Ms. Lauryn Hill: Hello All:Here is a link to a piece that I was ‘required’ to release...
Hello All:
Here is a link to a piece that I was ‘required’ to release immediately, by virtue of the impending legal deadline. I love being able to reach people directly, but in an ideal scenario, I would not have to rush the release of new music… but the message is still there. In light of…
Peter Nixey: Dear Apple, let’s talk about photos
We’ve been managing our photos together for almost a decade now. Things were nice and simple at the start and we both knew what to expect from each other - I pulled my photos off my camera on the computer, imported them into iPhoto and arranged them. Life was good.
But then you came and…
![strangewood:
The Pathéorama by Chris MarkerIt was a funny-shaped object. A small tin box with irregularly rounded ends, rectangular aperture in the middle, and on the opposed side a small lens, the size of a nickel. You had to insert gently a piece of film—real film, with sprockets and all—in the upper part, then a tiny rubber wheel blocked it, and by turning the corresponding knob, the film unrolled, frame by frame. To tell the truth, each frame represented a different shot, so the whole thing looked more like a slide show than a home cinema, yet the shots were beautifully printed stills out of celebrated pictures: Chaplin’s, Ben-Hur, Abel Gance’s Napoléon… If you were rich, you could lock that small unit in a sort of magic lantern and project it on your wall (or screen, if you were very rich). I had to content myself with the minimal version: pressing my eye against the lens and watching. That forgotten contraption was called Pathéorama. You could read it in golden letters on black, with the legendary Pathé rooster singing against a rising sun.The egotistic pleasure of watching by myself images pertaining to the unfathomable realm of Movieland had very soon a dialectical by-product: when I couldn’t even imagine having anything in common with the process of filmmaking (whose basic principles were naturally far beyond my comprehension), there something of the film itself was with my reach, pieces of celluloid that were not that different from the photographic negatives when they came back from the lab. Something I could touch and feel, something of the real world. And why (insinuated my own dialectical Jiminy Cricket) couldn’t I in turn make something of the same kind? All I needed was translucent material and the right measurements. (The sprockets were there to look good; the rubber wheel ignored them.) So, with scissors, tracing paper, and glue, I managed to get a proper copy of Pathórama model tape. Then, screen by screen, I began to draw a few postures of my cat (what else?), with captions in between. And all of a sudden, the cat belonged to the same universe as the characters in Ben-Hur or Napoléon. I had gone through the looking glass. Of all my school buddies, Jonathan was the most prestigious: he was mechanically minded and quite inventive; he made up maquettes of theaters with rolling curtains and flashing lights, and a miniature big band emerging from the abyss while a cranked gramophone was playing “Hail the Conquering Hero.” So it was natural that he was the first to whom I wished to show my masterwork. I was rather pleased with the result, and I unrolled the adventures of the cat Riri, which I presented as “my movie.” Jonathan managed to get me sobered up. “Movies are supposed to move, stupid,” he said. “Nobody can do a movie with still images.”Thirty years passed. Then I made La Jetée. [x]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7xj78yE9z1qf7r5lo1_250.jpg)
