Sundance

"He found his ration of words restrained. It was something one might think would never happen to you, like getting cancer. First nouns such as "egg" disappeared from his vocabulary. Then, adjectives such as "typically.'" Becoming multi-lingual did not help, for if he lost a word in one language, then he lost it in all languages."
-"whiteonewhite: algorithmic noir"

I figured that if I'm gonna live in Salt Lake City, then I should attend the Sundance Film Festival at least once.

This being my first time, I committed the rookie mistake of waiting till the second week of the fest to look at tickets.

Unsurprisingly, most were sold-out. Undeterred, I cobbled together from the scraps a list of what few films were still available, when, where, and with brief descriptions, and e-mailed it to a couple friends also lookin to go this year.

From my list, they picked "whiteonwhite: algorithmic noir"--a movie bizarre even by Sundance standards--primarily because it was the only one left actually viewing in Park City instead of SLC (since the whole point of going to Sundance was to get out of SLC for a night). They apparently didn't read the description.

"whiteonwhite: algorithmic noir" involves an actual computer algorithm editing in real time roughly 3,000 film clips filmed in and around Kazakhstan and other former Soviet Republics, and juxtaposing them with atmospheric music and voice-overs in English, Russian, and Russian-accented English.

The film is already running when you enter the theater. It is still running in the background when the house-lights come up and the director and actor come out for Q&A. That is, the film literally has no beginning and no end. No two viewing experiences are supposed to be the same.

The plot (such as there is) involves an American Geophysicist named Mr. Holz in "City-A," a near-future dystopia, beginning to suspect that the government has begun to infect the city water supply with Lithium (a hallucinogen) in order to lower the city's suicide rate, and make the citizenry more complacent and compliant.

Holz desperately seeks for patterns everywhere, something that proves his belief in a masterplan behind everything he encounters--that is, the protagonist is meta-narratively trying to impose the same sense onto his chaotic surroundings as the audience is trying to impose onto this strange film.

Now, I have enough art-theory training to understand that the function of such cinematic experiments is to call attention to and critique our innate human impulse to impose a neat narrative structure on our complex surroundings (indeed, I've taught the same to my own students).

And I have enough Post-Modernist background to understand that often such art is supposed to make you uncomfortable, to create a tension that causes you to second-guess you assumptions.

For example, after the film my friends and I said we each kept expecting some gratuitous sex scene or a sudden murder to appear--but why were we expecting that? What does it say about us that we kept expecting sex and violence from our films? That expectation speaks volumes more about me and my culturally-trained presumptions than it ever will about the film.

Nevertheless, near the end, I was really hoping for the house-lights to come up (and still not having my cell-phone to check the time also increased my discomfort--I could just wring Verizon's neck). Several audience members didn't even make it that far, and I didn't judge them for it. By the end, only my desire to get my $15 worth (yes, that is the cost of a Sundance ticket, explaining why I hadn't been before) kept me seated.

The lightening of the room and the silencing of the film (still running in the background) was indeed a relief, I'll admit. Also refreshing was how surprisingly unpretentious and low-key the film producers were. Indeed, during the Q&A, several of the audience members seemed to be fishing for some sort of congratulatory statement concerning their artistic stamina or avaunt-guard sensibilities or something, concerning the people who'd left early.

But director Eve Sussman only noted that "some people can only stand about 30 seconds of it" (and she said it the same way one might say "and there's nothing wrong with that") "while others can sit and watch it for 2 hours straight" (and she said it the same way one might say "and not even I can do that!").

I did participate and get my own question in: I noted that I have a Kazakh student this semester, and she told me that part of why she struggles with English is that in Russian, they do not use transitions, so I was curious as to whether the heavy use of Russian in this film was due to the apparent non-sequitur nature of Russian discourse.

Sussman laughed at that one, saying that they used Russian mainly cause it was the common shared language of central Asia where they were filming, but that, yes, that was a happy coincidence that Russian functions much like, well, the film itself.

The film itself, I'll just say, I was glad to have attended...though I'm in no hurry to see it again. And while I'll happily discuss it with someone else who's seen it, I would never recommend it to anyone else. At least not anyone sober.

We left after the Q&A, pretty much shell-shocked. Fortunately we'd had Park City itself to explore, which really is a classy little town worth visiting. Downtown does make one feel all one-percenty, waltzin past the up-scale boutiques and Escalades and classically-trained street musicians like a boss. If you ever attend Sundance, do make time to just wander downtown Park City.

Just get your tickets more than 2 days in advance.

The Thrill of Hamlet in Southern Accents

Tonight, some friends and I gathered together to, of all things, read Shakespeare's Hamlet in Southern accents.

It was a revelation.

It had no right to come off as well as it did--I mean, goodness, who on earth gathers friends together to do readings of Hamlet in Southern accents?! Didn't we have lives? And indeed, if my friend Lili hadn't helped organize it, I doubt it would've come off at all. We even both confessed after words that we were afraid the whole enterprise was going to suck. None of us were trained actors, and I was the only English major there. It was a wonder the reading came together at all.

Nevertheless, in Southern accents, the play opened up to us and came alive, in ways none of us had expected. Even the inexperienced Shakespeare readers found themselves reading the lines much more easily, as the words suddenly flowed naturally and rhythmically. To our delighted surprise, we were actually getting and laughing at the jokes; the innuendo became more obvious; and the insults were far more stinging.

Even some new internal rhymes opened up to us; for example, my roommate who's actually from Florida pointed out that "Contagion" in the South easily rhymes with "yawn" in Act III.iii, l. 380-1: "When the Churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out/Contagion to this world." Seriously, that blew my frickin' mind.

The selection of a Southern accent was not capricious; studies have shown that isolated regions of the Ozarks have actually most closely preserved the original Elizabethan English accent. That is, the people of Shakespeare's age talked with what we would nowadays term a Southern drawl. Queen Elizabeth I sounded much more like an American Southerner than she would have Elizabeth II. And boy oh boy, do I tell you, does that come through in the text! In other words, Hamlet was meant to be read in a Southern accent!

We even intuitively matched more aristocratic Southern accents to the monarchy, and more hillbilly accents to the lower-class characters, it was marvelous! (I should also add that the other revelation of this exercise is that I realized that I've made the right kind of friends!)

I myself claimed Hamlet's part myself, and I gotta say, the famed "To be or not to be" soliloquy trips off the tongue far more intensely and naturally when read in one's best Tennesse-Willliams-Cat-on-a-Hot-Tin-Roof accent. Just try it! Try it right now! Subvocalize in your mind the following in your best drawl: "To be or not be, that is the question/for whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer/the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them!" I found myself actually being carried away by the words themselves, and speaking more intensely, climaxing to a shout then hushing to a near whisper, not because I was trying to ham it up for my friends, but because the words actually demanded it!

In short, I thrilled to Shakespeare! That was the great revelation for me--I'd long learned to appreciate, enjoy, even admire Shakespeare, but I'd never thrilled to his words before. Now, I've read enough English literature to know that men are supposed to positively thrill (that's always the word) to read the Bard, that that's somehow supposed to be the archetypal experience of reading him, but I'd never had that experience myself. At some level, I guess I'd just come to assume that that thrilling was now an anachronistic experience, something foreign to our modern mind.

But tonight I did it. I understood at last. I thrilled to the words of Shakespeare. I read him as he was meant to be read. I'm still on a high, I'm still buzzed from the Bard, as I type right now. We all were after the reading finished; we gave each other a round of applause and a cheering ovation at the end, and that not even ironically. My only regret is that I may never be able to enjoy another production of Hamlet again, now that I've heard it as it was meant to be read!

So here's my call-out, to any within the reach of my meager voice: I will pay real money to see a Tennesse-Williams style production of Hamlet in straight-up Southern accents, put on the by trained actors in a full-on production. Serious. It will be a revelation to all, I promise.

We were promised flying cars.

Roughly a year ago, I posted a series of status updates, imagining what, when I was a child, I thought 2011 would actually look like, not what we actually got. I mean, serious, facebook? twitter? ipads? These are what you pitifully call game changers? These are what qualify as high-tech? You call this the future? Where's the moon bases, the androids, the rocket packs, the flying cars?! We were promised flying cars.

So, with a little help from my friends, I posted as though this was the actual 2011 that we should've gotten--consider it the 2011 we wanted, not the 2011 we deserved. I've rescued some of these posts, comments and all (original post in quotation marks, comments in the bullets), from the nether-regions of facebook, to preserve them for posterity...in the nether-regions of some blog. Behold!

"For Malcolm X Day, we sailed the space-clipper USS Margaret Thatcher along the solar winds to Jupiter, to see the monolith that's been receiving strange radio-signals from the moon for, oh, 10 years now. This is also where Major Tom mysteriously disappeared--his famous last words were "Tell my wife I love her very much..."

• Jacob: She knows, Major Tom, she knows...

• David Harris: What a joke! Malcolm X Day!?! It was only renamed thus in 1999. Before then it was John Carter Day. But no, since he was a Confederate Astronaut, it's just not Newspeak enough, so we have to change it. That's so doubleplusungood.
  

Anyway, did you get any good polaroids of the Monolith?

• Jacob: Not really--turns out it's just a giant black rectangle floating in space, so none of my photos turned out. giant tourist trap, I tell you what; you couldn't even get that close to it, what with the homicidal computer singing "Daisy" and all.

"Appears our fears of the droid uprising were unfounded; Skynet and the Matrix have destroyed each other in an ideological spat over whether twas more preferable to merely enslave humanity for battery power, or retroactively kill our rebel leaders through time-travel. Now my most pressing dilemma be in how to most profitably spend my Spring Break: the transporter room or the holodeck?"

• Elliot Walters: I'm still not comfortable with the idea of being disassembled molecule by molecule so I'm for the Holodeck. You have to turn the safety protocols down though or it's just not that exciting. Might I suggest some Sherlock Holmes? Or perhaps diving with the alpha centaurian laser sharks? I for one will be travelling back to the 1300's to perform "magic tricks" with my transmographer and to mack on some princesses.

• Jacob: The holodeck is still a little too matrixy for me; and last thing we need is another sentient Moliarte. And I didn't say I'd actually be disassembling my OWN molecules--no, I'll be transporting cats, tomatoes, pet rocks, bags of dog-poo, etc. into friends' beds, showers, cars, you know, the usual pranks! I might even transport a couple people I don't like onto nude beaches!

• Steven Fendry: My lunar break will be spent at the asteroid range breaking in my new quantum nuclear particle decimator, fully automatic of course. With the power of thirteen and a half white dwarfs, my baby could destroy a system of 56 parsecs in 1 nanosecond. I was hoping to take it planet hunting with my friends during the next solar revolution, but thanks to those damn democratic-republicans there is a waiting period before I can purchase ammunition for it. I mean what kind of patriots are they anyway? It’s my science given right to carry my weapon on my key chain for self-defense. SO what if it has a scope, a thousand round magazine, armor piercing rounds… and a silencer. That is what the founding Mothers, and Fathers intended when they meant the right to bear arms. But I digress.

"Balderdash! I called customer service on my videophone, concerning my malfunctioning automaton, and what do I get? A twin-headed, multi-tentacled trans-dimensional energy being, faking a New England accent and claiming his name is Reginald!"

• Jacob: When will President Rockefeller IV cease outsourcing all our jobs to Mars? It's bad enough they can immigrate here illegally through the holes in the space-time continuum and steal our fruit-picking jobs!

• Elliot Walters: I hear that by 2050 the martians will out number humans 10 to 1. Can you imagine that a martian as president of Earth? That is, of course, if the droids don't rise up...again. I cannot sit through another droid assimilation lecture.

• David Harris: The illegal-alien-rights activists always say that humans just will not take those jobs. Absurd! I know of a baker's dozen red-blooded young gents who would jump at the chance to pick the giant tomatoes, or harvest the soylent green. Sure, jovians might be better suited for work in atomic reactor piles, but we're in a recession, by Jove! Our dapper young men can handle the beta radiation! As to the droid troubles, my sympathies lie with the up-and-coming Butlerian Jihad Party. Also, here's one anti-robot propaganda film I can get behind. I saw it on the newsreel.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/4510/futurama-anti-robot-propaganda

• Jacob: Not to mention that the necessity for mentats following the destruction of all computers will create a booming new sector of job creation! Oh, wait, the Butlerian Jihad party?? Go ahead, waste your vote!

"Blast! It appears the global-weather-control satellites are malfunctioning again! Is this what my tax monies pay for?! (Nevermind that the Federsation has switched to a moneyless economy, this be no excuse for shoddy service!)"

"Quite the conundrum! Shall I spend my latest stock dividends upon a sleek new hoverboard with which to impress the ladies, or upon a more utilitarian rocket-pack, with which to fly to work? Ah, the endless dilemmas of the future!"

• David Harris: I myself just purchased a 2011 Homer from Powell Motors:

http://images.wikia.com/simpsons/images/0/05/TheHomer.png

• Jacob: Ah, the Homer, truly the chariot of the Gods! Will you be outfitting it with the anti-gravity features? I just beheld a wild-haired old man adapt a vintage '85 Delorean with flight-thrusters and a Mr. Fusion!

"Ah, I am much enjoying the Beatle's 50th album! Who would have thought that, after all they have been through--the near break-up in '70, the attempt on Sir John Lennon's life in '80, George Harrison's transformation into a Bodhisattva in '96--they would still be making gorgeous, revolutionary music together"

• Jacob: I'm also keen on the latest collaboration between Jimi Hendrix and Tupac Shakur, as well as the forthcoming solo albums from Kurt Cobain and Elliot Smith! It makes one wonder how music would be different if Michael Jackson hadn't been cut down so quickly after "Thriller," or if Beethoven had never been cloned and reanimated!

• David Harris: I'll buy any 8-track with a keytar-theremin-hydraulophone-holophonor quartet.

• Lili Hall: This is a good status, but what does it have to do with the future that is supposed to be now? (The now that is supposed to be the future?) You're veering from your course!

• Jacob; It's not about the future, Lili you silly goose, it's about what the present SHOULD look like! Now if you don't mind, I'm going to listen to Beethoven's clone's latest techno LP on the grammaphone, while I fly my auto-zeppelin to the Democratic Alliance of Muslim States--I hear Persia is lovely this time of year!

• Lili: right right. haha (I thought it had to be stuff that had actually been published--in the past--about what today would be like...) (And I was confused about this album you were mentioning...assumed it was some new mash-up or something, hahaha--I mean, they did managed to produce this after Lennon's death): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7twIF8PWic

• Lili: ...I wonder what each of the Beatles' music would've sounded like if they'd each gone their separate ways? ;-P (trying to play along after my silly goose-ish-ness)

• Jacob: I know! Or if the members of Wyld Stallyn had flunked out their high school history test, never formed their band, and thus never ushered in our present utopic society!

• David Harris: Speaking of that, one of my roommates just got a new air guitar. Hopefully he doesn't play it while I am trying to cryosleep.

• Ben Gillis: You really think the Beatles' music is still gorgeous and revolutionary? After Ringo quit, his solo career kind of eclipsed the music they were making, in my opinion. All of his repressed ideas came bubbling to the surface... In any case 50 years of songwriting does tend to drain one of creative ideas. Plus the cybernetic arm Lennon has to play with ever since the assassination attempt gives his music a lifeless feel.

• Jacob: I'm not saying they haven't had their ups and downs--the whole ill-advised Beatles disco album is best left forgotten. But ever since they added Bill Clinton on drums, I really feel like they've charted new sonic territory! Ringo's solo work is pretty legit though, I grant you that.

• Lili Hall: Jacob, I thought you were a better judge of music... I think it's all gone pretty far downhill.. That song featuring the 12-minute saxophone solo by Clinton? *Shudder* I think they would have been better off if they'd have stopped while they were ahead, like in the late 70's, early 80s...

Happy Malcolm X Day everyone!