The Brunch Table

Just read today that animator Pedro Lopes is creating a computer simulation of a famous early animation device, Alexeieff and Parker’s Pinscreen. The original was basically a giant version of the little pinscreens you can stick your hand into a at a Spencer’s Gifts (or your local equivalent). You used brushes, sticks, and other tools to coax the pins into position, and then snapped a frame of film.

The pinscreen was too expensive and too complex to be widely adopted, but Alexeieff and Parker produced some amazing work on the device at Canada’s Film Board, including an adaptation of Gogol’s “The Nose” (it’s a pity that there don’t seem to be any stills on the net).

But, as Lopes points out, a much-overlooked value of the machine is that, in the 1930s, it caused its users to start thinking of graphics in terms of pixels. (As far as I can tell, his pinscreen emulator isn’t merely an array of one-bit dots, but a 3D physical simulation, taking into account light sources, shadows, and the inevitable nudging of nearby pins.)

A couple days ago, my stepbrother and I sat down with a vintage Nintendo to appreciate the classics. He’s twenty, five years younger than me, which might explain why he gave up on it before I did–he couldn’t forgive the old games for punishing the player’s mistakes with replay time (go back to the beginning of the level when you die, and begin all over again when you lose).

It occurred to me–that trick, handy for extending the life of a product, was leaning pretty heavily on the games’ late-eighties novelty. What I took as a fact of life, my stepbrother considers as appealing as a malfunctioning VCR. Er, DVD player.

Putain, c’est la guerre!

Here is a list of media arts co-ops in the U.S., organized by state. (If you ever need to find video gear or people to work with in a new city, this’ll probably be a lot cheaper and more pleasant than going through the local phone book…)

It looks like some folks at Columbia–apparently inspired by all this Friendster business–are out to settle the “six degrees” question once and for all.

A quick thought…

An “action” movie is a competition fantasy, in which selection doesn’t exist. (Selection might mean that Man is thanked profusely by Woman for the saving of her life, but, a little ashamed, she confesses that she has no desire to sleep with him.)

A “romance” movie is a selection fantasy, in which competition doesn’t exist. (Competition might mean that, despite her best efforts, Woman really does end up forced into the loveless marriage with the rich and boring Man twenty years her senior.)

Having devoured all the George Saunders works I could get my hands on, I’ve moved on to Matt Derby’s Super Flat Times: Stories. I haven’t gotten very far yet, but he gets a gold star for delirious passages like these:

At the center my colleagues and I taught people different techniques of coaching food, getting the best performance out of a meal. This type of eating was called “Eating,” and it involved an intricate set of stances that are illegal now. Our goal, stressed in the grueling two-hour instruction tape, was to teach people how to work in the table, the whole room. It was a lifestyle. “When you think about eating,” the trainer on the tape said, strolling past a series of staggered food murals, “think about the part of yourself that has to leave to make room for the food coming in. Where does it go? That is the central question. That is when we turn eating into Eating.”
…
I stood behind her, arms crossed over her abdomen, pressing my palms upward just below her ribs, demonstrating rapid breath technique. I only came up to her shoulders, which made positions such as Filtering the Pool and Attending the Korean Audio Science Museum more challenging than they should have been. Gradually, though, her body yielded to my embrace.
…
“What — are you?” she said, pointing to my body. It was difficult, in those first days, to understand everything she said — what came out of her was more like a set of breathy, musical notes, whole mouthfuls of them. Pretty, though. I am sure she had the same trouble with my own spittled, mawkish bursts of language. We relied heavily on clothes, sketches, and the arrangement of objects in the room to convey meaning.

Like Lem at his most satirical, he just piles on absurd premises, one after the other, until you’re simply forced to accept the whole teetering, improbable mess. Incidentally, the promotional site is appropriately disorienting—be sure to check out the DVD-style “deleted scenes”.

I’m pretty sick of the whole SUV-bashing fad (talk to me when you’ve stopped driving, period), but this NYTimes article about how pickup trucks are the new SUVs is just plain funny, in a head-in-hands kind of way.

“It’s an S.U.V. with an open back,” Mr. Lawson, 33, said of his metallic gray Ford F-250 Crew Cab. The pickup weighs about three tons, empty, and has enough room in the cab for him, his wife, their two children in car seats and even the family’s chocolate lab.

Wait, didn’t the SUV start out as a pickup truck chassis with a top? The other day I was remembering how you could once mock SUV owners for never actually taking them off-road. Now that the Sport and Utility parts of the Vehicles have become all but vestigial, they need the truckbed to winch them back out of minivan territory.