It’s time again to blog about blogging. I wanted to share a bit about my Octopress setup, specifically how I was able to travel to SXSW this year with nothing but my iPad and could still update this site (most of the time). Tuck in, I’m going to head into some nerdy weeds here.

Octopress is a static blog generator based on Jekyll. I switched the candler blog to it from Wordpress back in January, but only after I confirmed that I would be able to run the site from my iPad. This is roughly what I came up with back then. The short of it:

• Write a new post on iOS in a Dropbox plain text editor and save it to /Dropbox/path/to/site/source/_posts
• Generate and commit the site via SSH to a private repository hosted on Beanstalk
• Auto-deploy the public folder to my Web server

Here’s how it’s done.

Dropbox

Any Octopress site is basically a single folder full of ruby scripts, your original Markdown writings and the complete HTML site that gets generated every time you write a new post. On my computer, it just looks like any other folder with a series of sub-folders and files within it. The final site, which gets written to a folder called public, is what I push out to my server; it’s what you’re reading right now.

The entirety of the site lives in my Dropbox folder on my Mac at home. That means the source documents, the “guts” of Octopress that actually generate the site, and the final site itself are all synced up to Dropbox. One advantage here is that my site gets backed up to Dropbox’s servers, but that’s not the real reason I use this method.

Almost every iOS writing app worth its salt can sync documents via Dropbox. Since Octopress posts are simply plain text files with the .markdown extension, I am able to access my posts on my iPhone and iPad from anywhere. Thanks to some TextExpander snippets I made (another post for another day) I can quickly create new posts in any of these editors.

When I write a new post and it syncs to Dropbox, it will automatically sync back to my Mac at home. From there, I need to generate and push the site.

SSH

OS X makes it fairly straightforward to allow SSH tunneling on your Mac. This Mac|Life article offers a decent walk-through of how to turn SSH on and use your router’s port forwarding features to allow you remote access. This may all sound like a bit much, but I promise, if you can use the command line well enough to run an Octopress site, this is a piece of cake.

Once SSH is turned on and your machine is accessible, you can access your machine (securely, mind you) from anywhere in the world via a command line. On iOS, I use the excellent Prompt from Panic to SSH into my home Mac. Once I’m connected, then I can generate and push my site right from the Dropbox folder.

Here’s the main wrench in the works. This remote workflow hinges on your home Mac being on all the time, or at least when you want to post remotely. There are some hurdles to making sure that happens including keeping your machine from falling to sleep, making sure there’s a bit of ventilation where your Mac is so it doesn’t melt and making sure that the Internet connection goes uninterrupted. Unfortunately, this last one is my biggest headache because of a Lion Wifi bug that I can’t seem to stamp out. Yes, I could hard-wire my iMac to my router, but, well, I haven’t.¹

Lucky for me, I had someone at home I could annoy to reconnect the Wifi when OS X Lion decided it didn’t want to be online anymore.

Beanstalk

Octopress’s documentation offers a few ways to deploy your site to a Web host. It basically boils down to pushing your site out to a Git repository with front-facing capabilities, like Github Pages or Heroku. I cut my teeth on Heroku deployments, which I highly recommend for a free way to learn the ropes of Git and Octopress. Ultimately it was untenable for my site. I needed a solution that would work with my current Web host.

Enter Beanstalk, an incredibly simple version control host. I use Beanstalk to host a private Git repository. Using their built-in deployment tools, I can automatically send only the changes made to the public folder to my Web host over FTP. You can set it to do this on every commit or you can use a special tag in the commit message to let specify which commits should be deployed. Once the changes get pushed, my site is updated, and that’s it.

Seriously Backed Up

It may seem like overkill, but the Dropbox and Beanstalk duo provide multiple layers of site backups that far outweigh any kind of precaution I used to take with Wordpress. Not only is the site hosted on my home computer (and any local backups I retain), but 100% of the code, including older commits, are hosted both on Dropbox’s servers and on Beanstalk’s. Furthermore, Beanstalk keeps its own backups, outlined in their documentation:

For all paying accounts Beanstalk automatically sends incremental backups to a remote data center every 10 minutes to ensure minimal loss in case the primary system fails completely or is corrupted.

Again, that’s 100% of the Octopress install, not just the front-facing public folder. Beanstalk’s lowest tier is $15 per month for 3 GB of storage, which is far more than I conceive using in the near future for my site. Comparatively, Vaultpress, Automattic’s official Wordpress backup solution, introductory tier costs $15 per month. Beanstalk, of course, is much more than backups. Check out their features page for what else you can use it for.

Remarks

I get that this is a bit convoluted and imperfect, but it works for me. This breakdown leaves out a few details that I would like to write about later, namely using TextExpander snippets for Octopress syntax, creating git aliases to streamline command line posting and which iOS writing apps fit into this workflow the best. Eventually, I’d like to cover those topics more in depth.

For now, I’d love to hear whatever remote workflows readers may have come up with. Happy static blogging.

While I was at SXSW I interviewed Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow. The full interview just went live over at Heeb Magazine. Here’s one of my favorite bits which came up as we were discussing Dunham’s move to television:

Judd Apatow: Lena was just happy to not have to be responsible to feed the crew herself.

Lena Dunham: It truly was. The amount of anxiety I had during takes about whether there had been enough pizza…I didn’t realize how much it was taking away from my ability to express myself artistically.

I love this because it sounds like a line written for one of Dunham’s characters. Which gets to the heart of why she is such an interesting filmmaker to watch: she is refreshingly honest.

{% blockquote -Ole Scheeren http://www.buro-os.com/archipelago_cinema/ Archipelago Cinema %} A landscape of pieces playfully joined together. A sense of temporality, randomness. Almost like drift wood. Or maybe something more architectural. Modular pieces, loosely assembled, like a group of little islands. A congregation of rafts as an auditorium. Archipelago Cinema. {% endblockquote %}

Now this is cool. From March 9th to 13th, while I was getting my cinematic fill at SXSW, Tilda Swinton and Apichatpong Weerasethakul served as curators for a new and unique film festival, Film on the Rocks Yao Noi. Started by Nat Sarasas and Chomwan Weeraworawit, the fest appears to be a highly free-form exploration of art, cinema and space, as well as a boon to the Thai film industry which now enjoys some time in the spotlight after Weerasethakul’s 2010 Palme D’Or win for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

The event took place on an archipelago off Thailand. Italian Vogue’s Carlotta Loverini Botta was on-hand for the festivities. Here’s what was she wrote about the fest’s second day¹:

…we were actually taking part in the village’s celebration day, in which the screen was mounted in the middle of a market/fun-fair open to the population of all villages and screening one of the historic pieces of the Festival’s partner, the Thai Film Foundation and Film Archive, the first Thai silent horror movie dubbed live by actors so talented that it was impossible to choose between watching the screening or the actors’ performance.

The real centerpiece of the fest, however was the “Floating Auditorium” pictured above. The impermanent theater, erected between two rocks, was designed by architect Ole Scheeren based on a design “borrowed” from local Thai fishermen. From the project’s Web site:

Local fishermen farm lobsters on rafts. Wooden frames are tied by rubber straps to foam blocks wrapped in mosquito nets. A simple construction. A local technique. Adopted to build the floating cinema.

Scheeren has toyed with outdoor cinema spaces before. In 2006 he designed the “Marfa Drive-In,” a new take on an old idea in the West Texas desert. It’s always nice to see public art and cinema collide like this. I am particularly intrigued by the way Scheeren is approaching public viewing in these projects.

Honestly, watching a movie at sea, where the screen and the projector are on different platforms, sounds disorienting. I’m sure the lagoon waters are calm, but what of the people fidgeting on the platform?

Caroline Lever at Dazed Digital seemed to have no complaints:

Surrounded by rocks forming a natural theatre, we reclined on modular rafts held together like a cluster of islands. And with the undulating waves under us, and the stars above, we returned to a state of naivete and wonder to Herbert Brenon’s Peter Pan, accompanied by a magnificent live score performed by Simon Fischer Turner.

Brenon’s 1924 silent picture is the first filmed version of J. M. Barrie’s play.² I’ve never seen it, but a quick search on YouTube gives a brief idea of one of the tale’s pivotal moments.

I imagine the screen border, wobbling near the picture’s edges, would make some viewers (like me) a bit uneasy. But perhaps that is the point. Why do an eminently “indoor” activity like watching a movie against such a beautiful backdrop? Could cinema ever recreate the beauty of sitting among friends on a raft in the evening? Does the space trump the film completely, and if so is that a problem?

The Film on the Rocks tumblr has some great photos and stories from the four day event.

Two interesting posts went live as I was headed to bed tonight. The first (that I noticed) was from Matt Singer at Criticwire, following up on his aforelinked “Critic of Everything” post. Tonight’s post was a response to my “Criticizing Everything” piece from yesterday. Here’s what he says:

Maybe it is my wishy-washiness coming out, but I kind of want to have it both ways on this issue. I want to be able to exalt “The Raid: Redemption” on the relative merits of its meticulously choreographed fight scenes, breathtaking long takes, and inventive use of camera placement; as an exemplar of technique in the world of modern action, the film is certainly without recent equal. But I also want to remind the people who have proclaimed “The Raid” the greatest action film in decades (like the unnamed critic who did so on the film’s poster that action films are more than savvy technique. Plot, characters, and dialogue matter too.

As Singer rightly points out, this is a never-ending discussion. The question of how we quantify a film’s “goodness” is something all reviewers struggle with. Which brings me to the other piece that went live tonight.

In my post yesterday, I wrote about how I agreed with most of Roger Ebert’s review of The Raid: Redemption. Tonight, Ebert posted a solemn reflection on why his review puts him “way out of step with other critics.” Essentially, he enters the same conversation from another angle:

When I began, I found the star rating system to be absurd. I still do. But I thought I’d found a way to work with it. I’d take a “generic approach.” Instead of pretending a star rating reflected some kind of absolute truth, I’d give stars based on how well I thought a movie worked within its genre and for its intended audience. A four-star rating might indicate the movie transcended generic boundaries. For example, what genre does “The Tree of Life” or “Synecdoche, NY” belong to?

Later:

So what am I saying? “The Raid: Redemption” failed as a generic success because it simplified its plot too much? Not really. It is a generic success. And yet my heart sank and I asked myself: Is this all they want? Are audiences satisfied with ceaseless violence, just so long as they can praise it for being “well choreographed?” Is there no appreciation for human dimension, meaning, and morality?

Ebert is someone whose writing never fails to amaze me. He is a prolific critic, a paragon of a tweeter and an incredibly generous linker. This piece, titled “Hollywood’s highway to Hell,” is just plain stunning. He at once regrets his decision to pan the film but admits it would go against his taste to praise it. He pats other critics on the back and agrees with their laudatory quotes, but still admits that the film delivers little. Ebert, it seems, is still working out how to be a critic of everything.

I don’t think there’s any shame in being the odd man out for panning The Raid. It does, however, hearten me to know that Ebert is still toiling with the demons of movie reviewing. You’d think he’d have had these battles long ago and figured them out. The truth is, though, that criticism will never be the same as long as the movies keep changing. From Ebert, to wit:

When I began as a film critic, the word “genre” suggested a type of film that had highly developed traditions, possibilities and richness. Now it suggests a marketing decision.

These days, audiences enter a film like this with tunnel vision. They know what they want, and they’d better find it.

I like to think that cinema is much richer than what audiences expect to find at the multiplex, but it feels like that’s exactly what we see week in and week out. It feels like we are getting what we pay for and nothing more. That’s how I felt about The Raid: Redemption; it delivered a wet dream of a slug-fest but was otherwise thin. I think we can do better.

Here’s Matt Singer over at Criticwire last week, in an article titled “The Pros and Cons of the Critic of Everything:”

…In an ideal situation, an outlet would employ several film critics, each with their own beats and areas of expertise; you might have one critic who focuses on mainstream American films, another with a background in Asian cinema, a third who can recite every film by Jean-Luc Godard. But, as we all know, these are not ideal times for professional film criticism, or for the journalism industry in general.

Publications that employ large fleets of freelancers (like, say, The Village Voice) might be able to keep specialists on hand, but for the most part, any working critic today is pretty much expected to be a critic of everything.

His piece, a reaction to Glenn Kenny’s post on his relief of not having to have an opinion on The Hunger Games, came across my web-trolling shortly after I had a related Twitter conversation with Scott Weinberg about Roger Ebert’s panning of The Raid: Redemption. You can read the whole thread, but here’s the money-tweet:

The Raid: Redemption is a film that has received gushing praise from a number of voices in the online film community, but overall I found it to be weak sauce. I agree with Ebert’s take that it is “essentially a visualized video game that spares the audience the inconvenience of playing it.” The director made almost no effort to build a narrative or take advantage of the vertical and horizontal playground that is the building at the film’s center. But hey, it has cool fight scenes!

How dare I, and Ebert for that matter, judge the film on a most basic cinematic rubric. We should have, as Weinberg, says, judged it as an action film, not merely as a film.¹ When one takes on the task of reviewing movies, there is always a question of how democratic one’s viewing schedule should be. Is the form itself comprehensive enough that we can ignore monikers such as horror, documentary and experimental; that we can be objective(ish) regardless of label? Or must we brace ourselves differently for each screening? Is it foolish to expect something more from an “action” film?

In cinematic terms, I believe genre is a misnomer, a classification that often holds people back from taking work seriously. I hate when people tell me that a film is good, stupid fun and that I shouldn’t try to watch it critically. This tends to come up in conversation with friends about a new Transformers or otherwise bombastic franchise film. Whenever I hate some boffo² punch-fest, or try to make my argument that our collective cinematic bars have been lowered to the point that some of this stuff is considered not just decent but high art (see Christopher Nolan’s career), my opinion tends to get sloughed off by friends who ask it. Such films deliver perennially on low expectations to the point that most would see them as being above criticism, by which I mean desperately far below it.

All of this brings me back to the issue of whether or not we should aspire to be critics of everything. When I say The Raid: Redemption isn’t a very good film it’s because I’m judging it the same way I would any other film (a Spielberg, a Malick, a Brakhage, etc.), based on my own knowledge of the cinema. If your experience is different, then great! This is why there is no shortage of critics and viewpoints.

While at SXSW, I struck up a conversation with a woman standing next to me in line for some film. The usual questions came up: where are you from and what do you do? “I’m a film critic,” I said. “Oh, you’re the bad guy,” she responded. Next she dove into an explanation about how awful film critics are (“Most, at least,” was the olive branch she offered to let me know that we were cool); how they never know how hard production actually is and tend to be overly academic when they write about films. She didn’t explain whose “bad guy” I was, but I didn’t take the time to find out.

Her stance is probably the one most film-goers have.³ I can’t help but wonder whether or not it’s not tied up in this same conversation. Is this “over-academic” stance not just my taking the medium and its makers to task? Isn’t it only fair that, when a filmmaker puts something out into the world, anyone and everyone can pass judgement on it?

I get that The Raid: Redemption is better than a lot of the other crappy action films of the last few years, so people are jumping to laud it in hopes of seeing more like it. But this is how the bar gets lowered; this is how we end up with multiplexes full of varying levels of crap. So no, I don’t think it’s a good movie, and I think it’s preposterous to tell me I’m judging it wrong. I’ll be as good a critic of everything as I can be.

I wrote a little wrap-up of SXSW for Turnstyle News:

Many cities have a film fest, and some have many, but there is something quite singular about the show they put on Austin for SXSW. It has a little bit of everything for everyone.

Griffin McElroy reporting for The Verge from GameFest, where Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima spoke:

Though he’s made a name for himself in the gaming industry, Kojima explained that he hadn’t completely abandoned his dreams of being a film director.

“Honestly, I’m a big movie fan, it’s very special to me and, honestly, I would love to make a movie some day,” Kojima said. “But that said, I think it has to be a certain, special game that has to provide the right setting.

“But I don’t think that game will be Metal Gear Solid,” he added, “and the reason why is that Metal Gear Solid was developed specifically to become a game. It has a world and story that’s well suited and optimized for a game. In my mind, Metal Gear Solid is a game and nothing else. So, I think if I were to create something that would become a movie, I would have to come up with a new story, new characters, something that’s suited to the medium of movies.”

Apparently, the audience didn’t like that. I for one am glad to hear Kojima assert that gaming and film require different kinds of plots. Just because Metal Gear Solid is very “cinematic” doesn’t necessarily mean it would make a great film.

Ben Howdle has a blog called “Movies {as code}.” Here’s the gist¹ of it:

boolean foundLove = false;
Man phil = new Man();
Woman rita = new Woman();

while (!foundLove)
{
    Day today = new Day();
    new Song("I Got You Babe").play();
    today.wakeTheGroundhog();
    switch (phil.getMood(today))
    {
        case "love" :
            foundLove = phil.triesToGet(rita);
            break;

        case "joyful" :
            phil.helpsPeople();
            break;

        case "sexual" :
            phil.tricksAWomanToSleepWithHer();
            break;

        case "thirstForKnowledge" :
            phil.learnsSomeStuff();
            break;

        case "suicidal" :
            phil.killsHimself();
            continue;
    }
    phil.goesToBed();
}

Many of the snippets of “movie code” are overly simplistic², but some, like this one, use basic coding concepts to break down a film from a particular angle, offering a sort of exploded view of the plot. Neat.

Added to the RSS routine.

I was late, which in SXSW parlance means only 45 minutes early, to the first screening here of Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk With Me. After barely making it into the screening, I searched for a seat at the Alamo Ritz as the “no talking or texting” PSA played on screen. An usher sat me down in the section reserved for filmmakers and their friends. I quickly dropped my things between a young woman and a gentleman in a zip-up sweathshirt, scrawled out a dinner order on a slip of paper (Alamo theaters are also full-service restaurants and I was starving) and turned to head to the bathroom. The be-sweatshirted gent seemed confused that I wanted to leave the theater even though the film was unspooling, but he pulled his knees back anyway. After expelling fluids in record time, I settled back into my seat and began watching all but the first minute of this deft comedy.

Sleepwalk With Me is the story of aspiring stand-up comedian Matt Pandamiglio, played by first-time director Birbiglia. He tends bar at a comedy club, taking the rare opportuities he gets to do sets when comics bail on their time slots. He has been with his girlfriend, Abby, played by Lauren Ambrose, since college and both she and Matt’s family are starting to wonder when things will move to the next, nuptial level. As his career slowly revs up, their relationship becomes strained. Oh, and Matt has a particularly rough disorder in which he sleepwalks and acts out the things he is dreaming about, often to violent effect.

The whole film is told in flashback from present-day Matt. This narrative conceit is lifted straight out of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. The two films feel almost intertwined, as if Birbiglia wants to make his own version of it. Surpsingly, this doesn’t get in the way of the film’s own originality.

The director brings to the table an unfettered honesty. Pandamiglio’s comedy becomes funnier as he shares embarrassing tid bits about his personal life. The more he divulges, the more gigs he is able to book. This is a theme in films about any kind of artistic, especially comic, refinement. At some point, a comedian learns to stop being a spectator and become a raw nerve, an open book that invites his audience into his private, perhaps demented world. Sleepwalk With Me focuses on Matt’s move from the outside in, moving from a pew to the pulpit, as it were.

Much like a young(er) Woody Allen, Birbiglia is learning the tools he has at hand, sometimes with a foolhardy ambition. He executes a ridiculous long take that feels out of place when compared to the film’s otherwise straightforward form. There is an argument for its narrative necessity as it does precede a major plot point that requires spatial understanding, but it still smacks of, “Hey, what if we just did an insanely difficult shot here?” That isn’t necessarily a bad attitude to have. After all, Allen played fast and loose with cinematic conventions with Annie Hall.

I don’t want to mislead you into believing that Mike Birbiglia is the next Woody Allen. Sleepwalk With Me feels like the product of a student of Allen’s, one who took away the specifics of his style but not the knowledge that led him to become a modern master. There is a lot to love in this film, but it would be nothing without the filmmaker’s willingness to share a very personal story. Will Birbiglia be able to tackle someone else’s tale? We’ll see.

Oh, and about my missing the first few minutes of the film. When the lights came up, someone from the festival went up on stage to announce Mike Birbiglia for a Q & A. The man to my right hopped out of his seat and sauntered down the aisle, walked on stage and took the mic. I sat next to Mike Birbiglia the whole time and had no idea. I was wondering why he wasn’t laughing at any of the jokes as I chuckled my head off. Sorry about running out, Mike, I really had to pee. Great work, though.

Rob Reid gives a TEDTalk:

{::nomarkdown}

Math can be very, very funny.