I went to dinner tonight to a place that has kombucha on tap.  Now that’s pretty frikkin cool.

And a big joyous celebration!

It’s about architecture and food!

Now this is what I’m talking about, an example of a house typology I’ve been envisioning for a while. Simple, passive design for a place, not divorced from its milieu:

To paraphrase an article I read on it: “The steel shading and concrete foundation help keep the home’s temperature a comfortable 23~C, even with outside temperatures hitting in the 40s; the air conditioning unit required by county codes still hasn’t been turned on.”

This is more of what we need.

Food wise, I caught a lecture by Michael Pollan on “It’s your World” (on NPR), great little lecture with those again simple three rules he’s researched:

• Eat Food (and have them be whole foods)
• Not too much (the 80% full rule seems to work well)
• Mostly Plants (85%+ of daily intake)

He also says much other interesting stuff to sum up his research and writing.

That the “western diet” is proving disastrous to health is one of those things that seems to fall in the “We don’t want to believe what we know” category. His illumination of the focus on nutritionism is spot-on, and interesting how it has not only altered eating and allowed huge profits and marketing, but also provided a cover for not confronting our actual food choices and consumption and their impact.

Good stuff.

The quote in my last post is a great segue to something I’ve been doing some contemplation over the past few weeks and wanting to explore and share, and that is the human phenomenon of Cognitive Dissonance.  It’s one of those things that hides out in the background, going mostly unnoticed in our lives, yet it’s there at play.  Broadly speaking one of the key components to cognitive dissonance is the ability to actually hold two contradictory ideas in our mind simultaneously.  When the two are actually present at the same time there is discomfort and discord and so to avoid this (cope with it) we often rationalize and justify the discontinuity, or we isolate the two in a way that the twain shall never meet.  And this is where the quote “We don’t want to believe what we know,” lives.  Something comes up to challenge where we stand, and we rationalize it, explain it away, or simply dismiss it out of hand.  It doesn’t even matter if it’s right in our face, we can do a great job of sweeping it under the rug and not seeing it, explaining away the discomfort.

Another aspect, mused upon by Scott Adams on his blog once, is that cognitive dissonance also gives rise to resistance to and the inability to hear and to entertain other explanations or viewpoints other than those we already hold.  New ideas and new information, or information that simply doesn’t match up, are filtered through this barrier, making it the rare few that make it through.

Given that we are human beings, we have cognitive dissonance.  It’s not a question of “if,” it’s a question of “where do I have cognitive dissonance?”  The great thing is that once we recognize we are having it we are free to just let it be and to actually, well, listen, learn and grow.  I think if we all spent more time getting that cognitive dissonance is at work in all sorts of instances, we’d grow our understanding of the world, of possibilities, and of each other.  And that can only make the sandbox in which we play bigger.

And that would be a fantastic place to be in.

QFMFT:  “We don’t want to believe what we know.”  –  Yann Arthus-Bertrand

That’s a good one to meditate on.

Soooo much going on, sooooo very cool stuff, and one stunning insight that has altered the very fabric of the everyday experience.  All of which begets some very cool things happening in my life!

Which I won’t catch up on in this post because I’m a meanie.  No, wait, that’s not right… actually simply because all that good stuff is making life very full and I’ve been neglecting this in its place…. and that’s not quite done yet.  HOWEVER, I would be very remiss if I didn’t post about UP!

So, it’s Pixar.  And Pixar can do no wrong.  So has been my mantra.  Even at their ‘worst’ they are still fine films… even though UP seems like yet another unlikely concept, would Pixar reign supreme once more?

Spoilers, of course!  You are super warned!  See the film first!

UP is a very damn fine movie.  Pixar keeps its crown for sure.  The first 10 minutes or so of the film are freaking brilliant, and I mean BRILLIANT.  This is storytelling at its purest and most powerful form, creating a whole world in a short timeframe, with few words and mostly powerful imagery and music.  It sets the scene brilliantly and is perhaps one of the most heavy and powerful and joyous and sad things ever released by Disney (did we just see a miscarriage in an animated movie???  or at the least insinuate the inability to bear children?).  Very moving, wet eye stuff.  W O W.

The film’s main acts are less heavy, and for the most part is simply a wild adventurous romp (which is, actually, quite a propos).  The rendering, as expected, is stunning and beautiful, with rich colours, great lighting effects, and fabulous water and mist.  The main action and gag of the film with the dogs almost (almost) threatens to overstay its welcome, but perhaps with deliberate timing the film’s over before it gets tiresome.  It is an enjoyable and fluffy romp.

What truly ties the story together however, and what is particularly amazing, is the drive and similarity between the two main characters.  Both are living in a world where they have to make up for something and to prove something.  They are driven by it, they are bitter from it and they are obsessed with it.  Carl is lucky in that he gets a reprieve, not by accomplishing his task (which he does) but from a note written by his wife, who reminds him what adventure (and their relationship) was/is really all about.  And in so doing he frees himself.

It is in the transitions between the fluffy and the profound where perhaps some success of the film is lost.  While they are linked chronologically and ‘event’-ly, story wise I haven’t discovered a tight interaction yet.   They seem to butt up against each other and flip about rather than merge and mesh.  On the other hand, maybe that was the point in itself , to illustrate the suddenness these undertones show up in our lives.

Russell also seemed to get short shrift in development, either that or I didn’t catch it (I didn’t notice the parallels between Carl and Charles until an hour after the film…).  He’s along for the ride, and he’s gained a new father like figure by the end, and maybe even got more care for the wilderness than just a set of phrases and a badge… and that seems like about it.  Maybe that’s where the fluffy could’ve been more filling, with more Russell growth … and in some ways that would’ve been an excellent ‘reason’ for the contrast in tone and direction of the scenes in the film.

Great, great film.  Saw it twice, no hesitation.  Additional thoughts:

• The music was overall solid.  And that one motif, the piano piece, played with such different character and tempo… oh how you grip and are powerful.  Very nice, simple, and effective, hats off for the music direction on that one.
• On my second viewing I saw it in 3D (using polarized lenses).  Overall, quite nice, adds a certain, achem, dimension to it.  (couldn’t resist)  The only difficulty seems to be when things reach the edges of the screen, there’s an incongruity there that breaks the effect (items pop off the screen and end abruptly, and then don’t mesh with what’s beyond).  Not sure how to modify for that other than keeping most pop-out 3D objects at the centre of the screen, which would make direction difficult.  At the other end of the spectrum, seeing characters behind glass was incredible.  And some of the landscape shots were very stunning in 3D.
• Squirrel!
• I liked how the dogs talked, with the translator making their English very rigid and literal.
• The opening short was cute and fun.  Not as awesome as Lifted or Presto, and a nifty premise that also lived in the same place as the main film.
• I nearly died laughing with the zeppelin parking in the handicapped stall (the rope ladder was down in the space).
• The simple imagery of Carl and Ellie holding hands… and the motif of the two chairs.
• The coloured lighting (what I call the stained glass effect) when light passes through the balloons and falls on an object, very nice.
• The frank honesty the characters speak with at several points in the film, almost by accident.  That’s refreshing.

So, yeah, loved the film.  Pixar continues to do no wrong.  High marks in my book!

Now this is an idea who’s time has come!  If I say “Old skhool Transformers” and “Ravage” you’ll probably get the mental image of the good ol’ Jaguar that transforms into the even more good ol’ cassette tape.   Here’s the genius marketing:  update him to today’s portable media, and you have this beaut, with full working USB storage action, and looking pretty good to boot.  Shame it’s only 2GB…

Today I also visited the finished Breezehouse owned by one of the principals of our firm (the one being lifted into position here).  First time I’d seen it finished, and I have to say holy f!k that is one amazingly gorgeous house!  MKD did a fabulous job on this thing, spatially the house is excellent, the details are excellent, the lines are excellent, the proportions are excellent and the breeze space is just brilliant.  Damn.  His own additions to the base design (including a nice simple yet elegant fountain) tie it nicely into the site.  I was very impresed (if you can’t tell yet).

Yes, I certainly want!

Quasi Quote of the Day:

“Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we CAN turn any movie into an action movie, does not mean we must turn every movie into an action movie.”

Quote of the Day:

“Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing.”

– Federation President

Let’s start this with a very fine LotD for this is very very cool – 24 hours, filmed from a geosynchronous satellite. Watch for the moon and the sun to make their appearances, the crescent shining limb of the atmosphere, and just the light splaying across the world’s surface.  Sweet.

Space… the final frontier.  These are the voyages of the movie reboot.  Their mission:  get everyone into the theatre.  Well, they got me there.  I wasn’t terribly anticipatory about the film until seeing the last couple of trailers, and then I got very excited.  Jose, Tri, William and myself headed for a late night showing on Thursday… how did the film fare vs the trailer?

Oh, and one very big spoiler warning, I won’t be hiding anything.

Back when the final Voyager episode was aired, I made a point to see it even though I hadn’t really watched the series.  At the first commercial break my roommate, who was less into the series than I, says with humour in his voice “I’ll bet it’s time travel!”   After a pause I could only go “Guorrrrghh… you’re probably right.”  And, of course, he was.  Trek is so full of time travel that the fact the space-time continuum hasn’t collapsed is almost a mystery.

Yet here, this stale plot device it was actually stroke of genius.  For the purposes of a reboot it gave the producers a licence to alter as much, or as little, as they wanted to craft the series anew without invalidating anything from the original timeline.  In the end they can now make a tonne of new content and tell a raft of stories without duplicating anything or breaking continuity.  It’s all new, but not entirely.  In a way they keep the best of both worlds and with less chance of alienating the old guard.  Brilliant.
It also could have given them the opportunity to send Nero back through another black hole and restore the timeline, and for about three quarters of the film I thought they might well do that.  Then the potential for future movies in this clean slate became readily apparent to me and I figured they wouldn’t.  And indeed, no reversing course.  The new timeline is the one to stay.

Inside of this framework, I thought the movie was pretty good.  Good humour and it kept it light.  Overall I really could have done with less blockbuster and more Trek, which kept this film solidly in my good fun category.  (and Trek is by no means the first or the few of films that has succumbed to (or been subjected to) blockbusteritis)

The thoughts:

• A mostly good job of introducing the various characters , though poor Chekov is played for a dialogue gag.  I especially liked the scenes on Vulcan with the young Spock.
• Actually, I liked the exploration of Spock’s character a lot, I think he got the focus of the movie.
• And I loved his almost throwaway line “We are now an endangered species.”  Profound, in many ways.
• I inwardly went “oh cool” when the upcoming Kobayashi Maru retest was presented… that’s a classic one, and we’d get to see it!  I was a bit let down by it though.  The sense I got of it in Wrath of Khan had me envision Kirk as tweaking the system and pulling out a victory, and not being so overly insensitive and flippant about it.  Then again, the apple was a great shout out.
• Ok there are a tonne of great shout outs.  And classic quotes/lines.  Every character got theirs.
• I found the score a bit overly bombastic once, yet properly adapted at others.  I need to hear this by its lonesome.  I think it may shine.
• The use of silence in the drop scene to the drill was perfect.  Just the sound of breathing as they scream into the atmosphere.  Nice touch.
• The older Spock bits worked surprisingly well.  That could’ve come off hokey or awkward, and it didn’t.
• I’m not sure of the physics of the planet Kirk was marooned on – close enough to the Enterprise to be dropped off before it goes into warp, supposedly close enough to Vulcan that you can see Vulcan huge in the sky to see its destruction sans telescope?  So it’s a moon?  Of Vulcan?  That is now orbiting a black hole?  That might be now moving towards the hole due to increased gravity?  Then the Enterprise warps away, and Scotty can, with old clunky equipment, now suddenly beam across solar systems (light years distant??), and now they can beam onto a ship some 100 light hours distant?  From a Spock calculation that was his to begin with?  It all didn’t sit well with me.
• I loved how they got the oft-used Vulcan “You lied?”  routine in there, this time even Spock to Spock.
• I liked the art direction for the most part.  A pretty good mix of new shiny with old-school.  The big E looked good!
• But wait… building starships on Earth?  Starships in the atmosphere of a planet? Nuh uh, no way.  YATI!
• For a supposed ‘only a mining ship’ Nero’s vessel was pretty damn well armed.
• Ok, here’s the bigge.  I’m coining a new term:  “Autonomous Action Sequence.”  This seems to be the key technique of moviemakers these days.  A random action-y sequence added in to make the film more ‘exciting’.  Please stop doing this.  If you can remove the sequence from the film and it changes the film not a whit then you’re not helping the story, you’re hurting the story.  It’s too obvious.  It serves nothing.  Just because it’s kinetic doesn’t make it tense, exciting or engaging.  Strange beast chasing and water tube weirdness, I’m eying you both, primarily.
• Is it me, or did Kirk spend half the movie hanging from things?  Cliffs, platforms, drills…
• The red goo was just too neat and unexplained and perfect that it pretty much became a Mac Guffin.
• One cliché I really wish they’d dropped – for the love of the directives please come up with another strategy than ejecting the warp core!  Starfleeet’s insurance bill must be killer.

This is a film I want to see again.  I’m a bit mixed about it still.  There’s lots of good in there, and if it extracts itself from the not as well handled, then so much the better.

Back in 2000 I went to the 3D Conference and Expo.  One of the panels I attended was a presentation of various lighting and rendering techniques given by Aristomenis Tsirbas.  His talk was pretty good, with cool tricks using spinning spotlights and the free motion blur available in Lightwave, but what blew us (all of us in the audience) away was his demo clips, especially those for the Boeing JSF X-32 design.  Only the fact I knew that the thing hadn’t flown yet made me believe what I was seeing on the screen wasn’t real.  He was good.   Then he showed us the opening vid for Mechwarrior 4 and that was just plain fun.

I didn’t know he had a full-length film in production (independent production, too) until I heard about it last week, and leapt out to see it this weekend.

This was no Miyazaki production.  The idea is a nice one, with some good themes and ultimately transcendence at the end.  The script, though, was straightforward and pretty ham handed, and no dialogue stood out as exemplary.  With an idea as simple as the base of the film it’s a case of weak storytelling here.  Not truly awful, but not artful.  There are a couple of nice segments of music, and I do hope the soundtrack will be made available electronically so I can grab a few of the tracks I remember.

It was the rendering that was the draw to get me into the theatre, of course (if this was a film by anyone other than Meni I doubt I would’ve made an effort to go see it).  Alas we didn’t see it in 3D (I’m not sure which theatres, if any, in the area are showing it in 3d), and the nebulae and other space scenes at the beginning really had me wondering what it would be like to be immersed into the 3D.  Overall the film was nicely rendered, with some nice aesthetics and designs to boot.  Which made certain weak areas all the more jarring.  The humans in the film don’t walk so much as lurch – though this may have been intentional, to contrast with the grace of the Terra folk.  It could equally be just poor animating, though, so if it was intentional it didn’t come off that way.  There were a few other areas that I was surprised didn’t have more polish or niceness or even rendering subtlety given Meni being at the helm, but overall it was a pretty gorgeous movie rendering-wise, and certainly given the independent nature of the film production.  And the voice choice for Giddy was great, a great combination of amusement, knowledge, dispassion and snark.

I give a hats off to Meni for getting a film he wrote done and out the door and having it look good.  Worth a see.