I toyed with the idea of going to see Snakes on a Plane last night in order to be able to write a negative review about it with more credibility.

I even considered the idea of making it seem like I went to the theatre with the expectation that the movie would be fun, thus lending my negative review the credibility of an aggreived victim of entertainment industry hype.

But (as should be pretty obvious by now) I have no desire to see the movie, and I do not actually expect it to be fun. In fact, I am 99% sure that the movie is complete crap, even without seeing it.

I have the intellectually honest “right” say the movie is probably god-awful for the same reason that the “prefans” who’ve been psyched about the film before seeing it had the same “right” to expect that the movie was probably going to be awesome. But I think I am more correct than the prefans for two reasons:

1. I think I’ve been better at reading between the lines of the movie’s reviews, the previews, and Samuel Jackson’s own statements about the movie: All are unified in stopping noticably short of saying the movie is actually a good movie, usually saying that the movie is, at best, “so bad it’s good” — a genre of movie that I don’t think should be rewarded with unquestioning praise, or for the most part even made in the first place.
2. If I have to be told in advance — by the makers of the film, even! — that the movie is going to be “so bad it’s good”, then my anti-marketing bullshit detector kicks in and alerts me that maybe the movie is just plain bad.

What’s worse, the broader movie industry’s embrace of this movie is obviously and depressingly cynical and crass. Watching Samuel Jackson and Jon Stewart talk about the movie on the Daily Show, I couldn’t help but read between the lines a little:

JACKSON: I’m pretending to be excited about this movie just so I can get people to go see it and I can make a ton of money.
STEWART: I’m pretending to be excited about this movie because every time I mention it the audience goes crazy. They love it when I say “motherfuckin”. It’s so easy.

JACKSON: Heh, tell me something I don’t already know.

I mean, the movie’s signature line (”I want these motherfuckin’ snakes off this motherfuckin’ plane!!”) was added to the film after filming was completed in response to the internet hype. The movie was basically “retro fitted” to transform it from crappy b-movie to manufactured popular phenomenon.

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Stills from Nuovi Comizi d’Amore (New Love Meetings) by Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi.

Two Italian filmmakers, Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi, have completed a feature-length movie shot entirely with a mobile phone. It’s an interview-centered documentary, which seems the ideal form for a mobile phone movie. Here’s what they have to say about the work:

Project’s philosophy: this project arises from one of our main belief: today who does not make a film It is because he has nothing to say. The new technologies (mltiDV and HO camcorders) give back to everybody the chance to regain their creativity to communicate trough images. We have chosen the easiest and less intrusive mean: the mobile phone. We privileged natural light and only in rare cases we illuminated with a made in china flashlight. The two of us made the entjre shooting and editing. The sound was taken by the same mobile phone without any additional microphone and later optimized in postproduction.

What a fantastic and liberating idea. I particularly love the (bolded) confrontational and manifesto-like accusation that because technology has put filmmaking in every westerner’s pocket, those of us who aren’t making movies are pretty much worthless. It’s Futurism without the fascism.

I imagine such micro-filmmakers would carry around some minimal additional equipment like extra batteries and a flashlight in order to make the production just a tiny little bit more professional without losing the spontaneous quality of the final result.

Using a mobile phone would seem at first to be a cheap novelty: why not simply bring a very small video camera? Even most digital still cameras can shoot video, and almost certainly at a better quality than a phone can. But I think the mobile phone aspect is important, since the informality of it defuses the gravity, such as it is, that people feel when they are “on camera”.

With web-based distribution (such as YouTube or Google Video, or even the iTunes Store) being the best-case scenario for most filmmakers these days, a low-resolution, highly-compressed image quality isn’t a signficant drawback to watchability, either. It’s only when the filmmaker aspires to wider distribution either via television or cinematic release that higher-quality footage becomes a concern.

The thing most amateur videographers mess up, however, is the sound: if the sound is bad — either because it is too low or drowned out by other ambient sounds, then the footage is often rendered useless. The sounds from a small mobile-phone microphone are pretty terrible. Do they make mobile phones with plug-ins for microphones that work with the video recorder, that is do any phones have jacks that can accommodate high quality mics?

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What if Sergei Brin and Larry Page were actually evil? What if they were in reality sinister villains planning to take over the world, like Lex Luthor or Dr. Doom? If so, they’re certainly going about it with great efficiency, controlling all of the instruments we use to function in the information age: web search, desktop search, mapping, news, everybody’s desktops, every book ever written. And nobody suspects a thing!

Sure, many will say they already are evil — censoring pages in China, bundling the Google Toolbar with other apps, enabling countless spam and crime opportunities).

But others see only benevolence. And investors just adore them.

This would make a great action movie plot: A thinly-veiled Google-like company, started by two clever but immensely bitter and increasingly megalomaniacal college students, seeks to control the entire information economy, and thus rule the world!!!

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Emily Dickinson’s totally awesome MySpace page

In which half-baked connections are made between American poetry and Internet social networking.

Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is like an 19th-century personal homepage, in which the poet constructs his profile/identity with the stuff he sees in his neighbors, peers, family, friends, and countrymen. He gives shout-outs to his peeps. He writes of himself and of them seamlessly, “I am large, I contain multitudes” … Whitman sees his identity as part of many collective identities, defined by its connections and its connectedness.

On the other end of the spectrum sits Emily Dickinson, the quintessential recluse, who wrote:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us–don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Dickinson, too, equates identity with publicness, with connections to other people. Of course, she explicitly sought to avoid such connections throughout her life — perhaps this poem reveals that she was seeking to minimize the existence of her self.

When we are online, when we post information about ourselves, our identities are cybernetically extended; they overlap — and in a way include — other people’s identities via our various kinds of social networks. Our social networks overlap in the same organic-ish way that computer networks overlap. We are always plugged into multiple systems, to multiple networks both social and functional.

The beat poet Frank O’Hara conceived of something called “Personism”, in which our thoughts and ideas are defined best when they are addressed to another person (instead of to oneself or to an imagined ideal). O’Hara’s Personism Manifesto is a bracing, albeit somewhat obscure, rumination on this concept. In it he argues that when we think of new ideas we think of them as being regarded and considered by others, sometimes by particular individuals. If this isn’t the essence of creating online personas, I don’t know what is.

I’m not aware of any blogs, of course, which exist for no-one to see. Where is the Emily Dickinson of blogging? We may never know.

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The Wordpress blog admin “Dashboard”, where I am currently typing these words. If you look closely, maybe you can see what kinds of things I might be posting here in the future.

I have what I fancy to be interesting ideas just about all the time, and usually when this happens I like to start scribbling in my little portable paper sketchbook.

After blogging for only a few months, however, I now find myself rushing here instead, to my Wordpress dashboard, to quickly jot down a few words — sometimes as little as a three-word title — and saving it into my growing list of unfinished blog drafts.

For those unfamiliar with Wordpress or other content managment software, most blogs let authors save many unfinished posts as drafts before we actually “publish” them. I do this all the time. Later, I can work on these unfinished fragments from anywhere, whenever I feel ready to do so. I have over twenty of these fragments right now, some days old, some months old.

This is exactly how I work in my physical sketchbook, too. In fact, sometimes I wonder if using Wordpress to express my ideas will diminish my output of drawings on paper, or if, instead, blogging will simply provide an additional channel — especially since the whole point of this site is to allow me to publish my sketchbook ideas fluidly and seamlessly alongside those ideas that come out as words. I think the latter is happening. I think I’m starting to get a feel for the voice and the beat of my blog, my publishing rhythm.

[Bonus: Can you find the paradox in this post?]

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I’m no architecture critic, but when I read the New York Times review of the just-reopened Morgan Library & Museum a few weeks ago (with words like “dazzling”, “mesmerizing”, and “triumph”) I knew I had to visit as soon as I could. So immediately following my class field trip the other day, I dismissed my students and walked a single a block up Madison Avenue to see what all the talk was about.

The Morgan Library has in the past been perceived as a second-tier New York museum, not quite at the level of the Metropolitan, MoMA, or Guggenheim. But from the moment you first walk into the new Morgan Libary, the entranceway and courtyard immediately make a strong, visceral case for moving the Morgan up into that exclusive pantheon of great New York institutions.

I could not take photographs within the galleries themselves, but maybe you can get a sense of the lobby’s bright energy from these images. It is a remarkably elegant and powerful space: despite the massive scale it succeeds in making the visitor feel welcome and unrushed. I was surprised by how intimate the experience was, both in the lobby and in the exhibition galleries. MORE…

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Yesterday I took my FIT students on a field trip to see the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibition at the Science, Industry and Business Library of The New York Public Library. It’s a modest little show consisting of several dozen examples of maps, globes, and information graphics — as exemplified by Edward Tufte’s much-beloved “Napoleon’s March to Moscow” by Charles Minard (seen here), which illustrates the utter devastation of Napoleon’s army as he attacked and retreated from Moscow in the deadly winter of 1812.

I was a little surprised at the close attention my students paid to much of the work, examining and discussing some of them pretty intensely. I knew they’d be interested, but I didn’t expect them to really investigate and talk about the works in detail as they did.

But I think I understand why: The maps on display have a puzzle-like quality to them, which is I think part of the aesthetic and experiential appeal of information graphics. People like to try to figure them out. MORE…

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