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directorcommentary | jasonbentley.org

Jason Bentley, Santa Clara, California: writing, photography, graphic design, music, audio, video, technology, life

December 13, 2004

Everything Gone Wrong:
The Fugliest Web Page of 2004

It's that time of year: everybody's into lists. Best this, best that. Which is cool. It seems natural at the end of a period of time to spend the endgame in reflection. I remember how from 1995 through 1999, what time wasn't spent on Pre-Millenium tension and Y2K planning was spent reveling in micro-fads where certain decades would come back and then peter out again and then come back and switch places...sixties chic, then rockabilly and 50's poodle-skirted Rebel Without A Cause fashion, then Titanic Victoriana, then the 70's! The 80's! The early 90's!

This was before VH-1 made it more convienient to live entirely in the past.

But I digress. Rather than give you any best/worst of lists (I'll leave that to fimoculous.com), I'll just throw out extremes as I think of them.

And so here's my vote for the Fugliest Web Page of 2004. I'm sure I'll get lots of email from my loyal readers with fuglier choices, but I kinda limited myself to pages that are professional (or at least aspire to be): magazines, entertainment sites, corporate websites, etc. Web amateurs with an itchy blink tag don't count - it's much too easy to pick on teenagers with bad midi and spinning hobbits 'n shit everywhere. I'd rather highlight pages created by those that should know better.

Which brings me to the gross visual ineptitude of www.playlouder.com, an online web-zine that makes me want to rip my eyes out of my head. Here's a sample page:



To me, this is the web version of a train wreck. Someone designed a background that goes half way down the page and stops at white space. That yellow-highlighting? In the CSS. If this is a style decision, to make it look "DIY" and like a bulletin board, it falls flat. Other sections of the site are just as bad.

I've said enough. Go see for yourself, and if you make web pages, don't ever do it like playlouder.com.

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C-section and de-cyst

Don Dorsey again sends me a link to yet another American oddity - only this one is a little more involuntary than Pan Man. Click here to read the article from South Florida's own NBC6. If the article is removed, click here to see what doctors pulled from within.

And then get on your knees and give thanks for your good health.

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Cog ex machina

This is an amazing ad, produced in France for Honda EU. It never aired in America, because Honda doesn't sell an Accord minivan the US. But it's just brilliant - a single-take CGI-free tour of car components arranged in a domino-style Rube Goldberg contraption for a full minute.

I know it doesn't sound like much (and if you think this is hard try getting your friends to watch Lagaan), but "Cog" is a sight to behold. To find out how it was made (and watch in higher resolution), click here.


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Brecht enlargement

Of all the figures in 20th century drama and literature, none seems to capture my imagination as much as Bertholt Brecht. His poetry and plays are continually translated, printed, and performed; the techniques he employed in search of the elusive Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) are so deeply ingrained in stage and film they seem like second nature - nobody broke the fourth wall and spoke to the audience before Brecht thought it a good idea.
His notion of a critical look at drama as a representation of reality, without the suspension of disbelief, speaks right to the core of how I view much of the world. Hell, even the name of this blog is hopelessly Brechtian.

Anyway, Brecht isn't a name that's bandied about these days outside the realm of the Actor's Studio, and that's a shame. So you can imagine my surprise when no less than The Hollywood Reporter evoked the name of der Meister - and correctly - in its review of Kevin Spacey's new movie, Beyond the Sea:
We may be witnessing the evolution of a new kind of biopic, beginning with the premieres in Cannes this year of films about Cole Porter ("De-Lovely") and Peter Sellers ("The Life and Death of Peter Sellers"), which in a Brechtian menage of fantasy, reality and make believe the subject views his life as a show played out on a stage or film set. If so, then "Beyond the Sea" is its first masterwork.
I have yet to see Spacey's movie, but I did watch the The Life and Death of Peter Sellers on HBO. It's a well done, but odd film - and yes, thoroughly Brechtian. Sellers often pauses so that Geoffrey Rush, as Sellers, stops the "film" to comment on the action. A harrowing scene during which Seller's wife (Emily Watson) confronts and leaves him, is immediately (and brillianly) followed by a scene where Sellers, dressed as his wife, redubs her lines so that the dialog better fits his psyche. You can almost hear Brecht, just off camera, whispering "Glotzt nicht so romantisch!" to both Rush and the audience.

Anyway, I think it's cool that Spacey makes use of Brechtian framing (and Spacey - a theatre guy if there ever was one, knows just what he's doing) in telling the story of Bobby Darin - and that The Hollywood Reporter knew enough to point it out. I wonder if anyone's considered this interesting coincidence: Darin's biggest song was, of course, "Mack the Knife," from The Threepenny Opera - which was written in 1928, with music by Kurt Weill and libretto by - you guessed it - Bertholt Brecht. Every cover of Mack the Knife - it's one of the most often recorded songs in the history of music - is credited to Weill/Brecht.

How meta is that? The sensation you're feeling as you search for thie answer is classic Verfremdungseffekt.

Look out ol' Brecht is back!

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Beware the strumpet!

I'm archiving some of my favorite World War II and Cold War propaganda posters at the Imageplex in an album called "The Art of War." I'll be adding Soviet artwork as I go through the massive number of files I have.













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