Filmmakers have given us memorable antagonists who single-handedly level large-scale devastation. Less appreciated, however, are cinematographers' skill at evoking systematic failure through atmospheric devices: innocent anf fluffy clouds part, darken, and hell fire descends. A quick inventory of disaster film-skies reminds us that in the movies - and in real life - crisis may strike anytime.

(click on the image to see the bigger picture)

Covered are Earthquake, Iron Man, Encounters of the Third Kind, The Happening, Airport, Armageddon, Babel, Jaws, Waterworld, Wall Street, Wall-E, THX-1138, There Will Be Blood, Poseidon, Dante's Peak, Syriana, 28 Days Later, The Perfect Storm, AI Artificial Inteligence, The Constant Gardiner and Resident Evil: Extintion.

Part of the "Urban China Bootlegged for Volume by C-Lab".

bootleg |ˈboōtˌleg|
adjective [ attrib.]
(esp. of liquor, computer software, or recordings) made, distributed, or sold illegally : bootleg cassettes | bootleg whiskey.
 
verb (-legged, -legging) [ trans.]
make, distribute, or sell (illicit goods, esp. liquor, computer software, or recordings) illegally : [as n.] (bootlegging) domestic bootlegging was almost impossible to control | [as adj.] (bootlegged) bootlegged videos.
 
noun
1 an illegal musical recording, esp. one made at a concert.
2 Football a play in which the quarterback fakes a handoff and runs with the ball hidden next to his hip: he scored on a 29-yard bootleg on fourth down.
 
DERIVATIVES
bootlegger |ˈbutˈlɛgər| noun
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from the smugglers' practice of concealing bottles in their boots.
in New Oxford American Dictionary

Wikipedia clears things up:

An illegally copied release is distinguished from a counterfeit. Counterfeits attempt to mimic the look of officially released product; illegally copied releases do not necessarily do so, possibly substituting cover art or creating new compilations of a group's released songs. A counterfeit is always an illegal copy but an illegal copy is not necessarily a counterfeit.

It's a nice stop-motion video.

A 1910 physics book asks:”If a tree falls in a forest and no animal is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Interpretations to this philosophical riddle point to the possibility of unperceived existence, the knowledge of the unobserved world and the dissimilarity between sensation and reality. Can something exist without being perceived? Can we assume the unobserved world functions the same as the observed world? What is the diference between what something is, and how it appears? In this way, the discussion regarding observation and knowledge of reality is addressed.

“...the capacity to transcend the mere intention of giving form to an idea, to atempt to encompass the entire universe surrounding (it).”
Sanford Kwinter: Architectures of Time

This is not an original story. You could say it has become a folk tale. A boy (it could be a girl but in this case it's a boy) graduates from Architecture school, goes into internship and gets payed less than he needs in order to survive in the big city. But here's where the story takes a turn. This boy, Dai Haifei, decides that he won't (since he can't) pay the (now) high rents in Beijing. He thinks that, since he spends most of his waking life at the office he only need a place to sleep and so he designs and builds a small egg-house a few meters from the office door. Of course! I sounds obvious now!

And so he did. This egg-house had an interlaced bambu structure covered juta bags filled with soil and grass seeds providing thermal isolation. It seems the little home as made a buzz all over China and around it (planet Earth). But what happened next? Now it's easy to guess. No? Of course: chinese government has ordered the little house to be demolshed. 

I recall the recent demolition of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei in Shangai also ordered by Chinese authorities. I'm starting to wonder if these mass demolition of all things creative in Chinese territory isn't just part of a destructive guerrilla marketing campaign since it does bring so much publicity (bad one?) to the red country. But no. Truth is this egg-house, as well as Weiwei's work,  "exposes the desolation behind the resplendent face of our cities" and societies.

Ver também:
Sunflower Seeds 2010 by Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei at Albion Gallery

Conan has recently made a joke on Jagnefält Milton's Master Plan proposal for the city of Åndalsnes in Norway by stating it already existed under the name "trailer park".

Here I was dwelling in ArchDaily, looking for a specific post I had seen a couple of weeks ago when Russian Constructivism hit me in the head (there is a pun here). It seems that some graduates of the University of Western Australia have been studying Soviet Constructivism "by researching, analyzing and reproducing various significant buildings from the movement". And right there, the first image that appears is Batman Return's Nygmatech facility.  Well, not really, but that's the first thing that came to my mind. It was (is) actually a model of the Monument to Christopher Columbus, a building conceptualised in 1929 that looks like a 50's blender and which was quite bluntly transformed into part of the Riddler's lair. Almost all depictions of Gotham try to transcended all times and places, melding elements of Art Deco, Russian Constructivism, European and American futurism, modernism and post-modernism. So this comes as no surprise and I wasn't really the first person to realize this connection - as can anyway be proven by ArchDaily's post comments. I'm unable to understand if the commenters think the Australian guys are joking with them or even if they think that Batman Forever, a film so bad it has gone past good and back to bad again (in Enid's words), has somehow inspired Russian Constructivism itself.

The Hype Machine has finished it ultimate list for 2010's top Artists, Albums and Songs as picked by music bloggers all over the world. Nice to see how "mainstream" you are and to discover some perls which may have slipped by during the last year.

Another source is Last.FM with its top 40 hottest new music of 2010 - a list based, as usual, on the site user's scrobbles. I like these companies. I like that they stand tall and haven't been bought by facebook, yet. Last.FM is actually owned by CBS though... but hey! Oh, about The Hype Machine: yes, it scrobbles :)

Ratatat likes playing with movies. Googling on the words present at the end of Bilar and at the beggining of Drugs I found out they're an extract of Werner Herzog's Stroszek. "Was wird daraus? - Wenn der Bruno mal tot geht - Wo landen diese Sachen? Wo landen diese Instrumente?" I couldn't find the exact scene but go and see the movie.

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Highlight of the movie: mall in credits.

Dan: Everybody wants to be happy.
Larry: Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing.