jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Another herky-jerky time-lapse experiment, this time assembled from about 500 still photos I took on a walk through Astoria. Vimeo’s video compression adds an additional level of strangeness that makes this almost worth watching.

Tim Borman (from Belgium) created a mashup that combines last.fm recommendations with an automated YouTube feed for your very own personal MTV. Here’s my channel. [via]

And if that’s no good, watch Trey playing Last Tube: “If I could surf in milk, this is what it would sound like.”

When I first visited Berlin (West) as a wide-eyed teenager, one of the highlights of the trip was running into Einstürzende Neubauten singer Blixa Bargeld in the back room of a shady Kreuzberg bar. Blixa, Alexander Hacke, and the rest of the Neubauten are still making beautiful noise, and watching their 2004 video Palast der Republik, I was happy to get reacquainted with Haus der Lüge, a catchy tune I’ve been singing on all the elevators in town.

Gott hat sich erschossen / ein Dachgeschoss wird ausgebaut!

Forty earth years have passed since the Star Child first floated into view at the mind blowing climax of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and to celebrate the anniversary of a movie full of birthdays, birth metaphors, and planet-sized foetuses, the Tribeca Film Festival put on a special screening followed by an extraordinary panel consisting of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, screenwriter Ann Druyan, artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky, and actor Matthew Modine. Continue reading on About.com….

I managed to film the first 20 minutes of the panel:

2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick, 1968. *****

Another excitement-free video, cobbled together from footage shot around Berlin-Mitte last September. Next time, I’ll put some more people in it.

Photo sharing site Flickr added video uploads last week, and some users are up in arms. I think the video player integrates well, quality is great, and the restrictions — clips can’t be longer than 90 seconds — appeal to me. After all, every single muckfilm I ever uploaded to YouTube could have been improved by more rigorous trimming. Here are a few soothing/dull trial vids we shot this weekend. More to come!

It sounds like a lame joke but it’s true: it took me all week to figure out that I wanted to post the following bit of wisdom from the Hagakure, via Ghost Dog:

In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break through to the other side. (listen)

Certainly lines up nicely with T.H. White’s lesson on how to pull the sword from the stone, quoted earlier. One person who clearly has the spirit to break through to the other side is fickle-blogger Ryan Adams, who can make a movie and write a song called “Thursday Night” and post it on Friday morning.

“THURSDAY NIGHT” from Ryan Adams on Vimeo.

“You’ve got a serious artist crush,” Marcy remarked — a statement, not a question — when I sent her a link to a gallery of adorably geeky photographs of Paul Thomas Anderson during the Hard Eight period. Guilty as charged: I’ve been rewatching and reassessing and obsessing over all five of PTA’s films, reevaluating Punch-Drunk Love (which I originally hated), rediscovering the ending of Boogie Nights (much different from what I remembered), and unable to resist the pull of Magnolia even on a matchbox-sized iPod screen.

Sez Dennis Lim:

If the Altman comparisons seem grossly reductive, it’s because Anderson is liberal when it comes to borrowing from the greats. Why not combine Altman’s panoramic outlook with Stanley Kubrick’s formal bravura with John Cassavetes’ messy candor? While Anderson fits the profile of a “hysterical realist,” to evoke the pejorative literary buzz-phrase of a few years ago, his films never indulge in excess for the sake of excess. He’s a born showman—his first three films bore the Barnumesque credit “A P.T. Anderson picture”—but his go-for-broke tendencies are tied to an expansive, humanist impulse.

Lim’s entire appreciation of Anderson is spot-on, and before I swipe his video clips, I’d just like to expand on his last point: seems to me, the unifying theme underlying all of Anderson’s films is the desperate need for human connection. Yes, that’s a cloying phrase, and perhaps that’s why it’s dressed up in such unlikely garb: the incendiary monologues, the sweeping steadycams, the assaultive music, the undulating colors. What all of Anderson’s characters really need is a family, but their real families rarely work: in Hard Eight, Jack’s father is dead, Dirk Diggler’s mom throws him out, everybody in Magnolia is messed up six different ways, Barry Egan’s seven sisters are worse than the furies, and we all know that Daniel Plainview’s an oilman, not a family man.

Instead, Anderson’s heroes create impromptu families. Jack finds a father figure in his father’s killer, porn gives Diggler not just a dad (Burt Reynolds) but a sister (Heather Graham) and a mother (Julianne Moore), too. In Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler and Emily Watson start their own family, and Magnolia ends in an orgy of characters coming home to each other. And Plainview? His salvation would have been an impromptu family with a bastard from a basket for a son and a brother who wasn’t his brother-from-another-mother. That he refused them is the tragedy of There Will Be Blood.

Can’t leave you without another word about Anderson’s breathtaking audacity, and you better believe I’m lazy enough to quote Lim again:

The prominent bursts of music—and the way the narratives rely on musical principles like rhythm, tone, and phrasing—result in a kind of delirious synesthesia. His movies set off a crazy multitude of sensory triggers, leaving the impression that Anderson is working from a larger palette than most filmmakers.

Yes indeed.

Hard Eight/Sydney. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1996. ***
Boogie Nights. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997. ****
Magnolia. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999. ****
Punch-Drunk Love. Paul Thomas Anderson. 2002. ****
There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007. *****

More from Stu VanAirsdale, who kept notes on his marathon Anderson retrospective. After the jump, videos with choice clips from Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love.

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