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mess of cardboard boxes and sorting stacks for the yard sale to balance the fat block of pages in my hands marveling that i had managed to produce such a thing about a year later i sent it out again this time as a book proposal i got polite notes back from two academic presses saying essentially thanks but no thanks and shelved the project until 2011 or so it went out again at that point and this time was met with a yes just in time for my tenure case then came the reader reports mostly positive with a handful of suggestions for changes they stopped me in my tracks it would be almost four more years before i got around to patching holes updating case studies and clarifying ambiguities needed to clear the final hurdle i should explain if it isn t clear from the outline that i am not a good writer process wise i mean faced with a task i put it off encouraged i dig in my feet and work even more grudgingly this goes deep with me all the way back to childhood though i have for the most part achieved the level of wisdom that involves accepting myself as i am procrastination is one of the traits i most want to change in myself as soon as i get around to it anyway it turns out that publishing a book at least a scholarly one involves more than one goodbye it s less like ilsa and rick lingering heartlost in the fog than like dropping off a child at school morning after morning that s probably the wrong metaphor here because i adore my children but have come to detest the book still the other images that spring to mind repeated skin biopsies for instance might express in a cronenbergian way the connection between writing and excrescence a putrefaction of words shed like skin dust but they don t capture the idea of an object consciously built a model kit seams puttied and sanded paint sprayed and retouched decals and weathering conscientiously applied doomed to show only flaws and mistakes in the eyes of its maker to everyone else it s probably y know okay my book is looking more okay these days thanks to the copyeditors at nyu press i got the manuscript back for review have been going through the chapters reviewing changes there are a few on every page and i see the wisdom of every single one that s generally my response to being edited gratitude harlan ellison and a mob of similarly perpetually disgruntled writers would kick me out of the tough kids club for saying so you can find me over by the janitor s closet eating lunch with strunk and white posted in scribbles tagged publishing writing fort posted on august 15 2017 by bob rehak there s nothing like a suddenly lost object to demonstrate the precarity of our systems for keeping order the flimsiness of the illusion that the spaces we inhabit are at our mercy rather than the other way around there are many sorts of object of course and many sorts of loss i daily shed millions of dead skin cells without thinking about it and it doesn t trouble my world if a lego block goes missing from the tupperware footlocker where all our lego pieces entropically end up the absence i m talking about is the shadow cast by a specific kind of item it must be something so critical to daily function that i need it at least need easy access to it almost all the time by the same token its ubiquity as both physical item and psychic token must make it easy to take for granted glasses keyring wallet phone various ipods and ipads made almost invisible by ritualized use these small but vital technologies don t often vanish from the map but when they do they threaten to take the map with them this week i spent a disturbing and disorienting couple of days searching for my laptop a silvery sylph of a macbook air which did not disappear so much as slowly slip off my radar not a jump cut but a slow dissolve like pasteur s germs the loss became an official fact only retrospectively first i had to shamble from spot to spot around the house to check all the places the macbook tends to get left the high shelf kids can t get at the table beside the wall outlet under the couch under the bed meanwhile my thoughts probed an alternative theory treating the missing computer as a theft hadn t i left my car unlocked work case in the front seat plain for all to see when i dropped my kids at school it was only a few minutes but how long would it have taken really i did not like the feeling of these suspicions germinating and spreading vinelike through my view of the world too much of the u s is ensnared and immobilized in such thorny psychic tendrils and just as the presidency is in a way the mass projection of a schizoid populace a country whose constituent blocs have lost the ability to comprehend each other an imagined community angry drunk on its dark and fearful imaginings my worries about some faceless thief are just a way of externalizing anxiety and disavowing my own responsibility for losing track of something valuable the computer finally turned up isn t it i who turned up the laptop didn t move in my campus office it was on a shelf at about shoulder height a place where books belong i had no memory of setting it there but set it there i must have so now my theoretical thief has become an inferred bob that word absentminded quick flash of fred macmurray and an infinitely receding four dimensional array of old academics wearing one sock and polishing their glasses a little past that tesseract of cliché is one very real person my mother whose memory loss has in recent years become profound because of her i suppose i watch my own slips and failings with a diagnostic eye sifting random problems for systematic ones signals in the noise that point to a larger noise in the signal the computer vanished the instant i put it somewhere it doesn t usually go what does that say about where the coordinates and position of any object reside is it all and only relational are there in fact only negative differences dark matter i think it s less important to answer those unanswerables than to note how close they are to the surface a magma of existential worry coursing under the brightness and rationality of waking life note it remember it honor it posted in scribbles our book is out posted on august 17 2015 by bob rehak i couldn t be more pleased to announce the publication of special effects new histories theories contexts an anthology i co edited with my good friends and colleagues dan north and michael s duffy inspired by a panel we presented together at the 2008 film and history conference in chicago the book features essays by the three of us along with contributions from established and rising luminaries such as scott bukatman julie turnock chuck tryon lisa bode drew ayers aylish wood angela ndalianis and well read the toc yourself foreword scott bukatman introduction bob rehak dan north and michael s duffy part 1 techniques 1 ectoplasm and oil methocel and the aesthetics of special effects ethan de seife 2 fleshing it out prosthetic makeup effects motion capture and the reception of performance lisa bode 3 stop motion control special effects in contemporary puppet animation andrea comiskey 4 magic mirrors the schüfftan process katharina loew 5 photorealism nostalgia and style photorealism and material properties of film in digital visual effects barbara flueckiger part 2 bodies 6 bleeding synthetic blood flesh and simulated space in 300 drew ayers 7 blackface happy feet the politics of race in motion capture and animation tanine allison 8 being georges méliès dan north 9 the battlefield for the soul special effects and the possessed body stacey abbott 10 baroque facades jeff bridges face and tron legacy angela ndalianis 11 organic clockwork guillermo del toro s practical and digital nature michael s duffy part 3 screens 12 digital 3d technological auteurism and the rhetoric of cinematic revolution chuck tryon 13 shooting stars chesley bonestell and the special effects of outer space bob rehak 14 designed for everyone who looks forward to tomorrow star wars close encounters of the third kind and the 1970s expanded blockbuster julie turnock 16 the right stuff handmade special effects in commercial and industrial film gregory zinman 17 don t you mean extinct on the circulation of knowledge in jurassic park oliver gaycken 18 inception s timespaces an ecology of technology aylish wood afterword an interview with lev manovich dan north the book can be ordered from amazon or directly from the publisher and if you should ever be in the philly area drop by my office and i ll sign your copy posted in announcements jurassic world posted on june 24 2015 by bob rehak driving home from last night s screening of jurassic world i kept thinking back to a similarly humid summer evening in 1997 when i locked horns with a friend over the merits of an earlier film in the franchise jurassic park the lost world we were lingering outside the theater before heading to our cars digesting the experience of the movie we had just watched together he d disliked the lost world which if i remember his stance accurately he saw as an empty commercial grab a cynical attempt by steven spielberg to repeat the success of jurassic park 1993 a film we agreed was a masterpiece of blockbuster storytelling and spectacle but possessing none of the spark and snap of the original as for my position all i can reconstruct these 18 years later is that i appreciated the lost world s promotion of ian malcolm to primary protagonist after the fly 1986 any movie that put jeff goldblum in the driver s seat was golden in my book as well as its audacious final sequence in which a tyrannosaurus rex runs rampant through the streets and suburbs of san diego really what it came down to though were two psychological factors facets of a subjectivity forged in the fantastic fictions and film frames of science fiction media my own version of scott bukatman s terminal identity the first which i associate with my fandom was that in those days i never backed down from a good disagreement whether on picayune questions like kirk versus picard or loftier matters such as the meaning of the last twenty minutes of 2001 a space odyssey 1968 hmm both of those links go to whatculture com maybe i should add it to my reading list the second reason for my defense of the lost world was simply my overriding wish that it not be a piece of crap that it be in fact great because even then i could feel the tug of loyalty tying me to an emergent franchise the sense that i d signed on for a serial experience that might well stretch into decades demanding fealty no matter how debased its future installments might become i hadn t yet read the work of jacques lacan that would come a couple of years later when i became a graduate student but i see now that i was thinking in the futur anterieur peering back on myself from a fantasized later point of view i will have done it s a twisty trick of temporality and if i no longer stress about contradictions in my viewing practice the way i once did following the pleasurable trauma of abrams s reboot i have accepted the death of the star trek i grew up with i am still haunted by a certain anxiety of the unarrived regarding my scholarly predilections and predictions i d hate to be the kind of academic whom future historians tsk ingly agree got things wrong but the tidal pull of the franchise commitment persists which why i m having a hard time deciding whether jurassic world succeeded or sucked objectively i m pretty sure the film is a muddle certainly worse in its money grabbing motivations and listless construction than either the lost world or its follow up the copy of a copy jurassic park iii 2001 anthony lane in the new yorker correctly bisects jurassic world into two halves doggedly dull for the first hour and beefy with basic thrills for most of the second to which i d add that most of that first hour is rushed graceless and elliptical to the point of incoherence one of my favorite movie critics walter chaw of film freak central damns that ramshackle execution with faint praise writing jurassic world is dada it is anti art anti sense willfully defiantly some would say exuberantly meaningless in its feckless anarchy find mute rebellion against narrative convention you didn t come for the story it says you came for the set ups and pay offs perhaps chaw is right but seeing the preview for this fall s bridge of spies reminded me what an effortless composer of the frame spielberg can be an elegance absent from jurassic world save for one shot which i ll get to in a minute and rewatching the opening minutes of jurassic park before tackling this review reminded me how gifted the man is at pacing in particular at putting a story s elements in place think of the careful build of the first twenty minutes of close encounters of the third kind 1977 laying out its globe jumping puzzle pieces or of jaws 1975 as the sleepy beach town of amity slowly wakes to the horror prowling its waters credit too the involvement of the late great michael crichton his early technothrillers especially 1969 s the andromeda strain and 1973 s westworld both of which feed directly into jurassic park might be remembered for their high concepts and derided for their thin characterizations but what made him such a perfect collaborator for spielberg was the clear pleasure he took in building narrative mousetraps one brief chapter at a time nowadays someone like dan brown is probably seen as crichton s heir apparent though i vastly prefer the superb half sf novels of daniel suarez i delve into these influences and inheritances because ancestry and lineage seem to be much on the mind of jurassic world dna and its pandora s box of wonders perils have always been a fascination of the jurassic franchise in the first film it was mosquitoes in amber in jurassic world it s the 1993 movie that s being resurrected something old something new something borrowed something blue in front of the camera you ve got b d wong and a crapload of production design tying the humble beginnings of isla nubar to its modern disneyesque metastasization while behind the scenes a phrase i put in scare quotes because let s face it if the material were really meant to stay behind the scenes we wouldn t be discussing it videos like this one work to reassure us of a meaningful connection between the original and its copy the classic jurassic crew profiled here might seem a little reachy lead greensman boom operator but the key names are obviously jack horner and phil tippett paleontology consultant and dinosaur consultant respectively the former conferring scientific legitimacy upon the proceedings the latter marking a tie to traditions of special effects that predate the digital tippett of course made his name in stop motion animation the imperial walkers in the empire strikes back s hoth battle are largely his handiwork and at first was approached by spielberg to provide similar animation for jurassic park but when tippett s go...