Golden Gate Bridge - Post # 500

The Golden Gate Bridge from Conzelman Road
(Golden Gate recreation area)

This is the post #500! Just a number, but I like it!
I started this blog March 13, 2008.

Drew Snyder's article "Michele Guieu's Defragmentation" was published in the printed edition of the San Diego Union Tribune. Which is great, only a few blog posts are published in the paper. Bravo Drew!
Saturday I am taking "Defragmentation" down. The five weeks went fast, I've got very good - and interesting - feedback. We'll see what happens next.



Just started a new class in the Video Arts Department, with the same teacher I had last semester, R.J. Ward. Online again. The class is "Digital Video Production", with the same easy-to-use interactive website: announcements, assignments, tests and surveys, discussion and private messages, chat room, syllabus. I really enjoyed "Digital Video Editing", during which I got to work on three projects: re-editing a scene of Million Dollar Baby, making a short documentary and working on a "detournement". The Second part of that class is scheduled for September.

I finally met R.J. Ward, we had a coffee and it was great to have a conversation person to person! He is very knowledgeable, funny and passionate about what he is doing.



Saw some powerful movies including black and white autobiographical animation "Persepolis" by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, the brutal and riveting "A Prophet" by Jacques Audiard. Also the recent "The Fighter", by David O. Russell, a boxing drama based on a true story - but above all a portrait of a dysfunctional family.



I loved "La Carte et le Territoire" (The Map and the Territory) by French author Michel Houellebecq. The book is about Jed Martin, an artist living in Paris who destroys his last painting (about Koons and Hirst), becomes famous by photographing large-scale Michelin maps, have a Russian girlfriend, a bitter and ill father, and meets... Michel Houellebecq.
It's cynical, funny, bleak and beautiful. Since I read his first novel "Extention du Domaine de la Lutte" (Whatever) in 1994 when it was published, I am very interested in that controversial - an not very correct - writer. “La Carte et le Territoire” received the Prix Goncourt in November 2010.