imomus | All very Nobel

Next Wednesday the Nobel Peace Prize will be presented, in the town hall of Oslo, to the person deemed to have "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind" over the past twelve months. This year's winner has already been announced; Martti Ahtisaari, the ex-president of Finland, takes the medallion "for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts". Ahtisaari will take home over a million euros for his work to resolve disputes in Kosovo, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa.

Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman are two artists currently based in Oslo; he's American, she's Spanish. You might know Alejandra and Aeron for their Lucky Kitchen label or their fabulous soundscapes of environments in places like Portugal and Scotland, released on CD and used in their gallery installations. Well, so, Alejandra and Aeron have invited about twenty artists to contribute pieces for an online exhibition about peace, held at their alternative Nobel Prize website, a benign spoof on the official site.

The peace pieces are mostly films, though Goodiepal contributed a piece of jazz and a score and Emma Khil made a slideshow of the factory where the gongs are made in Kongsberg. My friend Xavier Gautier (he's Anne Laplantine's husband) combined images of Anne Frank with children's songs from 1950s Edinburgh. Alejandra and Aeron made a video of themselves whistling in the ornate but somewhat warlike environs of the Oslo town hall, where the prize will be presented. My contribution is Floating Film, a radical re-edit of the 1959 film by Ozu, Floating Weeds. Click the image above (or here) to see it.

Floating Weeds is one of my favourite films, the tale of a kabuki theatre which comes to visit a small seaside town, and the melodrama which unfolds between various actors as old scores are settled. Despite the tranquil setting it's actually a film seething with a lot of hatred and conflict, with confrontations between men and women, young and old, actors and townsfolk. What I've done is take all the human drama -- all the conflict -- out of the film, leaving just the shots that establish each scene, and adding some warm crackling sounds and a narrative from a documentary about the functionalist architecture of an Alvar Aalto sanatorium, the Paimio Sanatorium in Finland.

The removal of melodrama turns the film into a design documentary about a residence for sick people, which is soothing, but also raises the question of whether a certain amount of conflict isn't necessary to human existence, to make stories happen and people relate to one another. The utopianism of design features about unoccupied buildings can be somewhat spooky; the chilly air of the rational Scandinavian forests may be good for our recovery, but when we're fit again we'll probably get back into the fray, swinging for what we believe in. All it takes is Jacques Tati -- or a family squabble -- to turn a chilly documentary back into a warm human melodrama.

It's not that Floating Film isn't a pacifist statement, just that that statement is qualified; a world without any conflict would have to be a world without people, and without stories. Just like Scandinavia, though, it would probably have great design.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Lovely new design. You may think about a little more margin space or padding on the left!

Do you know the CSS coding for that? I basically busked my way to the current layout just by dropping CSS code into the box semi-randomly. Ideally, I'd like to have a fixed column width of 550 pixels. I'd also like text to wrap around the side of images better than it does here -- the hspace tag doesn't seem to work in this new layout.

I know you are over this discussion, but since i made the original comment, I might be able to alter the css for you. You might also have great luck with this.. Css edit (http://www.macrabbit.com)

I'll try it out and send the results.

David Holl

new layout. cool. but why never use the whole screen?

Because it's tiring on the eye to travel across a long horizontal line. And everyone has different screen sizes, so if you design for the big ones, the little ones lose out. It's "screen communism"!

I'm all for different clothing...

But on this one you look like the geek back in school dressed by his mother (who's no Vivienne Westwood).

I was in love with the old design.... Now i'm heartbroken. :°

Well, I wouldn't have changed it, but the old design stopped showing links, and a blog without visible links is useless.

This one requires more tweaking, but I like the way it revives threads and subjects which, in the old model, were dead a day or so after being published.

I forgot the BIG fonts: how can i possibly have forgotten the BIG fonts? Narrow column plus BIG fonts: what a delicious contrast. I will miss the narrow column. I will miss the big, big, BIG fonts. So long, narrow column. So long, BIG fonts. :°

The moment someone tells me the CSS code for a fixed column width of 550, it'll be back!

You found 'human drama' in an Ozu film?! Aren't his characters like flowers in a vase anyway?

The Japanese must find Fellini's 'Roma' a frightening other world (actually you've sort of written a song about this already).

There's a lot of conflict in late Ozu. Between conservative fathers and daughters who want to do their own thing, between materialistic kids who want TV sets and their parents who can't afford them, between town and country folk, and so on.

Actually, Floating Weeds seems very directly inspired by Fellini's La Strada, even down to the Nina Rota-esque soundtrack.

The new design seems to be usurping today's article.
I logged on to Click Opera last night and it was cerise bordered with black font on slate grey background; I presume you were experimenting with the layout, just glad it didn't stay that way!
This design does indeed look good on both small and large screen.

Liked the post also btw.
Is aesthetic conflict not beneficial to design?

Actually, I just had lunch with a design writer and one of the things we were talking about is the impact the Cold War had on design -- a beneficial one, rooted in conflict and competition. But that particular competititon (http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/the-post-materialist-cold-war-modern/), paradoxically, was about one side's suppression of competition, and other other side's exaggeration of it.

If only someone like Momus had written an article in the past about post-design change entries, how they must be throwaway entries since all the attention will be on the radical tectonic shift in our cybergeography. But oh, there's that comforting wooden paneling.

Hmm, I don't like how the white "recently on..." text floats in the air on the right. It looks bad because of how it overlaps two backgrounds, I think. Worlds are colliding.

Bring back the old layout, or an approximation of it!

Enough wailing, what I need is people who know specific CSS attributes. Like, the code needed for a sitewide float around images.

I tried this:

img {
float: left;
margin-bottom="2em" margin-top="2em" margin-left="2em" margin-right="2em"
padding: 0;
}

...but it caused havoc.

Well, I've found a slightly clunky solution: replace my hspace tags in each aligned image with:

style="border:8px #ffffff solid"

That seems to do the trick.

So now, Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the film?

For what it's worth, I did a bunch of Googling, but realized I'm way obsolete with current standards and couldn't find anything you probably hadn't looked at already.

It reminded me of first memories. And those that may simply be dreams we had a while later.

That's a nice reaction, thank you!

It caused havoc due to the slightly incorrect CSS syntax, i think...
Try this instead:

img {
float: left;
margin-bottom: 2em;
margin-top: 2em;
margin-left: 2em;
margin-right: 2em;
padding: 0;
}

peace on you all

Momus JoeMus is back on the
"NEW AND NOTEWORTHY handpicked for you by our expert staff"
on the emusic first page.

Gonna make you reach this time...

TROY
from the land of peace (but no peace huh huh)

Nic.
Which song or songs would you tag to it, if you decided to do so.

Hmm, maybe The Cabinet of Kuniyoshi Kaneko?

Not a fan of the new layout. Very maximalist for you! And too far left.

One thing it's interesting to do, by the way, while watching Floating Film is spot the red object in every shot. Ozu was obsessed with red in his late colour films, and went out of his way to place some red object in literally every shot. Later, photographer William Eggleston got known for doing the same thing.

All very Nobel

Css

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I like narrow stuff.

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Narrow stuff stuffed with BIG fonts.

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captcha: trial installments

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isn't a pacifist melodrama

Sleepy Lagoon?

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