Ridley Scott and the company behind “The Devil Wears Prada” will bring the epic story of the Gucci dynasty to the screen. From Variety:
Just when Maurizio [Gucci] was on the verge of his greatest success — a daring fashion show debuting the clothes of newcomer Tom Ford — his penchant for accumulating enemies caught up with him; Maurizio was gunned down in front of his Milan apartment in 1995.
Plenty of potential for intrigue in the history of the House of Gucci in the 1970s and 80s, fleshed out by what is sure to be extravagant production design mixed with Scott’s highly-stylized aesthetic will make this an interesting project to look out for.
Avram notes that the introduction of a product to the real world based on one from the fictional world is nothing new, citing Holiday Inn hotel and Bubba Gump restaurant chains as examples. While he’s coined the term “tlönian” for this phenomenon, based on the Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a commenter suggests “defictionalization,” a Google search of which currently places the Making Light discussion as the #2 result, so I’m thinking it has staying power.
“People say, You must have been the class clown. And I say, No, I wasn’t. But I sat next to the class clown, and I studied him.”
- Dr. Allan Pearl
This is why I love my Twitter: it fulfills in me a primal urge to act out in class, in little bursts. Since having moved past school and into the working world, the class clowning urge was one I’d kept dormant. As it turns out, however, blurting out ridiculous things to a roomful of people offers every bit the dopamine jolt as an adult as it did as a kid, which turns out to be very therapeutic.
In Twitter, there is a sense of ordered play. There is no judgement. You can talk to your neighbors, stand up and give a report on what you’re doing, pass notes, make fart noises if that’s your schtick (the highest form of comedy), or sit in the back, observing. But if you do a real banger mouthfart, like where your arm gets all wet and people actually think they smell something, there’s the joy of peer approval, in the form of a “favorite.”
Oh, and an added benefit of Twitter: it helps you to develop an economy of words and conciseness of ideas. Because the longest mouthfart isn’t always the funniest one.
Influenced by his idol, Elvis Presley and the 1950s rock revolution, he rose to stardom as the main figure of the 60s musical movement known as Jovem Guarda (Young guard, in opposition to the ‘old guard’ of Brazilian music), which was the first manifestation of the Brazilian pop rock movement.
The LA Times reports on the Transportation Authority’s decision to forgo the honor system for passenger ticket-taking in hopes of earning what they estimate to be $5.5 million annually on the 5% of riders who ride without paying. The cost of installing 275 turnstiles, as proposed by the MTA, would be $30 million in installation and $1 million in annual maintenance.
The move would be a major cultural shift for L.A.’s rail system, which was designed to have a more open feel than those in eastern cities, with their gates, turnstiles and barriers.
I have to admit, I know of LA’s rail system only anecdotally at this point. For I, like most residents of Los Angeles, rely on my car for the daily commute. My own is particularly brutal, which, from East LA to the coast in Santa Monica, means an hour of road time each way. When a solution exists that doesn’t fall far short of riders’ expectations, I’ll be ready and eager to ditch my car.
Epic Records/Legacy Recordings is releasing a 25th Anniversary Special Edition of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” with bonus tracks including remixes by Akon, will.i.am, and Kanye West.
The latest installment of Super Mario has received plenty of notice for its revolutionary style of gameplay. But just as striking is the intricacy of its sound design. One convention of the game is a Pull Star, a floating anchor that Mario can grab with some sort of magical, musical force which, when activated emits a creepy, almost theremin-like wail, wavering just a bit before solemnly sliding down in pitch. This sound is one of those elemental formulas for touching an emotional soft spot. The other day I was playing a level with a series of Pull Stars in succession and my girlfriend implored me to stop, as it was making her sad, and not only because I’m a grown man playing a child’s video game. Here is an example of the Wailing Pull Star (and a taste of the very Vangelis-like score scattered throughout the game).
Also: via Boing Boing Gadgets, footage from a live orchestra scoring session for the game. Mario’s creator, Shigeru Miyamoto sits aside and supervises.
Also also: I noticed that the menu for selecting levels to play is a musical instrument in its own right, allowing the player to create melody with chord changes and everything. It’s a subtle touch.
After his last movie, “Delirious” brought in only $200,000 at the box office, a dejected Tom DiCillo, “a legend in the indie film world” reached out to Roger Ebert for answers.
“To give you some indication of how disoriented I feel at the moment,” he wrote, “I am getting no real, tangible feedback from anyone. And so I’m kind of struggling on my own to make sense of how a film I put my soul into, that Buscemi put his soul into, a film that generated such strong, positive reviews, had no life in the market.”
Ebert’s most telling response was to the question of whether independent filmmakers have any chance of surviving this opening-weekend-takes-all era of distribution. “I don’t know. Maybe DVDs and Netflix and Blockbuster on Demand and cable TV and pay-per-view and especially high-quality streaming on the Internet will rescue you and your fellow independents.”
While waiting for the release of “Delirious” to video, I recommend another of DiCillo’s movies, the delicious “Box of Moonlight” (1996).
While I’m no connoisseur of energy drinks, I do appreciate a good cult comedy movie like “Idiocracy (2006)”. So it’s worth a laugh that the movie’s fictional ultrastupid energy beverage Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator is being put on the market by an actual extreme beverage company. For those unfamiliar with “Idiocracy” (you poor bastards) Brawndo is what we will use to irrigate the crops in our inevitably stupid future because it’s got what plants crave (electrolytes).
The very Internetty commercial they’ve produced, I had assumed was created by the sketch group picnicface that hit YouTube six months ago with its tonally-identical Powerthirst commercial. There’s no mention of a connection on the picnicface site, so it makes me wonder if liberties were taken and what credit is due.
Update: The voice you hear in the Brawndo spot is confirmed to be Mark from picnicface. One and the same. Credit is given, at the end of the video. Now I can mutilate my thirst with a clear conscience.
Look out, 1897. There’s a new George Carlin in town, with a comprehensive no-no list of the things Major League Baseball players can’t say during gameplay (especially in the presence of a lady).
The Yanksfan vs. Soxfan blog has hilarious scans of the original parchment used for an official league document intended to eradicate swearing in baseball, drafted by the owner of the National League’s Cincinnati franchise. Highlights from the list:
You prick-eating bastard!
A dog must have fucked your mother when she made you!
I’ll make you suck my ass!
If the mood for obscenity strikes while on the field, players, concentrate on something else, like rewaxing the curl in your moustache or sipping on a nice, cool sasparilla ginger ale (I mixed up my old-timey beverages).
People who know me know that part of my charm is how wrong I tend to do things. Raleigh St. Clair could write books on my horrid sense of direction (I couldn’t tell you how to drive to my favorite restaurant yet I’m a totally awesome driver, curiously). Yesterday I made out-of-the-box mac n’ cheese but ruined it so royally I ended up dumping it and having an ice cream cone for lunch (no ice cream - just the cone).
So what the hell am doing guest-writing for this man, this hero of the web whom I so admire? I’d been toying with the idea of referring to Mr. Kottke only as ‘Cousin Jason’ hoping this would remove any doubt as to how I’d been put up to the task. But no, we’re not related. If we were, I’d have an easier time backing out at the last minute.
You may think, “Well, here you are, these are your words on the kottke blog, so you must’ve done something right.” I wouldn’t be so sure of that. But we’ll see if I can’t class this place up a bit while Mr. Kottke maintains his undercarriage.
For the next week, Adam Lisagor is going to be helping me out with kottke.org as I spend the week working on the site’s undercarriage, performing some long-overdue maintenance and (hopefully) finishing a couple of projects begun long ago during the Golden Age of Weblogs. As it happens, Adam worked on The Day After Tomorrow, one of my favorite movies of all time. Seriously, Adam really worked on The Day After Tomorrow and, seriously, The Day After Tomorrow is one of my favorite movies of all time. (Seriously! I’ve seen it like 20 times.)
You may know (or get to know) Adam from the iPhone cut and paste demo video he did, his tumblelog lonelysandwich, or his Merlin Mann-recommendedTwitter stream. He lives somewhere in California, which I’m told is a requirement for working on movies. But enough of that from me…I’ll let Adam introduce himself tomorrow morning before he gets going. Welcome, Adam!
This year’s AIGA Holiday Party features an auction conducted by Mr. John Hodgman to benefit a design mentoring program for NYC high school kids. Also, free wrapping paper.
Warning, RSSoterica and kottke.org sausage-making to follow. Matt Wood has a post up on 43Folders about how he groups his RSS feeds in Google Reader for easier reading. I use pretty much the same system as Matt, but with a few more folders. I have several folders for reading long-form blogs:
Always
Often
Sometimes
Pending
Food and Drink
Frippery
Infoglut
Always, Often, and Sometimes are self-explanatory. The Pending folder is for blogs that I’m trying out, Frippery is stuff that is non-kottke.org-related to be read during non-work hours (ha!), and the Infoglut folder contains a bunch of blogs that have a low signal-to-noise ratio and are too high volume to keep up with unless everything else is read (any multi-author pro blogs that I read (not many) are in here). For organizing non-long-form blogs, I use these folders:
Links
Yummy
Photos
Tumble
Links contains link blogs, Yummy has a bunch of stuff from del.icio.us, Photos are photoblogs, and Tumble contains tumblelogs, FFFFOUND!, and other Randomly Curated Other People’s Images White Background Sites. And then for news, I have an NY Times folder, a Sci/Tech News folder, and a Keywords folder for Google News keyword searches.
All this folder business might seem overcomplicated, but I find that grouping feeds by mode helps greatly. And by mode, I mean when I’m reading link blogs, that’s a different style than reading/skimming long-form blogs in the Always folder. Posts from link blogs usually take a few seconds to read/evaluate/discard while the Always folder posts take longer. If they were all lumped together, I couldn’t get through them as quickly and thoroughly as I can separately. A juggling analogy will help — Wait! Don’t leave, I’m almost done! — it’s easier to juggle balls or clubs or knives than it is to juggle balls, knives, and clubs at the same time…same thing with different kinds of blog posts.
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