So I was curious. I think it is a whole new genre of movie, 'horror-comedy'. Yes, I laughed at certain parts. I was horrified at other parts. It's an experience, I can say that much.

I went home and did a bit of research. How can he say those awful derogatory things about women and those anti-Semetic things? The guy who plays him, Sacha Baron Cohen, Cohen, isn't that a Jewish name? He's Jewish? Yes, he's Jewish. And that language he and Azamat speak through out the movie isn't a fake Kazakh language. It's HEBREW!

Naomi Alderman, the author of Disobedience, a novel about the Orthodox Jewish community, expresses succinctly the horror of this movie: "Borat is unsettling not because his opinions are outlandish but because he reveals how many ordinary people share them."

And yet there are truly funny parts in the movie. When he and Azamat get into a fight and wrestle naked, I howled with laughter.

So I am of mixed feelings. What do the Kazakhs think? After all, their country is being presented in such a sorry light. They've taken notice: "To counter the image of its country in the film - which was shot in the US and Romania - the government has funded a $50m tribal epic called Nomad." And apparently, the movie is creating an interest in the real Kazakhstan: "Travelex, the foreign exchange specialist, is ordering more than £500,000 worth of Kazakhstani currency to meet what it says is a surge in demand from British travellers." A surge indeed, for "Last year Travelex received only one request for the tenge, Kazakhstan's currency, but in the last week more than 1,000 inquiries have been made."

While I have neither the time nor money to go there, I did do a net search for photos of Kazakhstan. I was surprised to find beautiful lakes, snow topped mountains, sand dunes and even a canyon that looks like a scaled down Grand Canyon. There's beautiful mosques and cathedrals with tall minirets. I didn't see many goats or ramshackle buildings in the pictures.

So if it inspires people to examine their own prejudices and have a look at the real Kazakhstan, the movie is not all bad. And two naked men wrestling and running through a convention gathering is funny. It's not a masterpiece, to be earning all that $26,455,463. But it is an experience like no other.

If you're easily offended, don't go. Better instead to go see Stranger than Fiction, which Julia and I saw Friday night. That movie about an fictional character trying to save his life from his narrator, leaves you feeling good about the human race, and makes you laugh besides.

Sunday, November 12, 2006 B

"Experimentations"
1:43pm

The original is 472K, this version is reasonable at 90K...

So I tried that 'newfangled' LIVE TRACE. I got results that I couldn't duplicate in 'save for web' version or any other version. It can only exist as the special ai file type. I could see how it made a stylized vector drawing out of the original that is supposed to shrink and grow as you need. I took a screen capture of a 400x magnification:

I can't dump Picture Publisher, for I haven't found a screen capture available in the Adobe products!

Oh, yes, that looks all lovely, except for those strange lines around the eyes. Here is the 'save as web' file:

It's lost a remarkable amount of data!

Well, that just won't do. So I decided to try a much simpler drawing, one that doesn't feature so many lines of varying thickness.

It, being simple, made easily into a purely black and white image...

Here's the screen capture of the stylized LIVE TRACE, via screen capture...

Then I had a go at LIVE PAINT. I don't know what went wrong, I could not go any further in the process without the whole picture turning whatever color I selected, so I quit here:

This is 'save for web' version, I don't know why it's so small...

So then I decided to use my usual coloring method, from the tif version:

It's cheap K, being only 32K...

For giggles and grins, I decided to do the usual coloring method on the Live Trace screen capture:

But something went bizarre with the colors in this version!

I concluded it was a result of importing a gif into Photoshop. The gif came with a limited color palette that couldn't be changed. So I took my original screen capture, and saved it as a tif. That imported fine, and the resultant later gif has been saved with the proper colors. The stylized effect is cool:

But do I like the original version better? Here, the numbers and letters are too sketchy.


"WORLD INTERFACE MACHINE"
(With a little tweaking, this is my favorite version...)

Sunday, November 12, 2006 C

"Live Interface"
7:06pm

As I now look at the "WORLD INTERFACE MACHINE", it occurs to me that it represents more than a computer keyboard, but also a musical keyboard, such as that for a piano or organ. Music is also a 'world interface' method. Not only that, the letters and numbers in the picture could refer to musical rhythms and keys. Was my subconscious mind thinking of the organ concert we planned to attend in the evening?

This concert was a new experience for me. While I'd heard tiny organs little bigger than an upright piano, I'd never heard a pipe organ. This Casavant organ has 752 pipes ranging from five inches to sixteen feet. The concert featured a piece by Buxtehude I didn't much care for. But in contrast, Prelude and Fugure in A minor, BMV 543, the Bach piece, demonstrated why Bach is such a renowned composer. There was plenty of variety to showcase the instrument's strengths. I particularily liked Swing Five, a jazz piece by Johannes Matthias Michel, and Louis Vierne's Aria.

There is another reason I'm glad Julia and I went. There is no way a CD could capture the full experience of the organ sound. When it swells loud, when the slats open up to let the volume increase, a recording coming through tiny speakers can't capture that. When the organist uses the foot keyboard, and the deep tones roar, a recording can't capture the way the sound vibrates and envelopes you.

While I am grateful for all the joy recorded music has given me through the years, the live experience has its own inimitable magic.