Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Drupal 5.0 is soon to be released. I had to find an excuse for playing with it and at the same time research the hugely popular CCK and Views modules. I learn best from making small, complete projects. I'm no good at working with dummy examples when I'm trying to learn new technologies. So I grabbed a copy of the Release Candidate and created a database of my DVD collection. It took about 6 hours total (4 for setting up Drupal, 2 for watching Vertigo while typing in the movie information). You can see the result at http://movies.solitude.dk/. Just don't poke fun at which movies I own (okay, I won't mind, really).

One of my goals was to see how far I could get without touching any code. I could do everything using just the configuration screens, but the default design of the nodes (when using CCK) is so ugly that I had to go in (using contemplate) and change the design. After that I went in the theme directly and changed the way taxonomy terms were displayed.

I'm using these non-core modules:

• Views (for creating the table listings, sorted alphabetically).
• CCK with link(adding Year Released, My Rating and IMDB link fields).
• Content Templates (contemplate) (customizing the CCK output)
• Tagadelic (tag clouds)

In addition I'm using taxonomy module extensively. I'm controlling actor names, director name and which collection a movie belong to all using different taxonomy vocabularies.

There are advantages to having an engineer as your twin brother. Say that you're sitting around watching television and you happen to switch to Speed right as Sandra Bullock makes the bus do an impressive 15 meter jump while running at 70 miles/hour. When that happens you can simply hand said brother an old magazine and a pen and he will effortlessly calculate how fast the bus really should be driving to make the gap.

To those wondering: A bus travelling 70 miles/hour (112 km/h) would drop 1.14 meters during a 15 meter gap, surely rendering the bus unusable (not to mention throwing Keanu and Sandra through the front windshield). The bus would need a speed of 136 miles/hour (or 218km/h) to only drop 30 centimeters during a 15 meter gap. We estimate that the bus could still make the jump with a 30 centimeter drop (although the tires will be mangled). Also the above only applies if the bus is travelling in a vacuum and not in… you know… reality.

Lately I've bought a lo of movies. Not because I have time to sit down and watch them but because movies are cheap and it's great to have a couple of new DVDs to bring every time I have to take he 4,5 hour train ride to Copenhagen. Makes me wish I was taking the train to Milan for VlogEurope as I would be able to do a Planet of the Apes and a Tarantino marathon. Here's the unseen DVDs I've got on the shelf/lying all over the place right now. If you've got any suggestions as to what I should be watching first, let me know.

• Goodfellas
• Strangers on a train
• Saboteur
• Shadow of a doubt
• The trouble with Harry
• The man who knew too much
• Psycho
• Scarface
• Planet of the apes
• Beneath the planet of the apes
• Escape from the planet of the apes
• Conquest of the planet of the apes
• Battle for the planet of the apes
• The Yards (going to suck)
• City of Ghosts (this too)
• The Machinist (borrowed)
• The Deer Hunter (borrowed)
• Battle Royale (borrowed)

For my birthday I got a box with seven Hitchcock movies. I've only gotten to watch two of them so far, but it's all good. A box like that is something I will enjoy stretching out over several months. The first I picked out was Rope from 1948, Hitchcock's first colour film. I had seen it before when I was much too young to appreciate it. The movie is filmed like a stage play with the entire wall of an apartment never seen. It also uses very long takes of 7 to 10 minutes throughout the movie. We never once leave the apartment of our main characters and all these experiments with form is something I enjoy very much. Hitchcock is of course the master of suspense and while this movie is primarily about the undoubtedly homosexual relationship between Brandon and Philip, Hitchcock will have you sitting on the edge of your seat.

They just don't make movies like Rope anymore. Or rather Hollywood don't make movies like Rope anymore. There are a heap of interesting independent films being made these days, but Hollywood has thrown the towel in. Back in the old days (or perhaps “less recent days”) Hollywood would actually fund controversial, inspirational movies that provided food for thought. Not anymore. Everything is weighed on the altar of market analysts and the result is a bunch of movies that only provide fleeting entertainment. The movies have planned obsoletion like all other products in this day and age.

So do yourself favour. Take the money you were going to spend on a ticket for The Guardian and find your local art cinema of independent movie theater instead. My brother tipped me about Das Leben der Anderen which is currently playing in Denmark. Go see something non-Hollywood, then go buy Rope on DVD. I bet it's cheap.

Derek Powazek reports that the MPAA took a bashing at SXSW. One answer from the MPAA representative peaked my interest:

One guy moved to the UK and all his DVDs stopped working because they were region-encoded (as most are). Her answer? That was in the contract you agreed to when you bought the DVD.

I got out the last DVD I purchased located the legal stuff on the back.

This is the only legal text on the case — there is no text on the disc itself apart from “© 1940”. It carries words to the effect of: "Warning: The rights of this disc are owned by Poulin A/S. The movie may only be shown in private homes. Illegal use or copyingwill result in prosecution.

Somehow my disc is missing the part where I'm not allowed to watch my movie in a different country. Perhaps it's written in invisible ink (I wonder if that holds up in court).

A cable channel showed the brilliant movie One Hour Photo tonight, starring Robin Williams as the psychotic photo lab operator. I won't get into the tragedy of his character, but move on to a quote that stuck with me:

I'm sure my customers never think about it… but these snapshots are their little stands against the flow of time. The shutter is clicked… the flash goes off… and they've stopped time… if just for the blink of an eye. And if these pictures have anything important to say to future generations, it's this… I was here. I existed. I was young. I was happy… and someone cared enough about me in this world to take my picture. Most people don't take snapshots of the little things… the used Band-Aid… the guy at the gas station… the wasp on the Jell-O… but these are the things that make up the true picture of our lives. People don't take pictures of these things.

Peter Harms Larsen writes about this registrering aspect of the photograph and the video in “Faktion som udtryksmiddel” (in Danish only, sorry):

Fotografiets — og senere filmens specifikke mekanisk-kemiske produktionsteknik (i modsætning til tegningens og maleriets subjektivt håndværksmæssige), medfører at disse nye billedfremstillinger på én gang registrerer en del af den synlige virkelighed nærmest som et måleinstrument, samtidigt med at de afbilleder den med en særlig realistisk mimesis. Vi får altså billeder hvis betydning består i en kombination af den indexikalske og den ikoniske tegnfunktion i forhold til den gengivne virkelighed.

And Adrian Miles makes the more or less obvious connection to blogging in “Blogs: Distributed Documentaries of the Everyday”:

This 'everydayness' of blogging grounds practice in the lifeworld of the writer, and tends to assist in legitimating the blog in terms of its purchase upon the world. […] The notion of authenticity here is related to the indexical markers described, so that these texual markers operate much like the analog indexical relations evident in film. This is not to overstate the point, but it is to insist that when a blogger mentions a place, time, or person, such place, events and people do exist.

Richard BF somehow thinks that video has patented the registration of the everyday in videoblogging. He even says he doesn't like photography because it's posed (if that's not what he's saying I'm not understanding his dislike of photography). The difference between video and photography is not that one is somehow more real than the other — they are equally “posed” so to speak. The difference is simply that the photography freezes a blink of an eye in time, while the video records a series of blinks. I find this freezing in time very alluring, as it can show things the continuous recording cannot. They two are different, but to say that one is more real than the other would be a mistake.

Richard ended his post with a snapshot of real life. I suppose I should end with a photo snapshot from real life. Jenn took the photo, but I wish I had. The photo has frozen time at the right moment where Indie (the cute puppy) and the cow are looking at each other. That makes this blink of an eye much more powerful than a video of the event would have.

I'm a little late because the university is literally sucking 12 hours of work out of me every day this week.

Friday the whole country was upside down because the Crown Prince got married to Mary Donaldson from Australia. It was a very nice wedding and of course it brought forward the debate about monarchy again. The people who want a Danish republic were on the barricades shouting to get rid of the monarchy. Naturally it's more than a little odd to have the country formally run by a Queen even if she doesn't have any real power.

Despite that I would like to keep the monarchy because it is a defining part of Denmark. I'm a Dane, a citizen in that little fairy tale country in Scandinavia where princes and princesses really do exist. A place where Julia Stiles becomes a princess. Sure it might be nostalgia and romanticism. It's definately not cost-effective, but to me it's still worth paying for. Denmark just wouldn't be the same place without the monarchy — it would just be yet another small country. I would rather live in the fairy tale.

Just for the record: I haven't watched The Prince and Me where Julia Stiles falls in love with a Danish Prince. Judging from the plot summaries on IMDB it is not an accurate picture of the Danish monarchy. Princes don't come to the USA to quench their thirst for rebellion. They come there to attend Harvard. A gap year is something an Amish person has, not something a Prince in a modern monarchy has. And my favourite part from the previews on tv: Danish royalty do not run around every day wearing their formal, military uniforms with all their medals. What can you expect from a movie with Julia Stiles…