Rob Weychert

Art and Artifice

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 015:30:00 -0400

Art communicates. The core message might be as simple as “I like Slayer” or as complicated as “Let’s begin reversing centuries of female marginalization.” The work’s context and various expressive textures contribute narrative layers that enrich that core message. The more we identify with the message, its layers, and their convergence, the more we like the art, even if we can’t explain what those things are or how we connect with them.

In the who, what, when, where, why, and how of a work’s context, the how tends to be the most contentious for me, because I often feel that any attention it draws to itself is too much. A gasp of “How’d they do that?” loudly acknowledges the work’s artifice; these are the words of someone on the outside looking in rather than someone who has been absorbed.

Several years ago, I took in a performance from beatbox virtuoso Rahzel, and had this to say:

[...] while Rahzel’s human beatbox is astounding in its simulation of an actual DJ at the decks, it doesn’t simulate a particularly inventive DJ, and craft is only as valuable as the art it serves. [...] The result was generally so self-congratulatory, I wasn’t sure why it was even being performed for an audience.

Virtuosity becomes problematic when it wants its hard work to be appreciated as much as (or more than) the product of that work.

Filmmaker Greg Jardin recently released a stop-motion animated music video for pop singer Kina Grannis’s “In Your Arms.” The three-minute video’s production took two years and a team of three dozen people. Surely no one will argue that this is an impressive amount of dedication, but Jardin tips his hand at the end: “This video was made using 288,000 Jelly Belly jelly beans and 1 Kina Grannis.”

Sure enough, a short documentary about the incredibly laborious process behind the 2,300 frames of “In Your Arms” is more interesting and memorable than the video itself. This is a celebration of the hand more than the handmade.

A similarly juxtaposed pair of videos featuring saxophonist Colin Stetson yields a different result. The first video is a captivating live performance of Stetson’s “Judges,” as honest and purposeful a musical performance as I’ve seen.

In the second video, Stetson breaks down his music’s rich sonic palette and explains how it comes together live without accompaniment or overdubs. The sound he accomplishes with just a bass sax, a few well-placed microphones, and his own respiratory system is amazing, but at no time do his methods overwhelm their product. My appreciation of his process reinforces what I already love about the music (which is admittedly hard to articulate) without supplanting it.

Of course, art’s most central trait is its subjectivity. It is not impossible for Greg Jardin’s and Kina Grannis’s work to speak to someone else the same way Colin Stetson’s speaks to me. And I hope it does, especially to Jardin and Grannis themselves. Because doing something just to say you did it seems like a pretty empty endeavor.

Skulls

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 016:00:00 -0400

It is no secret that Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. Is there any other event celebrated on a mass scale whose very purpose is to challenge the tenuous divide between pain and pleasure? Halloween encourages us to enjoy our fear, to find mirth in the macabre, to recognize how death enriches life. On every other day, fear holds us back; on Halloween, it propels us forward. What’s not to love?

And so it is no coincidence that Halloween is the raison d’être of one of my favorite bands of all time: The Misfits. By turns melodic, aggressive, campy, and menacing, The Misfits traded in punk anthems that often made an effortlessly joyful celebration of horrific imagery. Every year, those anthems are the soundtrack to my October.

I’ve always wanted to take a stab at my own version of a Misfits tune, and this year, I finally did. Since Leah, my partner in crime, has her birthday just a few days after Halloween, I started with her favorite, “Skulls.” My version’s aesthetic goal is best described as a “Leonard Cohen spaghetti western.” I don’t think it quite got there, but the results are listenable enough. I hope you enjoy it. Happy Halloween!

Download “Skulls” (5.5 MB MP3)

Horror Business

Wed, 28 Oct 2011 09:30:00 -0400

Halloween is just a few days away, and I have spent this October as I spend most: preparing for Satan’s glorious return by watching as many horror movies as possible. In years past, I’ve mixed it up with classics and new releases alike, but this year I decided to tackle only established films that I hadn’t yet seen for one reason or another. This included recent blockbuster franchises (Saw, Paranormal Activity), infamous “video nasty” exploitation (Cannibal Holocaust), and gems from admired directors’ back catalogs (Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers, Peter Jackson’s Frighteners), among others.

By November’s arrival, I will have watched at least a dozen films, and, egged on by the fantastic new social film diary site Letterboxd, I wrote reviews for a handful of them. Since Letterboxd is not yet open to the public, I decided to republish those reviews here.

Hostel Part II

When I recently finally saw the first Hostel, I was surprised by how fun it was. Eli Roth’s first feature, Cabin Fever, had not endeared him to me, and that plus Hostel’s reputation for being a torture porn standard-bearer alongside the idiotic and gimmicky Saw films had done little to persuade me. But I had to admit Hostel was competently made and showed both the reverence Roth has for his influences and the glee he takes in his work.

I was similarly impressed going into Hostel Part II, which puts a new trio of college kids on the chopping block but adds a narrative layer from the other side of the blade, showing us how the plans are set in motion to seal these kids’ fates. It’s not an unusual trick for a sequel to essentially repeat its predecessor with added backstory that saps both films of any and all mystique, but Hostel Part II manages to keep things interesting by offering us a glimpse into the mindset of its villains, seemingly normal men who are willing to pay big bucks for the chance to disassemble undergrads.

Unfortunately, the one thing that’s not repeated from the first film is the fun. In particular, a very deliberate set piece designed for one character’s demise (a literal bloodbath) seems intent on being remembered for all time as cinema’s definitive torture porn sequence. It’s not fun, and it’s not scary; it just feels like it was made on a dare.

With a little less marketing savvy, it might have been called Hostel II: The Switcheroo, mainly because the protagonists are female this time, but ultimately because of the twist it introduces toward the end. It’s actually not a bad twist, but we don’t have much opportunity to enjoy it, as it apparently signifies the editor’s cue to dispense with the careful pacing and get this thing done in under ninety minutes already. The resulting rushed ending is deeply unsatisfying.

If I’m going to become an Eli Roth fan, I’ll need to see him build on the promise of the first Hostel. This sequel just doesn’t do it.

The Others

Remember when Nirvana exploded and every major label scrambled to sign any band they could find that was even remotely similar? Well, if The Sixth Sense is Nirvana (and given how quickly M Night Shyamalan squandered whatever goodwill his breakout hit engendered, I hesitate to draw the comparison), then The Others is Bush.

The themes, tone, essential plot points, and even the color palette are all lifted directly. To its credit, this is not immediately apparent, and the way the exposition is carefully doled out over the first two acts makes it genuinely intriguing for awhile. But once it brings the hammer down and starts clueing you in to you what’s really going on, it feels all too familiar.

The main thing that made The Sixth Sense work was that it was actually an affecting drama (thanks in large part to Toni Collette’s overlooked performance) masquerading as a horror movie. The Others has the same goal, but the drama falls flat. Nicole Kidman works so hard to keep you guessing whether she’s crazy or not that it becomes a study in overt dynamics (which the overwrought score echos faithfully). Everything out of her mouth is either a whisper or a shout, and it pretty quickly gets to be too annoying to have any sympathy for her.

If you’re in the mood for a good maternally-minded ghost story, I recommend skipping this one and seeing The Orphanage instead.

The Crazies

The Crazies arrived in 1973, five years after George Romero’s auspicious debut (Night of the Living Dead) and five years before his masterpiece (Dawn of the Dead). As a low-budget doomsday thriller, it lands directly between those two films as well, making great use of what he learned from Night of the Living Dead’s confined space (paranoia, a winking cynicism, and subtle but devastating irony) while sketching out in long form what he would later condense into Dawn of the Dead’s apocalyptic first act (the failure of institutional crisis management).

In terms of overall quality, The Crazies is definitely the least of the three films, but the one area it succeeds above the other two is in its use of dialogue. Romero has little faith in humanity’s capacity for conflict resolution, so his characters tend to spend a lot of time arguing. It can be overbearing and repetitive (as in the case of 1985’s exhausting Day of the Dead), but The Crazies’ heated debates manage to develop characters, generate suspense, and keep the plot moving at a good pace without ever feeling too artificial.

Of course, what superficially differentiates The Crazies most from Romero’s best-known films is its lack of zombies (strictly speaking, anyway). But any good zombie movie knows that zombies are but one of many available excuses for us to bring about our own ruin, and this one does too.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

A lot of foley artists and sound designers in the ’70s and ’80s seemed to have this fetishistic preoccupation with footsteps. In any scene where people were on the move, the soundtrack focused on footfalls to the exclusion of all else. The foley was produced with what I’m guessing was a maximum of three different kinds of shoes (loafers, heels, tennis shoes) on two different surfaces (asphalt, linoleum-tiled concrete). Despite being thoroughly unconvincing, it dominated the audio mix every chance it got.

The closest parallel I can draw is the outrageously unnatural sound effects in low budget kung fu movies from the same era. Those, of course, were a clear stylistic choice meant to echo the equally outrageous visuals. Maybe lavishing the same kind of aural attention on something as mundane as walking was intended to make a statement. Maybe there was a collective of foley artists who recognized their craft as the final frontier of Dada.

Anyway, films that were heavy on foot chases in quiet, desolate locations were goldmines for these footfall fetishists, and Halloween III was one such film. And there is nothing else to say about it. It is a pile of shit.

First Responder

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 08:45:00 -0400

If you are a web designer and don’t have a copy of this book, I strongly recommend you rectify that immediately.

I had only just recently decided to leave the game industry and return to the web when A List Apart published Ethan Marcotte’s pivotal article, “Responsive Web Design”. Since Ethan is a close friend, I assumed and continue to assume that his landmark discovery was specifically timed to validate my decision with firm authority. This was very, very exciting stuff.

This site is my first full-scale attempt at responsive design. It uses one template for all pages, with built-in modules to support three different content sizes: main (medium), supporting (small), and oversized (large). Since all of those modules accept virtually any type of content (text, images, tables, etc), this template gives me a good variety of layout options right out of the box. However, if it proves too limiting for what I want to do with a particular page, the template’s underlying grid allows for many more possibilities, and with just a few additional lines of code in a page-specific stylesheet, I’m off to the races.

Of course, nothing about the approach I’ve described so far is peculiar to responsive design. The amount of layout versatility this template enjoys is most applicable to a desktop display, a large canvas whose luxurious expanse of screen real estate is growing less relevant with every iPhone sold. To be properly responsive, this thing needs to work well in a variety of screen contexts. Luckily, my grid is designed to scale, and the display of each of the content modules (as well as page-specific styles) can easily be modified within the grid to suit the width of the user’s viewport.

Though my design began with the desktop and scaled down from there, the site is actually built in reverse order, for reasons expertly outlined in Luke Wroblewski’s superb Mobile First. In that order, the diagrams below illustrate what I’ve described above. Please note that while the grid and module widths have their basis in pixels, the widths are not fixed, so the numbers actually represent proportions.

For narrow viewports (up to 480 pixels wide), all content spans the width of four columns.

For medium-width viewports (between 480 and 800 pixels), the margin widths double, the layout expands to eight columns, and an inset three-column module is introduced for supporting content.

For wide viewports (above 800 pixels), the layout expands to twelve columns. The main content retains its eight-column width on the right, supporting content gets a dedicated four columns on the left, and oversized content spans the full twelve columns.

This archive page is one example of how the grid allows me to build on the limitations of the standard template.

Ask not what ASCII can do for you.

Since responsive design’s fluid nature requires widths to be specified primarily in percentages, and my twitching neuroses demand precision to as many decimal places as possible, my CSS is full of scary-looking numerals. I was careful to add comments explaining where each percentage came from, but the comments still worked best in conjunction with an image. So I decided to recreate the diagrams above as ASCII art and put them right in the CSS file so they would be readily available for my own reference and for the edification of anyone poking around under the site’s hood.

For medium viewports (eight columns):

--------------------------------------------------------
|                         684                          |
--------------------------------------------------------
|    |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |    |
| 72 |36|  |36|  |36|  |36|  |36|  |36|  |36|  |36| 72 |
|    |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |    |
--------------------------------------------------------
|    |                    540                     |    |
--------------------------------------------------------
|    |Main (.medium) & Oversized (.large) Content |    |
|    |                (8 Columns)                 |    |
|    |------------------                          |    |
|    |     108      |  |                          |    |
|    |------------------                          |    |
|    |  Supporting  |  |                          |    |
|    |   (.small)   |  |                          |    |
|    |   Content    |  |                          |    |
|    |  (3 Columns  |  |                          |    |
|    |    Inset)    |  |                          |    |
|    |------------------                          |    |
--------------------------------------------------------

Impress your friends!

Now that you know the underlying logic that shapes the pages on this site, I encourage you to regale your friends and family with the details at your next gathering. Bring a projector and laser pointer. They will thank you.

A Plea for Civility

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:31:00 -0400

Dear Elderly Woman From My Dream,

I can appreciate your frustration. There you were, undertaking a civic duty that was not even yours, trying in vain to remove a massive tree branch from the road so that people like me could pass through your neighborhood unimpeded. You were not expecting some guy to come shrieking around the corner on a bicycle, much like I was not expecting to have my path suddenly and fully obstructed by said tree branch. And let’s not forget the giant rat. Because that was what really startled me.

You have led a long and presumably productive life, and I’m sure you settled in this neighborhood with the expectation that you would not be asked to tolerate salty outbursts from frightened cyclists. I understand your position, and I respect it. But please try to understand mine.

I had friends in a nearby T.G.I.Friday’s parking lot waiting for me to gather all of my worldly possessions and return to them. We had plans to meet people for breakfast at a diner in Philadelphia, despite the fact that my friends are from Boston, and we had begun the day in Ottawa. Considering that your neighborhood appears to be in Chicago, you can see why I was in a hurry. Add to that the confusion over how my friends expected me to carry all my stuff on a bike instead of them just driving me, then throw a sudden impasse and a hulking rodent with glowing eyes into the mix, and you’ve got a pretty good recipe for a stentorian What the shit?

I’m sorry you had to hear it; I really am. All I’m asking is that next time, you just let it go. If tree-felling thunderstorms and rats that could fill out XL t-shirts are the norm in your neighborhood, surely a little cussing from a passerby is the least of your worries.

As for me, I still had hopes for this dream. It wasn’t too late for me to play a game of Scattergories with Dashiell Hammett or to stumble onto an alternate cure for tuberculosis while playing “Eight Days a Week” on a Bedazzled harpsichord. The last thing I wanted was to spend the remaining moments before my third snooze alarm arguing about something so trivial with you.

So, wherever you currently are in my subconscious, I hope we’re cool. And I hope you’ve gotten some help with that tree branch, because I can’t imagine what you expected to accomplish with that little broom.

Best wishes,
Rob Weychert

Hello Again

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:00:00 -0400

Over three years ago, I won my first air guitar competition in Philadelphia. It had more of an impact on my life than I ever would have expected, introducing me to a bizarre and joyful underworld of free spirits who forced me to reevaluate what it means to experience music.

A few months later, and not entirely coincidentally, I accepted a job offer in Boston at what might be described as competitive air guitar’s above-ground equivalent: Harmonix, the world’s premier developer of music games. It was a new industry in a new city with new faces, and it was a year and a half well spent, but it ultimately wasn’t for me.

Seeing the potential in what would soon come to be known as Studiomates, I decided to give self-employment in Brooklyn a try. The last fourteen months have been spent assimilating myself into yet another set of unfamiliar faces and surroundings, getting reacquainted with client services, and slowly learning how to run a tiny business.

Among everything else these last three years, I’ve sustained a distance relationship, begun learning how to make music, and grieved the loss of my father. My world has grown and changed a lot. But two things remain the same:

I don’t know quite what I want to be when I grow up. When I tell people I’m freelancing, they often ask what sorts of clients and projects I want to attract, what I want to make. I don’t have an answer. I don’t have a goal.
I’m not writing.

These phenomena are not mutually exclusive. Jeffrey Zeldman connects the dots: “Writing is fun. Writing is fundamental. If you don’t write, you don’t know what you think.” I’m not sure this is true for everyone, but it’s definitely true for me. And for pretty much as long as I’ve been able to read and write, it has been my most reliable tool for externalizing and arranging ideas that are too complex for my brain to manage in the abstract.

Robweychert.com has been my main writing outlet for nearly ten years. Its activity level has fluctuated over that time, but it has never been so quiet as it has in the three years since I moved to Boston, a time when I probably needed it more than ever.

Today, I’m finally bringing the site back to life, and while this relaunch is long overdue, it is by no means unwelcome. There are still holes to fill (home page, portfolio), bugs to squash (hello, Internet Explorer!), and design tweaks to make, but more importantly, my writing has a home again. I hope you enjoy it.