It is rare to find film documentaries that are narrator-less and avoid having a first person point of view. Even more rare, is to find documentaries that are at the same time poetic, lyric, and musical. Last week I discovered the works of Les Blank, an American filmmaker that creates documentaries with such unconventional characteristics….
The history of the personal computer revolution has several myths. Some of them focus on individual geniuses (hackers, nerds, or hippies), others on single machines (ALTAIR 8800, Apple II). Those myths tend to ignore not only the role of the USA government in helping to set up the sociotechnical infrastructure for the development of computing,…
Today i went to a special event organized by the center for mexican american studies that featured the film screening of Born in East L.A and a talk with director and actor Cheech Marin. Although i didn’t know anything about the career of this artist, the posters that advertised the event called my attention. An…
The first time i encountered an image of Comala was in the written words of Juan Rulfo’s master piece Pedro Paramo (1955). I was fascinated by the poetical power of this mythical space. Comala was at the same time a town, a state of mind, an underworld, heaven and a total universe. After re-reading Rulfo’s…
i invite people to mail me a telegram. since telegrams are a dead medium and we cannot send them anymore, i invite you to download the following image, print it and then, fill it with a short message. please limit your characters to no more than 200 hundred. the topic for this project is the…
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers By Tom Standage. New York : Walker and Co., 1998. Pp. IX + 227. $9.56. The title of this book, in particular the words “Internet” and “On-Line,” reminds us that networked telecommunication systems are not unique to our contemporary times….
Inside the multitude of twitter feeds i monitor as part of my job in the office of student affairs, i discovered that a 35mm print of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (W. Herzog, 1974) was going to be screened last monday at the campus movie theater, the texas union. I was glad to find this…