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8/27/03: Personal vouchers

[I'm in a busy busy week, in case you're wondering why the tumbleweed's been blowing through this blogade lately]

James from consumptive.org posted "Adjustments" - a short piece on his years printing evidence photos in a custom colour lab. This just happens to be the very same job that I have printing evidence photos in a custom colour lab (I replaced him a couple of years ago). But my last day is next week (glory be!).

James describes the sordid pimping of one's art school skills well.
I can personally vouch that Masked and Anonymous, although an intriguing an idea, is by far the most convoluted mess of a film I've seen in a good long while. I feel like such a sucker for thinking that, even though I couldn't be less interested in Bob Dylan, the film's setting - a post-apocalyptic United States transformed along the same precarious political dynamics of a Latin American junta - would be intriguing enough. But seeing as how I don't particularly care for Bob Dylan, rock music, americana, or Val Kilmer cameos, I feel like quite the sucker for having bothered with the thing. Don't be a sucker - read movie reviews.
However, if you're lucky enough to have Madame Sata playing in your selected city this week, do consider checking out this devastating and gorgeous new(-ish) Brazilian film. It concerns a "family" of outcasts in 1930s Lapa - a prostitute, a motherly transvestite, and a streetfighting pimp who eventually re-emerges as legendary Carnaval queen Madam Sata. It's often brutal treatment of the contradictions of poverty and family, and more overtly sexuality and race really transcend its achingly romantic setting (though this never ceases to be pure pleasure). As an outside northerner long-enamored of Brazil, I'm always quite fascinated by the seeming fluidity of race and sexuality when considering the culture, never the one/zero rigidness of that of what I come from. A film like Madame Sata is important for confounding those impressions, and profound enough to really transcend the particularities of place for deeper conditional insights. A rare work, for sure.

I saw this film first about a year ago when it took first prize in Chicago's International Film Festival. It made an interesting contrast to City of God the other Brazilian entry in the fest - here, the more Hollywood treatment of Rio's underworld that seemed to come off as glib to most folks despite the producer's good intentions.
Lastly, I'm characteristically late mentioning this, but Paul compares the "Boil Water Advisories" of US and Canadian websites in one of the funniest Great Blackout accounts I've read.