Friday in Santa Fe
The September Slideshow is up. Don’t forget to click on the symbol for Full Screen, which you will find above the image on the right.
I don’t want to forget the cherry tree in my celebration of Autumn!
Director Jim Jarmusch Tests Limits In ‘Control’ : NPR
“Frankly, I get a little annoyed with the pace of a lot of films where no shot is on longer than three seconds,” Jarmusch says, adding that viewers might be put off by the allusion to action in Limits without actual action. “And the reason for that was because the real subject of the film, in a way I guess, is simply one’s consciousness.”He says he was inspired by Pablo Neruda, who wrote poems about mundane things like “Ode to an Onion.”
Dialogue is kept to a minimum, but not sound. From footsteps on cobble stones to a guitar case closing, sound was as important to Jarmusch as image. “The idea was, accumulatively, that the film would work on your mind in a way that, even if only briefly, you would have a slightly heightened sense of your response to mundane things — both visual and certainly in terms of sound,” he says.
Doesn’t that sound great? Here is a preview of the film.
And there is Flamenco in the soundtrack:
Old-time flamenco cante in the soundtrack of the film ‘The Limits of Control’
he director explains that “when I was preparing the film in Spain, I was doing a lot of research into flamenco music. A friend turned me on to a certain form of flamenco called peteneras. It’s a slow form of flamenco that goes back to the 14th century, and it’s oddly enough a taboo form among most flamenco people because it has a long history of bad things happening. It’s kind of shunned”.The director of films like ‘Coffee & Cigarettes’ adds “I was interested in it being almost the blues version of the flamenco. It’s often about tragic subjects — death, lost love — and I discovered this one particular song that has an incredible existing version by Carmen Linares, one of the most amazing flamenco singers”. Specifically, it’s a cante off the début album ‘Su cante’, from 1984. And the lyrics have a lot of meaning in the movie, which say something like “He who thinks he is bigger than the rest must go to the cemetery, there he will see what life really is”.
Ah, I have always preferred a slower-paced film, don’t you. To hell with jump-cuts and MTV video style image-strobing! Is this a movement? A movement towards telling a story rather than trying to dazzle and overwhelm with imagery? And am I detecting a desire towards HD music on the interwebs? Well, here are some facts for you:
A 2 bit recording has a resolution of 4.
A 4 bit recording has a resolution of 16.
A 8 bit recording has a resolution of 256.
A 16 bit recording has a resolution of 65,536.
A 24 bit recording has a resolution of 16,777,216.
A 32 bit recording has a resolution of 4,294,967,296.
As you see the dynamic range of a 24 bit recording is dramatically larger than a 16 bit recording. Think of these numbers as something similar to the amount of colors or shades or pixels in an image or video. The higher the resolution the more detail and the bigger the palette. Lots of shades of color instead of a line-drawing.
Expressed in dB it looks like this: 24-bit digital audio has a theoretical maximum dynamic range of 144 dB, compared to 96 dB for 16-bit. An increase of 3dB is roughly a doubling of power, meaning that 144 dB doubles the dynamic range of 96 dB 16 times. And that means a gentle plucking of guitar-strings can be reproduced in true contrast to a hard attack…
We are working on making my albums available on HDTracks.com. In particular I want 24/96k versions of One Guitar and Up Close to become available to the general public, but we might add the rest of my SSRI catalog in regular 16/44.1k quality as well. I have bought a number of music from HDTracks and think the site works well. Just yesterday I bought a track from Keith Jarrett’s Paris/London Testament, piano solo-improvisation recorded live in Paris and London, in 24/96k FLAC…
And apparently somebody bootlegged some video in Riga:
The hall was quite cold and I was wearing several layers. Funny, how it seems as if I am looking straight at the bootlegger at the beginning of the video!
And in social media news:
Peter Handke on Facebook? Whose idea was that? Publisher? PR person? Handke himself? Whatever the reason, it apparently didn’t last long:
Flickr Photo: Peter Handke on facebook 2009-10-14 at 10.54.43 AM
Handke wrote:
(Peter Handke) kann das Geschwätz auf Facebook schon jetzt nicht mehr ertragen und wird niemals wieder etwas in dieses Feld hineinschreiben.
That means that he can’t stand the blather (((idle talk, gossip, flubdub, claptrap))) on Facebook and will never again enter a word in this field.
(Thanks for the link KF)
