David Simons talks Treme;

The series, called Treme, after a New Orleans neighbourhood, was commissioned by HBO earlier this month after a successful pilot, and will air in the US in 2010. Filming will start later this year – after the hurricane season abates. The 10- or 12-part drama will be, Simon told the Guardian, “an allegory for the trauma that the country as a whole went through two years later”.

“The fact is that the levees on the canals were substandard, and done on the cheap at an immense profit. Ultimately that becomes a metaphor,” he said. “New Orleans was relying on things that were believed to be genuine bulwarks against tragedy and disaster. People felt that there were similar bulwarks protecting our financial institutions and foreign policy. Now, two years on, we are all essentially in the same boat as New Orleans. Katrina was an outlyer of where we are today.”

Apparently the iPhone’s days are numbered.

The evidence to support this….

A similar thing happened with the personal computer market. The concept was championed by Apple when it launched Apple II, the world’s first personal computer, in 1977, and the first Macintosh in 1984, but other players now lead the market.

er…something similar happened to Apple 25 years ago. (that’s it ?)

And this on the same day that the iPhone wins top prize in the JD Power poll beating the competition in *every* category but one (battery life).

God knows why a paper like the Guardian needs to stoop to this kind of bullshit.

Weak.

You can feel a simmering sense of injustice in the air today.

Quite fancy heading down there myself-there a lot of stuff that needs venting.

Violence is never best the solution to any problem-but if you push enough people too far in any direction, you are bound to get a reaction.

Follow the G20 protests as they happen here.

I predict a riot.

Anyone with a more than a passing interest in sport, especially in football (but not specifically in Arsenal) should read Jason Cowley’s wonderful account of the final game of the 1988-89 season.

It’s all happening so fast, yet there’s also something curiously hallucinatory about what’s unfolding, as if time itself is being slowed.

Here he comes, Thomas, free, lost to the moment, as he would later describe it. He must know that the defenders are closing on him, must feel the hot rush and strain of their exertion. He has the ball and is moving towards the penalty spot.

An amazing example of the transformational power of sport.

The wonderful Kutiman, interviewed on NPR

Given that he’s a musician and a producer himself, one might think that Kutiman would get bored working with such mundane subject material.

“Actually, the other way around,” Kutiman says. “After I finished this project, I found it really boring to play something myself — to compose a song or play guitar or play bass, it really looked boring to me. It has no video in it, it has no person in it, and it has no other life in it.

And that’s it right there.

It’s not like us to get way overexcited about a film, spoon-feed ourselves outrageous hype, only to madly dissappointed when the final release doesn’t meet our ridiculous expectations.

Having said that, the tidbits coming out about Avatar make it sound like December 19, 2009 could be the first day of the rest of my life.

“I couldn’t tell what was real and what was animated–even knowing that the 9-ft.-tall blue, dappled dude couldn’t possibly be real,” Quittner said about the footage from Avatar that he saw. “The scenes were so startling and absorbing that the following morning, I had the peculiar sensation of wanting to return there, as if Pandora were real.”

more here

via kitsune noir

In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline.

Urban regeneration and the rise of artistic communities in the city of $100 homes.

Detroit’s artistic community making the most of subprime.

via waxy

(pic via boooooooom)

Sorry for the quietness round these parts in recent days/weeks.

Real life has been real busy and there is another project taking up most of my time at the moment.

All will be revealed shortly.

In the meantime we saw Watchmen (on IMAX!!) at the weekend. I think it worked pretty well considering the context. It’s obviously made by someone who loves the comic book (perhaps too much to make it into a great film). The more you think about what is missing, the more more you wish he’d had the budget to make it as a 12 episode HBO series-and really done it justice.

That said, I can’t wait to see the extended cut and the ‘Tales of the Black Freighter‘ looks amazing and if you’re in the mood for more Moore, there’s a great interview with the charmingly obtuse scribe/magician/beard from yesterday’s Guardian that’s really worth reading.

Speak soon.

70s, scifi, french italian*, animated, synth heavy, video.

It’s like all the keywords in my life have converged into one 3:34 long video.

*thanks inie