is not an intellectual exercise and he tries to teach you nothing. he's sort of experimental by default, by which i mean that his ends aren't "experimental", only his methods. i wish i could get more of his stuff. and he does a GREAT film noir actress! damn, he blows that student out of the water--he's like a, i don't know, bette davis or something.

[demonrail666]

I know what you're saying, especially about some of the underground stuff, but I don't think there's anything remotely intellectual about Jack Smith, and I really don't think he wanted to make 'experimental' films at all. Not self consciously, anyway. Anger, Brakhage, Deren were thinking about stuff on that level but Smith seemed to be working more along the lines of outsider art.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

I know what you're saying, especially about some of the underground stuff, but I don't think there's anything remotely intellectual about Jack Smith, and I really don't think he wanted to make 'experimental' films at all. Not self consciously, anyway. Anger, Brakhage, Deren were thinking about stuff on that level but Smith seemed to be working more along the lines of outsider art.

i've only seen jack smith as an actor so far, it was someone else's movie-- i haven't seen flaming creatures, only bits of it. the stuff i saw him in belonged to ken jacobs and… someone else i forget right now. oh yes in chumlum. but the documentary about smith was very compelling-- for a lot of reasons too late in the evening to mention (i've had some rum). still, i might like the stuff he directed when i actually get to see it. as for the "acting", in the first part of little stabs at happiness, the "couple" with the "babies" where he eats out the dolls crotch, it was disturbing but great-- you know, some sort of dumb family scene and the baby gets violated-- it worked. but it was only the additions after that where i lost my patience with ken jacobs (not really with jack smith).

i do like maya deren actually. not all the time but i "get" her. and anger. not really brakhage (too abstract i suppose, and i can't look at it for too long). anger bores me, but he bores me the right way-- he bores me with an excess of style, i suppose-- but he has tons of style. i don't see his work as cerebral or intellectual-- i actually find it pretty raw. and that's what saddened me about mario banana (the andy warhol thing w/ mario montez)-- what could have been a sort of apotheosis of style (a la anger) becomes a kind of banana porn which yes, maybe it was supposed to be funny, but i found to be a waste of a great drag queen. i don't know, maybe i was too annoyed at the time. if it had been mario montez in a kenneth anger set it would have been something brilliant. was mario montez ever in anger movies? anyway, back to the rum!

[ilduclo]

What Happened to Kerouac?

Nice archival interviews with Burroughs, Hunke and others, learned a few things abt "Kerroway" that I didn't already know, and an hilarious segment with Neal and Ginsberg. High reccos for those who like any of the beats

[A Thousand Threads]

oh no.

 

rip alain resnais

[sonic sphere]

 

[!@#$%!]

ARGO

 

i needed something from the redbox, and this was there, and it wasn't half bad! actually it was pretty good, even considering i don't like affleck much. the rest of the cast was pretty great though-- john goodman and alan arkin were particularly entertaining to watch. good/fun spy movie. good also that the start of the movie acknowledges the us intervention in deposing a democratic leader and propping up the shah in iran. anyway, highly watchable entertainment, if you're into this sort of thing.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by A Thousand Threads

oh no.

 

rip alain resnais

oh shit! i just realized. fuck!

i will always remember him for this:

 

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i've only seen jack smith as an actor so far, it was someone else's movie-- i haven't seen flaming creatures, only bits of it. the stuff i saw him in belonged to ken jacobs and… someone else i forget right now. oh yes in chumlum. but the documentary about smith was very compelling-- for a lot of reasons too late in the evening to mention (i've had some rum). still, i might like the stuff he directed when i actually get to see it. as for the "acting", in the first part of little stabs at happiness, the "couple" with the "babies" where he eats out the dolls crotch, it was disturbing but great-- you know, some sort of dumb family scene and the baby gets violated-- it worked. but it was only the additions after that where i lost my patience with ken jacobs (not really with jack smith).

i do like maya deren actually. not all the time but i "get" her. and anger. not really brakhage (too abstract i suppose, and i can't look at it for too long). anger bores me, but he bores me the right way-- he bores me with an excess of style, i suppose-- but he has tons of style. i don't see his work as cerebral or intellectual-- i actually find it pretty raw. and that's what saddened me about mario banana (the andy warhol thing w/ mario montez)-- what could have been a sort of apotheosis of style (a la anger) becomes a kind of banana porn which yes, maybe it was supposed to be funny, but i found to be a waste of a great drag queen. i don't know, maybe i was too annoyed at the time. if it had been mario montez in a kenneth anger set it would have been something brilliant. was mario montez ever in anger movies? anyway, back to the rum!

If you didn't like Chumlum I can't see you being into the films Jack Smith actually directed. They're variations on the same kind of thing.

I don't think Anger ever worked with Mario Montez or anyone from the NY underground scene. I imagine he saw himself as 'above all that'. The West Coast scene seemed far less shambolic than the East Coast's. There's a certain professionalism to Anger and Deren's stuff - technically at least - that you won't really find in most of the stuff coming out of NY at that time.

[A Thousand Threads]

Europe After The Rain

 

Excellent documentary on Dada and early Surrealism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpNJDBJOkFs

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

If you didn't like Chumlum I can't see you being into the films Jack Smith actually directed. They're variations on the same kind of thing..

really? i was looking forward to much more. the documentary about him made him look quite fascinating--him as a person. and i have a friend who is a huge fan of his movies. i'll have to try anyway because sometimes a small change makes all the difference.

Originally Posted by demonrail666

I don't think Anger ever worked with Mario Montez or anyone from the NY underground scene. I imagine he saw himself as 'above all that'. The West Coast scene seemed far less shambolic than the East Coast's. There's a certain professionalism to Anger and Deren's stuff - technically at least - that you won't really find in most of the stuff coming out of NY at that time.

a pity, cuz mario was better looking than anais nin, ha ha. and what you say about production values is very true, now that i think about it.

[!@#$%!]

THOR-- THE DARK WORLD

 

this one was pretty stupid. thumbs down. terrible dialogue and direction so the performances are blegh. structurally terrible-- a bunch of minor characters with nothing to contribute except being part of the decor (silf, the musketeer guy). villains that look like teletubbies (see picture). "worlds" that look right of a xena set. heavy london "product placement". just too fucking obvious and ponderous and meh. even the jokes sucked--like they were trying to channel joss whedon and failed. not completely unwatchable, but not really watchable either. maybe only loki was interesting. the rest not at all. it's like it was written by too many people and each did a bit.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

really? i was looking forward to much more. the documentary about him made him look quite fascinating--him as a person. and i have a friend who is a huge fan of his movies. i'll have to try anyway because sometimes a small change makes all the difference.

To be fair there's a massive cult of personality surrounding him. I have a friend who's a massive underground film fan and even he admits that Jack Smith is probably more interesting than any film he made or appeared in. I'm not sure I agree with that completely but there's definitely some truth to it - which is a key difference between him and Anger, who's just as eccentric and fascinating as a person but whose films still manage to stand up in their own right. It's possible to appreciate a film like Scorpio Rising without knowing anything about who made it. I'm not sure the same could be said about Flaming Creatures.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

what you say about production values is very true

Anger was brought up in Hollywood and his family worked in the industry so he had access to equipment and crew that nobody on the east coast had. Same for Deren, whose films were shot by her husband: a well respected and future oscar winnining filmmaker in his own right. The NY underground seemed more like a subculture, with film playing no bigger part than say poetry or music or theatre, whereas the west coast seemed far less like a scene and more dedicated just to making films.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Robert Schunk, I was reading some astronomy magazine with an interesting article about increasing discoveries of objects orbiting our Sun in the Kuiper Belt, and how these objects are all effected particularly by Neptune's gravity. Some folks are suggesting that it could be evidence to support an entirely new cosmology for planetary formation. New "discoveries" of Jupiter (and larger) sized "planets" orbiting much closer to their relative stars than where our gas giants also are a part of this. Current theories suggest planets formed at or near their current places, with the gas giants around the middle and the rocky Earth-sized planets nearer the sun. New theories suggest that possibly the gas giants can form nearer to their stars and then move out. How does Neptune play into this? If Neptune is a gas giant that formed nearer to our sun and then moved outward later its gravity could have attracted the 200 or so planetary sized objects in the Kuiper Belt. I thought this ridiculously interesting, it essentially flips the planetary formation model of the past 50 years on its head!

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily...iper-belt.html

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by Robert Schunk

I don't know what you've been reading, but the "switched" position of Neptune relative to that of Uranus involves gravitational interaction with Jupiter..

No, not talking about Neptune's orbit, talking about how Neptune's gravity effects objects in the Kuiper Belt.. been reading the link I posted and a couple of other things I searched..

The bulk of your post concerns solar systems with "Hot Jupiters", which are Jupiter-class planets that orbit their suns well within tiny Mercury's orbit around out own sun (such as Bellerophon and Dinky) and whose year lasts about four or so Earth days..

This is what I'm talking about..

The hot objects must have a different history from the cold
objects — yet they’re orbiting in the same region of space.
What did all of this mean? A major clue came from
outside the solar system entirely. At the same time as the
Kuiper Belt was first being surveyed, astronomers had
also begun to discover planets around nearby stars. Many
of these exoplanets were so-called “hot Jupiters,” giant
worlds on insanely tight orbits around their stars. Given
what (little) we know about planet formation, these boil-
ing-hot gas planets couldn’t possibly have formed in their
present locations. But that meant that, against conven-
tional wisdom, these gigantic worlds must somehow have
formed very far from their stars, then migrated inward.
If exo-Jupiters can move inward, researchers reasoned,
then perhaps the giant planets in our own solar system
are not in their original locations. They saw that if Nep-
tune had migrated outward since it formed and intruded
into a primordial belt of cometlike objects, it would have
eaten a few of them and scattered the rest like billiard
balls, trapping some in orbital resonances and sending
others inward toward the Sun.
A few of the inward-moving objects stayed safely in the
outer solar system as Trojans. But the majority of these
travelers would have kept right on going. The resulting
cascade of comets into the inner solar system could have
contributed to the Late Heavy Bombardment, thought to
have pelted the inner planets and moons a few hundred
million years after the solar system formed (S&T: August
2011, page 20).
The present distribution of orbits in the Kuiper Belt
is thus a crime scene, preserving evidence for the havoc
wreaked when Neptune invaded its domain. Dynamicists
still don’t know exactly how Neptune perpetrated the
crime, though — it’s hard to write a history of Neptune’s
motion that can create the various “excited” populations in
the Kuiper Belt (the resonant, scattered, and hot classical
objects) while leaving the cold classical disk unscathed.
In the early 2000s, Mike Brown (Caltech), Chad
Trujillo (Gemini North Observatory), and David Rabino-
witz (Yale) began new CCD-assisted surveys specifically
designed to detect large trans-Neptunian objects, result-
ing in the discoveries of several of the largest now known.
The KBO discovery rate peaked in 2003, with nearly 200
discovered that year; in 2011, fewer than 20 were found.
The discovery rate has dropped not just because we’ve
found all the bright ones, but because the rarefied group
of astronomers working on this distant part of the solar
system has largely moved on from describing them as a
population to studying them as individuals.

Part of the evidence of gas giants forming further in the solar system is the reality that we currently find them further away in the solar system. But if they can move? The "hot Jupiters" are potential evidence of them moving inward, and some of the solar orbits of objects in the Kuiper Belt may be evidence Neptune's migration outward. If Neptune migrated outward, it can flip the zones around a bit. I'm not saying these giants formed near the stars, but some evidence possibly suggests nearer than previously thought, and also, if Neptune is moving outward clearly it formed closer than its current location.

And, by the way, Kuyper Belt Objects do not orbit Neptune. They orbit the Sun. So guess who's still the gravitational boss of the Solar System?

Do you ever even read my posts or just trash talk them blindly??
I never said they orbited Neptune, I was talking about how Neptune's gravity has a measurable effect on their orbits around the Sun.


But thanks for being a total prick about it.. Its always nice to talk with you