Leopard upgrade notes

I upgraded to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) last night fairly smoothly, my Wacom driver needed to be upgraded and I needed the latest Xcode tools to get back into Quartz Composer.

Here's my first impressions:

• The new dock is silly. The old doc was cleaner looking, worked with the drop shadows that were already on the icons, and was fine the way it was. The new dock seems visually confusing and doesn't work with most icons. will applications have seperate icons for the finder and the dock now to compensate for this new view? it seems unlikely


• On the other hand, I seem to be the only person who doesn't hate the translucent menubar. Complaints that it makes text harder to read seem over the top, since the tranlucency is really low. I like the way it looks with the majority of my desktop images


• The quick view feature is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Preview the contents of any document in about a half a second just by hitting the space bar.


• Stacks are also great, the downloads stack has already turned my completely chaotic desktop into a model of clean, minimalist efficiency.


• I am bummed that the iChat "map your mouth onto a picture of a face, Conan O'Brien style' feature they demo'ed is not there.. also, where is the star-wars hologram effect they demo'ed? What gives? The difference matte effect they included is neat but works poorly if there's low light. My hair keeps disappearing. I guess it's time to replace the bulb in my office.


• According to my friend Scott, Samba sharing is even more hosed than before. Luckily I only need AFP in my household


• New iTunes visualizations- They finally included some neat looking iTunes visualizations, courtesy of Quartz Composer- and a template to make your own in QC. very cool

I really want to get in and create something with core animation and Quartz Composer, and I'll drop a few notes about it when I do on Video Thing and any artsy stuff I make here. I'm leaving for the movie in two days though, so it will be about a month before I can get into it.

Warner releases 'O Lucky Man! (Two-Disc Special Edition) on DVD

Warner Brothers has released Lindsay Anderson's excellent 'O Lucky Man on DVD in a special edition. The film is the third in a trilogy starring Malcolm McDowell that includes the classic If... and Britannia Hospital. The scene with the pig man that randomly makes it's way into this movie is in my top three personal scariest moments in cinema. I actually have to cover my eyes during the scene sometimes.
Amazon.com: O Lucky Man! (Two-Disc Special Edition): DVD: Malcolm McDowell,Lindsay Anderson
Thanks Raymond!

Truck

The Zellner's new video for The Octopus Project's "Truck" is on the Spin.com site, and it's awesome!!

Link

Hatching octopus eggs.

Darjeeling Limited

I finally got around to seeing the Darjeeling Limited last night, and I am going to stand a few steps outside the critical gang-beating being given to Wes Anderson- for the crime of having a recognizable voice and not individually jerking off each film critic's grad-school-coddled pet-peeves and instead attending to his own. It's a lovely movie, and I enjoyed it the way I enjoy a good Hal Ashby film. Fluffy and stylized, playful and musical.
And good grief, Amara Karan is gorgeous.

White Chalk live

Film Actions VI

Aphanisis

My Friend Rodney is one of my highly-valued, go-to people for film knowledge- along with Lars Nilsen, Kier-La Janisse, Chale Nafus, Scott Lee, David Hudson and Thomas Humphreys.

And now he's blessedly got a blog up. I expect great things.
Link

White Chalk

The new PJ Harvey album is bone-achingly beautiful.

buy it on iTunes

Diagonals at Beerland 10pm, Heading to SF for "Sorry, Thanks"

We're playing tonight at Beerland:

We are opening for some cool bands this wednesday. Firstly, at 10:00 Diagonals 11:00 Strange Boys 12:00 The Make Nice (Fucking Champs guit player) 1:00 Those Peabodys

This Friday I'm headed to San Francisco to start rehearsals for Sorry, Thanks- Directed by Dia Sokol. The only other actor I know for sure that has been cast is Andrew Bujalski, who plays my buddy. Dia is Andrew's longtime producer, so it should be interesting seeing them work together in this capacity.

Lovely David Lynch shoe-porn

David Lynch photographs some... extreme footwear by designer Christian Louboutin.

fluffy Lychees: Lynch meets Louboutin NSFW

CVM - Richard Baily

Tonight I recieved an email from the brother of Richard "Doc" Baily, the amazing mathematician and artist who contributed visuals to movies like Soderberg's Solaris Remake and Superman Returns (among others). I had written Doc last year about his 'Spore' Software and had recieved one reply but then the conversation abruptly ended. Doc's brother informed me in his mail that Doc had, sadly, passed away in April of last year, and he was now attending to Doc's archives of work. The one piece of good news he had to share was that the Center for Visual Music (who did the wonderful Oskar Fischinger disc) will be putting together a collection of Doc's work.

I am the legal trustee and copyright holder for Richard's artistic and musical work, and I apologize greatly for not replying to you in a timelier manner. Yes, I do have some high rez prints that Richard had developed and was marketing. One day I will place them for sale on Image Savant, just not right now. You are really thinking correctly about images. I will contact you when the prints become available if that is good with you.

If you wish to use or see some more of his material I have contracted with a company called Artbeats who is set-up to deliver a good variety of Richard's cg work at a very reasonable and affordable cost (Dreamlight, Dreamlight 2, Light Waves, Nightmare Light). If you wish, please check them out.

Dreamlight 1+2

There is a DVD coming out very soon of his collaboration with John Buchanan that I know you will be very interested in. The works are called Xtacism/ Aura which should be coming out this year through the Center for Visual Music (CVM).

CVM - Richard Baily

Next Weird Wednesday - The Baron

Next week's Weird Wednesday is a special treat for people who like 70's black american films that subvert or at least mutate the 'blaxploitation' stereotype. The Baron is a puzzling but enjoyable low-budget pic about a black filmmaker (played by Calvin Lockheart) who is willing to do anything it takes to raise money to realize his vision of a film about a positive black role-model; a kid-friendly, affluent, weirdly-exotic racecar driver named 'Baron Von Tripps'. In the process he gets entangled with drug dealers, gigolos himself out to a rich old white woman who nauseatingly calls him her "hot dog", and eventually finds himself afoul of a totally odious mobster played by Richard "I burned my face on LSD" Lynch. I've shown this movie to friends before and not everybody has responded to it- it doesn't deliver the tough guy action payoff that most people look for in blaxploitation films. I like it because it has a ton of character, it goes weird places, it's well directed and paced, and it has some incredibly funny moments (plus the poster looks like it was drawn in crayon by the director's niece or something). Check it out, next Wednesday at midnight (for free!) at the Alamo South Lamar.

Voicemail

Can anybody reccomend a good cheap or free voicemail service? Preferably one that lets you check your messages online or delivers them rss or email? Odeo is ok, but I would prefer something with an actual phone number people can call. I used to use a service called onebox when it was in a free beta version and it was awesome, then it got bought out, they changed the services around and charged more than I felt like paying. I found a service called evoice, but the fine print says they automatically bill you for every minute over 20 minutes that your voicemail fills up, and that is a scam.

The new version of wileywiggins.com and the video podcast that it hosts will optimally have a number that you can call in and babble or vent your spleen at. You'd think that would open it up to all manner of abuse, but since it's not live I can always mess with whatever calls I get as I see fit. Should be fun. Also it's a good excuse to use an iphone "tel" link.

Grandcentral is awesome! Thanks Rodney!

Alfonso Cuaron: The Shock Doctrine

Found via BoingBoing

Mister Lonely

All manner of exciting news bits are starting to trickle in about Harmony Korine's new film Mister Lonely. Here's the roundup on GreenCine Daily.