This illustrated list of "20 Cities, Islands & Countries Threatened by Global Warming" includes Yellowstone National Park and other thermal, geological and wildlife preserves:
Image from the generously stocked Yellowstone Digital Slide File Home Page.
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.
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?"
"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."
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!
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
2. M.I.A., "Paper Planes":
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.
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 handTo fill it and willing
[...]
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:
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?
The New York Times briefly discussed some ambitious poster art: "Not Just Another Half-Dozen Pretty, Floating Faces" (1/1/2006).
Criterion lovefest, no. 9 (in no order):
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.
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.
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:
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.
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 [...]"
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!
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.
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:
