The Guardian has a description of what it’s like to live on a space station. For me, it’d be the little things I’d miss. Like fresh fruit. Or the ability to wash my hair normally:

Hair-washing is trickier. Men tend to get military buzz cuts before a mission. Even Sunita Williams, who spent 195 consecutive days on the space station – a female record – had her long dark hair chopped to shoulder length but still had problems. “Washing took time. I’d squirt a little water under my hair, pat it down with my hand so it wasn’t splashing everywhere, then put some shampoo in my hand and moosh it around. Then I’d wet a towel and try and soak it up. I usually did it on a weekend when we didn’t have a whole lot of other things to do,” she says

This week over at /Film, I posted up two interviews with directors I deeply admire: Danny Boyle and Chris Morris.

As I like to say about certain directors, Boyle “gives great interview,” and even if he’s giving the same answers for the 500th time on his press tour, he still manages to imbue them with a profound enthusiasm. I always love films and the process of making them MORE after I speak with him. Boyle’s new film, 127 Hours, is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before and takes the guy-trapped-in-one-place genre to a whole new level. LISTEN.

Morris, on the other hand, has a whole different kind of energy. I’m familiar with his TV work from the past and there’s an undercurrent of “Fuck the establishment…and your expectations!” running through all of it that’s as infectious as the work of Monty Python was decades ago. I think his first film, Four Lions, is bold and challenging, but also very, very funny. LISTEN.

Incidentally, these were my first interviews recorded using the Zoom H4n in conjunction with external mics. I’m extremely pleased with the results, sound-quality wise.

The NYTimes has video interviews with four young adults describing what it’s like to grow up with H.I.V. The advent of antiretroviral therapy has allowed people to survive far longer than was previously possibly. It’s also had profound sociological effects, as these videos will attest to.

Drew McWeeny, on the future of online film journalism:

Things have changed in the last 14 years or so, since I first logged onto a computer looking for movie talk and/or movie news, and while some things about that evolution are great, there are many others that are starting to make me despise the state of the business. I have a feeling this is a conversation that is just warming up, and I hope to play a part in redefining my own feelings about how things should work both here on the site and on the Internet at large. One thing’s certain… it will not continue the way it’s going right now, and the sites that survive this next evolution are the ones that bring genuine knowledge and a voice and a perspective to the table, and ones that are willing to not simply serve as marketing arms to the studios.

Well-said, as with most things that Drew writes. I agree with him on this specific point, although most likely I disagree with him on others. Specifically, I’d add that balancing fairly serious business needs with brand/integrity will be a crucial part of the “survival” that Drew refers to.

[Drew also links to Pajiba’s great piece on the subject, which is well worth a read]

From the video description: “Six Flags New Orleans was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It has been abandoned ever since. This film was made in October 2010. The park is scheduled to be demolished in January 2011.”

It’s like that scene from 28 Days Later (or The Walking Dead) where a man wakes up and realizes all the trappings of civilization have been robbed of any sign of humanity. Only this isn’t a fictional movie.

Update: The creator of this video has removed it “for reasons [he] would not rather have made public.”

Mark Morford is always hilarious. Writing to lazy young democrats in the aftermath of the mid-term elections:

See what happens when you wallow in hollow disappointment, trudging all over your liberal arts campus and refusing to vote in a rather important mid-term election, all because your pet issues and nubile ego weren’t immediately serviced by a mesmerizing guy named Barack Obama just after he sucked you into his web of fuzzyhappy promises a mere two years ago, back when you were knee-high to a shiny liberal ideology? Well, now you know. This is what happens: The U.S. House of Representatives, the most insufferable gaggle of political mongrels this side of, well, the rest of Congress, reverts to GOP control like a brain tumor reverts to a more aggressive form of cancer, and everything gets bleaker and sadder and, frankly, a whole lot nastier.

For everyone who’s ever had their eyes/brain manhandled and condescended to by the likes of Pollock and Motherwell, know this: the CIA was using that art as a weapon against the Soviets during the Cold War. According to a former CIA case officer:

“Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I’d love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!” he joked. “But I think that what we did really was to recognise the difference. It was recognised that Abstract Expression- ism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions. In a way our understanding was helped because Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another.”