Tom Wilkinson as Greg Popovich in a mostly boring sports movie.
Video Treatment: Future, “Turn On The Lights”
[Intro]
We’re in a car, tight shot on Future’s face and we see street lights move on his dark glasses. He turns to look out the passenger side window. Quick cut to the driver who is Mike Will.
[Verse 1]
Mike Will and Future get out the car in front of the club, toss the keys to a valet and Future sees her in the VIP-line but as he looks at her and doubts her the screen starts to fade to darkness. Cut to Future in a bedroom with another woman. She’s in bed in he sings to her while leaning on a nightstand in his PJs. Don’t get too thirsty, get used to the cheddar. Passionate close-up on I wanna tell the world about you just so they can get jealous; zoom out and we see him in total darkness again, the nightstand is gone so he falls down on his ass like Buster Keaton.
[Hook]
Future starts running, camera in front of him tracking, alternately we cut to female faces badly lit so that we cannot make out the features.
[Verse 2]
Future on an expensive cream-colored couch, double-styrofoam cup in hand, coffee table loaded with money, chains and drug paraphernalia, a nice tall lamp to the right on the screen. Woman materializes on Future’s left as he slowly leans so that she is fully materialized and he is leaning on her shoulder by the middle of the verse. she a precious jewel, you treat her to medallions.
When Future says LIGHTS the first line of the next hook, she disappears and the lamp turns off. He falls over on the couch again, no longer supported by her. Slow off the lean, he gets up and stumbles of screen.
[Hook]
Same as the first one except Future walks, different women.
[Verse 3]
Close up of amorphous woman whose features change with each successive line as Future imagines, dreams her differently.
And tell her I been looking for her with a flashlight
cut back to Future looking in the darkness and he pulls out a flashlight. The camera stops and turns as Future passes it and himself fades into the darkness.
[Hook]
Performance shot in a club or a theatre, Future singing under a spotlight, cutaways to pretty ladies in the front row. End on Future and the spotlight goes out and he exits, stage right.
Video Treatment: Future “I’m Trippin” f. Juicy J
Future is floating in outer space, wearing Robin Jeans and a space helmet. He’s tumbling but the camera is at a static distance from him so we just see the stars passing by, the planets. We have two other shots to cut to: a close-up (he wears glasses beneath the helmet) and another location, completely white, in Future’s mind, where he dances and recites the ad-libs. We go into the close up more on the mumbled chorus. In space Future is completely placid and stoic, more animated in the white space.
after the first verse the helmet comes off, during the second one the glasses. When the hook before Juicy J comes on, we slowly zoom in to Future’s eyes and then into his pupil, which contains the white space. Juicy J walks into the shot and we don’t cut away for the whole of his verse. Let Juicy J lip sync as much as he wants but if he abandons it we just watch him vibe or whatever as the verse plays out.
In space again, the camera becomes still as Future tumbles away from us to the other side of the universe.
(Source: youtube.com)
A guy today started to ask me what my book was about
hesitated, and then asked what my book was like. This seems so small and yet so considerate and human. There was so much pressure off me. I didn’t have to explain how Nicolas Cage figured in my novella.
I got into an MFA program in fiction, at the New School in New York.
It will cost me twenty thousand a year for two years.
Four years of my undergraduate education cost me twenty thousand (with housing).
Classes are once a week in the evenings, the presumption being that students hold jobs.
If I could hold a job, why not use it to pay off undergrad and also write?
Classes are in Greenwich Village.
The letter was post-marked 4/10. I got it two weeks later. No phone call or email so now I have only eight days to decide. Do they really care about me? I’m thinking.
a joke about a book the only purpose of which
is to fill out the shelf and the joke includes the phrase “shelf help book”.
short essay sampling stuff in my Kindle highlights (1)
Contemporary humanity has lost the ability to engage in productive solitude. There are but two ways of fitting a bedroom. One could either make it a sense-stimulating alcove, a place for nocturnal delights, or a cell for solitude and repose, a retreat for thought, a sort of oratory. I mean ideally; for now our thought and repose is harried, jumbled. Gone the clear-headed singular artists. Now we all do all at once, thought clawing a space for stimulation, delight transfixing space. Never before in human history has it been so important to society that we all become unique individuals who express our insuppressible creativity and never before have we felt less creative, our space imposed upon.
Google made a new store called Play, which sells books
and you read the things on select devices that aren’t the Kindle with an Adobe file reader thing and your book is in the cloud. I think I’d want a .mobi file which I could read on any device I wanted, if I were paying $10 for a book. The situation is similar with Amazon and their .azw file, but at least most people have a Kindle. The problem, which Augie de Bliek has written a lot about in terms of digital comics, is owning your content and being able to read it wherever. It’d be like only being able to listen to iTunes music on your iPod or iTunes (which I do anyway (!) but what if I got an Android/other future phone).
makes me wonder, though, if I ever would want to re-read an e-book. I mostly read short stories/articles on my Kindle but I’ve read these novels/books:
- Nemesis Philip Roth
- The Death of WCW
- Robinson Crusoe Defoe
I’m not going to re-read any of these. I bought Nemesis ($10), but only because I needed it quickly for a class. I could experiment with a book I think I’ll really like, that I think will have some literary value, but then I’d want to actually have that book, my new Lethem or whatever. [I’ve also read Turn of the Screw, which I do plan on reading again some day, but public domain books seem a different case.]
If doing away with DRM would not negatively impact Google’s or Amazon’s sales, then they must be doing it just to get us to submit to the fact a book isn’t worth re-reading (a much easier prospect with book people than music and comics, since things generally are re-read less). Read the thing once and buy so’more. That’s not how I like to think about books I like.
I like the idea of the Kindle Single (a market for short works, more money going to authors, democracy with light curation), but when you look at the cover and it says “A Kindle Single by”, you should be semi-disgusted. A product is not a genre. One could say that this is inevitable, after all the “blog” certainly is a new genre of writing, but it shouldn’t apply to Long Form writing.
bleh
Comment originally published at the New Yorker blog, The Front Row.
While this is a great commercial, and a good Wes Anderson film, its message and thought are dampened by the commercial aspect. It is certainly not the case that technology has to be mysterious to us. Rather, it benefits Sony and other tech companies when we don’t know how to program or hack our machines. They lock us out through warranties and firewalls or what else, and censor the apps which we do try to make.
This one, while a better little film than the car commercials, is much more creepy.
a photo on my tumblr
to me would seem almost insolent.
rtf: notes for my first novel
One day he’d unconsciously name his children after gaffers on David Lynch films.
She’s probably working as a projectionist or something corny like that. She was always corny. That’s why she needed you.
—What do you think about Vincente Minelli?
Orson Welles: Hey, we’re meant to be having a serious conversation. We’re talking about real filmmakers.
—Cahiers du Cinema (1958), interview by Andre Bazin and Charles Bitsch
Fred Bong
She made a film about the male gaze. But people were just looking at the camera.
Coincidence is so hacky. Nobody wants to believe it. Hitchcock used coincidence. Hitchcock!
”I like orderliness, so that I can be wild within it,” he said. ”That’s why I like clean, well-lit places with good coffee, where everything is kind of taken care of and running smoothly. It gives you the freedom to think and make up things. If you are in the middle of turmoil and filth, it’s hard to settle down enough to create something.”
