No one click on the link in this comment, neither.
What I really liked (aside from the production of actual fake pages) was the way the conceit was continued in comments—e.g., the guy who pretends that "Henry James" names a contemporary soap and professes admiration at the ability of actors to get the lengthy sentences across whatever the analog of footlights would be for television.
That is one hell of a comment thread they have going over there. I think we might have to step up our game, folks.
This comment thread must be saved.
I do however agree that serial installments is the perfect format of film or video.
I trepidatiously cautiously disagree, focusing on the word "perfect." I have had many cinematic experiences not measured in months that were pleasing and fruitful. Just last night I watched a Japanese surfer move without dialog, plot, character, backstory, or surf that has nothing to do with my point but was only 96 minutes long.
Consider a haiku, and À la recherche du temps perdu, and get back to me. Then we can do some MRIs to determine the cognitive effect of 1 minute of frogs jumping versus six months of psychological analysis. Perhaps we could have our subjects play video games, or give each other electroshocks.
There was a time, not very long ago, that I too believed the extended dramatic format was a great leap forward because it better approximated the subjects and methods of...The Novel...but since that time I have decided that novels are bourgeois imperialistic shite, and take too long to read anyway. This could bespeak either my own loss of attention span and focus or something else entirely.
I feel a need to contemplate a cinema
Harry Tuttles "Obstacles to Contemplation" shown graphically
I guess I should have linked to Harry Tuttle's blog, Unspoken Cinema. Everything said there about ordinary cinema versus contemplative cinema of course applies to extended format cinema times infinity. (Not because it is longer, but the reasons, the justifying aesthetic that is used for the length of series. "We need so much more plot, more character than that loser Casablanca.")
Tuttle:
The point of CONTEMPLATION is that there is no incentive to stay there gazing at the screen for whatever time it takes.
The perfect movie or cinematic experience is two frames with an emotional connection rather than logical that if contemplated, will produce satori.
Project Haiku by Buffalo Corps 7 min video, unfortunately with ads.
Is there some reason I keep getting sent to the google cache version? (I tried going through the live site, but that just redirected me to the cache again.)
Somewhat on-topic, I do like the look of this steampunk laptop, you know, other than yet another steampunk thingy.
As a formalist, I just might note that the long narrative multi-character novel or series, Trollope, Balzac, etc was also of a previous Age of Empire.
More and more, I am believing we are at the beginning of Empire, that the Cold War was Rome vs Carthage, and we are now just before the Civil Wars or close to an Augustan age. Or maybe 2nd Century. Whatever, the USA/global MNC hegemon is conquering all.
Empire will be legitimated with an exchange of a couple nukes, after which the other nuke powers will give in, disarm, and become client states. There will be only one.
I also liked it that they understood that Omar was the worst character in the Wire -- more Sir Walter Scott than Dickens -- although then they immediately started apologetics for him.
@11: You're being redirected to the cache b/c the large # of readers (from boingboing originally) crashed their server.
@ original: you MUST watch The Wire from beginning to end. You must!
