This year the academy basically robbed Babel and Alejandro González Iñárritu of best film and best director respectively.

Best director? Yes Marty deserved an award, yes his body of work needed to be recognized, yes his films are masterful and unique, yes i attended the same grad film program that he did and will probably be chastised for this comment, but directing is about making choices and Iñárritu’s were flawless (yes even the casting of Pitt for that particular role). Marty, on the other-hand… not so much. The final image of the Departed (the rat) is just one such example.

I won’t go on about best film.

so i’ve done some upgrading here and i think i’ve caught all possible problems, but let me know if you experience any strange behavior or otherwise.

so as you may or may not (hopefully) have discovered on your own, 36invisible has relocated to a new web host.

there are two reasons for doing this:

1. our previous host had been letting us serve up 36invisible.com for years for free and i felt a little guilty.

2. we plan on streaming massive amounts of bandwidth-intensive content in the coming year and absolutely didn’t want to take advantage of our previous host.

hopefully the move (which is nearly complete) has been seamless and nobody viewing this site was the wiser, but if for some reason you’re experiencing errors with web content or mail, please do let me know.

here’s to a new year!

one of my favorite stories from one of my favorite writers…

“Borges and I”

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

-Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

Text is from Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964).

so i’ve imported the old post from the red letters log/blog/journal/archive below this one.

i should really go through and edit them for style and to correct the links, or at least to remove all the damn exclamations from the post titles, but i probably won’t…

enjoy.