This Film Is Not Yet Rated does a great job of exposing many of the deep problems with the movie industry's MPAA ratings, but I think it overlooks a big one. It seems to me that the movie ratings board hands out R and NC-17 ratings based on two general factors: how much they dislike the violence, and how much they like the sex. Just as pornography has been defined as "what turns the Supreme Court on", NC-17 is defined in practice as "what turns the Ratings Board on".
Cut for a major work in the canon of Western art, may be NSFW in parts of the US.
From the front page of today's Wall Street Journal (copying from the paper version - emphasis supplied):
The Pentagon has redesigned its biggest "bunker buster" bomb with more advanced features intended to enable it to destroy Iran's most heavily fortified and defended nuclear site.
U.S. officials see development of the weapon as critical to convincing Israel that the U.S. has the ability to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb if diplomacy fails, and also that Israel's military can't do that on its own.
Awesome. Also:
U.S. officials said the U.S. and Israel have reached an understanding that they will assess the intentions of Iran's leaders after the [June 2013] election, and then, barring progress on the dimplomatic track, shift to a detailed discussion of military options.
And the Administration was planning on publicly informing U.S. citizens of this when? And since when does "diplomacy" include things like outright sabotage and crippling economic sanctions?
To sum up: (i) the U.S. has spent somewhere between a third and 3/4 of a billion dollars (per the article) developing a weapon to demonstrate to Israel that the U.S. has the capability of destroying Iran's nuclear program so that Israel won't try to do the same even though Israel couldn't if it tried; and (ii) the U.S. has secretly agreed with Israel that the "military option" - I assume it's the U.S. military option since apparently Israel is incapable - will advance if the Iranian people don't elect people the U.S. and Israel are happy with, but it hasn't bothered to inform, like, Americans of this agreement.
We are coming up on the Japanese holiday period known as Golden Week. Which, being Japanese, is not really a week. Though I'm not a stickler for words keeping their god-given meaning, of course, I would prefer the translation of Ogata Renkyu. ('Have a nice Large Scale Holiday!'), but when I try it out on my students, it doesn't seem to work.
Still, a holiday is a holiday, and I'm travelling, so I'm putting this up a little early. Obviously, a holiday means you have time to develop yourself, so in case you want to master the Game of Kings, I add this informative video.
"Starships", by bironic. Music by Nicki Minaj. Lyrics may be NSFW; singing along loudly with them is *definitely* NSFW. And you may be tempted; I certainly am.
I'm working on a post about the Star Trek reboots, was reminded of this vid (which I saw when it first came out last summer), started re-watching, and just. can't. stop. It's partly the song, which is extremely catchy but also has at least 3 distinct moods: happy-bouncy, sense of wonder, and ludicrous speed. Bironic then matched each musical mood to clips from movies and TV shows to bring out all the ways I love the idea of space travel: with joy, with wonder, and with excitement.
What does this have to do with bouillon cubes? For me at least, fanvids are the most concentrated form of creative expression, because each clip comes from a much larger source work. To make a bouillon cube, you take out the water and (theoretically) leave the flavor behind, concentrating it. In a good fanvid, I feel as though the clips take out the time in the sources, leaving behind concentrated emotion. In this particular case, hundreds of hours of source gets boiled down to 3 1/2 minutes of vid -- bironic used 257 clips from 39 different movies or TV shows. I haven't seen absolutely all of her sources, but I *have* seen most of them and have strong feelings and associations with them.
For instance, at 1:50 in "Starships" Nicki Minaj is singing "if you want more" and the matching clip is Scotty talking to Captain Kirk. I immediately associate this with Kirk's habit of asking Scotty for "more power!" and "more speed!", while Scott has to explain that no, she can't do any more ... probably. And then there are a series of rapid clips showing others of my favorite engineers, giving just a bit "more" to get the job done. It's a lot of associations and the emotions that go with them, packed into just a few seconds.
I made this vid in a week and a half at the end of April while working six-day weeks at my day job. That's how much time there was between when I first heard the song/got permission to submit it to Club Vivid, and when Club Vivid vids were due. Words cannot describe the scramble to get enough source—I only own about a third of the above—plus make all the clips, figure out the best aspect ratio, find a good vid structure, define constraints (e.g. only clips where people look happy/enthralled to be flying; only ships in space, not in atmosphere, except for launches/crashes), etc.
Having done a bunch of vids before definitely made this one possible; it was like previous experience built up to allow me to do this one in the allotted time. I knew how to rip and encode and clip several different kinds of footage. I figured out how to deal with a Premiere letterboxing problem. I knew that like half the clips needed speed work. I knew how to export for DVD when it was done. All of that and more meant technical problems didn't defeat the project and I had a little more time to devote to things like making sure this wasn't an "all white guys, all the time" show.
The latter is particularly notable -- I figure she managed to get the percent white dudes down to about 50, which is one of the things I like to imagine about space travel -- that the heroes can have all kinds of faces.
Didn't post an open thread, as I thought Ugh and Dr. Science had things covered. But NBA center Jason Collins piece in SI seems to be something that you should read if you haven't and you might want to talk about if you have.
Some people insist they've never met a gay person. But Three Degrees of Jason Collins dictates that no NBA player can claim that anymore. Pro basketball is a family. And pretty much every family I know has a brother, sister or cousin who's gay. In the brotherhood of the NBA, I just happen to be the one who's out.
There's been talk that a group of gay NFL players were going to make a group announcement, so I wonder if Collins individual announcement may hasten that or perhaps forestall it.
There is the old joke that a pioneer is the person you find on the trail full of arrows. Cause whoever goes first is basically asking for trouble. Still, it is hard to imagine a better candidate for this than Jason Collins. He's friends with the politically powerful (Chelsea Clinton, Joe Kennedy), he's had a decent NBA career so is not in a precarious position, he's got a twin brother who also is an NBA player.
Or at least, not *just* an industrial accident. I see three interlocking sets of problems in the disaster[1]:
An industrial or occupational mishap at the West Texas Fertilizer Co. Some combination of mishandling or mis-storage of chemicals, improper or non-existent safely protocols, sloppy recordkeeping, sloppy materials-handling. These are the kind of issues people talk about when they discuss workplace or industrial safety.
No-one at the company, in the community, or at their various insurance companies seems to have considered that maybe it wasn't too smart having the middle and high schools so close to a plant dealing in explosive chemicals. Look at the damage to the middle school:
and think how lucky they were that the explosion didn't happen while there were children present. Killing most of the fire department was a disaster; if it had killed a bunch of children as well, it would have been a *catastrophe*.
It's part of the ongoing investigation, but I haven't seen any clear indications that the volunteer firefighters were aware that they were facing a chemical fire, or that they had the training and equipment to deal with one.
I'm working on a longer post about this disaster and about how we perceive and deal with risk, but I wanted to get this out first. It doesn't seem right to me to mostly talk about the West, Texas, deaths as workplace or occupational casualties, when very few (if any) of the deaths were of workers. It's not all that comparable to e.g. a mining disaster, because the death and destruction involves the community, not just the workplace.
One thing we do know is that whatever hateful agenda drove these men to such heinous acts will not -- cannot -- prevail. Whatever they thought they could ultimately achieve, they've already failed. They failed because the people of Boston refused to be intimidated. They failed because, as Americans, we refused to be terrorized. They failed because we will not waver from the character and the compassion and the values that define us as a country. Nor will we break the bonds that hold us together as Americans.
I suppose that paragraph holds together overall, but the sentences about Boston and Americans are, IMHO, rather farcical. I'm sorry, but what do you call shutting down the entire city of Boston (Boston!) and the surrounding area for 24 hours? Or 9,000+ law enforcement officers and members of the national guard, etc., searching for one guy who was, AFAICT, not suspected of carrying a nuclear weapon? Or 24-7 news coverage of the events provided to the rest of the nation? Or the increased security protocols across the country because, well, because? Or people celebrating in the streets after capturing an unarmed (it now seems) bleeding 19-year-old college student hiding in a boat in someone's backyard?
If that's not being terrorized or intimidated, I don't know what is.
As for not wavering from "the compassion and the values that define us as a country," well, I see the public safety exception to Miranda has been invoked and that Tsarnaev will be charged with using a "weapon of mass destruction." Most disturbingly, I see calls from the usual GOP suspects to treat him as an enemy combatant for who knows what reason (kudos to the Administration as it seems they will not do this) and lay blame on "lax" immigration standards so they can be further tightened (those dangerous 8 year old immigrants!). Of course, this puts the lie to another of President Obama's statements: "one of the things that makes America the greatest nation on Earth ... is that we welcome people from all around the world -- people of every faith, every ethnicity, from every corner of the globe." Right.
I suppose on the political level he needs to say these things, but at some point the BS is too much to take.
What I hadn't visually expected was how comfortably women *strode* even in garments that to me look heavy and awkward. I also hadn't realize how much women's posture is depicted as curving toward men. Even standing up straight is shown as "defiant" or otherwise posed -- while these photos show women standing up straight yet relaxed, because this is how they stand.
I just came across some Edwardian video which has been digitally enhanced to show motion naturalistically:
Most of the people in the film are men, but if you pick a woman out of the crowd and watch her, you'll notice that she isn't walking slower than the men around her. In general, women are walking *much* faster and more directly in their long skirts than I am used to seeing these days, either in historical (or fantastic) films or at most Real Life long-skirt occasions.
I think the ease with which women used to move in long skirts was a combination of factors. First, they were used to it, it wasn't "acting" or "special occasion" or "fancy" wear, long skirts were just everyday clothes. Second, Edwardian women clearly didn't have crinolines or other voluminous or clumsy-making undergarments beneath their skirts. (I just lost a bunch of time looking through stereo pictures of Broadway in the 1860s, but there aren't enough women in those pictures to give me any sense of how they actually *moved*.
Third, footgear. Because long skirts these days are usually "special occasion" wear, they tend to go with "special occasion" shoes, which in current fashion have high, spike heels. The *point* of such shoes is that you can't stride relaxedly in them, they force a certain stressed posture and restricted gait. Though stiletto-type heels were known in the Edwardian era, they were fetish gear, not (relatively) normal street wear. So all of the Edwardian women in the video are wearing flats, or the same kind of short, chunky heels that the men are wearing. And because none of them are used to wearing high heels, the way most actresses and many other modern women are, their gaits aren't distorted by high-heeled habits.
Nana's high heels are among the signals that she is a high-class prostitute meeting a client. This painting was submitted to the Salon but rejected, apparently on the grounds of excessive honesty -- paintings depicting complete nudes in sexual contact (e.g. Cabanel's Nymph and Satyr) were considered perfectly acceptable and even admirable, sanitized by history and mythology and cleaned up by the oil-painting equivalent of Photoshop.
I refuse to beat my chest over a grief that belongs to others, or shout about how terrorists messed with the wrong city. I find no virtue in braying over the capture of a teenager whose toxic grievances, and misguided loyalties, led to such senseless ruin. It is sad, all of it. The greater sadness for me is that America feels increasingly like a nation united by spectacles of atrocity. We pay attention, and open our hearts, only when violence of a random and gaudy enough variety strikes.
I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what terrorism is and how it can be defined separately from other forms of violence. I still don’t have a comprehensive answer, but one of the major, MAJOR features that seems to be overlooked all too often is that terrorism is performative. One of the reasons we handle it so badly is that we consistently overlook these performative aspects in favor of playing into them—the kind of reaction Almond is describing here. But the performative aspects of a terrorist act can tell you so much about what motivated it, what it was really about, sometimes even more than knowing if there was a group behind it or if there was religious thought involved. All of those things are stops along the way to the occurrence of an act of terror; but the how of such an act can’t be separated from the why.
A Broad Abroad noted that the US media devoted much more attention to the Boston bombing than to e.g. the recent Chinese earthquake, and pointed out one reason:
this is something with a narrative. There’s a protagonist. There’s the frisson of dread that it could happen again. There’s the satisfaction of having an iniquitous scapegoat to focus all that anger onto - whereas with an earthquake there’s just inchoate dread, and, for the religious, there’s the sense of confusion and disquiet that a loving god could let this occur - and hating god is much less reassuring than hating The Bad (presumed-brown-until-proven-WASP, and then STILL, even if he is a textbook example of Caucasian) Guy. The thing is, The Hunger Games was rather terrifyingly close to the bone, as a piece of dystopian satire.
Basically, Americans (or at least our media) are absolute *suckers* for performance and narrative, and we make a wonderful audience for terrorists, mass murderers, and anyone else who's willing to die for the chance to be a supervillain.
Yesterday's birding walk was good, but nothing unusual in the way of bird life. What made it one for the record books was the single cutest thing I've ever seen in nature: four Red Fox kits playing together. They must have been out of the den for a couple of weeks because they're no longer dark, pretty much like the ones in this video:
And let me tell you, if I'd had a video camera, a strong lens (I was about 50m away), and a tripod (because, judging by my photography, my cinematography would be Adventures in Shakycam), I could have made something that would get a million views on YouTube.
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