My potential to undermine any authority makes me a great leader.

There’s this great audio technology called MIDI. It’s very old and the principle is simple: in a midi audio file you don’t put actual sound, you just indicate “play this note on that instrument for so long”. That means midi files are very small: sounds are stored on the device you play the file on.

Mobile phone makers implemented midi in phones, but they called it “polyphonic ringtones”. That’s brilliant: people who want a new tune for their phone visit websites that charge over a buck per tune. According to BBC news, ringtones have outgrown even CD single sales. And nobody seems aware of the huge midi archive that’s on the net, free for download. A decent Rammstein track is impossible to find though.

Pool with the guys in Leuven, ex collegues, and I wander whether I’m better off working in Zellik. I wander how working this hard in a solid structure with art that will be seen compares to total lack of supervision, or playground, where little of my effords were spread.

Mamoru Oshii’s The Ghost In The Shell 2 features some overwhelming graphics; the makers learned from the The Spirits Within and steered clear from realistic humans. Yet the plot borrows from so many, that it’s almost too post-modern. Half the dialogue are quotes from Confucius to the Bible, the Matrix is in the introduction, Asimovs laws are implemented. Heck, even a parallel between main character Batou and the Terminator (both cool and human apart from their synthetic eyes) is not far fetched.

Back to the good. Just like Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, GITS2 features some charming fantasy scenes that remind of Disney dream sequences. Some scenes use very little to create an oppressing atmophere of lonelyness, as did Oshii’s own Avalon. Yet there again, some scenes come straight from Avalon. Lonely Man Feeds Dog versus Lonely Woman feeds Dog? What is it with directors who need to have their rememberable element in the movie? Is Oshii’s Dog John Woo’s pigeon? Go see it anyway, I’ve just seen too many

Apple manages to squeeze out a computer the size of a stack of CD jewel cases, let’s hope some wintellers get curious and get one with extra onion rings. The bar will not be lowered, people. And a Mac Mini render farm is so much cooler than a cracked X-box render farm.

Some nice bloke from work knows a lot of nice blokes with downloaded movies. As he happened to have his gigantic hard disk with him, he gave it his colleagues, all nice blokes, who added their movies to the disk. And in the end, you guessed, this nice bloke hooked said disk up to my pBook. So I just saw Alien vs. Predator (flic I would never have seen in the theatre), 31 pending. Is it just me, or do the predators look an awful lot like Jamaicans? Bloody racist Americans.

Noisy bars are great. I spend the day thinking a woman last night was wearing perfume called ‘Rash’, by Gucci. “Skin eruption“, I thought, how unique a name is that? It’s Rush, by the way.

I’m not claiming Jude Law is a bad actor. But seeing Michael Caine perform Alfie ages before Jude, I must admit Michael is natural. He’s an ass hole, but it’s natural. Jude is what men want to be. Is it, by the way, just me or are so many old movies more natural? If only Cartoons Cinema, the last quality theatre in town, didn’t have these stamp-size screens and legroom based on the body of an 8-year-old.

Mum warned me plenty. ‘Boy‘, she used to say, ‘don’t meddle with them damn’ conceptual artists. They’ll bring you nothing but trouble‘. You may want to flip through Lucies happy famous artists (specially work) though. If a strong concept is visualised attractively in installation or performance, it’s very compelling. One might argue that in a way every work of art is conceptual, but I can sure mail you some links to prove there are artists out there with little cerebral pre-production.

Perhaps mum had concept-only art in mind. Or maybe she thought it had something to do with the art of conception.

Anoyther working day tomorrow. Breaks over 2 days hurt like hell. Perhaps I should pack a small bottle of red whine for lunch, just to take the edge off the pain.

Saw movie “Alfie” earlier, with Jude Law. Makes me long for the original Michal Caine version Roger Ebert wrote about. Could Michael possibly be as sexy (and lonely) as Jude? I guess this flick once again confirms that love hurts.