Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 64
December 8, 2014
The Shining
Watching the Shining for the first time can be confusing. It doesn't seem all that scary. It plods along, nothing much happens, and by the end you sort of feel like it's you've been suckered. It's all hype, you'll think.
But then you'll watch The Shining again. Perhaps it'll be on late and it's the best thing on the guide. Maybe a partner will insist you missed something. Listen to them. They know better. (This is good advice generally). Inevitably, the re-watching will make you pay a little bit more attention. You'll start to look around the actors, and pay attention to the series of events. At some point, you'll catch an inconsistency. You will feel clever. Later, you will feel like an idiot, because there's loads of them.
If you're completely nuts, you'll dive into the content about it online. Here are the best pieces I've seen about the movie, to save you some time (but you'll want more. There is no "enough" with this film):
Todd Alcott’s Seven Part Analysis of ‘The Shining’
The Shining and The Steadicam
11 Things You Might Not Have Noticed In The Shining
The Set of "The Shining" is Intentionally Impossible
The Shining doesn't just reward multiple viewings, but different kinds of viewings. And that's why I was so excited to see it in the theatre (TIFF's Kubrick Exhibit), where I'd surely pick up on a few bits I hadn't before. I did notice two things I hadn't before. One inconsistency is that the first time we see the Overlook, there is no maze. This is definitely one of those head-smacking ones. I'm sure other people noticed it years ago. I'm sure there's tons of posts about it. But hey, it was the first time for me.
The other thing I noticed was just how loud the movie is. Having only watched it at home, I never realized I was supposed to crank the volume and break my speakers, but that's how it was in the theatre. The "waaaaah" factor reached 0.8 Nolan, and the enveloping noise succeeded in making a movie I've seen half a dozen times scary again. Well done.
December 7, 2014
I Used to spend a lot of time in RSS
As of today, I'm no longer using Feedly. In my eyes, Feedly was just the service that took over from Google Reader, and if you combine them I've got nearly ten years of daily RSS reading. I've taken breaks, and tried to quit before, but I think I've finally found a solid exit strategy.
For people who spend a lot of time on the internet, RSS catchers like Google Reader and Feedly have been a way to mainline the information. Even though there's always a touch of a delay from a website publishing a post and a reader acknowledging it, it's almost always faster than the reader thinking to check the site for new content.
RSS readers solved two problems: constantly updating people on sites that got lots of posts (so they can feel connected and complete), and equally updating people on sites that don't get updated very often (so the reader doesn't accidentally miss one). Readers are almost certainly at their best doing the latter (especially when it comes to things like webcomics or personal blogs seldom updated), but quickly becomes tantamount to smoking when it comes to the former.
Feedly's main problem (which was Google Reader's main problem) was that it displays the number of unread posts next to a site, and it never resets until you actually view them. There's an in-built pressure to return to the site, if only to clean it out. Twitter has done a remarkable job of making completedness feel difficult, overwhelming, and frankly not worth it, but Feedly continues to encourage the practice. Twitter gets that the internet is really a stream of content, and that what is missed is, well, missed. But that's okay. To get to everything would be insane.
Now, I still want to get updates on most of the things I had subscribed to in Feedly, but I want the frequency and expectations of completedness to vary based on the site. I don't need to read every single post on The Verge or Jezebel, for instance, and I don't want to feel any sort of guilt for not having at least skimmed everything. These kinds of sites, where the post count goes into the double digits every day, have to be dealt with differently than, say, Hark a Vagrant, a comic that's updated with no regularity.
While culling my Feedly subscription list, I found sites naturally fell into one of four categories:
sites that post a lot that I can skim anytime
sites that post regularly but not daily, and are mostly link posts
sites that post content I want to read, but not right now, and will likely send to Pocket anyway
sites that publish content I want to read right now
Thankfully, RSS is not only not the only way to get updates, it isn't even the encouraged route anymore. Twitter and Facebook are generally how people stay up to date on what's happening, but I'm not on Facebook, and Twitter is something I prefer to use just to communicate (to people, and the ether), so I've found four excellent solutions to these four problems:
Email newsletters
Push to Pocket (using IFTTT)
Puch to Pushbullet (using IFTTT)
Flipboard is great for routing sites that publish constantly. Not only is there no unread marker, the design of the app encourages the best stuff rising above the cruft. "Cover stories" reads like a "best-of" of the content you've added.
Many more sites these days are turning to weekly newsletters. Some people blog primarily through them. I couldn't recommend moving all your updates to this medium, but a small handful can make reading your email not suck quite as much again.
As for the other two, there are certain article series or blogs I want to read every single time they're published. There are a select few I want to read the second they're available, but most can simply be sent to my unread collection in Pocket. Both save me a step: checking for new content, and placing the content in a place I prefer it anyway.
It may seem counterintuitive to make this process more complex. I'm trying to simplify my life (at least online), so why use four services when one was working? Automation is certainly a factor, but mainly it's that now I don't have anything I feel the need to constantly check. The stuff I can get to later is in a place that won't guilt me for not getting to it. The stuff I want to get will come to me. The anxiety of RSS gets taken care of with a smarter system of pipes (oh man, remember Yahoo Pipes?)
If you think about it, you likely have a good number of sites that follow you around. Do you have them in the right bins? Are you conscious of their mental toll on constantly checking up on them, or of them notifying you in a way you might not like? A little custimization and a lot of consideration on your time and attention can go a long way.
May 27, 2014
A Photo of Everyone
I’ll have more photos of the wedding and honeymoon up pretty soon. People who have me on Facebook have already seen a few, but I wanted to put this one up here, because this is the only photo that actually has every single guest in it. It’s from the 64th floor of the Mandalay Bay, and it looks amazing.
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April 20, 2014
Gredunza Press is shutting down in June
Since 2007, I’ve designed and published works under the title of Gredunza Press. My partner and I have helped a good number of books see the light of day, including two of my own. We’ve been a team member for the publication of roughly 20 books and journals, and we’re really proud of the work we’ve done. But it’s time to embark on new projects, and it no longer makes sense to call what we do a press.
This also means that the podcast wing of Gredunza is also shutting down. I’ve already communicated with all the incredible hosts and hope they find new homes for their shows. A few have chosen to shutter, since there still isn’t an east, inexpensive solution for podcasting out there. I hoped to provide that, but the cost/profit ratio just doesn’t work for that particular vision.
As for my freelancing work, which often included Gredunza as a brand for hire, that work will continue, just under my own name and site. If you follow my blog International Object, you’ll soon begin seeing design work there (as well as news posts like this). But if you’re interested in hiring me, take a look at my services page.
Thank you to everyone who helped us out along the way, and shared in the creation of some inspiring projects. I hope I get to work with all of you again in the future.
April 7, 2014
Serious reading
The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade when dealing with other mediums as well.
While this article is jammed with “turns out” journalism and the “oh no people aren’t reading books anymore” thing that people are real tired of, I’ll take this time to point out how I read the internet these days.
I use a Kobo Aura HD to read both books and online articles. When an article looks interesting to me, I will almost never read it in my browser. Instead, I hit a bookmarklet that saves the article to Pocket. The Kobo has a built-in Pocket app that syncs quickly with Wi-Fi. If I like the article, I’ll mark it as a favourite, and it’ll get pushed to Facebook and Twitter as a link. This took ten minutes to set up, and it works great.
I don’t post or link to anything to this blog without reading over the material at least twice. The first time is almost always on my Kobo. The second is when I’m looking for a good quote.
As for books, I’ve been slacking. I used to read about three per month, but I’m down to one. It probably has to do with feature creep: right now, in 2014, there just happen to be more video games, TV shows, and essays I’d rather read than books. It fluctuates. I’m sure I’ll devour a ton when I get back from my wedding. There are quite a few in my wish list.
To get back to the article, Maryanne Wolf, the focus of Rosenwald’s piece, says “We can’t turn back” in regards to being able to concentrate on books, but two paragraphs later explains that after two weeks of trying to read a book (she’d lost the ability, apparently, through internets) she was back to normal. So. I don’t know. Maybe we’ll be fine.
March 26, 2014
The Grand Budapest Hotel Review
You can also find this review over at Deadshirt.
“Nobody’s saying it’s a stroll down the tree line promenade with a fine lady and a white poodle but it’s got what you’d call venerability.”
I’ve read in various reviews for The Grand Budapest Hotel that it confirms everything about writer and director Wes Anderson, and by extension presents nothing to change the minds of people who don’t care for his style. Certainly, there are signature moments of twee precision, of people with more money than us having problems we will never have. I understand the lack of reputability in many of his films, the alien notion that these people aren’t found in any life we know, and that their decisions aren’t ones people here — on this earth — would make. Grand Budapest has these characters, but we find them all on the side of villainy. The hero only wants to help his boss break out of prison to (maybe) sell a stolen painting inherited to him because he slept with an 84-year old murdered woman, and along the way clear his name for her murder which he didn’t (probably) commit, but can’t tell the truth to because it would disrepute some other old woman in another old country.
Okay, the heroes aren’t your next door neighbors. The villains are even less so. The old lady’s son (Adrien Brody) is painted as a Moose-and-Squirrel-hunting cartoon, clad entirely in black with pointed accents and a tiny gun around his ankle. His muscle (Willem Dafoe) scowls with missing teeth, punches with brass-knuckle-style rings on both hands, and shoots with a gun holstered on his chest, next to a flask. The death toll in the film is on him, but he’s a great skiier and I’ve had his theme music on repeat all week.
All right, so maybe The Grand Budapest Hotel is just another Wes Anderson movie, and to make matters worse, part of the recent set where it seems less like a deep character sketch (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) and more like a frolicking adventure for the kid in all of us (everything he’s done since). This means that the plot is more important than spending time with the cast, and this unfortunately means much of the cast is a blur. The movie ostensibly features nearly two dozen incredible stars, but few reach more than a paragraph in the script. Everyone chews the scenery (and what scenery there is!) but nobody is going to come out of this thinking they saw enough Bill Murray, Owen Wilson (literally 20 seconds of screen time), Tilda Swinton, Jude Law, the aforementioned Brody and Dafoe, or the charming, beautiful, and crafty Agatha, played by Saoirse Ronan.
I even get the sense that we didn’t get enough time with Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolori, the unlikely pair of buddies in this ostensible buddy caper. This isn’t due to lack of screen time, but instead that Anderson only scratched the surface of their profile. Revolori’s Zero has the back story of a refugee and survivor, but the guile of a man well beyond his years. Fiennes’ M. Gustav H combines dandy sensibilities with a sea of secret society esteem.
But here’s the thing with Anderson’s work since The Life Aquatic: if you let them in, his movies are an immeasurably good time. His work forces you to smile ear-to-ear like no other director, marveling at both the scale of his dioramas and ability to — stone-faced and without irony — tell you that none of it matters. There’s artifice upon artifice, stories about stories about stories, wrapped up neatly in a framing device that reminds us that even the most daring and brilliant adventures will one day be just a way to lazily burn an afternoon. And yet, I still found myself attracted to nearly everyone on screen, invested in their well-being, and hoping for not only the best but more.
Throughout The Grand Budapest Hotel, characters begin reciting poetry. These poems are romantic and profound (if a little pedantic), and invariably interrupted by plot. This happens roughly half a dozen times. The characters want to ruminate on a moment, and have the perfect stanza with which to do so, but there is no time. They are on the run, and their enemies are close. There is a sense that if they don’t hurry, there will never be time for poetry ever again. This is where the movie gets its actual weight: enemies are on the horizon. The edges of the film’s map are already lousy with Nazis (here retrofitted with no-name branding, complete with two Z’s instead of S’s), and they only encroach as the film progresses. But the Nazis aren’t what defeats our heroes eventually. It’s time.
The Grand Budapest Hotel shares quite a few ingredients from pre-war films with eastern-European flavor: The Shop Around The Corner and Grand Hotel, to name two. I look at films like these with borrowed melancholy, and see their essence as something lost to time and war. Technically, there’s nothing stopping films like Grand Budapest, Grand Hotel, and Shop Around The Corner from happening today. There are nice hotels, old ladies still get murdered, and young refugees find work and struggle with reality. But we miss both the feeling that death is actually around every corner, and the charm with which to repel it. Grand Budapest illuminates this, and makes us nostalgic for a time that is long since gone (if it, in fact, ever existed at all), like the particular world M Gustav H tried to keep alive, and the one Zero holds up in a ruin.
February 17, 2014
February 10, 2014
The Heart is Raw Season 1 Cover Art
Near the end of the month, I'll be releasing a collection of articles I wrote last year called The Heart is Raw. It's going to be a short and small book, but I wanted it to have a unified look throughout. The general idea behind the articles is to open up your own guts and pour them out onto pop culture, and explore the space that exists there, so I wanted the art style to be coarse and broken. Throughout the book, there will be pages dedicated to this look, with quotes I've gathered from a Tumblr I seldom update called Maltese Suplex. Here's the cover. I'd love to know your thoughts.
