Congratulations!

Congratulations! There are dark forces at work in the world, who are wedged securely between the wealthy cheeks of Willie Gates, for reasons way beyond my comprehension; Global we may be, now… I certainly am, but have you actually tried to enjoy what is rightfully yours in, say the Czech republic? or France? Do you know that compact disks in their many fragile manifestations often won't play in another country? That you may buy this form of entertainment is your prerogative; I have chosen not to. When the compact disk arrived, I quit the HiFi business. This medium has no right to be ranked as hifi (high fidelity to the original) and I have only once in my life bought a CD; (Laurie Anderson; 'Big Science') for a particularly beautiful body to dance to. But I have been given a few; the last one, and I will refuse any others, was a DVD from Warner Bros. 'The Last Samurai', which WILL NOT PLAY ON A MACINTOSH COMPUTER. Since then I have given up, after over thirty emails to Warner Bros, to consider this house of thieves anything other than worthless dross.

The American Film Industry  is a crock anyway; one just has to look at the credits for a supposedly decent film to see how this machine wastes our time and money, in a now digital regurgitation of the twenty or so plots that universally categorize what they serve up to the blobby public....and I look on with interest at the future path of that funky, Macintosh using Peter Jackson, who put the Lord of the Rings up on the Linux platform, and who could not have achieved even a shadow of this film had he relied on the aforementioned Willie Gates. Is Willie a bad loser? I suspect so; I have known a few nerdy types in my time; broad minded comprehension of universal values is not their strong point. But if you'd like to put together a 'big picture' these days, you need a few of them around, and choosing them well can net some great results; however, having taken a brand new Zip Disk to my last (some time ago, now) digital creativity session, three hours of radical fringe studio, and a lot of bucks lighter, I discovered, three months later, when about to undertake stage two, that the work of the first session had disappeared from said Zip Disk. Gone forever. Unrepeatable. Give me a master tape, or Vinyl anyday. I love where technology is going, in the research labs; I abhor what manufacturing expedience and the beady eyed focus of those dorks in black suits does to it to get it in the shops. Have you read 'Snow Crash' or 'Diamond Life'? And how about the emergence of the ‘avatar’ as representative of computer users globally? In your dreams fatty.

I prefer the Avatar now available in a cinema near you with 3D glasses at the door. Having avoided all the pre-release hype, I had to sit back at the end and watch the credits to discover WETA Studios put the masterpiece together. The creative geniuses from downunder. Not Hollywood. They’ve got the money is all, not the talent. Nuff said.