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A great improvement over an inexplicably beloved brand franchise:

Prehistory of The Matrix: Attn net.artists looking for a project: super-8 bullet-time. ( ffffound | jk )

Context for Tarkovsky: (ss)

Semantic web = tired. Somatic web = wired. (nyt)

Corporate-sponsored “naked cowboy” in Times Square, 2009 (via streetsblog):   Current context:   Cowboy in Times Square ca. 1969:   (Midnight Cowboy) [Update: Krugman, ever impolitic, asks this about the new TS pedo zone: I’m definitely in favor of making part of Broadway a traffic-free area. But you have to wonder—who’s this for? As far [...]

Some Slashdotter points in the right direction—Zombie Property Rights: But you do understand that the copyright law’s intent is to encourage the creation of new works. With life plus 50 years, there are untold numbers of authors dead only 10 or 20 years who might be willing to rise and take a crack at just [...]

Word on the street is that the Pirate Bay 3 have left the building, for any value of building where building = Sweden. The TPB trial is a lose–lose proposition: lose the trial or win and provoke a furious political backlash—of the kind that might, say, lead them to find a safer harbor. Where? Culture-war [...]

The Independent (Castle, “Brussels Stories: Playground craze gives Eurocrats’ offspring lessons in diplomacy,” 2005): Every parent knows about playground fads and the nightmare of having to track down that elusive, must-have toy. But for those with children at the European School in Brussels there is an added problem. The pupils here are sons and daughters [...]

The Onion, moribund for so long, rises from the dead again: “Sasha Obama Keeps Seeing Creepy Bush Twins While Riding Tricycle Through White House.” Question for Latinists: the gender of allium? (df)

Still from Florian Cramer’s Floppy Films version (silent) of Slumdog Millionaire: (nettime)

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three: The whole thing online for free. (Now Mr. Hollywood, that didn’t hurt so much, did it?) See also: “Minor detail,” “1974est guys in the room” [and “What a diff 24 years makes”].

  Bernie Madoff in his penthouse apt watching TV, 18 Dec ’08, 9:00pm (newyorksocialdiary.com). The Jewish Daily Forward (Weiss, 18 Dec ’08) on how Madoff worked his shtick. Apropos: The original Broadway production of The Producers opened at the St. James Theatre on April 19, 2001 and ran for 2,502 performances, closing on April 22, [...]

Attributed to “Sam Fuller”: (Ridiculousaurus)

How the Ali G crew stage-manages an interview: We were then kept waiting for an hour, a delay for which we were given a variety of production-related excuses. The interviewer disappeared. We had other engagements and were beginning to study our watches and complain. By the time the interview began, we were preoccupied with our [...]

So says Paul Ekman, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCSF and an expert on facial expressions, according to Errol Morris in “The Most Curious Thing” in the NYT. As prosecutors become more media-savvy with all their perp-walks, PR campaigning leaks, and the like, it follows to reason that filmmakers would become the new prosecutors: forensics [...]

NYT‘s review of Speed Racer, with original links preserved: Back in the early years of this century, it was possible to pretend that the grim-faced expository noodling of the later “Matrix” movies was the vehicle for profound insights into — well, something. Go look it up on Wikipedia. “Wikipedia” points at the NYT Business section’s [...]