Nerdology

Cool interview with Daft Punk in GQ by Zach Baron.

One of the things that stood is how much Daft Punk is kind of hating on their own record. They do it to the point of evoking Scream sequels:

Only a handful of people have heard the album so far, but the two men already seem resigned to the possibility that no one will like it.

“In Scream 2, they have this discussion about how sequels always suck,” Bangalter says. In this scheme, Random Access Memories might as well be Scream 4. “The thing we can ask ourselves at some point is like: We’re making music for twenty years. How many bands and acts do you have that are still making good music after twenty years? It always sucks—almost always, you know?”

And de Homem-Christo, who has said maybe a few dozen words up to this point, most of them about salad and directed at our waitress, peers over the golden top edge of his sunglasses and says: “So our new album is supposed to really suck.”

It reminds me of Nirvana before In Utero came out. Kurt Cobain went on record saying, “The grown-ups don’t like it,” and that it was “unlistenable”. He also told Circus, “The first time I played it at home, I knew there was something wrong. The whole first week I wasn’t really interested in listening to it at all, and that usually doesn’t happen. I got no emotion from it, I was just numb.”

It’s kind of interesting. And I’d like to go on record saying that Scream 4 was better than Scream 3… so there’s that.

Also, interesting is that this is the writers first article for GQ. So, good for him.

Mark this date. I have a feeling this is going to be a huge disruption in the TV space. It’s limited to select partners for right now, but I’ll bet that anyone with a YouTube channel will get the opportunity eventually. And as Mat Honan says, this brings us “a small step closer to the dream of a la carte programming.”

YouTube will let you pay to subscribe to channels with a new pilot program that includes a limited number of channel partners for now. The company listed Jim Henson Family TV and Ultimate Fighting Championship as initial members.

Prices start at $.99 per month, paid via Google Wallet. Users get a 14 day free trial to channels, which are also discounted if you subscribe by the year. Once signed up for a paid channel, you can suck down as much video as it has to offer.

You should read Rolling Stone’s 1977 cover story / interview with George Lucas.

What sets Star Wars apart from its predecessors are the special effects (some 365 separate shots) and the extraordinary richness of Lucas’ imagination. There’s the Cantina sequence, for instance, where the heroes stumble into a bar whose patrons are the scum of a dozen galaxies. And there are ancillary creatures like the Jawas, tiny, chattering beings who hustle used robots for a living. As for the opticals and miniatures, Lucas and Dykstra have come up with a new standard against which all future space-fiction films must be judged. Before Star Wars was released, Dykstra told an interviewer that the final battle sequence would be every bit as exciting as ‘The French Connection’ car chase. He was right.

And from George himself, letting us know right from the start that Star Wars was for kids:

I saw that kids today don’t have any fantasy life the way we had – they don’t have westerns, they don’t have pirate movies, they don’t have that stupid serial fantasy life that we used to believe in. It wasn’t that we really believed in it…
…
I just wanted to forget science. That would take care of itself. Stanley Kubrick made the ultimate science-fiction movie and it is going to be very hard for somebody to come along and make a better movie, as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t want to make a 2001, I wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties.

I was surprised to read that even in 1977 Lucas was trying to get out of filmmaking. He has enough money at this point, I kind of wish he was just making weird experimental films.

Also, I figured the merchandising along with the sequels would give me enough income over a period of time so that I could retire from professional filmmaking and go into making my own kind of movies, my own sort of abstract, weird, experimental stuff.