Robin mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, and I think I posted already, but I met Freddy last night. He’s making a fantastic graphic novel of Orwell’s 1984 (see: gutenberg australia’s ebook).
Freddy is selling these posters for $12 a pop:
And here is the opening scene (you can get it in B&W or colour):
From Maurizio, i got tagged. Shuffled itunes, to see what song plays as the background to various scenes in the movie of my life:
Opening credits
Relaxing with Lee - Charlie Parker
First day of school
I Heard You Looking - Yo La Tengo
Falling in love
Pump It Up - Elvis Costello
Prom/Grad
Next Lifetime - Erykah Badu
Mental breakdown
God Bless the Child - Billie Holiday
Flashbacks
Itaparica - Celso Machado
Getting back together
Vampire - Black Uhuru
Wedding scene
Almost Always Nearly Enough - Tortoise
Final battle
Lige Gould’s Double - Rufus Guinchard
Death scene
Deliver Me - Big Sugar
Funeral scene
Sleeping in the Devlis Bed - Daniel Lanois
End credits
High School Hierarchy - Local Rabbits
Finale
Speeding Motocycle - Daniel Johnston & Yo La Tengo
I’ll tag, oh, fling93, kara, julien, podchef, and, ah, bosko.
Oh, and just to piss him off, I will tag the short-tempered, but sensitive boris.
The single thing, I think, that makes me happiest about LibriVox, is the Community Podcast, a random initiative of volunteer Jim Mowatt (now an admin).
The Community Podcast now has a number of regular hosts, inlcuding Sean (ductapeguy), and Alan (cloudmountain), and I think there have been some others. For 2007, hosting spots are going quickly, with various people signing up to get a chance to direct traffic.
And what happens on the Community Podcast? Talk about LibriVox, snippets of projects, reporting on stats, various pleas for help on slow-moving books, musings on the librivox, public domain, on books, on poetry, news, views, and all sorts of other sundry bits and pieces.
In any case, the most recent installment (mp3), is really a fabulous listen, whether or not you care about LibriVox. Alan hosts, David (Earthcalling) talks about his love for the crazy fringe projects of LibriVox, Annie (LibraryLady) discusses her relationship with poetry, and there are a few other things on there.
Once again, well worth a listen: LibriVox Community Podcast 19.
Lullabies for Little Criminals
Book by Heather O’Neill
O’Neill, whose radio work can be heard on Public Radio International’s “This American Life” and CBC’s “Wiretap,” channels her gift for images through Baby’s words: “His compliments,” she says about her father, “were like little cupcakes all lined up in a window.” She is also a heartbreakingly wise poet: “If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go and hide in the closet for three or four hours. They get down on their knees and pray for your return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely Children probably wrote the Bible.”
Since Mordechai Richler died, you hear the occasional mutterings about who will be the next anglo bard of Montreal. Yann Martel took a stab by winning the Booker Prize for Life of Pi, but his writing (whatever its success) is in no way attached to Montreal. But here, I think, we have the only true contender to date, a novelist that in zeroing in on the gritty particular, has raised her book to a marvelous universal. This is the most exciting novel I have read by a Canadian writer in many years. It has its flaws (the impressionistic and circumambulatory narration feels a little forced in places; the staccato writing somewhat disjointed), but those minor quibbles are nothing compared with its strengths: the voice, the humour, the beauty, the emotion, the full broken-down world recreated in the eyes of its beholder.
O’Neill’s second novel is reportedly coming out soon. Second novels, so they say, are the tough ones. I’m rooting for her.
My rating: stars
Julien just launched a wonderful project: Listen to Your Kids:
Listen To Your Kids connects kids that want to share with parents that want to listen, all through very simple, existing technologies.
I’ve always felt that the most effective innovations are created through connecting already powerful elements (think podcasting). Here, there is a telephone number, and a podcast feed. Anything (relevant) that gets said by kids in one end will come out the other, to be heard by parents all around the world. I hope we can make this a valuable learning tool for people everywhere
You can subscribe in itunes, or if you think that Apple’s near-total control of the podcast market is dangerous, you can infer the plain vanilla RSS feed, and use that to subscribe, and hear what kids around the world want to say to their parents.
Powerful idea, I think. I love it when friends launch these little projects - Julien hasn’t said a word about this, and just got it done. Kudos.
A while back I posted about this great white-board art vid. In the same vein, here’s a blog with a daily monster, video of it’s birth from pen to page. I think you are supposed to write a story about the monster too, in the comments section.
(ponta do chapéu velho a Julien)
Over Xmas & New Years, I was away from computer a fair bit and I actually got some reading done. It was fantastic. So, not really a New Yrs resolution or anything, but just by happenstance, I was reading more, and even better, got back on the novel horse, and am chugging along through Chapter 8 of the new one (that’s about half-way done the whole thing, roughly). Feels good.
Patrick posted this about books he read in 2006 (well done); and Julien plans to read 52 - a book a week - in 2007. So I am going to jump in and join the fray.
I tried doing the book-a-week thing in 2005, I think, and got stalled. That always happens. Well, I shall try again this year. Maybe we can have a weekly support-group meeting.
Normally my reading modus is one novel and one non-fiction book at the same time. For the record, here are the last 5 books I have read, with the following star ratings:
*** to be stored on my top shelf, to the left of my desk
** please return after you are done with it
* satisfactory
ZERO a book I did not like
***Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow
*The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (explanation for my rating coming here soon)
**A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
***Notes on a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert
**The Upside of Down, by Thomas Homer-Dixon
(I note that I have been very lucky with these last reads … ususally I don’t have so many 2/3-stars to give out)
And here is my reading plan for the next little while, subject to change of course:
Fiction:
-Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
-Lullabies for Little Criminals, by Montrealer Heather O’Neil (really looking forward to this one)
-Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon
-Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevski
-Slow Man, by JM Coetzee
-A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews
-The Time in Between, David Bergen
Non-Fiction:
-Programming the Universe, by Seth Lloyd
-The Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler
-The Human Touch, Michael Frayne
-The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
-America at the Crossroads, by Francis Fukayama
-Hubris, by Michael Iskoff and David Corn
-The Prince of the Marshes, by Rory Stewart
I think I need to throw some candy in there to get through it all. And that gets me to mid-April, roughly.
Made some sausage (to dry) with some friends the other day, Italian-style (but very similar to the great Hungarian style sausage from Charcuterie Fairmount).
They are drying in Andrew’s basement, and here is what they look like:
Just listening to Brett on cinqasix on CBC radio, with radio goddess Patti Schmidt.
He’s talking about his great film project Basement Tapes, undertaken with support from the NFB. The film will be about remix culture generally, with a lots of talk with Lessig et al.
But the revolutionary angle here is that Brett wants all of you to edit some of the movie. You can download interviews and segmets of raw footage, and build them into something else. Try it, over at Open Source Cinema
I have yet to do my editing, but … if I get time … I … er … might.
Once in a while the net delivers with a piece of beautiful art that just makes me smile. This reminds me of some of the great old NFB animation stuff from back in the day - that same sense of manic whimsy. What’s so great is that all one needs to do now is just make art and set it free (for instance on YouTube, but any ol video service will do).
Stop Motion White Board Video.
Video from: These guys (I think).
(tip to GreenKri)
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