Two nights ago, I rented ‘The Machinist,’ a spooky psychological noir-ish Hitchcockian kind of movie. The plot goes like this: Trevor hasn’t slept for a year, and is wasting away. He works as a machinist, where he seem to be making all kinds of mistakes, with gruesome results. He believes the accidents are the result of a phantom worker there, who no one else seems to have met…

There’s a really excellent pacing and structure to this movie. It’s measured, very dark, and sparse enough to mimic Trevor’s wasting body. The spattering blood is kept to a minimum. But the best part of all is the way the screenwriters give you so much information, so many clues, that you know the solution to the mystery pretty quickly. So the interesting part is watching Trevor probe and prod the world and his own understanding of it. Whatever dark secret is hiding around the corner, he’s trying to find it, at the same time he’s trying to avoid it, which is to me one of the most interesting aspects of the human psyche. This isn’t a mystery.

And I have to say… Christian Bale lost 63 pounds of weight in order to play Trevor. His bones stick out. You can count his ribs. It adds an extra freakshow creep-out to the otherwise well-made movie, and should justify an Acadamy Award for weight loss.

You’re driving through the Snake river plain, in Idaho. It’s a big flat ancient lava flow; an inhospitible expanse of direct sunlight and dry weather bordered by mountains to the north and the Snake to the south. You’ve been driving across this flat plain for hours.

You drive into a town. You turn your head, and you see this:

A memorial park in Arco, Idaho.

Tonight’s movie: ‘The Fearless Freaks,’ which is a documentary about the band The Flaming Lips.

I’ve always thought of the Flaming Lips as some folks who had been around a while, but who were finally finding their own artistic stride. But I missed the boat; they’d been reaching their stride for a while now. It’s just the success I’ve been noticing.

This documentary was put together by a friend of the band, who has been making home movies of them since high school, and did a lot of their videos. It’s very, very intimate. At one point the drummer describes his heroin addiction while rigging up and getting ready to shoot up, saying, “I probably shouldn’t let you film this, but I trust you.”

But it’s not all heroin addicts and other seediness. It’s infused with the charisma of Wayne Coyne, front man, master of ceremonies, and general font of forward motion.

My favorite moment, and I really think the moment when the movie turns the corner into its most interesting chapter, is when the band loses a guitar player and they take it as a sign to reinvent themselves. They do some risky performances, where they give jam boxes to the audience, and the performance is pre-recorded on 40 tapes that are put in the jam boxes and turned on simultaneously.

Describing these events, Coyne says that he was terrified they wouldn’t work, but he came to realize that his audience trusts him. That they were truly on his side. And so he wanted to work to make that trust worthwhile.

So basically, that’s the underlying theme of this movie: Trust. And not only that, but trust that whimsy will kick melancholy’s ass.

Watched disc 1 of BBS.

It’s a huge documentary put together by a guy I know as Sketch.

The story here is that I was at Scarecrow video, hoping to rent the new DVD of Point Blank, but they didn’t have any copies left. Who knew it would be so popular? It turns out there’s a new DVD of Bullit, so I opted for that instead. On my way to the counter, I saw Sketch’s movie there for rental, and when you see a movie by a guy you sort of know, about a hobby that consumed many years of your life, you go ahead and rent it, along with Steve McQueen.

The movie itself is a lot like BBSes were: Kind of tedious, kind of quirky, requires commitment, unevenly edited, but with moments which transform the whole endeavor into something worthwhile.He’s just taping people talking about BBSes, without steering the conversation at all. It’s all in the editing. So imagine, if you will, a 6-hour documentary where people talk about their hobby.

Dude also runs Textfiles.com, which is the definitive archive of all the old text files and quite a few messages from BBSes. Read for yourself.

Xanga has a lot in common with the old BBSes of yore. That’s one of the reasons I’ve stuck with it, I think. In fact, stjnky used to run a BBS, and he’s the one who sent me to Xanga. The circle is complete.

Oh, and if you click through the ‘Currently Watching’ link, you might be priviledged enough to see the $200 super special K-RAD EELEET autographed version being sold by wickedwizards (just launched). I cackle with glee.

Update: I’d almost forgotten about this one… Back during the last presidential election, Bush outed an Al Qaeda double agent working for the US and the UK and Pakistan, in order to show that terror alerts weren’t politically-motivated. This agent happened to be in Britain at the time. When he was outed, Al Qaeda operatives ran for the hills. One wonders if the London bombings would have happened if that operation had been allowed to complete, rather than having been wrecked by Bush.

OK, let’s look at the chronology, shall we?

Late 2001: Terrorist attack in New York City, killing 3,000+

2002: US invades Afghanistan to get rid of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the NYC attack.

2003: US invades Iraq with ‘coalition’ of Britain.

Two years pass, during which the US doesn’t really do anything other than bomb Fallujah a few times. In 2004, radical Islamists bomb Madrid, however, killing 191.

2005: Al Qaeda bombs London, killing 40.

This very moment: Osama Bin Laden walks the earth. A bunch of people who might be terrorists (or might not be) are being tortured in Cuba by the US. NO criminal arrests of any terrorists by the US.

Bush and Blair sure did a good job of fighting terrorism, didn’t they? Meanwhile, Iraqis are happy to have traded Saddam Hussein for… Insurgents? Terrorists? Al Qaeda? Democracy?

Bush’s War On Terrah is unaccountably inept. Either you’re with him, or you’re not stupid.

World Wide Panorama 2005: Water.

‘Coined the term ‘weblog,’ never made a dime.‘

Seriously cool promotional site by photographer Mark Meyer.

I found him while doing some research into the highest quality digital photo output. The winner so far: LightJet, which is a process that exposes normal photographic paper with lasers. Calypso in Santa Clara, CA, quotes somewhere around $80 for a print in the size I want. Ivey here in Seattle doesn’t have a quote list on their web site. Sigh.

One of the places I visited on my recent return trip was the Wallowa Mountains region of Oregon.

To get there, I had to cross the southern end of Hell’s Canyon on the Snake river, where it’s dammed up and turned into a recreation area. That canyon is deeeeeep. I was worried it would go below sea level.

Most of this region, BTW, is managed as the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. The summit area of the Wallowa mountains is designated as Eagle Cap Wilderness, and of course the area along the Snake is Hell’s Canyon National Recreation Area.

Driving up the western side, and then up towards Joseph was a real treat. It’s a tiny, tiny two lane road clinging to the sides of 5,000 ft. sheer drop-offs. I was amazed the road was even paved. There were no mile markers, but there were numbers painted on the road.

Eventually, going up to a pass, the road was following Lick Creek. I wanted to get out and follow the instructions, but there wasn’t easy access. At least, not with privacy. I got to the top of the pass, and there was a sign: Salt Creek Pass. The watershed on the other side was Salt Creek. Mmm. Lick the salt.

An unexceptional picture taken from Salt Creek Pass. You can see the rakes, result of recent fires. There’s a project underway to revitalize a number of aspen groves which had been decimated by the fires.

Shortly thereafter, I came out of the mountain forest into a high valley, a bit of high-altitude mini-palouse. The granite Wallowas push their way out of the wrinkled velvety green. It might have been the late afternoon light, but everything seemed in perfect harmony; the mountains presiding over human-scale farms, red-winged blackbirds looking for a place to light, being stuck behind a tractor and not minding.

Eventually, the road takes one to Joseph, a small town with big tourist ambitions. Lovely Victorian architecture, too. Joseph is at the foot of Lake Wallowa, and a road pulls you up the lake to a beautiful valley in the middle of the granite mountains. This is the jump-off point for a lot of recreational activities, and it’s completely packed with people, especially during 4th of July weekend.

I was disappointed because there’s a restaurant on top of the mountain, and you take a ski lift up to it, but it was closed. I guess the health inspectors didn’t want to ride the ski lift or something.

Moving on, I decided not to return to the interstate, and made the rest of the trip to Washington on US and state highways. I ended up on the Palouse (not the mini-one) near Milton-Freewater.

There’s a McDonald’s in Milton-Freewater, and I hadn’t eaten (no ski lift), and it was the only place that looked open. So I made the biggest mistake of the trip: I went to their drive through. As a result, I spent the night at the Prosser rest area, making occassional trips to the bathroom to throw up.

I should mention that there’s a good college radio station in Walla-Walla, KWCW, 90.5 on your FM dial. They were playing some seriously underground music from the early ’80s while I was in the range of their mighty 200 watts. This was all before the puking, by the way.

The rest of the trip was a no-brainer. Leave behind the sunny summer of the east side for the overcast world on the other side of Snoqualmie pass. And home.

Rocky Mountains, sunset, looking north west from just above the tree line, Mt. Evans summit road, Colorado.

Click for a bigger version. The source image is much, much bigger. Not as big as the mountains, however.

Update: Ok, sandiegogal asks very politely about this photo, so I’ll give the technical explanation.

But first… The obligatory 1:1 crop.

There are 8 source images, all shot with the camera mounted on a tripod. I’d like to get a spherical panoramic head, but none really satisfy the price/quality ratio at the current time. I shot the sources in portrait orientation, using a conventional pano head. I used a 135mm lens, f/16, and something like 3 second exposure. Viz:

Each image is shot as a RAW file and converted to a 16-bit TIFF file, so there’s no lossy compression. This happens in Photoshop.

Then I fired up hugin and began the stitch. hugin is a frontend for software called PanoTools, which works by aligning images based on control points they have in common. Much of the process within hugin involves setting control points, which was difficult with these images. They have a lot of indistinct overlap area. It took some serious tweaking.

Next came the waiting. I told hugin to use software called enblend to disguise the seams between the pictures. The image warping part took a half hour, but enblend took all afternoon. I left and did some shopping and came back and it was still working.

The end result was well blended and stood up to scrutiny. Loaded into Photoshop, I made an effects layer for Levels and brightened the gamma a little bit. Then I painted a gradient mask on that effect layer so it only applied to the bottom third of the image. Cropped off the inevitable ragged edges that come with doing a stitched pano, and saved as a PS document, 303 megabytes.

I hope to print it out at it’s full potential size at 250dpi. That’ll work out somewhere around 40″ x 10″. I could go back and interpolate the RAW files into higher resolution images and re-do the process, to end up with something that I could print about 25% larger, but I’ll wait to see how well this outputs at different resolutions before I do.

I won’t give away a jpeg for a few reasons, all having to do with quality control. I can’t feel good about sending someone a jpeg of this image, even at full resolution, because it’ll be 8-bit and have compression. No printout you make would be as good as it should be. The PS file (or a correpsonding 16-bit TIFF file) fills half a CD, and would only really be useable in specialized software.

I’d like to work out a way to let people order their own fine art printing of this photo (and others) from some online source, but I have to do the research.

Anyway. There you go. More than you wanted to know about it.