13th May 2008, 11:26 pm
My new Jim Jarmusch box set arrived today. The Jim Jarmusch Collection Vol 1 – contains his first three movies:
Of the three, the only one I’d seen previously is Down By Law which I would thoroughly recommend it but this post is about Permanent Vacation which I’ve just finished watching. Jarmusch’s first film, it was allegedly made just after dropping out of film school in 1980, shot on 16mm film and costing just $15,000. I can certainly vouch for the budget, in fact I’m left wondering where it all went. The entire cast is made up of first time actors (most of whom have done little or nothing since), there are no sets to speak of, the music was scored by his pal John Lurie. They must have spent it all on coffee or something cos I can’t see where else it went, they could certainly have done with some better microphones because the sound quality is terrible.
Anyway, the film tells the story of a few days in the life of Allie, a bored young drifter who spends his time wandering the streets of New York meeting various other dysfunctional New Yorkites along the way. Nothing much happens and the dialog is pretty cringe worthy in places, there are a few good scenes though. I especially liked the scene where he stole the car.
Far from his best film but interesting in an art-house kind of way. You can certainly see the beginnings of his laid back style and casual wit & humour which come to the fore in his later films which you should definitely check out if you haven’t seen them already.
13th May 2008, 09:18 pm
More Twittery goodness… thanks to Ijonas for alerting me to TwitterFeed which basically enables you to feed any old rss feed in to your twitter account. The site says “feed your blog to twitter” but there’s not much in the way of restrictions on it, so you could feed the whole of the bbc news feed to your twitter account if you so wanted. I like it for the fact that you can set it up to use a feed from your flickr account, either using your latest photos of photos with a specific tag. To create your own flickr -> twitter feed….
- create a twitterfeed account
- upload a photo to flickr
- tag it with ‘post:twitter’ (or something more imaginative)
- grab the url for the tag feed (you can get this by clicking on the tag and copying the url from the ‘Latest’ feed link near the bottom of the page
- create a new twitter feed using the url from above
- set the frequency to whatever suits
Et voila, twitterfeed will check your flickr account for new photos with the ‘post:twitter’ tag (or what ever tag you used) however often you set the frequency for and it will dump a message into your twitter account with a link back to the photo and any extra text you specified.
Groovy 
12th May 2008, 02:41 pm
Thanks to a tweet from my good pal Robert I went and dug up this excerpt from an old Calvin & Hobbes cartoon. It’s one of my personal favourites and still brings a smile to my face.
Calvin: “Ah, I got the letter I wrote to myself.”
Hobbes: “What did you write?”
Calvin: “Dear Calvin — Hi! I’m writing this on Monday. What day is it now? How are things going? Your pal. Calvin.”
Calvin: “My past self is corresponding with my future self.”
Hobbes: “Too bad you can’t write back.”
Calvin (next day): “I got a letter from my past self.”
Hobbes: “What’s it say?”
Calvin: “Dear Future Calvin — I wrote this several days before you will receive it. You’ve done things I haven’t done. You’ve seen things I haven’t seen. You know things I don’t know. You lucky dog. Your pal. Calvin.”
Calvin (sniffing): “I feel so sorry for myself two days ago.”
Hobbes: “Poor him. He wasn’t you.
