Google Reader

Oh, and Google Reader isn't helping things any either. Instead of remembering now and then to check a blog once or thrice a month, I can waste time every day sifting through the aggregation of ALL those sites, and pass the good bits back and forth with people I know.

I even have this site in my Reader feed. It's the control group, I guess.

Anyone out there use it? Why not add the gmail address notArt to your friend list, and then we can help each other to be less productive!

Special greetings to people who are already in the mix, to whom I'm about to share THIS VERY POST.

Whittlin'

I am in no way any closer, by any true measurement, to having consumed the media the world provides me than I was around a year ago. If anything, I've further complicated life with a DS and 360, I've undoubtedly acquired more books and movies, begun work on more projects, found some other life in the world of live theatrical stuff that is its own fount of an enormous amount of things to see, and somehow I'm sure to have even gone and subscribed to more podcasts. There're a lot of podcasts. A lot. And I do have the senseless compulsion to need to listen to a show from it's creation, as opposed to from around the date I've discovered it. On some, I do keep up to date. Some have found a home as the soundtrack to certain kinds of activities. Others I almost never listen to, or just cherry pick occasionally, but I think they're neat to collect (re: 'classic radio'). Some have stopped being produced over a year ago, and I still enjoy new episodes regularly, and there are others that I haven't actually heard an episode that was produced after the date I subscribed, so extensive is the back library.

I catch a lucky break now and then, by noticing a) that in the past year or two I've never made time for a single episode of a given show, b) that I don't actually enjoy a given show, or c) that the host of the show has issued me an angry e-mail commanding me to never again listen to the program or any other endeavor in which he participates. In all of these cases, I can delete a lot of files at once. It's a feeling of false accomplishment.

With iTunes, I've ordered everything tagged 'podcast' by date. I figure this way, I'll get a nice pseudo-random mix of shows, and anyone referring to a current event or another show I'm listening to will all be on the same page. I've skipped some Museum of the Moving Image shows, which date back to 1989 (the date of recording, one presumes), because I haven't seen the films being discussed yet, but other than that, I'm progressing forward through the maelstrom, date by date.

I'm in February 2006.

Sigh...

Wingsuit, Skateboards,

New York City,

and.... Bobby Brown?

A cavalcade of shame!

I was doing some research on Topics (I do love topics), and an errant google search turned up THIS video, which is a live, on the spot, amateur home video taken on the site of David Blaine's most recent publicity stunt. Apparently in this one, he hung upside down for 50 minutes an hour for 60 hours, and then...was lowered and raised on a cable. (Enjoy the shouts of 'are you serious?' at the 2:05 mark)

"Okay," thought I, "so the stunt wasn't impressive in person, but that's what TV magic is for, right? I mean, Criss Angel's tricks must not look like much of anything in person since they're all editing tricks, and anyone who just looked over their shoulder would have realized that David Copperfield didn't really make the Statue of Liberty disappear, right?" So I navigated a series of tubes until I found a capture of the televised version. You can watch that HERE. In this version, instead of a booing crowd, you hear a technician saying things like 'let's go' and 'get him out of there.' But visually....it's just the same.

Now obviously, the 'lift him up so he looks like he flew away' gag was supposed to happen during or just after the blinding flash, so that folks couldn't get a handle on it. But since it did have to absorb a fall, the wires had to be a lot thicker than what Copperfield uses to fly around, so they were just hoping they'd be clear of the lights in time. More of a support staff-related failure.

But then I got to wondering how some of his other stunts have done in comparison, since I'm not much of a Blaine fan, myself. So, we turn to the internets!

According to his wikipedia entry, the Dive of Death (above) was "not well-received by spectators."

During Drowned Alive, he was unable to escape from his handcuffs, "pulled up and out of the water by his support divers" and hospitalized.

During Above the Below, a 44 day hunger strike done inside a plastic box, "eggs, lemons, sausages, bacon, water bottles, beer cans, paint-filled balloons and golf balls had all been thrown at the box....and a burger was flown up to the box by a remote-controlled helicopter as a taunt." But this stunt was a success because it only involved enduring, and no magic. Naturally, he was hospitalized immediately afterward.

In Vertigo, he sat on a flagpole with handles for 35 hours. It ended with a stuntman-like jump onto cardboard boxes, in which he was concussed.

For Frozen in Time, the stay inside a block of ice was supposedly so intense that it took him a month to regain the ability to walk.

And of course, there was the hullabaloo around Street Magic about intercutting crowd reactions with studio shots of effects, like 'levitating' with the help of a crane.

So what have we learned? That Blaine's a cheater? That's fine. All magicians are. I'm pretty sure most of them don't get caught at it quite so often though. Even if we believe he actually spends time locked in boxes every so often and really suffers the debilitating results, he's still no Guybrush Threepwood - he could hold his breath for ten minutes!

The internet brings movies to ME

You can steal your movies, there's the bittorrent, and the cleverly concealed films on the youtubes, and sites like hulu.com are bringing more and more tv shows and full features to viewers both free and with some greater legitimacy, but for some films, you just need to go back to the VHS, or even the original film, when home video releases were never brought to light. That said, if anyone knows where or when I can take in a screening of the classic Demonstrating the Action of the Brown Hoisting and Conveying Machine in Unloading a Schooner of Iron Ore, and Loading the Material on the Cars, I'd be much obliged.