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Iris

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Yellowstone

  • 2 days ago
  • Post a comment

This illustrated list of "20 Cities, Islands & Countries Threatened by Global Warming" includes Yellowstone National Park and other thermal, geological and wildlife preserves:

Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone National Park
"Summer rain storm over The Thunderer," photograph by E. Bovy, 1976.
Image from the generously stocked Yellowstone Digital Slide File Home Page.

Hayden Valley and Mount Washburn
Hayden Valley and Mount Washburn

Lower Falls, Yellowstone River
Lower Falls, Yellowstone River

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Marital Rating Scale

  • 2 days ago
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Are you jolly and gay just like those "Sex and the City" chicks? Do you warm up your cold feet by placing them on another person, à la Jessica Simpson? These are the stakes of the "Wife's Chart": it's a system to rate yourself or your spousal associate. The scale was composed in 1939 by George W. Crane, a Northwestern University psychologist. We only have the first page of Crane's wife-evaluation, so you'll have to adjust your rating: the highest possible score on the chart below is 25.

Marital chart
Marital chart
1 comment

Source: "Monitor on Psychology: Husbands, rate your wives"


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Ultimate Warrior

  • 3 days ago
  • 3 comments
Warrior
Warrior

As a pro-wrestler, the Ultimate Warrior was bombastic. He rumbled through phenomenological discourse while decked out in face paint and star-spangled leather undies. (A lengthy VH1-style montage of Ultimate Warrior's speeches is here.) Nowadays he is a motivational speaker not so different from the bearlike Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek.

When his words are in print, Warrior is messianic and a little hard to follow: in short, he's almost indistinguishable from higher-profile theorists like Heidegger or Foucault. Such is the thesis of Jeff Shaw of the Minneapolis City Pages. Shaw's brilliant 12-part quiz dares you to distinguish between Ultimate Warrior, Nietzsche, Rand et al: "Philosopher...or Warrior?"

Ultimate Warrior
Ultimate Warrior


"The standard of morality in altruism is the degree of selflessness for an action. The only justification for your own existence is to continue sacrificing and renouncing your own values for others. Individuality is crushed, and blatant crimes in the name of "selflessness" destroy man's spirit in an altruist society. It certainly does not mean a general good-will towards others, nor does it mean being charitable to worthy causes. Altruism is self-abnegation."

- the Ultimate Warrior


3 comments

Job Hunting

  • 4 days ago
  • 5 comments

O, VOX! The job hunt keeps me from drinking at the fountain of Voxers' pith and wisdom. There are some great opportunities out there for Balzac scholars and administrative polymaths like me and Marian the Librarian...

From The Music Man:

Marian:
Mama, a man with a suitcase followed me home. [...] I know what the gentleman wanted.

Mrs. Paroo:
What, dear?

Marian:
You'll find it in Balzac.

Mrs. Paroo:
Well, excuse me for livin', but I never read it!


Entertainment is in short supply for me these days; job hunts don't inspire pop culture. Working is a great motivator (viz. the catchy "Welcome to the Working Week" by Elvis Costello). So is school, though maybe the only excellent novel set in higher education is Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. But the in-between phase of the post-academic career search? A cultural void!

Elvis CostelloLuckyjim


Were artistic inspiration a slave to logic, job hunting would be a great subject for art. It's a quest like any other. There would be no Don Quixote without dusty roads and no Jane Austen novels without carriages that move people between districts. The verve, the tension of fiction requires a transition between places or between social groups. Name a great novel: odds are that it has something to do with provincial kids moving to the city because they need a job, or city folk vacationing in the country to prove that they're not the working kind.

A few job-hunt-related moments in pop culture:

1. Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski
He was so resolute in his antipathy to jobs; maybe he was never transitional, never seeking employment. Judge for yourself: his first published story, "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip" (1944), is online at bukowski.net.

2. M.I.A., "Paper Planes":
M.I.A. "Paper Planes" (2007)
"Bona fide hustler" M.I.A. lists her career objectives thus:
All I want to do is BANG BANG BANG BANG!
And KA-CHING!

3. Gwyneth Paltrow smirks "I hate job hunting" in the trailer for Iron Man.
Virginia "Pepper" Potts, "Iron Man"
Virginia "Pepper" Potts, "Iron Man"
Hey, I told you that these were slim pickings.

4. Sylvia Plath's poem "The Applicant" is an interview of a prospective husband. (Hear Plath recite it, or read the text by yourself, at poetryarchive.org.)

First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing
[...]

Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
1 comment
(Copyright Faber & Faber LTD and Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC, 2002.)
5 comments

Poster

  • 7 days ago
  • 2 comments

Art versus commerce: art won in Eastern Europe in the 60s, when symbolism and surrealism beat out money, at least where movie posters were concerned. The weird artwork in posters once contained anti-Communist messages; now they are purely l'art pour l'art.

Even the most abstract Polish posters communicate the tone and some of the plot of a movie. You can see the lioness Elsa and her life in Born Free:

"Born Free" Polish poster, 1966
"Born Free" Polish poster, 1966
Fatal Attraction's profanely quick plot arc influences the imagery:
"Fatal Attraction" Polish movie poster, 1987
"Fatal Attraction" Polish movie poster, 1987
Some poster artists develop followings of collectors, due to their instantly recognizeable styles. Artists' techniques vary radically, but they share a taste for the eerie:
Halka 2005
Halka 2005
"Under the Volcano" Polish poster, 1985
"Under the Volcano" Polish poster, 1985

Mulholland Drive is a dewy-eyed affair about a besotted ingénue. Why not promote it with posters that look like some dreamy girl's entries in a high school art fair?
"Mulholland Drive" Polish posters, 2001
"Mulholland Drive" Polish posters, 2001

All of the above posters are for sale at polishposter.com.  For a nice gallery of posters for familiar movies, see RetroCrush.
The New York Times briefly discussed some ambitious poster art: "Not Just Another Half-Dozen Pretty, Floating Faces" (1/1/2006).
2 comments

Top ten: Cléo from 5 to 7

  • 7 days ago
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Criterion lovefest, no. 9 (in no order):

Cleo From 5 to 7 - Criterion Collection
Cleo From 5 to 7 - Criterion Collection

Cleo from 5 to 7 is actually only 90 minutes, real-time, in the life of a pop star waiting for results from a biopsy. Cléo evolves each minute: at the beginning she's a preening whirlwind of ego, and at the end she's a cosmopolitan who's capable of earnest feeling and thought. In the last shot she watches us calmly as the camera zips off into the sunset, leaving her in Paris on a summer evening.

Cleo from 5 to 7
Cleo from 5 to 7

Agnès Varda was a photojournalist before she made this movie in 1962. As a result it's beautifully shot, and also the most intelligent and most fun movie in the New Wave or nouvelle vague of late 50s and 60s French cinema. Most New Wave movies imagine life as a struggle to cling to imitations and false hopes at all costs: that's a very superficial reading of Existentialism, one that Godard et al riffed on for many years. But Varda does something different: Cléo de 5 à 7 is about the process of shedding roles, divorcing clichés and arriving at connection and comfort with others.

Cléo de 5 à 7: Czech poster
Cléo de 5 à 7: Czech poster
Cléo from 5 to 7: hearing a new song

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Top Ten: Stan Brakhage

  • May 8, 2008
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If Diablo Cody and a Beastie Boy can do it, then we can, too. I refer, of course, to listing your top ten most beloved Criterion Collection DVDs. Criterion's expertly remastered DVDs tend towards French gangstas, Japanese ghosts, Swedish psycho-rigids, neo-realismo and general crème de la crème of art-house cinema.

Onward, ho!

No. 10:

By Brakhage - Anthology - Criterion Collection
By Brakhage - Anthology - Criterion Collection
If you’ve been to a modern art museum, you know the lameness of a “video art” installation. While painters and sculptors experiment, for some reason film/video artists just focus their camera on a talking head or a landscape, letting the subject do all the work. Movies can be much more or less than such slow, steady montages of easily decipherable things.


Enter Stan Brakhage. He used filmstrip itself as a medium: though he often worked with montage, sometimes he didn’t even need a camera to record images. Instead, he manipulated strips of film and then ran them through a projector for an unparalleled visual narrative.

To make “Mothlight” (1963), he collected small objects from nature, placed them between pieces of tape, and then he transferred the strips of tape to 16mm film. When they're projected, the film tells the story of a moth’s life, imagining the insect's perspective of its own flight, using nothing but grass, flowers, leaves and moth parts.

Filmstrips from "Mothlight", copyright the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Marilyn Brakhage
Filmstrips from "Mothlight", copyright the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Marilyn Brakhage

Fred Camper reproduces these and other filmstrips from Brakhage’s estate thanks to Marilyn Brakhage.

What was his workday like, making the small wonders compiled by Criterion on the DVD "By Brakhage"? The most insightful passage I've read is also the loveliest. Michael Stern posted to his blog this memory of his walk and talk with Brakhage:

"...[H]e asked me if I'd like to see the film he'd been working on.  I'd heard that he'd been haunting the local cafés, where he'd been painting and scratching his way through a few frames each day, and I was eager to see the results.  I told him that I'd be very pleased to see what he'd come up with, and so with a wry smile he reached into his bag and produced a small spool of film, which he drew across his chest and held up to the sun for us to see.  I remember the colours being a vivid array purples, reds, and blues, all mixed together like in a Turner sunset [...]"


Post a comment Tags: criterion

"I would shake her web"

  • May 7, 2008
  • 3 comments

How grand that the zeitgeist of email forwards contains, this week, two true gems:

A. After making the rounds at film festivals, it's available in full at the Sundance Channel site: "Green Porno," a series of shorts about how insects and small animals copulate. They are written, directed, produced and performed by Isabella Rosselini. Edu-tainment and auteur filmmaking are together, forever, at last!

Rossellini as male spider, "Green Porno"
Rossellini as male spider, "Green Porno"

B. One year ago, Stephen Colbert debuted his own K-Pop video; this week his rivalry with the Korean pop superstar Rain achieved "closure" during their after-hours danceoff.
RainColbert

3 comments

Wednesday afternoon shopping list

  • May 7, 2008
  • 2 comments
Orange nail polish
Orange nail polish
Gainful employment ("vive la greve" - long live striking)
Gainful employment ("vive la greve" - long live striking)
1 comment
The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss
The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss
Claire Nouvian

Animal crackers
Animal crackers

2 comments

Homecoming

  • May 7, 2008
  • 2 comments

There are too many exclusive reasons -- I mean, raisons trop intimes --  to feel beatific upon returning to my homeland, the beautiful country in Minnesota. However, one reason to come to Minnesota is pasted to the sides of bridges, fences and MySpace pages:

North Star Roller Girls poster, 2007-8 season
North Star Roller Girls poster, 2007-8 season
2 comments


Thanks to Andy, the only roller derby statistician in my Vox neighborhood.

2 comments

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Iris

About Me

Iris
United States
View my profile
archive fever

Photos

  • Marital chart
  • Hayden Valley and Mount Washburn
  • Lower Falls, Yellowstone River
  • Yellowstone National Park
  • Warrior
  • Ultimate Warrior
  • Sylvia Plath
  • Charles Bukowski
  • Virginia "Pepper" Potts, "Iron Man"

View more of my photos

Neighborhood

  • Renee
    Renee Updated: 53 minutes ago
  • DZgunrock
    DZgunrock Updated: 4 hours ago
  • kitty
    kitty Updated: 4 hours ago
  • Slow Learner
    Slow Learner Updated: 5 hours ago
  • W♥M
    W♥M Updated: 6 hours ago

Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.

View my neighbors

Videos

  • M.I.A. "Paper Planes" (2007)
  • Cléo from 5 to 7: hearing a new song
  • Cleo From 5 to 7 - Criterion Collection
  • By Brakhage - Anthology - Criterion Collection
  • "Ballade De Melody Nelson" - Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin
  • Kenzo Amour (perfume commercial)
  • Flower by Kenzo (perfume commercial with Shu Qi)
  • The Naked Kiss  - Criterion Collection

View more of my videos

Audio

  • "Red House"
  • Songs of the West, Vol. 2
  • Brahms: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2
  • Cocteau Twins & Faye Wong - Touch Upon Touch
  • Morrissey - Sister I'm a Poet
  • Back to Black
  • All This Useless Beauty (With Bonus Disc)
  • Mozart: Symphonies Nos. 38 & 39

View more of my audio

Books

  • Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
  • L'Ecume des jours
  • Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes
  • Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State
  • Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900
  • Bob and Harv's Comics
  • The Turn of the Screw & In the Cage (Modern Library Classics)
  • Notebook.

View more of my books

Archives

  • May 2008 (10)
  • April 2008 (15)
  • March 2008 (16)
  • February 2008 (17)
  • January 2008 (12)
  • 2008 (70)
  • 2007 (75)
  • 2006 (56)

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