Mine
when did people forget how to share?
reading boingboing today i find assholes are claiming copyright on the image of the eiffel tower at night and demanding license fees on model airplanes. in america, you can own rights to math, to biology, to damn near anything.
a school was denied rights to screen the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize because they didn't pay licence fees. that's disgusting.
this blog is published under a creative commons license. you can use anything you read here, altered or not, as long as you don't sell it. granted, this blog is not as valuable as say the image of the eiffel tower at night (put that camera down, tourist! i own that image!) but it's what i've got to share.
owning things is overrated.
sorry to go all hippy on you, but today i think you should give something away. something you could reasonably claim rights to. a dollar. an idea. an hour. a thing. and if you work for a big company that's hanging onto things just to squeeze another buck out of school teachers and tourists, you should copyright the way you enter your office. then, if anyone enters your office the way you do, you can sue. make the fuckers crawl.
in other non-preachy news, sean and i went to see Heaven's Gate at the Castro last night.
if you don't know about Heaven's Gate, it was the pre-cursor to Ishtar and Waterworld. a fantastically expensive project that got a nice, firm shafting from the critics and then lost more money than a Ben Affleck musical co-starring an animatronic rhino ever could.
we figured we better see it. you know, just to experience it. to increase our knowledge of film history.
it's not supposed to be a terrible film, just a financial disaster. i mean, i liked Ishtar. Waterworld is no worse than many summer blockbusters (Armaggedon anyone?). It's directed by Michael Cimino, hot off The Deer Hunter. it stars Kris Kristoferson, Christopher Walker, John Hurt, Isabelle Huppert and others. it's an epic western. it sounds okay, right?
well, jeez. first off, it's close to four hours long. for the first three it looks beautiful and is almost, but not quite, comprehensible. kristoferson and hurt graduate from harvard in a series of scenes not unlike the wedding in the Deer Hunter. then, twenty years later, they're in wyoming. kristoferson is some sort of sheriff and hurt is some sort of drunk cattleman. there are immigrants. people get killed. and they rollerskate. in russian. i think. isabelle huppert gets naked a lot, and that i followed easily enough. the rest... sean and i kept looking at each other going, "uh. do you understand what's happening here?" "nope. sure is pretty, though."
by intermission we were well perplexed. i couldn't really say what anyone was doing in the movie or what it was really about. i mean the whole impending immigrant massacre thing seemed important, but it wasn't clear if kristoferson really cared to save them or what the hell john hurt was doing besides drinking and lofting witty bon mots. kristoferson and walken were competing for the love of huppert, but her attachment to either man was as clear as cardboard.
after intermission, it went downhill. brad dourif gives a great little speech then there's a big battle, i think. it was pretty dusty. people rode around in a circle while jeff bridges (oh yeah. he's in it too. he was the mayor. or the publican? or the cock fighter? you tell me.) yells at huppert to GET DOWN! over and over and over until i was hoping someone would shoot him just to shut him up.
lots of people die then the ending sucks. then kristoferson goes to rhode island to be on a yacht. the end.
it's called Heaven's Gate because that's where your ass is after sitting through it. it doesn't suck so much as it numbs. it is beautiful. vilmos zsigmond is a fantastic cinematographer and it looks gorgeous. there's this one shot of john hurt astride his horse disappearing into the smoke from a train. lovely! it symbolizes the slow dissolution of your interest in watching the film.
i bought madhavi some tulips yesterday. because it's all springy here. maybe that's what you should give away today. some tulips. buy some tulips and give them to someone. everyone likes tulips.
