This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

MOTION-CAPTURE


Two tales of technology old and new, on the front page of today's New York Times Arts section, form an intriguing juxtaposition.

There's the old technology of a "home recording machine with a needle that cut grooves into acetate discs," used in the 'forties and 'fifties by an Australian store salesman named Roy Preston to record concerts transmitted on the radio. One of these recordings captured the spectacular young pianist William Kapell playing Prokofiev, Debussy, Chopin, and Mozart while on tour in that country in 1953. Kapell died when the plane taking him back from that tour to the States crashed.

A close friend of Mr. Preston's (Preston died recently) discovered this jewel among his obsessively organized old recordings, and - using much more recent technology - Googled and then emailed Kapell's grandson. "It's breaking me to pieces," says Kapell's widow, also a pianist. "When I listen to these performances, it's as if he's alive and in front of me. You can imagine what this does to me 50 years later. He was inseparable from the music."



And then there's the Times review of the cutting-edge animated film The Polar Express. The result of the latest, enormously expensive technology, writes Manohla Dargis, is, throughout, an "eerie listlessness," with interiors like a "munitions factory" and a Santa's workshop whose entrance "directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will.'"

"The largest intractable problem" with the film "is that the motion-capture technology used to create the human figures has resulted in a film filled with creepily unlifelike beings." The filmmakers have built "a vacuum-sealed simulacrum of the world" whose effect is "depressing."



UD is struck by the way in which the singular obsessive music-lover with his grainy old technology has generated for those who knew and loved Kapell a euphoric recognition of his enduring human presence; while the grand-scale teamwork of high-tech experts working on a children's tale has generated an entire world of dehumanization.