Agent Palmer

Of all things Geek. I am…

Celebrating Sydney and The Arts with Anthemic Play It Safe

Celebrating Sydney and The Arts with Anthemic Play It Safe

In October 2023, the iconic Sydney Opera House had a birthday festival to celebrate the 50 years since it opened its doors to the world.

The Sydney Opera House website, under “Our Story,” explains why this building should be a little more celebrated than most in their short three paragraph history, which is honestly one of the more accurate and succinct art building histories I have ever read.

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School Spirit, Like the Yearbooks that Inspired it, is a Neat Narrative Time Capsule

Time capsules aren’t often great at relevance, but this book as “a construct amassed from American High School Yearbooks” by Pierre Huyghe and Douglas Coupland is a time capsule that endures.

School Spirit is “an excursion through the soul of a dead and disembodied student lost inside the memories and infrastructure of a California High School.” That’s the premise, but as explained in the book, Kelly, our dearly departed guide, can visit other high schools.

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Small Oddities

Small Oddities: Villain Shit

At some point in our lives, most of us choose to see the value of the villain. It may be temporary, it may be permanent, but villains have solid work ethics and often great vision. While you can quibble over their methods or morals, they get shit done.

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Love it or Hate it, Blonde Might Be the Best Art Film Ever

Blonde is the best art film

Blonde, the much maligned fictionalized biopic of Marilyn Monroe from director Andrew Dominik and based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, may just be the art film to end all art films.

It plays with color and sound, aspect ratio and focus, cameras and camera angles, light and darkness, and hard cuts and pans. Put simply, it’s all of the things you can do with a film all in one film.

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‘Val’ explores the true heart of an artist

Val - Amazon Original Documentary - The Life You Live is the Story You Tell

Over the course of 16 months the world has learned a lot about Val Kilmer. If you ever wanted to get to know him as an actor, an artist, or the man behind all of that, you can through the April 21, 2020 release of his autobiography I’m Your Huckleberry, and the July 23, 2021 release of the documentary Val.

I’ve read and loved the autobiography, so I was curious at what awaited me in the documentary. It’s the same, but different.

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