Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

Photos :: Darling Harbour under storm clouds

25July2006 [directLink] [personal]

A few images from around Darling Harbour today. The storm clouds gathered but it didn’t rain. I’m pretty impressed with the quality of the images - these were only taken with the 2mp camera in my phone (a Nokia 6280).

16-22July2006 :: This Week

22July2006 [directLink] [weekly]
This item was changed on 23July2006

• watched The Brothers Grimm; “I know this story”
• watched 28 Days Later; a few too many conveniences at the end, but otherwise well told and tense
• watched Cypher; the double-triple-cross spy story has been told numerous times before, but was very cool in a scifi setting; loved the 30s style too, complete with scotch and cigarettes and funky cinematography
• watched Wicker Park; average thriller but well made
• watched North Country
• watched The Chronicles of Riddick; the Directors Cut is slightly better than the theatrical release, extending the universe a little; that very epic-ness is what makes it such a good movie anyway
• watched Aeon Flux; average to stupid story, but interesting to see the old way-post-apocalyptic domed-city scifi being made with the FX we have now; hopefully someone stops playing with the FX and comes up with a decent story though
• watched Serendipity; no comment

(Edit: added North Country; I knew I’d seen Charlize Theron and Frances McDormand in something else this week; they look better in Aeon Flux, but act better in the former)

9-15July2006 :: This Week

15July2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• watched the first part of Bleak House; it’s setting up rather nicely, complete with nasty Dickensian exposition; but I’m not sure I can stand a whole season of it; perhaps the ABC will broadcast a couple episodes each week to speed things up
• watched Pitch Black; cheap thriller but the suspense was remarkable
• watched 36 Quai des Orfèvres; not a bad French police thriller; they were doing rather interesting things with the soundtrack, making the mumbled dialogue rather difficult to follow; I caved and switched on subtitles 20 minutes in
• watched Good Night, and Good Luck; frightening
• watched Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang; entertaining, funny, but probably won’t stand up to a repeat viewing
• watched Lord of War; blows things up and makes you think
• finished reading Pattern Recognition; still one of the best books I’ve read; a beautiful line right at the end:

she might have told them she was weeping for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t know.

A Vampire Lore

10July2006 [directLink] [film]

The vampires, with their cousins the werewolves, represent two extremes of human nature. If a true human is body and spirit in harmony, a vampire is a spirit who has rejected the body, and a werewolf has rejected the spirit and surrendered itself to the body.

My sympathies lie on the vampiric end of this spectrum. But both extremes are wrong, and there are plenty of people today at these extremes. The vampires and werewolves of legend become more and less real with the fluctuation of society’s mores.

Those who would have us believe that the physical is everything are our werewolves. They say that this earth is all we have; that the body is everything; that sex is the ultimate human experience. And there are those who reject this outright, extending their rejection of this philosophy to a rejection of the physical; sex becomes evil.

There are heresies throughout the Church’s history, when various groups have claimed the vampire philosophy. The rejection of Christ’s humanity is the ultimate heresy: the idea that God would not “reduce himself” and possess a body.

In my creative explorations of the vampires, I especially want to explore the idea that they are here, amongst us, ready to make themselves known and take over the earth again. We are in the beginnings of a swing back in their direction; there are great social movements that seek to take control from the werewolves and return it to the vampires.

These aren’t the vampires of your fantasy.

Vampire mythology is rather convoluted, with elements from folklore, literature, film. But there are some common themes in the imagery. My vampire:spirit link has come from the imagery, but I also want to build up an image of the vampires as I see them, that is, that suits that philosophy.

There’s no doubt that vampires are generally portrayed as refined and as somewhat controlled. The blood-craze is interpreted differently though. I like the general image of it as a passion that must be fought and controlled. But sometimes it is taken too far and the vampires are portrayed as *-crazed and generally slave to their passions. This is the version that strays; they become debauched; they are, simply, no longer vampires. I’ve a feeling this portrayal is actually a product of our werewolf-dominant age with people assuming that passions cannot be controlled, and that, thus, if a vampire feels the blood-lust they must give in to it, and to lust of all kinds. My vampires are not passionate nor violent; they are controlled to the point of coldness.

And numerous aspects of the vampire myth point to their incorporeal nature. They are pale, untouched by the sun; they can fly or can transform their bodies into the form of bats; they have no reflection. I don’t want to reproduce all these aspects in my creative works: the lack of a reflection and the ability to change form are particularly unattractive. Similarly, my vampires are not necessarily allergic to sunlight. But the general imagery is still important: they exist in shadow. And there is the possibility that at least some of them can phase shift: essentially taking their body’s form at will.

The final image is the Bite, and blood. I don’t see the vampires as blood-crazed creatures who feed on human blood. I’m not sure the blood-lust is necessary at all, though as I said earlier, I like the idea of it as a passion that must be controlled. If the vampires are largely spiritual creatures, I don’t see a need for them to feed at all. I can see the use of the bite to turn humans; there is clearly something in the blood, and it helps the ‘victim’ release the body and become like the vampires. I’m still unsure about where I’m heading with this image, and it is key. But in The Journal of Paul Hunter I’ve basically presented the idea that an unprepared human will die when bitten. A human cannot be turned against their will, and so the body will reject the blood in an effort to remain conjoined to the spirit. The process is almost certainly deadly. If a human is properly prepared, then the bite merely acts as an aid to the spirit in its rejection of the body. (My idea being that a human could, theoretically, turn of their own volition, though the rejection process would be far more difficult.) In Paul Hunter the titular protagonist contacts Aaron, an old man who long ago prepared himself for the turning, but in the end rejected the vampire philosophy and was never bitten. His preparation did, however, give him unnaturally long life; he is almost a half-way-vampire.

2-8July2006 :: This Week

09July2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• watched Annie Hall; not as amazing as Manhattan but in a similar vein
• started rereading Pattern Recognition; have been meaning to reread it for a while, and it’s even better than I remembered
• watched The Manchurian Candidate; wonderfully ambiguous paranoia
• watched Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest; exciting adventure; Johnny Depp is still hilarious; the final 30 minutes were a drag though as instead of wrapping up the story they introduced a bunch of cliffhangers simply to prepare for the third movie
• watched Beyond from The Animatrix; beautiful animation and modern-fairytale-storytelling
• watched No Good Deed; average crime thriller
• watched Joan of Arc (The Messenger); interesting psychological explorations

MySpace :: the latest victim of cultural ignorance

07July2006 [directLink] [branding]

So MySpace just launched an Australian site. Haven’t seen it marketed yet, so it’s possible they’ll fix things up before a ‘real’ launch, but I very much doubt it.

Problems though: they’ve barely tried to adapt the site for an Australian audience! They do, at least, offer locally relevant info under the ‘MySpace Music’ heading on the front page (either Australian bands or bands that are touring here soon). But beyond that everything has been ripped straight from the US site. It becomes most obvious in the Videos section, “presented by Cingular”, who don’t even have a presence in Australia! One would think they’d make some sort of partnership with a local company before releasing an Aussie site!

Haven’t explored the rest of the site yet, because I’m terribly put off by the lack of actual localisation going on. I’ll be interested to see what the marketing in Oz is like. MySpace doesn’t have much of a presence here, but if they localise the marketing they could do really well. If they just reuse marketing material from the States they’ll go the way Starbucks did when they first came to Australia… And they don’t want to go that way.

While I was there, I did notice a rather strangely designed bit:

Doesn’t that look terribly like Google AdSense ads done up in site colours? The first time I saw them my eye skipped straight past. But I looked closely and saw that those ‘ads’ are actually inviting people to get started on MySpace! (Which is even more ad-like: I see a remarkable number of Google ads inviting me to create a blog or similar!) I grabbed the following from my uncle’s blog about blogging, The Qwertyrash blogs. He’s made sure the colours of the ads suit his site’s colours, and you’ll notice ads saying “Start blogging”, “Free website” &c; which is terribly similar to “Get Started on MySpace!” and “Create Your Profile!”…

Now, since my eye has been trained to ignore little boxes with a bold heading, a small paragraph of text, followed by a little hyperlink, especially when the text has keywords like blog or profile (that are becoming, increasingly, signs of spam), why would anyone put the most important links of their site (ie, to attract new users) hiding down the bottom of the page disguised as ads?!

Vampire/Watcher

05July2006 [directLink] [film]

Snapped this of the windows across the street from the Red Cross Blood Bank in the city. The perfect place for vampire surveillance.

Could I perhaps use one of these rooms to shoot some of The Journal of Paul Hunter? A scene in which Aaron exits the blood bank and is followed by Paul would look amazing shot surveillance-style.

That Imp of Earth and Industry

03July2006 [directLink] [film]

Download (Quicktime 6+ MP4):

• 320x240 8MB version
• 640x480 22MB version

Have just uploaded two versions of a film I made this past semester. It’s a three minute experimental piece entitled That Imp of Earth and Industry. There’s not really any narrative structure, but it is set up in a little voice over near the start: it’s a dream sequence; it’s about Fire. I kind of broke it up into three main arcs: the Ages of the Earth: the Age of Nature, the Age of Man, and the Age of the Machine. I’ve a suspicion that kind of detail is only there if you look for it, but I like that there a lots of little images if you’re willing to look for them.

Outside of the experimental storytelling I was really happy with the way it turned out. It was made for a class at UTS: “Creative Techniques for Shorts”, which is essentially an experimental class… Though that doesn’t necessarily mean experimental film; it was really about experimenting with techniques we hadn’t used before. So I took the opportunity to play with After Effects (especially the colour grading, which I’m really happy with: the shades of reds and oranges look beautiful) and to learn Final Cut Studio and Soundtrack Pro. I composed the soundtrack almost entirely from loops, and it turned out really well: a strange musical cacophony with lots of crunch. (At home with the bass turned up it sounds amazing, but I suspect the conversion for the web will have lost a lot of that beautiful bass!)

Okay, this is something of an experiment as it’s the first video I’ve put online. Am hoping the conversion options are okay: I couldn’t get much lower than 8MB without losing way too much quality, but at 2.5MB/minute that’s not a lot more than an MP3 so probably not a huge issue. On dialup, though, that low-quality version will take 45 minutes to download… On broadband it’s worth getting the larger version really. As I say, something of an experiment.

And theoretically the film requires Quicktime 6 to play, though I’ve not tested it widely. (But hey, it plays pretty well even on my mobile phone so it should be alright).

The film is licensed under the same Creative Commons license that covers this entire site (ie, everything under wintermute.com.au). The license lets you do whatever you want with the film as long as you make no money from it, you credit me, and you share/re-use it while retaining a CC license… The Creative Commons license basically encourages free information sharing; if you want to use the film for any other purposes you have to ask me for permission, which I’m likely to give.

25June-1July2006 :: This Week

01July2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• watched The Society Murders; which strangely felt like propaganda for the victims’ family
• watched Underworld Evolution; didn’t have the edge that the first film did; its backstory was well told, but the ‘present-day’ story was disappointing
• watched Domino; surprisingly underrated, a really stylish, intense, well-made film; one for the collection
• watched Secret Men’s Business; good Australian drama, but like most Australian drama, strayed into cliché on occasion
• watched Immortal (Ad Vitam); fascinating piece of story-telling; mostly CG with some live actors, but the whole time it feels like the animation is simply a tool used to tell a fantastic story, rather than overpowering it
• watched Woody Allen’s Manhattan from 1979; really funny and seemingly quite ahead of its time; shot all in black and white with some beautiful camera work; strangely feels like the urban equivalent of the camera work in Springtime in a Small Town, which I watched just last week, wondering how an urban equivalent would be shot