Go Blog It!

Similarly, Bell and Gemmell would like software that organized the contents of the archive into movies—something, at least, to compress and shape it, to summarize its parts.

“Auto-storytelling,” Gemmell calls it. “My dream is I go on vacation and take my pictures and come home and tell the computer, ‘Go blog it,’ so that my mother can see it. I don’t have to do anything; the story is there in the pattern of the images.”

...What Bell and the others imagine, ultimately, is a function by which a computer assembles a person’s autobiography, which he or she authorizes and passes on.

- The New Yorker, Remember This?: A project to record everything we do in life, by Alec Wilkinson

Yikes, if this software catches on, I might be out of a job. People can just go to an event, a Black Fly Festival, a German cabaret or a marathon and say to their computer, GO BLOG IT! And there will be no need for fools like me to stay up all night snipping away.

Memory revises itself endlessly. We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. The rest falls away. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so. The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth.

Someone uneasy with the candor of his archive could delete the material that pained him. People do it all the time: they destroy papers; they leave instructions in their wills for letters to be burned.

In the novel “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” William Maxwell writes, “Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”

In “The Seven Sins of Memory,” the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter mentions the work of Shelley Taylor, a psychologist at U.C.L.A., who has written that optimistic people tend to recall their pasts more favorably, and that the versions of their selves that they recalled contributed to their mental and physical health.

- The New Yorker, Remember This?: A project to record everything we do in life, by Alec Wilkinson

This is the sort of thing I have dreamt about since I was little, without even knowing what the hell I was dreaming about. I religiously saved every paper, exam and note from an early age, with hopes that someday, somehow, this would prove useful to me. That someday I would be able to tell "my story" with all these bits and pieces of nothing.

Turns out I am not the only history-obsessed egomaniac on the planet. And there is some software being built for people just like me.

SenseCam, Lifelogging, Lifebrowser, a memex - these new technologies all sound so tasty! Or are they scary? Threatening even? Is this beginning to the Terminator movies? Are computers rubbing their gray computer chip cells together and preparing to take over our planet??

Or is this the pre-story to The Matrix? Are the hyper-intelligent computers preparing to turn humans into battery packs to run these crazy programs? How dependent on computers should we become? And why does the following excerpt frighten me just a little?

At night, he said, he sometimes hears his computer working. “I hear the fan, and I think, My system is consolidating new memories,” he said. “It’s like a human being dreaming.”

- The New Yorker, Remember This?: A project to record everything we do in life, by Alec Wilkinson

When I was little, the concept of blogging my daily activites for anyone in the world to see would have blown me away. To take a picture of the tree in my backyard and my recently skinned-knee, and then write a story about it, well, that would have seemed crazy to me.

But if I was busy blogging my activities, it is more than likely that I would have spent less time running around the neighborhood late at night with a pack of hooligan kids. I would have been trying to capture a time in my life that was most likey too slippery to bottle up. And now all I have left from it are tattered old revised memories, re-worked time and time again in my dusty nogan, and maybe, that is how I like it.

“People argue about the need to forget things,” he says, “but if you look at business discipline—advising that you write everything down, your goals and objectives, and return to them to see how you did, examining what went wrong—I think the same thing could happen with our personal lives.

Being able to say, ‘Now I realize my tone of voice was threatening’—I think there’s a real positive aspect in having the real record of what things looked and sounded like, and sequences of events, because we often end up believing things that are not based on facts anymore.

Of course, the question built in there is how much can we take? How much do we need not to know reality because we can’t bear the truth?” Aside from issues of self-consciousness, being an entry in someone else’s archive is a problem, although not a new one. People have for centuries betrayed themselves in letters and diaries, and they have used them to betray each other. A videotape, an ill-considered answering-machine message, makes an impression that is not easily undone.

- The New Yorker, Remember This?: A project to record everything we do in life, by Alec Wilkinson

PS And may I just say, for the computer recording my daily thoughts, that catching up on a pile of old New Yorkers with one's morning coffee on the backporch is tantamount to heaven in my dusty old book....

Old Age Creeps Up

Before retiring to my cold basement to edit, I spent some time in the sun drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette (I know, I know - I need stress relief right now, so there!!) and reading this highly disturbing article in The New Yorker about aging (which quickly made me regret the cigarette).

Here are some excerpts but I recommend reading the whole thing (here) to be properly scared shitless :

"After all, for most of our hundred-thousand-year existence—all but the past couple of hundred years—the average life span of human beings has been thirty years or less. (Research suggests that subjects of the Roman Empire had an average life expectancy of twenty-eight years.)

Today, the average life span in developed countries is almost eighty years. If human life spans depend on our genetics, then medicine has got the upper hand. We are, in a way, freaks living well beyond our appointed time."

- "The Way We Age Now" by Atul Gawande, April 30th, The New Yorker Magazine

By all rights, I should be dead now that I am over 30. Hell, in Roman times I would be ancient! So I plan to enjoy every damn miserable moment I get on this planet as my organs harden, my teeth fall out, my eyes get worse, my feet become unattended, my inner hard drives fail, my prescriptions increase and I slowly begin to fall apart...

"Nonetheless, as the defects in a complex system increase, the time comes when just one more defect is enough to impair the whole, resulting in the condition known as frailty. It happens to power plants, cars, and large organizations. And it happens to us: eventually, one too many joints are damaged, one too many arteries calcify. There are no more backups. We wear down until we can’t wear down anymore."
- "The Way We Age Now" by Atul Gawande, April 30th, The New Yorker Magazine

And to make matters worse, there are not enough doctors to deal with all us aging, malfunctioning factories! Who wants to deal with machines that are falling apart when you can work with nicely oiled, brand new machines?

All of this reminds me of an ethnography I wrote in college connecting an old age home to American's obsession with horror movies. My thesis was that we are so afraid of the decline of our bodies that we hide the evidence away in nursing homes. Still, we are fascinated by the inevitable process, so we indulge in horror movies with decrepit zombies falling apart and trying to eat us as a way to indulge our hidden fears.

We are all gonna die. Some sooner than others. There it is. Sucks.

So all we have is this moment, the present. I guess I am glad I had that coffee and a ciggie (a heavenly combo if there ever was one) and sun/reading break (also heavenly combo) after all.

Pretty But Vacant

"If [Coppola's Marie Antoinette] does drop larger hints, they have less to do with the vanished culture of Versailles than with the fretful stasis of our own. The movie's approach to the world beyond, to everything that one doesn't know or wouldn't care to buy, is like the look on Kristen Dunst's face: a beautiful blankness, forever on the brink of drifting, with a smile, into sleep." - Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

When I was younger, I prided myself on being "real." I thought my overly emotional, artistic personality which made crying, smiling and feeling come so easily was a sign of my superior sensitivity. Over time, this cockiness has been replaced with a realization that feeling things intensely is not really all it is cracked up to be. Perhaps Sofia Coppola is on to something, perhaps feeling less is where it is at. I mean, why bother to struggle with things, that is just, like, so tacky.

I make no bones about my dislike of Sofia (see video full o'hate here). I found The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation to be beautiful but empty (although I have to hand it to Bill Murray - he gave me something real to munch on).

But maybe, more than anything, I am just jealous of people like Sofia who can take their emotions, bottle them up and bury them deep down inside their perfectly coiffed selves. This sounds far preferable to my mood of late which can be likened to having your heart tenderly massaged by a cheese grater. Maybe Sofia and her too-cool-for-school ilk are onto something?

"Coppola films Versailles with a flat acceptance, quickening at times into eager montage, and declares, in her notes on the film, that she sought to capture her heroine's "inner experience." Her what? This is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinkie." - Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

I tried to go into Marie Antoinette with an open mind, hers is a story that I find scintillating. I love the book it was based on, Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette: The Journey. I am fascinated with the time period and even enjoyed a trip to Versailles when I was 17.

I recall that cold, sunny winter afternoon well, when I stood in the magnificently gold-coated, marble-floored court yard (which also shows up in the film) and soaked up the grandeur of Versailles.

It is impossible not to get emotional as you come face to face with so much oppulence and beauty. Such an excess of decadence and immensity overwhelm the senses and blind the eye until they combine and turn to mud: hyper-manicured and pointy gardens, magnetic and powerful sculptures, detailed wallpaper, embroidered bedsheets, gold encrusted hallways, magnificent chandeliers, tree-lined pathways, and startlingly entrancing vistas everyway you turn.

It is almost too much, I don't blame Sofia for getting overwhelmed and churning out such an underwhelming film.

I still have my journal entry from that day. It is sad and melancholic (ahh, the joys of being an overly dramatic teen/30-something). For all that intense beauty and oppulence, I recall feeling very much alone. And the loneliness mixed with the massiveness of Versailles was overwhelming.

If nothing else, this pretty movie made me think of that day and sparked a brief, almost faded, moment of sentiment.

Needless to say, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette was beautiful. I knew it would be. Amazing set design, costumes, hair and make-up and haunting sound design. The music was perfect, the montages were spectacular, Kristen Dunst's heaving bosom was lovely - all this and I felt nary a thing the entire movie (save for that spark of a memory I mentioned earlier).

In fact, I recall thinking, "How much longer can this thing stretch on? They haven't even had sex yet?! I will die of boredom...oooh goody, another montage sequence!"

"The one, transfixing virtue of "Marie Antoinette" is its unembarrassed devotion to the superficial. There is no morality at play here, no agony other than boredom, and, until the last half hour, not a shred of political sense." - Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

Where Fraser's book was rich with details and intimate moments of Antoinette's rich life, Coppola's film skimmed the surface so quickly I think I got rug burn. It was a pretty ride but, nonetheless, I felt not a thing the entire journey.

Good actors such as Steve Coogan, Molly Shannon, Judy Davis, Jason Schwartzman, Shirley Henderson, Rip Torn and Asia Argento were frittered away. They hung like stiff costumes in the background of a museum, impressive and nice to look at, but empty and meaningless all the same.

Kristen Dunst tried admirably to convey some emotion but, as usual, her sunny valley girl personality (sort of fitting for Marie Antoinette in a strange sort of way) shone through and it was impossible to buy her one sad, crying fit. Sure, the King sleeps night after night with this hot little number and doesn't get around to tapping that shit till 7 years later, yeah right, I buy that Kristen. It isn't her fault she is sizzling!

Perhaps it all boils down to the fact that, despite my better judgement, I am an emotion junky and this movie felt like a long, painful withdrawl from a beloved drug. What a waste of actors, what a waste of beauty and good music.

"Is the movie somehow contending that the Queen was, with her gang of cronies and her witless overspends, the Paris Hilton of the late eighteenth century? ... On the other hand, I spent long periods of "Marie Antoinette" under the growing illusion that it was actually made by Paris Hilton...Snuff is snorted like coke. There are hilarious attempts at landscape, but the fountains and parterres of Versailles are grabbed by the camera and pasted into the action, as if the whole thing were being shot on a cell phone and sent to friends." - Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

All that said, I admit that Sofia did an admirable job with this movie. She had to cover a lot of ground and there were some nice moments when the 80s new wave soundtrack faded out and the sound of wind chimes could be heard (at the coronation) and of course, the beautiful shots of Kristen Dunst frolicking in Antoinette's meadow which were reminiscent of a similar scene in The Virgin Suicides.

Sofia has an artistic eye which I admire. She manages to stay calm, cool and collected in the face of a dramatic, highly emotionally charged episode in French history. I envy her cool detachment, I wish I had a hefty dose of it myself these days.

I was also disappointed by this film because I find the plot of Marie Antoinette's life to be so interesting and this movie's plot to be so uninteresting. It would be nice to see another director take on this subject matter and perhaps give less time to the fabulous montages, costumes and the excess of Versailles and more time to the dramatic end which left Marie Antoinette's family and court violently beheaded.

This is a tale full of fun gorey details, melodrama, suffering and pain! Maybe this film could be like a Part Two to Coppola's Marie Antoinette, perhaps like a VHI: Driven or an E! True Hollywood Story. It could be called, "Marie Antoinette: Some Heavy Shit Man."

There is a lot of dirt and grime in Marie Antoinette's story to be examined once you peel back the pretty layers of chiffon and bon bons (why so many cakes and sweets Sofia?). And being the emotional vampire that I am, I for one, would like to watch this Part 2 of Marie Antoinette's life.

The lonely time she spent in prison where she had to watch her best friend's decapitated head being paraded outside her window for her delight. The agony of having her young children ripped from her side and slowly turned against her. Her humiliating trial in court during which the revolutionaries dragged her character through the mud and convicted her as a child molester after convincing her son to testify against his own mother. And yet, through it all, Marie Antoinette remained a pretty level-headed Queen.

They did their best to beat her down and kill her spirit. They stripped her of all that was dear to her, tortured her for months and then tied her hands behind her back and made her ride in a rickety old carriage on her long journey to the guillitoine as angry mobs hurled insults in her wake. And even still, she had nothing but kind words as she apologized to the executioner for stepping on his foot. Even in the end, Marie Antoinette was a lady, if only we could all be so lucky:

She stepped lightly down from the cart and stared up at the guillotine. The priest who had accompanied her whispered, "This is the moment, Madame, to arm yourself with courage."

Marie Antoinette turned to look at him and smiled, "Courage? The moment when my troubles are going to end is not the moment when my courage is going to fail me." Legend states that her last words were, "Monsieur, I ask your pardon. I did not do it on purpose," spoken after she had stepped on the executioner's foot.

YouTube and Little Loca in The New Yorker

Never one to be slow to the punch, The New Yorker has hopped on the YouTube bandwagon. In its current October 16, 2006 issue, Ben McGrath takes an interesting look at the YouTube Universe and features Little Loca, AKA actress Stevie Ryan. Eat your heart out LisaNova!

Thanks to my YouTube addiction, I already knew this article was coming because Loca (Stevie Ryan's most well-known YouTube character) posted a video on YouTube with some stills from the article before it was released. The New Yorker got pissed and Stevie had to remove the video and repost without the stills.

It is strange hearing Little Loca, a Latina character created by Stevie Ryan, discussing an article in which we see a behind the scenes look at Ryan dressing up to film herself as her most popular character, Little Loca. Keep in mind that, like LonelyGirl15, Little Loca has never "come out of the closet" as a "character." Most people who watch Loca's videos know that she is played by a white actress named Stevie Ryan (although as with most actors and their biggest roles, the lines are sometimes blurred btw reality and story) but Loca does not seem aware of this fact yet.

It seems cruel and unnecessary to remind Dorothy that she is being played by an actress named Judy Garland. Just let the magic and the mystery keep the story alive a little bit longer please. We don't always want to see what is behind the Great Oz's curtains, do we? Are you confused? I know I am. Does this mean YouTube's gone Meta?

Even more fun is Ryan's hatred of LisaNova's popularity (they are sort of the ying and the yang of YouTube - Ryan is old movie glam while Nova is organic and real) and FilthyWhore (who doesn't hate that rapidly expanding, white trash, whiney mushball?), paranoia that YouTube is purposefully lowering her hits and viciously not featuring her (which is, according to her new BFF Crispin Glover, an anti-Latina, capitalist plot), and her critique of LonelyGirl15's lame wooden acting technique (well, duh!). But in a star-crazed kingdom like Hollywood, YouTube fame counts for shit:

"Along with the arrival of a Google track record had come some anxieties about her [Stevie Ryan's] place in the Hollywood pecking order, where, the revolution not withstanding, YouTube still doesn't count for much. She'd been embarrassed at a recent party when she wondered whether other guests were being patronizing about her Little Loca pursuits." Ben McGrath, The New Yorker

Ryan is a spitfire and her ingenuity and passion are what make her videos careen heads and tails above the rest. It will be interesting to see how the future careers of Ryan, Nova and Bree fare (let's face it, FilthyWhore has no Hollywood career potential unless Anna Nicole gives up her spot on the podium). Basically, they are all after a piece of the same delectable Hollywood pie, but who knows which hit sitcom or Lifetime movie of the week they will end up in. I, for one, am eager to see how this little YouTube "famathon" plays out.

Meanwhile, the appearance of Crispin Glover in one of Loca's latest videos (watch video here) and the New Yorker piece was mildly entertaining. Talk about one of my favorite YouTube vids, one of the best ones out there is Crispin freaking Dave Letterman out with his poorly aimed karate chop kick to the head (see video here). Man, you gotta love that moment and you gotta love YouTube for making it available. Please GoogTube, don't take this gem away from us!

One of my favorite moments of Sundance 2005 was Crispin Glover and Werner Herzog being interviewed together on the local Park City TV channel (I wonder if this clip is on YouTube??). They sat awkwardly side by side with Werner's thick German accent acting as a perfect compliment to Crispin's nervous tic persona. They were huge fans of each other and it was one weird-ass love fest. To put it in YouTube Terms, those two are like the LisaNova (Herzog) and Little Loca (Glover) of the indie film world.

One of my least favorite moments of Sundance 2005 was watching Glover's god-awful film, What Is It? which Loca advertises at the end of her Glover video. I made the mistake of taking a screener copy home to watch with my punk rock Mormon roommates. Obviously a recipe for disaster. Not only did the brainwashers hate it but I found it painfully ridiculous and not in a good way. Snails died for this self-important piece of poop?

What Is It? I will tell you what the hell it is. It is retards having sex in a cemetery, a bunch of naked retards in an over-sized vagina, Crispin prancing about in a large fur coat playing a character called "Dueling Demi-God Auteur" and many poor snails being salted to death. I know, this description is probably making you want to see it! Argh! And I know, I shouldn't call people retards but MAN, this movie is BAD! But perhaps that was Glover's intention, he is just crazy enough to make that his goal. Job well done McFly.

Anywho, the teaming of Ryan and Glover seems a perfect one. They are both in love with themselves and have an outdated Hollywood oddness that would seem more at home in the 40s. I can see the potential for a high hit count if they continue making vids together.

And even more funny is the subject heading of Glover's initial ice breaker email to Ryan's My Space account which read: "Genuine Crispin Glover writes to Stevie Ryan." Now come on, that is just silly. I wonder what proof he used to show that he was the Genuine Crispin Glover? An email full of rambling expletives? A photo of himself naked on a bear skin rug? No, no, a picture of whales mating with peanut butter?!

Other memorable parts of the article are reading how Stevie makes a video (she holds the camera at arms length!?). It is also humanizing to see that, like many of us, she is obsessed with her Google mentions and YouTube rankings. She admits to being obsessed with YouTube and spending most of her time on it which makes me feel a little better because there seems to be no way a mere mortal could post as much as she does (she has 4 user accounts that I know of).

"Within a few weeks, YouTube became a full-time pursuit for Ryan 'It's basically all I do,' she told me." Ben McGrath, The New Yorker

It's also interesting that her initial YouTube meanderings were art films that got no hits until she figured out that the bedroom blogging divas like FilthyWhore were the way to go for hits, thus came the birth of Little Loca:

"She experimented with uploading a few [vintage-style silent] films to YouTube, only to discover the site's ruthlessly populist ethos: what people seemed to like was not pretentious art films with obvious Hollywood aspirations but the confessional blogs of young girls in their bedrooms. Little Loca - a composite of tough-talking, strong-willed cholas Ryan used to admire in Victorville - was born." Ben McGrath, The New Yorker

The writer also visits the YouTube offices where things move a mile a second and the decisions made are big ones. It turns out that geriatric1927 was "discovered" thanks to the random attentions of a YouTube staffer who noticed his video and bothered to feature it. The rest, as the kids say, is YouTubeistory. Geriatric1927 became an instant YouTube star and one of its oldest users to boot. Thus proving that YouTube has some more uses up its copious sleeves than butt jiggling vids, teenage angst, cats pooping on toilets (thanks Conan) and what happens when you combine Mentos with Coke.

"…the story of YouTube, since its launch, ten months ago, has been one of exponential growth, at times challenging the company's abilities to cope with the demands of its servers. (Bandwidth costs are thought to exceed a million dollars a month.) Last week, according to Alexa, a Web--trafficking monitor, it was the tenth-biggest site on the Internet, drawing more visits than eBay, Amazon, or Wikipedia. By late summer, there were approximately six million videos archived on the site, and daily viewings had crossed the hundred-million mark, a great many of them not devoted to original content, such as Peter's or Stevie Ryan's, but to pre-existing footage in a variety of genre's…" Ben McGrath, The New Yorker

Jesus, it blows my mind to think that YouTube is not even 1 year old yet. If YouTube was a toddler, he/she would not even be out of diapers!? Screw the cat pooping on the toilet, let's potty train YouTube! This company was started in February of 2005. Man, things move pretty fast on the Internet horizon these days. I wonder what this little baby's Terrible Twos will bring?

With YouTube's recent merger with Google, it remains to be seen what direction the garage-born, almost 1-year old media monster will take. Will it continue to fill up with advertising and users like Diddy, Paris and NBC until no one "real" is left? Will it take out all the super cool, ancient, rare copyright-infringing footage that makes it so great? Or will it find some way to bridge the gap between an eclectic, populist-driven fledgling entity and a moneymaking, law-abiding profit machine?

This all remains to be seen and I, for one, will be tuning in to the GoogTube to check out what happens when Little Loca and crew prance off down the yellow brick road…

And now here is a fellow YouTuber named Emily, a girl who works at The New Yorker doing the calendar layout and her take on this article. She says the writer, Ben, is a nice guy. Don't you just love YouTube? Emily jokes that they should have interviewed her for the article because she is a YouTuber and then she says, "Well, I'm not a celebrity...yet..." And that is the glory of YouTube, tomorrow, or maybe the next day, Emily The New Yorker calendar designer could wake up the next YouTube star!