Where I’m @

20020927

Received this in an email today from Greg in LA:

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI IS DENIED US VISA
Abbas Kiarostami, the acclaimed director of "Through the Olive
Trees", "And Life Goes On...", awarded with the Palme d'Or for "The
Taste of Cherry", has been invited to introduce his latest film "Ten"
at the forthcoming New York Film Festival. He has also been invited
to give a lecture at the Harvard University.
Richard Pena, director of the New York film festival, informed that
Abbas Kiarostami was denied a visa to enter the United States, the
consular authorities needing about 90 days to "verify the background"
of a citizen before giving him a visa. In spite of Pena's efforts, in
spite of the fact that Kiarostami visited the USA several times, in
spite of his position and reputation, the US embassy in Paris, from
where the Iranian director had made his request, refused to take his
application into consideration.
Jack Lang, formerly France's Minister of National Education and
Culture, who tried vanely to intervene by writing a letter to the
American Ambassador in Paris, Howard Leach, commented that this
situation showed "an intellectual isolationism and an ignorance
confining to the contempt for other cultures".
Richard Pena comments: "It's a terrible sign of what's happening in
my country today that no one seems to realize or care about the kind
of negative signal this sends out to the entire Muslim world (not to
mention to everyone else)."
International Federation of Film Critics - FIPRESCI
Grégory Valens
September 26, 2002

(confirmation at Yahoo! News)
Ten is one of the pictures we’re seeing at this year’s New York Film Festival, so we’re not only politically disappointed in the bumpkin attitude displayed in this context but also personally disappointed that Mr. Kiarostami will not be around to make a comment or two.
Every year, some filmmakers introduce their films, and the range of comments made is very interesting. Tim Burton gave a medium-length disquisition on Ed Wood and reminded me of a good friend in his mannerisms; Tsai-ming Liang said very little, but brought out his alter ego actor; Deepa Mehta spoke a bit about the significance of Fire, though the work spoke for itself. We expect that Mr. Kiarostami is rather reticent about his artworks — too much verbiage in an introduction could easily overwhelm the spare dialogue within the film, perhaps.
We’ve stopped staying for the question-and-answer circus of shame after the films, however. The occasional worthwhile exchanges are more than outweighed by the boneheaded pseudo-deep questions, the awkward questions in the director’s native tongue (which then have to be translated for the rest of the audience), and the just plain stupid. Of the last category, my all-time favorite was after the screening of Les Voleurs, when a festgoer asked the assembled participants (to wit, director André Téchiné, Catherine Deneuve, and Daniel Auteil), “What is the significance of the people smoking in the film?”
To which M. Auteil responded, in a properly confused tone, “Because people smoke, and this movie shows people?”

20020916

Hey! We won something!
Weeks after submitting our CSS haikus to ConsolationChamps’ contest to win a copy of Eric Meyer’s latest CSS book, we were told that we were one of the Honourable Mentions, complete with the adorable Canadian u. Thanks, James!

20020910

So Ish mentioned a little while back that someone had come up with a Perl-based way to scrape Netflix for one’s queue to display on one’s blog. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t know Perl and our host’s servers do not have Perl on them anyway. So over the last couple of weeks, we came up with the way to do it using ASP, and you may be able to see the results on his blog. (Depends on whether he’s trying it out yet.) The code is much less robust than some of the other remote scripting (and we use that term loosely) features floating around. We’re thinking more specifically of the yaywastaken referrer script. It’s also a bit sluggish, but that could just be Ish’s current image-heavy blog. If you like it, tell us, and we may refine it for hoi polloi.

Update: Something is rotten with the scraper, so it’s returning bupkes for now. We would apologize, but the millions craving this script for their own use never materialized as we had hoped, so there is nobody to whom we need to apologize.

09.26.02 It’s working again, but we’ve decided to label it Beta, just in case others find bugs. Refine, refine, until it’s like Domino sugar.