Cinemagram makes moving gifs of a few frames. There’s this feature where you can edit out a portion of the gif and overlay a static shot that “fills in” the deleted area. The right side of this window, for instance:

What if you can do the same thing but with a video feed? So instead of a gif of the guy walking, there could be a live video stream of a street corner?

Some artist hangs a smartphone-scannable QR code on telephone poles at street corners.

And that URL is a video feed of a nearby surveillance camera – a camera with a bird’s eye view of that corner. Live. Traffic visible in the street in the background.

And then, like cinemagram, the space where the person is standing – presumably in front of the telephone pole where the QR code is posted – is deleted out. Replaced by a static shot of the empty corner.  As if you don’t exist. As if technology makes you disappear.

That’d be pretty cool.

Prospect Magazine:  “Clinton and Gore patched up their tattered relationship after September 11. Gore’s decision to distance himself from his sponsor during the 2000 campaign because of the Monica Lewinsky mess had created a rift. The tragedy brought about reconciliation. Both men were overseas when the terrorists struck, Clinton in Australia and Gore in Austria. After checking on their families and closest friends, associates say, each had the same compulsion to talk to the other.”

GORE: “I’d just arrived in Vienna on September 11, and when the planes hit the towers, I knew right away it was bin Laden.” Gore’s first thought was to call Tipper; his next was to call Clinton. “When we were in office, there was nothing significant that happened where we didn’t talk very quickly.”

Larry King: Did you try to get back home right away?

GORE: Yes, I did. Though they closed the air space. And it took a couple of days. And I finally said, get me anywhere in North America and I’ll do the rest. I flew to Canada and rented a car and started driving south.

CUT TO:

Bill Clinton on David Letterman

LETTERMAN: Tell me about what your day was?

CLINTON: …I was in Australia and I got a call from two former staff members of mine who were in Tribeca and had a clear view of the World Trade Center. Then they called me back as the second plane was hitting and I just blurted out Bin Laden did this. I just knew.

Then I tried to get a hold of my wife – because I knew she would be in the Senate – and I did. I wondered about our daughter, and Hillary spared me (because I was so far away) of the knowledge that Chelsea was in lower Manhattan at the time and was one of the throng basically running back up the island.

President Bush was kind enough to get me a military plane. I flew home.

CUT TO:

From the New York Times: “Gore crossed into the United States at Buffalo, where he stopped and donated blood…”  At 8:00 pm Bill Clinton called Al Gore’s cell phone. Gore answered Clinton’s call while on the road outside of Buffalo.

GORE: So I was going to drive all night long then Bill Clinton called me on my cell phone, returning a call that I had made to him from Europe. And he said, “Hey, why don’t you stop by the house in Chappaqua?” I got there at 3:00 in the morning (“…former president Clinton was napping on his couch waiting for Mr. Gore’s knock on his door.”), and we talked until dawn and then got on the plane that they had sent for him to go down to Washington.

In those few hours they spent together on September 14th, they fixed their friendship. It was their first extensive visit since a tense post-election face-off the year before in the final days of the Clinton White House, where the two aired their anger at each other over Gore’s presidential campaign.

I’m seeing it as a play.

Attucks died at 48

When British troops opened fire on a crowd of Bostonians in 1770, a former slave-turned-whaler-turned political activist was the first man killed. Our hero was part of the same terrorist caucus as Paul Revere. They were buds in the North End.

The script’s structure was based on The Battle of Algiers.  I got some good notes, wrote a few sequences, but then I shelved the project.

Why? Because the more dysfunctional the U.S. gets, the more people long for a man on a white horse to “restore” its greatness. And at this point, I just don’t think Americans will accept any story portraying the Framers as anything less than superhero geniuses who built THE best country on the planet with actual guidance from Jesus.

Men like Crispus Attucks didn’t want to merely replace the British aristocracy with an American one. Before the Boston Massacre, there were major conflicts and debates along this divide. Even some peasant uprisings. Ultimately… well, look at the very existence of the U.S. Senate to see who won out: the 1%.

But recently, I realized that, hello! — the French didn’t make The Battle of Algiers. Nope, Italian producers did. Of course. Which leads me to ask the internet, are there any Chinese production companies out there that want to… oh, never mind.

A nice image in that line. Which, since reading A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes, has made me think of Treppenwitz. Literally, ‘the wisdom of the stairs’. The striking reply that crosses one’s mind belatedly when already leaving, on the stairs.

Though, I’ve always preferred Cynthia Ozick’s version of the word: Treppenworte. The words one didn’t have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one’s dignity or survival.

Traditional advertising is increasingly losing its effectiveness. One marketing trade publication said that television advertising is only one-third as effective as it was in 1990. Only 14% of people say they trust it, and only 16% are even watching the ad. So television advertising as it has existed is not sustainable.

Advertisers used to be able to simply buy or rent a captive audience. Today, advertisers have to invent ideas that actually attract an audience. Now advertising is the price you pay for not realizing the value of building your passionate tribe.

People hate irrelevant advertising. Technology and channel choice are enabling viewers to eliminate irrelevant advertising. Every brand today has to think and act like a media company. They can’t just push spots and banners out onto websites or television, brands have to pull people in. It’s a very different attitude.

Pesce’s lesson is to connect the program with the advertiser authentically. The aim is relevance: in order for the advertiser to be relevant to the target market for the show, the advertising should feel like a part of the program content.

The advertising should be integrated completely with the program. The advertiser effectively pays for the budget of the show. Or show segment (or package). Then, in an internet-wired world, you hyper-distribute that piece of content any way you can. Put it on bittorrent, peer-to-peer networks, free video sites, you get it out there any way possible because the advertising message – which is relevant to your audience – is part of the program.  And the advertiser is paying producers for eyeballs. Wherever the producers can get them.

The trick is we’re getting sophisticated.  Therefore, this integration must be more than Clorox sponsoring General Hospital back in olden times. Integration also has to be more than glorified product placement. To be truly integrated, the content must be consistent with the advertisers’ brand. The advertiser’s involvement must be meaningful, trustworthy and valuable. Brands and producers have actually got to provide something that people want, not something that people avoid.

Red Bull does it with action sports. The soda company has an in-house video content department that creates content. They have an in-house event management department that stages competitions. After building an audience for their content, ESPN is now paying Red Bull for the right to air what are basically commercials for Red Bull.  That’s what I’m talking about.

Are any other brands beginning to do this?

The Dark Ages snuffed out the book, and with it, most details of Epicuranism – the view that the universe is atomic, made of matter, and our behavior should be based on the idea that fear destroys, and that a balance of knowledge and humility is the key to happiness (though you can’t get enough of both).

A long, pestilent 1400 years later, a scholar in the Papal Court named Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini became one of a new breed of hero from history: “the book hunter.” Perhaps because he had worked his way into the upper eschelon of the Church, Bracciolini was very successful at his hobby. He was probably the most successful book hunter of all. He rediscovered and paid for monks to copy major works by Cicero, Vitruvius, Manilius, Eutyches, Probus, and above all, Lucretius.

I’ve been thinking about people like Bracciolini recently. A story about him and his book hunter friends would probably be something like an historical adventure prequel to “The Name of the Rose.” I picture these friends and rivals of Bracciolini, racing around the region, bribing people to steal codex that were rumored to be locked away in dark abbeys. They evaded capture and trial by conservative sects when Vitruvius’ nudie human manuscripts were seized. I can picture this band of adventurers breaking each other out of prison. I can see them digging into the buried ruins of old country estates for sealed libraries. I can imagine them loathing the era in which they live, trying desperately to recreate an environment where learning was encouraged like it had been before the rise of the theocracy.

The story would find its natural conclusion in 1417 when Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things” is found. The poem contains the line: “So, little by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light.”

When all of this is lost, who in the future will rediscover Citizen Kane?

Then Google tells me somebody named Matt Bird beat me to the blog post.  Minus the perfect casting, but his write up is great:

Genre: Spy / Historical

Premise: A determined American spy develops an outrageous plan to overthrow the fragile democracy of Iran in 1953, at the request of the oil company that would become known as BP.

About: I haven’t heard anything about this getting adapted so far, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t on a development board somewhere.

Writer: Kinzer is a veteran New York Times correspondent who has written plenty of books about U.S. dirty dealings overseas. This book became an unexpected hit in 2003, as U.S. efforts in the Middle East fell apart and people started getting more serious about the question “Why do they hate us?” Unfortunately, it’s gotten even more timely since, due to the BP connection.

The whole writeup is pretty stellar. The book had me at hello. Read this other blog post.

“Almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting”
– David Foster Wallace, ‘The Pale King’

Similarly,

- Ira Glass on the art of the interview:
“Most people aren’t great storytellers in general, but if you stumble on the thing that really means something to them, you’ll get a great story out of them. This is one of the insights of therapy, actually. If you read all the early Freud stuff—you know how when he stumbles onto the central issue with his patients, suddenly stories flood out of them in pure narrative, with these incredible poetic images? That’s what happens when you’re working out in your head something that isn’t totally resolved and then you speak about it. It comes out as narrative.”

What are you interested in?

That’s what makes you interesting.

Henry Miller once said, “The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”