Yes we did.
Watching that video from the late 80’s, it occurs to me that three decades later a performance that lucid would make you the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
Never fear, dear. If the Teabillies have their way, you’ll be working in a sweatshop by the age of 8, pregnant by age 12, forced birth by age 12.9 (give or take), after which the Teabillies won’t even look you in the eye. Why? Because they’re hypocrites.
Obama, on the other hand, ensured that when you get that job, girl, you have a shot at making just as much as the boys.
Then again, if the Teabillies proceed on their current crash course to crazytown, you’re going to be nothing but a womb with a head.
More »Game of Thrones update: partway through the third book I started to worry that George Martin had settled into a recursive storytelling pattern of the sort that Wheel Of Time fans know and hate. I’m not worried about that anymore. In other news, for reasons that a few of you can guess Walder Frey (the eldest) is no longer my favorite character in all of literature. Now I find myself hoping with all of my being that HBO will bankroll a spin-off show that features Pyp, Grenn and Dolorous Edd*.
Also, Max. Too.
(*) “Band of Breathers“, maybe.
...as the worst science-fiction movie sweepstakes?
I had to take a serious hiatus from blogging, or really much of anything this week. (Speaking of which, my feline Galtian Overlord is eyeing me with hunger and peculiar disdain just now.) So I’ve missed what seems to have been an eventful couple of days around here. Given that my students just finished making documentaries about the fundamental and applied neurobiology of conflict resolution, I actually have a couple of PGOs to add to CommentGate (sic). A hint: in results you can in part track down to the level of neurons firing, power disparities really, really matter. Those with power—even if it is illusory*—have an enormous difficulty grasping the experience of those without. Y’all can probably guess how that kind of thing might frame what I might say at the hurt feelings of members of the dominant group when minor matters like the history of race relations in this country cut too deep.
But, as I say, too much time deep in the bunker with those same students, trying to take hours of pretty raw footage and within the week turn them into actual stories, so I haven’t grasped even a rumor of the ambient light for days. And in that context, I have nothing right now to say about Balloon Juice bloggery; Mitt Romney’s dilemmas; OBL’s reading matter—or just about anything that requires more sophisticated cognition than the statement “pass the potatoes, please.”
Which is why this clip so filled me with joy that I just had to share it here:
This is from the movie The Big Bang, in which Antonio Banderas plays a private detective hunting for a thug’s dead stripper girlfriend. (Do you think that they have numbers for this kind of plot point in Hollywood, just like that old line about the jokes in the prison yard reduced to numbers?)
Haven’t seen it yet (no real plans to…) but I learn from the invaluable Jen Luc Picard (Jennifer Oullette) over at Cocktail Party Physics of the subplot of truly delightful science wankery captured in the clip above, complete with (via the clip at the link to which J-L Picard connects) a wide-eyed invocation of “the God particle.** (Warning, good stuff at Jen Luc’s link, but also an annoying self-starting preview for the Werner Herzog doc. on cave paintings in southern France)
What I love most about that clip? The way that Banderas, attempting to look aloof and threatening, actually conveys almost as clearly as if he had spoken this one thought:
“Dear FSM, get me out of this movie.”
Open thread everyone. We’ll have plenty of time to gnaw each other’s tendons in the morning.
*See, e.g., crab bucket syndrome, as to a partial explanation why so many of our fellow citizens seem willing to vote and act against their own interests.
*Is it just me, or does Leon Lederman have some serious ‘splainin to do?
I wonder how many people bought the book just because they can’t stand to wait another week to find out what happens next. To avoid spoilers, I will say two things.
1. Badass. Completely badass.
2. Walder Frey appears in maybe four pages total. By the second he had joined my pantheon of all-time great literary characters.
Discuss here. Try not to give away anything that has not yet come up on TV.
R.I.P, Sarah Jane Smith. (If only The Doctor’s TARDIS worked for us non-Time-Lords.)
...There were absolutely lessons for the political process in this, about “Team Edward, Team Jacob, and inability to compromise.” I was excited. Which was which? The Tea Party is “Team Edward – they’re very one-minded and determined.”
What team is Obama? “Jacob.” “Jacob.” “The underdog,” Cara and Leti say. “Had to pull himself up by his bootstraps.”
Cara explains that the series is about class struggle. “It’s like ‘Pretty in Pink’ — she ends up with the rich white guy.” Those are the vampires, the Volturi and the Cullen clan, all in buttoned-down white-collar households, from families literally centuries old. “And you have Jacob, wrong side of the tracks. It’s blue-collar vs. white-collar.” One has money and immortality—the other is scrappy and underdoggish.
So what does this mean for the budget? Vampires don’t like taxes? “Vampires don’t like taxes is the lesson of today,” Cara confirmed.
(Tongue so firmly in cheek, to quote R.A. Lafferty, as to protrude from the vulgar bodily orifice.)
James Frey has written is publishing a new novel! The Financial Times reviewer says it is “... both a work of art and a bombshell hurled at the religious right. It tackles the Second Coming of Jesus in modern America – with the promised Messiah enacting the deeds the religious right consider most wicked. He is, for example, an active bisexual who supports his prostitute girlfriend when she aborts her first child…. This book is very good indeed… weirdly believable, often extremely moving and sometimes funny.”
What the reviewer does not say, at least in the Slate excerpt, is that this artful tome will set you back fifty fekking dollars, unless you are among the gadget-enabled who settle for the $10 Kindle version. I could not understand the premium for a writer best known for being legally obligated to apologize to Oprah on-camera, until I read the interview on Amazon’s sale page:
Q: You’ve opted to go with the Gagosian Gallery in New York rather than a traditional publisher. Why did you choose a small art gallery over a traditional publishing house?
A: Gagosian is the most prestigious gallery in the world. And they publish about 50 books a year—beautiful art books that transcend what a writer can do with a traditional publisher. I wanted to make a beautiful book, an object that people would be proud to own and display,something looked and felt like a real Bible, but more contemporary. I have always said that art influences me more than writing does so the idea of working with a gallery made sense to me.
Q: What artists inspired you while writing The Final Testament?
A: I looked at a ton of Renaissance religious art, like Michelangelo and Raphael, Carvaggio. Some of the sculpture Rodin made. Illuminated manuscripts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is a much greater and more substantial body of religious art than there is religious literature.
Q: Could you talk about the design of the book? How involved were you in the process?
A: I was very involved in every step of it, in every decision related to it. I worked with a design firm in London called GTF. They make incredible books, and they were incredible to work with on this project. The goal was to make a beautiful, unique, collectible book.
Q: The Final Testament will be released as a limited-edition $50 printed book and a $150 autographed version, but you’re self-publishing the ebook at $10. Do you see a future where the printed book is an expensive object intended for collectors while digital copies are for everyone else?
A: Absolutely. I think the future of publishing, or one version of it, is in physical books for collectors and serious fans and ebooks for mass distribution. I believe in that future and want to be a part of it as early as possible.
SO PERFECT. A comely Art-Appreciation-101 version to be displayed on all the best coffee tables, and a tech-friendly (words-only?) version for minimum-wage-earning hipsters who might actually want to read the thing! And if the publicity gods are very very kind, maybe some godbothering yahoo in flyover country will be inspired to denounce it! I wonder if GTF was responsive to the marketing challenge of a high-flashpoint paper stock?
And is the particularly spank-worthy text printed in red ink, like the words of you-know-who in an old-fashioned “real Bible”?
Truly, if James Frey did not exist, Tom Wolfe—or David Mamet—would have to invent him.
Melissa Bell, Washington Post blogger, “bemoans” the end of a rival city’s latest (inadvertent) tourist advertisement:
It’s official: the Bronx Zoo Cobra has been found. I’m glad the poor zookeepers can get back to business as usual, but I do mourn for one thing: the end of one of the best New York City advertisements since the ubiquitous “I ♥ NY” came on the scene.
While the zookeepers claim the snake was in the zoo enclosure all along, folks on Twitter know the adolescent Egyptian Cobra has been out on the town.
For the past four days, @BronxZoosCobra has tweeted the length and breadth of Manhattan, making those of us outside the city limits long for Herald Square. She dined on a Magnolia Bakery cupcake. She snapped a photograph of an immigrant on Ellis Island with an uncanny resemblance to Jon Favreau. She marveled at how tiny people looked from the top of the Empire State Building (“All the people look like little mice down there. Delicious little mice”). She even made it out to Yankee Stadium for opening day. From the snake’s eye view, the city looks good and tasty.
What could have been a public relations problem for the city — Don’t travel to New York! Deadly snake on the lose! — instead wound up being a tweeting advertisement hissing the praises of the Big Apple. Who wouldn’t want to be out and about with #snakeonthetown?
This is the difference between a company town like DC, a place that exists as the hub for (and at the mercy of ) a single industry, and a “world class” city like NYC. A city like Terry Prachett’s Ankh-Morpork, varied and robust enough to warp the very space-time continuum to serve its desires. I grew up in the outer boroughs of New York, and couldn’t wait to move elsewhere, but when I told my Midwestern college dormmates that I’d lost the secret lottery whereby a certain percentage of NYC natives were required to leave to make room for the hordes of wanna-bes… a surprising percentage of them believed me.
And yet, the national capital has plenty of accomplished professional liars lobbyists, advertisers and other self-identified “creative class” members within its boundaries. Surely there must be a public-spirited individual who could design a twitter feed to challenge the Bronx Zoo Cobra?
But I am not that person. The first image I came up with was #NotcongresscritterEricCantor tweeting from the Senate Floor, “All the voters look like little mice up there. Delicious little mice!”
Sully links to this Rebecca Black song, which I had never heard of until about five minutes ago:
Apparently this is the newest big thing, and it is sweeping the intertrons because it is apparently really, really bad. Critics are panning it, and Sullivan included one critic who stated that “Black’s video for ‘Friday’ is one of those rare occurrences where even the most seasoned critics of Internet culture don’t know where to begin. From the singing straight out of Auto-Tuned hell to lyrics such as ‘Tomorrow is Saturday / And Sunday comes afterwards / I don’t want this weekend to end’ and a hilariously bad rap about passing school buses, ‘Friday’ is something that simply must be seen and heard to be fully appreciated.”
Here’s my problem, and why I think I am getting old. First, I’d never heard of it. Second, I watched it and listened, and to me, it seemed not much worse than most of the crap you hear every day anyway. Flip through the television and watch any of the shows on Disney or those networks geared towards teens, and you hear this kind of crap every single day. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t my style of music and I think it is bad in that sense and I will live a very happy life if I never have to listen to it again, but I have a hard time describing it as qualitatively worse than any crap that has spewed from Miley Cyrus or the likes. If I were in a store or restaurant and that was playing in the background I wouldn’t stop and say “That’s really bad,” because it sounds just like all the other crap out there passing itself off as music.
And I thought the young girl singing it had a sweet smile.
/oldfart
... Although I think Men in Black (S. Spielberg, Executive Producer) would be a better template. From the Guardian’s preliminary victory lap:
Steven Spielberg’s Hollywood studio [Dreamworks] looks set to oversee WikiLeaks: the Movie after securing the screen rights to WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, the book by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding…
Leigh and Harding’s book charts Julian Assange’s life and times, from his itinerant childhood through to the creation of the WikiLeaks website in 2006. It also provides the inside story of Assange’s explosive partnership with the Guardian and the release, last December, of more than 250,000 secret diplomatic cables.
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, said:”... It’s Woodward and Bernstein meets Stieg Larsson meets Jason Bourne. Plus the odd moment of sheer farce and, in Julian Assange, a compelling character who goes beyond what any Hollywood scriptwriter would dare to invent.”
In addition to snapping up the Leigh/Harding bestseller, DreamWorks has secured rights to Inside WikiLeaks, by Assange’s former colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg. This has led insiders to speculate that DreamWorks executives are planning a heavily fictionalised thriller.
“A good template for what they are thinking is The Social Network, where Aaron Sorkin not only used the Ben Mezrich book The Accidental Billionaires as a resource, but gathered actual testimony from the lawsuits filed against Mark Zuckerberg that detailed the formation of Facebook and provided high drama,” said Mike Fleming of the industry website Deadline Hollywood.
The picture is the most prominent of a number of WikiLeaks movies at various stages of development. These include a documentary by award-winning film-maker Alex Gibney, director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and a mooted biopic based on a New Yorker article by Raffi Khatchadourian, co-produced by HBO and the BBC.
I guess the casting-couch snark kinda writes itself…
I still have my first-run copy of Amphigorey, which marks me as only a second- or third-generation Goreyphile. But I think he’d be perversely tickled at his “new” postmortem celebrity:
... [U]ntil the last few years true Gorey devotees were a secret society, wearing Gorey-philia like a Masonic ring. Now, however, their numbers have swelled. The writer Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, said, “When I was first writing ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events,’ I was wandering around everywhere saying, ‘I am a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey,’ and everyone said, ‘Who’s that?’ Now, everyone says, ‘That’s right, you are a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey.’ ”
Tim Burton owes an obvious debt to Gorey, as do Rob Reger, creator of the goth gamine Emily the Strange, and Neil Gaiman, the author of the novella “Coraline.” Mr. Gaiman has an original Gorey drawing of “children gathered around a sickbed” hanging on his bedroom wall; he wanted Gorey to illustrate “Coraline,” he said, but he “died the day I finished it.”
Gorey illustrations are even becoming voguish as tattoos. Last year the ninth-season “American Idol” finalist Siobhan Magnus had a biceps tattoo of Death playing nanny to a flock of soon-to-be-doomed children, from “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” Gorey’s grimly funny alphabet book.
First off, another reminder: NIXONLAND discussion group tonight, 9pm EST, “The Stench”. Now aren’t you curious enough to come lurk and see what you’re missing?
Second, since I know many of us are geeks and some of us are gamers, how come no love for this particular Superbowl ad?
Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly highlights another low-light from “The Anti-Science Party“:
“Real Time” host Bill Maher asked Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) a fairly straightforward question: “Do you believe in evolution?” Kingston not only said he rejects the foundation of modern biology, he explained it this way: “I believe I came from God, not from a monkey.” He added, “If it happened over millions and millions of years, there should be lots of fossil evidence.”
Seriously, that’s what he said.
Let’s pause to appreciate the fact that it’s the 21st century—and Jack Kingston is a 10-term congressman who helps oversee federal funding on the Food and Drug Administration.
As part of the same discussion, former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell tried to ask Kingston about the overuse of antibiotics. The far-right congressman had no idea how the question related to evolution…
In the larger context, there’s a renewed push underway for the United States to value and appreciate science in the 21st century—our future depends on it. And while this push is underway, Republican leaders are more comfortable walking a bridge to the 18th century.
Video at the link, if you think he’s exaggerating.
More »As someone born during the back end of the Pig-in-the-Python cohort (1955), I spent the first half of my life being told “You should’ve been here five years ago, before everything got used up & worn out & overcrowded” and the second half being told “It’s too late for you old people, you’ll just have to resign yourself to being obsolete.” So I’m somewhat allergic to the strict-constructionist timeline where distinct sociopolitical “generations” can be sliced off and sealed into neat ideological packages like deli meat.
But I do think Mark Ames, at the Exiled Online, has captured an important trend among anti-authoritarian politically-aware Americans since approximately the days of the “Reagan Revolution / Moral Majority / Morning-in-America” backlash in the 1980s in his essay on the Stewart/Colbert “Rally to Restore Vanity: Gen X Celebrates Its Homeric Struggle Against Lameness”.
Only (by the evidence of any recent thread here) it’s a mindset that’s liable to infect all of us liberal/progressive/anti-conservative/not-batshite-insane Americans, not just those born between certain calendar dates:
A century-old ideological movement, Liberalism: once devoted to impossible causes like ending racism and inequality, empowering the powerless, fighting against militarism, and all that silly hippie shit—now it’s been reduced to besting the other side at one-liners…and to the Liberals’ credit, they’re clearly on top. Sure there are a lot of problems out there, a lot of pressing needs—but the main thing is, the Liberals don’t look nearly as stupid as the other guys do. And if you don’t know how important that is to this generation, then you won’t understand what’s so wrong and so deeply depressing about the Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity.
That’s what makes this rally so depressing and grotesque: It’s an anti-rally, a kind of mass concession speech without the speech–some kind of sick funeral party for Liberalism, in which Liberals are led, at last, by a clown. Not a figurative clown, but by a clown–and Liberals are sure that this somehow makes them smarter and less lame–and indeed, they are less lame, because they are not taking themselves too seriously, which is something they’re very, very proud of. All great political struggles and ideological advances, all great human rights achievements were won by clown-led crowds of people who don’t take themselves too seriously, duh! That’s why they’re following a clown like Stewart, whose entire political program comes down to this: not being stupid, the way the other guys are stupid–or when being stupid, only stupid in a self-consciously stupid way, which is to say, not stupid. That’s it, that’s all this is about: Not to protest wars or oligarchical theft or declining health care or crushing debt or a corrupt political system or imperial decay—nope, the only thing that motivates Liberals to gather in the their thousands is the chance to celebrate their own lack of stupidity! Woo-hoo!
[...]
I’ve come to the conclusion that this has been the Great Dream of my generation: to position ourselves in such a way that we’re beyond mockery. To not look stupid. That’s the biggest crime of all–looking stupid. That’s why they’ve turned Stewart into a demigod, because he knows how to make the other guys look really stupid, and if you’re on the same team as Stewart, you’re on the safe side of the mockery, rather than dangerously vulnerable to mockery.
In fact, I think this is why so many Gen-X/Yers turned against Obama: because he made them look stupid. They made themselves vulnerable to looking stupid by believing in him–and he jilted them. That’s how they see it–not that politics is a long ugly process that has nothing to do with self-esteem and everything to do with money and brawling–it was more like an “indie” consumer choice: They bought into the Obama brand, wore it, and suddenly discovered that the label wasn’t as cool as it seemed at the time, especially after the sentimental high of electing a half-black president wore off to the hard slog of what came after… so they threw the Obama jeans away and went to work trying to salvage their coolness creds for having made that fashion mistake.
I was never much a fan of Police Squad and the Naked Gun franchise, but I still think Airplane! is one of the greatest comedies ever made, and can quote basically the entire movie. Which is sad and funny in and of itself.
RIP, Shirley.
