Check out a bit of a plot summary for this movie Wanted:
25-year-old Wes
(James McAvoy) was the most disaffected, cube-dwelling
drone the planet had ever known. His boss chewed him out
hourly, his girlfriend ignored him routinely and his life
plodded on interminably. Everyone was certain this
disengaged slacker would amount to nothing. There was
little else for Wes to do but wile away the days and die in
his slow, clock-punching rut. Until he met a woman named
Fox (Angelina Jolie). After his estranged father is murdered,
the deadly sexy Fox recruits Wes into the Fraternity, a secret
society that trains Wes to avenge his dad’s death by
unlocking his dormant powers. As she teaches him how to
develop lightning-quick reflexes and phenomenal agility,
Wes discovers this team lives by an ancient, unbreakable
code: carry out the death orders given by fate itself.
Nobody hopes this movie is good more than I do. If you watch the linked preview, complete with McAvoy’s tennis-forehand bullet-curving oh-my-god how-awesome is-that scene, you’ll understand why I have such high hopes. Hard to make any more guesses about the movie for now.
UPDATE: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Shuffle Your Feet will also rock your face off, possibly more so than the previous song, simply because it features hand-clapping.
The return of Dean Allen’s blog, Textism, has been heraldedbysome folks as a big deal. I loved the clean aesthetic on my first visit to his newly reopened site, but it took a little while for the quality of his writing to sink in. Case in point: one of the items from a recent list-styled entry entitled “My father is visiting,” reads:
We got into a fistfight when I was sixteen and he had me
down in seconds
This Mr. Allen fellow does a lot with a little, whether the medium is pixels or words. It’s all a bit like a poem, but longer and you need to scroll and have access to an internet connection.
I am a location scout & location manager for television
commercials, music video & still photography, feature
films, episodic TV, etc - working primarily in the new york
area for the last 14 years or so
The International Herald Tribune has an interesting article: Hedge fund managers get billion-dollar paydays. When the market is down in so many places, it has to be up in others. Incidentally, the reported $3.7 billion bonus for one man in one year would give a $100,000+ bonus to all the families in my home town of Woodbury.
I have no problem with people lucky enough to earn these massive bonuses, but it’s hard to wrap your brain around how big that number is.
Next time you’re in an Apple retail store, take a look at the floor. If you’re in a newer store, you’ll notice that the dark gray stone is incredibly smooth, durable, and flecked with random bits of shiny material. The 30"x30" square tiles are made of stone called Italian Tuscan or Pietra Serena sandstone, and it’s a good material to keep in mind for your next flooring project.
As for me, my next flooring project of this caliber is about 10-15 years from now. As the song says, Don’t stop, believin’…
Until now, [correcting pitch] was only possible with
single notes — an exaggerated example can be heard
in Cher’s 1998 hit, “Believe,” which used the competing
Auto-Tune system. For more than a decade, that software
has been the recording industry’s dirty little secret, fixing
any out-of-tune notes crooned by an individual singer
or played on any single-note instrument. But this
breakthrough takes that magic manipulation many steps
further, allowing engineers to create entirely new music
from existing recordings.
With this astonishing software, engineers can dig deep into
< a mix. For example, they could change each individual note
of a guitar chord, or fix one wrong note played by a musician
in a symphony orchestra. It’s like Photoshop for music.
The demo video is the coolest thing I’ve seen all month — and the song they use to demonstrate the software is pretty cool, too. Make sure to watch the part where they start completely shuffling around guitar notes plucked out of individual cords.
Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser make up the band MGMT. I’m addicted to the grinding bass and counter melodies in their catchy song “Kids”. Give a listen to the full song at Last.fm.
Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi is a cult film I think I might enjoy:
The film consists primarily of slow motion and
time-lapse photography of cities and natural landscapes
across the United States. The visual tone poem
contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its
tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. In
the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means ‘crazy
life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating,
a state of life that calls for another way of living’, and the
film implies that modern humanity is living in such a way.