Crikey.

By now everyone on the planet, Down Under and Up Here, has heard of the untimely passing of "The Crocodile Hunter." Barbed through the heart by a stingray in shallow waters off the coast of his island-continent, Steve Irwin went out doing what he loved: bringing Australia's native fauna into the world's living rooms. He has been publicly mourned by his Prime Minister, by the devoted fans who've set up a floral shrine outside his Australia Zoo, by Russell Crowe, and by millions of people the world over who grew to love his quirky, controversial, frontier approach to wildlife conservation. His death came as both a shock and an inevitability, for this was a man who thought nothing of sidling up to 16-foot saltwater crocs, of handling taipans mambas vipers cobras, of diving with every predator of the deep.

The saying goes that we make our own fun, and everything else is entertainment. Steve Irwin made his own fun, crafted a life around bringing that fun to every couchbound entertainment-seeker who caught his show. You could see the gleam in his eyes when he had some monster in a close-up's foreground, the twinkle of a kid bringing home a frog in his lunchbox. "Isn't she a beaut?!" he would whisper with that ripe-for-caricature Aussie awe. "She's gorgeous!" For many, Irwin's exploits were legendary in the pop-culture sense of the term, marveled over for an hour or so and forgotten as soon as the channel flipped. There might be a lingering awareness of the fact that he had his smiling mug in the mouth of a huge reptile, or had grabbed a venomous snake by the tail, but the specifics could tend to fade with each successive televisual moment. Entertainment is, after all, entertainment. It is evanescent and mercurial by nature, lasting only as long as the pixels flicker before the eye.

For the rest of us, Irwin was--and remains--a hero by every definition. He did what we could only hope to do, given the opportunity and the balls-out willingness to stare Death in the face and say, "Not just now, thanks. You'll have your chance soon enough, but not just now."

"Daring" is a word too often used in this entertainment-driven world, a term applied most frequently to trivial pursuits of the mind, of creativity and essential passivity. That last Michael Winterbottom flick was daring, say, or the most recent frame hung on the walls at MOMA. Steve Irwin was Daring. His life required capitalization and, if available, block letters and boldface. And yet he also managed to come across as the most down-to-earth, self-effacing daredevil. He was wired differently than most of us, and it showed.

There's another cliché out there, that you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have. My fondest memory of Steve Irwin, the one I would cite to anyone who mentions his name, is of watching him snorkeling with sea snakes and diving to follow them--clad not in wetsuit trunks Speedo, but in his trademark khaki shorts and shirt. Underwater. Steve Irwin dressed for the job he had, and he did it well. If the clothes make the man, The Crocodile Hunter was more of a man than most of us can ever hope to be--and without ever sacrificing that childlike twinkle. The world is better for his having been here.

Crocs rule. R.I.P.

"everyday"

My good friend J. sent me the above link late last night, and it's easily the coolest thing I've seen all week. Noah Kalina has taken a candid self-portrait every day for six-and-a-half years (and counting), stitching them all together over some really ominous piano. It's a fascinating glimpse into a person's life. We are privy to his changing hairstyles, living arrangements, random friends/acquaintances in the background, clothes worn and discarded that magically move from desk to floor to back-of-chair, etc. The expressionless camera-presence is the only relative constant.

There's something about the immediacy of Kalina's face in these frames, the contextualization of a life-in-progress that goes on in the periphery around the static, almost serene center. It grabbed me in an unexpected way--much as van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear [below right] draws me in, or Schiele's Self-Portrait with Black Vase [below left], or any of Rembrandt's self-portraits with their luminous-yet-still-murky backgrounds. Each of these works makes me stare into the eyes at the same time I'm looking at what else is in the frame, curious to discover how the mind behind a famous face describes itself by what it makes available in the mise-en-scene.

But Kalina's photography here is more raw, less contrived than a painted self-portrait, where the artist must consider each individual brushstroke. To add another layer of reference to this deconstruction, the animation of his snapshots strikes me as almost pointillist. Like Seurat or Lichtenstein, the overall effect when one stands back from the framed work (or, here, the 6 minutes or so of animation) is something greater than the sum of its individual dots. The viewer is left to infer any stories implied by the changing periphery, and the questions that arise etch the piece with all the contours and textures of a 3-dimensional, 360-degree, "real" life: "Why the beaded necklace near the middle of the piece? Who gave it to him? Why did it suddenly disappear?" "Etc., etc., etc..."

everyday is also a declaration of the power of editing and scoring to alter the meaning of any individual frame in a film. As we have seen recently with the burgeoning craft of "alternative trailers," the image on celluloid is only part of the picture. [My favorite example, taken from one of my favorite films, follows at the end of this post. -N.] By changing the music or the surrounding visual elements of a filmic image, one can effectively re-invent any work in the medium. The Russian film pioneer Lev Kuleshov first described this phenomenon, what would later be called "The Kuleshov Effect." He showed static film of a man's impassive face, then a bowl of soup, then the man's face again, then a coffin, then the man's face, and on and on. Between juxtapositions he would ask his audiences to describe what the man might be feeling. The reaction was overwhelmingly uniform across several versions of the experiment: after the shot of the soup went back to the face, the man was happy because he could eat; after the coffin, the man was sad because someone he knew had died. Keep in mind that the shot of the man's face was the same, changeless and betraying no emotion. What the audience registered was the power of montage, of a filmed moment's context within an edited work rather than as a moment in and of itself. Kalina's blank stare asks his viewers to work the same sort of deduction based on the changing information along the edges of the frame, but at a pace much faster than Kuleshov ever considered.

There's another element at work here that subverts the essential voyeuristic nature of film even as it exploits it. Sure, we have this peek into another's life, and he can't see us watching--but he is staring directly into our eyes from the middle of the frame. It's rare in narrative film to have a character looking directly into the camera (Jonathan Demme uses the technique most unsettlingly in The Silence of the Lambs). It happens more often in documentary film, but for a person to offer, without stutter, "Welcome into my world, my life, my home" from the simultaneous remove and immediacy of a piece like everyday is startling, to say the very least.

Film history lectures aside, a brief admission: it's early yet this rainy Boston Sunday, I've only now hooked up my morning coffee, and everyday was the first thing I saw upon waking after a night of fitful, talkative sleep. I had a definite moment of existential crisis while viewing the piece, wondering where the last six-and-a-half years of my own life have gone while I watched those of another passing before my eyes. I have no doubt that my morning would have been considerably less thoughtful had Kalina scored his epic transformations with, say, The Black Eyed Peas. "Let's Get Retarded" would impart upon the viewer a completely different impression of his work and life than does the current piano score by Carly Comando. Were there also more glaring changes in angle and framing, I probably wouldn't have taken time out of a grey day to write this entry. Behold the power of film, right?

As it stands, this is the kind of project I would advise my kids to undertake as soon as they can wield a camera. It's the perfect complement to a written or video diary (or blog, for that matter), but without all the pressure that a daily catalogue of one's feelings tends to exert over time. A literal fraction of a second each day, and there exists in the digital ether a record of your life in stop-motion. Amazing. Wish I had thought of it years ago. Might start tomorrow. Cheers in the meantime to Mr. Kalina for having the bravery (nay, balls?) to show us the blink-and-you-miss-it passage of time as one man experiences it, at just under 24 frames-per-second.

Things I'm Not Going To Write About

[zzzz. zzzzyzzzzx. zzzSNAP. What the... Poopytrip! What month is it? September!? Okay... wellywell... Time for a bit of the ol' pipecleaner on the brainside. Don't we all need that from time to time? Like when it's been six weeks of monkeyshit in between you and your last blog post? I owe apologies to everyone who has logged on and been forced to witness the Basketcase-esque abomination that is two Wayanses latched together in a frontal-papoose-style arrangement. Scusilo. Je m'excuse. Et cetera. Ad infinitum.... So here's what I've been working on that will never get a full-length, exhaustive (read: boring) examination in these pages. Consider these open letters as being written to whomever* might be the intended recipient. Peace.]

Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones and NASCAR: There was an ad that hyped the TNT (read: AOL-Time/Warner) airings of NASCAR races, which are in the first place incomprehensible; in the second, inexcusable. I write this, mind you, as a man who spent his formative years in the American South. So take it how you will: am I merely offering apologia for My Redneck Past, or am I genuinely perturbed by Our Red States' Obsession With Men Turning Left? Take the latter. Anyway, the Stones are singing about a woman who's "Driving Too Fast" in this tune, and I can't help thinking it sounds like exactly what I'd expect from a group so...so...septuagenarian? It's a 6-minute track if you steal it, and it's only worth half that. The opening chorus goes something like: "I love you baby I love you too much. / I love you baby that I can't stop the fuss." The "fuss?" Is this some Britslang I ain't party to quite yet, or is it just lazy writing?

MJ: "Hey, Keith, what rhymes with "Much?"

KR: "Er...zzz...wha--Poopytrip! 'Fuss!'"

This is a band that rocked for a few good years (until around 1981ish) on riffs and beats lifted from The Great American Bluesmen. Now they're relegated to the rubbishbin of pop-redneck, corporate-salaried, AOL-Time/Warnerish hackery, re-examining a theme I thought Prince had killed with "Little Red Corvette."

P: "Baby, you much too fast [You got to slow dow-own!]."

Sure she drives too fast, Mick. You're old and crotchety and every old, crotchety man claims that everyone else--hot women included--drives too fast. Show the kind of restraint that Jimi and Bob and Kurt and Janis and Stevie and Hank and Woody and Buddy and Axl did and roll out with some dignity, okay?

Axl?: I'll believe he's still breathing when I hear Chinese Democracy.

Keith Richards and the 1967 Rolling Stones Death Pool: How. I mean. Really. Is it just your cholesterol's low, or what? Were it not for the smoking cigarette dangling from your lips at the Super Bowl, I would have assumed animatronics and Disney-style floofaroo. Kudos if you're not already animatronic. If you're already all gears and pulleys, then you aren't even reading this. With that in mind...

Animatronic Rolling Stones: It's really the only stop after Johnny Depp claims your swagger as his own in a movie based on a theme-park ride. Like Gibson did with his whole Man-On-The-Cross shit.

Mel Gibson? An Anti-Semite? Nah...: Really the ugliest story, but also the most predictable. Here's a guy whose father put out white-power, pro-Nazi newsletters as part of a radical-Catholic movement in Australia while Mel was off growing the Ubermullet that would eventually gain him Lethal Weapons 1 through IV. So when William Wallace switches from beer to SS-and-Sevens, all manner of donkeypiss spews forth. It's wildly ironic that the man who made the most wildly anti-Semitic movie of all time (The Passion of The Christ), when pissed, flails on and on about every Hebrew who's not already his Lord and Saviour. Pick a Jew and stick with it, Mel. Please. I liked The Man Without A Face, really. Cross my heart. No, not that cross, Mel. Just climb down and we'll talk.

Crosses: Better than crescents or Mogen Davids? Who decides? (5 USD on the latter...takers?).

War In The Middle East: Seriously, Lebanon. What? Rocks only beat scissors, and the paper comes from Washington. Be happy with the land you have and just be done with the rest. Thanks.

Nukes In The Middle East: Oh. What? I thought that was just North Korea and Libya and Iran and India and Pakistan and aren't all of these people just pissed off at each other? At US?!?! Okay. Lebanon, listen up: Sorry about that whole last shit. We're cool as long as we're cool, y'know? Just don't do anything I wouldn't, and leave a full tank when you drop off the keys. Rightyroo, rocknroll. Speaking of...

Plane Crashes and Emmys: Congrats, Monk. Congrats, Mister Carell. Congrats, Jon Stewart. O'Brien? Nice show. Don't hold you accountable in any way for anything that happened during that telecast. Your timing's never been flawless (but neither was Johnny's), but this time the flaws found a momentary audience. Fear not: Like the Emmys, the controversy and the crash will fade into distant memory soon enough...

Oliver Stone and World Trade Center: ...until Ollie comes out WAAAAY after the starting bell, murmurs a barely audible "Poopytrip!" and sets to work assassinating your character in 2011. On peyote and Cuban hookers.

Peyote and Cuban Hookers: Um... Yeah, how much por la noche? And how much if you don't melt into David Crosby?

Robert DeNiro: Really, Bob. Dead to me. Don't even bother calling this time.

John Mark Karr: "She loves me, she loves me not. She loves me, she loves me not. I was there in the room, I wasn't even in the state. I just wanted a hug from police officers, or the FBI." Can't skinny and goofy-looking qualify as a capital offense? Please? Just once?

The Chicken I Raped With A Beer Can Last Night: Sorry. I can only imagine how that hurt. If it helps matters any: you were delicious and you were dead. And I promise I'll work that entire carcass into a bitchin' leftover-chix soup. I try to roll like a Plains Indian (feathers, not dots) with that good shit, y'know, use every part of the proverbial buffalo. Even though you can't hunt them anymore, except by private arrangement. Buffalo, that is. Black gold, West-Texas plea. Yeah, um...

Buffalo: Sorry. I meant "bison," and never meant to understate your car-knocking-over ability. Kudos to great SUV-relocation potential, and long may you prosper.

My Pillow: A great place to spend the night. Cheers and

[zzzz...zzzzyzzzzx...zzzSNAP!]

*: Oh, or is it "whoever?" Did you really scroll all the way down here after the asterisk? There are greater problems on the horizon, mi amigo, than my grasp of interstitial M's. Focus.