The Tribeca Film Festival starts next month, and I will be observing ten years of skipping films screening at this festival. I last went to a film screening at Tribeca in 2006, when I saw two films. One was the worst film I ever watched in a theater, and the second was the site of the worst Q&A session I’ve ever endured. After these two experiences, with some very oblivious film viewers, I vowed to never return.
The Worst Film
Choking Manseemed promising at the time. It featured Mandy Pantankin, who I held in high regard from appearing in the Showtime dramedy Dead Like Me, and it took place in Queens.
The apparent inspiration for Choking Man (2006), the last film I ever watched at the Tribeca Film Festival.
I haven’t revisited the film since watching it at the festival: I have not re-screened it nor did I follow up to research the filmmaker’s vision. While it’s true that filmmakers sometimes find inspiration in the strangest places, this film seemed to be informed by two morsels of inspiration:
The colorful “Choking Man” posters that appear in every New York City–restaurant. At the time, there was a version with a lemon wedge and a fish. It was hard not to notice it.
Some New York Times article that revealed that there are a lot of languages spoken in Queens. Who knew?!?
As far as substance, these two bits were all the film had to offer. The characters in this film are all very flat, and the flimsy plot was immediately forgettable. I didn’t leave the screening, but I did mentally “check out” once Jorge, the Ecuadorian immigrant at the center of the film’s fish-out-of-water story, starts doing magic. If this was intended to be a moment of magical realism, whoever included this in the film needed to pay more attention in his Latin American literature class.
After the screening had ended, there was the requisite Q&A. The audience loved the film and expressed their gee-whiz fascination with Queens and brown people, and they marveled at the area “by the airport.” They showered the filmmaker with praise and mid-2000s–era platitudes, such as “poignant” and “transcendent.” I never wanted to vomit in public as bad as I did then. It probably didn’t help matters that I saw this film with a girl I had already broken up with, but we decided to watch the film together anyway because we did want to give up our tickets. (Hi, Tori.)
One could be forgiven for thinking that the audience was just being polite. After all, why would any want to be mean in public…especially in New York? But days earlier, I witnessed the Tribeca audience draw their “critical” claws. And it wasn’t pretty.
The Worst Audience
Two hours and forty-eight minutes is a long time to sit through a movie. No one I knew at the time would go with me to see this film, but Free Will [Der freie Wille] was one of the boldest films I had seen at the time. The story profiles Theo, a convicted rapist, after serving his sentence at a mental institution. Now free, he struggles to suppress his urge to rape again.
At first, Theo comports himself, but as the film continues, he finds himself consumed with his urges. On a cognitive level, he’s aware that it is wrong and that violating his parole will bring dire consequences. But he’s clearly sick, and serving time did not heal him. With each subsequent scene, the visuals in the film become more unstable. The pace of the editing quickens. The film stock becomes “faster,” which makes for a more grainy and noisy image. Perhaps most noticeably, the cinematographer starts to hold the camera in his hand, and the image shakes considerably.
The duration of the film also exacerbates the difficulty of identifying with Theo. Throughout the film, we want Theo to control his urges, but by the end, we share his exhaustion. Much like Chantal Akerman needed nearly three-and-a-half hours to show Jeanne Dielman’s dreary life, this film needed to torment its audience for it to experience Theo’s demons.
For the people who remained through the entire screening, their questions were harsh. Not only was Matthias Glasner, the film’s director, in attendance, but the actor who played Theo, Jürgen Vogel, was also present. The audience interrogated both Glasner and Vogel. Some questioners seemed to forget that they had seen a fiction film and treated Vogel as if he was an actual rapist. Others grilled Glasner over the “shaky” camerawork towards the end of the film. One viewer even asked, “Couldn’t you find a cameraman with a steady hand?” Both Glasner and Vogel seemed dumbfounded. At the time, the world held the US in pretty low esteem because of George W. Bush and his War in Iraq. This Q&A did not help elevate our global status.
I Can’t Sit With You
To be fair, Tribeca screens well over a hundred films each year at its festival, and this was the first or second year after it had expanded north of Canal Street. With so many more films, there were going to be “duds.” But it was the audience’s taste, not the selected films, that really bothered me.
This week, the New York State Assembly will finish their proposed state budget for the following year. The budget process includes negotiations between the state legislature and the governor, but this year, the City University of New York is in precarious position after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo suggested in his State of the State address in January that the city of New York should be responsible to fully fund CUNY. Last year, the state contributed $485 million to CUNY and placing that kind of financial burden on the City of New York is tantamount to defunding CUNY for that amount. It would be a catastrophe for public secondary education in the nation’s largest city.
If you’re a resident of New York State, ask the state legislature to reject Cuomo’s budget proposal and to contribute to CUNY and the livelihood of the state.
WNYC’s Note to Self recently asked its listeners to share stories about using mobile apps and fitness trackers to quantify their daily progress—with dieting, sleeping, fitness—for the episode, Your Quantified Body, Your Quantified Self.
I’ve maintained a pretty ambivalent attitude towards the new wave of trackers that have emerged over the last decade with the advent of the smartphone and the proliferation of wearables. In the mid-2000s, I used to employ a heart rate monitor to do interval training for bicycle rides. I have since soured on the practice. After sinking hundred of dollars on a couple of Polar devices, I learned that the best way to train is to simply put in the miles and find a few hills along the way. Of course, others swear by it so your “mileage” may vary.
However, I have unwittingly resumed tracking my activity after getting an Apple Watch. The stock Activity app not only counts my steps, but it awards me circles for meeting daily goals. If I keep active for thirty minutes throughout the day, I get a green circle. If I avert sitting for a full hour, twelve hours throughout the day, I get a blue circle. And if I burn 870 calories, I get a red circle. I regularly meet these goals, but unless I bike more than fifteen miles or take a very long walk, it’s easy to miss meeting the calorie-burned goal. Thus, no red circle for me.
In the episode, we hear about people becoming anxious in meeting their goals, including walking laps around their kitchen before bedtime in order to walk the requisite number of steps. This resonated with me because, once, I was twenty calories short of my daily goal. My solution? I walked to the corner pizza shop to burn those twenty-plus calories and to get that elusive red circle. But I also bought 300-calorie slice of pepperoni.
Obviously, it would have been better not meeting my calorie-burned goal. The Apple Watch and its activity tracking couldn’t save me from my own poor eating choices, and because it does not record my eating, it was none the wiser.
We also hear that for many who obsessively tracked their fitness, dieting, or sleep, they almost invariably were overcome with anxiety, fearing they would not meet their goals. Ultimately, this anxiety leads to their abandoning the trackers. One participant noted that instead of using the notifications to make exercising a regular habit, she noted that dismissing and ignoring the reminders became the habit. Overall, the participants all soured on the experience, much like I did with heart-rate monitoring a decade ago and with journaling and habit-tracking in recent years.
I should note that I have found this podcast series and New Tech City—its predecessor as a segment on WNYC radio—to be bothersome. The host is too technoutopian for my taste and seems very cozy with the technocratic entrepreneurs that she profiles. In this episode, instead of conceding that trackers offer only temporary benefits for most, she imagined possibilities for “what will they think of next?”
You might take a personality test before you choose a tracker, one that understands that you are a social butterfly, and you need social support. You need that competitive edge with your friends… Or you would respond better to a fitness tracker that lights up in soothing colors, indicating it’s lovely outside, the sun is about to set, and right now would be the perfect time to take a twenty-minute walk.
Did you get that? It’s not that constantly tracking our eating, sleeping, and exercise are unnatural processes that as humans we will invariably abandon. It’s that the tracking devices and apps simply don’t have enough data. Yet.
The middle of March is upon us, and all around the New York area, many college students and faculty are preparing for Spring Break. The break is always welcomed because it “breaks” up the extended slog of the spring term, which usually lasts for four full months.
This semester, I’m teaching at two colleges: at Pratt Institute and at CUNY Queens College. For my film history class at Pratt, I was able to schedule the midterm exam today, on March 11, just before spring break starts on March 14. However, I couldn’t do the same for the students in my media technologies class at Queens College. Their midterm exam will take place on March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day), but their spring break doesn’t take place until April 28. That is a very late spring break, taking place between the twelfth and thirteenth weeks of class.
Here’s a comparison of spring 2016 semesters at four area colleges where I have worked (Pratt, CUNY, and Fordham) or studied (NYU).
Week
NYU
Pratt
CUNY
Fordham
Jan 18
Week 1
Week 1
Jan 25
Week 1
Week 2
Week 2
Feb 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 1
Week 3
Feb 8
Week 3
Week 4
Week 2
Week 4
Feb 15
Week 4
Week 5
Week 3
Week 5
Feb 22
Week 5
Week 6
Week 4
Week 6
Feb 29
Week 6
Week 7
Week 5
Midterm Exam
Mar 7
Midterm Exam
Midterm Exam
Week 6
Week 8
Mar 14
Spring Break
Spring Break
Midterm Exam
Week 9
Mar 21
Week 8
Week 9
Week 8
Spring Break
Mar 28
Week 9
Week 10
Week 9
Easter Break
Apr 4
Week 10
Week 11
Week 10
Week 10
Apr 11
Week 11
Week 12
Week 11
Week 11
Apr 18
Week 12
Week 13
Week 12
Week 12
Apr 25
Week 13
Week 14
Spring Break
Week 13
May 2
Week 14
Studio Days
Week 13
Week 14
May 9
Reading Day
Final Exam
Week 14
Final Exam
May 16
Final Exam
?
May 23
Final Exam
NYU and Pratt both schedule their spring breaks in the middle of March, just after Week 7 at NYU and Week 8 at Pratt. That’s ideal because you can schedule a Midterm Exam the week before and have it wrap up the first half of the course. Fordham schedules their spring break a week later but, because it’s a Jesuit university, it adds an additional Easter Break. For some reason, Fordham dictates that faculty schedule their Midterm Exams in late February. Whereas courses at NYU and at Pratt are divided into halves, the semester at Fordham is broken up into (unequal) thirds: before the midterm, between the midterm and breaks, and after the breaks.
The CUNY schedule, on the other hand, is a mess. As I’ve complained in the past, CUNY should stop scheduling spring break around the spring Easter/Passover holidays because it’s not conducive to learning. My students will endure twelve consecutive weeks of class before they get a break. Once the break is over and they will have emptied their minds of everything I taught them, they will have only two weeks to recover that knowledge before heading into the final exam. Moreover, the students in my class will also bear an additional burden: our final exam is scheduled for two weeks after our last class, despite Finals Week starting on the week of May 16.
My own undergraduate experience was quite different from that of these students. My university was on the quarter system, and spring break was the week between the winter and spring quarters. Once we finished our winter-quarter, final exams in late-March, we were off until classes started again in early April.
An ad for Soylent 2.0, as it appeared via The Deck.
When I first saw the small boxy ad with a brief text description, which is common to all ads powered by The Deck, I thought it was a joke. Did someone really make a food-drink called Soylent?1
Soylent is indeed real. It is a food substitute, launched in 2014 by Rosa Labs, a Silicon Valley–type startup based in Los Angeles. It aspires to be the future of food.
It’s a Startup
After poking around the Soylent website, I was stricken by how much Soylent uses the lexicon of contemporary tech startups. The website promoting Soylent is mercifully responsive, peppered with little jQuery animations, and styled in the minimalist aesthetic that will someday soon date websites as “soooo 2013.” As you scroll down the page, you’ll find a requisite feature list, illustrated with those circle-masked images that are all the rage these days. The Soylent store is powered through Stripe, and there’s also a “sandwich” video.
Your food has a feature list, illustrated with circle-masked images.
Spend more time on the website and you’ll wonder whether Soylent is a software platform, and not an actual drink. First, Soylent is versioned. The 1.x line was a powder mix, which has undergone several iterations. There are release notes charting the evolution. Though Soylent 1.5 is still for sale, the current 2.0 version is a ready-to-consume drink. It is, after all, a major upgrade. Second, they also open-sourced Soylent for anyone interested in mixing their own Soylent. Third, there is also a beta program to test future versions of Soylent. And lastly, there are the user forums.
It’s “The Future”
Some members of the Soylent Forums appear to belong to a sect of techno-utopian futurists who are determined to save time and money by cutting out food.2 Some active discussions surround pairing Soylent with MealSquares, another food substitute. Others wonder how to deal with the lasting hunger that comes from drinking your meals. But, by far, my favorite discussions come from the polyphasic sleep crowd, who have come to regard sleep as a waste of time and are interested in maximizing net-waking hours. (Full disclosure: I am a coffee napper.) One friend asked what these people are doing with all the extra time they’ve saved by not sleeping or eating: are they researching new ways to save even more time?
I asked a machine learning company to try to find nutrition databases of readily available, deliverable foods from Amazon and to cross reference those databases against the Amazon delivered price in one urban city. The goal is to create the least cost, deliverable daily or weekly menu of food that meets a high level of nutritional requirements for individuals and families.
Although I presume he’s referring to actual food, not necessarily meal replacements, it’s not a stretch to wonder if something like Soylent could be a compatible solution.
It’s “Food”
Despite being initially hesitant, I couldn’t stop thinking about Soylent. I succumbed to my curiosity and ordered a case.
At first taste, I thought “soy milk.” That’s not a stretch given the product’s name and that its primary ingredient is soy. A friend sampled it and reported a more nuanced tasting note: it reminded her of “soy milk left over after finishing your cereal.” That dispelled my first concern, whether it would taste bad. It doesn’t.
That same intrepid friend and I split a bottle recently, before watching Frederick Wiseman’s newest film, In Jackson Heights (2015). Our initial plan was to eat dinner after the screening and drink a Soylent tide us over until then. I even naively quipped about the movie, “it’s not like it’s going to be three hours long.” I was wrong. The documentary ran 190 minutes. I can report that while I was craving food throughout the screening, I didn’t get a headache, feel low on energy, or get “hangry.” I circumvented needing to eat so I could watch a three-hour film. That half-bottle of Soylent did its job.
While Soylent is technically food, it’s hard to see this as a sustainable and nutritionally complete food substitute, even if its stated aims are to be sustainable and nutritionally complete as food. Celebrated food writer Michael Pollan sees Soylent as little more than “Silicon Valley” hype:
Soylent! Soylent is not new. We had Nutrament; you can go to the diet aisle of your supermarket and find all sorts of equally disgusting food substitutes. The genius of Soylent is that it comes out of Silicon Valley, and anything that comes out of there is assumed to be new and technologically advanced and wonderful. But it’s nothing of the type.
Although the company is actually based in a Southern California, I take his point. Soylent is poised to “disrupt” food.
Future of Food is Food
The year before last, I regularly ate dinner at the dining hall at Fordham University. Having broken up with my girlfriend at the end of the summer, I was too depressed to make myself food. Also, because the faculty dining room was being remodeled, the university discounted our meals—to five dollars—so that we would eat with the students living on-campus. While I was excited to eat a cheap, balanced meal, I was surprised to see how many students bypassed the buffet and opted for only a bowl of cereal at dinnertime. Not even pizza or hot dogs could entice them away from Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Lee Hutchinson, an early Soylent adopter, jumped into the polemics of “food vs. ‘food’” and carefully judged it as a “tool in a toolbox.” In his article, he also considered the various people who struggle with food, both those who fear making it and those who don’t much like the taste of food. Soylent offers these people a simple solution: like the undergraduate students who ate a bowl of cereal before heading to their rooms for the night, presumably to study, to game, or both. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it solves the food problem for a while.
But that’s just it: it is ephemeral. The history of food diets—like technology and mass culture—are notoriously riddled with passing fads that don’t endure. Right now, it’s the era of Paleo and gluten-free. Next, we might eat only vegan and raw food. By the end of the century, someone might open an retro, early-21st century place that serves beef and pork. I’m not foolish enough to try to predict whether Soylent will be around in five to ten years. But, like the wave of hot new tech startups and the aesthetics of web design that accompanies that wave will teach us, the future of food might not be as futuristic as some might expect.
Soylent
A “nutritionally complete” food substitute that comes in a white bottle.
I do remember seeing an ad for this a while ago, but this time it made an impression, both in terms of grabbing my attention and getting my money. ↩
I really hope someone archives these discussions so that historians and anthropologists can study them in the future. ↩
I have been slowly catching up with the tenth season of the X-Files, otherwise known as the thing that Fox needed to air after the NFC Championship Game wrapped up in late-January.
The fifth and penultimate episode of the tenth season, “Babylon”, bears an uncanny resemblance to the recent events in San Bernadino and the aftermath of gathering information from one of the terrorists. In the episode, a couple of young Muslim men detonate a bomb an art gallery in Texas, exhibiting a painting that depicts Allah “sitting on a toilet defecating radical Islamists.” One of the suicide bombers barely survives the attack. The FBI is interested if he has any information about a larger terrorist cell or a possible future attack, but because he is in a persistent vegetative state and imminently close to death, he is not talking. To gather any possibly useful intel, Mulder and Scully each separately try to “listen” to his thoughts to uncover any useful information.
This reminded me of the FBI and Apple.
I’ll admit that it’s a bit of a stretch to relate this to the protracted battle between the FBI and Apple. In both the real-life and the X-Files cases, the FBI is seeking information from a “dead” terrorist. The real FBI is asking Apple to defeat its own security protocols to unlock his phone, while the TV FBI tries two different methods to read the bomber’s mind. To no one’s surprise, Mulder’s method seemed a lot more fun than Scully’s: we see a few familiar faces during “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Mulder.”
I won’t spoil how they try to get the information or whether they succeed, but I wonder what kind of software can the FBI compel someone to write to read someone’s thoughts. Is that covered under the “All Writs Act,” too?
Ten summers ago, I taught a six-week summer class at NYU on New York Independent filmmaking. The class was based on my own interests in New York City as an historical center for independent, experimental, and avant-garde filmmaking. This fact was a key factor in my moving here after college.
Looking back, there were three distinct highlights:
Nick Zedd shook me down for money, years after I ran the course, because he had learned that I screened his films in this class.
I saw, for the first time, the Diego Echeverria film Los Sures, a 1984 documentary of the then-Puerto Rican enclave of South Williamsburg. The film’s title is Spanish for “the Southsiders” and refers to the residents who dominated the neighborhood in the 1980s.
The original film is remarkable today because it documented a part of Williamsburg that has undergone radical changes over the last thirty-plus years, and the Living Los Sures project attempts to excavate and preserve the culture of the Southside.
Tomorrow, the Cinema Studies Department at NYU, is screening the 1984 film and hosting a presentation about the current and ongoing Living Los Sures project. This is a rare opportunity to see this film. Until the original film is available for purchase, you’ll have to settle for screening a 16mm or VHS copy at the New York Public Library.
Admission to tomorrow’s screening is free, but seating is limited.
Living Los Sures
March 3, 2016
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NYU King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South
