Events

Some music videos are really entrancing. Kelly Osbourne’s recent One Word is directly inspired by the great film Alphaville, as Ms. Osbourne happily acknowledges:

“I’m going for something like very ‘Alphaville,’ ” Osbourne told MTV News last month when she was dreaming up the concept….”Very ’60s, nothing that I thought I’d ever do, like very black-and-white. I’m excited for that. And I’m going to wear a wig!”

To flesh out her idea, Osbourne enlisted director Chris Applebaum to emulate “Alphaville,” Jean-Luc Godard’s classic 1965 avant-garde film. Their take . . . was filmed in black-and-white 35 mm, while Osbourne herself embodied the look of the film’s star, Anna Karina, with sharp bangs and porcelain skin.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers appear a little more reticent about Otherside. Though some say its “black-and-white/monochrome Gothic style [is very] similar to Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” a Jonathan Dayton stated:

“We did look at Caligari, and we looked at a lot of German Expressionist film. But it was also very important to avoid ‘Caligari.’ It was both inspiration and something to work around, because it has such a strong, specific style, and there have been other videos that have completely ripped it off.”

Taking this from the sublime to the banal, Thomas Kinkade has been translating his painting style into a guide for a movie to be based on his vision:
Read More »Copyrights in Movie and Painting Styles?

There is a fascinating interview with Steven Shapin, author of The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation, at the U. Chicago Press website. Shapin questions the distinctiveness of academic and business modes of inquiry:

If we . . . look at the pure research done in industry and that done in academia, many of the most popular contrasts describe the situation rather poorly. If autonomy is the issue, many industrial scientists from early in the twentieth century enjoyed as much of that as their academic colleagues. And the same applies to notions of secrecy and openness. A clear contrast of quality between university and industrial science similarly seems not to hold, while a presumption that applied research and development requires less brain-power than pure research is just dogmatic. But most of all, I am impressed that both industrial and academic scientists seem to want environments in which they can do interesting work and, perhaps, to enjoy a degree of freedom in doing that work. . . .

Read More »Politics, Science, Vocation, and Purpose

I had a good afternoon of gallery-hopping today, checking out some of Casey Ruble’s fantastic series “Except in Struggle” and… Read More »Siebren Versteeg’s Infinite Touchscreen