For The Damaged Right Eye (1968)

This is a surreal short film from Toshio Matsumoto, a Japanese filmmaker, whose Funeral Parade of Roses heavily influenced Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. For The Damaged Right Eye is long for this site (12 mins) but if you've got the time it's pretty far out. Great soundtrack too.

Nathan Keepers: Pay Attention

Every once in a while, an actor comes along, who not only defines his generation, but surpasses it in timelessness. That actor is Brian Atene. Seen here, in his audition tape for Stanley Kubrick for Kubrick's upcoming Full Metal Jacket, Atene somehow manages to funnel all races and experiences into S.E. Hinton's Johnny Cade from The Outsiders. It is a bonus treat that Atene allows us to compare his singular performance with that of Ralph Maccio, who comes off as a total hack. I mean, Maccio's so natural and nuanced! Where's the Drama, the feeling, the yelling? Where are you Brian Atene? The Fannings and Lipnickis of the world need your mighty actorly hand to guide them!

The Cutest Gay Couple Ever

Sent to me by Neeve, who knows too much about my fetish for "Alternative" families.

Smoking Is Terrible

Smoking is Bad

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By Kristen Schaal

Busy Busy Bee

Hello all. Been a while. Still inundated with CSI Miami. I've felt so lost without this connection we call "blog." Last night Katy and I saw The Prestige. Amazing. Great story, great performances, beautiful cinematography, and Magic!! That's entertainment! It was adapted from Christopher Priest's novel by the Nolan brothers, who also wrote Memento together. Katy read the book, and thought the screenplay did a better job of bringing the story to life for her. We were highly engrossed. And the movie starred Batman, Golum, and Ziggy Stardust! Probably the ultimate cast. In fact, I want to see a movie with those three who have to work together to solve mysteries throughout time. It would be called: Mystery Squad Galactic Force Zero. Someone get Joel Silver on the phone.

How Can I Tell If I'm Really In Love?

The reason national divorce rates are so high is because they've stopped showing this video to teens. Ted Danson come back! Tell us how to love again!



Unfortunately, this is only part one, and is a huge tease, but when the other parts surface you can rest assured Best of the Blank will feature them proudly.

Amazing New Sony Bravia Commercial

Does anyone remember the Sony Bravia commercial from last year, in which thousands of colorful bouncy balls are released on a hill in San Francisco? It was a stunningly beautiful spot, and won all kinds of awards in advertising and short-form content. Their new spot is also pretty amazing.

Our latest TV ad - featuring massive paint explosions - took 10 days and 250 people to film. Huge quantities of paint were needed to accomplish this, which had to be delivered in 1 tonne trucks and mixed on-site by 20 people.

The effect was stunning, but afterwards a major clean-up operation was required to clear away all that paint!

The cleaning took 5 days and 60 people. Thankfully, the use of a special water-based paint made it easy to scrape-up once the water had evaporated.

It was directed by Jonathan Glaser, who's done a number of really cool music videos and directed Sexy Beast, with Ben Kingsley.

It's very smart of Sony to make such amazingly cool commercials that don't look anything like commercials. It gets people like myself to pass them around and advertise for them willingly. Sony, if you're listening: I am your next director.

Watch the video.

But what does Outlook care!

I just wanted to share some spam I recieved today. It's pretty stream-of-conscious. It sort of reads like Henry Miller or Burroughs. I bet if McSweeney's published it, people would lose their shit.

And they really hurt. I really miss having a painless period. But what does Outlook care!
BBC News provides trusted World and UK news as well as local and regional perspectives. , RLLP All rights reserved. You know, that dumb question the GP asked my mum was a rather dumb remark the conservatives told the GP last year. I have of those yummy baby pears. But what does Outlook care!
Many individuals at Visibility Corporation have been APICS. Forgive me for being so stupid but I, haha, panic very fast, apparently.
I love experimenting with food and tastes.
Not much to see yet, but this is a really exciting film project.
NET-grokking people like myself. Because, really, that would be a great topic. This time, it was for our language, which accompanied by the Swedes, is thought to sound just like. Not that I have so many, the gynaecologist explained to me I was less fertile. You see, I am so not free. It was a fake one, as so many I have are.
I thought about blogging. I love experimenting with food and tastes. NET-grokking people like myself. But still, the language is not perfect.
html, manufacturing journalist, Thomas R. You see, I am so not free.
And I covered them with Chaumes.
Forgive me for being so stupid but I, haha, panic very fast, apparently.
Because, really, that would be a great topic.
I need to be able to mail.
A mere five years after being. This is exactly how it is to be a web designer. Silly, because I have a great relationship with my parents.

Extinction Ahoy!

Yesterday Treehugger posted this interesting timeline showing how long it would take to eradicate our traces from the planet. It's strangely soothing to think about a world without humans. Remember "(Nothing But) Flowers" by the Talking Heads?

Years ago
I was an angry young man
I'd pretend
That I was a billboard
Standing tall
By the side of the road
I fell in love
With a beautiful highway
This used to be real estate
Now it's only fields and trees
Where, where is the town
Now, it's nothing but flowers
The highways and cars
Were sacrificed for agriculture
I thought that we'd start over
But I guess I was wrong

Great song. So this concept seems to be somewhat en vogue at the moment. New Scientist has a great article up that fleshes out what you see in the graphic timeline, along with interesting little tidbits:

Feral descendants of domestic animals and plants, too, are likely to become permanent additions in many ecosystems, just as wild horses and feral pigs already have in some places. Highly domesticated species such as cattle, dogs and wheat, the products of centuries of artificial selection and inbreeding, will probably evolve back towards hardier, less specialised forms through random breeding. "If man disappears tomorrow, do you expect to see herds of poodles roaming the plains?" asks Chesser. Almost certainly not - but hardy mongrels will probably do just fine. Even cattle and other livestock, bred for meat or milk rather than hardiness, are likely to persist, though in much fewer numbers than today.

I also ran across The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) while researching this, which is a group that encourages the wholesale cessation of human breeding in order to return earth to its pre homo erectus utopian state. Their slogan: "May we live long and die out". Their site could really use a redisign, maybe a little color, but aesthetics are probably not too important to a group that is hoping to not exist. Their site does offer itself in several languages, emphasing their global aspect, which is important since the US is really a very small percentage of the earth's total population.

My Jams

I'm going to try and do a semi-regular column here on Best of the Blank starting...now. Entitled My Jams, it is a presentation of things that I'm into, from literature, to music, to movies, to opinions, to tasty eats. So here are My Jams for the week:


Blog
The Masticator. This is written by the brilliant Harry Sheff. My Jam this week is his post Liberals on Conservatives on Liberals, in which Harry takes a brave leap into conservative punditry and returns with a wonderful deconstruction of hypocrisy-filled arguments (from both sides). (That picture came up when I did a search for "masticator" on google. Harry, I think this guy could be your new mascott.)

Book
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I've just started this book, but I already want to stand up and proclaim my athiesm from the chuch steeples. Dawkins is an impassioned and eloquent writer, who can also be really funny, and knows exactly what he's talking about. And what he's talking about is what is wrong with religion and why it's time for it to go.

Record
The Crane Wife by The Decemberists. The Decemberists bring their pirate ship into Prog Rock waters, and fear neither the extended jam nor the Reaper on their latest release. The first song will make you wanna hug yourself and then the second makes you wanna rock. On the moon.

Food
Massaman Curry. Yum.



TV
The Office (American version). Katy and I raced through the first two seasons of this with a quickness. The first season left us amused but not amazed, since it aped the British one so much (which is one of our absolute faves). But the second season was flat-out awesome. We laughed, we cried, we squeezed one another everytime Jim and Pam were together on screen. I've downloaded the first three episodes of the third season, and thus know what we're doing some night this weekend.

Work
CSI: Miami. All I've been doing here for the last week are promos for this show. I've come to appreciate David Caruso's monotone delivery and need to take off/put on sunglasses for every statement like I appreciate the delicate movements of a winter swan coming home after a spring thaw. Since we are now running CSI: Miami on A&E at least 20 times a week, I expect to eventually experience a Videodrome-like moment with the entire cast.

Feel free to leave comments with your own Jams!

There's A Film Here...

I'm working on a screen adaptation of this story that came out today:

BERLIN (Reuters) - A small pile of leftover jelly discarded beside the road after a wedding party caused a large-scale security alert in Germany with biochemical experts, firemen and police called in to investigate.

"Passers-by called police after finding a pool of a flabby red, orange and green substance on the roadside," a police spokesman in the eastern town of Halle told Reuters on Monday.

Fears of toxic waste led to the closure of a wide area after the emergency call on Sunday, and experts wearing chemical warfare suits spent two hours examining the gelatinous substance before deciding that it was -- jelly [Jell-O].

"The fire brigade always has to assume a worst-case scenario," said a fire brigade spokesman. "We conducted a variety of tests and figured out it was jelly."

He said the newly wed groom, who was pulled out of bed at noon following a tipoff, confirmed that the jelly, known as Jell-O in the United States, was a party leftover -- and agreed to clean it up.

Ladies And Gentlemen: Joey Reid.

I present to you all: the first guest review on The Best of the Blank. Joey will eventually be transmogrifying this into a column about Ecology. He'll answer questions, address current topics and issues, and eventually make this world a better place, all thanks to the blog. And you, the readers. But mostly this blog. I would also like to take this opportunity to invite any of you with ideas for columns or single posts to submit them to me at robo_chic [at] yahoo [dot] com. Take advantage of the Wild-West-like conditions and get in while there's still plenty of gold in the stream! Open up a saloon! Or a brothel! All the things that made this country great will eventually make this blog great. So, for once in your lives, be a part of something important. And now, without further ado:

Joey's Green Revue
Product: Simple Play Toe sneaker, from the Green Toe line Cost: $93.50 with free shipping from Zappos

Green business is big business. Walmart, one of the 20 largest economies in the world, is trying to sell at least one compact fluorescent lightbulb to each of its customers in the coming year. In addition, Walmart is poised to become the single largest retailer of organic foods in the U.S. Why does Walmart care? One of their employees calculated that they would save 7 million dollars a year by upgrading the fixtures in their stores with compact fluorescents. As for organics, with the market constantly growing, it's just good business for Walmart to get into it; never mind any adverse impacts on the industry.

Although vegetarian shoes have been available for a long time, green shoes just started popping up. Recently, Simple began marketing a new shoe aimed at the green consumer. Simple use the tagline "Shoes with less stuff in them," for their Green Toe line of shoes and sandals. The concept is simple, and Simple are not alone in the market. Camper recently released a line of modular shoes called Wabi. The Camper website describes the horrors of shoemaking, the number of components, the complexity, the nastiness, and offers Wabi as the solution: three interchangeable parts, recyclable materials, replaceable units, something to please everyone. Well, almost everyone, since there's no Camper store in Minnesota, and they're pretty expensive, so you have to spend a fair amount of money on somewhat blind faith. Several places in the Twin Cities carry the Green Toe line of Simple shoes, at somewhat more reasonable prices than the Campers.

After four years, and a ridiculous number of kilometers (miles), I've nearly worn through the heels on my old pair of Campers. I love my Campers; they were comfortable, waterproof, windproof, fashionable and unique. Someone once recognized me at a urinal just from my shoes. Anyway, I figured it was a good time to get something new and the Simples seemed like the perfect choice for a sustainability minded person like myself. I purchased the Play Toe sneakers from Zappos.com for $93.50, a $3.50 premium over Simple's own online store, but with free shipping both ways, in case they suck. The shoes arrived, signed for by my caretaker, in a recycled cardboard shoe carton, complete with laces and crepe paper!

In terms of aesthetics, all you need to know is that these shoes literally make girls scream (in joy, not horror); it's happened to me more than once in the last two weeks. Comfort, is a different matter. If anything these shoes love to contradict themselves. The ped-bed insert actually does sort of massage your feet as you walk, which surprised me. But no ped-bed will ever make up for a lack of cushioning, structure and anatomical design. The shoes lack all semblance of arch support. The unstructured footbed, combined with the essentially flat crepe rubber sole, results in a jolting stride. After two weeks, I feel pain in the balls of my feet, where I've never felt pain before. In contrast to the painful soles, the jute uppers breathe well and create a great climate for my toesies. But even that relative calm is destroyed by the hurricane of a disaster that is the jute laces. Whoever decided that stiff, hard, inflexible, thick laces were a good idea should be fired. They don't tie well. I have to double-knot them, or they'll untie within a few minutes. They're uncomfortable, the hard, thick nature of them digs into the top of my feet, forcing me to tie the laces looser than I'm accustomed. Finally, the damn things don't seem to be very durable, the only excuse I could think of for them. One of them has already frayed halfway through. Why not just replace them? Why not indeed. That would be wasteful, these shoes are all about green production, if you have to throw out a part of them a soon as they arrive, they've failed.

Which leads me to perhaps their greatest failure, other than the pain inducement. The rubber sole, as cool looking as it is, seems to be rubbing off in small pieces. The cutout under the big toe is already wearing from contact with the ground. Looking at these shoes, I highly doubt the soles are replaceable. So what's the point? It would seem that I just spent $90 to keep a bunch of stuff out of the environment, only to dump a fragile pair of shoes in the trash in the not too distant future. I could be wrong on the durability, but if the pain keeps up, I may never find out. Let me summarize the design principles for you: green materials, cute, natural looking colors. Someone forgot to mention that shoes can support natural walking motions or impede them. They also forgot that their ultimate goal should be to keep them out of the landfill as long as possible. The toxic materials that went into the creation of my old Campers will probably be offset by the amount of time I wore them, especially in relation to the Simples. If Campers would just resole them, I wouldn't give a damn about green materials. Some cobblers will resole Campers, so I may try that option. Actually, my Campers would be perfect if the leather had come from organically raised cows, and was tanned non-toxically (progress is being made on this front,) or if they used recycled leather.

Still, these shoes bring some good into the world. They remind me of early digital cameras. They were big, but not huge, they took pictures, and you could see them right away. Wow! Actually, they were a lot like polaroids, but easily transferred onto a hard drive or floppy disk. The image quality was horrific: poor color rendition, poor dynamic range, poor resolution. The cameras were slow, difficult to use, expensive. Film trumped them in every aspect save one, the ease of transferring onto a computer. My experience with the Green Toe shoes is similar. They suck, in most aspects save one, the materials used in construction. Everything else should improve with time, just like digital cameras. Buying one of these shoes now encourages more businesses to make greener products. They'll figure out the durability thing and the comfort thing with time, or they’ll go out of business.

With that in mind, these shoes seem to be designed for the early adopter, the person with a multitude of shoes, who can wear them out on a Friday night, without having to wear them all day for the rest of the week. If you buy a pair of shoes every year, if you love the latest thing, if you love cute, and green, these are the shoes for you. If you're primary concern is long term sustainability, there are some serious issues with these shoes.

Style: ****
Comfort: *
Green: ****
Durability: **

--Joey Reid

A(nother) Tree Grows In Brooklyn

This weekend Elizabeth and Jeremy, our landlords and neighbors, put a new tree in the backyard. It's a very cute crabapple tree.

The process of moving that small crabapple tree into the backyard was surprisingly Herculean. It took four adults and one small person. There were also several failed attempts that anyone who's been through high school physics should feel ashamed for having attempted. Luckily for Stella, she is blameless.

See the flickr set.

Like A Great God Swallowing The Sun

This is how I would describe the ever-moving progress that is Best of the Blank. New features are coming, beginning tonight and increasing throughout the coming weeks, including the inaugural guest posting by Mr. Joey Reid: a review and overview of Simple's Green Toe shoes and the future of Green products. Very cool stuff. Stay tuned!

The Results Are In!

And Quiz Bowl's "Science Baby of the Future" did very well! Our accomplishments:

• 2nd Place Overall
• Audience Award Runner-up
• Best Writing
• Best Sound Design
• Best Baby Actor

2nd Place Prize is:

• WBC Course Certificate for Online Basic Training (valued at $650).
• 1 Master DVD w/ 25 DVD-R copies of the 2nd place team's short film from Tobin Productions
• Free Entry into the 5th Annual Movie Making Madness Film Competition (valued at $85)

Woo-hoo! We're very pleased. The film that beat us didn't say it, but I'm pretty sure it was a collaborative project between Scorsese, Spielberg, and Orson Welles. So that makes us feel a lot better. We're just a rag-tag group of no-goods that decided to put on a show!

To see our film again, for the first time: Science Baby of the Future!

Gospel Feist

This is a picture I snapped on my way to work. This guy was standing on a corner in midtown. "The World Wide Crusade Victory Is Mine Saith the Lord Deliverance Center" does have a certain ring to it.

Applause-O-Meter

Last night was our triumphant screening along with several of the other films. It was a nearly packed house -- when I say house I'm talking about a classroom -- but a very LARGE classroom. It was fun. Some of the movies were not terrible, many of them were. A surprising number of them all had to do with spicing up a couple's sex life, which probably spoke to a lot of filmmakers in general. And even though I am obviously biased, I do think our film had the biggest applause and laughter. We also heard a lot of murmuring about a "cute baby" and "science" so we're feeling pretty good. They handed out audience award ballots that we turned in after the screenings, and I was hoping they would be counted during the Q&A session with the filmmakers, but, as there were no questions, they just sent us out with promises of award announcements on Friday. We wait with baited breaths. After the screening we headed to Dallas BBQ, which may be one of the more depressing neon-adorned restaurants I've ever been to, and drank goblets of Blue Hawaiians and other slushy alcoholic drinks, and ate loaves of fried onions. A celebratory meal fit for artists of our stature for sure.

Say Goodnight to the Bad Guy

It's like when peanut butter met jelly or Hall met Oates: it's a perfect combination. (NSFW, btw)

We Love You All!

Thanks to everyone who watched SPACE BABIES OF THE FUTURE! We've gotten over 250 views on youtube! We're tre tre excited to go to the screenings tomorrow night. It turns out the awards are not presented then, but on Friday, so stay tuned. There will be a Q&A after the screening that we're gonna send Michael up for and there will be audience awards, so we'll probably snag up most of those. In case anyone is interested in attending, we're in the 8:00-10:00pm segment at NYU's Cantor Film Center (36 East 8th Street @ University Place), Wednesday night, and tickets are $5. To represent how tomorrow evening will be playing out, I present the following video, sent in by Buddy Cohen. In this video, the terrified girl will be playing every other film at the screening, while the Indian Michael Jackson zombie and his zombie posse

Science Babies of the Future!

Here it is! The end result of team Quiz Bowl's 12 hour NYC Film Run. For those unfamiliar: the NYC Film Run pits teams against one another in a race to create a film of four minutes or less in 12 hours, from noon on saturday to midnight. There is a specific theme and an action that must be in each film. For this race the theme was A Search, and the action was A Slap. We got this information at noon sharp and raced over to a loft of Jacky's friend to begin planning the story and production. Everything came together beautifully. Check out the credits for how everyone contributed. It went remarkably smooth for how constrained we were with time, largely to everyone's ability to multi-task like what. The films are all being shown this Wednesday where they will also announce the winners. We think we've got it locked, but there are 46 teams against us, so who knows. Check out the end result. It may terrify you, but like An Inconvenient Truth, it was something that needed to be addressed.