Bill Moyers interviews The Yes Men.

You’ll find it amusing. Really.

Here’s my movie review for ‘Eolomea,’ which is yet another DEFA sci-fi flick, that came out in 1972:

At about 7PM, having watched maybe 45 minutes worth of ‘Eolomea,’ I found myself nodding off. I felt like taking a nap, so I climbed into bed. Then it was 1AM, and I was waking from a dream about helping my sister climb a giant tree that was dead and decaying and rotten.

I got up and watched the end of the movie, which was vaguely satisfying, but which left me wondering why anyone would go to the trouble of telling this particular story.

I tried to get some more sleep, but I’m all sleeped-out. And now I’m sleepless.

thisisby.us, a ‘blog with a revenue plan.

I haven’t signed up or anything. I just think it’s an interesting idea.

I found it on craigslist while I was trying to find someone who needs shipped across the state on a slow boat. Or in a slow van, as the case may be.

I have this problem.

I have an iPod, which I’m like the last kid on the block to get, which is fine.

And I have iTunes, which has a way to subscribe to podcasts. And podcasts are named after the iPod. Right? So I subscribe to a bunch of them, from NPR and PRI and there’s one from the Nature Conservancy and of course Democracy Now! and Samadhisound which had an interview with Harold Budd a while back, and On The Media and this nice one called Philosophy Bites which talks in very abbreviated terms about philosophical problems, and so forth.

Except I never listen to them.

I don’t drive that much when I’m in town, so I can’t listen then, and if I turn one on while I’m doing other stuff on the computer, I end up turning it off in order to concentrate on something else.

Some days I make an effort to listen to Democracy Now!, but yesterday it was just Amy Goodman and this one woman talking about health care for children for half an hour, making the same arguments over and over about a dozen times, thrashing Bush for his attitude towards CHIPS. That’s a tune I like, but to hear it repeated again and again, in the same indignant tone of voice without moving on to anything else?

So I’m staring at the Podcasts screen on iTunes trying to figure out which ones I can do without. And truthfully, if I can do without one of them I can do without all of them. I’d like them to be arranged semi-randomly, like a real radio station, that I could tune into or out of. And guess what? You can make a smart playlist to do just this.

I call it ‘Podcast Party Mix.’ I’ve decided I can just skip forward past anything I don’t want to listen to at the moment, and then it’s just plain gone from the playlist. Farewell.

I’ve been watching all these old Soviet sci-fi movies, and it turns out the NW Film Forum is going to be showing many of them in a series called From the Tsars to the Stars. Rawk.

But I went ahead and rented two that aren’t on the screening list anyway. Har. I’ve only made it through one of them. In addition, I rented a movie called ‘Walker,’ because Bob Harris had mentioned it.

One of the great things about being in Seattle is that you can read about an obscure movie that’s hard to obtain, and then that evening be watching it, having rented it from Scarecrow Video. After it’s short theatrical run, ‘Walker’ was only ever released in the US on VHS, and later on a European, PAL-format DVD. And of course, Scarecrow had both, and the VHS case on display was autographed by Alex Cox, the film’s director. If you’re a student of film, move to Seattle.

‘Walker:’ The anachronistic, highly-subjective re-telling of the public life of William Walker, an American recruited by Cornelius Vanderbilt to ‘pacify’ Nicaragua in 1855. Walker ruled Nicaragua for two brutal years. The film came out in 1987, largely as a response to President Reagan’s central America policies, and includes plenty of anachronisms, including Walker as Time’s Man of the Year, and Cornelius Vanderbilt using a computer. What I like about the film is that it’s trying to take on huge subjects (US attitudes towards central America, the racism that exists just under the surface and justifies economics, betrayal of American ideals for personal glory and economic gain, stuff like that) and pack it into a single character and then tying all that to the present day. It doesn’t work that well, but it’s a valiant attempt. The post-punk irreverence of the filmmakers to the subject gives one plenty to feel smug about, and the politics are pretty obvious. Some might say excessive, but not me. Still, the individual dramas are mostly lost in the sea of near-genocidal tragedy, and you really need to be familiar with the historical material to decode this telling. The film should be called ‘Alex Cox Makes A Film About Nicaragua,’ because it’s not really about William Walker. But you should watch it anyway. Music by Joe Strummer.

‘The Dust Of The Stars’ is yet another East German DEFA production, from 1976. It’s actually pretty enjoyable, if you can read between the lines of the ham-fisted ideology. That’s the trick with these movies: You know there were censors, and you know the filmmakers were often trying to be subversive and critical of their own government, so to unpack the message of the film is to play a game of guess-chess with the story of the film’s production. In this case, the protagonists land in a space ship on a planet that beamed out a distress call. They discover a decadent world of midnight parties and bizarre architecture, and the inhabitants insist that nothing is wrong, and that the distress call was a mistake. But when one of them discovers the mines, and the slaves forced to work there in order to support the decadence above ground, and learns that it was the slaves who had sent out the distress call…. You get the picture. So an obvious reading is that the planet is the west and the spaceship crew is the Soviet east, but maybe not… Maybe the spaceship crew is saying just enough to illustrate that the decadence is at the top of the ruling party… I wish I knew more about the specifics of East German politics in 1976.

The art direction is great. The ‘midnight party’ is a lot of fun, with allusions to Fellini. There’s a great ‘chamber of mirrors’ set that’s quite stunning. It’s an entertaining, low expectation movie until they start arguing about whether it’s appropriate to arm foreign insurrections (an obvious swipe at US foreign policy.. see previous review). Things fall apart rapidly after that, and the sad ending came as a relief. I want to mention the soundtrack music, because it’s really great ’70s prog/disco stuff, and it’d love to find a copy of the isolated music tracks.

Tonight I’ll watch ‘Eolomea,’ another utopian fantasy.

I made two stops for geocaches on this track. Guess where they are. Bonus points for naming them.

And can this be the track recorded by a geocacher?

Welcome to the Land Of The Blue LEDs.

OK, so here’s something interesting.

Over on firedoglake, one of the posts made allusion to Fahreneit 451, and showed a YouTube clip from the 1966 film.

I felt like seeing more, since I don’t have that movie. But it turns out that if you search YouTube for ‘fahrenheit 451,’ you end up looking at a lot of high school English class projects. Apparently it’s fashionable for English teachers to: A) believe that their students are nascent Francois Truffauts, and B) not see the irony in assigning their students to make a video of a work of literature about the end of literature.

Poking through the videos, the students don’t see the irony, either. Lots of them made music videos with Truffaut’s footage; I can’t think of why a student would make a music video mashup using only footage from a 1966 film, so apparently the irony deepens: A music video counts as a high school English project.

FireWire kicks ass!

FireWire is the coolest thing ever!

FireWire is badass!

No, really!

You get FireWire drives and you can move files at FOUR HUNDRED MEGABITS PER SECOND!!1!! That’s badass!

Unless, of course, you’re moving it between different devices on the chain. I mean, duh. Then it’s kinda slow.

BUT FIREWIRE IS BADASS!!11!

(Here’s a word problem: A train leaves the FireWire host on the computer at 400 megabits per second. A train leaves the external hard drive at 400 megabits per second. They’re on the same track. How long before they collide?)

Update: Hey, I just found a solution to my 16 MB/s file transfer problem: USB 2.0. I’m so glad I had the foresight to get external hard drives with FireWire *and* USB. 222 MB/s. Plug one in the FireWire, and the other in USB. My backup won’t take all night now.

I know you were all *very* concerned.

By the way: SuperDuper! is a program I left off of the list of Mac software I made a while back. It’s all-round excellent, and it keeps all of the file system’s metadata, which other products do not.

This has been…. possibly the lamest ‘blog entry ever.

‘The Silent Star,’ while not all that excellent, was an interesting (and most importantly: watchable) peek into the Soviet use of propaganda in film. The main point of propaganda is that the doctor on the space ship is Japanese, and her parents died in the Hiroshima atomic bombing. This point is revisited at least a few times while back on Earth. When we get to Venus, it’s discovered that the Venusians, who meant to attack Earth, had instead blown themselves up in an atomic blast. So of course we have the ship’s doctor around to remind us that the US blew up Hiroshima, just like the Venusians did. The rest of the thing is standard flat-charactered sci-fi from 1962, with plenty of delightful spectacle. The art direction of the space ship and the Venusian landscape are really fun, but I kept wishing we could dwell there a little longer, to take it all in. The cosmonauts, however, have to keep the plot moving, so we never really get to see too much. Probably to hide the strings holding up the spaceships.

‘Battle Beyond The Sun’ is a bit of a snore, but it must have blown a few minds in 1960. That is, the original must have. The re-cut, re-dub, and ham-fisted insertion of a stupid fight between two monsters really detracts. The original came out just after ‘Destination: Moon,’ and parallels it in many ways.

‘Battle Beyond The Sun’ came with a double-feature feature, an Italian flick called ‘Star Pilot,’ which I have yet to watch. Well, that’s not true; I took in about ten minutes of it, and I think it’ll be a slog to make to through to the end. I’ll probably just toss it on the heap of movies that I never finished.

I noticed that Scarecrow also had two other Soviet sci-fi flicks, in their non-Roger-Corman-ized versions, and I’ll have to pick them up next time.