Adventures in Phone Support

My recently purchased HP 1300 LaserJet printer has taken to printing out pages with curling paper. I mean, severely curling paper; by the final page of a hundred-page document, the left and right sides of the paper are practically touching each other.

So, off to HP's website for technical support. First, I try an online chat; online chats are a great means of getting tech support, as you don't have to hold a phone up to your ear for half an hour, you can surf the web while you're getting support, and you don't have to deal with some godawful automated phone system.

Unfortunately, HP's online chat function only supports Windows. So I called the phone line. And got the godawful automated phone support system, which asked me for specific information about the product I was calling about, then routed me through to a live human being who asked me the exact same questions, in a series of conversations that went something like this:

HP: Thank you for calling HP phone support. Can I get your type of product and model?

So, after three goarounds, they'd apparently determined that the HP LaserJet section's phone system was down, and I was advised to call back in fifteen minutes. I waited thirty, called, got bounced around twice before they told me the problem still wasn't fixed, try back an an hour or so. Called back two hours later, got a message that the call center had closed five minutes ago.

Whippee!

Collateral: a Night in L.A.

I recently had the pleasure of listening to L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan speak with Michael Mann, along with actors Tom Cruise and Barry Shabaka Henley, about Mann and company's new film COLLATERAL, and about the general representation of Los Angeles in film. As HEAT is one of my favorite films of all time and played an inordinately large part in drawing me to Los Angeles, the chance to listen to Mann talk about Los Angeles and film was basically a big ol' wet dream for me. The fact that they would also be showing extended clips of COLLATERAL was icing on the cake.

Michael Mann is the most visually exciting director currently working in American film. The way he composes a scene, his use of color and lighting, and the way he moves the camera combine to create films that are, on an aesthetic level, unbeatable. Naysayers are invited to revisit THE INSIDER, a film with a particularly uncinematic central character (with Russell Crowe in his best performance to date as an overweight, bispectacled scientist) and a visually uninspiring subject matter (a legal trial against tobacco companies), that through Mann's skill is transformed into cinema as exciting and kinetic as the best action film.

Note here, when I say "kinetic," I don't mean he moves the camera around a lot. Mann's camera movements, swooping helicopter shots aside, are largely noticeable; the camera moves to keep a moving subject in view (though not necessarily in focus). This goes directly in the face of the current rule of filmmaking that to create an exciting, dramatic moment, you've got to move the camera like it's strapped to a spastic grip who just pounded a heavily caffeinated beverage and is in the process of being electrocuted, even if (or especially if) the subject of the scene is doing something static like talking on a telephone. Jerking the camera around like it's on a bungee cord does not create excitement; it creates disorientation, which is nowhere near the same thing. It can work in an overwhelming, disorienting situation, like the storming of Omaha Beach in the opening of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN; it fails miserably in a godawful mess like PHONE BOOTH.

Merriam-Webster Online's definition of "kinetic":

1 : of or relating to the motion of material bodies and the forces and energy associated therewith
2 a : ACTIVE, LIVELY
2 b : DYNAMIC, ENERGIZING

That's what I mean when I say "kinetic." Or, to put it more simply, Michael Mann could film your grandmother taking a dump and make it look cool.

And while THE INSIDER is probably Mann's best film to date (ALI, the best film nobody saw in 2001, is darn close, and makes a great fist-pumping double feature when paired with WHEN WE WERE KINGS on a Saturday night), HEAT is hands down, his coolest. Not only is it visually perfect, but it's the best L.A. film since CHINATOWN; with it, Mann captures the bizarre aesthetic of this city better than any director before or since. It took eight years, with the making of the remake of THE ITALIAN JOB, of all things, before anyone else realized how cool something as uncool the Los Angeles subway system could look on film, but Mann had already got it with HEAT's opening scene. Other directors, jetting off to foreign lands for visually enticing climes, completely overlooked the wonderlands in their own backyards, while Mann, with HEAT (and later with the criminally underwatched television show ROBBERY HOMICIDE DIVISION), captured the seedy nightclubs, the sulfur mines, the tarp-shrouded chop shops, and the endless constellation of fallen stars that is Los Angeles at night, viewed from the hills. The legendary confrontation between Robert Deniro and Al Pacino's characters took place at a Bob's Big Boy in Burbank, for Pete's sake. The man knows L.A., and he knows how to make it look good, while not making it look like something else. He sees the beauty in what is largely considered to be an incredibly ugly city.

And from what I've seen of COLLATERAL, he's found even more. Shot largely in digital, Mann used a camera that, according to his description, is basically the size of a 35mm film camera attached to a good-sized refrigerator, to capture that particular Los Angeles twilight that starts when the sun sets and ends when it comes back up again, caused by the lights of the city reflecting off the cloud layer. COLLATERAL, the story of a Angelino cab driver (Jamie Foxx) who picks up the wrong fare in the form of a hitman named Vincent (played by Tom Cruise, in his second "Vince" role), takes place completely at night, and largely outdoors, which encouraged Mann to resort to digital film, not because he wanted to be able to manipulate the footage to include a couple million Stormtroopers or trolls, but because he wanted to fully capture what I a couple million others see out our car windows at night on the drive home. See, there's not enough ambient light for conventional film to capture anything in the Los Angeles pseudo-night without resorting to some major lighting help, as in the massive Kleig lights you see when you're going past a film set; but under that much light, you completely wash out the cool visual glow that you're trying to capture. So Mann went with the digital camera umbilicalled to the Frigidare, and ended up with, from what I saw, some amazing-looking footage. Which he's compiled, as far as I can tell, into an amazing-looking film. Which I'll have to wait until August to see.

In the meantime, I'm going to go watch HEAT again, and enjoy the view outside my window.

What's on Top

The images that show up at the top of the site are rotated randomly using Dan Benjamin's Image Rotator, and are from photographs taken by yours truly using a Canon Powershot G2, which is, for my money. the best consumer-level digital camera Canon's offered to date. The original photographs were cropped in Photoshop, and in some cases, I tweaked the brightness and contrast a bit for that super-cool bursting color effect. In other cases, no tweaking was necessary.

Click on the thumbnail image if you want to see the larger original.

Cleveland Hopkins Airport, Ohio, September 2003

Highway 5, west of the Colorado Rockies, March 2004

Coachella festival, Indio, California, May 2004

Keyspan Park, Coney Island, New York, August 2003

Red Rocks Amphitheater, Morrison, Colorado, April 2004

Pebble Beach golf course, Carmel, California, April 2004

Keyspan Park, August 2003

Brooklyn, New York, July 2003

Coachella Festival, May 2004. The Pixies are on stage.

The Cloisters, Manhattan, New York, October 2003

Somewhere on Highway 5, California, March 2004

The Parachute Jump, Coney Island, August 2003

Weblog, Meet Sidelog

For those of you who haven't noticed, or are reading this through an RSS feed, or honestly could care less, I've created a new weblog.

Where is it, you ask?

Well, it's about an inch or so to the left, depending on your screen resolution. Yes, that little bundle of links I've titled "Of Interest" is actually it's own separate weblog, powered by Movable Type (like this site), and embedded within this site by PHP, to which said site has been converted (thanks, Evil Queen).

But sir, you're asking, how does this effect my Foreign Embassy viewing experience?

Why, it only enhances it! Now, rather than being forced to read only my personal meanderings, you can also view a selection of items that I've found Of Interest (hence the title) through my travels on the World Wide Web! It's a win-win situation, honestly, and I'd feel really cool and hip about it if it wasn't so, like, early 2003. But it's something I've been meaning to do for a while, and it means I no longer have to change the code of my site or create a new entry when I find something Of Interest (there it is again!) that l like to post. Plus, I post the entries using a neat little application called Kung-Log, which means I don't have to access Movable Type at all and can do updates from my desktop.

And if you've gotten this far without getting lost in a maze of hyperlinks, you'll notice I've no longer set links to open in a separate window. As far as I could tell, based on pretty much every website I visit regularly, absolutely no one does this. Is it rude? Poor taste? Elitist? Does it waste precious processing resources? I don't know. I just know that no one else does it, and maybe I should quit as well. I'm a follower, me. Make friends with the "Back" button on your browser.

In the works is an archive page for the Of Interest links, an explanation of the photographs used in the site header (yes, they're mine), and even, yes, an "About" page! Another thing that I've been meaning to do for a while, since, if nothing else, it'll give me an always-welcome opportunity to write about myself in third person.

Signs of Life

And forty days later, I'm still here.

Okay, I've been a bit preoccupied. But after a couple of weeks of feeling like I was thrown in the deep end with my arms broken at work, I've started to finally get a handle on things and can start devoting some of my mental energies elsewhere. So, here I am. I haven't had an opportunity to do a full redesign of the site, but I'm tweaking it a bit, in the hopes of making it a bit more pleasant to the eye while showing off some photos I'm proud of, and I'll be doing more with it in the following weeks, God willing and the creek don't rise. But for now, hit the "refresh" button a couple times and enjoy the pics, courtesy of my Canon Powershot G2 and Dan Benjamin's Image Rotator.