Monday Morning Stimulus

UPDATE: Pardon me while I fix this -- for some reason the YouTube videos vanished from the entry between the Preview and the Posting. I'm going back to find the problem in the code. Thanks.


UPDATE 2: Dammit! No matter what, I can't get the embedding to work, either in LJ's Rich Text or HTML entry formats, or by entering the code myself -- I did this last originally, and it worked perfectly in "preview" but when I posted it altered the code for some reason and won't keep it the way it was; I've been having this happen a LOT with LJ recently when it comes to paragraph/line breaks, too.

I'm inserting the links to the videos I was trying to embed instead, as what was supposed to be a quick half-hour post winds up eating several hours . . .


Okay, woke up, got the coffee, opened the email, and wound up with a couple of links to follow, taking me to a game and a video.

The coffee not having kicked in, the video led to other videos, and it's become a morning of sleepy wandering through an abstract game and some Peter Greenaway videos. At home in Brooklyn, we only have a dial-up connection, and I'm enjoying this brief time of being able to watch videos and play games.


So why not share?


First the game, a link sent to me by Daniel Kleinfeld, which was created by Jason Nelson, and is called game, game, game and again game. Maybe I'm still just sleepy, but right now it's my favorite videogame ever.


And someone in the Yahoo email group for Peter Greenaway passed on a piece of stop-motion animation created by what appears to be a group of Dutch film students, based on imagery from Greenaway's great film The Falls. Unfortunately, embedding is disabled on their film, but you can watch it HERE.

You don't have to know The Falls to enjoy it, I think, though knowing it makes some of the images have more resonance.


This led me to look for actual Greenaway pieces on YouTube, coming up with a section of M Is For Man, Music, Mozart, a film of his I still haven't seen:

LINK


And from there led to the first part of Vertical Features Remake, a film I've written about before HERE in some unfinished notes on the early films of Greenaway as part of my Luperist study with the VFI and the IRR -- and I thank again my occasional collaborator Dr. Martin I. Wesley of the Institute for Applied Neocollisionism (who sometimes appears in my stage work under the name "Doctor Memory") for his assistance in editing the notes when I succumbed to pernicious VUE symptoms.

Here is Part One. When I first saw this film, about 15 years ago, I completely loved the "narration" sections and was deeply bored by the "film recreation" sections (while recognizing they had to be just as they were). Now I'm not bored by any of it anymore after many viewings, but YMMV:

LINK


If you want to go on (it's worth it), here are PART TWO, PART THREE, PART FOUR, and PART FIVE.


And if you don't want to sit through an hour of Greenaway on a computer screen, here's a complete, earlier, shorter film:

LINK


The kindly YouTuber who has uploaded most of this Greenaway, Armeror, has also included what appears to be the entirety of The Falls in easily digestible, bite-size segments, which may be a good way to watch it on a computer, bit by bit, each of the 92 biographies of the VUE-afflicted people whose last names begin with the letters FALL as a separate file.

If you wish, you can start watching the film at THIS PAGE (if it doesn't move as he uploads new videos) with the "Opening Sequence," then move backwards to "Orchard Falla" and on, eventually leading to "Leasting Falvo," "Anthior Fallwaste" and the "End Credits."

Here's a sample biography from The Falls, perhaps of interest as it features (in photographs) the then-obscure animators The Brothers Quay:

LINK


Enjoy.

Power

I was saddened to hear about the sudden death - car accident in San Francisco - of writer/newspaperman David Halberstam. The current Times obit is HERE - it appears to be a brief squib from the AP right now; I assume the paper he served (and which stood by him) in difficult times will do more for him later.


There was plenty of writing about the death of Kurt Vonnegut around the blogs, and he certainly meant a great deal to me, but nothing worth saying that others weren't saying better. On the other hand, I don't know a lot of people who read Halberstam's books, unfortunately, and I might as well recommend my favorites as I'm thinking of him now.


He's probably best known for The Best and the Brightest, his epic account of the bad decisions that got America into Vietnam. A great book informationally, I still find it a slog to read compared to his other work. Still, it's amazing to me that, according to Amazon, it appears to be out-of-print (though available used).


I prefer The Powers That Be, a history of the news media in the US, The Fifties, an overview of the decade, which was also turned into an excellent series on The History Channel (with annoying bookends added on the original broadcasts in which Roger Mudd smugly dismisses the achievements of the liberal forces profiled in that evening's show), and my favorite, The Reckoning, a history of the auto industry in the US and Japan -- in my dreams, I have the skill and the budget to turn this massive book into an opera. I generally wind up reading these three at least once a year, and they're always worth revisiting.


An excellent nonfiction work in which Halberstam figures greatly as a character is William Prochnau's Once Upon a Distant War, an account of the first groups of American journalists covering Vietnam in country, and their growing disillusionment with the war and the US government.


I first encountered Halberstam in the parody figure that Garry Trudeau made of him for a week in Doonesbury as he interviewed Rick Redfern for his upcoming "massive tome," The Creme de la Creme. So for years I somewhat thought of him as the pompous ass Trudeau played him as. Later, reading his work and seeing interviews with him, I was pleased to note that, judging from his personality, probably no one laughed longer and harder at Trudeau's version of Halberstam than Halberstam himself.


He had a book on the Korean War scheduled to come out later this year. I hope he left it in some kind of publishable form. I'd like to read it.

(no subject)

Interesting, this . . .


I did another little online meme thing not long ago that was supposed to determine your accent from a number of questions that had fewer questions but seemed to come up with a more accurate breakdown. Here's the one I just got from mcbrennan:

What American accent do you have?
Created by Xavier on Memegen.net

Northern. Whether you have the world famous Inland North accent of the Great Lakes area, or the radio-friendly sound of upstate NY and western New England, your accent is what used to set the standard for American English pronunciation (not much anymore now that the Inland North sounds like it does).

Take this quiz now - it's easy!

We're going to start with "cot" and "caught." When you say those words do they sound the same or different?

Same, no wait I mean different, maybe, a little bit different... Same Different

I once was stunned when I met a young woman, who was working on a show at The Piano Store, about whom it was said that she could peg where anyone was born after hearing them speak a short time. Thinking I'd stump her, I asked her to guess at mine, and she said, "South Jersey or Philadelphia."

I was born just outside Philly. We moved when I was four. I was stunned, as I always thought of myself as having the exact accent described above in the meme-thing.

I probably got some Philly just from listening to my parents later. According to the other questionnaire - wish I could remember where it was - I was indeed primarily a Yankee, with touches of the Philly area, the Chicago area (an Indiana leftover?), and the West Virginia area (my great-grandmother, apparently). Odd how few questions can peg this . . .