You take your information, your encyclopedia text, and you transpose it into numerics. You assign everything a two-digit number, periods and commas included. 00 is a blank, A is 01, B is 02, and so on. Then after you’ve lined them all up, you put a decimal point before the whole lot. So now you’ve got a very long sub-decimal fraction. 0.17300631. . . Next, you engrave a mark at exactly that point along the toothpick. If 0.5000′s your exact middle on the toothpick, then 0.3333′s got to be a third of the way from the tip.
That’s how you can fit data of any length on a toothpick. Only theoretically, of course. No existing technology can actually engrave so fine a point. But this should give you a perspective on what tautologies are like. Say time is the length of your toothpick. The amount of information you can pack into it doesn’t have anything to do with the length. Make the fraction as long as you want. It’ll be a repeating decimal, why, then it is eternal. You understand what that means? The problem’s the software, no relation to the hardware. It could be a toothpick or a two-hundred meter timber or the equator–doesn’t matter. Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in one tautological point an instant before, subdividing for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It’s making a straight line for the brain. No dodging it, not for anyone. People have to die, the body has to fall. And yet, like I was saying, thought goes on subdividing that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits.
Took a road trip with some UD folks this past weekend up to Maine to shoot some footy for production of our Documenting Mythologies piece. Got very little sleep and ate some really salty lobster, but it was a good time. We ended our trip at the Harvard Film Archive to present an iteration of the piece to about 40 people on a Sunday afternoon. The archive is evidently the only building by Le Corbusier in the U.S., but that still wasn’t enough to impress me. Still not really a fan of Boston.
Finally got a mini-Red Team reunion on a couple of weeks ago, and made some t-shirts. We need to put some work in on making some new screens though, these are all a couple of years old at this point. Still, the “I Red Team NY” is a classic.
I picked up Scott McCloud’sUnderstanding Comics from Desert Island a few weeks ago on the advice of HOVA, who told me that the book is considered one of the seminal texts of game design. I was especially interested in McCloud’s deconstruction of “the gutter,” the space that exists between panels, and it’s relation to closure, the phenomenon by which people take parts of information to construct a whole. The ideas are ones that are interesting to think about in the context of film, with film cuts serving as an analogue to the gutter. But the text also reminded me of the brilliant video for the Madvillainy song “All Caps” directed by James Reitano. In the video, Reitano makes playful use of the assumed constraints of comic panels in some sequences, whilst simultaneously paying homage to the art of Jack Kirby, one of the most influential comic book artists of all time. Plus Madlib and Doom murdah dem on the track. Dig.
Josh asked for a friend’s help to shoot.
Josh asked for a friend to provide a condom.
Josh asked for a film lab that would process the film for him.
(the lab tends to ruin his films)
Josh wraps the microphone in the condom, tells his friend to start shooting, and tries to swallow what he’s made.
