Welcome to Coriolistic Anachronisms

Introducing the new jQuery sliding panel and accordion menu!

[applause]

Click on a vertical tab to the right for help and options

And enjoy your visit!
Vince

  • HOME

    Click here to visit the main photo galleries at VMP.com or stick around and click here (or on the blog header from anywhere in the blog) to reach the Coriolistic Anachronisms home page and most recent posts.

  • ABOUT

    My name is Vincent Mounier. I'm a photographer and designer of this site. My blog Coriolistic Anachronisms is now five years old. Find out more about the web site and me.

  • CONTACT

    Click here to send me an email. Enthusiastic praise, technical questions, geek jokes and constructive criticism are always welcome!

  • FAQ's

    If you have unanswered questions, why don't you check out this helpful FAQ's page. You could also email me and if your question is relevent, it might appear as a new FAQ.

  • SHARE

    Here's a one-stop social bookmarking tool for your convenience. Please use as many of the available links, I don't mind. And don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed.

  • RULES OF CONDUCT AND COPYRIGHTS

    A few notes on what I hope will be a respectful visit, and my promise to play by the same rules. Basically, don't swear, don't steal, don't spam. Please.

  • 66 SQUARE FEET

    Let me Marie at 66 Square Feetintroduce you to my blogging and life soulmate. Different blogs, different views, different ideas, same passion.

  • SITEMAP

    A graphic, user-friendly navigational overview of the entire web site, which is made of two main sections:

    • This blog and all sub-sections,
    • Vincent Mounier Photography, where the main photo galleries are located.

Schtroumpfissime: Thinking out loud, and writing it down. The opinions expressed in here are mine only and might offend or thrill you.

01
04
2010

Avatar: I don't see you.

Ok, now that I have your attention, let me explain what I really have on my mind. It’s 9:00 PM. We walked out of the theater around 5:30 PM. I am still sulking. I feel sad and extremely disappointed, and sour. Because you see, for me, Avatar totally sucked.

I had been basking in a deep trance of the finest expectation for over two months, thinking about the upcoming 3D IMAX blockbuster constantly, counting down, cherishing each moment gone between me and D-day. I don’t believe a child awaits Christmas with more enthusiasm, more passion than I did my movie.

Avatar, I assumed, was going to be it. The Movie of the Decade. The Star Wars of a new generation. The one masterpiece that transcended its time and took cinematography and special effects to a new level. The benchmark for many years to come. As my sister had described it referring to Fynn’s Anna and Mister God, « an Ah! movie ».

Waking up this morning, I barely could contain my excitement. Walking into the theater, I hardly managed to breathe. The CGI was going to be out of this world. The 3D was going to be so immersive it would suck us into the screen. I fully expected Avatar to blow my mind. Instead, it blew it away.

We got to the AMC Loews Lincoln Square theater only 15 minutes before showtime, 15 minutes late on my planned schedule thanks to NYC’s painfully slow subway system and the resulting 6 or 7 block walk. I had already screwed up. I should have known better. When you want something really bad, you must bleed for it. I should have decided on an hour early arrival just to be sure.

By the time we entered the gigantic IMAX amphitheater, it was already 80 or 90% full. There simply were no good seats left. Having been on the guest list at the Vancouver Canada Place IMAX for 3 years, I am very familiar with the setup and know all too well that the only good seats in the house are up high at the back, center. Period. I was lucky enough to once be given a tour of the projection room by the Vancouver projectionist himself, and that for sure had blown my mind. What I hadn’t realized then is that unless you are seated in the 25% prime seating, IMAX is nothing but a hoax.

Our New York tickets cost $18.50 each and by the time they were bought online, we were short US$41.50 for two people, no popcorn. And these days, that’s rough on the budget. So walking in 15 minutes before lights out got us a seat rather centered but about 3 rows from the bottom. The bottom. Right then and there, I screwed up again. I should have made an executive decision and bailed us out of there.

We stayed. The screen could not have been further away from our faces than the opposite end of a subway car. That screen, however, was 4 or 5 stories high. Across the entire theater, morons were wasting seats by leaving a space between themselves and the next person, effectively killing space for couples and making it just about impossible for late-comers to fit themselves in. The theater probably seats over 400 people, and it was, as far as I could tell, sold out.

The movie started. Given our low seating, I had made a solemn promise to myself not to break my neck trying to follow the action on screen by twisting said neck. Instead, I would fling my eyes sideways. We put our plastic glasses on. Instantly, starships flew across space, planets revolved one around another, a bunch of sleepy guys awoke from cryogenic sleep in complete weightlessness, and rather than lifting me up, they drowned me into my seat.

This was not the 3D IMAX I remembered. As long as the scene was a panoramic, distant view, things were acceptable. But as soon as the action got closer, you lost track. Close-ups were simple abstract moments of jagged perspective. I could not grasp the entire picture without ordering my brain to switch off some sensors. It was either the guy in the foreground or the blurry background; there was no in-between. We were just basically too bloody close to the screen.

Within 20 minutes, Marie, who is rather sensitive to heights and motion, was feeling sick. I spent the rest of the movie worrying about her. This must not have helped.

Through a childish scenario and a transparent plot, James Cameron then threw some seemingly stunning CGI at us, except I couldn’t really enjoy it, as it was literally in my face. Later, he branched into First Person Shooter-style video games. The aerial chase scenes and never-ending explosions made it impossible to distinguish between a PSP console, a colorful nightmare, some cheap Vin Diesel / John Woo action movie where everything blows up, and the movie Avatar.

There were puerile allusions to the Middle East, the good guy was a Marine fighting other Marines, Sigourney Weaver was back in space dealing with Aliens, islands lost track of their gravitational duties, plants glowed happily in the dark and a close-up of the two computer-animated Na’vi kissing was just as real as Jack Dawson kissing Rose DeWitt Bukater on the Titanic. It was all too much to handle while attempting to control three-dimensional explosions.

End credits. We walked out within the human flow, dropped our 3D glasses in the ritual bin, and I looked for a bathroom, which I found 4 floors down thanks to a complete absence of signage. The queue was longer on the men’s side, something I have never seen anywhere. There were 2 stalls for an entire floor of multiple theaters. What the hell is AMC thinking? That once the tickets are sold, customers can hold it?

So what’s the bottom line? I’m a kid, and I was robbed of my Christmas. All that anticipation only led to a tease and no sugar, no toys. It feels like maybe, probably, from another vantage point, some utter magic might have been happening on the giant silver screen, but it wasn’t mine to taste. Sure, I could go see the damn movie again. It would mean having made an overall hefty donation of $60 to James Cameron, IMAX and AMC, which I’m sure neither really needs. It would imply getting the right seat at the top of the room, and thus arriving at least an hour early at the theater and waiting patiently in line. And still it would be a show without surprises, without wonders. It would be a redemption viewing, a last chance at convincing myself that indeed, the movie was worth the 300+ million dollars it cost.

It think that IMAX needs to rethink its seating configuration - hell, its entire theater design. Charging almost $20 for a movie that less than 50% of the audience can fully appreciate is theft, an incredible ripoff that nobody so far, to my knowledge, seems to have denounced.

Avatar was going to be great. It was going to reconcile me with art as a way of life, as an expression of our infinite creative potential, as a proof that some people walk this earth with their eyes turned skyward, where everything is possible. That reconciliation would have been much needed, my personal dealings with the concept of art having been rather morose recently.

Instead, I am left with nothing to dream about, no endless after-dinner conversations about the how’s and why’s, no admiring praise of the vision and technique, no inspiration nor renewed belief in our race’s clever use of technology for the amusement of the masses - and worse, no raving review of the movie on this very blog that would catapult my traffic into three-dimensional dimensions...

I am left wondering if I’ll ever chance an IMAX movie again. I am left pondering if others actually saw everything they raved about or if all the hype was simply a clever media manipulation and the result of mass-hysteria and sheep-like behavior. Yet Marie liked it despite feeling dizzy, and so did my sister. How did I miss the show, then?

I glance at the calendar and wonder if I will manage to wait another decade for the next Avatar. Who knows. Chat échaudé craint l’eau froide.

P.S.  Yes, for you keen eyes out there, the added tear on the poster is my own CGI. And it cost nothing to produce. Ok, so if Cameron drops me a line with a job offer, I’ll withdraw all the above...

 

 Posted at 10:57 PM in Reviews: & Schtroumpfissime: 6 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
01
01
2010

The old year is dead, long live the new year!

A difficult decade is over. Major terror plots, a severe depression, worldwide epidemics and the passing of Michael Jackson. It sure wasn’t easy.

Last night, Marie and I watched fireworks under an pink umbrella, holding each other tight while the Manhattan skyline disappeared in a foggy, rainy night. An NYPD police car was parked on the Brooklyn Promenade, playing an oldies radio station out through it’s loudspeaker. This morning, as we awake to a new cycle of life, we receive terrible news that another life, far away to the east and the south, has ended. A sad gate is opened. Emotions and memories rush in. Tears flow. Then the mind drifts. It seems like yesterday - rather than 365 days ago - Marie and I were celebrating the New Year in Cape Town.

Seemingly a year or two before that, I was standing on a Little Cayman beach at midnight with a bottle of champagne in my hand, watching Peter and his crew launch the ritual New Year’s Eve fireworks from the Southern Cross Club dock, the real Southern Cross hanging low in the sky*, Yin and Yang of constellations with its trailing stars forming a « minus » to the main « plus ». But in fact that was a full decade ago.

Another decade before that, I was about to embark on a 15-year journey throughout the Tropics that would change me radically and forever shift my passionate embrace of the world to include the oceans. And 10 years before that, I had been finishing high school and getting ready for college and flight school.

Where has the time gone?

Easy. It’s here. It’s now. I hold it all in my hand today, January 1st, 2010. Time has lead me along, landing me its magic, letting me ride it, allowing me to live with maddening intensity and a careful abandon. It is never wasted, never spilled nor even spoiled. Time builds us into who we are now. And if we don’t like that, we can change in a split second because time, despite my father’s old saying that « it will not respect what was built without it, » is also the strangest contortionist; just when you thought it was stretching itself to infinity, it bends, shifts, swivels and twists, and delivers in a single moment a millennium’s worth of perfection.

Time is a beautiful, cruel and impossible thing. The toll is terrible, the rewards sweet and colorfully tingling. Without it passing, we would not value anything and couldn’t appreciate what we have, or have not. Without it ticking, there would be no memories. Without it flowing through our lives like sand through fingers, we would never say « thank you ». Without time, we wouldn’t really have a soul.

So I’ll use this time, on the morning of the first day of a new decade, to repeat myself and wish the world a simple thing: peace - peace to all, within, around and away. Inner peace, most of all, to the ones who, today, are struggling to make sense of the absurdity of life. A time will hopefully come...


* That was a bit of a poetic stretch; at the Cayman Islands’ slightly northern latitude, the Southern Cross only becomes visible later in the year and the night.

 

 Posted at 11:01 AM in Schtroumpfissime: 2 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
11
16
2009

Untitled

« Dying, that doesn’t frighten me...
It’s losing my life that would make me sad. »

Le grand Marcel Pagnol

 

 Posted at 11:04 AM in Schtroumpfissime: 2 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
11
14
2009

QRN sur Bretzelburg

I know I’m not posting much these days. It’s just that, there’s that thing. It’s sneaky. It comes in stealthily and creeps into daily momentum, coating all things great with a fuzzy interference blanket. It’s a kind of existential static, the white noise of life that sometimes obstructs clear line of sight to the essential stuff that Saint Exupéry confirmed invisible to the eyes any way.

Like a fog bank over complicated shores, existential static renders simple navigation tricky and makes my ship vulnerable to shoals. It blurs perspective and adds a grainy texture to the sequence of events that make life. That static is born from routine and the repetitive small tugs of trouble at my sleeves. I become annoyed and concentrate on the sleeve rather than on wearing the coat with grace and confidence. When perspective is lost, it is replaced by a series of uninterrupted obstacles challenging me like a horse on a difficult course.

The approach of Christmas, bureaucracy bearing down on sore shoulders, a sense of purposelessness, receiving a lot and not being able to give much back, miscellaneous computer issues, a cold and another and some laziness, urban distraction, much to see and do, still, well these all contribute to the static.

I do promise the blogging rhythm will eventually pick up, but first it will slow down even further - you see, growing nearer every day on a shimmering horizon is our next episode of travels. Quebec and South Africa are booked and hooked, and there’s yet another road trip brewing.

Then at our return to the US, critically important and exceptionally busy days await. So it will be a while. But posting will resume. In the meantime, I will do my very best to keep the blog from going into random mode. Have mercy.

Note: QRN sur Bretzelburg was an album of the Spirou et Fantasio comics series by Franquin and Greg. It featured the fantastic Marsupilami and was set in a fantasy European dictatorship-kingdom. The term QRN is taken from the old radio-communications « Q » code and means there is static in the transmission.

 

 Posted at 11:01 PM in Schtroumpfissime: No comments yet »  Post one!
10
16
2009

Getting bent for the Brooklyn Bridge

Fellow divers, did you know that the first people to get bent were not divers but bridge builders? You see, decompression sickness (DCS) - also labeled decompression illness (DCI) when diagnosed and treated on a common ground with the similar arterial gas embolism, was actually born under the name of « Caisson Disease » and although it involved pressure and the surrounding water, its unlucky victims certainly never saw little fishies. They were building a bridge.

Their task was digging to anchor the foundations of the future Brooklyn Bridge towers into the bottom of the East River, incarcerated for hours below the surface in enormous watertight pressurized caissons. Their average progress rate on a hopeful descent towards firm bedrock was a mere 6 inches a week. It was the end of the 19th century. Crossing the bridge would later cost 5 cents.

DCS, also called the bends, can be described as the formation of air bubbles inside the body following depressurization. Recreational and commercial divers are thoroughly familiar with the risks associated with pressure changes, but theoretically, DCS can also affect someone flying in an unpressurized aircraft and astronauts - the latter probably being more than happy to assume this slight risk in exchange for space walks...

When it was opened, the Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the Wild Wide World. Today it is just the longest bridge to be called Brooklyn. Was it worth dying for?

In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge construction, at least three men died of DCS; but records were poorly kept and other casualties might easily have gone unnoticed. Washington Roebbling, the mastermind behind the project left in charge after his father’s early passing, was struck himself and left incapacitated. He finished supervising the 13 year-long process from his house, his wife insuring the liaison with the engineers.

When it was opened, the Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the whole Wild Wide World. Today it is just the longest bridge to be called Brooklyn. Was it worth dying for? Not unless you’re a visionary - and these workers most certainly weren’t, quite the opposite. Their vision must have been that of bread on a cheap table, period. But because of their sacrifice and the dedication and hard labour of so many others, we now have a cool way to walk from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back, enjoying one of the most spectacular cityscapes worldwide. In fact, the only place I can think of that would top the skyline view from the Brooklyn Bridge is the magnificent Bay of Honk Kong.

We now have a cool way to walk, as I think I just wrote in my modern English. The folks who built this bridge would not even have understood what I mean by that. Cool? Why, is it a bit cold up there? And once enlightened, they would have remained skeptical. How could we call such a marvel of engineering, the fruit of 13 years of incredibly hard work involving over 20 casualties and requiring 3600 miles of cable wire - « cool »?

Easy. You just need to be a 21st century child. To have seen a man walk on the moon. To have flown across the ocean in a giant coach along with 300 others just below the speed of sound in 5 hours. To have been granted a view through space to an event horizon located over 46 billion light-years away. To have explored the human anatomy from a front-row perspective with miniaturized cameras. To have decoded the human genome. To be able to write this today in New York and have you read it from half-way across the globe, instantly, on your iPhone.

We are a spoiled species. We tend to take it all for granted. Still, the Brooklyn Bridge is so freakin’  cool.

 

 Posted at 10:52 AM in New York: & Schtroumpfissime: 4 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
10
11
2009

Dazed in Harlem

I’m miserably dragging my bones, today. The subway ride wasn’t even that long yet stations lazily drifted by like distant planetary stops on an endless journey to the universe’s end. I wonder if I’ve got a fever. Space travel is said to be hard on you.

As I sip my coffee at a terrace, a warm autumn day lighting up the wide Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd, Harlem is asleep around me. Its Dutch roots forgotten, the renaissance of the 20’s a pale memory, later crime and drug records having painfully been filed and put aside, the city finally seems at peace. She speaks in hushed tones, subdued by heavy gentrification and a new found love for peace.

Harlem finally seems at peace. She speaks in hushed tones, subdued by heavy gentrification and a new found love for peace

A man with a perfect Easter Island statue profile walks by wearing a brightly coloured African suit and open sandals, hurrying on some mid-day errand. I imagine him having a deep voice and maybe speaking some French. He doesn’t fit my expectations of this place. But then again nothing does.

The young black woman who served me my double espresso with a bright smile wore her baby behind her in a cradle board while working behind the coffee shop counter. People are sitting at small tables around me and inside, sharing cups and laptop computers, wearing headphones and microphones, smiling blindly to distant interlocutors.

The streets are indeed surprisingly wide in Harlem, as Marie had described them. The southern parts almost have a Parisian feel with their long avenues of nice buildings looking like hôtels particuliers, with the exception of those ugly street-facing fire escapes, which - thank god - were never invented in Europe.

I look around me while rubbing my eyes. The scene seems password-protected, and I haven’t cracked the code. What am I not seeing? Something is missing, something previously written to a chapter of my preconceptions by history and media and now having been lost in a new superficial reality.

I should come back when my imagination is healthier. And my head. Maybe, then, will I see through the curtain and figure out where Harlem has gone.


 

 Posted at 1:12 PM in New York: & Schtroumpfissime: 4 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
07
11
2009

Free @ YVR

It’s 9:26 AM. Finally, Vancouver’s International Airport offers terminal-wide free Wi-Fi access. I’m sitting in the more modest Domestic Departure Terminal, gate B21. Westjet flight 506 is on time, bound for Montreal Trudeau International, aka good old Dorval airport.

Even though I’m still in town and I didn’t have to clear customs this time, Vancouver and the West Coast have already receded far behind the horizon and an imaginary but very tangible line now separates me from an old home, drawing me towards a new one.

My heart is heavy. British Columbia is an extraordinary place and will be dearly missed. But where I’m going, no time to cry; many more jewels await and my own star shines with infinite grace on the Eastern Seaboard.

We leave small pieces of ourselves everywhere we go, but take so much in exchange along with us, to keep us warm, to keep us amazed, and growing. Change is a blessing. It reminds me, always, of the uncanny ability of this universe to keep surprising me. I wonder how the other ones work...


"Everything will be alright
Everything will turn out fine
Some nights I still can’t sleep
And the voices pass with time
And I keep

No time for tears
No time to run and hide
No time to be afraid of fear
I keep no time to cry"

The Sisters of Mercy - No Time to Cry


 

 Posted at 12:26 PM in Always: & Schtroumpfissime: 1 Comment » Toggle display • Reply
07
05
2009

Good bye Vancouver

As I sit at home in an almost empty apartment, sorting out my fireworks pictures while waiting for Craigslist to do its magic and rid me of a few remaining pieces of furniture, I am peering through my immense window at the city beyond. Without leaving my seat, I can count around 60 buildings - the tallest being Shangri-La at 62 floors - and less than 10 of these are office towers. With more than 100,000 people living on a 5 by 5 km peninsula, the heck if I can’t sell a couple of dressers, a table and a bed.

The July 1st fireworks seemed lame but I was stationed further away than usual. I had decided to include more skyline in my shots and parked myself at the very beginning of Coal Harbour, where the city meets Stanley Park and water is at its calmest.

In any case, I thought it would be proper to end my photo posting from Vancouver with fireworks. These will be the last pictures taken in Vancouver this year, and maybe - who knows - forever. I hope to be able to post something from Quebec next week-end, maybe a trail run report from revisiting the good old Dieppe run on Mont St Hilaire. And then entries will resume from New York, and this blog’s name will change slightly. Stay tuned!

As for you Vancouverites, « I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve... I regret to announce that - though, as I said, three and a half years is far too short a time to spend among you - this is the END. I am going. I am leaving NOW. GOOD-BYE! »*

* Borrowed from Tolkien.

 

 Posted at 9:09 PM in Schtroumpfissime: & Vancouver: 11 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
06
27
2009

10 best ways to download the 5 most useful free social networking tutorials from 7 startup sites in less than 20 minutes via a new faster photoshop plugin

Of course, the title doesn’t mean anything! It never tried to.

This just illustrates what I think of the direction blogging is taking nowadays: a tangent to nowhere via this visceral need and pathetic attempt at magnetizing traffic by using catchy and keyword-savvy titles, and the corresponding topics. So what do I think? It’s SHIT. And yet I’ll bet anything that this very title will get me more traffic than a post about Stanley Park’s incredible beauty and the pictures that might go along...

It would seem that less and less bloggers are writing for the fun of it, for the pleasure of rambling, for the lust of a few puns, for poetic license, to say nothing, to say too much, to put foot in mouth and dots on i’s, to be unique. Instead, most are beginning to write for traffic and to please the masses, to attract numbers and distract them long enough to gain a numbed interest - click here and make me your fav, addict yourself to my keywords, chain your returns into my lack of creativity, me, me, me.

The hell with social networking and all those bright new ideas and startups turned giants, if all they can generate is stereotyped bulshit, the disapearance of individuality and the end of a properly punctuated sentence.

We didn’t need 15 years to evolve from IRC to messaging, to intelligent blogging and comments, back down to Facebook and finally as low as Twitter. We could have stayed there. IRC was geekier and funnier, and it was already invented.

If you want an antidote to all this crap, go check out some amazing mammatus. Really!

Or enjoy this from Bash.org, to make us smile after such a bleakly negativational post:

<reo4k> just type /quit whoever, and it’ll quit them from irc
* luckyb1tch has quit IRC (r`heaven)
* r3devl has quit IRC (r`heaven)
* sasopi has quit IRC (r`heaven)
* phhhfft has quit IRC (r`heaven)
* blackersnake has quit IRC (r`heaven)
<ibaN`reo4k[ex]> that’s gotta hurt
<r`heaven> :(

Note from Vince:
Ok, this was for IRC geeks only - one must understand how the /quit command works otherwise it makes no sense whatsoever.
/me says too bad for you.
: - )

 

 Posted at 12:43 AM in Schtroumpfissime: 2 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
06
17
2009

Neuroplasticity: I think, therefore I change

I’ve always believed that what we put in our brain directly influences who we become. That’s one of the reasons why I refuse to watch violent and horror movies, and will always favour comedies and adventure stories. I’ve long been a firm believer of visualization as a training tool for physical activities and even after 20 years away from Aikido, I still catch myself mentally rehearsing tsuki kote gaeshi and shomen uchi irimi nage.

I recently found a fascinating CBC documentary via Stumble Upon; it’s called « The brain that changes itself » and it talks about the emerging concept of neuroplasticity, which is the ability for our brain to change and rewire itself upon learning or receiving new input. That’s a drastic departure from traditional brain science that had it all figured out: our brain was a fixed machine. It would start aging and decaying and the process would never stop until the end. Trauma was irreversible and no new neurons could ever be created.

With the new concept of neuroplasticity, this all changed. Scientists are beginning to realize that our brain, like most of our body, has the ability to adapt and regenerate. But what’s even more fascinating, it would seem it is able to reprogram, or rewire itself to use various areas to perform a given function - in other words no single region of the brain can be exclusively associated with specific tasks and activities.

What’s more, studies are showing that our thought process has a direct impact on brain development and hence, on our personality. At some point in the documentary, neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone is explaining a study he conducted where subjects were instructed to rehearse a five finger piano sequence for five days, after which their brain was examined via transcranial-magnetic-stimulation (TMS). A specific growth was registered in the motor cortex region associated with playing the piano.

However he decided to push the experiment one step further and repeated the process with new subjects, this time instructing them to only mentally rehearse the sequence without actually touching the piano or even moving their fingers. Stunningly, he found out that the same growth was registering in the brain of these passive subjects, without any actual physical practice!

At that point of the interview, he goes on to say: « What that ultimately means is that one needs to be careful what one thinks... »

It gives me chills.

 

 Posted at 2:59 PM in Schtroumpfissime: & Science: 7 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
next page
(Page 1 of 15, totaling 149 entries)