L'esprit biere

Feeling the need to start posting things to here again.

2008-10-19T21:08:00.001-07:00

We'll see how long this lasts.

Dang, I wish that I had saved some of the postcards from the PostSecretPosts rather than just hotlinked, as those links are now dead and the postcards gone. If only I had maintained the paranoia...

In the meantime...

NYT
October 19, 2008

Completely Unplugged, Fully Green

By JOANNE KAUFMAN

SIMON WOODS, who is 6, would like to play on a baseball team. His mother, Sharon Astyk, is sympathetic, but is also heavily committed to shrinking her family’s carbon footprint. “We haven’t been able to find a league that doesn’t involve a long drive,” she said. “I say that it isn’t good for the planet, so we play catch in the yard.”

That is one way that Ms. Astyk, a mother of four, expresses her concern for the environment. She has unplugged the family refrigerator, using it as an icebox during warmer months by putting in frozen jugs of water as the coolant (in colder weather, she stores milk and butter outdoors). Her farmhouse in Knox, N.Y., has a homemade composting toilet and gets its heat from a wood stove; the average indoor winter temperature is 52 degrees.

Many people who can comfortably use “carbon footprint,” “global warming” and “energy offset” in a sentence will toss a bottle or can into a blue recycling bin and call it a day. Those who are somewhat more committed may swap incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents, rely on cloth shopping bags and turn to mass transit.

Then there are people like Ms. Astyk, 36, a writer and a farmer who is trying, with the aid of a specially designed calculator, to whittle her family’s energy use to 10 percent of the national average. She and her husband, Eric Woods, a college professor, grow virtually all their own produce, raise chickens and turkeys, and spend only $1,000 a year in consumer goods, most of which they buy used. They air-dry their clothes, and their four sons often sleep huddled together to pool body heat.

They began this regimen in 2002. “My husband and I started to talk about climate change, and oil prices were going up,” Ms. Astyk said. “The other factor was a justice issue. There was a great disparity between the resources used by the third world and by us, so we decided we had to cut back.” Some people may view Ms. Astyk and her family as role models, pioneers who will lead us to a cleaner earth.

Others may see them as colorful eccentrics, people with admirable intentions who have arrived at a way of life close to zealotry. To others they come across as “energy anorexics,” obsessing over personal carbon emissions to an unhealthy degree, the way crash dieters watch the bathroom scale.

Ms. Astyk has heard such talk but says her neighbors’ attitudes have softened as energy prices have risen. “People have moved gradually from ‘Sharon is a fruitcake’ to ‘Sharon is a fruitcake who might make some sense,’ ” she said.

Jay Matsueda, who might also answer to the name energy anorexic, or carborexic, has neither heat nor air-conditioning in his condominium in Culver City, Calif.

He runs his car, a 1983 Mercedes SD Turbo, on waste oil from a Los Angeles restaurant. When he gives a gift, it is usually an organic cookbook, a copy of Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth” or reusable bamboo flatware. “That way, people don’t have to accept plastic cutlery at takeout places,” said Mr. Matsueda, 35, who wrote in an e-mail message that he occasionally relieves himself on his lawn in order to “save a flush.”

Although he concedes that there is “sometimes an impracticality” to habits like filtering vegetable oil for fuel, people do view him as part of the mainstream, he said. “I’m not perceived as a very radical guy,” said Mr. Matsueda, the marketing director for a company that manufactures compact fluorescent bulbs. “People will say, ‘Jay’s doing it, and he’s normal.’ ”

How normal? Mr. Matsueda lives the sort of life that the public relations firm Porter Novelli recently called “dark green.”

The company conducted a poll of 12,000 people, examining their commitment to various environmental practices — reducing energy use at home, buying energy-efficient appliances, boycotting companies with bad environmental records. Seven percent earned the top designation, dark green.

Some people who organize their lives around carbon emissions do so in a private way, aiming to help the planet, and secondarily to influence friends and relatives. Others want to prove a point in public, including several who are pulling stunts.

David Chameides, a cameraman in Los Angeles, is collecting all the waste he generates in a year in his basement, and keeping a blog that describes his detritus. A sample entry (from Oct. 6, Day 279 out of 365) includes “1 bag of hair from haircut — put out on lawn for birds,” “1 plastic wrapper from ice cream — garbage” and “2 aluminum tuna cans — recycle.”

Similarly, Colin Beavan, a writer in New York City, is working on a book and movie, “No Impact Man,” about the efforts that he and his wife, daughter and dog are making to spend a year without harming the planet. “In other words, no trash, no carbon emissions, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no toilets ...” he has written on his blog.

Not even Al Gore recommends such privations.

The former vice president, who is cited as an inspiration by some carborexics, is the founder of the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit group that sponsors the We Campaign. On that campaign’s Web site — wecansolveit.org — the advice is fairly prim: turn down the heat and air-conditioning when you aren’t at home, wash your clothes in cold water, pump up your tires, car-pool at least once a week.

The utility company Con Edison goes a bit further, offering more than 100 tips on its Web site. Among the less intuitive: take showers rather than baths, replace light switches with dimmers or motion sensors, don’t preheat your oven when you broil or roast food, cover liquids in the refrigerator (“uncovered liquids make the refrigerator work harder,” Con Ed says).

But nobody recommends reusing the same plastic Ziploc bag for a year, as Anita Lavine and Joe Turcotte, a Seattle couple, have been doing. When their two toddlers come home from preschool, Ms. Lavine scrubs the Ziploc bags that hold their soiled clothes and biodegradable diapers, and uses them the next day. She does the same with the plastic bags that hold her children’s apples “and random lunch stuff,” she said.

Whatever the weather, Mr. Turcotte, who is 40, rides his bicycle 16 miles a day (round trip) to his job at a health care foundation. Ms. Lavine, 35, who works for a company that makes DVD games, keeps the thermostat at 60 and is about to acquire three chickens. They’ll be welcomed for their eggs, their willingness to eat food waste and for their ordure — a nice addition to the family’s compost heap.

“My friends,” Ms. Lavine said, “think I’m the craziest person they know.”

Not everyone thinks that Ms. Lavine and her ilk are crazy. “What these people are doing is fantastic, needed and catalytic,” said David Gershon, the author of the book “Low Carbon Diet” and founder of the Empowerment Institute, a consultancy that helps people and communities reduce energy consumption. “Some people are in the vanguard and show what it’s possible to do,” he said.

When one half of a couple is less zealous than the other, it can be a strain.

Mr. Matsueda, the Los Angeles marketing executive, said he once broke up with a girlfriend who owned a Ford F-150. “It drove me nuts,” he said. “It was this big truck she took all over town with nothing to haul — she just didn’t get it.” The relationship, he said, ended for other reasons, but her choice of vehicle “didn’t help.”

To some mental health professionals, the compulsion to live green in the extreme can suggest a kind of disorder.

“If you can’t have something in your house that isn’t green or organic, if you can’t eat at a relative’s house because they don’t serve organic food, if you’re criticizing friends because they’re not living up to your standards of green, that’s a problem,” said Elizabeth Carll, a psychologist in Huntington, N.Y., who specializes in anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Certainly there is no recognized syndrome in mental health related to the compulsion toward living a green life. But Dr. Jack Hirschowitz, a psychiatrist in private practice in Manhattan and a professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said that certain carborexic behaviors might raise a red flag.

“The critical factor in determining whether something has reached the level of a disorder is if dysfunction is involved,” he said. “Is it getting in the way of your ability to do a good job at work? Is it taking precedence over everything else in your relationships?”

People who adhere to a strict carbon diet say there are some sacrifices they are not willing to make. Ms. Astyk acknowledges that she sometimes buys new books and toys for her children — and that being the mother of four might even, to some, call her eco-credentials into question.

To her detractors, she points out that her children still receive Popsicles, Cheerios and the occasional new toy. “We let them have sugar and we let them watch television,” she said. And while she mainly shops at yard sales, “I do buy some new books. I’m not pure. I use Amazon.”

In part, she said, her family is living out a sort of futuristic experiment. “What does a life with less energy look like?” she said. “It’s fun to try to get the most out of the least. It’s like a party game.”

First PostSecret post in a while

2008-04-06T13:44:00.001-07:00

----Email Message-----
Sent: Sunday, April 06, 2008 2:07 PM
Subject: Molestation

My dad used to hit my mom and my brother, but never me. My mom has since taken a liking to my brother over me. I always wonder why it never happened to me, and envy how much attention she gives my brother because of it.

PostSecretPost

2007-12-16T21:23:00.000-08:00

PostSecretPost

2007-12-02T01:12:00.000-08:00

PostSecretPost

2007-11-25T00:39:00.001-08:00

PostSecretPost

2007-11-03T23:57:00.001-07:00

PostSecretPost

2007-10-28T17:34:00.001-07:00

----Email Message-----
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2007 8:04 AM

By the time my mom finished "editing" my Harvard essay, nothing of what I wrote was left. I knew it was a terrible essay, but I submitted it anyway rather than fight her. Unsurprisingly, I was waitlisted and then rejected. I am convinced that the horrible, stilted, lifeless essay did me in.

Later I applied for a prestigious full-ride scholarship and hid the paperwork at school so that I could write my own essay. I won that scholarship, and two degrees and $120,000 later, I'm a debt-free Fulbright grantee living in a foreign country.

Moral of the story: love your mother, but write your own college essays. Being rejected for who you are is so much better than being accepted for who you aren't.

----Email Message-----
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2007 2:26 AM
Subject: Re: Next Door To The Old Folks Home

I used to work at a nursing home, and every night, when the residents were being escorted back to their rooms, I would sing old jazz songs my grandparents used to play. The nurses thought I was crazy, but the residents all smiled and some would make requests and tell me stories about the good old days.

I thought I sang just to make the residents happy, but I was singing so that for a few moments I could share their memories.

Maybe you should sing a little closer to the old folks home.

-----Email Message-----
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2007 1:20 PM
Subject: halloween sluts

i was at a halloween costume party this past weekend, and i was the ONLY female there who wasn't half-dressed && flaunting my body all over the place. i secretly think that most women take advantage of halloween just to dress like sluts.

PostSecretPost

2007-09-19T00:02:00.000-07:00

A Rather Amusing Review of Phantom of the Opera

2007-08-14T01:17:00.000-07:00

Snippets of my favorite parts of the review. Full review can be found here.
(Very excited at having finally figured out to use the embed link feature).

If, on the other hand, you consider the Broadway extravaganza nothing more than a theme-park ride for unsophisticated tourists who mistake spectacle for drama and want to see stuff blow up real good if they're gonna shell out $125 a pop, an insult to centuries-long theatrical traditions and poisoned, to boot, by music that's awful and repetitious but so insidiously, evilly catchy that you CANNOT GET IT OUT OF YOUR HEAD, EVER... well, then, you'll feel the same way about Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera.

The problem is -- and this may be my favorite bad thing about Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera -- that Christine is played by Emmy Rossum (The Day After Tomorrow, Mystic River), whose completely immobile plastic face just doesn't move, not at all, not ever. Surely director Joel Schumacher (Veronica Guerin, Phone Booth) didn't set out to make a theme-park movie... did he? But why else cast a Disney animatron as your leading lady?

I mean, sure, if you intend to make a safe, bland, boring, thoroughly desexualized movie, then you will want to go ahead with the Emmy Rossum plan, make sure you get an actress who cannot emote and so comes across as a fickle, shallow little bint, who swoons in the glow of the Phantom's attentions (because it says to do that in the script!) and then, when she can't deal with a little scar tissue even on the Angel of Music, decides that she prefers her own plastic people and runs into the arms of opera patron Robot-- er, Raoul (Patrick Wilson: The Alamo), who doesn't even have his own theme music or anything. I mean sure, if you're trying to avoid upsetting folk at a time in which a large portion of the public would rather sex didn't exist, that male/female interaction be limited to chaste chaperoned ice-cream socials, then you certainly do not want to go the other route, in which a ravishing and womanly Christine is seriously tempted by a tantalizingly virile Phantom and almost gets actually corrupted before she decides that his tendency toward homicidal mania may be the thing that will ruin the relationship down the road and so turns reluctantly to white-bread Raoul, whom she will regard with some pity as the long years of their dull marriage increasingly make her regret the excitement she gave up. Cuz with a petulant and childish Christine and a Phantom who looks like he wants to break out and be all dangerous and sexy if only the movie would let him and a Raoul who has nothing to recommend him except that he isn't the Phantom, what you get is a Precious Moments horror movie. But maybe that's what Schumacher was shooting for.

Why on earth would you let Minnie Driver (Ella Enchanted, An Ideal Husband), as the diva Carlotta, or Ciarán Hinds (The Statement, The Mayor of Casterbridge) or Simon Callow (Christmas Carol: The Movie, No Man's Land), as the opera-house owners, sing? It's an insult to chalk-on-a-board to call it chalk-on-a-board when they croon.
_____________________________________________________
I love the snark.

PostSecretPost

2007-07-29T00:32:00.000-07:00

Salon.com- Goodbye, Harry Potter

2007-07-23T02:00:00.000-07:00

WARNING: EXTREMELY SPOILERIFIC POST:
_______________________________________

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2007/07/20/harry/print.html

Does J.K. Rowling's final installment, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," provide the magical ending to the beloved series her readers so desperately long for?

By Laura Miller

Jul. 20, 2007 | Ask someone what the Harry Potter series is about, and they'll probably answer, "a boy wizard." But in mulling over J.K. Rowling's innovative melding of children's fantasy fiction with old-fashioned boarding school stories, I've concluded that the boarding school element has the edge. Much as we may love Harry, Hermione, Ron, Hagrid and Dumbledore, don't we all love Hogwarts just a little bit more? (Or, let me put it this way: Given the choice between meeting any one of Rowling's characters and getting to attend the celebrated school of witchcraft and wizardry, which do you think most readers would pick?) So brace yourselves, fans: Hardly any of the latest and last book in the series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," takes place at the school.

Whatever the troubles lurking in the richly imagined wizardry world outside its walls, Hogwarts has always been a sanctum for the forces of decency, presided over by headmaster Albus Dumbledore. But, with Dumbledore's death at the end of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," Hogwarts can obviously never be the same, and Harry has to be spirited off into hiding by the remaining members of the Order of the Phoenix. The influence of the diabolical Lord Voldemort has grown, infiltrating the press and finally the Ministry of Magic itself. A Nazi-like racialist campaign to "register" and control Muggle-born and "blood traitor" wizards burgeons. Harry, Hermione (a Muggle born) and Ron never get to climb aboard the Hogwarts Express for their seventh and final term.

Of course, the idea that boarding school offers shelter from the rough injustices of the real world is a delusion enjoyed only by people who have never attended one. British writers as diverse as C.S. Lewis and George Orwell have tried to disabuse the general public of its bizarre affection for such institutions and the genre of children's fiction set in them. Lewis was fond of saying that "school stories" fostered fantasies far more pernicious than any fairy tale because they actually tricked children into believing that boarding school offered something more than "raw and sordid ugliness." The writer Neil Gaiman has called Rowling's depiction of boarding school a "weird and idealized" vision of something that's "really all about bullying, torture and [in deference to any children who might be reading this, let's just say that the last word he mentioned refers to an activity usually practiced alone]."

Nevertheless, in the Harry Potter universe, Hogwarts has been the last holdout of the good and true, and by exiling Harry, Hermione and Ron from its grounds, Rowling is forcing her narrative to grow up. Harry has that experience so common to people who've just lost a parent (or, in this case, a parent figure): discovering that the Dumbledore he thought he knew so well had a past he never suspected, one that doesn't fit with the memories he cherishes. The protection spell that his mother cast over the Dursleys' house on Privet Drive expires when he turns 17, and he's got to leave it and them forever; much as he hated the place, he's cast doubly adrift.

Harry and his friends are thrust into a perilous society where the brutality of real-world boarding schools prevails. The omnipresent dread, the held breath at the closing noose of fascism, familiar from so many World War II stories, hovers over the whole book. Much of "The Deathly Hallows" reads like a thriller, beginning with a breathless broomstick chase in the fourth chapter. After a brief, amusing pause for a wizard wedding (no less exhausting than the Muggle kind), it evolves into an extended chase, with Harry and his comrades falling into the clutches of Voldemort's Death Eaters only to escape by the skin of their teeth at least a half dozen times.

These action scenes are expertly executed, and if Rowling really does decide to write more fiction set in Harry's world, she could probably do worse than inventing a wizard detective or spy as her next hero. Unlike some great children's authors (Kenneth Grahame, Lewis or E. Nesbit, for three) her prose style has never been especially graceful or beautiful (one Salon reader really hit it on the nail by calling her writing "sturdy"), but it's perfectly suited to this kind of scene, and her control over the whole novel feels much firmer and tighter than it did in the preceding two volumes, "Order of the Phoenix" and "Half-Blood Prince." She does have to resort once more to the Pensieve (a sort of magical VCR for other people's memories) to handle some heavily expository flashbacks toward the book's conclusion, but by then you're so caught up in the narrative you don't mind.

As for the ending, and the strange, widespread and literarily autistic obsession with who does and doesn't die in it, suffice to say that some sympathetic characters are killed and that everything -- the configuration of the horcruxes, the true colors of Severus Snape, the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort -- turns out in the only way it possibly could if you thought about it for more than two seconds. But that doesn't detract from the cumulative power of Rowling's storytelling, because a real story, as anyone with half a soul knows, is much more than a series of plot points. Even though (as a grown-up) I did occasionally weary of Rowling's rudimentary romantic comedy and love-conquers-all moral -- and even though I found myself conscientiously ticking off her borrowings from a host of other fantasy classics -- I was still genuinely moved at the end. (Which, by the way, had already been spoiled for me.)

But far be it from me to ruin the book for anyone whose enjoyment of it can be so ruined. This is all I have to say to those readers who have yet to finish "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows": Click on the link below only if you want to read a discussion of the series that includes information up to and including the very last page of the very last Harry Potter novel.

Rowling's gift has always been for boisterous, jolly ensemble scenes and for cooking up zany and prankish magical creatures, spells and devices -- there's as much Fred and George Weasley in her as there is Hermione Granger. From Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans to the gnomes in the Weasleys' garden to the Whomping Willow, the texture and color of her imaginary world is earthy (but not lusty), homely, grounded, irreverent, antic, perfectly suited to the audience of 10-year-olds she first devised it for 10 years ago. Her voice, tone and imagination are rooted in social comedy and observation, not in the metaphysical and transcendent, which is why her more realistic bad guys -- the loathsome Dolores Umbridge, who makes a most-welcome cameo appearance in "Deathly Hallows" -- are more vigorous and chilling than her supreme antagonist, Voldemort. Umbridge is a bureaucrat, a petty tyrant and semi-closeted sadist allowed to run amok in a wizarding world gone wrong. We've all met people just like her, even if they don't come equipped with enchanted torture pens. Voldemort, by contrast, is a melodrama villain, a device. Sauron, he ain't.

Some critics have objected to an Op-Ed the British novelist A.S. Byatt wrote for the New York Times in 2003, in which she complained that Rowling's books lack the "shiver of awe" she expects from superior fantasy. But you don't have to dismiss Harry Potter the way Byatt does to recognize that she has a point. The sublime is missing from Rowling's series, but then you won't find it in "Barchester Towers" or "A Confederacy of Dunces," either, which doesn't make them anything less than masterly novels. The sublime and the comic don't mix well, and to try to squeeze both into a children's book is the kind of experiment even a master potion-concocter like Severus Snape would wisely avoid.

Nevertheless, for the final, climactic confrontation in a seven-volume series that has become a cultural phenomenon, people expect something epic, momentous, archetypal. So it's no surprise that the closer Rowling gets to that confrontation, the more heavily she relies on borrowings from writers with a natural gift for that sort of thing: Tolkien, Lewis, even Philip Pullman. The locket horcrux that weighs down whoever wears it, sapping their initiative and hope, is one of the more obvious quotes from "The Lord of the Rings," along with the thunderous last-minute arrival of centaur troops at the Battle of Hogwarts (the Ride of Rohan redux). Above all, reading the emotional turning point of the "The Deathly Hallows" -- Harry's solemn walk to the Death Eaters' camp, his willing surrender to Voldemort and the taunting, capering glee of the evil wizard and his minions -- induces (in me, at least) an LSD-grade flashback to the sacrifice scene in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

None of this is meant as a detraction -- the writers Rowling borrows from in turn gleaned parts of their fiction from even older works. The fantasy genre at its best draws from stories older than written language itself; originality isn't really the point. You could even say that Lewis and Tolkien didn't write novels at all (they called their fiction "fairy tales" or "romance," citing much earlier literary forms). Myth, archetype, allegory -- all of these are literary modes in which characters, places and objects often stand not for anything in the real world, but for elements of the human psyche, parts of the self. That "shiver of awe" Byatt wrote about happens when you feel the boundaries between the inner and outer worlds dissolve, if only for a moment. Given that this isn't the register that Rowling usually works in, it's impressive how well she pulls it off when she has to.

But Rowling is most definitely a novelist; she writes about people and stuff, not about elemental forces and unconscious urges. Like all true novelists, she is the champion of the specific and the domestic, the often unsung pleasures and perils of a good lunch, a crush, a ball game with friends and a little gossip about machinations at the ministry -- which is why the doings at Hogwarts and in the Weasley household were always the best parts of the series. Her books, for all their spells and incantations and magical creatures, have never been the stuff that dreams are made of. Instead, they're the stuff that life is made of.

That's why Harry's great reward isn't something otherworldly, like Frodo Baggins sailing into immortality with the elves in the Uttermost West. He gets married, settles down with a good woman and has a few kids. His fate is to make many return visits to platform nine and three-quarters, even if he never again boards the Hogwarts Express. He gets to feel that twinge, that "little bereavement" that every parent feels on his child's first day of school; time passing, life going on. It's a very ordinary, unheroic sort of feeling, and that, more even that the assurance of the book's final sentence, tells us that all really is well.

PostSecretPost

2007-07-23T00:04:00.000-07:00

PostSecretPost

2007-07-15T01:55:00.001-07:00

Things I Love- Part 2

2007-07-13T00:32:00.000-07:00

Jamba Juice

Kohr Bros Frozen Custard on the Ocean City Boardwalk

The Wah, and especially their hoagies.

Poutine!!! The Canadian national dish. Looks terrible, but tastes amazing!

In N Out 4x4 Protein Style with onions and no tomatoes. Plus fries and a strawberry shake. Yum!

Hot Donuts from Krispy Kreme that pretty much melt in your mouth. Only really worth it when the Hot Donuts Now sign is on.
My favorite donut: the French Cruller. Not available at Krispy Kreme unfortunately.

Mmm... Chocolate

2007-07-12T23:46:00.000-07:00

The World’s Best Candy Bars? English, of Course

July 11, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/dining/11cand.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

By KIM SEVERSON

A TELEVISION news producer from Atlanta recently made a deal with her boss, who was traveling in London. The producer promised she would submit her script for an investigative story ahead of deadline in exchange for two British Kit Kats and a Curly Wurly bar.

The woman, who did not want her name revealed for fear of being teased endlessly by her colleagues, so loves her British chocolate that she takes an extra suitcase when she travels to London just to bring back a haul.

“Should I admit I am carrying two U.K. Kit Kats with me in my briefcase right now, just in case I get into a bind on my trip?” she e-mailed this reporter from the road.

At this point, it would be easy to take a long, clichéd side trip into a discussion of the relative inferiority of British food. But for the rarefied palate that can appreciate the soft, immediate pleasure of an inexpensive candy bar, it’s not difficult to give the edge to sweets from the realm of the queen.

That’s why Malcolm Smart takes his son, Rowan, for a stroll to Blue Apron in Park Slope, Brooklyn, twice a week for a proper British candy bar. Rowan is 6 years old, and tends toward the mint Aero bar.

Mr. Smart, who grew up in Birmingham, England, home of the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury-Schweppes, is a Flake man himself. The Cadbury Flake, a crumbly bar of compressed ribbons of chocolate, was invented in 1920. It is thrust into swirls of soft ice cream at parks all over London, creating a dessert called a 99.

Alan Palmer, who is an owner of Blue Apron, said the British candy bars have been strong sellers since he opened the shop five years ago.“Anybody who went to school there or had any kind of business or family connection over there is totally addicted to them,” he said.

Mr. Smart, who has lived in the United States for 25 years, learned early on in his life here that British and American chocolate bars are different, even if they share a name and a look.

“One day I was eating a bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk and I thought, this has absolutely no flavor,” he said. “I looked at the label and saw it was made by Hershey. I was outraged.”

Cadbury Dairy Milk is the iconic British candy bar, the one most likely to be tucked into the suitcase of a Yankee tourist looking for an inexpensive souvenir. Versions are filled with caramel, whipped fondant, whole nuts or pellets of shortbread cookie.

It’s a different bar from the Cadbury bar available in the United States. According to the label, a British Cadbury Dairy Milk bar contains milk, sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, vegetable fat and emulsifiers. The version made by the Hershey Company, which holds the license from Cadbury-Schweppes to produce the candy in the United States under the British company’s direction, starts its ingredient list with sugar. It lists lactose and the emulsifier soy lecithin, which keeps the cocoa butter from separating from the cocoa. The American product also lists “natural and artificial flavorings.”

Tony Bilsborough, a spokesman for Cadbury-Schweppes in Britain, said his company ships its specially formulated chocolate crumb — a mash of dried milk and chocolate to which cocoa butter will be added later — to Hershey, Pa. What happens next accounts for the differences.

“I imagine it’s down to the final processing and the blending,” he said. After consulting with chocolate manufacturers in each country, Cadbury tries to replicate the taste people grew up with, he said. In the United States, that means a bar that is more akin to a Hershey bar, which to many British palates tastes sour.

Kirk Seville, a spokesman for the Hershey Company, declined to explain the manufacturing process, saying the company preferred not to take part in a discussion about the manufacturing differences between a British and an American Cadbury bar.

For people here with a taste for British candy, no explanation is necessary. Their opinions are already formed.

“Hershey’s tastes like ear wax,” said Kevin Ellis, an Alaskan-born designer with Adobe Systems in San Francisco. Mr. Ellis, who says Canadian and British chocolate bars are comparable, anticipates with delight the boxes of imported chocolate bars his wife's family sends.

The appeal of British chocolate is powerful. When the Ellis family moved not long ago to another Bay Area house, a burly man from Birmingham who was helping to haul the sofa spied a box.

“Do you mind if I have a Curly Wurly?” he asked with the tenderness of a hopeful child.

The Curly Wurly, a thick strip of braided caramel covered in chocolate, is a sibling to the discontinued Marathon bar, which any American who was in high school when Jimmy Carter was president will remember fondly.

The Curly Wurly is not as popular in Britain as the Crunchie. With its crisp honeycomb interior, it’s what a Butterfinger might be if it went to finishing school and married up.

But neither rivals the Mars bar, the prom queen of British candy bars. About three million of them are made daily in Slough, just west of London. It’s like a less sweet version of the American Milky Way, rather than the almond-stuffed American Mars bar. The smart set in London melts it over ice cream for a fast dinner party dessert. Mars bars are also fried in the same sort of batter used to coat cod.

And then there is the television producer’s beloved Kit Kat, invented in York, England, in the early 1930s and available in versions that match the tastes of, variously, Japanese, Germans, Australians, Canadians and Americans.

Nicky Perry has sold chocolate bars from her home country for more than a decade at her store, Tea and Sympathy, in Greenwich Village.

Her theory is that the bars from the United Kingdom are made from a better recipe, containing fewer stabilizers. They melt more quickly than a Hershey bar, which is why she cuts back on the amount she stocks in summer.

“I can’t afford to keep the A.C. on all night or a chocolate bar would cost $10, wouldn’t it?” she said.

At the London Food Company in Montclair, N.J., about 17 percent of the store’s sales are British chocolate bars, said Samantha Codling, the owner.

Ms. Codling, who is from Essex, offers a range of Cadbury Milk bars, including the mint crisp, whole nut and Turkish delight with rose jelly. The British Smartie, which resembles an M & M but has a thicker shell, and the Malteser malt ball, also sell well.

“All the ex-pats definitely know the difference already and the Americans soon figure it out,” she said.

Bryn Dyment, a Web developer in the Bay Area who grew up in Canada, said he was shocked when his parents took him to a candy counter in the United States. He found out that not every child in the world was eating the same chocolate bars he was.

It wasn’t until he moved to the United States as an adult that he realized just how vast that divide is.

“You get in these religious arguments with people,” he said. “I haven’t met a Canadian who likes a Hershey bar, but Americans think you’re crazy when you say that, because they think everyone loves a Hershey bar.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
__________________________________________________
I bought a Crunchie bar when I was in Canada at Shoppers. I've yet to buy one here back in the States, but I'll be heart-broken if it's different. I hope Cost Plus has the non-US version if there is a difference in the Crunchie bar.

And I totally agree about the Hershey bars. I'll eat them, but I'm not really a fan, and it wouldn't really be my first choice... or 10th choice. I also don't really like Ghiradelli, which is blasphemy, as I'm from SF. But I do recall having good Ghiradelli once (and only once).

Linux, the new Apple?

2007-07-10T23:44:00.000-07:00

The $300 Linux-Powered 'iPhone Killer' Arrives

By Michael Calore July 09, 2007 | 1:41:33 PMCategories: Linux, iPhone

After seemingly endless delays, the OpenMoko phone is here. The first version of the NEO 1973 mobile phone, which carries the Linux kernel inside and is not locked to a specific network, is available for purchase from OpenMoko.com. It's not as jaw-droppingly pretty as the iPhone, but it shares a design philosophy -- no buttons, just a screen -- and it's ready to be loaded with any number of open-source software applications. (Though, according to Gadget Lab, so is the iPhone).

The base version of the NEO sells for $300. It has a 2.8" VGA touch screen, a micro SD card slot, a USB port and 2.5G GSM quad band capability.

Keep in mind that this unit (the GTA01) was pushed out early so developers could begin writing device drivers, custom GUIs and some cool apps for the phone. The next revision (GTA02), which will be available starting at $450 in October, will be ready for the mass market. It will have wi-fi, 3-D motion sensors and added graphics accelerators. So this phone isn't exactly an iPhone killer -- the next one will be a contender. AptUsTech has a nice comparison of the NEO 1973 and the iPhone.

When it comes to devices, more choice is almost always "a good thing." But will consumers respond to the NEO? We all know developers are going to dig this phone. But what's more important to consumers -- a super-sexy status item that's locked to one carrier and one set of functions, or a less sexy look-alike with a fully free and open software system?

Source: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/07/the-linux-power.html

iPhonyWhy Apple's new cell phone isn't really revolutionary.

By Tim Wu
Posted Friday, June 29, 2007, at 11:54 AM ET

Steve Jobs with the Apple iPhone

When the word iPhone appears in Apple press releases, the word revolutionary is rarely far behind. But what counts as revolutionary? In Apple's case, the bar is high. Since the 1970s, the firm has changed both the personal computer and music industries. Will the iPhone fundamentally alter the structure of the wireless world as well?

Not yet. The iPhone's style and user interface are pathbreaking, and (as the iPod proved) aesthetics do matter. But the iPhone is—so far—not a product that will turn any industry inside out. Seen as a phone, the iPhone is striking. Seen as a small computer, it's limited, and compromised by the existing business models of the wireless industry. Saying the iPhone is a pointless gadget is a bit too strong. But it isn't yet a revolutionary device.

It is in some ways astonishing that AT&T and Apple are partners at all. AT&T is the oldest of the old school—the most ancient major high-tech firm in the United States, founded in 1878. Unfazed by spending the last 23 years in suspended animation (after the great breakup of 1984), AT&T is back to its classic business model: own the largest networks and everything on them. Apple, meanwhile, is the original hippie computer company, a child of the 1970s, not the 1870s. At least in its origins, Apple is an ideological foe of IBM and AT&T. (Remember that 1984 ad?) Considering that these firms were born on the opposite sides of the tech Kulturkampf, the iPhone cannot help but be a little strange.

Most obviously, the iPhone is locked, as is de rigueur in the wireless world. It will work only with one carrier, AT&T. Judged by the standards of a personal computer or electronics, that's odd: Imagine buying a Dell that worked only with Comcast Internet access or a VCR that worked only with NBC. Despite the fact that the iPhone costs $500 or so, it cannot yet be brought over to T-Mobile or Verizon or Sprint. AT&T sees this as a feature, not a bug, as every new iPhone customer must commit to a two-year, $1,400 to $2,400 contract.

If Apple wanted to be "revolutionary," it would sell an unlocked version of the iPhone that, like a computer, you could bring to the carrier of your choice. An even more radical device would be the "X Phone"—a phone on permanent roam that chose whatever network was providing the best service. Imagine, for example, using your iPhone to talk on Sprint because it had the best voice coverage in Alaska, while at the same time using Verizon's 3G network for Internet access. Of course, getting that phone to market would be difficult, and Apple hasn't tried.

The iPhone does have Wi-Fi access, which is a giant step forward. Wi-Fi has been kept off American cell phones for years, for reasons that have never passed the smell test ("for security reasons" or "to protect battery life"). The real reason the cell providers have kept Wi-Fi out? To keep consumers eating up minutes on the carriers' networks and to prevent people from grabbing ringtones and other media from their computers, which the industry calls "revenue leakage."

But while the iPhone has Wi-Fi, it doesn't let you do one very obvious thing with its Wi-Fi connection: make phone calls. In an ideal world, you might want to use AT&T when on the road and have your phone switch automatically to Skype or Vonage when at home, since they're much cheaper and can have better voice quality. But Apple hasn't yet hinted at this possibility. AT&T, meanwhile, probably prefers to cheer on Verizon's ongoing efforts to sue Vonage out of existence.

The iPhone's Achilles' heel is its Internet access when it's not near a Wi-Fi hot spot. The fact that the iPhone can use only AT&T's rather slow EDGE network is a weakness that affects the phone's most exciting capabilities (such as application development, below). As the New York Times' David Pogue writes, "You almost ache for a dial-up modem." Oddly enough, you can't even download music directly from iTunes. In a different world, you'd be able to use your iPhone to roam on Verizon's much better 3G network, download media at will, and also use your iPhone as a modem for your PC. But don't hold your breath.

The iPhone is also a closed platform. Unlike your Macintosh computer, which can run whatever software developers write for it, the iPhone will, in native mode, run only whatever Apple (and AT&T) approve of. While there are some technical and security reasons to do things this way, there's an ideological point here, too. The closed iPhone stands in contrast to the open-platform design that has been the bedrock of both the personal computer and Internet revolutions. By design, the iPhone embodies the opposite of what made the Apple II so successful.

Sensitive to this point, Steve Jobs claims to have left some room for developing iPhone applications. The iPhone, as we said already, is a miniature Mac, and comes with Apple's Safari browser. Developers will be able to write Web-based applications that will work on the iPhone via the browser.

Whether this will mean much is hard to say. Doubtless, many will take a shot at trying to write a killer app for the iPhone, and some may be pretty good. But the problem is that you have to be online to use a Web application. Unless you're in an open Wi-Fi zone, that means running right into the limits of AT&T's slower-than-a-dialup-modem EDGE network. In addition, the phone won't support Java or Flash, which are both important components of many powerful Web apps. Without access to the full power of the phone, the limits on developers will be severe.

We're left to wonder, then, why the iPhone plays by the rules. Isn't this Apple, the company of "Think Different"? You could argue that the iPhone proves that Apple is no longer a company interested in transforming industries. Once Big Brother's foe, it's now more like Little Brother, happy to sell cute little devices that are easy to use, make money, and spread false consciousness.

If you're an optimist, the more intriguing possibility is that Apple's iPhone is a Trojan Horse. The iPhone is fatally attractive to AT&T, since it gives the firm a chance to steal tens of thousands of new customers from rivals like Verizon. But Apple may be betting that, once it has its customers, they'll be more loyal to Apple than AT&T. With its foothold in the wireless world, Apple may be planning to slowly but inexorably demand more room. If iPhone 2.0 is a 3G phone that works with any carrier and supports third-party apps, then industry power will begin to move away from the carrier oligopoly and toward Apple and other Silicon Valley firms. Now, that would be a revolution.

Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of Who Controls the Internet?

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2169352/

Things I Love. Part 1 of n

2007-07-06T22:32:00.000-07:00

http://sanfrancisco.menupages.com/restaurantdetails.asp?areaid=0&restaurantid=7967&neighborhoodid=62&cuisineid=0

www.nuggetmarket.com

http://www.davisfarmersmarket.org/

Father's Day PostSecretPost

2007-06-17T10:35:00.001-07:00

-----Email Message-----
Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 5:12 AM

My dad used to say that inside of the car's air-bags was uncooked popcorn. When you wrecked the popcorn would pop and you would have a snack until help came.

-----Email Message-----
Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 6:13 AM

When I was little, my dad told me ATMs worked by having little monkeys inside them. I believed that for years. Now I work in a bank, and wish it were true!

-----Email Message-----
Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 6:55 AM

My dad told me the worst swear word you could possibly say was "Bostonian". It meant "someone who has no private parts." My brother and I used the word until we were teenagers and my father giggled every time we said it, right before he sent us to our rooms.

-----Email Message-----
Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 8:58 AM

My dad told me that men worked under the streets pulling levers to change the street lights from red to green. They went to work by climbing down manholes, and then sat there all day and ate doughnuts and pulled levers.

-----Email Message-----
Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 9:56 AM

When we'd approach exits or toll booths, my father told me the sound the car made when it went over the rumble strips was the car getting angry because I had been bad. I still sit up a little straighter when I hit a rumble strip.

Charlie the Unicorn Nuttiness (Thanks Mui)

2007-05-22T01:16:00.000-07:00

PostSecretPost

2007-05-20T00:44:00.000-07:00

BBC Day in Pictures

2007-05-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

Moaamal Mohammed, age seven, sits alone in a classroom in western Baghdad. Many children stay away from school in Iraq because of violence.

Hollywood’s Shortage of Female Power

2007-04-27T04:08:00.000-07:00

By SHARON WAXMAN

Published: April 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/movies/26wome.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

LOS ANGELES, April 25 — A few days after the annual ShoWest movie convention last month in Las Vegas, where the studios trotted out clips from coming horror films and a battle-heavy science-fiction spectacle, “Transformers,” the producer Cathy Schulman got an unusual call

“ ‘We need a women’s picture,’ ” said the head of a Hollywood studio, whom Ms. Schulman declined to name. “ ‘Put it together.’ ”

With that, the studio executive revived a movie that Ms. Schulman, a producer of “Crash,” had long considered comatose, a romantic comedy-drama about a woman in her 40s. If the movie, as Ms. Schulman understood, was added as an afterthought to the studio’s slate, that is also one way to describe how some women in Hollywood are feeling these days.

While Hollywood has not stopped making films appealing to women and girls, as evidenced by recent and coming releases like “Music and Lyrics,” “Nancy Drew,” and “The Nanny Diaries,” women here worry that the future will not be so bright.

They are nervous about the disappearance of many of the movie world’s most visible female power brokers and concerned that a box office dominated by seemingly male-oriented action films like “300” means less attention for movies that have obvious appeal to female audiences, 51 percent of moviegoers.

“I feel that it’s a different time; it’s not the time that it was,” said Lynda Obst, the producer of “Hope Floats” and “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” who said she recently had to fight to keep Disney from canceling one of her productions, a remake of “Adventures in Babysitting.”

“I don’t feel prejudice against me, not like in the early days,” she added, “but it’s not like the heyday either. It’s a boys’ era. And the market is driving that.”

Feeding this unease is the departure in the past 14 months of three of the four women who held top jobs at Hollywood’s major studios. Nina Jacobson, president of Disney’s motion picture group, lost out in a power play. Gail Berman, the president of Paramount, did not mesh well with her boss, Brad Grey, the studio’s chairman, and was pushed out. And Stacey Snider, the former chairwoman of Universal Pictures, chose to defect to DreamWorks, now a Paramount subsidiary, rather than continue to labor under the pressures of Universal’s ultimate corporate parent, General Electric.

They were all replaced by men. (Amy Pascal remains co-chairwoman of Sony Pictures Entertainment.) Meanwhile, one of the industry’s veteran executives, the former Paramount chairwoman Sherry Lansing, retired in late 2005, leaving the entertainment industry for charity work.

It is debatable whether the diminished number of women running major studios has had any effect on the kinds of movies being made. Studio executives, both men and women, have shown themselves to be pragmatists above all, choosing movies that they believe will make the most money for their corporate parents.

While running Disney, Ms. Jacobson presided over a wide array of movies, including muscular hits like “Pirates of the Caribbean,” along with what some considered softer fare like “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.”

The current schedule for Disney, under a new motion picture group president, Oren Aviv, has a mix of movies tied to the company’s new philosophy of focusing more closely on the family audience. But so far the production green light has been given, or is about to be, to a narrow slice of movies: a sequel to the Nicolas Cage action thriller “National Treasure”; a Martin Lawrence road comedy; and “Old Dogs,” a comedy about two middle-aged dads. A Disney spokeswoman said these films were not male-centric and were instead geared toward broad audiences, including women and girls.

Nonetheless, Tom Ortenberg, the president of Lionsgate, said he did sense a gender divide in Hollywood fare. “In general, female markets have been underserved, and the over-25 female audience is one that’s dramatically underserved in the marketplace,” he said. “I don’t know why that is. You could speculate that it’s because this is a male-driven world, with people greenlighting the movies they feel most close to.”

Yet he said that bias did not apply at Lionsgate. Even though, at first glance, a slate filled with films like “Bug” and “Hostel 2” would seem to be classic male-oriented shriekfests, the reality is that women are avid fans of horror films. (Fifty percent of the “Hostel” audience was female, he said.)

Still, some long-time Hollywood producers feel that something has shifted. “For every Lionsgate, you’d hope there would be another company saying, ‘We’re going to make ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding,’ ” said Lindsay Doran, an independent producer (“Nanny McPhee,” “Sense and Sensibility”) who once ran United Artists. “You don’t see that. You don’t see companies saying, ‘More than half of this population is women, we should design a slate to come up with movies like ‘The Break-Up,’ and ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’ ”

Box office calculations may have something to do with that. Despite the success of “The Break-Up,” for example, romantic comedies have been in decline for a number of years, since their heyday a decade ago with stars like Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock. (This past winter, “Catch and Release,” “Because I Said So” and “Holiday” struggled, while “Music and Lyrics,” with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, did only decent business.)

Not only have few women emerged to replace those A-list stars, but studios are also reluctant to pay the price tags of $20 million or so that those women once commanded. And producers like Ms. Doran say that at a time of growing importance for the international box office, romantic comedies are considered to fare less well overseas than male-led action movies or fantasy adventures heavy with special effects.

Women are also going to those kinds of movies, anyway. More and more, Hollywood tinkers with the horror and adventure genres to attract women to the theaters. “Disturbia,” an updated “Rear Window” with more gore and the former Disney Channel star Shia LeBeouf, is both a horror film and a teenage love story. Even “300,” the abs-and-sandals fanboy’s favorite, enhanced the role of the Spartan queen, Gorgo, to boost the movie’s appeal to women.

While the shift in the hierarchy may just be the normal turning of Hollywood’s fickle wheel of fortune, it is still worrisome to women here who are eager for role models and a mentoring system to compete with the well-established boys’ club.

Martha Lauzen, a professor at San Diego State University, found that the number of women working as directors, writers, producers and editors declined in 2006 from the year before, to 15 percent from 16 percent. And she estimated that the number of female executives in the studios is only slightly higher, perhaps 20 percent. “We’re at same place we would have been in 1999,” she said.

Ms. Lansing, who was the dean of female Hollywood studio executives, said she believed that lifestyle choices, along with the dumbing down of Hollywood movies, was affecting the number of women in the running for top jobs.

“Most people who got into the movie business wanted to make a certain kind of movie: movies that were character-driven, that affected the way you thought, that had social content, political content,” she said. “But now it’s about opening weekend.”

“At a certain point,” she continued, “some women will say: ‘I’ve done this enough. I have enough money. How long am I going to get up at 6 a.m. and go to bed at 11 p.m., six days a week?’ Women also want to be in love. A huge percentage want children. They want friends. They want life.”

Interviewing candidates for the production company she runs, Mandalay Entertainment, Ms. Schulman was recently struck by the number of out-of-work female executives she encountered. “I see a definite problem with the lack of support for women at the lower ranks, which may ultimately create a lack of women who could be viable for the top-dog jobs,” she said. “I don’t know if the two areas are related, but it is an area I see as getting worse.”

______________________________________________________

Well, chick flicks in general just tend not to be good movies. They tend to be contrived and cheesy and fluffy, with a touch of vomit-inducing saccharine sweetness. Also, while women tend not to have a problem going with their gal-pals in droves to watch a movie like 300, you're not going to see a group of guys going to see How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days-type together. Guys may go out and rent these movies to watch in the safety of their homes (and behind closed blinds), but they certainly won't openly admit to liking these movies unless they are ready and willing to deal with the stigma.

PostSecretPost

2007-04-22T14:28:00.000-07:00

On the Tiger's Trail- Documentary on Uganda

2007-03-20T16:31:00.000-07:00

I love this soooo much! Thanks Mui!

2007-03-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

PostSecretPost

2007-03-11T03:27:00.000-07:00

Addendum to Anti-Paul Haggis post

2007-03-02T20:58:00.000-08:00

Black Donnellys Kinda Gray

http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/screen/black-donnellys-kinda-gray/15780/

Crash’s Paul Haggis gets his Irish up
By ROBERT ABELE
Wednesday, February 28, 2007 - 12:00 pm
If by any chance you think a new television series about four Irish-American brothers in New York is going to avoid thievery, barroom scuffles and violence-laced tragedy, then you could be safely accused of a basic ignorance about popular storytelling. Especially if you know the series has a myth-courting, danger-laced title like The Black Donnellys. NBC’s newest one-hour drama is one of the more open-faced attempts yet by a big network to find something, anything, that will bring a Sopranos-ish seal of gloomy, grown-up, bloody prestige to formula-friendly prime time. And since there aren’t many criminals heading major series in the Big Four universe — Jack Bauer’s highly watchable constitutional shortcutting notwithstanding — there’s an initial tendency to forgive the regrettable cliché of a crime-friendly band of good-looking Irish roustabouts who steal their way into scrapes, brotherly-love their way into worse scrapes, and, naturally, kill, thinking it will get them out of those scrapes. That’s because sinners, as we all know, are infinitely more inviting TV company than do-gooders. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never watched Touched by an Angel. Touched by the Devil? Sign me up.
The next Sopranos?

Prime time, however, is not unlike a carefully controlled syndicate: If you don’t pony up the protection to the ratings-greedy networks — comforting stereotypes, action, suspense, romantic-comedy humor, moments of warmth, beautiful young people — you’ll get cement-blocked off the air. The Black Donnellys’ co-creator Paul Haggis knows this, because before he became a movie darling — nabbing a Best Picture Oscar for Crash and writing Million Dollar Baby and the Iwo Jima films for Clint Eastwood — he was a TV guy who, in 1996, managed to get a brooding, adult labyrinth of a show about cops and criminals called EZ Streets on CBS. That mesmerizing anomaly lasted about as long as a raindrop on a steam grate, but in its intelligent bleakness, it hinted at what the massaging of genre could do, and certainly acted as a precursor for the uncompromising artistry of lauded cable series like The Wire and The Sopranos.

So now that Haggis is a man with clout, why is The Black Donnellys — which he wrote with his Crash collaborator Bobby Moresco (and directed, as far as the pilot goes) — so blah? It certainly doesn’t lack for street intrigue, although it’s obnoxiously framed as the cell-house remembrances of a weasely hanger-on named Joey Ice Cream (Keith Nobbs). Right away, you feel like you’re in a subpar GoodFellas narration universe. Through voice-over thumbnails, we learn about the four Donnellys: Jimmy (Thomas Guiry) is the hothead who never got over two ugly boyhood incidents, a car crushing his leg and the fact that Italians whacked the Donnellys’ union-rep dad while he sat in a car outside; Kevin (Billy Lush) is the itchy gambler; Sean (Michael Stahl-David) loves the ladies; and Tommy (Jonathan Tucker) is the Michael Corleone–like sensitive soul with his whole life ahead of him — he’s studying art — but also a drive to keep his brothers out of trouble. The pilot’s domino-tipping scenario lays out the many ways this quartet’s familial devotion is a lifesaver and a dream crusher, from Kevin’s gambling debt, which ignites Jimmy’s ill-conceived kidnapping scenario, which infuriates a climber in the Italian mob named Nicky (Kirk Acevedo), which leads to a brutal retaliation against Sean, which leads Tommy to think... well, you get the idea. If people knew how to end these things, there wouldn’t be a series.

In a universe like this, women become the elements of grace who must represent the way out, and Haggis and Moresco give us raven-haired beauty Jenny Reilly (Olivia Wilde), who helps her grandpa run a diner. A youthful tomboyishness made her the fifth Donnelly growing up, but now she’s married, and aside from an on-again/off-again flirtation with Tommy, she isn’t too pleased with the path her childhood playmates have taken. Unfortunately, Jenny is pretty much it for anything outside of the crime stuff, and while she is appealing enough — if maybe a little unbelievable as an ex–stickball player, as flashbacks show — it’s too big a symbolic burden, considering the wan charisma of the titular foursome. The brothers’ lives are so far (based on five episodes sent in advance) entirely defined by the whirlpool of gangster shenanigans; it’s hard for us as viewers to get a gauge on their relationship to a recognizable outside world. (Unlike Showtime’s Brotherhood, which earns its Mob thrills by crafting a web of corruption themes that encompasses everything from city politics to the intricacies of a failing marriage.) Here, we only see Jimmy fly off the handle, Tommy mope and berate his siblings, Kevin worry about money, and the Zeppo-like Sean make out with a girl Tommy is interested in.

And unfortunately, the young actors on display aren’t compelling enough to make us care much beyond their sometimes stupidly self-induced crises. The Gordon Willis–inspired cinematography, where no indoor or outdoor space can ever be too dark, may invoke the epic shadow-filled portent of Godfather days past. But with The Black Donnellys, you mostly worry that the darkness around the edges, rather than heightening a sense of lives that reflect the abyss, will just swallow these shallow toughs whole.
___________________________________________
This, plus how much the ratings suck for this show makes me happy. Lost nearly half its audience in the second half hour, eh?

By precursor to The Wire and Sopranos, i hope they mean they EZ Streets just happened to come before.

Must stop myself before this turns into the Anti-Paul Haggis blog. Maybe allow one more when Black Donnellys gets cancelled. Man, I hope it gets cancelled. Bring back Studio 60! I love me some Bradley Whitford and Steven Weber.

Beatboxing + Flute

2007-03-02T20:47:00.001-08:00

Thank goodness for circular breathing.

Helen Mirren + In N Out = awesomeness

2007-02-27T21:20:00.001-08:00

Because I hate Paul Haggis...

2007-02-27T00:24:00.000-08:00

Herc Deems Paul Haggis’
THE BLACK DONNELLYS
A Great Heap O’ Blarney!!
I am – Hercules!!

I remember when the big stack of NBC drama pilots turned up last summer. I watched “Studio 60,” then “Heroes,” then “Kidnapped,” and thought to myself, “NBC comes roaring back!” Then I got to the “The Black Donnellys” pilot, which is awful, and chalked it up to the law of averages.

It’s a mob drama from Paul Haggis, who created “Walker: Texas Ranger” before he started winning Oscars for writing “Million Dollar Baby” and “Crash.”

If “Crash” was Haggis and Bobby Morasco maybe trying to do “Magnolia” (or maybe “Pulp Fiction”?), this may be their stab at an Irish “GoodFellas.”

Trouble is, the writers incessantly mistake “boorish” for “colorful,” and their plotting is predictable and too derivative of other, much better mob sagas. The show’s non-saving grace is the presence of fabulous Olivia Wilde, who was much more fun as Mischa Barton’s smoking-hot lesbian love interest on “The O.C.”

But what matters Herc’s opinion?

USA Today gives it one star (out of four) and says:

… a failed, frustrating attempt to build a weekly hour around four young thugs staking out their criminal ground between New York's Irish and Italian Mobs. … It won't be long before you're asking yourself two main questions: Is the plot ever going to sort itself out? And is Joey ever going to shut up? The answers are "in time" and, sadly, "no." You'll eventually be able to tell one gun-toting, ax-wielding character from another. You're just not likely to develop a desire to spend time with them. …

Entertainment Weekly gives it a “C-plus” and says:

… a thinking viewer's head-scratcher … Haggis equates the slow revealing of character and plot with classy writing; you'll probably experience it as stuff you can see coming a mile away. …

The New York Times says:

… Paul Haggis’s much-celebrated 2004 film, “Crash,” used shortcuts — clichés in the score, camerawork and color mix — to induce emotional responses. The same methods inform his latest television series, “The Black Donnellys.” Actually the show lays bare his form of aesthetic condescension so baldly that it may cause viewers to rethink his earlier achievement. …

The Los Angeles Times says:

… "The Black Donnellys" is tripe. Not tripe as in, "I'd recommend a medium-bodied Cab with that," but tripe as in rubbish. NBC sent out five episodes; I sat through three before throwing the DVD on the Donate to Public Library pile. I would like to apologize in advance to the library. …

The Chicago Tribune says:

… This pretentious mishmash is a paint-by-numbers Irish-American “Sopranos” ripoff … most of the details on “The Black Donnellys” feel too retro and ring false. This show is more artificial than a bowl of Lucky Charms. ... Though the plots are complicated, they’re not involving. Very little happens in this show that isn’t easy to predict, and the occasional energetic sequences are offset by ponderously long scenes that go nowhere. ...

The Chicago Sun-Times gives it three stars and says:

… These tall tales flow into a stream of consciousness. That's good. The acting is convincing. That's good. The Irish stuff is heavy-handed. That's bad. …

The San Francisco Chronicle says:

… First, it's a mob story. And all mob stories get compared to "The Sopranos." This is no "Sopranos." Secondly, there's a kind of "Irish Sopranos" wannabe feel to "The Black Donnellys," and if any show is going to wear that hat, it's "Brotherhood" on Showtime. This is no "Brotherhood." … has a few neat tricks up its sleeve but ultimately succumbs to being an inferior story on a broadcast network that can't even remotely match two far better cable series. And it's not just a matter of looser standards on HBO and Showtime. "The Black Donnellys" wants us to root for what has to be the dumbest -- and youngest -- crime family on television. …

The Houston Chronicle says:

… Those expecting Godfather-style violence and Sopranos-style archetypes and language will be disappointed; broadcasters are in no mood (at least not until 2008) to test FCC boundaries. Even if they were, The Black Donnellys wouldn't be in the league of those great shows. It more closely resembles Showtime's Brotherhood, but neither the writing nor the acting — with the exceptions of Tucker and Wilde's — is up to that series' standards. …

The Boston Herald says:

What if Archie Comics and the folks behind Lucky Charms cereal decided to make a mob drama? It would look a lot like “The Black Donnellys,” a violent, unintentionally funny series about Irish himbo hoods in New York. These lads are full of it, all right.

The Hollywood Reporter says:

… Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco (creators, writers and exec producers) ask us to invest time and emotion in characters that often are so obnoxious and self-centered that we can only wish, at times, that they get their comeuppance, either from the law or neighborhood rivals. Maybe this show would be more compelling if the Donnellys were a little less black and a little more gray. The saving grace is that Haggis and Moresco are nothing if not superior storytellers. Watching the first five episodes sent for review, you have to marvel at how seeds planted in an early episode blossom into complicated and absorbing tales in a later show. It is well-cast, too. If only those characters weren't so off-putting. …

Variety says:

… An old adage cautions that every successful filmmaker has a highly personal dud in them, just yearning for the industry clout to set it free. Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco enjoyed precisely such leverage after their Oscar-winning "Crash," and the result is this grim, brooding, utterly muddled crime series, which travels the same littered, dangerous roads -- with considerably less panache -- as an earlier Haggis offering that squandered CBS' time and resources, "EZ Streets." NBC might fare better with "Heroes" as a lead-in, but it will take true heroics to win "The Black Donnellys" an extended reprieve from an Irish wake. …

Source: aicn- aintitcool.com
________________________________________________

This makes me happy. And I will draw comfort from this if this show ends up being successful, just because nielson families tend to watch crappy tv.

Some commercials I love

2007-02-24T03:38:00.000-08:00

Brilliance from AV Club

2007-02-22T01:05:00.000-08:00

Why I Don't Watch Grey's Anatomy

posted by: Amelie Gillette

February 16, 2007 - 1:13pm

Want to know why I don't watch Grey's Anatomy?

Here you go:

Add in a few "Mc" references, an abundance of words that end in "jay-jay," maybe a montage of people in scrubs making out, and then set it to a soundtrack of The Fray, and you will have a perfect summary of why this show is so completely unbearable to me. If I wanted to watch ER and General Hospital at once while listening to bad music, I would put two TV sets next to each other, and tune my radio to Jack FM.

Still, I have to give Grey's Anatomy credit for creating the sweeps-iest February sweeps promo to ever air: A giant ferry disaster, the swelling music, the serious voiceover intoning that "last week millions experienced unforgettable television," the drowning of a main character, "I've gotta drill holes in your friend's head," an ending "you'll never see coming", AND it's stretched out over three episodes? It's one accidental shooting (or pregnancy) away from hitting every sweeps cliché ever.

http://www.avclub.com/content/node/58669

_______________________________________

I agree with this person wholeheartedly. Sheer ridiculousness.

Mary Mack

2007-02-22T01:00:00.000-08:00

Happy Chinese New Year (about 30 minutes ago...)

2007-02-19T00:23:00.000-08:00

Woot! Year of the Pig. I was about to put up this picture I found of where various cuts of meat come from the pig, but out of respect for my parents and their regard for Chinese New Year, I exercised some self-control.

Photography

2007-02-16T15:57:00.000-08:00

Ansel Adams.

Not really an offshoot of my cataloguing of my favorite paintings (now expanded to artworks, given the recent inclusion of Rodin's The Kiss). I'm fairly neutral about Ansel Adams. His photos are very beautiful and I especially love B&W photography, but I really have no idea about standards when it comes to photographs of nature. Nature itself is beautiful, so you can't really go wrong when photographing nature. B&Ws of nature are slightly more complex because of shades and contrasts and all the jazz, but color photos are nature.... Maybe because I'm not trained in that sort of thing, but it's hard to differentiate between professional nature photos and amateur nature photos. This is slightly disturbing to me... that people can make a fortune on being "professional" nature photographers. Is there really something special to them, or can any photographer, maybe even anyone, do it? [Yes, I acknowledge the historical significance of Ansel Adam's work. I am not grouping him with the photo works I am thinking of].

Happy Valentine's Day

2007-02-14T17:54:00.000-08:00

Rodin's The Kiss

The sculpture was originally titled Francesca da Rimini, as it depicts the 13th-century Italian noblewoman immortalised in Dante's Inferno (Circle 2, Canto 5) who falls in love with her husband Giovanni Malatesta's younger brother Paolo. Having fallen in love while reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, the couple are discovered and killed by Francesca's husband. In the sculpture, the book can be seen in Paolo's hand. The lovers lips do not actually touch in the sculpture to suggest that they were interrupted and met their demise without their lips ever having touched.
From Wikipedia

Perhaps not the most appropriate story for Valentine's Day.... I think Francesca and Paolo are the one's who are in Hell, locked in an eternal, passionate embrace, but one from which they can never derive satisfaction. Just deserts.

Valentine's Day offerings from PostSecret

2007-02-11T23:03:00.000-08:00

Ganked a few more than usual. These range from being poignant, to ringing true, to making me smile. Thanks PostSecret!

Part 4: Raphael

2007-02-10T17:23:00.000-08:00

Part 3: Marcel Duchamp

2007-02-09T10:34:00.000-08:00

Paintings Part 2: Petrus Christus

2007-02-09T00:28:00.000-08:00

My favorite paintings Part 1: Rene Magritte

2007-02-08T01:10:00.000-08:00

Let's see how long I can keep this up before I a) get sick of it, or b) forget about it, or c) finish it (this will never happen).

This is what I do with my time....

2007-02-06T00:45:00.001-08:00

Your results:
You are Dark Phoenix

Dark Phoenix		84%
Apocalypse		74%
Venom		72%
The Joker		69%
Dr. Doom		69%
Poison Ivy		67%
Two-Face		67%
Mystique		63%
Juggernaut		63%
Magneto		61%
Mr. Freeze		54%
Riddler		53%
Lex Luthor		49%
Green Goblin		39%
Catwoman		37%
Kingpin		37%

A prime example of emotional extremes: Passion and fury incarnate.

Click here to take the "Which Super Villain am I?" quiz...

PostSecretPost

2007-02-03T21:33:00.000-08:00

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

For the Bible told them so

2007-01-21T10:15:00.000-08:00

Documentary shows how the Bible's verses have been used to justify discrimination - and how modern conservatives use the Good Book to lambaste gays

By Jessica Ravitz
The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake Tribune

http://www.sltrib.com/faith/ci_5047696

"Last week I bought a gun. Yesterday I wrote the note. But last night I happened to turn on your show and just knowing that someday I might be able to go back into my church, I threw the gun in the river. My mom never has to know."
-- A boy in Iowa

The e-mail was only four sentences long, but it shaped Daniel Karslake's future.
Karslake, 41, was a young television producer in 1998 when he received the above note from a boy in Iowa. His segment on a lesbian theologian had just aired on the PBS program "In the Life." This boy's short message, one that still brings Karslake to tears, was the first of hundreds he would receive from gays and lesbians across the country - from people who felt rejected by their church families. The aspiring filmmaker had found his mission.
"This e-mail fueled everything I've done since," he said this week.
Opening Sunday night at the Sundance Film Festival is Karslake's "For the Bible Tells Me So," a documentary in the independent film competition. The production, which took more than three years to complete, was funded in large part by Orem-resident Bruce Bastian, co-creator of the word-processing software that became WordPerfect. The film shows how the Bible's verses have been used to justify, over centuries, various forms of discrimination, and how today religious conservatives use the Good Book to back anti-gay rhetoric.
For gay and lesbian people who grew up steeped in Scripture and tied to church communities, this rhetoric - something referred to in the film as "a modern invention" - has been especially painful. Not just for them, but for their families.
By focusing on the journeys of five Christian families, each with a member who came out as gay or lesbian, Karslake paints a personal picture.
Viewers meet Mary Lou Wallner, who blames herself, and the teachings that shaped who she was, for the suicide of her daughter. They gain an insider's perspective on the coming-out process for Chrissy Gephardt, daughter of former Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) and his wife, Jane. They also get to know Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay Episcopal Church bishop, his parents and his ex-wife.
The path for Tonia Poteat's family wasn't easy to navigate, but by agreeing to be interviewed for this documentary, Poteat, 37, said lines of communication were opened.
"I was shocked that they agreed pretty easily to do it," Poteat, of Atlanta, said of her parents, who live in North Carolina. "I actually think it's a coming-out process for them also. . . . It's been a journey for me to recognize this is a struggle for them."
Randi Reitan, also featured in the film and reached in her Minneapolis-area home, thought back to when her son, Jake, came out. The family was then living in Mankato, Minn., a place she described as "a very closeted town," and she and her husband, Phil, "knew nothing about homosexuality."
The Reitans never stopped loving their son, but the strict Lutherans first sought counsel and understanding from a pastor who told them, "Don't worry, Jake can change," she remembered, her voice cracking. "I get emotional just speaking about it."
Now the Reitans count themselves among activists, finding their voice and passion in an organization called Soulforce.
The Rev. Mel White, a former ghostwriter for evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker, is behind Soulforce. The organization combats "the misuse of religion to sanction the condemnation and rejection of any of God's children" through "relentless nonviolent resistance," the group's Web site explains.
White, 66, is one of many religious leaders and scholars, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who appear in Karslake's film. Contacted in Lynchburg, Va., where he moved so he could regularly attend and silently protest in Falwell's church, White said for 30 years he battled his homosexuality with therapies including electric shock. Only after he slit his wrists did he part ways with his wife and face up to who he was.
"I realized my orientation, too, was a gift from God," he said.
He also realized preachers such as Falwell and Robertson were doling out messages that were "the ultimate source of disinformation," he said. "Fundamentalism is based on fear and politics of blame. . . . They were so smart at knowing what would create the kind of fear that would lead to donations."
Peppered throughout "For the Bible Tells Me So" are snippets, including a cartoon, outlining statistics and research findings. Mixed in is the annual revenue of Bible-thumping moneymakers. James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, brings in $138 million a year, the film reports. Robertson: $459 million.
The problem, too, the film points out, is the masses blindly accept biblical interpretations offered by these popular personalities rather than read and study for themselves. As a result, historical context is ignored, as are broader and supplementary materials, said the Rev. Laurence Keene, a soon-to-retire sociology professor at Pepperdine University.
"I have a soft spot in my heart for literalists because I used to be one," he said in the film. "There's nothing wrong with a fifth-grade understanding of God [or the Bible], as long as you're in the fifth grade."
Take, for instance, the word "abomination," which is used over and over by fundamentalists to describe what the Bible says about same-sex relations. Keene reiterated in a phone call this week that the word "abomination" refers to actions that were deemed "ritually impure." Other abominations include eating pork or shrimp, wearing linen and wool at the same time, and commingling crops.
Abominations, Keene explained, are not "intrinsically evil or immoral"; they are the actions that were considered "unclean" or "un-Jewish" at the time when the Hebrew people were trying to build a nation and procreation - requiring sex between a man and a woman - was paramount.
Rather than shy away from talk about religion, Keene said it's time people other than conservatives "stood up" to "give the public another look at how the Bible can be understood."
And it's this longing to spark conversation, this longing to reach gay youth like the boy who wrote him years ago, that motivates Karslake.
"I'm hoping fair-minded people of all kinds see the film, and it makes them think," he said. "These kids just want a glimmer of hope."
---
* JESSICA RAVITZ can be reached at jravitz@sltrib.com or 801-257-8776. Send comments to the religion editor at religioneditor@sltrib.com.

For the Bible also tells them . . .
* And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, . . . the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death (Leviticus 20:10).

* For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death (Leviticus 20:9).
* Moreover ye shall eat no manner of blood, whether it be of fowl or of beast, in any of your dwellings. Whatsoever soul it be that eateth any manner of blood, even that soul shall be cut off from his people (Leviticus 11:26-27).

* Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you (Leviticus 11:12).
'IF A MAN LIES WITH A MAN AS ONE LIES WITH A WOMAN, BOTH OF THEM HAVE DONE WHAT IS DETESTABLE. THEY MUST BE PUT TO DEATH; THEIR BLOOD WILL BE ON THEIR HANDS.'
LEVITICUS 20:13

* For a complete listing of faith films playing at the Sundance Film Festival, visit www.sltrib.com/sundance

__________________________________________________

Finally, some good can come out of the bad things preached by some religious ultra-conservatives. People who actually read the Bible rather than follow blindly people like Falwell and Robertson are coming up with projects that set things straight.

Bathrooms

2007-01-11T15:45:00.000-08:00

From Slate. http://www.slate.com/id/2157288/

I love Wittgenstein!

2007-01-07T00:12:00.000-08:00

From Wikipedia.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (IPA: ['luːtvɪç 'joːzɛf 'joːhan 'vɪtgənʃtaɪn]) (April 26, 1889 – April 29, 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who contributed several ground-breaking works to contemporary philosophy, primarily on the foundations of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. He is regarded by some as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.[1]

Life

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on April 26, 1889, to Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein. He was the youngest of eight children, born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father's parents, Hermann Christian and Fanny Wittgenstein, were born into Jewish families but later converted to Protestantism, and after they moved from Saxony to Vienna in the 1850s, assimilated themselves into the Viennese Protestant professional classes. Ludwig's father, Karl Wittgenstein, became an industrialist, and went on to make a fortune in iron and steel. Ludwig's mother Leopoldine, born Kalmus, was also of Jewish descent on her father's side, but had been brought up as a practising Roman Catholic. Ludwig, like all his brothers and sisters, was baptized as a Roman Catholic and was given a Roman Catholic burial by his friends upon his death.

Early life

Ludwig grew up in a household that provided an exceptionally intense environment for artistic and intellectual achievement. His parents were both very musical and all their children were artistically and intellectually gifted. Karl Wittgenstein was a leading patron of the arts, and the Wittgenstein house hosted many figures of high culture — above all, musicians. The family was often visited by artists such as Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. Ludwig's older brother Paul Wittgenstein went on to become a world-famous concert pianist, even after losing his right arm in World War I. Ludwig himself did not have prodigious musical talent, but nonetheless had perfect pitch and his devotion to music remained vitally important to him throughout his life — he made frequent use of musical examples and metaphors in his philosophical writings, and was said to be unusually adept at whistling lengthy and detailed musical passages. He also played the clarinet and is said to have remarked that he approved of this instrument because it took a proper role in the orchestra.

His family also had a history of intense self-criticism, to the point of depression and suicidal tendencies. Three of his four brothers committed suicide. The eldest of the brothers, Hans — a musical prodigy who started composing at age four — killed himself in April 1902, in Havana, Cuba. The third son, Rudolf, followed in May 1904 in Berlin. Their brother Kurt shot himself at the end of World War I, in October 1918, when the Austrian troops he was commanding deserted en masse.[2]

Until 1903, Ludwig was educated at home; after that, he began three years of schooling at the Realschule in Linz, a school emphasizing technical topics. Adolf Hitler was a student there at the same time, when both boys were 14 or 15 years old.[3] Ludwig was interested in physics and wanted to study with Ludwig Boltzmann, whose collection of popular writings, including an inspiring essay about the hero and genius who would solve the problem of heavier-than-air flight ("On Aeronautics") was published during this time (1905).[4] Boltzmann committed suicide in 1906, however.

In 1906, Wittgenstein began studying mechanical engineering in Berlin, and in 1908 he went to the Victoria University of Manchester to study for his doctorate in engineering, full of plans for aeronautical projects. He registered as a research student in an engineering laboratory, where he conducted research on the behaviour of kites in the upper atmosphere, and worked on the design of a propeller with small jet engines on the end of its blades. During his research in Manchester, he became interested in the foundations of mathematics, particularly after reading Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics and Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze. In the summer of 1911, Wittgenstein visited Frege, after having corresponded with him for some time, and Frege advised him to go to the University of Cambridge to study under Russell.

In October 1911, Wittgenstein arrived unannounced at Russell's rooms in Trinity College, and was soon attending his lectures and discussing philosophy with him at great length. He made a great impression on Russell and G. E. Moore and started to work on the foundations of logic and mathematical logic. Russell was increasingly tired of philosophy, and saw Wittgenstein as a successor who would carry on his work. During this period, Wittgenstein's other major interests were music and travelling, often in the company of David Pinsent, an undergraduate who became a firm friend. He was also invited to join the elite secret society, the Cambridge Apostles, which Russell and Moore had both belonged to as students.

In 1913, Wittgenstein inherited a great fortune when his father died. He donated some of it, initially anonymously, to Austrian artists and writers, including Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. In 1914 he went to visit Trakl when the latter wanted to meet his benefactor, but Trakl killed himself days before Wittgenstein arrived.

Although he was invigorated by his study in Cambridge and his conversations with Russell, Wittgenstein came to feel that he could not get to the heart of his most fundamental questions while surrounded by other academics. In 1913, he retreated to the relative solitude of the remote village of Skjolden at the bottom of the Sognefjord in Norway. Here he rented the second floor of a house and stayed for the winter. The isolation from academia allowed him to devote himself entirely to his work, and he later saw this period as one of the most passionate and productive times of his life. While there, he wrote a ground-breaking work in the foundations of logic, a book entitled Logik, which was the immediate predecessor and source of much of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

[edit] World War I

The outbreak of World War I in the next year took him completely by surprise, as he was living a secluded life at the time. He volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army as a private soldier, first serving on a ship and then in an artillery workshop. In 1916, he was sent as a member of a howitzer regiment to the Russian front, where he won several medals for bravery. The diary entries of this time reflect his contempt for the baseness, as he saw it, of his fellow soldiers. Throughout the war, Wittgenstein kept notebooks in which he frequently wrote philosophical and religious reflections alongside personal remarks. The notebooks reflect a profound change in his religious life: a militant atheist during his stint at Cambridge, Wittgenstein discovered Leo Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief at a bookshop in Galicia. He devoured Tolstoy's commentary and became an evangelist of sorts; he carried the book everywhere he went and recommended it to anyone in distress (to the point that he became known to his fellow soldiers as "the man with the gospels"). Although Monk notes that Wittgenstein began to doubt by at least 1937, and that by the end of his life he said he could not believe Christian doctrines (although religious belief remained an important preoccupation), this is not contrary to the influence that Tolstoy had on his philosophy.[5] Wittgenstein's other religious influences include Saint Augustine, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and most notably Søren Kierkegaard, whom Wittgenstein referred to as "a saint".[6]

[edit] Developing the Tractatus

Wittgenstein's work on Logik began to take on an ethical and religious significance. With this new concern with the ethical, combined with his earlier interest in logical analysis, and with key insights developed during the war (such as the so-called "picture theory" of propositions), Wittgenstein's work from Cambridge and Norway was transfigured into the material that eventually became the Tractatus. In 1918, toward the end of the war, Wittgenstein was promoted to reserve officer (lieutenant) and sent to northern Italy as part of an artillery regiment. On leave in the summer of 1918, he received a letter from David Pinsent's mother telling Wittgenstein that her son had been killed in an airplane accident. Suicidal, Wittgenstein went to stay with his uncle Paul, and completed the Tractatus, which was dedicated to Pinsent. In a letter to Mrs Pinsent, Wittgenstein said "only in him did I find a real friend". The book was sent to publishers at this time, without success.

In October, Wittgenstein returned to Italy and was captured by the Italians. Through the intervention of his Cambridge friends (Russell, Keynes and Pinsent had corresponded with him throughout the war, via Switzerland), Wittgenstein managed to get access to books, prepare his manuscript, and send it back to England. Russell recognized it as a work of supreme philosophical importance, and after Wittgenstein's release in 1919, he worked with Wittgenstein to get it published. An English translation was prepared, first by Frank P. Ramsey and then by C. K. Ogden, with Wittgenstein's involvement. After some discussion of how best to translate the title, G. E. Moore suggested Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in an allusion to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Russell wrote an introduction, lending the book his reputation as one of the foremost philosophers in the world.

However, difficulties remained. Wittgenstein had become personally disaffected with Russell, and he was displeased with Russell's introduction, which he thought evinced fundamental misunderstandings of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein grew frustrated as interested publishers proved difficult to find. To add insult to injury, those publishers who were interested proved to be so mainly because of Russell's introduction. At last, Wittgenstein found publishers in Wilhelm Ostwald's journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie, which printed a German edition in 1921, and in Routledge Kegan Paul, which printed a bilingual edition with Russell's introduction and the Ramsey-Ogden translation in 1922.

[edit] The "lost years": life after the Tractatus

At the same time, Wittgenstein was a profoundly changed man. He had embraced the Christianity that he had previously opposed, faced harrowing combat in World War I, and crystallized his intellectual and emotional upheavals with the exhausting composition of the Tractatus. It was a work which transfigured all of his past work on logic into a radically new framework that he believed offered a definitive solution to all the problems of philosophy. These changes in Wittgenstein's inner and outer life left him both haunted and yet invigorated to follow a new, ascetic life. One of the most dramatic expressions of this change was his decision in 1919 to give away his portion of the family fortune that he had inherited when his father had died. The money was divided between his sisters Helene and Hermine and his brother Paul, and Wittgenstein insisted that they promise never to give it back. He felt that giving money to the poor could only corrupt them further, whereas the rich would not be harmed by it.

Since Wittgenstein thought that the Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, he left philosophy and returned to Austria to train as a primary school teacher. He was educated in the methods of the Austrian School Reform Movement which advocated the stimulation of the natural curiosity of children and their development as independent thinkers, instead of just letting them memorize facts. Wittgenstein was enthusiastic about these ideas but ran into problems when he was appointed as an elementary teacher in the rural Austrian villages of Trattenbach, Puchberg-am-Schneeberg, and Otterthal. During his time as a schoolteacher, Wittgenstein wrote a pronunciation and spelling dictionary for his use in teaching students; it was published and well-received by his colleagues.[7] This would be the only book besides the Tractatus that Wittgenstein published in his lifetime.

Wittgenstein had unrealistic expectations of the rural children he taught, and his teaching methods were intense and exacting - he had little patience with those children who had no aptitude for mathematics. However, he achieved good results with children attuned to his interests and style of teaching, especially boys. His severe disciplinary methods (often involving corporal punishment) — as well as a general suspicion amongst the villagers that he was somewhat mad — led to a long series of bitter disagreements with some of his students' parents, and eventually culminated in April 1926 in the collapse of an eleven year old boy whom Wittgenstein had struck on the head. The boy's father attempted to have Wittgenstein arrested, and despite being cleared of misconduct he resigned his position and returned to Vienna, feeling that he had failed as a school teacher.

After abandoning his work as a school teacher, Wittgenstein worked as a gardener's assistant in a monastery near Vienna. He considered becoming a monk, and went so far as to inquire about the requirements for joining an order. However, at the interview he was advised that he could not find in monastic life what he sought.

Two major developments helped to save Wittgenstein from this despairing state. The first was an invitation from his sister Margaret ("Gretl") Stonborough (who was painted by Gustav Klimt in 1905) to work on the design and construction of her new house. He worked with the architect, Paul Engelmann (who had become a close friend of Wittgenstein's during the war), and the two designed a spare modernist house after the style of Adolf Loos (whom they both greatly admired). Wittgenstein found the work intellectually absorbing, and exhausting — he poured himself into the design in painstaking detail, including even small aspects such as doorknobs and radiators (which had to be exactly positioned to maintain the symmetry of the rooms). As a work of modernist architecture the house evoked some high praise; G. H. von Wright said that it possessed the same "static beauty" as the Tractatus. The effort of totally involving himself in intellectual work once again did much to restore Wittgenstein's spirits.

Secondly, toward the end of his work on the house, Wittgenstein was contacted by Moritz Schlick, one of the leading figures of the newly formed Vienna Circle. The Tractatus had been tremendously influential to the development of the Vienna positivism, and although Schlick never succeeded in drawing Wittgenstein into the discussions of the Vienna Circle itself, he and some of his fellow circle members (especially Friedrich Waismann) met occasionally with Wittgenstein to discuss philosophical topics. Wittgenstein was frequently frustrated by these meetings — he believed that Schlick and his colleagues had fundamentally misunderstood the Tractatus, and at times would refuse to talk about it at all. (Much of the disagreements concerned the importance of religious life and the mystical; Wittgenstein considered these matters of a sort of wordless faith, whereas the positivists disdained them as useless. In one meeting, Wittgenstein refused to discuss the Tractatus at all, and sat with his back to his guests while he read aloud from the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.) Nevertheless, the contact with the Vienna Circle stimulated Wittgenstein intellectually and revived his interest in philosophy. He also met with Frank P. Ramsey, a young philosopher of mathematics who travelled several times from Cambridge to Austria to meet with Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. In the course of his conversations with the Vienna Circle and with Ramsey, Wittgenstein began to think that there might be some "grave mistakes" in his work as presented in the Tractatus — marking the beginning of a second career of ground-breaking philosophical work, which would occupy him for the rest of his life.

[edit] Returning to Cambridge

In 1929 he decided, at the urging of Ramsey and others, to return to Cambridge. He was met at the train station by a crowd of England's greatest intellectuals, discovering rather to his horror that he was one of the most famed philosophers in the world. In a letter to his wife, Lydia Lopokova, Lord Keynes wrote: "Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train."

Despite this fame, he could not initially work at Cambridge, as he did not have a degree, so he applied as an advanced undergraduate. Russell noted that his previous residency was in fact sufficient for a doctoral degree, and urged him to offer the Tractatus as a doctoral thesis, which he did in 1929. It was examined by Russell and Moore; at the end of the thesis defence, Wittgenstein clapped the two examiners on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it." (Monk 271) Moore commented in the examiner's report: "In my opinion this is a work of genius; it is, in any case, up to the standards of a degree from Cambridge." Wittgenstein was appointed as a lecturer and was made a fellow of Trinity College.

Although Wittgenstein was involved in a relationship with Marguerite Respinger (a young Swiss woman he had met as a friend of the family), his plans to marry her were broken off in 1931, and he never married. Most of his romantic attachments were to young men. There is considerable debate over how active Wittgenstein's homosexual life was--inspired by W. W. Bartley's claim to have found evidence of not only active homosexuality but in particular several casual liaisons with young men in the Wiener Prater park during his time in Vienna. Bartley published his claims in a biography of Wittgenstein in 1973, claiming to have his information from "confidential reports from... friends" of Wittgenstein (Bartley 160), whom he declined to name, and to have discovered two coded notebooks unknown to Wittgenstein's executors that detailed the visits to the Prater. Wittgenstein's estate and other biographers have disputed Bartley's claims and asked him to produce the sources that he claims. What has become clear, in any case, is that Wittgenstein had several long-term homoerotic attachments, including an infatuation with his friend David Pinsent and long-term relationships during his years in Cambridge with Francis Skinner and possibly Ben Richards.

Wittgenstein's political sympathies lay on the left, and while he was opposed to Marxist theory, he described himself as a "communist at heart" and romanticized the life of labourers [citation needed]. In 1934, attracted by Keynes' description of Soviet life in Short View of Russia, he conceived the idea of emigrating to the Soviet Union with Skinner. They took lessons in Russian and in 1935 Wittgenstein travelled to Leningrad and Moscow in an attempt to secure employment. He was offered teaching positions but preferred manual work and returned three weeks later.

From 1936 to 1937, Wittgenstein lived again in Norway, leaving Skinner behind. He worked on the Philosophical Investigations. In the winter of 1936/37, he delivered a series of "confessions" to close friends, most of them about minor infractions like white lies, in an effort to cleanse himself. In 1938 he travelled to Ireland to visit Maurice Drury, a friend who was training as a doctor, and considered such training himself, with the intention of abandoning philosophy for psychiatry. He travelled to Ireland at the invitation of the then Irish Prime Minister, Mr. Eamon de Valera, himself a mathematics teacher. De Valera hoped that Wittgenstein's presence would contribute to an academy for advanced mathematics. Whilst staying in Ireland Wittgenstein resided at the Ashling hotel, now commemorated by a plaque in his honour.

While in Ireland, the Anschluss took place. Wittgenstein was now technically a German citizen, and a Jew under the German racial laws. While he found this intolerable, and started to investigate the possibilities of acquiring British or Irish citizenship (with the help of Keynes), it put his siblings Hermine, Helene and Paul (all still residing in Austria) in considerable danger. Wittgenstein's first thought was to travel to Vienna, but he was dissuaded by friends. Had the Wittgensteins been classified as Jews, their fate would have been no different from that of any other Austrian Jews (of approximately 600 in Linz at the end of the 1930s, for example, only 26 survived the war[8]). Their only hope was to be classified as Mischlinge – officially, Aryan/Jewish mongrels, whose treatment, while harsh, was less brutal than that reserved for Jews. This reclassification was known as a "Befreiung". The successful conclusion of these negotiations required the personal approval of Adolf Hitler. "The figures show how difficult it was to gain a Befreiung. In 1939 there were 2,100 applications for a different racial classification: the Führer allowed only twelve." [9]

Gretl (an American citizen by marriage) started negotiations with the Nazi authorities over the racial status of their grandfather Hermann, claiming that he was the illegitimate son of an "Aryan". Since the Reichsbank was keen to get its hands on the large amounts of foreign currency owned by the Wittgenstein family, this was used as a bargaining tool. Paul, who had escaped to Switzerland and then the United States in July 1938, disagreed with the family's stance. After G. E. Moore's resignation in 1939, Wittgenstein, who was by then considered a philosophical genius, was appointed to the chair in Philosophy at Cambridge. He acquired British citizenship soon afterwards, and in July 1939 he travelled to Vienna to assist Gretl and his other sisters, visiting Berlin for one day to meet with an official of the Reichsbank. After this, he travelled to New York to persuade Paul (whose agreement was required) to back the scheme. The required Befreiung was granted in August 1939. The amount signed over to the Nazis by the Wittgenstein family, a week or so before the outbreak of war, was 1.7 tonnes of gold. At current prices (late 2006), this amount of gold would be worth over $22m.

After exhausting philosophical work, Wittgenstein would often relax by watching an American western (preferring to sit at the very front of the theater) or reading detective stories. These tastes are in stark contrast to his preferences in music, where he rejected anything after Brahms as a symptom of the decay of society.

By this time, Wittgenstein's view on the foundations of mathematics had changed considerably. Earlier, he had thought that logic could provide a solid foundation, and he had even considered updating Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. Now he denied that there were any mathematical facts to be discovered and he denied that mathematical statements were "true" in any real sense: they simply expressed the conventional established meanings of certain symbols. He also denied that a contradiction should count as a fatal flaw of a mathematical system. He gave a series of lectures which may have been attended by Alan Turing and there are unsupported claims that the two vigorously discussed these matters.

During World War II he left Cambridge and volunteered as a hospital porter in Guy's Hospital in London and as a laboratory assistant in Newcastle upon Tyne's Royal Victoria Infirmary. This was arranged by his friend John Ryle, a brother of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who was then working at the hospital. After the war, Wittgenstein returned to teach at Cambridge, but he found teaching an increasing burden: he had never liked the intellectual atmosphere at Cambridge, and in fact encouraged several of his students (including Skinner) to find work outside of academic philosophy. (There are stories, perhaps apocryphal, that if any of his philosophy students expressed an interest in pursuing the subject, he would ban them from attending any more of his classes.)

Final years

Wittgenstein resigned his position at Cambridge in 1947 to concentrate on his writing. He was succeeded as professor by his friend Georg Henrik von Wright. Much of his later work was done on the west coast of Ireland in the rural isolation he preferred. By 1949, when he was diagnosed as having prostate cancer, he had written most of the material that would be published after his death as Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations), which arguably contains his most important work.

He spent the last two years of his life working in Vienna, the United States, Oxford, and Cambridge. He worked continuously on new material, inspired by the conversations that he had had with his friend and former student Norman Malcolm during a long vacation at the Malcolms' house in the United States. Malcolm had been wrestling with G.E. Moore's common sense response to external world skepticism ("Here is one hand, and here is another; therefore I know at least two external things exist"). Wittgenstein began to work on another series of remarks inspired by his conversations, which he continued to work on until two days before his death, and which were published posthumously as On Certainty.

The only known fragment of music composed by Wittgenstein was premiered in November 2003. It is a piece of music that lasts less than half a minute.

Wittgenstein died from prostate cancer at his doctor's home in Cambridge in 1951. His last words were: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."

[edit] Work

Although many of Wittgenstein's notebooks, papers, and lectures have been published since his death, he published only one philosophical book in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921. Wittgenstein's early work was deeply influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer, and by the new systems of logic put forward by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. When the Tractatus was published, it was taken up as a major influence by the Vienna Circle positivists. However, Wittgenstein did not consider himself part of that school and alleged that logical positivism involved grave misunderstandings of the Tractatus.

With the completion of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein believed he had solved all the problems of philosophy, and he abandoned his studies, working as a schoolteacher, a gardener at a monastery, and an architect, along with Paul Engelmann, on his sister's new house in Vienna. However, in 1929, he returned to Cambridge, was awarded a Ph.D. for the Tractatus, and took a teaching position there. He renounced or revised much of his earlier work, and his development of a new philosophical method and a new understanding of language culminated in his second magnum opus, the Philosophical Investigations, which was published posthumously.

The Tractatus

Main article: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

In rough order, the first half of the book sets forth the following theses:

* The world consists of independent atomic facts — existing states of affairs — out of which larger facts are built.
* Language consists of atomic, and then larger-scale propositions that correspond to these facts by sharing the same "logical form".
* Thought, expressed in language, "pictures" these facts.
* We can analyse our thoughts and sentences to express ("express" as in show, not say) their true logical form.
* Those we cannot so analyse cannot be meaningfully discussed.
* Philosophy consists of no more than this form of analysis: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen" ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent").

Some commentators [citation needed] believe that, although no other type of discourse is, properly speaking, philosophy, Wittgenstein does imply that those things to be passed over "in silence" may be important or useful, according to some of his more cryptic propositions in the last sections of the Tractatus; indeed, that they may be the most important and most useful. He himself wrote about the Tractatus in a letter to his publisher Ficker:

…the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I’ll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were by my book; and I’m convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are babbling I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it.

—Wittgenstein, Letter to Ludwig von Ficker, October or November 1919, translated by Ray Monk

Other commentators [citation needed] point out that the sentences of the Tractatus would not qualify as meaningful according to its own rigid criteria, and that Wittgenstein's method in the book does not follow its own demands regarding the only strictly correct philosophical method. This also is admitted by Wittgenstein, when he writes in proposition 6.54: ‘My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless’. These commentators believe that the book is deeply ironic, and that it demonstrates the ultimate nonsensicality of any sentence attempting to say something metaphysical, something about those fixations of metaphysical philosophers, about those things that must be passed over in silence, and about logic. He attempts to define the limits of logic in understanding the world.

The work also contains several innovations in logic, including a version of the truth table.

[edit] Intermediate works

Wittgenstein wrote copiously after his return to Cambridge, and arranged much of his writing into an array of incomplete manuscripts. Some thirty thousand pages existed at the time of his death. Much, but by no means all, of this has been sorted and released in several volumes. During his "middle work" in the 1920s and 1930s, much of his work involved attacks from various angles on the sort of philosophical perfectionism embodied in the Tractatus. Of this work, Wittgenstein published only a single paper, "Remarks on Logical Form," which was submitted to be read for the Aristotelian Society and published in their proceedings. By the time of the conference, however, Wittgenstein had repudiated the essay as worthless, and gave a talk on the concept of infinity instead. Wittgenstein was increasingly frustrated to find that, although he was not yet ready to publish his work, some other philosophers were beginning to publish essays containing inaccurate presentations of his own views based on their conversations with him. As a result, he published a very brief letter to the journal Mind, taking a recent article by R. B. Braithwaite as a case in point, and asked philosophers to hold off writing about his views until he was himself ready to publish them. Although unpublished, the Blue Book, a set of notes dictated to his class at Cambridge in 1933 – 1934 contains seeds of Wittgenstein's later thoughts on language (later developed in the Investigations), and is widely read today as a turning point in his philosophy of language.

[edit] The Philosophical Investigations

Main article: Philosophical Investigations

Although the Tractatus is a major work, Wittgenstein is mostly studied today for the Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen). In 1953, two years after Wittgenstein's death, the long-awaited book was published in two parts. Most of the 693 numbered paragraphs in Part I were ready for printing in 1946, but Wittgenstein withdrew the manuscript from the publisher. The shorter Part II was added by the editors, G.E.M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees. (Had Wittgenstein lived to complete the book himself, some of the remarks in Part II would likely have been incorporated into Part I, and the book would no longer have this bifurcated structure.)

It is notoriously difficult to find consensus among interpreters of Wittgenstein's work, and this is particularly true in the case of the Investigations. Very briefly, Wittgenstein asks the reader to think of language and its uses as a multiplicity [10] of language-games within which the parts of language function and have meaning in order to resolve the problems of philosophy. This viewing of language represents what many consider a break from the Wittgenstein in the Tractatus and, hence, meaning as representation. In the carrying out of such an investigation, one of the most radical characteristics of the "later" Wittgenstein comes to light. The "conventional" view of philosophy's "task", perhaps coming to a head in Bertrand Russell, is that the philosopher's task is to solve the seemingly intractable problems of philosophy using logical analysis (for example, the problem of "free will", the relationship between "mind" and "matter", what is "the good" or "the beautiful" and so on). However, Wittgenstein argues that these "problems" are, in fact, "bewitchments" that arise from the philosophers' misuse of language.

On Wittgenstein's account, language is inextricably woven into the fabric of life, and as part of that fabric it works unproblematically. Philosophical problems arise, on this account, when language is forced from its proper home and into a metaphysical environment, where all the familiar and necessary landmarks have been deliberately removed. Removed for what appear to be sound philosophical reasons, but which are, for Wittgenstein, the very source of the problem. Wittgenstein describes this metaphysical environment as like being on frictionless ice; where the conditions are apparently perfect for a philosophically and logically perfect language (the language of the Tractatus), where all philosophical problems can be solved without the confusing and muddying effects of everyday contexts; but where, just because of the lack of friction, language can in fact do no actual work at all. There is much talk in the Investigations, then, of “idle wheels” and language being “on holiday” or a mere "ornament", all of which are used to express the idea of what is lacking in philosophical contexts. To resolve the problems encountered there, Wittgenstein argues that philosophers must leave the frictionless ice and return to the “rough ground” of ordinary language in use; that is, philosophers must “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”

In this regard, Wittgenstein may be perceived as a successor to Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason argues in a similar manner that when concepts are applied outside of the range of possible experience, they result in contradictions. The second part of Kant's Critique consists of refutation, typically by reductio ad absurdum or contradiction, of such matters as logical proofs of the existence of god, the existence of souls, infinity and necessity. Wittgenstein's objections to the use of language in inappropriate contexts mirrors Kant's objections to the non-empirical use of reason.

Returning to the rough ground is, however, easier said than done. Philosophical problems having the character of depth, and running as deep as the forms of language and thought that set philosophers on the road to confusion. Wittgenstein therefore speaks of “illusions”, "bewitchment" and “conjuring tricks” performed on our thinking by our forms of language, and tries to break their spell by attending to differences between superficially similar aspects of language which he feels leads to this type of confusion. For much of the Investigations, then, Wittgenstein tries to show how philosophers are led away from the ordinary world of language in use by misleading aspects of language itself. He does this by looking in turn at the role language plays in the development of various philosophical problems, from some general problems involving language itself, then at the notions of rules and rule following, and then on to some more specific problems in philosophy of mind. Throughout these investigations, the style of writing is conversational with Wittgenstein in turn taking the role of the puzzled philosopher (on either or both sides of traditional philosophical debates), and that of the guide attempting to show the puzzled philosopher the way back: the “way out of the fly bottle.”

Much of the Investigations, then, consists of examples of how philosophical confusion is generated and how, by a close examination of the actual workings of everyday language, the first false steps towards philosophical puzzlement can be avoided. By avoiding these first false steps, philosophical problems themselves simply no longer arise and are therefore dissolved rather than solved. As Wittgenstein puts it; "the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear."

Charlie Rose - Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro, & Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

2007-01-01T03:22:00.001-08:00

An hour on film and friendship with three Mexican filmmakers: Alfonso Cuaron, director of "Children of Men", Guillermo del Toro, director of "Pan's Labyrinth", and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, director of "Babel".

__________________________________________________________________________
Haven't seen any of these yet, but definitely on my to-do list. Their relationship is interesting and markedly different from what you would expect of Hollywood. That none of these directors are really "Hollywood" is probably a big part of why this friendship is the way it is. I liked what del Toro says about forgiving success and what Cuaron says about turning envy into admiration. Certainly important character traits, and admirable, and something to aspire to.

Happy New Years!

Another something wonderful from PostSecret.

2006-12-31T00:29:00.000-08:00

Christian Cinema

2006-12-29T22:12:00.000-08:00

Why the Life of Brian beats The Passion of The Christ

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/screen/story/0,,1978298,00.html

Mark Kermode
Sunday December 24, 2006
The Observer

If headlines are to be believed, the rise of secularism on both sides of the Atlantic is threatening to crucify Christianity in general, and Christmas in particular. Here in the UK, scare stories in the run-up to the 'Winterval' knees-up have ranged from British Airways banning staff from displaying crosses on uniforms to local councils allegedly outlawing any mention of Baby Jesus in their festive greetings. In God-fearing America, video ads for the film The Nativity Story were reportedly removed from a downtown Chicago Christmas festival after city officials claimed they would be 'insensitive to the many people of different faiths who come to enjoy the market for its food and unique gifts'.

There's no doubting that The Nativity Story is monotheistic fare. It was the first major theatrical film to have its premiere at The Vatican, representing what The Hollywood Reporter called 'a clear endorsement by the Holy See, the seat of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics'. Yet it was trounced at the box-office by Happy Feet, an animated romp about tap-dancing Emperor Penguins, who seem to have become the secular deities du jour. By contrast, Mel Gibson's brutal Apocalypto, a blood-spilling, limb-ripping pagan romp in which Christ is notable by his absence, briefly topped the US box-office despite bad press about Mel's drunken anti-Semitic outbursts. Perhaps it was the violence, rather than the 'religion', which drew all those multitudes to The Passion of the Christ a few years ago after all.

It's easy to be cynical about self-proclaimedly 'Christian' movies when even Rupert Murdoch is getting in on the act, with the 'Fox Faith' distribution label hawking films with 'overt Christian context or derived from the work of a Christian author'. Yet the history of cinema has proven that true spirituality can often be found in the most apparently secular fare. The notorious Nineties shocker Bad Lieutenant may have been directed by Driller Killer helmsman Abel Ferrara, but this lurid tale of rape, drugs, squalor and salvation is now rightly hailed as a powerful tale of redemptive Catholicism. Movies as diverse as Ken Russell's The Devils, Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, and even Monty Python's Life of Brian have all been branded as blasphemous and attracted sanctimonious calls for bans, yet all provided platforms for the serious and heated discussion of issues of faith in an increasingly materialistic, secular society.

When it comes to films, outward piety seems to exist in inverse proportion to inner spirituality. Max von Sydow famously played Jesus 'as a man' in George Stevens's worshipful Hollywood epic The Greatest Story Ever Told. But the most memorable screen Jesus was Enrique Irazoqui in The Gospel According to St Matthew, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini - a gay Marxist (and, at times, an avowed atheist) who had been previously been labelled a blasphemer. Pasolini, who decried 'disgusting pietism' in all its forms, portrayed Jesus as a political radical, and even objected to the inclusion of the word 'Saint' in the English translation of his title Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo. Yet his 1964 classic remains a sacred text for anyone attempting to reinterpret the Gospel texts for cinema, evoking a sublime sense of sacrifice and rebirth which is firmly rooted in credible realism.

Denys Arcand's 1989 gem Jesus of Montreal seems at first glance to be a witheringly satirical attack on the institutions of Catholicism. Arcand's masterpiece depicts a fiery young actor battling church hypocrisy as he attempts to mount a modern passion play which genuinely reflects the radicalism of the Gospels. The film climaxes with our down-to-earth anti-hero (whose endeavours have touched an entire community) suffering dramatic crucifixion and death, only for his body to escape the grave via heart and eye transplants which restore sight to the blind and offer the gift of new life. 'He's young, and he's got type O blood,' says a doctor attending this unlikely messiah's demise. 'That's a godsend.'

For all its secular trappings, Jesus of Montreal more eloquently dramatises themes of sacrifice and love for one's fellow man than the avowedly evangelical The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson may claim that his masochistic magnum opus merely depicted the true extent of Jesus's physical ordeal, thereby making the crucifixion more 'real' to modern audiences. Yet, as the macho disembowellings of Braveheart prove, Gibson has always had a soft spot for the spectacle of heroic screen suffering. When I watch The Passion of the Christ or Apocalypto, I don't feel compelled to rush to the scriptures for contemplative meditation. I just start to wonder where I left that dog-eared video copy of Cannibal Holocaust

In the case of The Nativity Story, screenwriter Mike Rich describes himself as 'a person of faith' who 'felt compelled, both spiritually and emotionally' to tackle the project. Director Catherine Hardwicke, who cut her gritty teen-trauma teeth on Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, brings an element of promising earthiness as Mary's mysterious pregnancy provokes the disdain of her parents and the anguish of her betrothed. Yet the film soon downshifts into two-dimensional Christmas-card campery, replete with gasping shepherds and adoring Magi, all illuminated by heavenly shafts of light which are more trashy than transcendent.

Compare this ultimately empty experience with the more low-key charms of Echo Park L.A., which opened to far less heavenly trumpeting a few months ago. This overlooked, indie-spirited gem (originally entitled Quinceanera) is a modern-day tale of a young Hispanic girl, Magdalena, who experiences a virgin pregnancy to the outrage of her zealous preacher father. Although not quite immaculate, Magdalena's conception is ultimately accepted as a form of miracle which heals a rift within her family, bringing reconciliation and rebirth. Echo Park L.A., which preaches tolerance for persons of all sexual persuasions, was executive-produced by Todd Haynes, whom Variety hailed as a 'New Queer Cinema pioneer', and co-directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, whose previous feature, The Fluffer, dealt with gay porn. Perhaps this explains why so few commentators (Christian or otherwise) picked up on its sly reworking of the traditional nativity narrative, which it approaches with far more heart and soul than Hardwicke's higher profile Christmas release.

At a time when secularism is being blamed for the erosion of Christian values, cinemagoers should perhaps ask themselves whether the true spirit of Christmas can indeed be found in such flawed fare as The Nativity Story. Or whether, as has so often been the case, we should look outside of the evangelical canon for films which best embody the values of peace on earth and goodwill to all men. Happy Christmas!

· What do you think? review@observer.co.uk
__________________________________________________________________

I was not inclined to watch either Passion or Nativity Story. I am going to catch Last Temptation and Greatest Story Ever Told at some point.

It rubs the lotion on its skin

2006-12-24T23:45:00.000-08:00

I suppose this is disturbing as a Christmas post. Just pretend this is any other day post.

But Merry Christmas anyway.

Christmas Goat

2006-12-10T21:13:00.000-08:00

A giant straw Christmas goat is erected in Gavle, Sweden Sunday Dec. 3 2006, a centuries-old Scandinavian yule symbol that preceded Santa Claus as the bringer of gifts to Swedish homes.
Photograph by : AP photo/Scanpix, Pernilla Wahlman

Swedish city strives to safeguard straw goat

Mattias Karen, Associated Press
Published: Thursday, December 07, 2006

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/oddities/story.html?id=2aad93d4-e0c8-4aae-a57f-38a88c881e3a&k=92412

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- For 40 years it has been torched, vandalized, had its legs cut off and even been run over by a car.

But officials in the Swedish city of Gavle are guaranteeing that this year's giant straw Christmas goat -- the victim of Sweden's most violent yule tradition - will survive unscathed.

The 13-metre-high goat -- a centuries-old yule symbol that predates Santa Claus as the bringer of gifts to Swedish homes - has been burned down 22 times since it was first set up in Gavle's square on Dec. 3, 1966.

But for its 40th anniversary Sunday, officials think they have finally outsmarted resourceful vandals by dousing the battered ram with flame-resistant chemicals normally used on airplanes.

"It is impossible to burn it to the ground this year, although you might be able to singe its hooves," said Anna Ostman, a spokeswoman for the committee in charge of building the goat. "After 40 years, we think we finally found the solution."

The company providing the fireproof treatment is so sure of its resilience that its spokesman Freddy Klassmo told newspaper Aftonbladet that "not even napalm can set fire to the goat now."

For those who want to follow its fate, a 24-hour web cam has been set up to film the straw goat where it stands on the central square in Gavle, 145 kilometres north of Stockholm.

"We can sleep very soundly at night now," she said. "The goat can too."

While the origins of the Christmas goat are unclear, the symbol is believed to date to Norse mythology and the two goats that drew the carriage of Thor, god of thunder.

Many Swedes place a small straw goat underneath their Christmas tree, or hang miniature versions on the branches.

Since 1966, just 10 of Gavle's giant goats have survived beyond Christmas Day. Aside from being burned, several were beaten down and the 1976 goat was hit by a car.

The vandals are seldom caught, but the 2001 culprit -- 51-year-old American Lawrence Jones -- was convicted and spent 18 days in jail.

The 2005 vandals -- who witnesses said were dressed up as Santa Claus and the Gingerbread Man -- remain at large. The pair fired flaming arrows at the goat, reducing it to its steel skeleton.

Yay! I'm Like Starbuck.

2006-12-07T16:57:00.000-08:00

Well, I always thought so anyway. But nice to have it confirmed.

You scored as Lt. Kara Thrace (Starbuck). You are the best damn Viper pilot in the fleet, so everyone else can just frack off. They need you, not the other way around. Maybe if you keep pushing people away they won't get close, because that is scary and it hurts. Oh yes, and anyone who has a problem with you being a woman needs to just get over it.

Lt. Kara Thrace (Starbuck)

94%

Dr Gaius Baltar

75%

Capt. Lee Adama (Apollo)

75%

Commander William Adama

56%

President Laura Roslin

56%

Lt. Sharon Valerii (Boomer)

56%

CPO Galen Tyrol

56%

Number 6

50%

Tom Zarek

50%

Col. Saul Tigh

38%

What New Battlestar Galactica character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Great article on Profit

2006-12-06T02:24:00.000-08:00

I agree especially with the idea the the best shows really are most often the ones the fail to find an audience. Thank goodness for DVD making these show, and their unaired episodes available to use. I remembered when Profit came out. I was probably in middle school at the time and only cause bits and pieces of maybe 2 eps. The two scenes that have stuck with me throughout the years just because of the sheer bizarreness were the scene mentioned below with the cardboard box, and the scene where he cheats the lie-detector test. Very creepy. Very troubling show. For a middle schooler. It's probably be troubling still, but this show has been popping up in odd places online for me and popping up at random times in my head. Must watch it...eventually. May even make a blind faith buy on the DVD. It's not too expensive.

Some of the shows which I thought were brilliant were: Carnivale, Arrested Development, and The Inside.
My top favorite shows at the moment enjoy a loyal, albeit small following: Battlestar Galactica and Veronica Mars.

Maybe the shorter the run, the better. X-files was brilliant until it dragged on in the later seasons, which caused the network to kill it. Same goes for Alias.

Perhaps short and sweet is the way to perfection...
____________________________________________

Profit- Sometimes The Rumors Are True

Wednesday, 20 September 2006
By D. W. O'Dell

http://www.mediablvd.com/magazine/News/Television/Profit--Sometimes-The-Rumors-Are-True.html

Sometimes, occasionally, rumors are true. I don’t mean headlines in the tabloids; those are always wrong (it never ceases to amaze me how often they incorrectly predict the end of the world and yet remain in business). But sometimes word of mouth is the best indication that a movie or TV show is worthwhile.

For several years I heard rumors about a legendary TV series that was the quintessential “too good for television” show. A show so intelligent, so well made, that it was a miracle it ever got made in the first place. And the fact it was cancelled after only 4 episodes just proved how good it was.

So when the series Profit became available on DVD I put it on my Netflix queue and waited...for over two months. But the wait was worth it, and after seeing the show in its entirety I rushed out and bought my own copy.

In case you are unfamiliar with the show, Profit was an early (1996) attempt to create a show around an anti-hero, much like the later The Sopranos or, to a less murderous extent, Dr. Gregory House. The protagonist of the series was Jim Profit, a junior VP at an international conglomerate called Gracen and Gracen. What made Jim Profit different from any previous TV hero was the fact that he was a cold blooded sociopath. In fact, in the pilot episode he even murders his father (and when he wipes away a single tear afterwards, he looks at the drop on his hand as if to ask, “Why is water leaking from my eye?”).

His main antagonist, the company’s security chief, incorrectly refers to him as a psychopath. A psychopath enjoys being evil; a sociopath doesn’t recognize concepts like “evil” and “good.” He has goals, and any interference with achieving those goals will be eliminated. When Profit is up against Russian mobsters and corporate bosses willing to sell tainted baby food, his lack of malice becomes benign by comparison.

He never acts out of anger; when he is double crossed by a new employee his reaction is, “I underestimated him. I won’t do that again.” He never seeks vengeance (“Revenge is for the weak," he instructs his assistant). At one point he gets his rival committed to a mental hospital, but then he releases her, philosophically commenting that keeping her there would have made his life simpler, but that life is about struggle. And he is always unfailingly polite, even when people are calling him a psychopath.

The source of Profit’s mental state? When he was a child his father raised him by putting him in a cardboard box (manufactured by Gracen & Gracen) with a hole cut out so he could watch television. “Can you imagine a child raised by television?” asks someone in the pilot. As a corporate VP he has a luxury apartment, but he continues to sleep naked in a cardboard box within a secret room behind a bookcase. The shot of Profit, curled up naked in his cardboard box, is one of the great iconic images in the history of television.

Profit was created by David Greenwalt (who later co-created Angel and Miracles) and John McNamara (who subsequently worked on Brisco County Jr., Lois and Clark, and created the underrated series Eyes). In the commentary tracks they describe the difficulty they had pitching a show about an anti-hero in the early 1990’s - they were asked to physically leave the CBS building when they got to the part where Profit open-mouth kissed his step-mother. But they somehow got super producer Stephen J. Cannell behind them, and they managed to sell the idea to the edgy FOX network.

Critical praise was universal, but the ratings were abysmal even by FOX’s standards at the time. After four episodes FOX pulled the plug. But now, after ten years, all eight episodes (seven episodes plus the two hour pilot), both aired and unaired, are available on DVD, with commentary tracks on several episodes and a one hour documentary about the show.

The commentaries do tend to be a little overly self-congratulatory. The cast is good but not that good, except for star Adrian Pasdar, who hits every note just right. And the low budget shooting in Vancouver does tend to show through. But the character is a breakthrough in the history of TV--a hero without a conscience. The scripts are generally well-plotted and the character development over the few episodes that were produced is expertly done.

The great thing about DVDs is that small blips on the TV radar like Profit can find an audience and be preserved for posterity. In the commentaries Greenwalt and McNamara seem to be fishing for someone to commission a new version of Profit. I hope that doesn’t succeed, because the DVD set of Profit features as perfect a television show as has ever been produced by a network. Why mess with perfection?

I like bacon.

2006-12-03T17:52:00.000-08:00

But I don't think I could ever love it as much as this guy.

http://www.speakeasy.org/~sjmaks/bacon/ <--- Ultimate bacon sandwich

http://www.speakeasy.org/~sjmaks/cereal/ <--- Bacon cereal.

My GOODNESS! How does one not have an instant heart attack?

World on Fire

2006-11-29T18:01:00.000-08:00

I was reminded about this video in an email from a dear friend of mine.
Also, take a look at www.invisiblechildren.com for more about the world outside this monied bubble we live in.

Overlooked Movies (not according to me)

2006-11-27T22:58:00.000-08:00

"Overlooked" by Ari http://www.theaspectratio.net/overlooked.htm I figured the only appropriate introduction to the central feature of The Aspect Ratio would be something easily accessible and entertaining, yet interesting enough and somewhat indicative of the material we hope to eventually present. The ultimate aim of focusing this website on analysis is to hopefully bring something provocative to the film community, and to accomplish that in the most engaging and exciting way. In Focus will mostly revolve around in-depth reviews of specific films, retrospectives, lists, and a continuous series of different subjects. For example: Articles will include The Noir Series, The Neo-Realist Series, The Animation series and so on and so forth. The idea is to eventually create one of the most comprehensive catalogues of film analysis on the internet, with the widest variety of content. Lists are perhaps the most enjoyable way to compile a broad range of interesting content in one place, so a list is where we’ll begin. The list is simple enough. There have been plenty of noteworthy movies released this decade so far - some that received a wealth of praise and attention, and some that were unfortunately overshadowed or ignored. The following selections represent what I feel are ten American movies that deserve much more recognition. Undertow - David Gordon Green One of the most difficult things to comprehend about contemporary film is how David Gordon Green is so under-appreciated. Here is one of the most naturally talented and genuinely exciting filmmakers working today - releasing one exquisitely made feature after another to perhaps the most limited audience possible. David Gordon Green isn’t just underrated. He’s barely known. How a filmmaker that possesses the ability to create genuine art is so non-existent in the realm of honored American directors is beyond reason. This isn’t a case of a filmmaker unfairly receiving critical hostility (since most critics, especially Roger Ebert, champion his work). This is a director that simply isn’t exposed outside the world of independent film and the few critics who take it seriously. Or is it a case of a filmmaker that confounds studio executives and receives the bare minimum of support because of it? Whatever the case, David Gordon Green deserves much more appreciation than he’s getting, and his majestic adventure/thriller, Undertow, is a film that should be garnering a lot more attention. “Sometimes it’s the strange things that stick with you the longest”, one of the characters muses at the beginning of Undertow. This line is a fair description of what this picture feels like - a collision of peculiarities and oddities created from a fairly horrific circumstance that forever alters the lives of two young brothers living in the south. Part old-fashioned thriller, part adventure/odyssey, part coming-of-age drama, Undertow fuses simple, classical storytelling arcs into a sincerely affecting amalgam of cinematic sensibilities. Densely layered, yet subtly effective, David Gordon Green creates an honest and beautiful portrait of troubled youth and family tension set against an adventurous and metaphorical journey. This is a movie with real artistic expression, and that sense of depth and feeling is what makes it matter. John Munn (Dermot Mulroney) and his two sons Chris (Jamie Bell) and Tim (Devon Alan) live a quiet, secluded, not particularly healthy life in Georgia, working to survive and hoping for better times. The family is a small, but relatively strong unit despite their problems, with only Chris acting up in response to his personal anxiety. When John’s ex-con-brother Deel (Josh Lucas) reunites with his long lost family searching for his father’s hidden treasure, past experiences and old tensions are unearthed, and tragic loss and bloodshed ensues. The terror leads the children on a perilous and aimless quest for help, and it’s here that Undertow becomes something far more profound than one might initially expect. David Gordon Green is a thematic storyteller more than anything, and he expertly weaves meaning into his characters and stories. The performances are great across the board, especially the mature, impressive work by Jamie Bell. Undertow is a striking work - as piercing as the unfortunate accident that opens the film. This is excellent work. All the Real Girls - David Gordon Green While Undertow may be Green’s most thrilling and satisfying film, All the Real Girls is his most emotionally draining and moving. What’s fascinating (and inspiring) about Gordon Green is how talented he is at such a young age. He was twenty-nine when he made Undertow. Twenty-seven for this film. That’s an incredibly young age to be so accomplished. His films have an emotional sophistication that is considerably lacking in most American films, especially the ones that are most synonymous with the romantic drama. What usually winds up being fairly mundane, shallow, and perfunctory in the romance genre is given a stronger emotional weight and immediacy in Green’s All the Real Girls. This isn’t a film about unrealistic experiences, artificial and self-indulgent conversations, or superficial optimism. All the Real Girls is a straightforward and honest picture of the joy, innocence, laughter, confusion, and pain that defines the nature of young love. And while the story is told with Green’s trademark cinematic eloquences (poetic imagery, deliberate pacing) it’s easily his most accessible film. Paul (Paul Schneider) lives a simple, rather uninspired life in a small town in the South (Green’s favorite setting) with his small group of friends and lonely, unsuccessful mother (Patricia Clarkson). He's a relatively matured, well-meaning young man, who’s learned from his seedy, womanizing past to grow into a more responsible adult, especially when he becomes infatuated with his best friend’s sister, Noel (Zooey Deschanel). The two begin a very sweet and innocent relationship, the exact opposite of what Paul's past experiences have been. In Noel, he sees the sort of tenderness and warmth he previously shunned, and finally understands and values it. In Paul, Noel sees heart and security and an attraction she’s never experienced, and feels confident and fulfilled in his company. Of course, the very notion of dreamy, untouched innocence is left for the more unrealistic portraits of young love, and certain events transpire between Paul and Noel that shake the foundation of their love and turn things into a much more complex puzzle. The transition between innocence and trauma is handled with great care and feeling, and grounds the entire story in a believable and affecting realism. Most impressive about All the Real Girls is how Green uses the generally expected moments of the genre to great effect within the first half of the picture. The silly and awkward things young lovers do with each other to express their affection is present in All the Real Girls, but it’s done without the melodramatic carelessness of something like Elizabethtown. Everything feels like something Green genuinely experienced, whether he actually did or not. It’s maturely written and beautifully acted. The performances by Zooey Deschanel and Paul Schneider are, quite frankly, perfect. It would be dishonest to give all the credit to Gordon Green for the realism of All the Real Girls when both actors express themselves with such charisma, depth, and delicacy. Their work is exceptional, whether it’s Paul dancing like a lunatic on a bowling lane (my favorite sequence) or Noel desperately trying to explain her love at the darkest of times. This is profound work, arguably the best on-screen couple of recent years. What I am saying, this absolutely IS the best on-screen couple of recent years. Like Undertow, this film has an incredibly small audience. Hopefully, time will reward David Gordon Green for his invaluable contribution to film. All the Real Girls is a great film that only improves on subsequent viewing. Tremendous work. I Heart Huckabess - David O. Russell Philosophical studies in film naturally divide audiences simply because philosophical content isn’t usually regarded as entertainment. It’s a fascinating irony considering how universal philosophic questioning is, and always has been, for several centuries. For whatever strange reason, philosophy doesn’t easily translate to cinematic narrative, especially outside science-fiction. The initial expectation of such deep, metaphysical content is something heavy and deadly serious, so you’d think David O. Russell would strike gold by translating these ideas into a comedy. Well, so much for wishful thinking. Unfortunately, Russell’s witty, hilarious, and surprisingly touching existential comedy left people more perplexed than ever. The relentlessly labyrinthine syntax, debating existential and nihilistic issues of trying to comprehend just what the hell our insignificant lives mean in the grand infinity of time and space is certainly not mainstream, but Russell mixes it with such light-hearted fun that it makes it impossible to NOT enjoy! As a comedy, I Heart Huckabees is priceless. It contains some of the most charming and entertaining characters, impeccable work by a tremendous cast, and instantly classic lines of dialogue - all of which usually signify a memorable comedy. On top of that, it’s a densely layered and thoughtful philosophical exploration, one that you can’t help but get caught up in. The basic plot is fairly simple: Albert Markoviski (Jason Schwartzman) is looking for an answer to a strange coincidence he’s encountered, and hires two existential detectives, Bernard (Dustin Hoffman) and Vivian (Lily Tomlin), to unravel the nature of his existence. This case leads into his work as an environmentalist where he competes with the slimy, corporate Brad Stand (Jude Law) and introduces him to a fellow philosophically confused friend, Tommy (Mark Wahlberg). Issues bleed over into the lives of all involved, including Brad’s model girlfriend, Dawn (Naomi Watts) and the dark, mysterious figure, Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), bent on converting the young Albert to a place of meaninglessness. Okay, maybe that’s not the simplest plot ever conceived, but it is terribly fun watching the characters do everything in their power to understand the nature of, well, everything. Particularly amusing is the evolution of Jude Law’s character, easily the best work he’s done in a very accomplished career. “How am I not myself?”, indeed. Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin give lively, effortlessly enjoyable performances as the existential/detective couple, and Schwartzman and Wahlberg are absolutely unforgettable as the pair of soul-searching misfits. “Is it a crime to look at Lange?”. Underlining the peculiar nature of the film is the wonderfully playful score by the talented Jon Brion. David O. Russell is one of the smartest filmmakers working today, and I Heart Huckabees may just be his most pleasurable feat. That’s no minor accomplishment, considering he has a flawless filmography that includes Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster, and Three Kings. Gangs of New York - Martin Scorsese Gangs of New York is not a perfect film. It’s not Scorsese’s best film. It’s not the best film of the decade. It is, however, a very good historical epic made with meticulous detail and skillful craftsmanship, not to mention the source of arguably the most theatrically epic screen-performance cinema has seen since the days of Richard Burton. And that counts for something. Scorsese’s dream project may not have exceeded the enormous anticipation it created, but to become a victim of such resentment is completely undeserving when so much of the film is resoundingly successful. First of all, this is a film by Martin Scorsese, who always releases something professional and worthwhile at the very least (excluding Roger Corman exploitation shlock Boxcar Bertha). I’ve seen all of Scorsese’s films, and not once have I ever been inclined to dismiss something as completely worthless. His films that are generally regarded as “lesser works”, like New York, New York or The Color of Money or Kundun still exemplify his usual mastery in one way or another, whether it’s the ambitious scope, well directed performances, or startling visual sensibilities. Scorsese is an extraordinary filmmaker, and he always brings something worthy to his pictures. Gangs of New York is, more than anything (and most historical epics) about a specific piece of history and how it defined a place and people of America, only to be completely dwarfed by the changes that re-shaped the country. Less about the surface conflict that drives the film (a standard revenge story) and more about the transition of a time and a place, Gangs of New York tells a sprawling tale of a city in strife between the gangs, tribes, immigrants, and politicians trying to hold their ground in the small, Five Points. Set against the threat of the Civil War, Scorsese presents a fascinating glimpse of New York just before it completely explodes. As passionate about the smallest details to accurately recreate the period as he is about the epic characters that inhabit it - Scorsese mounts a fairly spectacular picture of a very different time in our history. This film covers a lot of material, and it’s a testament to Scorsese’s abilities that he manages to complete the undertaking with such thrilling results. Of course, when you have a character as commanding as Bill the Butcher, it helps. The shortcomings of Gangs of New York prevent it from reaching the masterwork status it admirably attempts to reach, but they’re not strong enough to seriously affect the overall outcome of the picture. The performances by the main leads are uneven, mostly because Cameron Diaz isn’t remotely as talented as Day-Lewis or DiCaprio. It’s also difficult for really any actor in this film to keep up with Day-Lewis, simply because his performance as the Butcher is instantly iconic. It’s one of the minor distractions, along with the tedious romance, but nothing profound enough to ruin the many great moments. The production design by Dante Ferretti makes the film worthy on its own, and it’s only complimented by the rich cinematography by Michael Ballhaus. The technical side of Gangs of New York is flawless. It’s highly skilled work by extremely talented filmmakers, and their effort is more than apparent on-screen. As for the revenge story, it’s a plot-device to move the story, and on that basis, it works. The film is more about tribal warfare over territory than anything else, and how two groups living in a small section of New York stick to ancient ritual, while the rest of the city worries about more significant dangers. I find it interesting how the conflict between gangs spanning over a decade is swamped by the Civil War and its effect on citizens. The transition between ritualist battle and new-world conflict is intriguing and reveting. The riots are some of the best sequences of Scorsese’s career, and only a director and editor (the always amazing Thelma Schoonmaker) of immense power could so smoothly handle it. Riots and chaos all over the city, and a tribal battle caught in-between. For something so complex, Gangs of New York is mighty impressive. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - Shane Black This is arguably the most overlooked mainstream comedy of the decade so far. When this movie is finally given a chance, people seem to wonder why it wasn’t an enormous success when it came out. Despite its self-referential, satirical core, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a very accessible and entertaining Hollywood comedy/thriller by the man who essentially redefined the genre in the 80’s. It’s smartly written and fast-paced, with a considerable amount of violence and hysterical comedic antics. Basically, everything that made his earlier movies so much fun. However, with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Black ups the ante with more entertaining characters and outrageous scenarios, providing the viewer with one amusing anecdote after another. You have the great lead characters: The loser (and narrator) caught in the wrong situation with the wrong people, Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr). The private detective who solves sleazy cases for wealthy Hollywood moguls, Gay Perry (Val Kilmer). The sexy aspiring actress who searches for the truth behind her sister’s supposed suicide, Harmony (Michelle Monaghan). Between these three leads, you have comedic gold, and the actors utilize every opportunity Black gives them by completely becoming these pulpy characters. The chemistry between Downey and Kilmer is just as good as the chemisty between Downey and Monaghan. No moments are wasted. No actor is overwhelmed by the other. These are three talented performers doing their best to execute Black’s witty, hilarious banter, and the result is one of the most genuinely pleasing comedic turns the genre has seen. The plot is deliberately convoluted in order to stay true to its pulp/noir influences, and Downey’s (or Black’s, if you will) smarmy voice-over gives it a fresh and energetic new spin. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang feels like something refreshingly new, even though it’s just an amalgam of Black’s common storytelling sensibilities. One thing is definite: The genre hasn’t been this exciting in a long time, and Black deserves the wide audience that this film can appeal to. Mostly everyone who eventually sees this thing enjoys it, and hopefully that enthusiasm will continue to carry on. Plus, any movie that has the line “I swear to God, it's like somebody took America by the East Coast, and shook it, and all the normal girls managed to hang on” has to win you over. Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World - Peter Weir What’s bizarre about this film is that despite the critical acclaim, decent box-office take, and numerous Oscar nominations (including best picture), the immediate enthusiasm quickly fizzled into a mild appreciation. A mild appreciation for what now seems to be considered a solid, if not spectacular Russell Crowe vehicle. It’s always fascinating to watch how a movie’s shelf-life treats it, and in the case of Master & Commander, it’s unfortunately sinking (excuse the blatant pun) into the realm of forgotten classics. I feel that this film represents the finest work of Weir’s career, is one of the great dramatic adventures set in a historical context, and simply one of the most engrossing stories brought to the screen this decade so far. Master & Commander is absorbing and compelling from the very outset - and it never lets up, never loses its sense of urgency, and never falls victim to the sentimental melodrama that plagues many of these pictures, even though it’s a sentimental (or romantic) look at the world and people of early 19th Century sea-warfare. One of the dramatic advantages of the sea-epic is the level of intimacy between characters stuck aboard a ship, and Weir carefully and wisely structures the entire narrative around that togetherness. The viewer is immersed into this lifestyle, as if part of Captain Jack Aubrey’s (Russell Crowe) crew. Once the film begins, the scope and adventure and lives of these shipmates is real and gripping, and not once do you realize just how immersive the experience has been until the film concludes and the lights go up. The story never bothers will excess or triviality, keeping everything taut and lean. Weir focuses exclusively on the key members of the ship and their mission, never becoming distracted by some of the predictable angles of the historical epic, like useless subplots involving unimportant characters. Everything is precise in Master & Commander, whether it’s Aubrey’s determination to defeat his foe (a French ship called “The Phantom”), the superstition of insecure crew members, or the scientific expedition of the ship’s doctor (Paul Bettany in his best performance). The screenplay is excellent, and the direction and editing is even better. This is one of the most briskly paced adventures of recent memory, showing that length isn’t so much the defining aspect of the epic as dramatic precision is. As for the adventure itself, Weir just about out-classes every other filmmaker working in enormous-budgeted spectacle there is today. This film is as alive and thrilling as the greatest of escapist entertainments. The technical proficiency is masterful, and seamless. The visual effects are some of the best in the history of computer generated imagery, beautifully working with the detailed sets and immensely talented cast. Weir found some of the best child actors in the world, and their performances are amazingly real. Russell Crowe gives his best performance since The Insider, acting superbly as the commanding presence that leads the men. This is the kind of role he’s made for, and hopefully he gets to reprise his role in sequels that absolutely need to happen. This is beautiful filmmaking. The Dreamers - Bernardo Bertolucci Bertolucci has been intrigued by themes surrounding sexual exoticism since his seminal work, The Last Tango in Paris, so it’s no surprise that The Dreamers would be one of the most explicit films released in American theaters. The fact that explicit sexual content prevents a work like this its proper audience is unfortunate. The Dreamers is a wondrous portrait of fiery emotion and youthful exuberance. It’s a film about love and friendship, individuality and communion - set during the turbulent period of a small cultural revolution in France regarding none other than cinema itself. While The Dreamers will certainly appeal to the film-lovers who can more closely identify with the main characters, the story itself is still about the universal concept young, frantic, desperate expression. Anyone looking for a more artistically made romantic drama will enjoy The Dreamers, regardless of the graphic nature of the sexuality or the many cinematic references. Bertolucci has always been an intriguing filmmaker, and this is easily his most electrifying work since The Last Emperor. A young American student (Michael Pitt) is in Paris during the time of the French New Wave. It’s the late 60’s, and the world of the film-aficionado is quickly growing because of the French cinematheque. As he states, “only the French would put a movie theater inside a palace”. In this palace, young film-lovers would be chemically affected by the dozens of movies from highly accomplished cinematic masters. And because of the cinematheque, Matthew is introduced to his first two friends in Paris, siblings Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green). Like him, they live for cinema and yearn for artistic revolution, so becoming quickly fond of each other is only natural. Their friendship seems exciting and joyous at first, except for a strange undercurrent of intense closeness between brother and sister. Nothing unusual happens during the first act of the film, just small touches of impending danger every now and then. Once Matthew moves in with his new friends, he discovers a very different relationship between the two - a sexual tension that he doesn’t quite understand. And this is when everything starts to spiral out of control. The three of them begin a sexual adventure - experiencing new things and unearthing confusing, eventually unsavory feelings. The sexual release works is an effective metaphor for the trio’s passionate spirit as they watch the world explode around them. The lead actors deserve much praise for their fearless, natural, and absolutely convincing performances. Michael Pitt, Eva Green, and Louis Garrel are remarkable, and not just because they handle the nudity extremely well. These are excellent performances by three very exciting young actors. I particularly enjoy the Keaton vs. Chaplin debate between Pitt and Garrell - one of the most amusing segments of the entire film. Bertolucci really lets the actors shine in their roles, and he only compliments their work with his masterful visual sensibilities. The Dreamers came and went extremely quickly during its theatrical release, and received only a tad more attention when it hit dvd. This is inspired and ambitious filmmaking, the kind that is absolutely worth a look. Munich - Steven Spielberg Political baggage and excessive controversy can overwhelm a movie, especially when it’s directed by the most commercially successful and accessible filmmaker in the history of cinema. And like most politically controversial films, the movie is extremely different once removed from the commotion. One thing was certainly unfair about the vitriol aimed at Spielberg, and that’s faulting him for having the ambition to do something brave and new in his career. People are entitled to agree or disagree with the film itself, but undermining Spielberg’s attempt to evolve as a filmmaker is simply ridiculous. The fact that he insists on challenging himself is admirable and inspiring, and I hope he continues to do so for the rest of his career. Munich represents something special in his body of work - something completely different from anything he’s ever done. This is not only his most complex film to date, but his most demanding, his most powerful, and his most cinematic. And all of these things are accomplished as the spy/thriller Munich is. As a piece of art (which it is), Munich does an amazing job of reflecting themes that make it so complex, while working tremendously as the entertainment that defines the thriller. And removed from the political upheaval that surrounded its release, Munich is a very direct and effective 70’s inspired thriller that works in the same way as movies like The Day of the Jackal, The Spy who came in from the Cold, and The Parallax View. This is the best screenplay Spielberg has had since Jaws. The sophistication of the characters and themes and the impressively structured plot make for one hell of a movie. Pacing is one of the most important factors of any thriller, and Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn do exceptional work at gradually raising the tension as the situations get more and more complex. The rhythm of the violence is what takes its toll on the main character, and the audience. It’s repetitive because the very conflict that created the movie is repetitive. It’s violence followed by violence followed by violence, in an endless cycle of bloodshed and hatred. Since he’s perhaps the greatest filmmaker of set-pieces that ever lived, each new assassination in Munich is expertly filmed, performed, and executed. The hotel bombing is one of the most startling moments - a sequences that perfectly demonstrates his ability to create intense realism. The entire film is incredibly well crafted, with much credit due to cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and production designer Rick Carter. Brilliant work. Munich is not the most overly political film ever made, and hopefully more people, including its initial detractors, will give it another chance now that it’s removed from the outrageous hype that accompanied its release. Before Sunset - Richard Linklater If David Gordon Green is the most overlooked American filmmaker working today, Richard Linklater is the second. Linklater is an intriguing voice in the world of film, and movies like Before Sunset demonstrate how vital that voice truly is. Sometimes the smallest and shortest stories have the most feeling, and this is certainly the case with this movie. Before Sunset is what I consider to be a perfect film. Not a single flaw. Not a single wasted moment. Not one distraction or sequence that doesn’t serve or take away from the story that’s being told. Before Sunset is lean and simple - an eighty minute conversation that has to be one of the most realistic, interesting, and emotional I’ve seen. Two characters simply talking for the entire duration of the movie, yet touching on the arcs and transitions and feelings that make cinema such a powerful form of art. Before Sunset isn’t a movie that goes out of its way to stun you, and because of that, it just ends up doing so. It’s been almost a decade since Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s characters last met each other in Before Sunrise. On tour in Paris to promote his new book (an autobiographical look at the events that transpired in Sunrise), the two characters are suddenly reunited. The reunion is awkward and nervous at first, but then as the two former lovers begin to talk, things start picking up. It begins very casually - friendly affection, silly jokes, catching up on what they do for a living, then it becomes more personal, more intimate. While the writing is extremely smart (one of the best screenplays written this decade), it’s the little details in the performances that make the experience so special. Body language plays a huge part in this film, and both Hawke and Delpy brilliantly display the warmth, affection, hesitation, uncertainty, and subtle sexuality that forms their bond. For instance, Delpy’s outfit is obviously something sexy and attractive - something that her long lost lover would (or should) clearly notice. Also watch as Hawke uses the opportunity of a joke to make physical contact with her. It’s playful on the surface, but something deeper in actuality. Their conversation is real. Whether it’s about politics or religion or past relationships, the interaction is honest and adult, without diving into the emotional extravagancies that usually end up falling flat. There’s a greater sense of urgency in some sequences than there are in whole movies. The way Linklater gradually lets the conversation become more serious and emotional is what really demonstrates his confidence as a filmmaker. When the characters finally let everything out, it’s genuinely powerful. Delpy’s song at the end is a classic - a small masterpiece of a sequence all on its own. The ending is, simply put, unforgettable. Like All the Real Girls, this movie is among the finest examples of the genre. This is Richard Linklater’s masterpiece. Match Point - Woody Allen Sometimes a movie comes along with an intelligence, immediacy, and intensely brutal honesty that leaves its viewer shocked, shaken, and dizzy on the potential of truly brilliant filmmaking. The veterans of the 70’s are showing their worth in a new era of filmmaking, and that worth is incredibly important for the stability of the medium. Woody Allen, one of the greatest and influential minds of the last thirty years brought us a perfect example of why classical storytelling is the essence of cinema in a time when technology is running rampant throughout the industry. Match Point is a strong reminder of how edgy and bold movies can be, and how quintessential complex, intellectual storytelling is at a time when so many filmmakers insist on safe, simplistic formula. This is a flawless work of emotional upheaval and morality, with an especially dark outlook on personal anguish and happiness. Christopher Wilton (Jonathon Rhys in last year’s best performance) is a young tennis instructor and former professional who gives lessons for a modest living, but has larger plans for a successful future. We’re introduced to a confident, well-spoken (who isn’t in a Woody Allen film?), but ultimately unsatisfied individual from a lower-class family who dreams of accomplishing something important and significant. He’s smart and knowledgable, the kind of Dostoevsky-reading, opera-loving idealist that represents many of the characteristics we’ve come to expect from Woody Allen. However, he’s also extremely charming in a steely sort of way, much more forward and brash than the typically neurotic Allen lead. He’s unsure and conflicted, but not entirely insecure. At the outset of the story, Wilton meets Tom Hewett, a wealthy young man in need of serious tennis lessons, and ends up casually bonding over similar interests, most notably opera. After a friendly chat, Tom invites him to the opera with his family, where he’s introduced to his father (Brian Cox), mother (Penelope Wilton), and sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), who immediately takes a liking to him. They start a very sweet relationship that pleases her family and provides Wilton with some excellent financial opportunities. At a lovely day-time gathering at her family estate, Wilton is introduced to many wealthy friends, but one particular person catches his eye. He finds a beautiful young American woman (Scarlett Johansson) at a ping-pong table beating up on guests. He’s stunned by her beauty and immediately risks embarrassment to make an aggressive pass at her, only to find out she’s engaged to Tom. Ouch. He handles the situation rather smoothly, but is forever changed by his necessity to have her. This of course, is the first of many complications. As time passes and the two characters become closer, it’s clear that both of them share a lustful reaction to each other, but understand the consequences of putting their personal lives in jeopardy. Or do they? Wilton realizes how uncertain his personal strength might be when faced with what he truly desires. He lusts for Johansson, and his determination to have her eventually leads to a classic sequence of passion in the torrential rainfall. This passion fizzles away quickly though, as Johansson considers the consequences and detaches herself from anything that has to do with him. Then, suddenly, she and Tom call off the marriage, and she disappears. In response, Wilton marries Chloe, which allows him to join her father’s business and make enormous amounts of money. Chloe wants children, so he’s obviously hesitant since he enjoys her company in a friendly manner rather than that of a passionate lover. And when Johannson returns and a full-on affair ensues, Match Point becomes an entirely new monster, something much darker and tragic than one might initially expect. The tension builds and builds and builds. Allen doesn’t allow a breather, a moment’s rest or any unrealistic, compromised sequence to break the relentless narrative and disturbing emotional brutality. This is the most dramatic of drama’s, the most thrilling of thrillers. The performances are amazing, and the actors deserve enormous praise for delivering Allen’s dialogue and nuance with tremendous energy. Match Point isn’t just the best Woody Allen movie of the last decade, it’s one of his absolute best films. Period. __________________________________________________________________ Saw Undertow, want to see All the Real Girls, own and adore I heart Huckabees, own but haven't watch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang yet, own Dreamers (excellent movie, despite the rating), own Before Sunset (brilliant movie), will catch Match Point at some point and am more determined now given the kudos that this article gives it.

Kiwi, by Dony Permedi

2006-11-20T00:53:00.000-08:00

From PostSecret. This made me cry.

2006-11-13T21:59:00.000-08:00

Pink Panther!

2006-11-11T19:51:00.000-08:00

Which famous feline are you?

You're the Pink Panther. Suave and sophisticated, you enjoy your superiority and your natural grace. Though to some, this attitude makes you appear arrogant, most people are attracted by it rather than turned off. You especially enjoy being in the social spotlight. It just doesn't get any better than this.
Take this quiz!

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2006-11-08T23:39:00.000-08:00

What to watch, what to save

By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY

http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2006-11-06-DVR-guide_x.htm

Save for later

Battlestar Galactica ,Sci Fi, 9 ET/PT

If you're a member of the cult, you'll watch the instant it airs. If you're not, odds are you'll never watch it at all. So we'll compromise with this category.

_________________________________________________________

One of three cable shows to make it onto the list. I love that this guy relegates Heroes to "Catch When You Can." (The other two cable shows are The Wire and Dexter, neither of which I watch, actually). Perhaps I'll pick up The Wire eventually.

And I most certainly am a member of the cult. When I am not able to watch it the instant it airs, I start having nervous twitches.

Really really big cow.

2006-11-03T21:03:00.000-08:00

Because I like cows. Mostly for eating, but in general as well.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=414142&in_page_id=1770

Pigeon Update

2006-11-01T21:41:00.000-08:00

Well, probably not on that specific pigeon. But if you are really curious, google pelican eating pigeon. There's a site with perhaps the most disturbing vid ever!

Apparently, the pigeons like to go take fish from the pelican's mouth and sometimes the pelicans don't have fish in there, so they end up with a pigeon in their mouth which they for some reason refuse to let out. So the vid is pretty much a pigeon trapped inside the mouth of a pelican flapping about violently and the pelican, in turn, trying to swallow the pigeon. THE PELICAN TRIES TO SWALLOW THE PIGEON!!! I wanted to cry. It was really freaky.

Birds eating birds. I know if happens... with hawks, eagles, falcons, ospreys, and the like! but not with pelicans. My Gosh! It's just not right. People don't have much pity for the pigeons though. Disease-ridden flying rats and all. While I partially share this opinion, I am not okay with the pelican eating it. ::shivers::

Why does the tortoise need wheels?

2006-10-27T20:23:00.000-07:00

I don't get it...

2006-10-27T18:35:00.000-07:00

An Eastern White pelican eats a pigeon in St James's Park, London. he pelican is predominantly found in South East Europe and Central Asia where it feeds on small fish. Photo: Cathal McNaughton/PA

So confused. I just don't think pelicans eat pigeons. Plus, that pigeon looks pretty calm.

Joel McHale is pretty much my favorite person.

2006-10-20T20:55:00.000-07:00

Guest Critic: Joel McHale

By Kristin Veitch
Oct 20, 2006 1:17 PM

The first time I met Joel McHale, I thought he was incredibly rude. I ran into him as I was exiting the ladies' room, and when I greeted him, he said nothing. Just stood there, and...nothing. Then, after what seemed an eternally long awkward beat, he suddenly opened his mouth and began talking, letting an entire mouthful of mouthwash pour down his chin, down his shirt and onto the floor.

It was then that I knew: Joel McHale would be one of my favorite people ever to walk through the doors of E!. Not only does he have good dental hygiene (he was on his way to the men's room to spit out that minty fresh Listerine), he'll do pretty much anything to make someone laugh. Even if it means a carpet-cleaning bill.

If you've seen his show The Soup —E!'s laughfest that celebrates the “best” of television—chances are, Joel's one of your favorite people, too. And I just happen to know (after witnessing him pretty much stalk Alias ' Kevin Weisman at a party) that Mr. McHale has impeccable taste in television.

So, I asked Joel to fill in as our guest TV critic today and share his wisdom in all things televisionary. Professor McHale graciously accepted, partly because he loves TV and partly because he thought there was money in it, but mostly because he wants to spread the word that The Soup is celebrating its big 103rd episode tonight at 10 p.m. on E!.

You heard me right. One hundred and three .

Why not celebrate episode 100 like everybody else?
We missed 100. We were drunk.

Are you sober now?
I can't make any promises.

Okay. Well, Joel, thanks for joining us anyway. Will you please tell the class, in your own expert opinion, what are the best shows on TV right now?
Ultimate Fighting Championship . Then I'd have to say, in no order, 24 , Lost , Extras . And right now, the show that makes me a little, I've got to say, physically aroused is Battlestar Galactica .

Really?
It is the greatest show ever. The most subversive show on television.

I love it, too. Have you worked the word frak into your vernacular?
I have a shirt that says Frak Off. That's how much of a geek I am. And we got to shoot a promo with [ Battlestar star] Tricia Helfer that's on The Soup tonight for the 103rd episode.

Frakkin' awesome. What's not so awesome is that I've heard you hate Grey's Anatomy . We need to clear this up. What's up with that?
There was an article in the Seattle Times in which I said, "I hate Grey's Anatomy ," and I don't hate it. I don't wish the people dead. I just disliked the [season two] finale. A lot.

What?! It was so good! Denny died. And they wore prom dresses!
Do you want me to go into this right now?

Will you, please?
All right, let me just recap. What's her name, the blonde, who was the belle of the ball at the Emmys, Katherine Heigl, she falls in love with the guy who has a bad heart, right? Okay, he's not going to get the heart because his heart isn't that bad compared to the other guy who is in front of him in line. So, I got an idea, we're gonna kill you, and then you're gonna get the heart. And then the guy in the parking lot carrying the heart is shot. And then the boyfriend dies, she does that awesome hysterical routine...

Hey, now, that was a good scene!
No, it was good. All the acting is good. But then big Mr. Head of the Hospital goes, "Oh, I can't believe you guys did this! You guys are in real trouble! You killed someone!" I'm thinking, awesome! It's now going to be Prison Break , because they all killed someone. But instead, he says something like, "I want you to go home, and I want you to put on your ball gowns and tuxedos and come back here, and we're gonna hold a prom for a sick girl who can't go to her prom, and we'll forget about this." Then the hot girl runs into the prom, and they've got a disco ball and, oh my god, are you kidding me? And people bought that crap. It's a fricking telenovela !

[Laughs.] But you're just bitter because you were originally cast as McDreamy, right?
Yes, but I got a new role in it. I am McNightmare. Wait, no, I think it's O'Nightmare. I'm the new Irish guy now that the vet is gone.

What's your expert take on Desperate Housewives , Professor McHale?
I do like Desperate Housewives . But it just gets to a point where it's very much like Grey's Anatomy and I'm like, Sure, why not have Evil Knievel move in next door! Sure, let's dig up more dead people! They are at a point where they're so concerned about keeping viewers that they make these gigantic promises that they cannot pay off without major character and story shifts. So, things just go unanswered, and then it's what happened to Alias . You just stop caring. They won't have a big finale like Cheers or Seinfeld , they'll just peter out.

What's the best new show this season?
I have to admit I am watching Jericho . Why do I watch it? It's pretty good. I like the premise a lot. Great premise. And the stories are solid, so I get interested. It's just sometimes it gets a little melodramatic. It's a little sappy. But overall, I would recommend it.

What's your TV guilty pleasure?
I was serious about Ultimate Fighting Championship . And I'm not even ashamed to say it because I want free tickets.

Best comedy?
The best comedy show on television is The Alan Partridge Show . Do you know who Alan Partridge is? It's on the BBC and freaking funny. Family Guy , I fricken love that show. Simpsons has lost me a little bit, but I still love it. And of course, Stephen Colbert and The Daily Show .

What's the best show on television tonight?
Well, let's see. The Chelsea Handler Show is on hiatus. Cheaters is on at 2 a.m., so technically, that's tomorrow. JAG was canceled. So, Kristin, what I think you are alluding to is… The Soup 's 103rd episode! It airs tonight at 10 p.m. on E!, and it celebrates the greatest in television! We had a big party last night and a lot of celebrities came.

Really? I missed the invite…Um, who was the biggest celebrity there?
Ron Jeremy.

Awesome. And what can we see tonight on The Soup 's 103rd?
Clips from my very first show and a very special photograph of Ron Jeremy asleep at our party.

______________________________________________

from eonline.

Battlestar Galactica love and Grey's Anatomy hate.
::swoons::

More pretties from bbc

2006-10-20T01:54:00.000-07:00

amit patel- anghor wat

andrew haggar- coming in from the cold

maxine khan- untitled

martin jordan

I. Gouthaman

Beauty

2006-10-18T23:57:00.000-07:00

Arkadiusz Dziczek- "Brothers"

Ganked from bbc.co.uk.

Who knew?

2006-08-25T01:19:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Francisco)

I guess my high school was actually pretty awesome. I feel a strange sense of pride that I really never had when I was there, nor in the 4 years I was in college. Maybe I needed to get the heck away from the droves of Lowell people.

New living space

2006-08-21T21:30:00.000-07:00

Because I'm a philosophy nerd....

2006-08-20T13:51:00.000-07:00

http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/25475/Doctors_Weigh_Surgery_For_Two_Headed_Baby

Doctors weigh surgery for two-headed baby

Newborn girl in Indonesia has 2 spines and one set of internal organs

Doctors in Indonesia are unsure whether they can operate on a baby born with two heads, although the newborn girl is in stable condition, according to published reports.

A team of experts has been assembled at the Pelni Petamburan Hospital in Jakarta to determine how to treat the infant who was born in a healthy condition by Caesarean on Aug. 8, the Agence France-Presse news service reported.

The newborn is an extremely rare form of conjoined twins called a dicephalus twin, which is a child born with two heads, two spinal columns, two arms and legs, but shared multiple internal organs.

The baby, named Syafitri by her parents, is breathing with the assistance of a machine to ensure that enough oxygen flows from her one heart to the two heads, Channel NewsAsia reported.

Currently the baby's vital organs are functioning normally and is in no immediate danger, although doctors are concerned about other complications from her complex condition.

_______________________________________

They refer to her as 'a' baby (one person). But she has two heads. Doesn't that make her two distinct people. How will her (their) personality (-ies) turn out? I guess the question is really what theory of identity you subscribe to. This reminded me of my Metaphysics class (which I actually rarely paid attention in, due to my refining of my Sudoku skills in class).

Trip to Oregon! Plus old home!

2006-08-18T00:16:00.000-07:00

Kissing

2006-05-31T19:56:00.000-07:00

From Shoutwire. I bolded the part that validates what I already thought. Whoopee!

Pucker Up: The Science of Kissing

Editorial in [Lifestyle] / [Dating] Comments (31) (Blog It)

dockwats posted this 2 days 18 hours ago Report Problem

Thursday night I was finally able to land a date with a very attractive woman I met a few weeks before. All went well -dinner, club, dancing, light nightcaps- then came the pivotal moment of every first date. Go for the kiss or hug?

It’s an age old decision that every person must wrestle with at some point in life. For me, I decided to be conservative and go with the quintessential hug-peck.

While this scenario plays out in front of many homes, likely millions across the world, we hardly ever take time to ask why do we kiss? Is it all in the lips?

Study of Kissing

The study of kissing is called philematology. While it is not an extensively covered field, there are some important things to take into consideration from it. Kissing involves very sensual parts of the body, namely the lips and tongue. These parts of the body are packed with nerves and are very sensitive to stimulation. There is a good reason it hurts to high-hell when you bite your tongue or bust the inner lip area. In the same sense, stimulation in these areas can cause great pleasurable sensations within the nervous system.

From a learned response over time (likely from seeing others kiss and oral stimulation), people have created a habit of stimulating pleasure and “thrill” centers of the brain from what humanity has made a sensual act. Many scientists feel that kissing is more sociological in origin, though physically the pleasures it can cause are very biologically based. This could explain why people may, on average, spend more than two weeks of their lives kissing.

Given the nature of the nerve receptors in the area, people deemed as good kissers are likely ones who habitually alternate pressure upon the lips and tongue.

History of Smooches

As far as anyone can tell, kissing may be as old as humanity itself. There are theories that kissing may have developed in ancient times when mothers chewed for their young and would pass, by mouth, the food to babies, establishing the societal norm for affection. Others have theorized that kissing may take root in religious rituals, societal signs of peace, or other cultural customs related to symbolism.

Some have even conjectured that kissing developed as signs of communication between early humans and early primate “cousins” during, yeah...gross.

Whatever the origins may be, from pheromones to communication, it is clear that kissing plays many developed roles in human society. From kids mimicking actions seen in adults, to signs of affection between family, to pleasurable stimulation within teens and adults, kissing is widespread throughout many cultures.

Tips to Effective Canoodling

Philematophobe. This is the word you are going to use if you ever get shut down when going for a kiss. It’s not that the person didn’t like you, it’s just they were scared of kissing. Remember it and use it wisely.

Dr. Onur Güntürkün of Ruhr-Universität-Bochum (say that ten times fast) did a study on kissing preference. In it, he found that most people opt to tilt the head to the right when kissing. This may be due to handiness and preferences established early in fetal and infant development. So what’s the take home message? Tilt your head to the right when going in for that first kiss. It may seem a little more natural.

As mentioned before, the key to effective sensual kissing is of course, first, mutual attraction but then remembering the science behind kissing. You are stimulating nerve sites. Make sure not to rush in like a fist on the mouth. There’s nothing worse than a girl or guy who shoves the tongue in or bop-pecks. Not good. Stimulate. Tease. Excite. These are the things that go through the good kissers mind. Besos.

Who would I be in 1400?

2006-05-29T03:19:00.000-07:00

The Harlequin
You scored 44% Cardinal, 41% Monk, 41% Lady, and 27% Knight!

You are a mystery, a jack-of-all-trades. You have the king's ear, but also listen to murmurings of the common folk. You believe in the value of force and also literature. Truly you are the puzzlement of the age.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 80% on Cardinal
You scored higher than 28% on Monk
You scored higher than 15% on Lady
You scored higher than 9% on Knight

Link: The Who Would You Be in 1400 AD Test written by KnightlyKnave on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

My Hitman Name

2006-05-13T23:30:00.000-07:00

The Arm Breaker
People Iced:	Nineteen
Car Bombs Planted:	Five
Favorite Weapon	A Cleaver
Arms Broken:	Seventeen
Eyes Gouged:	Twenty Six
Tongues Cut Off:	Nine
Biggest Enemy:	Bloody Benny
Get Your HITMAN Name

Find your Celestial Choir

Great song, one of my favorites

2006-05-02T23:59:00.000-07:00

"Turn, Turn, Turn" by The Byrds

To everything - turn, turn, turn
There is a season - turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

To everything - turn, turn, turn
There is a season - turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together

To everything - turn, turn, turn
There is a season - turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time of war, a time of peace
A time of love, a time of hate
A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing

To everything - turn, turn, turn
There is a season - turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time to love, a time to hate
A time of peace, I swear it's not too late!

The Grand Inquisitor

2006-04-19T02:53:00.000-07:00

Interesting article from Shoutwire. The idea behind Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor lives on.

If Christ Returned To Earth For Easter

in [Entertainment] / [Oddly Enough] (156) (Blog It)

Scienott posted this 1 day 10 hours ago

If Christ returned to Earth for an Easter vacation, would he be hated, abused, and murdered? Most likely …

Most of us know Christ as a long-haired peace activist whose soul would be sickened by the world’s corruption – America's political corruption in particular. “Blessed are the peacemakers" Jesus said…"Turn the other cheek...Love thy neighbor."

Such ideals, contradictions and rebuttals are the "Christian" right wing's worst nightmare. Self-proclaimed Christians who are selfishly entertained by power, nationalism, and war are a disgrace to Christianity. These are the same ignorant saps who believe Jews are doomed to Hell, but love a Zionist Israel. These so-called Christians are bound for the lake of fire (assuming there is one) and some of them, sadly, don’t even know it.

Technically speaking, the Pope is also bound for the lake of fire (unless of course he stays up to date with his confessions …) because he has become mesmerized by riches which should otherwise, by Jesus’ teachings, be given to the poor. The Vatican is like any corporate whore, except worse, because they claim to better our existence, when they are merely exploiting people and their beliefs for their own wealth and so forth.

Almost every Pope in history has been as corrupt as any politician (i.e. slave trade, support for Hitler and Nazi Germany, etc.). Christ said, "Judge a tree by the fruit that it bears; by its fruit will you know whether the tree be good or evil,” and not by what they say. The facts speak for themselves. The papacy is the wealthiest business empire on Earth. They obtain money by deception, from the poor, for example, to buy shares, property, paintings, gold, precious stones and pearls. Didn’t God apparently say not to store up treasures on Earth (Matt. 6 v 19-21)? Yet what do the Popes do? They take money from the poor and give it to the rich, hoarding it in the Vatican's vaults (creating mass poverty) - the exact opposite of what Christ said His followers must do. I know, you’re probably saying that the Vatican is just “keeping an eye on all that stuff” or “keeping it safe”, but that is irrelevant to what Christianity stands for - capitalism, tradition, or heritage preservation doesn’t necessarily or magically make it “right”.

More than 95% of the world’s wealth and resources are in the hands of less than 5% of the world’s population and every night, two-thirds of the world’s population goes to sleep hungry. How has this come to pass and be accepted as “normal”? It would be very wrong to believe that our reason for living is simply to serve a group of people, who have exalted themselves into positions where they can hoard wealth and have “authority” over others for the bettering of themselves only.

Some say religion is no longer needed, but that’s not true – regardless of whether or not religion is needed – it’s being used today, and is often sinfully exploited for political and/or personal gain. Why do you think Bush is a Christian? It’s most certainly not because he feels it in his soul to be so. Consider what freedom means and then consider the bonds of slavery that we are subject to under “the system”. We are taught from an early age to follow their system, and that anyone who does not do so is the enemy. Schools, media…all those forms of order attempt to condition us to "the new system".

Whatever happened to the traditional Laws of Freedom – the Ten Commandments (and common sense, for that matter)? They directly contradict materialistically rich rulers of this world claiming to be of a group known as Christianity. What it contains, if practiced, would keep us all, as one race, at peace. Religion can be an effective tool in further evaluating the injustice, environmental destruction and mass-oppression that is (and has been) happening in the world.

Now I know what you’re thinking; you think that I’m just another anti-establishment guy, who may be just bitter about things I can’t change, but it’s much deeper than that alone and if your mind is half open, you'll see where I'm coming from.

Jesus' life of peaceful rebellion was followed by a perverse twenty centuries of bloodthirsty bigotry. I’ve always found it strange that the same people who believe we need more weapons are generally fundamentalist Christians. Based on this, our leaders are either evil as Hell, or they’re very uneducated and way too ignorant for everyone’s good. Should we not be praising the embracement of better education? Ironically, we’re not…and here’s proof:

National leaders’ disregard for the people (i.e. the federal allowance of the 9/11 attacks), attacks on people of color (racism), attacks on nations [most notably those with wealth (i.e. opium & oil)], attacks on humans of the same gender who love each other, attacks on youth who enjoy sex, etc. All that, in the name of God? All of these attacks which involve the over-sight of “Christians” would leave Jesus himself horrified. So it’s not that religion is not needed – some would argue that religion is needed more than ever – it’s just that religion has been disgustingly manhandled to the point that it has been made the excuse for chaos (it’s not…man is the cause of chaos, and religion is the so-called solution to chaos in the first place). Jesus came to be viewed as Divine because he spoke eloquently for a gracious, loving God – he did not speak of the God that George W. Bush claims to know. Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, George Bush and their corporate-fundamentalist dependants speak for a very different kind of God - one at war with the Deity described by Christ – yes, that’s right, another war that you might not have been aware of.

Bush’s and Rove’s "master" must be defined by hate, greed, intolerance and hypocrisy. Christ kicked the money-mongers out of the temple, told the rich to give their wealth to the poor, and to follow him. Bush is unable to do that and has given no sign to ever do so; therefore, he is unable to speak for Christianity beyond a politically devious point of view. Today's Republicans have enshrined wealth, power and greed. Christ spoke of a God of compassion and joy…not the God that our corrupt leaders, including the Pope, seem to have found behind the scenes. In fact, from a religiously argumentative point of view, we could say they speak from Satan and have given no sign of detouring from their crusades.

Today's "religious" right-wingers worship meanness of spirit and a greed-driven, war-loving totalitarianism without respect for nature (which includes the people). The only way to salvation, they say, is their own unilateral way – otherwise, you’re a terrorist, a liberal divorced from reality, or something else not pleasant and supposedly subject to ridicule. I hope you interpret my words as unpleasant, because that’s what I’ve aimed for (war), to remind you of all the wars around us.

Tecumseh, the great Shawnee spirit-warrior, allegedly shouted in the early 1800s: "When Jesus Christ came upon the Earth, you killed him. The son of your own God. And only after he was dead did you worship him and start killing those who would not."

If Christ came back to organize against US political actions, there would be an unfathomable amount of hate-speak directed from the more notable Republicans. O’Reilly would not believe the Easter thing and more than question, or make fun of, a "peace prophet”; these so-called Christians cannot even come close to handling the very things they preach – are you reminded of the term blasphemy? If Jesus persisted, and his followers grew in numbers, Republicans wouldn’t hesitate to kill him. Unrealistic scenario you say? Maybe so, but the Republicans in power of the US are even more unrealistic…I can guarantee that. They’d design a scandal, pin the blame on one measly terrorist or ethnic group, and pump out propaganda with the help of the media. Modern Republicans would go to great lengths in censoring an anti-war “Son of God”. There’d likely be rumors that Jesus was gay and a user of drugs. Why then, or how, can this be considered normal? Or can it at all?

Would Jesus stand for the slaughter of 100,000 or more Iraqis in his name for wealth and political gain (even if it is the only thing that seems idealistic)? What would Christ think about a president who supports the torture chamber and electric chair? What would Jesus, who despised hypocrisy, say about a Bush who scurries around to prolong the life of a brain-dead woman, but whom gleefully executed 150 people as governor and even more as president? How would Jesus cope with a “self-proclaimed Divinity” embracing the death, misery, poverty, and many other evil premises, of others? There are several million prisoners held in the US military and civilian gulag, a barbaric prison system that makes the Romans' seem benign by comparison. What about systematic sexual abuse by both prison guards and Catholic priests? What about the wholesale slaughter of Iraqi children? What would Jesus say about gay marriage? "Love thy neighbor," would be a fair assumption, regardless. Why is someone’s sexual preference the business of those who use Jesus’ name to prolong and promote bigotry and intolerance? 50 years ago, those same cynical haters claimed Biblical sanction for laws preventing people of different colors from marrying one another.

Hitler called Christ an Aryan supremacist. Now, the US elite use him to sell tyrannical, greed-driven, gay-hating, anti-abortion, anti-personal choice, war-loving hypocrisy (not to mention, election campaigns). There’s no way Bush could have made it this far in his endeavors without the blasphemous exploitation of Christianity which in turn duped us, “the sheep”. In fact, Bush would not have been able to become President had he not “found Jesus” after the exposure of his corrupt past.

Religion is the United States’ weakest link.

Easter should remind us that if Jesus returned to preach what he challenged the Romans with, particular Republicans would do to him what Pontius Pilate (the one who ordered Jesus' crucifixion) did; they would ridicule him and then kill him.

More Quiz fun

2006-04-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

You Have a Melancholic Temperament

Introspective and reflective, you think about everything and anything.
You are a soft-hearted daydreamer. You long for your ideal life.
You love silence and solitude. Everyday life is usually too chaotic for you.

Given enough time alone, it's easy for you to find inner peace.
You tend to be spiritual, having found your own meaning of life.
Wise and patient, you can help people through difficult times.

At your worst, you brood and sulk. Your negative thoughts can trap you.
You are reserved and withdrawn. This makes it hard to connect to others.
You tend to over think small things, making decisions difficult.

What Temperment Are You?

You Are Mud Pie

You're the perfect combo of flavor and depth
Those who like you give into their impulses

What Kind of Pie Are You?

More from New Orleans

2006-04-08T01:40:00.000-07:00

New Orleans Spring Break

2006-04-02T21:30:00.000-07:00

Quiz fun

2006-03-29T18:45:00.000-08:00

You Are 29 Years Old

Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe.

13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world.

20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences.

30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more!

40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

What Age Do You Act?

Your Eyes Should Be Brown

Your eyes reflect: Depth and wisdom

What's hidden behind your eyes: A tender heart

What Color Should Your Eyes Be?

What Your Face Says

At first glance, people see you as warm and well-balanced.

Overall, your true self is reserved and logical.

With friends, you seem dramatic, lively, and quick to react.

In love, you seem mysterious and interesting.

In stressful situations, you seem sad and helpless.

What Do People Think Of Your Face?

You Are an Indie Rocker!

You are in it for the love of the music...
And you couldn't care less about being signed by a big label.
You're all about loving and supporting music - not commercial success.
You may not have the fame and glory, but you have complete control of your career.

What Kind of Rocker Are You?

You Are 64% Abnormal

You are at medium risk for being a psychopath. It is somewhat likely that you have no soul.

You are at high risk for having a borderline personality. It is very likely that you are a chaotic mess.

You are at high risk for having a narcissistic personality. It is very likely that you are in love with your own reflection.

You are at medium risk for having a social phobia. It is somewhat likely that you feel most comfortable in your mom's basement.

You are at medium risk for obsessive compulsive disorder. It is somewhat likely that you are addicted to hand sanitizer.

How Abnormal Are You?

Some brilliance from George Carlin

2006-02-22T01:01:00.000-08:00

George Carlin on Stuff

Actually this is just a place for my stuff, ya know? That's all, a little place for my stuff. That's all I want, that's all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know? I can see it on your table, everybody's got a little place for their stuff. This is my stuff, that's your stuff, that'll be his stuff over there. That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time.

A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you're taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see everybody's got a little pile of stuff. All the little piles of stuff. And when you leave your house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn't want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They never bother with that crap you're saving. All they want is the shiny stuff. That's what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get...more stuff!

Sometimes you gotta move, gotta get a bigger house. Why? No room for your stuff anymore. Did you ever notice when you go to somebody else's house, you never quite feel a hundred percent at home? You know why? No room for your stuff. Somebody else's stuff is all over the goddamn place! And if you stay overnight, unexpectedly, they give you a little bedroom to sleep in. Bedroom they haven't used in about eleven years. Someone died in it, eleven years ago. And they haven't moved any of his stuff! Right next to the bed there's usually a dresser or a bureau of some kind, and there's NO ROOM for your stuff on it. Somebody else's shit is on the dresser.

Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff? God! And you say, "Get that shit offa there and let me put my stuff down!"

Sometimes you leave your house to go on vacation. And you gotta take some of your stuff with you. Gotta take about two big suitcases full of stuff, when you go on vacation. You gotta take a smaller version of your house. It's the second version of your stuff. And you're gonna fly all the way to Honolulu. Gonna go across the continent, across half an ocean to Honolulu. You get down to the hotel room in Honolulu and you open up your suitcase and you put away all your stuff. "Here's a place here, put a little bit of stuff there, put some stuff here, put some stuff--you put your stuff there, I'll put some stuff--here's another place for stuff, look at this, I'll put some stuff here..." And even though you're far away from home, you start to get used to it, you start to feel okay, because after all, you do have some of your stuff with you. That's when your friend calls up from Maui, and says, "Hey, why don'tchya come over to Maui for the weekend and spend a couple of nights over here."

Oh, no! Now what do I pack? Right, you've gotta pack an even SMALLER version of your stuff. The third version of your house. Just enough stuff to take to Maui for a coupla days. You get over to Maui--I mean you're really getting extended now, when you think about it. You got stuff ALL the way back on the mainland, you got stuff on another island, you got stuff on this island. I mean, supply lines are getting longer and harder to maintain. You get over to your friend's house on Maui and he gives you a little place to sleep, a little bed right next to his windowsill or something. You put some of your stuff up there. You put your stuff up there. You got your Visine, you got your nail clippers, and you put everything up. It takes about an hour and a half, but after a while you finally feel okay, say, "All right, I got my nail clippers, I must be okay." That's when your friend says, "Aaaaay, I think tonight we'll go over the other side of the island, visit a pal of mine and maybe stay over."

Aww, no. NOW what do you pack? Right--you gotta pack an even SMALLER version of your stuff. The fourth version of your house. Only the stuff you know you're gonna need. Money, keys, comb, wallet, lighter, hanky, pen, smokes, rubber and change. Well, only the stuff you HOPE you're gonna need.

All material written and owned by George Carlin.

Happy Valentines Day from the movies!

2006-02-14T23:34:00.000-08:00

The Times

February 11, 2006

Darling, please. Not in front of the cameras

By Kevin Maher

Want to make a sexy movie? Cut out the sex. Great films keep their hands to themselves

Let’s get one thing straight from the start: they kiss in Brief Encounter! Yes, they do. They kiss under the railway station, they kiss up on the platform, they kiss on the river bridge, and then they kiss, torridly, while fumbling in front of the open fire in an empty apartment. Here, the embrace becomes so intense and the intentions so deliberate that our supposedly stoical protagonists, Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), are denied an earth-shattering bout of extramarital intercourse only by the untimely return of the owner of the apartment.

And yet, in a bizarre act of collective cultural denial, most observers misremember David Lean’s 1945 classic as a chaste affair. An official review on the BBC’s website is typical when it says that, romantically, “nothing happens” between the straying couple, while a Los Angeles-based cineaste reporting for the Internet Movie Database is more revealing still when he writes: “This passionate pair never even exchange a kiss.” Even the great New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, when writing about the film in the summer of 1946, just days after seeing it, could only conjure up the vaguest notion of interpersonal contact with the poetically oblique line: “For a brief spell they spin in the bewilderment of conventions and their own emotional ties.”

The reason for this amnesia is that Brief Encounter is defined by what it denies, not what it permits. It has become a classic movie romance, if not the classic movie romance, precisely because of its monumental refusal to consummate the affair of its own star-crossed lovers.

It is a film, written by a privately gay man (Noël Coward), that defends and even celebrates the tragic impossibility of the unattainable relationship. Yet it’s also a film written by a publicly patriotic man that gives a warning of the dire consequences to the national character if this same relationship were suddenly attainable. “It came at the end of the Second World War when England was in danger of losing its morality,” says Coward’s biographer Sheridan Morley, in the documentary A Profile of Brief Encounter. “It’s the last bastion of good behaviour, the last film that says: ‘Don’t give into your heart! Simply do your duty!’ ”

Context, of course, is everything — even in 1945 the Herculean moral restraint on display in Brief Encounter was contestable. Lean recalled sitting in horror in a cinema while a mainly working-class audience laughed derisively at his film’s po-faced rectitude. He would later claim that his protagonists might have been “screwing like rabbits” were it not for the demands of the Rank Organisation, the movie’s upstanding studio home.

Yet it’s precisely this same anachronism, this sense of slightly overdone and oddly artificial restraint, that casts such a long and imposing sha-dow on the entire history of serious screen romance since.

Films such as the 1984 Robert De Niro-Meryl Streep two-hander Falling in Love explicitly attempted to recreate Brief Encounter’s romantic tension and searing self-denial. The two stars play decent yet gloomily married New Yorkers who meet on a train, fall in love and spend the rest of the film scrupulously avoiding hanky panky. It’s all very Howard and Johnson, but in the context of mid-1980s modern metropolitan America it seems at first odd, then dramatically wearying, and finally just plain dull.

Similarly, Neil Jordan’s The End of the Affair is meticulous in its re-creation of Brief Encounter’s repressive wartime middle-class milieu and the agony of unfulfilled passion between the very married Julianne Moore and the very tortured Ralph Fiennes. This time, however, Jordan’s answer to the film’s crisis question of consummation is to throw caution to the wind and to insert some very 21st-century sex scenes into a mid-20th century romance.

The resulting scenes, mostly featuring loving close-ups of Fiennes’s buttocks, seem to tear at the very heart of the story. Though Jordan’s stated aim was to re-historicise the Brief Encounter-type romance within the “real” social and sexual context of the 1940s, the film does not feel any more real because of them. If anything, the sex scenes make the film more unreal.

Romantic movies all have the same dramatic motor: the overcoming of obstacles on the path to love. With speedy consummation of passion now more acceptable both in society and on screen, modern films have a problem: how can they keep their love-struck protagonists as far apart as possible?

Death is usually your best bet here. Look at Ghost, Shadowlands, The English Patient or even Titanic. In all these films, the price you pay for sex is an appointment with the grim reaper. It’s as if, in purely filmic terms, the dramatic tension diffused by a physically consummated relationship must be quickly re-established by the introduction of an incredible crisis in the lives of the lovers. This is graphically illustrated by the brutal slaying of Patrick Swayze in Ghost. Howard’s Dr Alec should consider himself lucky that Johnson’s Laura never actually “put out” for him — he would have undoubtedly ended up in pieces under the 5.40 from Milford.

Even B-grade romances such as Message in a Bottle, What Dreams May Come, City of Angels and Untamed Heart can’t resist the allure of postcoital death, while those romantic movies that avoid death usually employ some arch contrivance to keep the lovers apart. In Sleepless in Seattle it’s physical distance, in Notting Hill it’s the price of fame, in Forever Young it’s time travel, and in Pearl Harbor it ’s an execrable script.

In every case these movies are emulating and making formulaic what was once natural in the narrative kernel of Brief Encounter. There are, however, some exceptions. Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love sustains the circuitous story of two simultaneous extramarital affairs solely through the power of art direction, musical score and the depiction of unreleased sexual tension. Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, again owing a lot to Brief Encounter, gives us two lost and lonely souls (Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson), both separately married, both drifting around a modern metropolis in search of meaningful human connection. Unlike Falling in Love, though, when the couple deny themselves an illicit physical relationship it seems utterly appropriate to the film’s airy, wispy and non-corporeal Japanese dreamworld setting.

Even Brokeback Mountain, despite its scant and curiously tasteful sex scenes, owes a debt to Brief Encounter. The cowboys in question might as well be Johnson and Howard, meeting on a mountainside instead of a railway platform, with a moralistic world standing between them and the possibility of true love.

Of course what these romantic classics are really doing, at a chromosomal level, is articulating the impossibility of desire. As any Freudian will tell you, and as any Buddhist will agree, the most fundamental human truth is that there is nothing beyond desire. Desire is its own ineffably unsatisfying end. The end of desire is simply more desire. Thus what the genuinely romantic movie aims to do, and what Brief Encounter does so efficiently, is to freeze the story in a giddy state of agitated desire. Here, untouched by disappointment, and in the everlasting flush of romantic arousal, the film can happily perpetuate the myths of permanent romantic love, of finding Mr and Mrs Right, and of the final and fulfilling satisfaction of human desire. But with lots of kissing on the side.

Source: entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

Anticipated Movies

2006-01-05T18:29:00.000-08:00

My Winter Break consists of....

2005-12-22T20:40:00.001-08:00

Finally finally finally read it. Good book, I liked it. Will try to read Foucault's Pendulum soon. It's funny that there are so many books out there trying to debunk the Da Vinci book given that the book is a work of FICTION! But might check one of those out just to learn about the historical stuff, nerd that I am. But will certainly not pay for one of those. Yay, library.

I liked this movie a lot. Love the penguins. Wasn't planning to watch it, but my sister loves animals, so I thought the sibs would want to see it.

Ah, John Hughes marathon! Sweet 80s movies.

And Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs: Rouge.

Narnia and Back!

2005-12-10T16:53:00.000-08:00

I've found Narnia!
I liked it a lot.
Watch it! Watch it! Watch it!
If you don't want to watch it because you think it's a "Christian" movie, you are an idiot. Don't watch Ben-Hur, or Ten Commandments, or Greatest Story Ever Told, or any other movie with references to Christ then. Oh, and never read most of Western Literature ever again. Oh, and you're an idiot.
It's a spectacular movie, and I shall return to Narnia again soon.
Yay, Narnia!

I Heart SF!

2005-11-12T00:55:00.000-08:00

ARTICLE OF INTEREST:

O'Reilly invites mass-murder

Does Bill O'Reilly have it in for the city by the bay?

San Franciscans have been in an uproar this week over apparent comments by the host of Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor" that it was A-OK for terrorists to wipe the city off the map.

At issue are comments from O'Reilly's Election Day broadcast on his syndicated Westwood One radio show about a San Francisco ballot measure opposing the presence of military recruiters in city schools.

"Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead," O'Reilly said, according to a transcript and audio posted by liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America, and by the San Francisco Chronicle.

"And if al-Qaida comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead," O'Reilly continued, referring to the 1933 San Francisco landmark that sits atop Telegraph Hill.

Adding to the buzz was the archived version of O'Reilly's Tuesday show, which omitted the incendiary comments, according to Bay Area TV station KNTV.

City officials were not amused. "It sounds like he's on the same medication Rush Limbaugh is addicted to, and he should go see a therapist,'' Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, whose district includes the tower, told the Chronicle.

Neither O'Reilly nor Fox News have yet commented on the dust-up.'

The big digit to the military'?As for the ballot measure, which urged local high schools and colleges to bar military recruiters from their campuses, it passed with 60 percent of San Franciscans in favor of it.

The radio show was not the only time O'Reilly commented on the ballot proposition. On his Monday night "O'Reilly Factor," he tangled with Angela Alioto, the former president of the city's Board of Supervisors.

"Why should the rest of the country protect your butt, with all due respect, OK, when it comes to the war on terror, if San Francisco is going to thumb your nose and give the big digit to the military? Why should ... why should we protect you from al-Qaida and terrorists if you're going to disrespect the military, by passing this ... even though it's symbolic ... this resolution?" he asked Alioto.

Alioto briefly tripped up O'Reilly during her appearance, pointing out that he had conflated the military-recruitment measure with another measure to ban handguns. That measure also passed, 58 percent to 42 percent.
________________________________________________

I love my city! Especially because Bill O'Reilly hates it. Would anyone really want to blow this up? In the words of Arrested Development's GOB, "C'mon!"

Lake Tahoe Piers

2005-11-06T18:12:00.000-08:00

No idea.

2005-11-01T19:03:00.000-08:00

The 1000 Mark

2005-11-01T18:58:00.000-08:00

Sweet sweet Phantom Gray Toyota Corolla '06.

Goodbye Cruel World.

2005-10-22T01:36:00.000-07:00

158. My life is over. Goodbye and farewell. I'm going to drown myself in the sink. It can't get much more pathetic than that. Goodbye UCLA. Goodbye world. Goodbye future. Goodbye friends. RIP: Me.

PS: Sorry if you don't appreciate this sort of humor. Don't mean to offend. It's just the way I am.

FU 158 and FU LSAT!

Menu du jour

2005-10-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

Mann's The Magic Mountain is slowly killing me, but it's getting better.

Batman Begins rocks my world. Christian Bale? So hot!

The end of LSAT season.

2005-10-09T19:48:00.000-07:00

R.I.P. LSAT Studies.

August 1, 2005- September 30, 2005

CostcoCarts

2005-09-29T19:29:00.000-07:00

Death Star profile

2005-09-27T01:09:00.000-07:00

"Abandon every hope, ye who enter here."
- Dante, "Inferno."

L'esprit biere

Feeling the need to start posting things to here again.

Completely Unplugged, Fully Green

First PostSecret post in a while

PostSecretPost

PostSecretPost

PostSecretPost

PostSecretPost

PostSecretPost

PostSecretPost

A Rather Amusing Review of Phantom of the Opera

PostSecretPost

Salon.com- Goodbye, Harry Potter

PostSecretPost

PostSecretPost

Things I Love- Part 2

Mmm... Chocolate

July 11, 2007

Linux, the new Apple?

iPhonyWhy Apple's new cell phone isn't really revolutionary.

Things I Love. Part 1 of n

Father's Day PostSecretPost

Charlie the Unicorn Nuttiness (Thanks Mui)

PostSecretPost

BBC Day in Pictures

Hollywood’s Shortage of Female Power

PostSecretPost

On the Tiger's Trail- Documentary on Uganda

I love this soooo much! Thanks Mui!

PostSecretPost

Addendum to Anti-Paul Haggis post

Beatboxing + Flute

Helen Mirren + In N Out = awesomeness

Because I hate Paul Haggis...

Some commercials I love

Brilliance from AV Club

Why I Don't Watch Grey's Anatomy

Mary Mack

Happy Chinese New Year (about 30 minutes ago...)

Photography

Happy Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day offerings from PostSecret

Part 4: Raphael

Part 3: Marcel Duchamp

Paintings Part 2: Petrus Christus

My favorite paintings Part 1: Rene Magritte

This is what I do with my time....

PostSecretPost

For the Bible told them so

Bathrooms

I love Wittgenstein!

Charlie Rose - Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro, & Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Another something wonderful from PostSecret.

Christian Cinema

It rubs the lotion on its skin

Christmas Goat

Yay! I'm Like Starbuck.

Great article on Profit

I like bacon.

World on Fire

Overlooked Movies (not according to me)

by Ari

Kiwi, by Dony Permedi

From PostSecret. This made me cry.

Pink Panther!

Really really big cow.

Pigeon Update

Why does the tortoise need wheels?

I don't get it...

Joel McHale is pretty much my favorite person.

Guest Critic: Joel McHale

More pretties from bbc

Beauty

Who knew?

New living space

Because I'm a philosophy nerd....

Doctors weigh surgery for two-headed baby

Newborn girl in Indonesia has 2 spines and one set of internal organs

Trip to Oregon! Plus old home!

Kissing