Artsy and Fartsy

Last night, I saw Children of Men and thought it was the most amazing movie I've seen in a long time. If I had done a "Best of 2006" movie list, I'd need to rewrite it and put this movie way on top. I found Children a perfect blend of exciting, moving and thought provoking.

It is the anti-Tony Scott movie. The tension comes from characters and drama, not frenetic editing and contrived situations. (In fact, there are some extraordinarily long, unbroken shots that are getting a lot of attention.)

Bits of the movie rang very true for me and I identified with them.

The vision of the future, grimy buses adorned with video displays, seemed real and compelling. It's a dark dystopic near future that feels real and not comic bookish, like the The Matrix or Blade Runner.

The kitchen table meeting where activists argue their personal agendas, while blindly ignoring the compelling morality and need of the overall situation, is a situation I've seen dozens of times.

The scenes in the Homeland Security internment camp were chilling, and made me wonder how close Guantanamo Bay might be to one of these.

I think the movie may have something to do with hope, or the lack thereof. Is there anything more hopeless than the knowledge that your species is doomed? The people without hope act in despicable ways; those with hope act heroically.

I'm a little irritated that the marketing campaign was so bad (I saw the trailers and put it immediately on my "no way" list). If I cared about Oscar awards, I'd be a lot irritated this movie wasn't better recognized.

P.S. Super bonus props for featuring a song off this King Crimson album, which, I bought on CD just this past month.

This weekend, I've been blogging about issues related to the metadata stored in my music files, such as song title and performer. Today I wrap up with one final problem—one I've yet to solve.

When you walk into your favorite music store, the music is binned and organized for easy browsing. I want the same for my digital music. I can't, and I haven't found a solution yet, and that's frustrating me.

In my previous blog entry, I discussed creating the metadata for my music collection. The metadata are stuff like song title and artist, which are stored in the music file.

The chuckleheads that run the music industry won't give us metadata, which is one reason why CDs are dying. So, we have to turn to third party services to get them. There are free services that do this, but you get what you pay for.

Just about a year ago, I converted my music library to digital form—and I love it. The CDs are all ripped to lossless FLAC format. I've got a small computer (running Ubuntu Linux) in the living room connected to the A/V receiver by S/PDIF optical connection. The fidelity from this hardware isn't quite as good as the original CD player, but it's close.

I've spent a lot of time—maybe too much time—trying to get the music organized. A lot of the work was spent trying to get the metadata right. I'm going to write a couple of blog articles about my adventures. Today, I'm going to talk about gathering the metadata—stuff you probably know if you've been through this already.

I recently thought it was time to get a disk-based MP3 player. I already had an inexpensive flash memory player, which was great for carrying a dozen albums on an afternoon road trip, but I wanted something big enough to carry my music collection into work.

My two key product requirements were:

• Open platform.
• Good sound.

Requirement number one knocked the Apple iPod product line right out.

If you want to know what's so wrong with the movie business today, go look at somebody who is doing it right. That's easy here in Austin, because we're home to the Original Alamo Draft House theaters.

My wife and I frequently go to Sunday night movies. The town is quiet and it's easy to get in. That is, it's easy unless you are trying to go to our neighborhood theater, the Alamo Village. For the past couple of months, every time we've gone to a Sunday movie the show has sold out. Even when we went to a Sunday evening showing of The Departed many weeks into the release, every seat was taken.

Since there wasn't a lot of music happening in town last weekend (ha! ha!), I thought I'd drive down to Galveston to catch Austin's own Freddie "Steady" Krc at the Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe. Most recently, Freddie has been drumming behind Roky Erikson as well as fronting the Freddie Steady 5.

Freddie brought along Bradley Kopp (one of my favorite Austin guitarists) to play electric guitar, and Cam King (recent Austinite by way of Nashville) on acoustic guitar (and comedy relief).

Freddie and crew played a great set. They played a mix of Freddie's originals and covers (Beatles, Texas garage rock, and more).

Bradley is going to be playing tonight (Wednesday) down south at Evangeline Cafe. He's going to have Bill Browder playing with him. I really wish I could attend (I'll be out of town), because those guys are my all-time favorite guitar duo on the planet. The show could be a lot of fun.

Just finished watching When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee's documentary on Hurricane Katrina. I recommend it highly. I was surprised—and pleased—at how much Lee stayed out of the way and let the participants tell the story themselves. I think the documentary does a remarkable job capturing the scope of human suffering.

If I was to find fault, it's that Lee's documentary does not capture the scope of the physical devastation. You see the houses ripped off their foundations by the force of the waters. That doesn't capture the power of driving through the neighborhoods and seeing the destruction for miles on end. Or the awesome mountains of debris created in parks and medians as the city began to dig out. Or the eery, gray, lifeless moonscapes left behind immediately after the waters receded.

Here are three critically important things about the Katrina disaster that people may not realize:

This was an engineering disaster, not a natural disaster. At least, that's the case in New Orleans. The hurricane hit full force in Mississippi. What hit New Orleans was barely category one, and that was enough to breech the defective levee system. You cannot blame the current occupant of the White House for that. That's a failure of several decades of presidencies—and corrupt New Orleans politics.

Brownie was not the problem. Here is where you can blame the Bush administration. Michael Brown was a lousy administrator with bad political acumen, but he's not the one responsible for emasculating James Lee Witt's FEMA. According to Cooper and Block, Brown actually tried to do the right thing with FEMA. His bosses (Bush, Ridge, Chertoff) are the ones who destroyed our nation's ability to respond to natural disasters, by redirecting most resources not specifically earmarked for terror threats. They are the architects of our dysfunctional, imcompetent homeland security apparatus. Brown is an easy fall guy for the people really responsible for this tragedy.

The disaster continues. Spike Lee captured the situation six months out. Here we are a year later and it's still bad. My sister-in-law is still waiting for the insurance check to be released to pay for the tree that Katrina pushed through her roof. And she's one of the lucky ones.

You're doing a heck of a job, Bushie.

Long time Austin artist/musician Jean Caffeine is pulling up stakes and heading off for the great white north. She will be doing a farewell show this Wednesday evening (Aug. 23) 7:30pm at Mozart's Coffee Roasters. She's written a lot of great songs over the years, and it will be good to hear them live one final time.

She hasn't been doing a lot of public playing the past few years, so don't expect a tight Vegas-style extravaganza. Just a heap of laid back, old-time Austin fun.

Last night, while stumbling around Fry's, I noticed they have a small HD-DVD section. I was not a fan of the format to begin with. Now, I'm even less so.

The first thing that surprised me was the prices. The movies cost in the range of $25-50. That's insane, nobody is going to pay that sort of money per unit for their movie collection. Sure, back in the day I bough a few "Mobile Fidelity Sound Studio" albums (high priced specially pressed vinyl records), but I didn't need to buy special record player to hear them.

I guess they feel that early adopters are less price sensitive, but these prices sure do discourage people from becoming early adopters. The volume of these movies is going to be so small initially, the studios are almost certainly going to lose money, and they probably wouldn't lose that much more if the price was a buck. Prices these high won't help them to prevent losses, but they sure will help prevent sales.

But, hey, who wouldn't jump at the chance to pay $35 to own The Chronicles of Riddick.

Which brings me to the second problem: the selection is almost exactly not what you want. I think the early adopters would want stunning eye candy, such as Star Wars (Fox) and The Matrix (Warner Bros.). Instead you get stuff like Blazing Saddles (Warner Bros.), which while one of the ten most important movies ever made ("Work...work...work...hello boys!"), I can't imagine it benefits from the HD format.

There is so much technically wrong with the high def formats to begin with. The price tag is just icing on the shitpile. I don't think I'll be upgrading my DVD collection to HD anytime soon.

For more info, here is a recent Ars Technica article on HD-DVD movie prices.