artdiamondblog.com – Page 445 – Art Diamond's web log

Lasseter’s Epiphany: “This Is What Walt Was Waiting For”

(p. 52) In a trailer on the Disney lot, Lasseter huddled with Rees and Kroyer to look at the first computer-generated scene to come in–a race among drivers in virtual motorcycles known as light cycles. The scene had no character animation and its graphics were rudimentary, but it brought Lasseter an epiphany. The dimensionality of the scene was something he had never witnessed before. If this technology could be melded with Disney animation, he thought, he would have the makings of a revolution. Until then, three-dimensional effects in animation had required difficult, costly sessions with the multistory “multiplane” camera, practical for only a few key sequences in a film, if that. The computers could even move the audience’s point of view around a scene like a Steadicam. The possibilities seemed infinite.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said later. “Walt Disney, all his career, all his life, was striving to get more dimension in his (p. 53) animation . . . and I was standing there, looking at it, going, ‘This is what Walt was waiting for.'”
He was not able to interest the animation executives in it; they did not care to hear about new technology unless it made animation faster or cheaper.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

“The Astaires’ Defiant New World Optimism”

Source of book image:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/513pEMI-LeL._.jpg

(p. C6) The Astaire universe was made of crazy joy, that guiltless worldview unique to the art of the American 1920s. The Astaires’ trademarked exit was the gleefully mischievous “runaround,” in which they trotted about the stage in ever increasing circles as if joined at the hip, expanding their geometry till they reached the wings and vanished. It was goofy and expert at once, a way of defining musical comedy as the state of being young, cute and in love with life.
. . .
“For all their jazz-fueled modernity,” Ms. Riley writes of the Astaires’ London réclame, they were “anti-modernist.” This pair was more than sunshine. The sheer zest with which they frisked through a show ran “counter to High Modernism’s pervasive sense of the instability of the self and the universe.” This was the time, Ms. Riley notes, of “The Waste Land,” “Ulysses,” “Vile Bodies.” Art was in despair. But the Astaires’ “defiant New World optimism” proved a remedy: meeting cute, assuming disguises and high-hatting the blues with fascinating rhythm. It’s a very American notion: that a strong foundation in popular art creates a positive worldview in general. Call it the audacity of charm.
. . .
They don’t make shows that way anymore, and Ms. Riley’s book is thus a resuscitation of a naive but perhaps more authentically native showbiz, an art of natural forces. “The Astaires” is a salute to an America at ease with itself and doing something wonderful in the song-and-dance line that seemed, for a time, like the hottest thing in the culture.

For the full review, see:
Kathleen Riley. “BOOKSHELF; Sibling Revelry.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 3, 2012): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:
Riley, Kathleen. The Astaires: Fred & Adele. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2012.

Majority of Marine Creatures Thrive in Greater Acidity

(p. C4) The effect of acidification, according to J.E.N. Veron, an Australian coral scientist, will be “nothing less than catastrophic…. What were once thriving coral gardens that supported the greatest biodiversity of the marine realm will become red-black bacterial slime, and they will stay that way.”
This is a common view. The Natural Resources Defense Council has called ocean acidification “the scariest environmental problem you’ve never heard of.” Sigourney Weaver, who narrated a film about the issue, said that “the scientists are freaked out.” The head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calls it global warming’s “equally evil twin.”
. . .
If the average pH of the ocean drops to 7.8 from 8.1 by 2100 as predicted, it will still be well above seven, the neutral point where alkalinity becomes acidity.
. . .
In a recent experiment in the Mediterranean, reported in Nature Climate Change, corals and mollusks were transplanted to lower pH sites, where they proved “able to calcify and grow at even faster than normal rates when exposed to the high [carbon-dioxide] levels projected for the next 300 years.” In any case, freshwater mussels thrive in Scottish rivers, where the pH is as low as five.
Laboratory experiments find that more marine creatures thrive than suffer when carbon dioxide lowers the pH level to 7.8. This is because the carbon dioxide dissolves mainly as bicarbonate, which many calcifiers use as raw material for carbonate.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “MIND & MATTER; Taking Fears of Acid Oceans With a Grain of Salt.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., January 7, 2012): C4.
(Note: ellipsis in first paragraph in original; ellipses between paragraphs added.)

Upper Class “Have Lost the Confidence to Preach What They Practice”

Source of book image:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K9jKNHD0vwE/Tzn4yKgEtII/AAAAAAAAC8Q/2wZqk1Hl1V4/s1600/murray-coming-apart.jpg

(p. 9) The problem, Murray argues, is not that members of the new upper class eat French cheese or vote for Barack Obama. It is that they have lost the confidence to preach what they practice, adopting instead a creed of “ecumenical niceness.” They work, marry and raise children, but they refuse to insist that the rest of the country do so, too. “The belief that being a good American involved behaving in certain kinds of ways, and that the nation itself relied upon a certain kind of people in order to succeed, had begun to fade and has not revived,” Murray writes.

For the full review, see:
NICHOLAS CONFESSORE. “Tramps Like Them; Charles Murray Argues that the White Working Class Is No Longer a Virtuous Silent Majority.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., February 12, 2012): 9.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 10, 2012 and has the title “Tramps Like Them; Charles Murray Examines the White Working Class in ‘Coming Apart’.”)

CalArts Was One of Walt Disney’s Last Projects

It is a nice minor coda to Walt Disney’s life that the CalArts school that he founded provided a starting point for many of the next generation of great innovative animators, including John Lasseter.

(p. 47) CalArts was Walt Disney’s brainchild; he had started the planning of the school in the late 1950s and provided generously for it in his will. Walt and his brother Roy formed it in 1961 through a merger of two struggling Los Angeles institutions, the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and the Chouinard Art Institute. The doors opened at the school’s consolidated campus in Valencia in 1971, five years after Walt’s death.
. . .
(p. 48) The storms of the 1960s had mostly receded by the time Lasseter arrived. At CalArts, he found his own kind of liberation: Here, he no longer needed to conceal his passion for cartoons. His twenty classmates from across the country were animation geeks like him. Others had been corresponding with the Disney studio just as he had, and even making their own short films. Many would go on from CalArts to perform significant work at Disney or elsewhere; among them were future stars John Musker (co-director of Aladdin, Hercules, and The Little Mermaid) and Brad Bird.
First-year classes took place in room A113, a windowless space with white walls, floor, and ceiling, and buzzing fluorescent lights. The teachers made up tor the setting, however: Almost all of them were longtime Disney artists with awe-inspiring animation credits. Kendall O’Connor, an art director on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, taught layout; Elmer Plummer, a character designer on Dumbo, taught life drawing; T. Hee, a sequence director on Pinocchio, taught caricature. The program was rigorous and the hours long; the fact that the campus was in the middle of nowhere made it easier to focus on work. Tim Burton, who entered the program the following year, remembered the experience: . . .

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

“Innovation and Invention Don’t Grow Out of the Government’s Orders”

“”You can have democracy no matter what level of development. Just look at the Arab Spring.”- Zhou Youguang” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) BEIJING. EVEN at 106 years old, Zhou Youguang is the kind of creative thinker that Chinese leaders regularly command the government to cultivate in their bid to raise their nation from the world’s factory floor.
So it is curious that he embodies a contradiction at the heart of their premise: the notion that free thinkers are to be venerated unless and until they challenge the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party.
Mr. Zhou is the inventor of Pinyin, the Romanized spelling system that linked China’s ancient written language to the modern age and helped China all but stamp out illiteracy. He was one of the leaders of the Chinese translation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the 1980s. He has written about 40 books, the most recent published last year.
. . .
His blog entries range from the modernization of Confucianism to Silk Road history and China’s new middle class. Computer screens hurt his eyes, but he devours foreign newspapers and magazines. A well-known Chinese artist nicknamed him “Trendy Old Guy.”
. . .
THE decade-long Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 wiped out Mr. Zhou’s lingering belief in communism. He was publicly humiliated and sent to toil for two years in the wilderness.
. . .
About Mao, he said in an interview: “I deny he did any good.” About the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre: “I am sure one day justice will be done.” About popular support for the Communist Party: “The people have no freedom to express themselves, so we cannot know.”
As for fostering creativity in the Communist system, Mr. Zhou had this to say, in a 2010 book of essays: “Inventions are flowers that grow out of the soil of freedom. Innovation and invention don’t grow out of the government’s orders.”
No sooner had the first batch of copies been printed than the book was banned in China.

For the full story, see:
SHARON LaFRANIERE. “THE SATURDAY PROFILE; A Chinese Voice of Dissent That Took Its Time.” The New York Times (Sat., March 3, 2012): A5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date March 2, 2012.)

“Crises Are an Inevitable Concomitant of Risk”

(p. 11) Some economic risks are worth taking, and crises are an inevitable concomitant of risk. Crises, like firm failures, can be seen as a manifestation of the Schumpeterian process of creative destruction. The role for economic analysis is to ensure that the creation dominates and that the destruction is not too costly.

Source:
Eichengreen, Barry. Capital Flows and Crises. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.

Web Sites Expose Petty Corruption

“Swati Ramanathan, a founder of the site I Paid a Bribe, in India.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) The cost of claiming a legitimate income tax refund in Hyderabad, India? 10,000 rupees.

The going rate to get a child who has already passed the entrance requirements into high school in Nairobi, Kenya? 20,000 shillings.
The expense of obtaining a driver’s license after having passed the test in Karachi, Pakistan? 3,000 rupees.
Such is the price of what Swati Ramanathan calls “retail corruption,” the sort of nickel-and-dime bribery, as opposed to large-scale graft, that infects everyday life in so many parts of the world.
Ms. Ramanathan and her husband, Ramesh, along with Sridar Iyengar, set out to change all that in August 2010 when they started ipaidabribe.com, a site that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid and requests that were expected but not forthcoming.
About 80 percent of the more than 400,000 reports to the site tell stories like the ones above of officials and bureaucrats seeking illicit payments to provide routine services or process paperwork and forms.
“I was asked to pay a bribe to get a birth certificate for my daughter,” someone in Bangalore, India, wrote in to the Web site on Feb. 29, recording payment of a 120-rupee bribe in Bangalore. “The guy in charge called it ‘fees’ ” — except there are no fees charged for birth certificates, Ms. Ramanathan said.
Now, similar sites are spreading like kudzu around the globe, vexing petty bureaucrats the world over. Ms. Ramanathan said nongovernmental organizations and government agencies from at least 17 countries had contacted Janaagraha, the nonprofit organization in Bangalore that operates I Paid a Bribe, to ask about obtaining the source code and setting up a site of their own.

For the full story, see:
STEPHANIE STROM. “Web Sites Shine Light on Petty Bribery Worldwide.” The New York Times (Weds., March 7, 2012): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date March 6, 2012.)

“Antony Ragui started an I Paid a Bribe site in Kenya.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Funding Was Scarce to Develop Computer Graphics

(p. 29) As in Catmull’s graduate school days, however, the Walt Disney Co. was not interested in computer graphics. Walt had died of cancer in 1966, and the company was now run by a caretaker chief executive, Esmond Cardon “Card” Walker. Some of Disney’s technology experts saw great promise in the NYIT group’s work, but that was as far as it ever went.
Who else had pockets deep enough to support a major research effort into computer animation for filmmaking? It might take a decade, or even longer, before computer costs came down enough for (p. 30) a feature film to be anywhere near the realm of possibility. The only option, it seemed, was to keep making progress on the technical issues–on NYIT’s dime–while waiting for Disney to call.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Hero Was Oblivious to What Others Thought

Author Eyal Press. Source of photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C26) Maybe the refined intellectual, engaged with ideas, manages to think herself above petty concerns like nationalism? That was what Mr. Press suspected he would find in Aleksander Jevtic, the Serb who pulled many Croatians from a line of men destined to be tortured or killed in 1991.

“Aleksander Jevtic had somehow avoided internalizing this us-versus-them thinking,” Mr. Press writes, “which I assumed had something do with his education and intellect, a rare skepticism and levelheadedness that enabled him to see past the blinding passions and compellingly simple ideas that drove the logic of hate.”
But when Mr. Press at last meets Mr. Jevtic, he finds not a Balkan Isaiah Berlin, nor a soldier-philosopher like Orwell. This lifesaver, this ethical prince among men, turns out to be a slovenly couch potato living off rents he collects from a building he owns: “He also liked sleeping late, hanging out with friends, and watching sports” on his “giant flat-screen television.”
Mr. Press surveys the findings of social scientists and neuroscientists, but none of them have entirely figured out where bravery comes from. Every beautiful soul is different.
Mr. Jevtic’s wife is Croatian, which certainly helped him think of the enemy as human. But Mr. Jevtic is also a misanthrope, and his natural social isolation helped him hear the call of an instinctive decency; he didn’t care what his fellow Serbians, including his commanding officers, might think.
He “wasn’t in the business of making good impressions,” Mr. Press writes. “His obliviousness to what others thought wasn’t necessarily his most becoming feature. But it had served him well in 1991.”

For the full review, see:

MARK OPPENHEIMER. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Loneliness in Doing Right.” The New York Times (Fri., February 24, 2012): C26.
(Note: the online version of the review is dated February 23, 2012.)

The book under review is:
Press, Eyal. Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Source of book image:
http://jacketupload.macmillanusa.com/jackets/high_res/jpgs/9780374143428.jpg

“Amazed by the Short-Term Psychology in the Market”

(p. A1) Even after European leaders appeared to have averted a chaotic default by Greece with an eleventh-hour deal for aid, worries persist that a debt disaster on the Continent has merely been delayed.

The tortured process that culminated in that latest bailout has exposed the severe limitations of Europe’s approach to the crisis. Many fear that policy makers simply don’t have the right tools to deal with other troubled countries like Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, a situation that could weigh on the markets and the broader economy.
“I don’t want to be a Cassandra, but the idea that it’s over is an illusion,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard and co-author of “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.” “I am amazed by the short-term psychology in the market.”
. . .
(p. B3) “I don’t think we’re anywhere near the endgame,” Professor Rogoff of Harvard said.

For the full commentary, see:
PETER EAVIS. ” NEWS ANALYSIS; For Greece, a Bailout; for Europe, Perhaps Just an Illusion.” The New York Times (Weds., February 22, 2012): A1 & B3 (sic).
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated February 21, 2012.)

Rogoff and Reinhart’s thought-provoking and much-praised book is:
Reinhart, Carmen M., and Kenneth Rogoff. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.