(Courtesy of Laura Webb)
Living Arts and Science Center
April 25th, 10 AM – 3 PM
Family Fun Day
It’s springtime in the Bluegrass and a great time to explore, experiment, and get creative inside and out! Join the Living Arts & Science Center’s teachers, staff and special guests for a free day of hands-on arts, science and music activities on April 25, from 10 am to 3 pm at the LASC.
The event is free and open to the public and offers many new activities as well as annual events. All activities are hands-on and will take place indoors and out!
Family Fun Day will include interactive demonstrations by Joe Allred of the Capoeira Cultural Center in Lexington. Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian art form that begin over 400 years ago. The beautiful, choreographed, and extremely strenuous physical movements are performed to music and drumming and are thrilling to watch.
In addition, children and adults can participate in numerous art and science activities such as creating and flying kites, collaborating on the annual painting of the “art car”, painting a mural in the parking lot, testing out science experiments, and much more!
Family Fun Day will also present the interactive exhibits, Cutting Edge, a fiber art show showcasing the work of seven Kentucky Women artists in the Art Gallery, and the Invisible Worlds exhibit in the Discovery Room.
Visitors can also enjoy The Living Arts & Science Center’s new pondless waterfall, and the native Kentucky plants that are being added to the outdoor environment.
Events are free and open to the public.
Snacks and refreshments are available for purchase.
If you have any questions before then contact Linda Page 859-552-6114 or call the LASC, Heather Lyons 859 252-5222
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Saul Hansell: Reports on Time-Warner and ATT Cable Controversies and Why Japan Has a Better Model; Tana Geneva: On Consumer Responses
As Costs Fall, Companies Push to Raise Internet Price
By SAUL HANSELL
New York Times
Internet service providers want to end the all-you-can-eat plans and get their customers paying à la carte.
But they are having a hard time closing the buffet line.
Faced with rising consumer protest and calls from members of Congress for new regulations, Time Warner Cable backed down last week from a plan to impose new fees on heavy users of its Road Runner Internet service.
The debate over the price of Internet use is far from over. Critics say cable and phone companies are already charging far more than Internet providers in other countries. Some also wonder whether the new price plans are meant to prevent online video sites from cutting into the lucrative revenue from cable TV service.
Cable executives say the issue is not competition but cost. People who watch or download a lot of movies and TV shows use hundreds of times more Internet capacity than those who simply read e-mail and browse the Web. It is only fair, they argue, that heavy users should pay more.
“When you go to lunch with a friend, do you split the bill in half if he gets the steak and you have a salad?” Landel C. Hobbs, the chief operating officer of Time Warner Cable, asked recently in a blog post defending the company’s now abandoned plan.
Still, critics say the image of Internet providers as restaurants about to go broke serving an endless line of gluttons simply does not match the financial or technological realities of the industry.
They point out that providers’ profit margins are stable, and that investment in network equipment is generally falling.
To Read the Rest of the Article
The Cost of Downloading All Those Videos
By Saul Hansell
New York Times
In an article in today’s New York Times, I wrote about the controversy over the now-abandoned plan by Time Warner Cable to impose additional fees on customers who upload and download more than a set quota.
AT&T continues to test a similar plan, and many cable and phone company executives still argue that usage is growing so fast, mainly driven by video that they need to start charging heavy users to cover the additional cost of the bandwidth they consume.
Hard numbers are not that easy to come by, but I’ve found a few. I see no evidence that the pace of spending to expand network capacity has increased at all. Indeed there are a lot of areas where new technology is radically cutting the cost of Internet bandwidth.
For those that want to understand more about what drives these costs, here is some of the hard data I’ve found. (As always, Bits readers are a knowledgeable bunch, so if you are in the network business, please share your own experience in the comments.)
I’ve mainly been looking at the costs that will increase as the bandwidth used by customers goes up. So I haven’t looked at overhead, marketing, customer service and so on. All of the discussion of cost is complex because much of the infrastructure at these providers is shared between video, phone and Internet service.
Still, there seem to be two major buckets of expense to consider: the cost of local networks that connect to people’s homes and the cost of the bandwidth that link those networks to the Internet. The local costs are larger, but falling faster with new technology.
Local Network Costs
Think of a broadband Internet provider like a river of bandwidth that divides into smaller and smaller tributaries as it flows from a regional hub through neighborhood facilities until it trickles a stream of connectivity into each home. Each connection in this network, and each node where connections are split into smaller streams, has a set capacity.
Most of the network for any Internet provider is high-capacity fiber optic cable. But the last link, running from a neighborhood office or a small device hung on a phone pole—runs over cable TV or phone wires. In a cable system, there is a fixed amount of bandwidth that is shared among all the customers in a node, often about 500 homes.
To Read the Rest of the Article
World’s Fastest Broadband at $20 Per Home
By Saul Hansell
New York Times
If you get excited about the prospect of really, really fast broadband Internet service, here’s a statistic that will make heart race. Or your blood boil. Or both.
Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here’s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed.
The cable modem needed for that speed costs about $60, compared with about $30 for the current generation.
By contrast, Verizon is spending an average of $817 per home passed to wire neighborhoods for its FiOS fiber optic network and another $716 for equipment and labor in each home that subscribes, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.
Those numbers from Japan came from Michael T. Fries, the chief executive of Liberty Global, the American company that operates J:Com.
His larger point: “To me, this just isn’t an expensive capital investment,” he said.
The experience in Japan suggests that the major cable systems in the United States might be able to increase the speed of their broadband service by five to 10 times right away. They might not need to charge much more for it than they do now and they’d still make as much money.
The cable industry here uses the same technology as J:Com. And several vendors said that while the prices Mr. Fries quoted were on the low side, most systems can be upgraded for no more than about $100 per home, including a new modem. Moreover, the monthly cost of bandwidth to connect a home to the Internet is minimal, executives say.
So what’s wrong with this picture in the United States? The cable companies, like Comcast and Cablevision, that are moving quickly to install the fast broadband technology, called Docsis 3, are charging as much as $140 a month for 50 Mbps service. Meanwhile other companies, like Time Warner Cable, are moving much more slowly to upgrade.
Competition, or the lack of it, goes a long way to explaining why the fees are higher in the United States. There is less competition in the United States than in many other countries. Broadband already has the highest profit margins of any product cable companies offer. Like any profit-maximizing business would do, they set prices in relation to other providers and market demand rather than based on costs.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Cable Giants Continue Hoping No One Will Notice Their Attempts to Destroy the Internet
By Tana Ganeva
AlterNet
Last week, a full-on customer revolt forced Time Warner to cease their metered billing program — a system in which Internet users sign up for differently priced broadband plans and pay extra if they exceed their bandwidth limits. The plan was an infuriating inconvenience (e.g. rip—off) premised on the ethical business concept that you can arbitrarily jack up prices on a product if a heavily-monopolized marketplace leaves customers with little in the way of consumer choice.
Seems like a sweet idea. Except that Time Warner customers, media reform groups and tech bloggers inundated both government Representatives and the company with complaints. Soon, members of Congress were winning easy points by vocally criticizing Time Warner. On April 15th, CEO Glenn Britt announced that the company was dropping metered billing.
Anyway, not having learned anything from Time Warner’s epic fail, AT & T continues to maintain metered billing in Reno, Nev., and in Beaumont, Texas., which signals the cable giant's hopes that the infuriating, universally despised program might just work for them. Except that AT&T risks becoming even more hateable than Time Warner.
To Read the Rest of the Article
By SAUL HANSELL
New York Times
Internet service providers want to end the all-you-can-eat plans and get their customers paying à la carte.
But they are having a hard time closing the buffet line.
Faced with rising consumer protest and calls from members of Congress for new regulations, Time Warner Cable backed down last week from a plan to impose new fees on heavy users of its Road Runner Internet service.
The debate over the price of Internet use is far from over. Critics say cable and phone companies are already charging far more than Internet providers in other countries. Some also wonder whether the new price plans are meant to prevent online video sites from cutting into the lucrative revenue from cable TV service.
Cable executives say the issue is not competition but cost. People who watch or download a lot of movies and TV shows use hundreds of times more Internet capacity than those who simply read e-mail and browse the Web. It is only fair, they argue, that heavy users should pay more.
“When you go to lunch with a friend, do you split the bill in half if he gets the steak and you have a salad?” Landel C. Hobbs, the chief operating officer of Time Warner Cable, asked recently in a blog post defending the company’s now abandoned plan.
Still, critics say the image of Internet providers as restaurants about to go broke serving an endless line of gluttons simply does not match the financial or technological realities of the industry.
They point out that providers’ profit margins are stable, and that investment in network equipment is generally falling.
To Read the Rest of the Article
The Cost of Downloading All Those Videos
By Saul Hansell
New York Times
In an article in today’s New York Times, I wrote about the controversy over the now-abandoned plan by Time Warner Cable to impose additional fees on customers who upload and download more than a set quota.
AT&T continues to test a similar plan, and many cable and phone company executives still argue that usage is growing so fast, mainly driven by video that they need to start charging heavy users to cover the additional cost of the bandwidth they consume.
Hard numbers are not that easy to come by, but I’ve found a few. I see no evidence that the pace of spending to expand network capacity has increased at all. Indeed there are a lot of areas where new technology is radically cutting the cost of Internet bandwidth.
For those that want to understand more about what drives these costs, here is some of the hard data I’ve found. (As always, Bits readers are a knowledgeable bunch, so if you are in the network business, please share your own experience in the comments.)
I’ve mainly been looking at the costs that will increase as the bandwidth used by customers goes up. So I haven’t looked at overhead, marketing, customer service and so on. All of the discussion of cost is complex because much of the infrastructure at these providers is shared between video, phone and Internet service.
Still, there seem to be two major buckets of expense to consider: the cost of local networks that connect to people’s homes and the cost of the bandwidth that link those networks to the Internet. The local costs are larger, but falling faster with new technology.
Local Network Costs
Think of a broadband Internet provider like a river of bandwidth that divides into smaller and smaller tributaries as it flows from a regional hub through neighborhood facilities until it trickles a stream of connectivity into each home. Each connection in this network, and each node where connections are split into smaller streams, has a set capacity.
Most of the network for any Internet provider is high-capacity fiber optic cable. But the last link, running from a neighborhood office or a small device hung on a phone pole—runs over cable TV or phone wires. In a cable system, there is a fixed amount of bandwidth that is shared among all the customers in a node, often about 500 homes.
To Read the Rest of the Article
World’s Fastest Broadband at $20 Per Home
By Saul Hansell
New York Times
If you get excited about the prospect of really, really fast broadband Internet service, here’s a statistic that will make heart race. Or your blood boil. Or both.
Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here’s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed.
The cable modem needed for that speed costs about $60, compared with about $30 for the current generation.
By contrast, Verizon is spending an average of $817 per home passed to wire neighborhoods for its FiOS fiber optic network and another $716 for equipment and labor in each home that subscribes, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.
Those numbers from Japan came from Michael T. Fries, the chief executive of Liberty Global, the American company that operates J:Com.
His larger point: “To me, this just isn’t an expensive capital investment,” he said.
The experience in Japan suggests that the major cable systems in the United States might be able to increase the speed of their broadband service by five to 10 times right away. They might not need to charge much more for it than they do now and they’d still make as much money.
The cable industry here uses the same technology as J:Com. And several vendors said that while the prices Mr. Fries quoted were on the low side, most systems can be upgraded for no more than about $100 per home, including a new modem. Moreover, the monthly cost of bandwidth to connect a home to the Internet is minimal, executives say.
So what’s wrong with this picture in the United States? The cable companies, like Comcast and Cablevision, that are moving quickly to install the fast broadband technology, called Docsis 3, are charging as much as $140 a month for 50 Mbps service. Meanwhile other companies, like Time Warner Cable, are moving much more slowly to upgrade.
Competition, or the lack of it, goes a long way to explaining why the fees are higher in the United States. There is less competition in the United States than in many other countries. Broadband already has the highest profit margins of any product cable companies offer. Like any profit-maximizing business would do, they set prices in relation to other providers and market demand rather than based on costs.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Cable Giants Continue Hoping No One Will Notice Their Attempts to Destroy the Internet
By Tana Ganeva
AlterNet
Last week, a full-on customer revolt forced Time Warner to cease their metered billing program — a system in which Internet users sign up for differently priced broadband plans and pay extra if they exceed their bandwidth limits. The plan was an infuriating inconvenience (e.g. rip—off) premised on the ethical business concept that you can arbitrarily jack up prices on a product if a heavily-monopolized marketplace leaves customers with little in the way of consumer choice.
Seems like a sweet idea. Except that Time Warner customers, media reform groups and tech bloggers inundated both government Representatives and the company with complaints. Soon, members of Congress were winning easy points by vocally criticizing Time Warner. On April 15th, CEO Glenn Britt announced that the company was dropping metered billing.
Anyway, not having learned anything from Time Warner’s epic fail, AT & T continues to maintain metered billing in Reno, Nev., and in Beaumont, Texas., which signals the cable giant's hopes that the infuriating, universally despised program might just work for them. Except that AT&T risks becoming even more hateable than Time Warner.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Cara Richards on the Recent Decision by the Board of Regents for the Kentucky Community and Technical College System to Eliminate Teacher Tenure
(Courtesy of Stephanie Simon :)
Commentator Assails Vote To Eliminate Tenure
WUKY (University of Kentucky/Lexington, KY)
Controversy continues to swirl over a recent decision by the Board of Regents for the Kentucky Community and Technical College System to eliminate teacher tenure for new hires. Board members claim it will save money and offer schools more flexibility in hiring decisions. WUKY commentator Cara Richards, a retired professor at Transylvania University has a few thoughts on that.
Visit this link for the full story
Commentator Assails Vote To Eliminate Tenure
WUKY (University of Kentucky/Lexington, KY)
Controversy continues to swirl over a recent decision by the Board of Regents for the Kentucky Community and Technical College System to eliminate teacher tenure for new hires. Board members claim it will save money and offer schools more flexibility in hiring decisions. WUKY commentator Cara Richards, a retired professor at Transylvania University has a few thoughts on that.
Visit this link for the full story
Monday, April 20, 2009
Bluegrass Community and Technical College Faculty Council Declares a Vote of No-Confidence in the President and the Board of Regents of KCTCS
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen of the BCTC Faculty,
On Friday, April 17, 2009 Faculty Council met and passed the following resolution on your behalf and charged the Chair of the Faculty to forward this to the President of KCTCS, Dr. McCall and the Chair of the KCTCS Board of Regents, Mr. Bean with an introductory letter.
Whereas, The Board of Regents of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System voted, effective July 1, 2009, to abolish tenure, end post retirement health benefits, and restrict vestment of retirement benefits for five years for new faculty, now therefore, be it
Resolved, The faculty of Bluegrass Community and Technical College hereby declares no confidence in the President and Board of Regents of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System and,
Resolved, The faculty of Bluegrass Community and Technical College asks the Kentucky Community and Technical College System to reinstate the options of tenure and continuing status for newly-hired faculty, to provide a viable means for current faculty to transition to tenure status or to continuing status, and to extend full healthcare benefits and vestment rights to newly-hired faculty members.
The voting was done by position with Senators, Officers, and the Chairs of the Standing Committees of the faculty voting according to input they had received from across the college, and Division Representatives voting in accord with their divisions. The final vote of Faculty Council was 27 for, 1 against, 1 abstention. Additionally, Division Representatives were requested to provide input regarding the level of faculty support for the resolution. The input they provided indicated that voting in division meetings was almost unanimous for adopting a resolution of No Confidence with recorded votes of 122 for, 7 against and 2 abstentions.
On Friday, April 17, 2009 Faculty Council met and passed the following resolution on your behalf and charged the Chair of the Faculty to forward this to the President of KCTCS, Dr. McCall and the Chair of the KCTCS Board of Regents, Mr. Bean with an introductory letter.
Whereas, The Board of Regents of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System voted, effective July 1, 2009, to abolish tenure, end post retirement health benefits, and restrict vestment of retirement benefits for five years for new faculty, now therefore, be it
Resolved, The faculty of Bluegrass Community and Technical College hereby declares no confidence in the President and Board of Regents of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System and,
Resolved, The faculty of Bluegrass Community and Technical College asks the Kentucky Community and Technical College System to reinstate the options of tenure and continuing status for newly-hired faculty, to provide a viable means for current faculty to transition to tenure status or to continuing status, and to extend full healthcare benefits and vestment rights to newly-hired faculty members.
The voting was done by position with Senators, Officers, and the Chairs of the Standing Committees of the faculty voting according to input they had received from across the college, and Division Representatives voting in accord with their divisions. The final vote of Faculty Council was 27 for, 1 against, 1 abstention. Additionally, Division Representatives were requested to provide input regarding the level of faculty support for the resolution. The input they provided indicated that voting in division meetings was almost unanimous for adopting a resolution of No Confidence with recorded votes of 122 for, 7 against and 2 abstentions.
CNN: Kentucky is Cited As the Highest-Stress State
Feeling stressed? It's more likely in some U.S. states than others
by Denise Mann
CNN
...
In the study, the researchers looked at rates of mental distress by state among 2.4 million adults across two time periods -- 1993 through 2001 and 2003 through 2006 -- as part of the ongoing Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System study. Overall, the prevalence for frequent mental distress across both time periods was 9.4 percent, with the lowest rate in Hawaii and the highest rate in Kentucky.
Why the difference? It may be because residents in some areas of the country are more likely than others to have health conditions such as disability or diabetes, untreated mental conditions like anxiety or depression, high unemployment rates, risky behaviors including cigarette smoking and alcohol abuse, and/or social circumstances such as lower incomes.
An area centered on Kentucky showed high levels of frequent mental distress that remained elevated over time, while in other parts of the country (such as the upper Midwest) low levels of frequent mental distress remained low over time, the study showed.
Overall, though, frequent mental distress seems to be on the rise. The rate of frequent mental distress increased by at least 1 percentage point in 27 states, and by more than 4 percentage points in Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia from the first time period to the second time period.
To Read the Entire Report
by Denise Mann
CNN
...
In the study, the researchers looked at rates of mental distress by state among 2.4 million adults across two time periods -- 1993 through 2001 and 2003 through 2006 -- as part of the ongoing Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System study. Overall, the prevalence for frequent mental distress across both time periods was 9.4 percent, with the lowest rate in Hawaii and the highest rate in Kentucky.
Why the difference? It may be because residents in some areas of the country are more likely than others to have health conditions such as disability or diabetes, untreated mental conditions like anxiety or depression, high unemployment rates, risky behaviors including cigarette smoking and alcohol abuse, and/or social circumstances such as lower incomes.
An area centered on Kentucky showed high levels of frequent mental distress that remained elevated over time, while in other parts of the country (such as the upper Midwest) low levels of frequent mental distress remained low over time, the study showed.
Overall, though, frequent mental distress seems to be on the rise. The rate of frequent mental distress increased by at least 1 percentage point in 27 states, and by more than 4 percentage points in Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia from the first time period to the second time period.
To Read the Entire Report
C. Wright Mills: The Sociological Imagination; Stanley Aronowitz: A Mills Revival?
(Aronowitz is writing in 2003, but the need for a revival of Mills is even more important now. Also check out Mark K. Smith's C. Wright Mills: Power, Craftsmanship, and Private Troubles and Public Issues)
A Mills Revival?
by Stanley Aronowitz
Logos
...
C. Wright Mills is exemplary of a vanishing breed in American life: the public political intellectual who, despite his grating message, often received a hearing in mainstream media. For almost fifteen years, beginning with the publication of The New Men of Power in 1948 and ending with his untimely death, at age forty six, in 1962, Mills was among America’s best known social scientists and social critics. During the late 1940s and 1950s he published three books that constitute a theory and description of the post-World War II American social structure. His Sociological Imagination remains widely read in college classrooms, both for its attempt to provide a socially-committed introduction to the discipline, and its fierce critique of the prevailing tendencies in American sociology, what Mills calls “Grand Theory” and “Abstracted Empiricism.” The grand theorist’s scope is much too wide to yield practical and theoretical insight. And Mills criticizes the legions of Abstracted Empiricists who, in the service of incrementally accumulated verifiable scientific knowledge, confine themselves to producing small-scale investigations. Together with his collaborator and mentor, Hans Gerth, he edited one of the earliest and best collections in English translation of Max Weber’s essays. And Character and Social Structure (1954), written with Gerth, an unjustly neglected work, may be considered Mills’s premier work of social theory. This book elaborates what I claim was the “scaffolding” upon which he hung his major works of middle range theory, especially the triology. In fact, it is difficult to fully comprehend the harsh critiques of Sociological Imagination, and Mills’s method, without the elaborated theoretical framework of Character.
While not exactly a household name, he was widely known among the politically active population and wide circles of academic and independent intellectuals. Unlike many public intellectuals he was neither a servant nor a supplicant of power but, in the sense of the 17th century English radical, was a “ranter”; in American terms, he was a Paul Revere whose job it was to sound the alarm. Indeed, some of his writings recall the pamphlets of the decades of the American revolution where the address of numerous and often anonymous writers was to the “publick” of small farmers and artisans, as much as to those holding political and economic power. Much of his later writing may be compared to turn of the 20th century populist and socialist pamphleteers whose aim was to simultaneously educate and arouse workers and farmers to the evils of corporate power.
Yet in his most fertile period of intellectual work, the decade and a half ending with the publication of The Sociological Imagination (1959), with the possible exception of The Power Elite, Mills hardly expected to reach a popular, let alone mass public. Nevertheless, he always attempted to reach out to a wider public than did his fellow academics, even when he was formulating new theories, let alone engaging in public criticism. But Mills’s intention is entirely subversive of contemporary mainstream social science, especially the notion that intellectuals should remain neutral observers of economic, political and social life. While he performed his fair share of funded research—notably his study of Puerto Rico and the collective portraits of characteristic social types—most of his writing is addressed to potential and actual political publics. Following Marx and Weber, who at the end of his life was a major contributor in shaping the moral and legal framework of the Weimar Republic, Mills held that intellectuals and their ideas were embedded in the social antagonisms and struggles of their own time; they bring to their analysis a definite standpoint, whether or not they are prepared to acknowledge it.
Yet Mills adhered to none of the mainstream parties nor to those on the fringes of mainstream politics. While he was a figure of his own time (his main work was done in the 1940s and 1950s, when issues of sex, gender and ecology were barely blips on the screen), his position was congenitally critical—of the right, conservatives, liberals, the relatively tiny parties of the left and especially members of his own shrinking group, the independent leftists. Like one of his heroes, the economist and social theorist Thorstein Veblen, himself a pariah in his chosen discipline, to paraphrase a famous aphorism of Marx, Mills was “in but not of” the academy insofar as he refuses the distinction between scholarship and partisanship. But, unlike Veblen, whose alienation from conventional economics was almost total, Mills was, for most of his professional career, a sociologist in his heart as much as his mind The rhetoric and the methods embodied in his books on American social structure—The New Men of Power, White Collar, and The Power Elite—are firmly rooted in the perspectives of mainstream American sociology at the end of the war. These perspectives owed as much to the methodological precepts of Emile Durkheim as they did to the critical theory of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Using many of the tools of conventional social inquiry: surveys, interviews, data analysis—charts included—Mills takes pains to stay close to the “data” until the concluding chapters.
But what distinguishes Mills from mainstream sociology, and from Weber, with whom he shares a considerable portion of his intellectual outlook, is the standpoint of radical social change, not of fashionable sociological neutrality. At the height of the Cold War and in the midst of the so-called McCarthy era, he fearlessly named capitalism as the system of domination from within one of its intellectual bastions, Columbia University, and distanced himself from ex-radicals among his colleagues who were busy “choosing the west,” otherwise giving aid and comfort to the witch-hunters, or neutering themselves by hiding behind the ideology of value-free scholarship. Anti-Stalinist to the core, toward the end of his life he was, nevertheless, accused of pro-Communist sympathies for his unsparing criticism of the militarization of America and his spirited defense of the Cuban revolution.
In the light of his later writings which, to say the least, held out little hope for radical social change in the United States The New Men of Power, Mills’s first major work, occupies a singular place in the Mills corpus. Written on the heels of the veritable general strike of industrial workers in 1946, and the conservative counterattack the following year embedded in the Taft-Hartley amendments to the Labor Relations Act, the study of America’s labor leaders argues that for the first time in history the labor movement, having shown its capacity to shape the political economy, possessed the practical requisites to become a major actor in American politics as well. But as both “as army general and a contractor of labor,” a “machine politician” and the head of a “social movement,” the labor leader occupies contradictory space. (Mills, 1948) By 1948, the year of publication of the first edition of The New Men of Power, buoyed by American capitalism’s unparalleled global dominance, a powerful conservative force was arrayed against labor’s recently acquired power and, according to Mills, had no intention of yielding more ground without an all-out industrial and political war. Yet, he found union leaders curiously unprepared for the struggle. Even as their cause was being abandoned by liberal allies, and belittled and besmirched by their natural enemies among the corporations and their ideological mouthpieces, right-wing intellectuals and conservative politicians, union leaders remained faithful to the Democratic party and to the New Deal, which was rapidly fading into history. Mills and his collaborator, Helen Schneider, found that the concept that working people needed a labor party to truly represent their political interests had declined from the perspective of most labor leaders whereas a decade earlier, the apex of industrial unionism, a majority favored the formation of such a party, despite their expedient support of the Democrats.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career; whether he knows it or not, the intellectual workman forms his own self as he works toward the perfection of his craft; to realize his own potentialities, and any opportunities that come his way, he constructs a character which has as its core the qualities of a good workman.
What this means is that you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it. In this sense craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you work. (Mills, C. Wright (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press: 196)
A Mills Revival?
by Stanley Aronowitz
Logos
...
C. Wright Mills is exemplary of a vanishing breed in American life: the public political intellectual who, despite his grating message, often received a hearing in mainstream media. For almost fifteen years, beginning with the publication of The New Men of Power in 1948 and ending with his untimely death, at age forty six, in 1962, Mills was among America’s best known social scientists and social critics. During the late 1940s and 1950s he published three books that constitute a theory and description of the post-World War II American social structure. His Sociological Imagination remains widely read in college classrooms, both for its attempt to provide a socially-committed introduction to the discipline, and its fierce critique of the prevailing tendencies in American sociology, what Mills calls “Grand Theory” and “Abstracted Empiricism.” The grand theorist’s scope is much too wide to yield practical and theoretical insight. And Mills criticizes the legions of Abstracted Empiricists who, in the service of incrementally accumulated verifiable scientific knowledge, confine themselves to producing small-scale investigations. Together with his collaborator and mentor, Hans Gerth, he edited one of the earliest and best collections in English translation of Max Weber’s essays. And Character and Social Structure (1954), written with Gerth, an unjustly neglected work, may be considered Mills’s premier work of social theory. This book elaborates what I claim was the “scaffolding” upon which he hung his major works of middle range theory, especially the triology. In fact, it is difficult to fully comprehend the harsh critiques of Sociological Imagination, and Mills’s method, without the elaborated theoretical framework of Character.
While not exactly a household name, he was widely known among the politically active population and wide circles of academic and independent intellectuals. Unlike many public intellectuals he was neither a servant nor a supplicant of power but, in the sense of the 17th century English radical, was a “ranter”; in American terms, he was a Paul Revere whose job it was to sound the alarm. Indeed, some of his writings recall the pamphlets of the decades of the American revolution where the address of numerous and often anonymous writers was to the “publick” of small farmers and artisans, as much as to those holding political and economic power. Much of his later writing may be compared to turn of the 20th century populist and socialist pamphleteers whose aim was to simultaneously educate and arouse workers and farmers to the evils of corporate power.
Yet in his most fertile period of intellectual work, the decade and a half ending with the publication of The Sociological Imagination (1959), with the possible exception of The Power Elite, Mills hardly expected to reach a popular, let alone mass public. Nevertheless, he always attempted to reach out to a wider public than did his fellow academics, even when he was formulating new theories, let alone engaging in public criticism. But Mills’s intention is entirely subversive of contemporary mainstream social science, especially the notion that intellectuals should remain neutral observers of economic, political and social life. While he performed his fair share of funded research—notably his study of Puerto Rico and the collective portraits of characteristic social types—most of his writing is addressed to potential and actual political publics. Following Marx and Weber, who at the end of his life was a major contributor in shaping the moral and legal framework of the Weimar Republic, Mills held that intellectuals and their ideas were embedded in the social antagonisms and struggles of their own time; they bring to their analysis a definite standpoint, whether or not they are prepared to acknowledge it.
Yet Mills adhered to none of the mainstream parties nor to those on the fringes of mainstream politics. While he was a figure of his own time (his main work was done in the 1940s and 1950s, when issues of sex, gender and ecology were barely blips on the screen), his position was congenitally critical—of the right, conservatives, liberals, the relatively tiny parties of the left and especially members of his own shrinking group, the independent leftists. Like one of his heroes, the economist and social theorist Thorstein Veblen, himself a pariah in his chosen discipline, to paraphrase a famous aphorism of Marx, Mills was “in but not of” the academy insofar as he refuses the distinction between scholarship and partisanship. But, unlike Veblen, whose alienation from conventional economics was almost total, Mills was, for most of his professional career, a sociologist in his heart as much as his mind The rhetoric and the methods embodied in his books on American social structure—The New Men of Power, White Collar, and The Power Elite—are firmly rooted in the perspectives of mainstream American sociology at the end of the war. These perspectives owed as much to the methodological precepts of Emile Durkheim as they did to the critical theory of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Using many of the tools of conventional social inquiry: surveys, interviews, data analysis—charts included—Mills takes pains to stay close to the “data” until the concluding chapters.
But what distinguishes Mills from mainstream sociology, and from Weber, with whom he shares a considerable portion of his intellectual outlook, is the standpoint of radical social change, not of fashionable sociological neutrality. At the height of the Cold War and in the midst of the so-called McCarthy era, he fearlessly named capitalism as the system of domination from within one of its intellectual bastions, Columbia University, and distanced himself from ex-radicals among his colleagues who were busy “choosing the west,” otherwise giving aid and comfort to the witch-hunters, or neutering themselves by hiding behind the ideology of value-free scholarship. Anti-Stalinist to the core, toward the end of his life he was, nevertheless, accused of pro-Communist sympathies for his unsparing criticism of the militarization of America and his spirited defense of the Cuban revolution.
In the light of his later writings which, to say the least, held out little hope for radical social change in the United States The New Men of Power, Mills’s first major work, occupies a singular place in the Mills corpus. Written on the heels of the veritable general strike of industrial workers in 1946, and the conservative counterattack the following year embedded in the Taft-Hartley amendments to the Labor Relations Act, the study of America’s labor leaders argues that for the first time in history the labor movement, having shown its capacity to shape the political economy, possessed the practical requisites to become a major actor in American politics as well. But as both “as army general and a contractor of labor,” a “machine politician” and the head of a “social movement,” the labor leader occupies contradictory space. (Mills, 1948) By 1948, the year of publication of the first edition of The New Men of Power, buoyed by American capitalism’s unparalleled global dominance, a powerful conservative force was arrayed against labor’s recently acquired power and, according to Mills, had no intention of yielding more ground without an all-out industrial and political war. Yet, he found union leaders curiously unprepared for the struggle. Even as their cause was being abandoned by liberal allies, and belittled and besmirched by their natural enemies among the corporations and their ideological mouthpieces, right-wing intellectuals and conservative politicians, union leaders remained faithful to the Democratic party and to the New Deal, which was rapidly fading into history. Mills and his collaborator, Helen Schneider, found that the concept that working people needed a labor party to truly represent their political interests had declined from the perspective of most labor leaders whereas a decade earlier, the apex of industrial unionism, a majority favored the formation of such a party, despite their expedient support of the Democrats.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
J.G. Ballard 1930 - 2009
(I wrote my undergraduate honor's thesis on J.G. Ballard's technological trilogy of Atrocity Exhibition/Crash/High Rise read through Erich Fromm's conception of modern necrophilia in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Courtesy of David Hudson's archive of memorials to Ballard.)
J. G. Ballard
By Richard Behrens
The Modern Word
Introduction
Working quietly over the last forty years from the domestic seclusion of a London suburb, J.G. Ballard has proven to be one of the world's most imaginative and thought-provoking writers. His books are primarily known to readers of science fiction, but he has produced work that crosses many boundaries, borrowing from and blending several genres, fusing action adventure with hard science, psychiatry with surrealism, and postmodernism with pulp narratives. His stories, often hallucinatory or dreamlike in character, are futurist predictions of where technology, media and the internal logic of our own suburban landscapes may be leading us. Ballard has described his mission as writing "a mythology of the future" and that is about as accurate a label as you can give to his collected works.
To a mainstream audience, he is the author of Empire of the Sun, a novel about his wartime experiences in China, and Crash, a puzzling and disturbing novel about the sexuality of car crashes. Both have been made into Hollywood movies, the former to great acclaim by Stephen Spielberg in 1985 and the later by David Cronenberg in 1995 amidst a controversy that resulted in the film being banned from certain parts of London. Both films have done justice to the source material, mixing Ballard's authentic poetic sensibilities with the highly individual visions of their respective directors. Hopefully, the films have helped his books find a new generation of readers.
Ballard has never stayed with the perimeters of his chosen professions. As a medical student in Cambridge, he looked at the dissected corpses upon which he labored with the subconscious fascination of a Surrealist poet. In The Kindness of Women, he wrote: "I held her dissected hand, whose nerves and tendons I had teased into the light. Its layers of skin and muscle resembled a deck of cards that she waited to deal across the table to me." As an RAF pilot-in-training, he was more concerned with the dream of mass atomic destruction than the craft of flying: "The mysterious mushroom clouds . . . were a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything."
Likewise, as a science fiction writer, he shied away from the usual trappings of the genre. Missing are the spaceships, galactic empires, and imaginary fantasy worlds with their elven kingdoms and fanciful histories. Also gone are the alien races, the flying saucers and mutated atomic monsters so prevalent in the science fiction of the 1950's when Ballard got his start. Instead we are treated to a poet's vision of a haunted world. Though still essentially grounded in science fiction (his future technologies and ecological disasters are unsurpassed in the genre), reading one of his books is like falling into the interior world of a Surrealist painting.
Ballard often said that the main difference between a Surrealist landscape and one painted by a classical artist is that the Surrealist landscape is lacking the element of time. Whereas the scenes depicted by Rembrandt, for example, are always very explicit about time -- the light of the sun penetrating the picture in such a way that you can always pinpoint the time of day -- a landscape by Ernst shows a place where the element of time has been extracted. Ballard has tried over and again to not only portray these timeless landscapes (often needing to destroy civilization to bring them about in a way that makes narrative sense), but he has shown his main characters suffering from a time extraction that is very real.
The virus in The Crystal World that is destroying the African jungle is not a conventional virus, but one which freezes matter into a timeless state:
The infected jungle landscapes he describes in the novel are worthy of a painting by Max Ernst, who transformed the Arizona desert with the keen eye of a timeless visionary. No wonder many of Ballard's early paperback collections of stories feature cover paintings that depict Tanguy-like amorphic blobs floating on the fused sands of psychic landscapes. What Ballard wrote was more like a Surrealist painting in prose, visions of vast subconscious shifts and the intersections where they touch the perimeter of conscious reality and every day life.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
J. G. Ballard
By Richard Behrens
The Modern Word
"Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire."
-- J.G. Ballard
Introduction
Working quietly over the last forty years from the domestic seclusion of a London suburb, J.G. Ballard has proven to be one of the world's most imaginative and thought-provoking writers. His books are primarily known to readers of science fiction, but he has produced work that crosses many boundaries, borrowing from and blending several genres, fusing action adventure with hard science, psychiatry with surrealism, and postmodernism with pulp narratives. His stories, often hallucinatory or dreamlike in character, are futurist predictions of where technology, media and the internal logic of our own suburban landscapes may be leading us. Ballard has described his mission as writing "a mythology of the future" and that is about as accurate a label as you can give to his collected works.
To a mainstream audience, he is the author of Empire of the Sun, a novel about his wartime experiences in China, and Crash, a puzzling and disturbing novel about the sexuality of car crashes. Both have been made into Hollywood movies, the former to great acclaim by Stephen Spielberg in 1985 and the later by David Cronenberg in 1995 amidst a controversy that resulted in the film being banned from certain parts of London. Both films have done justice to the source material, mixing Ballard's authentic poetic sensibilities with the highly individual visions of their respective directors. Hopefully, the films have helped his books find a new generation of readers.
Ballard has never stayed with the perimeters of his chosen professions. As a medical student in Cambridge, he looked at the dissected corpses upon which he labored with the subconscious fascination of a Surrealist poet. In The Kindness of Women, he wrote: "I held her dissected hand, whose nerves and tendons I had teased into the light. Its layers of skin and muscle resembled a deck of cards that she waited to deal across the table to me." As an RAF pilot-in-training, he was more concerned with the dream of mass atomic destruction than the craft of flying: "The mysterious mushroom clouds . . . were a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything."
Likewise, as a science fiction writer, he shied away from the usual trappings of the genre. Missing are the spaceships, galactic empires, and imaginary fantasy worlds with their elven kingdoms and fanciful histories. Also gone are the alien races, the flying saucers and mutated atomic monsters so prevalent in the science fiction of the 1950's when Ballard got his start. Instead we are treated to a poet's vision of a haunted world. Though still essentially grounded in science fiction (his future technologies and ecological disasters are unsurpassed in the genre), reading one of his books is like falling into the interior world of a Surrealist painting.
Ballard often said that the main difference between a Surrealist landscape and one painted by a classical artist is that the Surrealist landscape is lacking the element of time. Whereas the scenes depicted by Rembrandt, for example, are always very explicit about time -- the light of the sun penetrating the picture in such a way that you can always pinpoint the time of day -- a landscape by Ernst shows a place where the element of time has been extracted. Ballard has tried over and again to not only portray these timeless landscapes (often needing to destroy civilization to bring them about in a way that makes narrative sense), but he has shown his main characters suffering from a time extraction that is very real.
Dr. Nathan passed the illustration across his desk to Margaret Travis. "Marey's chronograms are multiple-exposure photographs in which the element of time is visible-the walking human figure, for example represented as a series of dune-like lumps . . . Your husband's brilliant feat was to reverse the process. Using a series of photographs of the most commonplace objects-this office, let us say, a panorama of New York skyscrapers, the naked body of a woman, the face of a catatonic patient-he treated them as if they already were chronograms and extracted the element of time." Dr. Nathan lit his cigarette with care. 'The results were extraordinary. A very different world was revealed. The familiar surroundings of our lives, even our smallest gestures, were seen to have total altered meanings. As for the reclining figure of a film star, or this hospital...." (The Atrocity Exhibition)
The virus in The Crystal World that is destroying the African jungle is not a conventional virus, but one which freezes matter into a timeless state:
Radek paused, collecting his energies with an effort. 'Tatlin believes that this Hubble Effect, as they call it, is closer to a cancer than anything else -- and about as curable -- an actual proliferation of the sub-atomic identity of all matter. It's as if a sequence of displaced but identical images of the same object were being produced by refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light." (The Crystal World)
The infected jungle landscapes he describes in the novel are worthy of a painting by Max Ernst, who transformed the Arizona desert with the keen eye of a timeless visionary. No wonder many of Ballard's early paperback collections of stories feature cover paintings that depict Tanguy-like amorphic blobs floating on the fused sands of psychic landscapes. What Ballard wrote was more like a Surrealist painting in prose, visions of vast subconscious shifts and the intersections where they touch the perimeter of conscious reality and every day life.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Tom Bissell: The Secret Mainstream -- Contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog
The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog
by Tom Bissell
Harper's Magazine
Herzog’s ecstatic truth finds its way into his feature films as well. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser fictionalizes the real story of a young man who turned up in a nineteenth-century German town with scarcely any speech and no experience with the outside world, for he had been kept chained in a cellar, by unknown parties, for the first two decades of his life. In the role of Kaspar, Herzog cast a nonprofessional actor, the incomparable Bruno S., who was in actual fact a prostitute’s son who had spent twenty-three years in various institutions, where he was often beaten and kept in deep isolation.
In Stroszek, the story of a luckless German street musician who travels to the American Midwest to improve his life, and fails miserably, Herzog uses Bruno S. again. The film’s most disturbing scene involves Bruno S.’s character being beaten by pimps in his apartment, which Herzog chose to film in Bruno’s actual apartment. This sequence, Herzog has admitted, “pains me so much because it was probably the kind of treatment that had been doled out to him for years when he was a child.” Two other sequences offer equally startling but far less brutal ecstatic truths: a scene in which Bruno talks to his prostitute girlfriend about life in America (under the Nazis, Bruno says, they beat you and cursed you, but in America, “They do it ever so politely, and with a smile”) was improvised, reflected what Bruno S. himself felt upon his first trip to the United States, and results in what is perhaps the most intimate moment in the film.
For another sequence, Herzog flagged down two Wisconsin deer hunters and asked them if they would agree to be filmed while one of his elderly German actors spoke to them in German. They agreed, and Herzog turned on his camera. After listening for a few moments to this strange little German discuss the power of “animal magnetism,” the deer hunters look at each other, laugh, get into their car, and quickly drive away. Herzog never saw the deer hunters again. It is one of the funniest sequences in any of Herzog’s movies.
For Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), a violent, troubling film about a breakaway expedition of Spaniards searching for El Dorado along the Amazon River while gradually going mad, Herzog filmed on the Amazon with a cast and crew who nearly went mad. The reality of the shoot constantly intrudes into Aguirre’s story. When the raft he was filming on developed a mouse infestation, Herzog filmed the mice. When part of the raft was in danger of being sheared off by low-hanging branches, Herzog scrambled for his camera, captured the collision, and incorporated it into the film, which ends with the megalomaniacal Aguirre (played by the megalomaniacal Klaus Kinski) coming to grief on a raft crawling with spidery little monkeys. While Aguirre wanders about his raft, his comrades dead, his mind slipping past the final checkpoints of sanity, he delivers a mad speech—parts of which Herzog says incorporate an equally mad speech delivered by the Zanzibari revolutionary John Okello—while the monkeys skitter around him.
In Fitzcarraldo (1982), Herzog again tells the story of a dreamer searching for salvation in the Amazon. Fitzcarraldo’s doomed quest to bring opera to the Amazon requires dragging a 340-ton ship over a mountain to reach an inaccessible river; Herzog naturally decided that he would actually drag the ship over the mountain. The film thus becomes an allegory of itself. Herzog spent three years in the jungle making Fitzcarraldo, and in the process had to deal with scrapping everything halfway through when his original star, Jason Robards, fell ill with dysentery and was forbidden by his doctor to return to Peru; plane crashes; a border war between Peru and Ecuador; Herzog’s arrest by the authorities; several crew members’ injuries (including one man chainsawing off his own foot after being bitten by a poisonous snake); and attacks by hostile Indians (one of which resulted in two members of the production undergoing eight hours of surgery). When the time came to recast Fitzcarraldo’s leading man, one might have expected Herzog to opt for an actor with peace at the center. Herzog, however, cast the miracle of ill temper that was Klaus Kinski, even though he knew Kinski “would freak out” and “go totally bonkers” in the jungle. Kinski did not disappoint.
Yet Herzog continued working with Kinski—they eventually made five films together—and in this, one can detect something of the perversity that impelled the director to drag a boat across a mountain in the first place. Herzog has never really been able to fully account for his and Kinski’s twisted reliance upon each other. He did pull from Kinski some astonishing performances—particularly in Woyzeck, a film basically composed of several long one-take sequences—but their working relationship involved serial pledges to kill each other. Kinski, who died in 1991, wrote in his autobiography that “I absolutely despise this murderous Herzog. . . . Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes, gobble up his balls, penetrate his asshole, and eat his guts!”
To Read the Entire Essay
by Tom Bissell
Harper's Magazine
Herzog’s ecstatic truth finds its way into his feature films as well. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser fictionalizes the real story of a young man who turned up in a nineteenth-century German town with scarcely any speech and no experience with the outside world, for he had been kept chained in a cellar, by unknown parties, for the first two decades of his life. In the role of Kaspar, Herzog cast a nonprofessional actor, the incomparable Bruno S., who was in actual fact a prostitute’s son who had spent twenty-three years in various institutions, where he was often beaten and kept in deep isolation.
In Stroszek, the story of a luckless German street musician who travels to the American Midwest to improve his life, and fails miserably, Herzog uses Bruno S. again. The film’s most disturbing scene involves Bruno S.’s character being beaten by pimps in his apartment, which Herzog chose to film in Bruno’s actual apartment. This sequence, Herzog has admitted, “pains me so much because it was probably the kind of treatment that had been doled out to him for years when he was a child.” Two other sequences offer equally startling but far less brutal ecstatic truths: a scene in which Bruno talks to his prostitute girlfriend about life in America (under the Nazis, Bruno says, they beat you and cursed you, but in America, “They do it ever so politely, and with a smile”) was improvised, reflected what Bruno S. himself felt upon his first trip to the United States, and results in what is perhaps the most intimate moment in the film.
For another sequence, Herzog flagged down two Wisconsin deer hunters and asked them if they would agree to be filmed while one of his elderly German actors spoke to them in German. They agreed, and Herzog turned on his camera. After listening for a few moments to this strange little German discuss the power of “animal magnetism,” the deer hunters look at each other, laugh, get into their car, and quickly drive away. Herzog never saw the deer hunters again. It is one of the funniest sequences in any of Herzog’s movies.
For Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), a violent, troubling film about a breakaway expedition of Spaniards searching for El Dorado along the Amazon River while gradually going mad, Herzog filmed on the Amazon with a cast and crew who nearly went mad. The reality of the shoot constantly intrudes into Aguirre’s story. When the raft he was filming on developed a mouse infestation, Herzog filmed the mice. When part of the raft was in danger of being sheared off by low-hanging branches, Herzog scrambled for his camera, captured the collision, and incorporated it into the film, which ends with the megalomaniacal Aguirre (played by the megalomaniacal Klaus Kinski) coming to grief on a raft crawling with spidery little monkeys. While Aguirre wanders about his raft, his comrades dead, his mind slipping past the final checkpoints of sanity, he delivers a mad speech—parts of which Herzog says incorporate an equally mad speech delivered by the Zanzibari revolutionary John Okello—while the monkeys skitter around him.
In Fitzcarraldo (1982), Herzog again tells the story of a dreamer searching for salvation in the Amazon. Fitzcarraldo’s doomed quest to bring opera to the Amazon requires dragging a 340-ton ship over a mountain to reach an inaccessible river; Herzog naturally decided that he would actually drag the ship over the mountain. The film thus becomes an allegory of itself. Herzog spent three years in the jungle making Fitzcarraldo, and in the process had to deal with scrapping everything halfway through when his original star, Jason Robards, fell ill with dysentery and was forbidden by his doctor to return to Peru; plane crashes; a border war between Peru and Ecuador; Herzog’s arrest by the authorities; several crew members’ injuries (including one man chainsawing off his own foot after being bitten by a poisonous snake); and attacks by hostile Indians (one of which resulted in two members of the production undergoing eight hours of surgery). When the time came to recast Fitzcarraldo’s leading man, one might have expected Herzog to opt for an actor with peace at the center. Herzog, however, cast the miracle of ill temper that was Klaus Kinski, even though he knew Kinski “would freak out” and “go totally bonkers” in the jungle. Kinski did not disappoint.
Yet Herzog continued working with Kinski—they eventually made five films together—and in this, one can detect something of the perversity that impelled the director to drag a boat across a mountain in the first place. Herzog has never really been able to fully account for his and Kinski’s twisted reliance upon each other. He did pull from Kinski some astonishing performances—particularly in Woyzeck, a film basically composed of several long one-take sequences—but their working relationship involved serial pledges to kill each other. Kinski, who died in 1991, wrote in his autobiography that “I absolutely despise this murderous Herzog. . . . Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes, gobble up his balls, penetrate his asshole, and eat his guts!”
To Read the Entire Essay
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Left Field Cinema: Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (Hungary: 2000)
Werckmeister Harmonies
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema
An extended examination of Bela Tarr's modern masterpiece about the boundaries between civility and barbarism. Also featuring a look back at the first eight feature films of Tarr's career.
To Listen to the Critique
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema
An extended examination of Bela Tarr's modern masterpiece about the boundaries between civility and barbarism. Also featuring a look back at the first eight feature films of Tarr's career.
To Listen to the Critique
Film School: Directors/Producers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern on Their Documentary The Trials of Darryl Hunt
THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT
Hosts: Nathan Callahan and Mike Kaspar
Film School (KUCI/Irvine, CA)
An interview with Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern producers and directors of The Trials of Darryl Hunt — a documentary about a brutal rape/murder in the American South, that offers a deeply personal story of a wrongfully convicted man, Darryl Hunt, who spent twenty years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Base on an ID made by a former Klan member, a 19-year-old black man, Darryl Hunt, was charged. No physical evidence linked Hunt to the crime. Hunt was convicted by an all white jury, and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1994, DNA testing cleared Hunt, yet he would spend another ten years behind bars. Winner of more than a dozen Film Festival awards, The Trials of Darryl Hunt [was] among 15 films in the Documentary Feature category [of] the 79th Academy Awards®.
To Listen to the Interview
Hosts: Nathan Callahan and Mike Kaspar
Film School (KUCI/Irvine, CA)
An interview with Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern producers and directors of The Trials of Darryl Hunt — a documentary about a brutal rape/murder in the American South, that offers a deeply personal story of a wrongfully convicted man, Darryl Hunt, who spent twenty years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Base on an ID made by a former Klan member, a 19-year-old black man, Darryl Hunt, was charged. No physical evidence linked Hunt to the crime. Hunt was convicted by an all white jury, and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1994, DNA testing cleared Hunt, yet he would spend another ten years behind bars. Winner of more than a dozen Film Festival awards, The Trials of Darryl Hunt [was] among 15 films in the Documentary Feature category [of] the 79th Academy Awards®.
To Listen to the Interview
Daniel Hui: Fun and Games -- On Michael Haneke's 2007 Remake of His 1997 Funny Games
Fun and Games: On Michael Haneke's 2007 Remake of His 1997 Funny Games
By Daniel Hui
Bright Lights Film Journal
...
In the age where reality shows are being shot with several takes to hide technical mistakes, it says a lot about modern culture when exposing a film's manipulation becomes shocking for so many people. Throughout the history of drama and tragedy, audiences have been used to characters breaking the fourth wall (Greek choruses and Shakespearean asides). Cinema, in its symbolically voyeuristic darkened room (darkening the world outside and creating a new world to escape to), has primed audiences into accepting an idealistic totality that resolves its own problems. It is no wonder that cinema is the ideal tool for political propaganda. Movies are preoccupied with hiding (their artifice, manipulation or technique, and message), and wherever there is hiding, things must be held suspect. In the closing scene of Funny Games, the two killers debate the reality of what we see. It seems that in today's information-overload age, images are produced with such rapidity and ease that not much thought is given to their implications. Haneke's Funny Games attempts, at least, to restore to images some of their responsibility — the implication that our gaze and its demands are never innocent as such.
To Read the Entire Essay
By Daniel Hui
Bright Lights Film Journal
...
In the age where reality shows are being shot with several takes to hide technical mistakes, it says a lot about modern culture when exposing a film's manipulation becomes shocking for so many people. Throughout the history of drama and tragedy, audiences have been used to characters breaking the fourth wall (Greek choruses and Shakespearean asides). Cinema, in its symbolically voyeuristic darkened room (darkening the world outside and creating a new world to escape to), has primed audiences into accepting an idealistic totality that resolves its own problems. It is no wonder that cinema is the ideal tool for political propaganda. Movies are preoccupied with hiding (their artifice, manipulation or technique, and message), and wherever there is hiding, things must be held suspect. In the closing scene of Funny Games, the two killers debate the reality of what we see. It seems that in today's information-overload age, images are produced with such rapidity and ease that not much thought is given to their implications. Haneke's Funny Games attempts, at least, to restore to images some of their responsibility — the implication that our gaze and its demands are never innocent as such.
To Read the Entire Essay
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Counterspin: T.R. Reid on Sick Around America, Mark Danner on torture
T.R. Reid on Sick Around America, Mark Danner on torture
Counterspin (FAIR)
Sick Around America, the recently aired documentary on PBS's Frontline purported to ask why the US can't finance universal health care the way other developed countries do. But the picture was at best incomplete, since it seems some options were considered off the table. We'll hear from reporter and author T.R. Reid, who worked on Sick Around America as a follow up to his Sick Around the World from last year, but who disassociated himself from the domestic version when he saw what producers had done with it. What was wrong? We'll find out.
Also on the show: A landmark essay in the New York Review of Books details U.S. torture of detainees through Red Cross interviews with the detainees themselves. Mark Danner's powerful piece raises questions about how a society that claims to seek justice, can look the other way when faced with evidence that high officials have ordered heinous crimes? We'll talk to Danner about the Red Cross Report and what it means.
To Listen to the Episode
Counterspin (FAIR)
Sick Around America, the recently aired documentary on PBS's Frontline purported to ask why the US can't finance universal health care the way other developed countries do. But the picture was at best incomplete, since it seems some options were considered off the table. We'll hear from reporter and author T.R. Reid, who worked on Sick Around America as a follow up to his Sick Around the World from last year, but who disassociated himself from the domestic version when he saw what producers had done with it. What was wrong? We'll find out.
Also on the show: A landmark essay in the New York Review of Books details U.S. torture of detainees through Red Cross interviews with the detainees themselves. Mark Danner's powerful piece raises questions about how a society that claims to seek justice, can look the other way when faced with evidence that high officials have ordered heinous crimes? We'll talk to Danner about the Red Cross Report and what it means.
To Listen to the Episode
Matt Taibbi: Teabagging Michelle Malkin
(Courtesy of Danny Mayer)
Teabagging Michelle Malkin
by Matt Taibbi
The Smirking Chimp
...
Anyway this teabag thing has really gotten out of control. It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.
Look, I’m a taxpayer too. And I’m no less pissed off than any of these people about the taxes I have to pay. Just today I was reading hedge-fund manager David Einhorn’s book, Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, about his battles with a company called Allied Capital. Einhorn was shorting Allied because he found accounting irregularities in Allied’s books after analyzing the firm. Among other things, he found that an Allied subsidiary called BLX was irresponsibly handling tens of millions in Small Business Association loans, shoving this SBA money out to unworthy recipients and costing the taxpayer an enormous amount of money. When Einhorn went to the SBA, they basically blew him off. “We see this all the time; what’s so special about those?” was the SBA official’s response when Einhorn presented him with evidence of loan fraud. Einhorn pointed out that one of the reasons companies like BLX got away with bilking the government was because the enforcement agencies were so understaffed: he routinely found that agencies like the SEC and the OIG could not or would not investigate fraud against the taxpayer because they had no staff to pursue the investigations.
That attitude, that complete and total I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude about taxpayer money, that’s endemic to almost every branch of the government. We saw in the last five years how contractors in Iraq nakedly robbed money from the you and me, running phantom convoys across the desert (some companies called that transporting “sailboat fuel”), systematically risking human life and gouging the taxpayer more or less right out in the open. There was over $100 billion in sole-source, non-competitive contracts in Iraq in 2006; a House Committee identified just 50 contracts totalling more than $21 billion that require “scrutiny,” but not much has been recovered so far. Why did they get away with it? Because there is basically no serious enforcement mechanism, in the military or anywhere else, for preserving taxpayer money given to contractors. In Iraq, the military auditor, SIGIR, had about seventy men in the entire military theater at the time I was there. We just bailed out AIG to the tune of more than $160 billion; its primary auditor, the Office of Thrift Supervision, had exactly one insurance expert on its staff while AIG was falling apart. There were staff cuts at the SEC several times in the last ten years; in fact there was a crucial cut of the SEC budget in an $821 billion Omnibus spending bill at the tail end of 2003 (just in time for the housing bubble) that was packed with plenty of pork and, again, inspired no protests from Joe Sixpack.
Meanwhile the federal government has systematically expanded a whole ecosystem of contractor-handout programs, most of them with names the public has never heard of. How many people out there are aware of all the millions in grants given to fortune 500 companies over the years through the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), which basically subsidizes the R&D departments of already rich firms while allowing those same companies to keep the benefits of those innovations? How about the nearly $5 billion in loan guarantees given to Boeing over the years through the Ex-Im Bank? How about the Foreign Military Financing Program, which gives millions of dollars to dozens of foreign countries every year so that they can buy American-made weapons?
Or how about the four or five billion dollars we spent annually for the last decade or so on Federal Housing Authority subsidies? Well, actually, the teabaggers probably would get riled up about those programs, which subsidize mortgage loans to low-income homeowners. The one constant in teabagger outrage is that the whatever wasteful government program they’re freaking out about has to benefit some poor slob, or else they usually don’t give a shit. What they forget, of course, is that FHA loans ultimately benefit the banks a lot more than the poor slobs — a homeowner defaulting on his FHA loan loses his house, but the bank that irresponsibly issued the loan (without fear, knowing they are backed up by the government) is still fully compensated, with you picking up the tab.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Teabagging Michelle Malkin
by Matt Taibbi
The Smirking Chimp
...
Anyway this teabag thing has really gotten out of control. It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.
Look, I’m a taxpayer too. And I’m no less pissed off than any of these people about the taxes I have to pay. Just today I was reading hedge-fund manager David Einhorn’s book, Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, about his battles with a company called Allied Capital. Einhorn was shorting Allied because he found accounting irregularities in Allied’s books after analyzing the firm. Among other things, he found that an Allied subsidiary called BLX was irresponsibly handling tens of millions in Small Business Association loans, shoving this SBA money out to unworthy recipients and costing the taxpayer an enormous amount of money. When Einhorn went to the SBA, they basically blew him off. “We see this all the time; what’s so special about those?” was the SBA official’s response when Einhorn presented him with evidence of loan fraud. Einhorn pointed out that one of the reasons companies like BLX got away with bilking the government was because the enforcement agencies were so understaffed: he routinely found that agencies like the SEC and the OIG could not or would not investigate fraud against the taxpayer because they had no staff to pursue the investigations.
That attitude, that complete and total I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude about taxpayer money, that’s endemic to almost every branch of the government. We saw in the last five years how contractors in Iraq nakedly robbed money from the you and me, running phantom convoys across the desert (some companies called that transporting “sailboat fuel”), systematically risking human life and gouging the taxpayer more or less right out in the open. There was over $100 billion in sole-source, non-competitive contracts in Iraq in 2006; a House Committee identified just 50 contracts totalling more than $21 billion that require “scrutiny,” but not much has been recovered so far. Why did they get away with it? Because there is basically no serious enforcement mechanism, in the military or anywhere else, for preserving taxpayer money given to contractors. In Iraq, the military auditor, SIGIR, had about seventy men in the entire military theater at the time I was there. We just bailed out AIG to the tune of more than $160 billion; its primary auditor, the Office of Thrift Supervision, had exactly one insurance expert on its staff while AIG was falling apart. There were staff cuts at the SEC several times in the last ten years; in fact there was a crucial cut of the SEC budget in an $821 billion Omnibus spending bill at the tail end of 2003 (just in time for the housing bubble) that was packed with plenty of pork and, again, inspired no protests from Joe Sixpack.
Meanwhile the federal government has systematically expanded a whole ecosystem of contractor-handout programs, most of them with names the public has never heard of. How many people out there are aware of all the millions in grants given to fortune 500 companies over the years through the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), which basically subsidizes the R&D departments of already rich firms while allowing those same companies to keep the benefits of those innovations? How about the nearly $5 billion in loan guarantees given to Boeing over the years through the Ex-Im Bank? How about the Foreign Military Financing Program, which gives millions of dollars to dozens of foreign countries every year so that they can buy American-made weapons?
Or how about the four or five billion dollars we spent annually for the last decade or so on Federal Housing Authority subsidies? Well, actually, the teabaggers probably would get riled up about those programs, which subsidize mortgage loans to low-income homeowners. The one constant in teabagger outrage is that the whatever wasteful government program they’re freaking out about has to benefit some poor slob, or else they usually don’t give a shit. What they forget, of course, is that FHA loans ultimately benefit the banks a lot more than the poor slobs — a homeowner defaulting on his FHA loan loses his house, but the bank that irresponsibly issued the loan (without fear, knowing they are backed up by the government) is still fully compensated, with you picking up the tab.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Thom Hartmann: The Real Boston Tea Party was Against the Wal-Mart of the 1770s
(Courtesy of Danny Mayer)
The Real Boston Tea Party was Against the Wal-Mart of the 1770s
by Thom Hartmann
The Smirking Chimp
CNBC Correspondent Rick Santelli called for a "Chicago Tea Party" on Feb 19th in protesting President Obama's plan to help homeowners in trouble. Santelli's call was answered by the right-wing group Freedomworks, which funds campaigns promoting big business interests, and is the opposite of what the real Boston Tea Party was. FreedomWorks was funded in 2004 by Dick Army (former Republican House Majority leader & lobbyist); consolidated Citizens for a Sound Economy, funded by the Koch family; and Empower America, a lobbying firm, that had fought against healthcare and minimum-wage efforts while hailing deregulation.
Anti-tax "tea party" organizers are delivering one million tea bags to a Washington, D.C., park Wednesday morning - to promote protests across the country by people they say are fed up with high taxes and excess spending.
The real Boston Tea Party was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. This corporate tax cut threatened to decimate small Colonial businesses by helping the BEIC pull a Wal-Mart against small entrepreneurial tea shops, and individuals began a revolt that kicked-off a series of events that ended in the creation of The United States of America.
They covered their faces, massed in the streets, and destroyed the property of a giant global corporation. Declaring an end to global trade run by the East India Company that was destroying local economies, this small, masked minority started a revolution with an act of rebellion later called the Boston Tea Party.
On a cold November day in 1773, activists gathered in a coastal town. The corporation had gone too far, and the two thousand people who'd jammed into the meeting hall were torn as to what to do about it. Unemployment was exploding and the economic crisis was deepening; corporate crime, governmental corruption spawned by corporate cash, and an ethos of greed were blamed. "Why do we wait?" demanded one at the meeting, a fisherman named George Hewes. "The more we delay, the more strength is acquired" by the company and its puppets in the government. "Now is the time to prove our courage," he said. Soon, the moment came when the crowd decided for direct action and rushed into the streets.
That is how I tell the story of the Boston Tea Party, now that I have read a first-person account of it. While striving to understand my nation's struggles against corporations, in a rare book store I came upon a first edition of "Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773," and I jumped at the chance to buy it. Because the identities of the Boston Tea Party participants were hidden (other than Samuel Adams) and all were sworn to secrecy for the next 50 years, this account is the only first-person account of the event by a participant that exists. As I read, I began to understand the true causes of the American Revolution.
I learned that the Boston Tea Party resembled in many ways the growing modern-day protests against transnational corporations and small-town efforts to protect themselves from chain-store retailers or factory farms. The Tea Party's participants thought of themselves as protesters against the actions of the multinational East India Company.
Although schoolchildren are usually taught that the American Revolution was a rebellion against "taxation without representation," akin to modern day conservative taxpayer revolts, in fact what led to the revolution was rage against a transnational corporation that, by the 1760s, dominated trade from China to India to the Caribbean, and controlled nearly all commerce to and from North America, with subsidies and special dispensation from the British crown.
Hewes notes: "The [East India] Company received permission to transport tea, free of all duty, from Great Britain to America..." allowing it to wipe out New England-based tea wholesalers and mom-and-pop stores and take over the tea business in all of America. "Hence," wrote, "it was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity ... The colonies were now arrived at the decisive moment when they must cast the dye, and determine their course ... "
To Read the Rest of the Essay
The Real Boston Tea Party was Against the Wal-Mart of the 1770s
by Thom Hartmann
The Smirking Chimp
CNBC Correspondent Rick Santelli called for a "Chicago Tea Party" on Feb 19th in protesting President Obama's plan to help homeowners in trouble. Santelli's call was answered by the right-wing group Freedomworks, which funds campaigns promoting big business interests, and is the opposite of what the real Boston Tea Party was. FreedomWorks was funded in 2004 by Dick Army (former Republican House Majority leader & lobbyist); consolidated Citizens for a Sound Economy, funded by the Koch family; and Empower America, a lobbying firm, that had fought against healthcare and minimum-wage efforts while hailing deregulation.
Anti-tax "tea party" organizers are delivering one million tea bags to a Washington, D.C., park Wednesday morning - to promote protests across the country by people they say are fed up with high taxes and excess spending.
The real Boston Tea Party was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. This corporate tax cut threatened to decimate small Colonial businesses by helping the BEIC pull a Wal-Mart against small entrepreneurial tea shops, and individuals began a revolt that kicked-off a series of events that ended in the creation of The United States of America.
They covered their faces, massed in the streets, and destroyed the property of a giant global corporation. Declaring an end to global trade run by the East India Company that was destroying local economies, this small, masked minority started a revolution with an act of rebellion later called the Boston Tea Party.
On a cold November day in 1773, activists gathered in a coastal town. The corporation had gone too far, and the two thousand people who'd jammed into the meeting hall were torn as to what to do about it. Unemployment was exploding and the economic crisis was deepening; corporate crime, governmental corruption spawned by corporate cash, and an ethos of greed were blamed. "Why do we wait?" demanded one at the meeting, a fisherman named George Hewes. "The more we delay, the more strength is acquired" by the company and its puppets in the government. "Now is the time to prove our courage," he said. Soon, the moment came when the crowd decided for direct action and rushed into the streets.
That is how I tell the story of the Boston Tea Party, now that I have read a first-person account of it. While striving to understand my nation's struggles against corporations, in a rare book store I came upon a first edition of "Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773," and I jumped at the chance to buy it. Because the identities of the Boston Tea Party participants were hidden (other than Samuel Adams) and all were sworn to secrecy for the next 50 years, this account is the only first-person account of the event by a participant that exists. As I read, I began to understand the true causes of the American Revolution.
I learned that the Boston Tea Party resembled in many ways the growing modern-day protests against transnational corporations and small-town efforts to protect themselves from chain-store retailers or factory farms. The Tea Party's participants thought of themselves as protesters against the actions of the multinational East India Company.
Although schoolchildren are usually taught that the American Revolution was a rebellion against "taxation without representation," akin to modern day conservative taxpayer revolts, in fact what led to the revolution was rage against a transnational corporation that, by the 1760s, dominated trade from China to India to the Caribbean, and controlled nearly all commerce to and from North America, with subsidies and special dispensation from the British crown.
Hewes notes: "The [East India] Company received permission to transport tea, free of all duty, from Great Britain to America..." allowing it to wipe out New England-based tea wholesalers and mom-and-pop stores and take over the tea business in all of America. "Hence," wrote, "it was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity ... The colonies were now arrived at the decisive moment when they must cast the dye, and determine their course ... "
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Kentucky Poet Laureate Gurney Norman: Capitol Rotunda in Frankfort, KY (April 24th)
On Friday, April 24th, beginning at 11 a.m. in the Capitol Rotunda in Frankfort, the Kentucky Arts Council is hosting an induction ceremony for Kentucky’s new Poet Laureate, Gurney Norman. Other Kentucky poets and writers, including Richard Taylor and Jane Gentry Vance, will also read and a reception on the mezzanine will follow the induction.
Let your students know about this event—even if they can’t attend, it will help raise awareness about Kentucky’s Poet Laureate Program and Kentucky’s rich literary heritage.
And forward this to anyone else you think might be interested in attending!
Eileen
Let your students know about this event—even if they can’t attend, it will help raise awareness about Kentucky’s Poet Laureate Program and Kentucky’s rich literary heritage.
And forward this to anyone else you think might be interested in attending!
Eileen
Sylvain Verstricht: Women with Imaginary Children -- Old Gender Stereotypes in New American Thrillers
Women with Imaginary Children: Old Gender Stereotypes in New American Thrillers
by Sylvain Verstricht
Synoptique
Sylvain observes how traditional gender stereotypes concerning parenthood are finding new representations in a series of recent American thrillers where mothers find their sanity put into question when their children mysteriously disappear.
In Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan (2005), Air Marshal Carson (Peter Sarsgaard) tells flight passenger Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) that his job is to protect passengers from crazy individuals, and that “Women with imaginary children qualify.” The implication, of course, is that Kyle is one such crazy individual, suspected of creating turmoil throughout the airplane in the search for a child that some suspect may never even have existed.
This is not the first time in film history that a woman has been suspected of making up a child’s existence out of thin air. The apparition of this phenomenon first occurred in Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), based on the novel of the same name by Marryam Modell (written under the pseudonym Evelyn Piper). In Preminger’s adaptation, Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) moves to London to live with her brother Stephen (Keir Dullea). When she goes to pick up her four-year old daughter from the first day of school, she is nowhere to be found and no one even remembers her having ever been there. Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) is brought in to investigate and, given the lack of evidence concerning the existence of Ann’s daughter, hints that the daughter may only be a product of Ann’s imagination.
This occurred again nearly thirty years later in Joseph Ruben’s the Forgotten (2004), where Telly Paretta (Julianne Moore) grieves the loss of her son who died in a plane crash, only to be told by her husband (Anthony Edwards) and therapist (Gary Sinise) that she never had a child. Her therapist suggests that she created an entire life for her son, lasting until when he would have been the age of nine, after she had actually miscarried.
Less than a year after the release of the forgotten, Flightplan came out in theatres with a similar storyline. The film begins in Germany, where engineer Kyle boards a plane she helped build in order to go back to New York to bury her husband, who seemingly committed suicide. Traveling with her is her six-year-old daughter. When Kyle wakes up from a nap, her daughter is nowhere to be found in the exceptionally large double-decker airplane. Kyle creates quite a commotion on the airplane because of her panicked search for her daughter, who does not even appear on the passenger manifest, leading the crew to believe that the child never existed in the first place.
Finally, director Joe Carnahan is currently working on a remake of Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing, which was set for release in 2008. The release date has now been pushed back to 2009 since Reese Witherspoon, who was supposed to play the main role, unexpectedly abandoned the project less than a month before it was set to begin shooting.
Given that all these movies fall under the popular genre of thriller and not psychological drama, it does not come as much of a surprise to the audience that in every single one of them, the mother ultimately proves that she is right, that she does have a child. Still, a question remains: what can we learn about the discourse surrounding issues of maternity and paternity through these films? Unfortunately, even though their stories take place in a recent social context, they reiterate detrimental conceptions of parenthood that are centuries old: that family is the woman’s concern; that biology ensures that mothers are more intimately connected to their children; that women give life and men destroy it; and that, as such, men are the most expendable in the family structure. As we shall also see, filmmakers seem to feel that they can only tamper with the mother-child bond for a minimal amount of time, and that even under these advantageous conditions they need additional facilitating elements that often fail to be realistic.
To Read the Entire Essay
by Sylvain Verstricht
Synoptique
Sylvain observes how traditional gender stereotypes concerning parenthood are finding new representations in a series of recent American thrillers where mothers find their sanity put into question when their children mysteriously disappear.
In Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan (2005), Air Marshal Carson (Peter Sarsgaard) tells flight passenger Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) that his job is to protect passengers from crazy individuals, and that “Women with imaginary children qualify.” The implication, of course, is that Kyle is one such crazy individual, suspected of creating turmoil throughout the airplane in the search for a child that some suspect may never even have existed.
This is not the first time in film history that a woman has been suspected of making up a child’s existence out of thin air. The apparition of this phenomenon first occurred in Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), based on the novel of the same name by Marryam Modell (written under the pseudonym Evelyn Piper). In Preminger’s adaptation, Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) moves to London to live with her brother Stephen (Keir Dullea). When she goes to pick up her four-year old daughter from the first day of school, she is nowhere to be found and no one even remembers her having ever been there. Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) is brought in to investigate and, given the lack of evidence concerning the existence of Ann’s daughter, hints that the daughter may only be a product of Ann’s imagination.
This occurred again nearly thirty years later in Joseph Ruben’s the Forgotten (2004), where Telly Paretta (Julianne Moore) grieves the loss of her son who died in a plane crash, only to be told by her husband (Anthony Edwards) and therapist (Gary Sinise) that she never had a child. Her therapist suggests that she created an entire life for her son, lasting until when he would have been the age of nine, after she had actually miscarried.
Less than a year after the release of the forgotten, Flightplan came out in theatres with a similar storyline. The film begins in Germany, where engineer Kyle boards a plane she helped build in order to go back to New York to bury her husband, who seemingly committed suicide. Traveling with her is her six-year-old daughter. When Kyle wakes up from a nap, her daughter is nowhere to be found in the exceptionally large double-decker airplane. Kyle creates quite a commotion on the airplane because of her panicked search for her daughter, who does not even appear on the passenger manifest, leading the crew to believe that the child never existed in the first place.
Finally, director Joe Carnahan is currently working on a remake of Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing, which was set for release in 2008. The release date has now been pushed back to 2009 since Reese Witherspoon, who was supposed to play the main role, unexpectedly abandoned the project less than a month before it was set to begin shooting.
Given that all these movies fall under the popular genre of thriller and not psychological drama, it does not come as much of a surprise to the audience that in every single one of them, the mother ultimately proves that she is right, that she does have a child. Still, a question remains: what can we learn about the discourse surrounding issues of maternity and paternity through these films? Unfortunately, even though their stories take place in a recent social context, they reiterate detrimental conceptions of parenthood that are centuries old: that family is the woman’s concern; that biology ensures that mothers are more intimately connected to their children; that women give life and men destroy it; and that, as such, men are the most expendable in the family structure. As we shall also see, filmmakers seem to feel that they can only tamper with the mother-child bond for a minimal amount of time, and that even under these advantageous conditions they need additional facilitating elements that often fail to be realistic.
To Read the Entire Essay
Zoë Heyn-Jones: Eye and Brain, Torn Asunder -- Reading Ideology in Sally Potter’s Orlando
Eye and Brain, Torn Asunder: Reading Ideology in Sally Potter’s Orlando
by Zoë Heyn-Jones
Synoptique
An investigation of how gender, genre and politics play out in Sally Potter’s Orlando.
...
Potter’s Orlando exhibits a high degree of thematic, narrative, and stylistic fluidity and pluralism that would trouble any binary assertion. The film exists within a complex terrain of issues, from Orlando’s status as a literary adaptation, to questions of the politics of the film’s aesthetics and representational strategies, to its engagement within a particular socio-historical context. This paper will address the issue of how these disparate strands of Orlando’s matrix come together to create its “readable ideological orientation” (Monk, 181). An ideological reading of the film is inevitable considering the concerns stated above, and ideology in Orlando can be discussed in terms of the performance of gender, androgyny as transcendence, and the film’s situation in the (post)heritage-film debate.
Costume and the Performance of Gendered Identity
Analysis of costume is often ignored in film studies. Influenced by the work of Pamela Church Gibson, Sarah Street believes that
Just as the analysis of costume itself is given short shrift in cinema studies, so, too, is the analysis of the ‘costume drama’. Julianne Pidduck asserts that “often perceived as a woman’s genre, costume drama shares some of the abuse regularly leveled at soap operas and popular romance” (5). This lack of critical analysis of the costume drama is surprising when one considers the myriad avenues for analysis within the genre: “gendered accounts of (historical) significance, taste and quality are intertwined with the development of the historical epic, literary adaptation, British ‘quality’ cinema and television, melodrama and the ‘woman’s film’” (5). It is with the duality of the under-examination of the costume drama, and its enormous potential, in mind that I will begin a discussion of Sally Potter’s Orlando.
While a discussion of costume might, at first glance, appear to be perhaps a (literally) surface-level analysis, it contains possibilities for radical critique. On one hand, ”’costume’ suggests the pleasures and possibilities of masquerade–the construction, constraint, and display of the body through clothes” (Pidduck, 4). Contrary to its pleasures and emancipatory potential, however, is the sustained view that costume goes hand-in-hand with a patriarchal notion of gendered identity construction. The costuming in Orlando is both a source of visual pleasure and a comment on its inherent role in the construction of gendered identity.
Costume designer Sandy Powell’s elaborate creations are preeminent in Orlando’s diegesis and the focal point for discussions of the film’s stylistic excess. In her discussion of the film’s baroque scopic regime, Cristina Degli-Eposti states:
The grandiose, the redundant, the trompe l’oeil, the excessiveness of the details of the mise-en-scene work together to produce an effect of estrangement and separation from previous aesthetic forms – those forms of the baroque style elaborated, manipulated, “staged”, and translated to excess (79).
The frame is consistently filled with ridiculously large and ornate ball gowns, heavy powdered wigs, and countless other stylized pieces of apparel, making costume the essential part of the mise-en-scene that translates to excess.
While the sheer volume and ornate nature of the costumes could simply signify a postmodern parody or social commentary on the bourgeoisie through cinematic excess, costume also has narrative significance. Queen Elizabeth I slips a garter onto Orlando’s leg as she declares her affection for the young Lord. This scene is remarkable in terms of gender performance: a decrepit Quentin Crisp plays the Virgin Queen, while the Lord Orlando is played by Tilda Swinton, both of whom are swathed in ornate garments. While the garter on Orlando’s leg acts as a signifier of the Queen’s affection for the Lord’s youthful masculinity, it also acts as a narrative tool, as it is into the garter that the Queen slips the deed for Orlando’s house as she coos, “For you, Orlando. And for your heirs.” Costume here plays a central role in both the indexing of gender as well as narrative progression.
To Read the Entire Essay
by Zoë Heyn-Jones
Synoptique
An investigation of how gender, genre and politics play out in Sally Potter’s Orlando.
...
Potter’s Orlando exhibits a high degree of thematic, narrative, and stylistic fluidity and pluralism that would trouble any binary assertion. The film exists within a complex terrain of issues, from Orlando’s status as a literary adaptation, to questions of the politics of the film’s aesthetics and representational strategies, to its engagement within a particular socio-historical context. This paper will address the issue of how these disparate strands of Orlando’s matrix come together to create its “readable ideological orientation” (Monk, 181). An ideological reading of the film is inevitable considering the concerns stated above, and ideology in Orlando can be discussed in terms of the performance of gender, androgyny as transcendence, and the film’s situation in the (post)heritage-film debate.
Costume and the Performance of Gendered Identity
Analysis of costume is often ignored in film studies. Influenced by the work of Pamela Church Gibson, Sarah Street believes that
the possible reasons for the relative scarcity of sustained analyses of film costume… [are] the assumption, held by many academics, that fashion is a frivolous, feminine field; the suspicion that fashion is merely an expression of capitalist commodity fetishism and the opinion, held by some feminists, that fashion is one of the primary ways in which women are trapped into gratifying the male gaze (1).
Just as the analysis of costume itself is given short shrift in cinema studies, so, too, is the analysis of the ‘costume drama’. Julianne Pidduck asserts that “often perceived as a woman’s genre, costume drama shares some of the abuse regularly leveled at soap operas and popular romance” (5). This lack of critical analysis of the costume drama is surprising when one considers the myriad avenues for analysis within the genre: “gendered accounts of (historical) significance, taste and quality are intertwined with the development of the historical epic, literary adaptation, British ‘quality’ cinema and television, melodrama and the ‘woman’s film’” (5). It is with the duality of the under-examination of the costume drama, and its enormous potential, in mind that I will begin a discussion of Sally Potter’s Orlando.
While a discussion of costume might, at first glance, appear to be perhaps a (literally) surface-level analysis, it contains possibilities for radical critique. On one hand, ”’costume’ suggests the pleasures and possibilities of masquerade–the construction, constraint, and display of the body through clothes” (Pidduck, 4). Contrary to its pleasures and emancipatory potential, however, is the sustained view that costume goes hand-in-hand with a patriarchal notion of gendered identity construction. The costuming in Orlando is both a source of visual pleasure and a comment on its inherent role in the construction of gendered identity.
Costume designer Sandy Powell’s elaborate creations are preeminent in Orlando’s diegesis and the focal point for discussions of the film’s stylistic excess. In her discussion of the film’s baroque scopic regime, Cristina Degli-Eposti states:
The grandiose, the redundant, the trompe l’oeil, the excessiveness of the details of the mise-en-scene work together to produce an effect of estrangement and separation from previous aesthetic forms – those forms of the baroque style elaborated, manipulated, “staged”, and translated to excess (79).
The frame is consistently filled with ridiculously large and ornate ball gowns, heavy powdered wigs, and countless other stylized pieces of apparel, making costume the essential part of the mise-en-scene that translates to excess.
While the sheer volume and ornate nature of the costumes could simply signify a postmodern parody or social commentary on the bourgeoisie through cinematic excess, costume also has narrative significance. Queen Elizabeth I slips a garter onto Orlando’s leg as she declares her affection for the young Lord. This scene is remarkable in terms of gender performance: a decrepit Quentin Crisp plays the Virgin Queen, while the Lord Orlando is played by Tilda Swinton, both of whom are swathed in ornate garments. While the garter on Orlando’s leg acts as a signifier of the Queen’s affection for the Lord’s youthful masculinity, it also acts as a narrative tool, as it is into the garter that the Queen slips the deed for Orlando’s house as she coos, “For you, Orlando. And for your heirs.” Costume here plays a central role in both the indexing of gender as well as narrative progression.
To Read the Entire Essay
Media Lens: Thought Control and Professional Journalism
(Remix and apply to critiques of the various professional enclaves, including my own cacademia.)
Media Lens
Thought Control and 'Professional' Journalism - part 1
Thought Control and 'Professional' Journalism - part 2
Media Lens
Thought Control and 'Professional' Journalism - part 1
"Professional" journalism accepts that powerful interests - the political and economic allies of the corporate media - should be allowed to set the news agenda. Reporters are to channel the words of officialdom without expressing their own personal opinions. To express criticism of the powerful in news reports is deemed "unprofessional" - that is, "crusading", "committed", "polemical" and "radioactive". Curiously, the myth of professional "objectivity" exists alongside the clear fact that expressing support for the claims and actions of the powerful is not considered unprofessional.
Thought Control and 'Professional' Journalism - part 2
Ben Aslinger: Blogotheques and Black Cabs -- Popular Music and Urban Place
(To prepare yourself for this one take a listen to Royksopp's song Remind Me which is mentioned in the essay... although I think Only a Moment is a better example simply because it is not so diagrammatic and thus relates to Aslinger's examples of the musical/spatial experimental documentations of raw performances by contemporary bands/musicians in Vincent Moon's La Blogotheque and Hidden Fruit's Black Cab Sessions.)
Blogotheques and Black Cabs: Popular Music and Urban Place
Ben Aslinger / Bentley College
Flow TV
The music video for Röyksopp’s song “Remind Me” from their studio album Melody A.M. (2001) follows a day in the life of a woman who works in the information technology offices of a company housed in a central London skyscraper. Röyksopp, a Norwegian electronica duo, was formed in Bergen when Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge reunited years after they had stopped experimenting with composing as schoolboys in the town of Tromsø. But as the plaintive lyrics of “Remind Me” indirectly indicate, music made in Norway and the artists who made it would only be heard outside Scandinavia if they got noticed by those executives, label bosses, critics and reviewers in London who wielded the most power to make music audible to a pan-European audience and to North American ears. Indeed, the reason I discovered Röyksopp’s work was because the duo is signed to Astralwerks – a label specializing in alternative rock and electronica that was purchased by Virgin and later became a part of EMI when the conglomerate purchased Virgin.
Thus, Röyksopp’s music alludes to the ways that the culture industries work to make music scenes visible and to construct music’s ties to place and travel. Röyksopp’s music, born of Bergen, found its way to my ears in Madison through the mediations of London-based music firms and a bevy of critics. Digging deeper into the animated video for “Remind Me,” however, reveals another tie between Röyksopp’s electronica and spatial understandings. In the video, we follow the various vectors of movement one woman takes through suburban and central London as the music overlays the rhythms of a workday, data visualizations of world markets, and statistics on how many Londoners walk, drive, take the bus, or catch the train to work. Remind Me links the engineered sounds and plaintive lyrics that emphasize travel, memory, and affect with various ways of mapping movements within the city and understanding the ways in which modern urban life relies on a multitude of systems and technologies – such as sewers, electricity, and communications infrastructures – that are largely taken for granted.
Röyksopp’s Remind Me highlights two issues surrounding music’s connections to place. First, musical sounds, styles, genres, and the performers who popularize them emerge in specific places, but the travel of specific sounds and performers to a national and/or international audience depends on critics, label bosses, bloggers, scholars and/or dedicated fans who work to construct and define the relationship of the music to place. Critics, musicologists and popular music historians have examined the conditions under which musical forms such as Detroit techno, Chicago house, New York garage, London grime, Seattle grunge, Memphis blues, Kansas City jazz, and Atlanta hip hop have evolved, traveled, and influenced other genres.1 While it might appear to the casual observer that networked and mobile mediations of popular music work to wrest musical performances, performers, and styles from any ties to location, experiments such as Vincent Moon’s La Blogotheque and Hidden Fruit’s Black Cab Sessions illustrate that articulations between place and music remain vital, even if site-specific listening practices have turned into the “site-unspecific” practices Max Dawson has chronicled in relation to U.S. television.2
La Blogotheque and the Black Cab Sessions feature musical performances primarily in Paris in London, offering performers a new way of promoting their records and new ways of imaging musical performance in both networked and particular places. On one level, La Blogotheque and the Black Cab Sessions challenge the traditional ways of visualizing genres such as indie rock. Music video scholar Carol Vernallis argues that videos for alternative bands emphasize interior and domestic settings associated with the middle class suburban locations that the largely white producers and listeners of such music wish to escape from. Vernallis writes, “In alternative videos, one might see a small, boxy set, built in a studio or warehouse, covered with murky green wallpaper, and decorated with shabby furniture. The run-down look of these settings underscores an interest in rawness and spontaneity and an ambivalence about such practices as writing attractive, accessible hooks. Alternative groups are typically imagined to play in low-rent spaces, like garages and small clubs, and these sites become associated with specific musical practices.”
To Read the Rest of the Essay and Access More Resources
Blogotheques and Black Cabs: Popular Music and Urban Place
Ben Aslinger / Bentley College
Flow TV
The music video for Röyksopp’s song “Remind Me” from their studio album Melody A.M. (2001) follows a day in the life of a woman who works in the information technology offices of a company housed in a central London skyscraper. Röyksopp, a Norwegian electronica duo, was formed in Bergen when Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge reunited years after they had stopped experimenting with composing as schoolboys in the town of Tromsø. But as the plaintive lyrics of “Remind Me” indirectly indicate, music made in Norway and the artists who made it would only be heard outside Scandinavia if they got noticed by those executives, label bosses, critics and reviewers in London who wielded the most power to make music audible to a pan-European audience and to North American ears. Indeed, the reason I discovered Röyksopp’s work was because the duo is signed to Astralwerks – a label specializing in alternative rock and electronica that was purchased by Virgin and later became a part of EMI when the conglomerate purchased Virgin.
Thus, Röyksopp’s music alludes to the ways that the culture industries work to make music scenes visible and to construct music’s ties to place and travel. Röyksopp’s music, born of Bergen, found its way to my ears in Madison through the mediations of London-based music firms and a bevy of critics. Digging deeper into the animated video for “Remind Me,” however, reveals another tie between Röyksopp’s electronica and spatial understandings. In the video, we follow the various vectors of movement one woman takes through suburban and central London as the music overlays the rhythms of a workday, data visualizations of world markets, and statistics on how many Londoners walk, drive, take the bus, or catch the train to work. Remind Me links the engineered sounds and plaintive lyrics that emphasize travel, memory, and affect with various ways of mapping movements within the city and understanding the ways in which modern urban life relies on a multitude of systems and technologies – such as sewers, electricity, and communications infrastructures – that are largely taken for granted.
Röyksopp’s Remind Me highlights two issues surrounding music’s connections to place. First, musical sounds, styles, genres, and the performers who popularize them emerge in specific places, but the travel of specific sounds and performers to a national and/or international audience depends on critics, label bosses, bloggers, scholars and/or dedicated fans who work to construct and define the relationship of the music to place. Critics, musicologists and popular music historians have examined the conditions under which musical forms such as Detroit techno, Chicago house, New York garage, London grime, Seattle grunge, Memphis blues, Kansas City jazz, and Atlanta hip hop have evolved, traveled, and influenced other genres.1 While it might appear to the casual observer that networked and mobile mediations of popular music work to wrest musical performances, performers, and styles from any ties to location, experiments such as Vincent Moon’s La Blogotheque and Hidden Fruit’s Black Cab Sessions illustrate that articulations between place and music remain vital, even if site-specific listening practices have turned into the “site-unspecific” practices Max Dawson has chronicled in relation to U.S. television.2
La Blogotheque and the Black Cab Sessions feature musical performances primarily in Paris in London, offering performers a new way of promoting their records and new ways of imaging musical performance in both networked and particular places. On one level, La Blogotheque and the Black Cab Sessions challenge the traditional ways of visualizing genres such as indie rock. Music video scholar Carol Vernallis argues that videos for alternative bands emphasize interior and domestic settings associated with the middle class suburban locations that the largely white producers and listeners of such music wish to escape from. Vernallis writes, “In alternative videos, one might see a small, boxy set, built in a studio or warehouse, covered with murky green wallpaper, and decorated with shabby furniture. The run-down look of these settings underscores an interest in rawness and spontaneity and an ambivalence about such practices as writing attractive, accessible hooks. Alternative groups are typically imagined to play in low-rent spaces, like garages and small clubs, and these sites become associated with specific musical practices.”
To Read the Rest of the Essay and Access More Resources
Karina M. Totah: Trainspotting's Playlist -- A Compilation of Subcultural Struggles
(Courtesy of Film Studies For Free recent Danny Boyle post... excerpt, for my students who are writing on the film I added a few clips from Youtube.)
Trainspotting's Playlist: A Compilation of Subcultural Struggles
Choose a big fucking noise
By Karina M. Totah
Bright Lights Film Journal
...
Choose text.
Drawing on the language of Trainspotting's original text, a novel by Irvine Welsh published in 1993, the movie adapted the distinctive phonetic Scottish dialect with which the novel is written. Often difficult to understand upon first reading, novel reviewer Jane Mendelsohn characterized the experience of the language as, "alienating at first, exhilarating once you get the hang of it, and finally poetic in its complications."5 Indeed, acclimatization to the language requires a reading out-loud of the typographical rendering in the mind's ear: "Ah wished tae fuck that ah wis in one ay they squads instead ay wi this auld cunt."6 The vernacular contains strong rhythms and poetic slang, contributing to its vocalization-prone style.7 A highly sonant book, even on the written page, Trainspotting the novel sets up an already audible framework for the filmmakers.
Choose a verse,
Welsh wrote in the style of James Kelman, a Scottish writer and winner of the Booker Prize; his language was quick and episodic utilizing profane language and free verse, as Harlan Kennedy put it. The many variances and jumps in the language, and its often poetry-like structure on the page, parallels the frozen frames, montage sequences and "fantastical visual punctuation" of the movie. Welsh willingly recognized the potential for an "unfaithful representation" of the text in the film adaptation; however, he considered the text to be dynamic and felt "the exciting part of it" was to note how, "it's going to change as it moves into a different medium." The looseness, loudness and inherent rhythms of the original language ease the tension of text-film adaptation and accentuate the aural cinematic product.
Choose a dialect,
The distinctive Scottish dialect signifies a stress on heritage. However, talk regarding Scotland in the movie (and novel) actively condemns and insults the national heritage. Tommy takes his mates for a walk through a classic Scottish landscape; Renton reacts by calling the Scots the, "lowest of the fucking low."11 Renton literally and metaphorically abandons symbolic Scottish geography and heritage through the course of Trainspotting. The film rejects the context of Scottish nationalistic/glorification films from within which it arises — Braveheart and Rob Roy. Trainspotting's producers took, as Harlan Kennedy of Film Comment phrases it, "the leftover stock footage [and] handed [it] back to the Scottish Tourist board."12 Dialect is the film's primary vehicle and simultaneous undertone to indicate heritage. Although Renton addresses Scotland directly only on one occasion, the distinctiveness of the argot and the difficulty in understanding the characters' speech continually reminds us of nationalistic differences and tensions. In addition, Renton's back-and-forth to London further emphasizes this element.
Choose a big fucking noise,
Despite its Scottish character, Trainspotting achieved transnational success. As reviewer Robert Morace indicates, the arresting opening sequence juxtaposes Renton's Scot diatribe with Iggy Pop's American drawl; establishing the inter- and intranational dynamics of the movie. The sequence also demonstrates the most pervasive quality of the film — the many layers of diegetic sound, or sound that exists within the film's narrative space. Sound in the backdrop of Trainspotting, unlike the "sounds of society" typical in British realist film — people talking, traffic passing by, machines working, dogs barking — are absent; instead, a "rushing, wind noise"14 replaces the noises of surrounding society and its members. Suggestive both of a type of surreal silence and constant motion, the wind noise plays an essential role in the film's kinetic, fast-paced energy. Only heard in full effect when all the film's other sounds disappear, the rushing sound comes directly preceding a realization. It appears as Renton strolls along before toppling over impending with diarrhea; after reading his girlfriend Diane's letter, hearing his doorbell buzz and understanding his friend Begbie's arrival; and as he knocks on his friend Tommy's door, confronting him AIDS-ridden. The sound of movement replaces silent thought while also propelling the narrative forward.
Choose material objects,
The "whooshing" sound denies the film of silence, highlighting its on-going rapid pace in addition to serving as a reminder of the noise ever-present in the world of overstimulated youth. Welsh, in writing his novel, acknowledged the condition of the youth, club-going culture who inhabited an overly-arousing environment of soundbites, music videos, advertisements, and computer graphics. Accordingly, Welsh felt the importance of writing in a style "to keep the pages turning, to keep the action moving, just like a DJ."15 The constant noise necessary to drive the story forward correlates with youth's lowered sensitivity to common din; yet Trainspotting chooses to deliberately amplify the sounds of objects in the everyday, material world. The exaggerated reverberations of cans opening, bags of chips ripping, trains whistling, bottles hitting tables, lights flickering, flies buzzing, drinks being slurped, doors locking and bolting (a double camera shot for emphasis), and water faucets dripping create a soundscape of increased volume and awareness of material objects. The film emphasizes material goods in order to explain, open, fill and cut scenes; the almost comical multiplication of their relative sonority shows the importance of such commodities in consumer culture. Further, the amplification of these sounds contributes to the disparity between the silence of society and the heightened sounds in Trainspotting's world. Here, sound in its contextual exaggeration represents the reduced focus of the rest of society in Trainspotting; Renton and his mates resign themselves to societal poverty and unemployment as norms and, in a sense, render society trivial. Society is not a relevant part of Renton's existence; it fades into the background exerting no influence, soundless. Further, the separation from society, demonstrated through relative volume, also emphasizes the characters' extreme individualism and self-containment relative to their environment. The exaggeration of material objects' noise serves a two-fold purpose: it highlights consumerism and the associated individualism of a capitalist, as well as separate youth culture.
To Read the Entire Essay
Trainspotting's Playlist: A Compilation of Subcultural Struggles
Choose a big fucking noise
By Karina M. Totah
Bright Lights Film Journal
...
Choose text.
Drawing on the language of Trainspotting's original text, a novel by Irvine Welsh published in 1993, the movie adapted the distinctive phonetic Scottish dialect with which the novel is written. Often difficult to understand upon first reading, novel reviewer Jane Mendelsohn characterized the experience of the language as, "alienating at first, exhilarating once you get the hang of it, and finally poetic in its complications."5 Indeed, acclimatization to the language requires a reading out-loud of the typographical rendering in the mind's ear: "Ah wished tae fuck that ah wis in one ay they squads instead ay wi this auld cunt."6 The vernacular contains strong rhythms and poetic slang, contributing to its vocalization-prone style.7 A highly sonant book, even on the written page, Trainspotting the novel sets up an already audible framework for the filmmakers.
Choose a verse,
Welsh wrote in the style of James Kelman, a Scottish writer and winner of the Booker Prize; his language was quick and episodic utilizing profane language and free verse, as Harlan Kennedy put it. The many variances and jumps in the language, and its often poetry-like structure on the page, parallels the frozen frames, montage sequences and "fantastical visual punctuation" of the movie. Welsh willingly recognized the potential for an "unfaithful representation" of the text in the film adaptation; however, he considered the text to be dynamic and felt "the exciting part of it" was to note how, "it's going to change as it moves into a different medium." The looseness, loudness and inherent rhythms of the original language ease the tension of text-film adaptation and accentuate the aural cinematic product.
Choose a dialect,
The distinctive Scottish dialect signifies a stress on heritage. However, talk regarding Scotland in the movie (and novel) actively condemns and insults the national heritage. Tommy takes his mates for a walk through a classic Scottish landscape; Renton reacts by calling the Scots the, "lowest of the fucking low."11 Renton literally and metaphorically abandons symbolic Scottish geography and heritage through the course of Trainspotting. The film rejects the context of Scottish nationalistic/glorification films from within which it arises — Braveheart and Rob Roy. Trainspotting's producers took, as Harlan Kennedy of Film Comment phrases it, "the leftover stock footage [and] handed [it] back to the Scottish Tourist board."12 Dialect is the film's primary vehicle and simultaneous undertone to indicate heritage. Although Renton addresses Scotland directly only on one occasion, the distinctiveness of the argot and the difficulty in understanding the characters' speech continually reminds us of nationalistic differences and tensions. In addition, Renton's back-and-forth to London further emphasizes this element.
Choose a big fucking noise,
Despite its Scottish character, Trainspotting achieved transnational success. As reviewer Robert Morace indicates, the arresting opening sequence juxtaposes Renton's Scot diatribe with Iggy Pop's American drawl; establishing the inter- and intranational dynamics of the movie. The sequence also demonstrates the most pervasive quality of the film — the many layers of diegetic sound, or sound that exists within the film's narrative space. Sound in the backdrop of Trainspotting, unlike the "sounds of society" typical in British realist film — people talking, traffic passing by, machines working, dogs barking — are absent; instead, a "rushing, wind noise"14 replaces the noises of surrounding society and its members. Suggestive both of a type of surreal silence and constant motion, the wind noise plays an essential role in the film's kinetic, fast-paced energy. Only heard in full effect when all the film's other sounds disappear, the rushing sound comes directly preceding a realization. It appears as Renton strolls along before toppling over impending with diarrhea; after reading his girlfriend Diane's letter, hearing his doorbell buzz and understanding his friend Begbie's arrival; and as he knocks on his friend Tommy's door, confronting him AIDS-ridden. The sound of movement replaces silent thought while also propelling the narrative forward.
Choose material objects,
The "whooshing" sound denies the film of silence, highlighting its on-going rapid pace in addition to serving as a reminder of the noise ever-present in the world of overstimulated youth. Welsh, in writing his novel, acknowledged the condition of the youth, club-going culture who inhabited an overly-arousing environment of soundbites, music videos, advertisements, and computer graphics. Accordingly, Welsh felt the importance of writing in a style "to keep the pages turning, to keep the action moving, just like a DJ."15 The constant noise necessary to drive the story forward correlates with youth's lowered sensitivity to common din; yet Trainspotting chooses to deliberately amplify the sounds of objects in the everyday, material world. The exaggerated reverberations of cans opening, bags of chips ripping, trains whistling, bottles hitting tables, lights flickering, flies buzzing, drinks being slurped, doors locking and bolting (a double camera shot for emphasis), and water faucets dripping create a soundscape of increased volume and awareness of material objects. The film emphasizes material goods in order to explain, open, fill and cut scenes; the almost comical multiplication of their relative sonority shows the importance of such commodities in consumer culture. Further, the amplification of these sounds contributes to the disparity between the silence of society and the heightened sounds in Trainspotting's world. Here, sound in its contextual exaggeration represents the reduced focus of the rest of society in Trainspotting; Renton and his mates resign themselves to societal poverty and unemployment as norms and, in a sense, render society trivial. Society is not a relevant part of Renton's existence; it fades into the background exerting no influence, soundless. Further, the separation from society, demonstrated through relative volume, also emphasizes the characters' extreme individualism and self-containment relative to their environment. The exaggeration of material objects' noise serves a two-fold purpose: it highlights consumerism and the associated individualism of a capitalist, as well as separate youth culture.
To Read the Entire Essay
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Matt Mclure: Cet obscur objet du desir -- A Diegetic Analysis of Conchita and the RAIJ
ENG 282: International Film Studies student response
That Obscure Object of Desire, written and directed by Luis Bunuel, and released in the U.S. in 1977, is a surreal expression of how a man is blinded by his lust for a woman. In this example Mathieu, played by Fernando Rey, is used by Conchita, played by both Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, to gain intel for and finance the Spanish terrorist organization The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, or RAIJ.
The first clue is seen in the beginning of the movie when Mathieu returns to his hotel room after purchasing his train ticket. The camera focuses on his laundry bag being carried presumably to his car. You will see this bag again in close proximity to other terrorist attacks throughout the movie. The first terrorist attack we see takes place in front of the hotel where Mathieu is staying as a man enters a car to be driven to the bank. If you pay attention you will see that the car closely resembles the car that Mathieu is in when the bomb goes off, and does not even remotely resemble any other car in the scene. I suggest the bomb was meant for Mathieu in retaliation or to remove any connections that could be made between him and Conchita. When the RAIJ realize their mistake, they send Conchita to the train station to re-establish contact with Mathieu. Notice that someone has tended to her injuries. You then have to ask why would a woman who has just been raped return to the man who raped her if not for some sinister reason. If she truly wanted to be with him, I believe she would not have left the hotel in the first place.
The significance of the terrorist connection is further emphasized as Mathieu tells his story to his fellow passengers and explains why he dumped the water on her head. He begins by telling them about the terrorist who are on trial and his conversation with his cousin the prosecuting attorney in the case. Their conversation begins with his cousin telling him how the terrorist priest and the three others only received eight year prison terms for their activities because he believes the jury members had received death threats. We find out later that Conchita’s mother spends all her time at church, probably the same church as the terrorist priest. It only makes sense to me that the terrorist would want to move in closer to the prosecuting attorney by either gaining intel through Mathieu, sending a message to his cousin by killing Mathieu, or making it easier to kill the cousin himself.
The RAIJ probably had been watching Mathieu and decided the best way to infiltrate his life was to send a young beautiful woman that they knew he could not resist to become one of his servants. This would give Mathieu a false sense of control making him easy pickings. Mathieu noticed that she had never worked with her hands and was not knowledgeable about which glass should be used for the particular type of wine being served. If she truly came from an affluent family as she later claims, she would have been well versed on proper table etiquette. This would have been the perfect opportunity for a terrorist agent to gain intel about what the prosecutor was thinking because he was in an environment in which he was comfortable and would speak more freely as people often do in conversation over meals.
I find it suspicious that Conchita would have left without her wages if she and her mother were in such dire straits. I think she left because she had gathered the information she needed and had baited the trap for Mathieu. The next scene we find Mathieu in Switzerland on a business trip. He is taking a walk in a park when three men ambush him and rob him of 800 francs. These guys looked like they knew what they were doing. Next we find him having breakfast, and out of the clear blue, who happens to show up but Conchita. She feeds him some sob story about how her troupe had been abandoned by their manager and only needed the money for the trip home. This is where I find gaping holes in her story. Back at his house where they first met she told him that her dancing was no way for her to make money, but here she is coincidently in the same foreign country, and in the exact same city working as a dancer in a traveling act? She tries to give the money back like poor little old honest me, my conscience wont let me keep it, knowing he would not take it because he is infatuated with her. Of course he doesn’t take the money, and asks her to stay at this lavish hotel for free for a few more days. She says she can’t because she has to return to her starving mother. My question is what was her mother going to do if poor Conchita had been stuck in Switzerland for a few more days if her story were true, eat her shoes for sustenance? I suggest the RAIJ sees an opportunity in Mathieu to fund their operations in France out of his misguided generosity to Conchita. I contend that Conchita’s mother was not her mother at all but another RAIJ operative involved in the rouse to extort money from Mathieu.
The rest of the movie continues to provide many more tortuous examples of Mathieu’s blindness as he tries to get into Conchita’s pants, all along playing right into the RAIJ’s hands. Some of these include the gratuitous amount of money he gives her so-called mother, who he remarks that he does even have to see. So who knows where the money is going. The terrorist attacks that just coincidently follow Conchita around the continent of Europe. The safe-house he buys them in Spain. In this scene I believe this is first time Conchita is actually being honest with him. Even up until the very last scene where she attempts to assassinate Mathieu by placing another bomb in his laundry bag. In this scene she casually steps away from him just as the bomb is about to go off, praying it will kill him so she can be free of his molesting advances. I think you can see the hatred and loathing she really has for him in the expression on her face as she turns to walk away after she realizes he is no longer standing in front of the window. Bunuel does not let you see what happens next, but since we do not see any bodies, I can only speculate that his luck allows him yet to live another day.
That Obscure Object of Desire. Dir. Luis Bunuel, Perfs. Fernando Rey, Carole Bouquet, Angela Molina. 1977. DVD. Criterion Collection, 2001.
That Obscure Object of Desire, written and directed by Luis Bunuel, and released in the U.S. in 1977, is a surreal expression of how a man is blinded by his lust for a woman. In this example Mathieu, played by Fernando Rey, is used by Conchita, played by both Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, to gain intel for and finance the Spanish terrorist organization The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, or RAIJ.
The first clue is seen in the beginning of the movie when Mathieu returns to his hotel room after purchasing his train ticket. The camera focuses on his laundry bag being carried presumably to his car. You will see this bag again in close proximity to other terrorist attacks throughout the movie. The first terrorist attack we see takes place in front of the hotel where Mathieu is staying as a man enters a car to be driven to the bank. If you pay attention you will see that the car closely resembles the car that Mathieu is in when the bomb goes off, and does not even remotely resemble any other car in the scene. I suggest the bomb was meant for Mathieu in retaliation or to remove any connections that could be made between him and Conchita. When the RAIJ realize their mistake, they send Conchita to the train station to re-establish contact with Mathieu. Notice that someone has tended to her injuries. You then have to ask why would a woman who has just been raped return to the man who raped her if not for some sinister reason. If she truly wanted to be with him, I believe she would not have left the hotel in the first place.
The significance of the terrorist connection is further emphasized as Mathieu tells his story to his fellow passengers and explains why he dumped the water on her head. He begins by telling them about the terrorist who are on trial and his conversation with his cousin the prosecuting attorney in the case. Their conversation begins with his cousin telling him how the terrorist priest and the three others only received eight year prison terms for their activities because he believes the jury members had received death threats. We find out later that Conchita’s mother spends all her time at church, probably the same church as the terrorist priest. It only makes sense to me that the terrorist would want to move in closer to the prosecuting attorney by either gaining intel through Mathieu, sending a message to his cousin by killing Mathieu, or making it easier to kill the cousin himself.
The RAIJ probably had been watching Mathieu and decided the best way to infiltrate his life was to send a young beautiful woman that they knew he could not resist to become one of his servants. This would give Mathieu a false sense of control making him easy pickings. Mathieu noticed that she had never worked with her hands and was not knowledgeable about which glass should be used for the particular type of wine being served. If she truly came from an affluent family as she later claims, she would have been well versed on proper table etiquette. This would have been the perfect opportunity for a terrorist agent to gain intel about what the prosecutor was thinking because he was in an environment in which he was comfortable and would speak more freely as people often do in conversation over meals.
I find it suspicious that Conchita would have left without her wages if she and her mother were in such dire straits. I think she left because she had gathered the information she needed and had baited the trap for Mathieu. The next scene we find Mathieu in Switzerland on a business trip. He is taking a walk in a park when three men ambush him and rob him of 800 francs. These guys looked like they knew what they were doing. Next we find him having breakfast, and out of the clear blue, who happens to show up but Conchita. She feeds him some sob story about how her troupe had been abandoned by their manager and only needed the money for the trip home. This is where I find gaping holes in her story. Back at his house where they first met she told him that her dancing was no way for her to make money, but here she is coincidently in the same foreign country, and in the exact same city working as a dancer in a traveling act? She tries to give the money back like poor little old honest me, my conscience wont let me keep it, knowing he would not take it because he is infatuated with her. Of course he doesn’t take the money, and asks her to stay at this lavish hotel for free for a few more days. She says she can’t because she has to return to her starving mother. My question is what was her mother going to do if poor Conchita had been stuck in Switzerland for a few more days if her story were true, eat her shoes for sustenance? I suggest the RAIJ sees an opportunity in Mathieu to fund their operations in France out of his misguided generosity to Conchita. I contend that Conchita’s mother was not her mother at all but another RAIJ operative involved in the rouse to extort money from Mathieu.
The rest of the movie continues to provide many more tortuous examples of Mathieu’s blindness as he tries to get into Conchita’s pants, all along playing right into the RAIJ’s hands. Some of these include the gratuitous amount of money he gives her so-called mother, who he remarks that he does even have to see. So who knows where the money is going. The terrorist attacks that just coincidently follow Conchita around the continent of Europe. The safe-house he buys them in Spain. In this scene I believe this is first time Conchita is actually being honest with him. Even up until the very last scene where she attempts to assassinate Mathieu by placing another bomb in his laundry bag. In this scene she casually steps away from him just as the bomb is about to go off, praying it will kill him so she can be free of his molesting advances. I think you can see the hatred and loathing she really has for him in the expression on her face as she turns to walk away after she realizes he is no longer standing in front of the window. Bunuel does not let you see what happens next, but since we do not see any bodies, I can only speculate that his luck allows him yet to live another day.
That Obscure Object of Desire. Dir. Luis Bunuel, Perfs. Fernando Rey, Carole Bouquet, Angela Molina. 1977. DVD. Criterion Collection, 2001.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks: Ballad of a Thin Man
(The other day I ran into the "Thin Man" in a BCTC hallway and the spooky nature of our exchange gave me the creeps and only through the playing of this song over and over during the next few days was I able to remove the vile stickiness that adhered to my psyche.)
Steven Shaviro: Doom Patrols
I owe Shaviro an intellectual debt. He took a lot of complex, mysterious concepts/theorists and filtered them through the lense of Grant Morrison's comic series Doom Patrol (and much, much more). It exploded my understanding of cultural/literary analysis as dry, dusty, lectures that instruct and opened me up to the idea of interdisciplinary, traveling, parisitic dialogues that bring subjects alive.
From the Preface:
Doom Patrols, then, is not a work of historical scholarship or objective description or ideology critique or in-depth interpretation. I have scrupulously followed Oscar Wilde's two fine maxims, that the critic should avoid "careless habits of accuracy," and that he should strive "to see the object as in itself it really is not." Each chapter of Doom Patrols is headed by a proper name. But these names are themselves fictional, even when they ostensibly refer to actual individuals. For they are not identities, but singularities, as I try to work out in the course of the book. Any resemblances to persons living or dead, to objects or commercial products, or to other works of fiction and the characters and situations therein, are precisely that: resemblances, which is to say simulacra, deceptive and superficial imitations, fraudulent impersonations. All accurate depictions and representational correspondences, on the other hand, are accidental and unintended, and should be taken as signs of failure on the part of the author; the aim of the book being precisely to pervert and undermine all such forms and canons of representation.
Read Doom Patrols
Daniel T. Willingham: Why Don't Students Like School?
Why Don't Students Like School?: Because the Mind is Not Designed for Thinking
By Daniel T. Willingham
American Educator (AFT: American Federation of Teachers)
Strange as it may sound, the mind is not designed for thinking—it's designed to save us from having to think. Because thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain, we rely on memory, not thought, to guide us whenever possible. Nonetheless, we are curious and we do like to think, so long as the issue or problem at hand is neither too easy nor too hard.
To Read the Essay (PDF File)
By Daniel T. Willingham
American Educator (AFT: American Federation of Teachers)
Strange as it may sound, the mind is not designed for thinking—it's designed to save us from having to think. Because thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain, we rely on memory, not thought, to guide us whenever possible. Nonetheless, we are curious and we do like to think, so long as the issue or problem at hand is neither too easy nor too hard.
To Read the Essay (PDF File)
The Politics of Culture: The New Annotated Dracula
The New Annotated Dracula
Host: Jonathan Kirsch
Politics of Culture (KCRW/Los Angeles, CA)
Editor Leslie S. Klinger (editor of the award winning Sherlock Holmes annotated volumes) has gone back to the source and unearthed much that is new and fascinating about the vampire classic that started the current cult craze, Bram Stoker's Dracula.
To Listen to the Conversation
Host: Jonathan Kirsch
Politics of Culture (KCRW/Los Angeles, CA)
Editor Leslie S. Klinger (editor of the award winning Sherlock Holmes annotated volumes) has gone back to the source and unearthed much that is new and fascinating about the vampire classic that started the current cult craze, Bram Stoker's Dracula.
To Listen to the Conversation
Monday, April 13, 2009
Michel Foucault: "So Is It Important to Think?"
Thought does exist, both beyond and underneath systems and edifices of discourse. It is something that is often hidden but always drives everyday behaviors. There is always a little thought occurring even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits. Criticism consists in uncovering that thought and trying to change it: showing that things are not as obvious as people believe, making it so that what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted. To practise criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy... [A]s soon as people begin to no longer be able to think things the way they have been thinking them, transformation becomes at the same time very urgent, very difficult and entirely possible.
-- Michel Foucault, (1981) [2000] "So is it important to think?" in In J. Faubion, ed., Power (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 160-1.
-- Michel Foucault, (1981) [2000] "So is it important to think?" in In J. Faubion, ed., Power (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 160-1.
Slavoj Zizek: "The ideological power of fascism..."
The ideological power of fascism lies precisely in the feature which was perceived by liberal or leftist critics as its greatest weakness: in the utterly void, formal character of its appeal, in the fact that it demands obedience and sacrifice for their own sake. (82)
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso: 1989)
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso: 1989)
Bluegrass Community and Technical College: “Novel uses of biotechnology in agriculture" (April 14th)
Biotechnology seminar
Introduction to Biotechnology, BT 101
(Open to the Public)
“Novel uses of biotechnology in agriculture: Application of molecular biology to revolutionize livestock feeding strategies and human nutrition”
Speaker: Karl Dawson, PhD
Director of Worldwide Research
Alltech, Inc.
Date: Tuesday, April 14th
Time: 5:30-6:30 pm
Place: Oswald Building Auditorium, OB 230 (BCTC Cooper campus)
Introduction to Biotechnology, BT 101
(Open to the Public)
“Novel uses of biotechnology in agriculture: Application of molecular biology to revolutionize livestock feeding strategies and human nutrition”
Speaker: Karl Dawson, PhD
Director of Worldwide Research
Alltech, Inc.
Date: Tuesday, April 14th
Time: 5:30-6:30 pm
Place: Oswald Building Auditorium, OB 230 (BCTC Cooper campus)
Bluegrass Community and Technical College: Energy Conservation -- Not a Moment to Lose
What: Energy Conservation: Not a Moment to Lose
When: April 16, 3:30-4:20 p.m.
Where: Oswald Auditorium (OB 230), BCTC Cooper Campus
Who: Ben Perry
Description: President of Greenworks, Inc. and organizer of the Bluegrass Green Expo, Ben Perry will introduce his audience to green initiatives. Drawing from his years of work with Appalachia-Science in the Public Interest and the Green Expo (first hosted in 2004), Mr. Perry will highlight some of the rising stars on the energy conservation horizon, offer practical suggestions for reducing one’s energy use, and illustrate how, in the process, we can save money.
When: April 16, 3:30-4:20 p.m.
Where: Oswald Auditorium (OB 230), BCTC Cooper Campus
Who: Ben Perry
Description: President of Greenworks, Inc. and organizer of the Bluegrass Green Expo, Ben Perry will introduce his audience to green initiatives. Drawing from his years of work with Appalachia-Science in the Public Interest and the Green Expo (first hosted in 2004), Mr. Perry will highlight some of the rising stars on the energy conservation horizon, offer practical suggestions for reducing one’s energy use, and illustrate how, in the process, we can save money.
Bluegrass Community and Technical College: Fair Trade Chocolate -- The Sweet Taste of Justice (April 15)
What: Fair Trade Chocolate: The Sweet Taste of Justice
When: April 15, 6:30-7:45 p.m.
Where: Oswald Auditorium (OB 230), BCTC Cooper Campus
Who: Kim Browning
Description: Fair trade is defined as “…a system of trade aimed at equitable treatment of farmers and workers worldwide. Its basic goals include fair wages, safe work environments and self-sufficiency for workers, cultural awareness, and consumer education.” In the spring of 2008, Kim Browning traveled to the Dominican Republic on an Equal Exchange sponsored trip to meet cocoa farmers and their families who participate in fair trade. Kim will share her amazing experience in the hope that it will help you better understand the importance of supporting fair trade. Your treat at the end of the presentation is some FAIR TRADE CHOCOLATE!
When: April 15, 6:30-7:45 p.m.
Where: Oswald Auditorium (OB 230), BCTC Cooper Campus
Who: Kim Browning
Description: Fair trade is defined as “…a system of trade aimed at equitable treatment of farmers and workers worldwide. Its basic goals include fair wages, safe work environments and self-sufficiency for workers, cultural awareness, and consumer education.” In the spring of 2008, Kim Browning traveled to the Dominican Republic on an Equal Exchange sponsored trip to meet cocoa farmers and their families who participate in fair trade. Kim will share her amazing experience in the hope that it will help you better understand the importance of supporting fair trade. Your treat at the end of the presentation is some FAIR TRADE CHOCOLATE!
Fora TV: The Ten-Cent Plague -- The Great Comic-Book Scare with author David Hajdu
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare with author David Hajdu.
Fora TV
Long before Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan from the waist up, long before Jerry Lee Lewis married his cousin, long before James Dean yelled "you're tearing me apart," teachers, politicians, priests and parents were lining up across from comic book publishers, writers, artists, and children at bonfires and Senate hearings decrying the evil that was The Ten-Cent Plague.
In what is the third in an informal trilogy about American popular culture at mid-century, Hajdu (Lush Life, Positively Fourth Street) radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between "high" and "low" art.
To Listen to the Lecture
Fora TV
Long before Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan from the waist up, long before Jerry Lee Lewis married his cousin, long before James Dean yelled "you're tearing me apart," teachers, politicians, priests and parents were lining up across from comic book publishers, writers, artists, and children at bonfires and Senate hearings decrying the evil that was The Ten-Cent Plague.
In what is the third in an informal trilogy about American popular culture at mid-century, Hajdu (Lush Life, Positively Fourth Street) radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between "high" and "low" art.
To Listen to the Lecture
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Democracy Now: In Historic Vote, Vermont Legislature Legalizes Gay Marriage; Testimony of 12-Year-Old with Two Moms Moves Some Vermont Legislators
Democracy Now
In Historic Vote, Vermont Legislature Legalizes Gay Marriage
The Vermont legislature made history Tuesday by becoming the first in the nation to vote in favor of gay marriage. Vermont lawmakers had voted for a same-sex marriage bill last week, but it was short of a veto-overriding majority, and Governor Jim Douglas vetoed the bill Monday. But on Tuesday, enough House members switched sides to override the veto and voted 100-to-49 to make gay marriage legal. House Speaker Shap Smith announced the final tally to resounding applause. We speak with Vermont state legislator Bill Lippert and Beth Robinson, an attorney who has led the struggle to legalize gay marriage for years.
To Listen to the Conversation
Testimony of 12-Year-Old with Two Moms Moves Some Vermont Legislators to Support Gay Marriage Bill
Evann Orleck-Jetter testified at the public hearings on gay marriage last month before Vermont’s Joint Senate and House Judiciary Committees. Many legislators later told Evann and her parents that her testimony had moved them to support the bill.
To Liswten to the Conversation
In Historic Vote, Vermont Legislature Legalizes Gay Marriage
The Vermont legislature made history Tuesday by becoming the first in the nation to vote in favor of gay marriage. Vermont lawmakers had voted for a same-sex marriage bill last week, but it was short of a veto-overriding majority, and Governor Jim Douglas vetoed the bill Monday. But on Tuesday, enough House members switched sides to override the veto and voted 100-to-49 to make gay marriage legal. House Speaker Shap Smith announced the final tally to resounding applause. We speak with Vermont state legislator Bill Lippert and Beth Robinson, an attorney who has led the struggle to legalize gay marriage for years.
To Listen to the Conversation
Testimony of 12-Year-Old with Two Moms Moves Some Vermont Legislators to Support Gay Marriage Bill
Evann Orleck-Jetter testified at the public hearings on gay marriage last month before Vermont’s Joint Senate and House Judiciary Committees. Many legislators later told Evann and her parents that her testimony had moved them to support the bill.
To Liswten to the Conversation
Speaking of Faith: Evolution and Wonder -- Understanding Charles Darwin
(This is fascinating exploration of the Darwin that is rarely represented--highly recommended for both the faithful and the faithless!)
Evolution and Wonder: Understanding Charles Darwin
Speaking of Faith (American Public Media)
Host: Krista Tippet
... a fresh and thought-provoking look at Darwin's life and ideas. He did not argue against God but against a simple understanding of the world — its beauty, its brutality, and its unfolding creation.
From the Scopes Trial to school board controversies in our day, Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution are portrayed as a refutal of the very idea of God. With Darwin biographer James Moore, we'll learn about the world in which Darwin formulated his ideas and how he took religion seriously.
To Listen to the conversation and to access more resources on this subject
Evolution and Wonder: Understanding Charles Darwin
Speaking of Faith (American Public Media)
Host: Krista Tippet
... a fresh and thought-provoking look at Darwin's life and ideas. He did not argue against God but against a simple understanding of the world — its beauty, its brutality, and its unfolding creation.
From the Scopes Trial to school board controversies in our day, Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution are portrayed as a refutal of the very idea of God. With Darwin biographer James Moore, we'll learn about the world in which Darwin formulated his ideas and how he took religion seriously.
To Listen to the conversation and to access more resources on this subject
Elyssa East: Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place
(In case you haven't heard of the wonderful experiment that was Black Mountain College 1933-1953)
Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place
by Elyssa East
Brooklyn Rail
Airing now on PBS
From its first shot of an eye with a flashing iris that yields to light playing upon the ocean, Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, establishes itself as a meditation on the life and poetic vision of the 20th century American poet Charles Olson and his muse America’s oldest seaport, Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Writing in the Village Voice in 1983, author and cultural commentator Nick Tosches referred to Olson, the last director of the famed avant-garde Black Mountain College, as “one of the greatest our century has heard.” Olson’s manifesto Projective Verse inspired a generation of poets including William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and the Beats. Olson is widely credited with coining the term “postmodern.”
Rather than unspool its subject’s life in a standard documentary narrative, Polis intersperses cinematic interpretations of Olson’s poetry with interviews with townspeople, scholars and poets such as Amiri Baraka, Diane Di Prima, and Jonathan Williams. These talking heads help provide an introduction to Olson’s life and legacy in context, but fail to capture the essence of the man. For that, the film leans on Olson’s poetry, as read by Olson and by John Malkovich. Voiceovers of Olson’s poems are juxtaposed with contemporary and historical images of the Gloucester harbor scenes they describe. While some of these shots of Gloucester are undeniably beautiful—and help capture the town’s unique character as America’s oldest seaport—they merely scratch the surface of Olson’s poetry. His work is too dense and complex to be revealed through this treatment.
The archival footage of Olson talking and reading his own poetry drives viewer attention. Olson, who stood six foot eight, doesn’t merely read his poems, he performs them. Casually pausing to take a drag from his cigarette or a sip from his beer, Olson reads in a husky whisper both cool and inspired. His expressive face and gestures make plain that for Olson poetry was a vital, physical process. In this footage, Olson’s poems become the high-energy constructs he intended them to be and it becomes clear why Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac called Olson “the great fire source.”
Link to the Review
Official Website, Film Trailer, and PBS Viewing Times
Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place
by Elyssa East
Brooklyn Rail
Airing now on PBS
From its first shot of an eye with a flashing iris that yields to light playing upon the ocean, Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, establishes itself as a meditation on the life and poetic vision of the 20th century American poet Charles Olson and his muse America’s oldest seaport, Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Writing in the Village Voice in 1983, author and cultural commentator Nick Tosches referred to Olson, the last director of the famed avant-garde Black Mountain College, as “one of the greatest our century has heard.” Olson’s manifesto Projective Verse inspired a generation of poets including William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and the Beats. Olson is widely credited with coining the term “postmodern.”
Rather than unspool its subject’s life in a standard documentary narrative, Polis intersperses cinematic interpretations of Olson’s poetry with interviews with townspeople, scholars and poets such as Amiri Baraka, Diane Di Prima, and Jonathan Williams. These talking heads help provide an introduction to Olson’s life and legacy in context, but fail to capture the essence of the man. For that, the film leans on Olson’s poetry, as read by Olson and by John Malkovich. Voiceovers of Olson’s poems are juxtaposed with contemporary and historical images of the Gloucester harbor scenes they describe. While some of these shots of Gloucester are undeniably beautiful—and help capture the town’s unique character as America’s oldest seaport—they merely scratch the surface of Olson’s poetry. His work is too dense and complex to be revealed through this treatment.
The archival footage of Olson talking and reading his own poetry drives viewer attention. Olson, who stood six foot eight, doesn’t merely read his poems, he performs them. Casually pausing to take a drag from his cigarette or a sip from his beer, Olson reads in a husky whisper both cool and inspired. His expressive face and gestures make plain that for Olson poetry was a vital, physical process. In this footage, Olson’s poems become the high-energy constructs he intended them to be and it becomes clear why Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac called Olson “the great fire source.”
Link to the Review
Official Website, Film Trailer, and PBS Viewing Times
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