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Documentary Bloggers
Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self etc) recently got his blog on over @ the BBC, featuring :
“a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives.” For fans of his provocative and entertaining film-making style, this is good news indeed. Already featured, ‘It felt like a kiss’, an experimental film he made for the BBC last year with the aim of trying to find “a more involving and emotional way of doing political journalism on TV”.

Blogging on the other side of the Atlantic, Errol Morris ( director of The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure, and many more) has been applying his interrogating powers onto photography, art forgeries and documentary re-enactments. Warning : while pursuing his trains of thought, his lines of investigation, you might find a need to go and have a lie down, several times before even getting halfway – the man has the research jaws of a vigorous bulldog. Expect your understandings to flip several times during the course of an investigation.

Comic Remixes
Written and directed by comic author Marjane Satrapi, with Vincent Paronnaud, Persepolis is an animated film showing Marjane’s coming of age while the Iranian revolution unfolded in 1979. It’s a powerful film, showing Marjane’s childhood obsessions ( Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson, punk rock ) juxtaposed with the politics surrounding the Islamic fundamentalist rulers of Iran. Using the very same comic book panels, a pair of comic artists have re-sequenced and re-worded Marjane’s comic to reflect the contemporary situation in Iran, and the lead up to current dissent about the recent election results.

Says Marjane :

Dear Friends
To all who believe in freedom and democracy
Please sign this petition to the United Nations to stop the violence,
arrests and torture in Iran.
( http://www.petitiononline.com/12June/petition.html )
The situation is really really bad.

Please forward it to whoever you know
Best and lots of love
Marjane Satrapi

Tongue Tips
As far as the continued outsourcing of our mental tasks to an internet application goes, this one’s pretty cute – using a combination of dictionaries and word matching algorithims, Tip of My Tongue tries to help with a word that is just out of reach. Clues you can enter include the starting and ending letters, the word’s meaning, the minimum and maximum length and what it sounds like. Good luck with that.

The Pirate Bay Sold Off
The world’s largest torrent site ( hosting over half of the world’s torrent files ), recently the subject of a landmark court case in Sweden, just announced they were being acquired by the Global Gaming Factory for nearly $8 million US. Which by itself might sound ominous for the site’s future, but they have also decided to decentralise the storage of the site’s torrent files, hoping that BitTorrent users will be less reliant on the uptime of The Pirate Bay’s servers alone, the burden now to be spread among several independently operated services.

MSA Remote for the iPhone
Good news as video producer Memo finally gets his iphone app approved :
“MSA Remote is a remote control application for iPhone & iPod Touch that sends OSC messages over the wifi network. This allows you to control any OSC supporting applications such as Max/MSP/Jitter, PureData, Reaktor, VDMX, vvvv, Resolume, Quartz Composer etc. By mapping the OSC to midi on desktop (e.g. using OSCulator) allows further control of any application which supports midi such as Ableton Live, Cubase, Logic Pro, 3DSMax etc. In addition, developers can easily integrate OSC into their applications knowing it can be controlled remotely. The application can be distributed to visitors, guests, members of the public etc. to interact with an installation or performance, or used by dedicated performers.”