& a blog

we are tired of division: media, culture, society, law, meaning, humanity, and so on. these are interconnected terms, defined by one another. they must be re-united.
explication has been held prisoner by written language for too long. as if we only understand words. as if true meaning were only possible to produce there. we do not [...]

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If Avatar has changed anything about then movies, then it has changed everything. Let’s begin by considering what depth means to cinema. Historically, depth has only existed as a perspective, the idea taken from painting and camera optics that all viewed reality merges at a ‘vanishing point’ somewhere behind the picture plane. The whole notion [...]

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In 1993, Cyan published a game called Myst marooning the nascent gaming world onto a mysterious island whose parts interacted like some sinister engine waiting to re-stoked after countless years un-used. The cover featured a perspectival overview of the island, with a shadowy man falling down towards it. The island was the game, the player [...]

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my dream of assassin’s creed
when my a good friend of mine first got assassin’s creed, i was enchanted by its premise. as a serious lover of medieval history, particularly the crusades, the concept of gaming a 12th century jerusalem was immediately attractive to me. when i finally saw the game, i realized that the power [...]

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i’ve been taking an outstanding film theory class with phil rosen this semester. rosen, it tuns out, is kind of the reigning critical perspective on the authors we are reading: eisenstein, bazin, munsterberg, etc.
a couple of weeks ago, in an attempt to both exorcise my creative demons and begin assessing the necessary theory [...]

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this is the most insane advertising campaign i’ve ever seen: kevin garnett cast as a king arthur, wearing an abstracted celtics jersey, and “questing” for gatorade. but in order to find this “holy g” he must face kareem abdul jabbar (as the wizard “tim”) and other alice-in-wonderland type pop culture insanity.
i don’t even know what [...]

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doubt is an actor’s vehicle, a film of great performances, but without any real drive to its narrative. where philip seymour hoffman, meryl streep, and amy adams put in exceptional performances, they seem to be almost freestyling through a listless and contrived story-line. perhaps this artificiality has something to do with the fact the doubt [...]

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the curious case of benjamin button is philosophy produced from a photograph found in the attic of american literature. it is gimmick made beautiful, which makes it a truly american film, caught between the circus and the opera as it were, and in the tradition of ‘fable americana’ films like forrest gump, and big fish. [...]

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in the spirit of christmas, and the fact that i just completed my gift wrapping (yes! best wrapping-EVER), here’s a short history of xmas in celluloid.
1898

the most interesting thing about this short clip, is that santa claus carries a tree the whole time (wtf?) i was assuming that he was bringing it to the kids, [...]

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