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Thursday, January 16, 2003 |
Like a Circle Around My Skull
I haven't played with digitizing video in a good 7 or 8 years. But my pal Blair was having a time with the Formac video digitizer, so we sat down with it yesterday. I short, it was a blast. The first thing I brought in was from a bootleg Dylan video, not surprisingly. I recorded a great performance of Idiot Wind from '95 at the Warfield in San Francisco. A while back I had seen a comment on that video by Andy Muir in his book The Razor's Edge. I had forgotten until I saw that comment, but I was in fact standing next to the videographer (who shall remain nameless) when he shot that video, but had never seen it.
So I got a copy, and finally got around to watching it yesterday while digitizing it. I watched it, indeed, half a dozen times. Though it's a little shaky (actually, it's very shaky, there was, of course, no tripod -- the videographer was holding the camera at waist level, working hard at not getting caught.
This reminded me what a great show that was. That whole series in the Bay Area -- two shows at the Warfield and two at the Berkeley Community Theatre -- were great. Blair told me once he thinks of that as the "Idiot Wind" tour, and I do, too. Bob sang that wild song time after time during that concert. The band was playing raucously, and Bob was in great voice.
So, more rambling than I'm used to, but it's such a hoot to see something like that, a really fine performance, and to be taken back in time like that. It's really great that people record these concerts; some of them are important artistic records, and most of them are just worth listening to anyway.
9:35:26 PM Permalink
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W, the Affirmative Action President
When they talk about affirmative action and how opposed they are to it, they never seem to include affirmative action for the rich. A case in point is Dubya, who never go anything in his life unless it was given from him (or, in the case of his current job, stolen for him). A nice rundown from Tomdispatch.com:
Now, our President, who made the announcement yesterday that his administration would go before the Supreme Court to lobby against the Michigan "quota" system, was himself the direct beneficiary of college affirmative action. He arrived at Yale in 1964, only a few years after the college threw out its unofficial quotas against Jews (in those years Blacks and Hispanics were barely on the radar screens of most major Ivies). He was admitted at the end of an era during which Yale's admissions people thought it obvious that you empty the bottom third of Andover, his prep school -- those were our natural leaders of the future -- into the Yale freshman class before you went into a major public high school and found yourself fearfully face to face with some brainy Jew.
Our President, a self-admitted mediocre student at prep school, was a major legacy admittee to Yale. There was nothing strange about this in those days -- affirmative action then, by whatever other name, meant offering an extra hand to those who already had every benefit on earth. This was the carefree world of George the younger. It still is. After all, does anything sound familiar here -- from a president who has just announced a major affirmative action tax plan that gives everything to those who already have it? It's called ideology, I suppose, and whatever it is it has the remarkable ability to blind George to his own life.
9:15:40 PM Permalink
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NASA faked moon landings [FARK]
Warning: intelligence drain. Certainly this is one of the most moronic web pages this side of Ann Coulter. There is hardly a readable sentence in the whole thing, let alone one that makes sense. Falacy is built on falacy, by someone who clearly knows nothing about physics or Project Apollo. I wish there was a way to "negative link" to say: don't go here. It's the kind of thing that makes you stupider after you read it than you were before.
3:13:00 PM Permalink
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I've Been to War?
Here's a timeline of Dubya's military "career" from Mother Jones. (It opens in a funny little window, but I cant' find a permanent link to it otherwise from their site.) The MOJO newsletter has this bit:
"I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd go to war."
So said George W. Bush in a January, 2002 Houston Chronicle interview. It's a nice, pithy quote, and Bush does indeed have twin daughters. But what exactly did he mean when he said he'd 'been to war'? The fact is, Bush has never seen the reality of combat, avoiding the Vietnam conflict through a stint in the Texas Air National Guard's 'Champagne Unit.'
The Timeline is fun. Some highlights:
February 1968:
Bush takes an Air Force officers test. Scores in 25th percentile in the pilot aptitude portion. Declares that he does not wish to serve overseas.
November 1969:
Bush is flown to the White House by President Nixon for a date with daughter Tricia.
May 26, 1972:
Transfers to Alabama Guard unit so he can work on Senator William Blount's reelection campaign. According to his commanding officer, Bush never shows up for duty while in Alabama, nor can anyone confirm he ever serves in the Guard again.
9:51:45 AM Permalink
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Terry Gilliam: The Meaning of Strife. The Village Voice: Features: by Jessica Winter "But actually getting it done would probably be a huge mistake, because it won't be as good as people imagine it could have been," continues Gilliam, clearly on a roll. "It's probably better to leave it as a documentary with little tantalizing glimpses of what might have been. It's my theory about Stanley Kubrick: He should have died before he finished Eyes Wide Shut. It would have forever been an unfinished masterpiece, beautiful ruins. When it's a ruin, you get these little fragments and you can imagine what the castle looked like." [Moon Farmer]
9:10:39 AM Permalink
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annoying discovery.... In my aggregator this morning, I noticed some JavaScript code in an entry pertaining to an article from Slate. I visited the blog that was linking to Slate and wouldn't you know it -- an advertising pop-up appeared. It seems that the nice folks at MSN are inserting the pop-up code within the first few paragraphs of the article so if you copy and paste it, you also get the JavaScript and your visitors get the pop-up ad. That really sucks!
Maybe you should look at your own weblog now and then if you care about such things... [jenett.radio]
He found it in my page, in a paragraph I copied from Slate below (since fixed). What a drag. As he says, it's a good idea to look at your own weblog, and also to look at the HTML you're creating.
8:59:46 AM Permalink
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Masked and Anonymous
Well, here's a website on Dylan's movie, due for showing week after next at Sundance, complete with some clips. After watching a chunk of Renaldo & Clara yesterday, it's hard to be very optimistic about this thing. Dylan's history in movies, with a couple exceptions (Pat Garret & Billy the Kid, the small appearance in Backtrack with Jodie Foster), Bob hasn't acquitted himself very well onscreen. It's hard to imagine him really playing a "character" in this, and the story looks really obvious to me. Hope I'm wrong. [Expecting Rain]
Jack Fate: a cult musician--once a presence on the radar of popular culture--someone who had it all but didn't care. Twenty years ago, he refused to cooperate with the powers that were and parlay his early success into a career. Instead, he has lived the past few decades in relative obscurity, playing honky tonks and bars, in and out of the county lock-up, content to be a wandering minstrel.
This almost sounds like the career Dylan wishes he would have had. I guess, looking back at some of those albums and some of those careers, and lots of missed chances, this alternate reality might be a tempting role to play. Did Bob refuse to cooperate with the powers that be? Or were some of his talents squandered in other ways for which he might be more responsible?
8:52:20 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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