BeigeJournal

I first saw Koyaanisqatsi quite a few years ago and I loved it. Unfortunately, it was out of print at the time, so I could not buy my own copy of the tape. Now, in the DVD era, it is again available, and I picked up a copy the other day. I paid $11 at the downtown Milwaukee Borders. There are two more in the series, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi, which I’m going to have to see as well.

It is not really a normal movie. There are no characters, no dialog. It consists of images, mostly time-lapse or high-speed, set to music. Time-lapse clouds and traffic. Pedestrians in both time-lapse and high-speed. Factories in time-lapse. It is just beautiful. It is very much a case of what you get out of it depends on what you bring to it. (As Tom Lehrer said, “Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”) It is not really explicitly anti-technology (it isn’t explicitly anything), and could be read as something of a celebration of technology, tempered by the realization that so much of what we’ve built is tacky and ugly, and the shear quantity of technological stuff the Earth is blanketed with.

I have to mention my favorite scene, which is the last one of the movie. An Atlas rocket is shown lifting off, accelerating in the sky, and blowing up. A piece of the rocket, I think the sustainer engine still attached to a bit of the structure, is followed by the camera as it spirals down, burning, smoke and flame puffing out as it rotates in the air. Organ music plays. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it, but I really like this.

The DVD includes an interview with director Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass which is very interesting.

I highly recommend it.

I saw a link on Boing Boing to the new Bushisms DVD and thought it sounded likely to be pretty funny, so I ordered one. I’m underwhelmed.

It is a bit unfair to pick on people for occasionally misspeaking. As anyone who has lived in a dorm room, or worked in a lab or office, in which someone kept a ‘quote board’ with everything everyone there has said that didn’t come out right knows, we all sometimes have trouble getting the words out correctly. Bush does seem to be an especially prolific source of mangled syntax and garbled words. He grew up listening to his father, after all. So often we see him leaning against the lectern in that oddly casual way he has, struggling to get some sort of thought out. Fair or not, this could be entertaining, I thought.

The problem is they seem to have about fifteen minutes of material but apparently were told that they needed to make the DVD an hour long so that people would feel they were getting a good value. There is too much time spent talking about what George tried to say. Though TV is a lousy medium for comic strips, they tediously show a few Doonesbury strips anyway. The George W. Bush Singers set a few of his stranger statements to music, but they didn’t really write songs, they just sing the same mangled W. bits over and over. Tom Smith could do far better in five minutes. Honestly, “food on your family” was pretty funny the first time, but at times this seems like the Food On Your Family DVD. I don’t think it’s worth the time or money.