I saw a preview the other day for an upcoming movie (to be released in March) called “Inkheart” with Brendan Fraser. The central premise of the movie revolves around a single father who has the ability to “magically” bring stories to life by reading them aloud.
Yahoo:
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809787394/info
IMDB:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0494238/plotsummary
~Jenna P.
Bless Brandon for posting about Helvetica and the Fionn Regan song. The lyrics, pasted below, are astonishing for the way they conflate female sexality and the typewriter. And note the sly allusion to the alphabet: “I draw a line from A to B”
Fionn Regan
° The Underwood Typewriter °
The roots go deep below ground
I like to walk with you in the evening
Up the hill and back down
I watch the mailboat from the clearing
My mind is so confused, I climb back on top of you
And I’m changing the ribbons in this old underwood
Step out of your dress and I’ll wear you like a hood
For a hood is a home
for someone who lives alone
I draw a line from A to B and what happens in between
It is an open mystery as far as I can see
My mind is so confused, I climb back on top of you
And I’m changing the ribbons in this old underwood
Step out of your dress and I’ll wear you like a hood
For a hood is a home
Dr. B.
I just finished watching the Helvetica documentary we talked about in class, and it was pretty fascinating. Here are a couple of things I found interesting:
1. Helvetica comes from the Latin word for Switzerland (the neutrality reflected in the font), and it came out in response to the poor designs of the 1950s, i.e. the same time as the Xerox.
2. The second type designer interviewed says he became a typographer because his father was one.
3. One of the type designers (the only female one) talked about how, during the ’70s, Helvetica became the font of the establishment, so to the counterculture, it was the font of the Vietnam War. The documentarian asked what the font of the Iraq War is, and she immediately responded, “Helvetica.” She even goes so far as to say Helvetica is why we’re fighting again.
4. Lastly, after recapping the modern era’s transition from overly stylized to Helvetica to grunge and back to Helvetica, the designers say, in a way, we’ve reached the end of history. That reminded me of how our class studied history backward, to get to the end/beginning.
Semi-relatedly, young Irish folk singer Fionn Regan released an album last year called The End of History, and it is pretty full of references from class. The second song is even called “The Underwood Typewriter.”
–Brandon
Somehow this op-ed piece comparing O&C touches on practically every pattern we examined except teeth, dragons, and vampires — and I wouldn’t be surprised if those show up in a subsequent op-ed piece. BTW, some of the oldest artifacts from ancient cultures before the advent of writing technology are “dice.” They were used for counting things as well as amusement.
December 18, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Obama-Clinton Issue
By DAVID BROOKS
Hillary Clinton has been a much better senator than Barack Obama. She has been a serious, substantive lawmaker who has worked effectively across party lines. Obama has some accomplishments under his belt, but many of his colleagues believe that he has not bothered to master the intricacies of legislation or the maze of Senate rules. He talks about independence, but he has never quite bucked liberal orthodoxy or party discipline.
If Clinton were running against Obama for Senate, it would be easy to choose between them.
But they are running for president, and the presidency requires a different set of qualities. Presidents are buffeted by sycophancy, criticism and betrayal. They must improvise amid a thousand fluid crises. They’re isolated and also exposed, puffed up on the outside and hollowed out within. With the presidency, character and self-knowledge matter more than even experience. There are reasons to think that, among Democrats, Obama is better prepared for this madness.
Many of the best presidents in U.S. history had their character forged before they entered politics and carried to it a degree of self-possession and tranquillity that was impervious to the Sturm und Drang of White House life.
Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant.
Like most of the rival campaigns, I’ve been poring over press clippings from Obama’s past, looking for inconsistencies and flip-flops. There are virtually none. The unity speech he gives on the stump today is essentially the same speech that he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004, and it’s the same sort of speech he gave to Illinois legislators and Harvard Law students in the decades before that. He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall.
Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.
But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.
Obama did not respond to his fatherlessness or his racial predicament with anger and rage, but as questions for investigation, conversation and synthesis. He approaches politics the same way. In her outstanding New Yorker profile, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that Obama does not perceive politics as a series of battles but as a series of systemic problems to be addressed. He pursues liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways.
Obama also has powers of observation that may mitigate his own inexperience and the isolating pressures of the White House. In his famous essay, “Political Judgment,” Isaiah Berlin writes that wise leaders don’t think abstractly. They use powers of close observation to integrate the vast shifting amalgam of data that constitute their own particular situation — their own and no other.
Obama demonstrated those powers in “Dreams From My Father” and still reveals glimpses of the ability to step outside his own ego and look at reality in uninhibited and honest ways. He still retains the capacity, also rare in presidents, of being able to sympathize with and grasp the motivations of his rivals. Even in his political memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” he astutely observes that candidates are driven less by the desire for victory than by the raw fear of loss and humiliation.
What Bill Clinton said on “The Charlie Rose Show” is right: picking Obama is a roll of the dice. Sometimes he seems more concerned with process than results. But for Democrats, there’s a roll of the dice either way. The presidency is a bacterium. It finds the open wounds in the people who hold it. It infects them, and the resulting scandals infect the presidency and the country. The person with the fewest wounds usually does best in the White House, and is best for the country.
If you don’t watch Nip/Tuck regularly you are missing out on a show that has its hand firmly on the pulse of the cultural unconscious. As we move from the analog to the digital, in much the same way as we when we moved from scribal culture to print, the body makes a come back, especially fetishized in our efforts to manipulate and modify it. And where there’s paternity and technology, there is almost always incest. Witness a review of the show in today’s NYT:
December 18, 2007
Television Review
The Quest for Beauty Gives Way to Ugliness
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Kimber, the porn star turned porn mogul turned coke addict, cultist and meth-head, has been tussling with her ex-boyfriend and former plastic surgeon, Dr. Christian Troy, who by the logic of “Nip/Tuck,” now in its fifth anarchic season on FX, must always look as if he bathes in canola oil and also happens to be the biological father of her husband, Matt.
“Nip/Tuck,” among its many other distinctions, is probably more committed to incestuous takes on genealogy than any other show on television. Matt’s other father, the man who reared him into his current namby-pambiness, is Sean McNamara, Christian’s partner in McNamara/Troy. A cosmetic-enhancement outfit the men founded in their 20s, it moved to Beverly Hills from Miami Beach this season because, as Christian explains it: “I’m a jack rabbit. I don’t do slow and steady. I paid my dues, and I want some overnight success.”
The series needed reigniting, and it got some from the location shift: Los Angeles allows “Nip/Tuck” to indulge the full courage of its sleaziness. It feels less and less like a moralizing satire on the ruthlessness of vanity and more and more like a joyless exploration of desperate sex hatched in a windowless building of a strip mall in the San Fernando Valley. (As if to drive the point home, the namesake of Matt and Kimber’s barely surviving new baby is the sex film star Jenna Jameson.)
“Nip/Tuck” seems no longer to be about the misery guaranteed by striving for ideals of physical perfection; it is about the cruelty and ugliness guaranteed simply by waking up. The show has become bleaker as it has become more grotesquely farcical. (Suffice it to say that there has been at least one gastrointestinal accident in a hot tub.) No one is left unmolested physically, psychically, spiritually. “Nip/Tuck” demands the complicity of your self-loathing to really be enjoyed now. A show that’s always been about abjection, it now seems almost entirely directed at the abject.
“Have you looked in a mirror lately?” Christian asked Kimber recently. “Your face looks like a fraternity couch.” It’s a great line — the show’s still full of them — but it also describes what it feels like to watch: flattened, spit on, used, washed out.
People come and go, selling themselves to a thousand different devils this season. A handsome black patient arrives at McNamara/Troy to have scars removed from his back; he got them catering to white soccer moms at sex parties. In a recurring guest appearance as the millionairess Dawn Budge, Rosie O’Donnell is abused by a fake hospital orderly, and then so is her new television producer boyfriend (brilliantly played by Oliver Platt), only he ends up enjoying it.
And heaven save the children this season! Sean’s skinny 9-year old daughter demanded liposuction. Why? Because the high school-age daughter of her mother’s girlfriend has been telling her that she needs to cut the carbs and lose the pudge. Sean hates the older girl, the vicious Eden, until he decides that she’s just what his midlife crisis needs and stumbles into circus sex with her: dozens of positions, lots of tents. Things don’t work out because, well, pedophilia rarely does.
None of this, however, will prevent Eden from being invited by Sean’s former wife, Julia, to spend Christmas with the family (the subject of Tuesday’s episode) and Christian too, whom Julia has been sleeping with again even though she has been dating Eden’s mother. (Sean and Christian, who are best friends, aren’t sleeping together but might as well be because they are living under the same roof, “My Two Daddies” style, with Christian’s sporadically appearing young son.)
For four seasons “Nip/Tuck” danced around the idea that sex creepily ought to stay within the province of family life’s pre-existing perversions; now it is saying so more directly, and with home-baked fruitcake.
NIP/TUCK
FX, Tuesday night at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.
~Jenna P.
Ok, so here’s the scoop. BS (Britney Spears) is in the early stages of being cast as the Virgin Mary in a film. This makes perfect, albeit bizaare, sense to me in terms of the way things are moving under the surace of this culture. Forget immaculate conception, it’s a miracle just to associate the word “Virgin” with BS. Those wacky French — they think of everything. First, it was cooking potato slices in hot oil, then they invented bread shaped in such a way that you could use it as a baseball bat after a few days, now it’s replacing the manger with a trailer. If the US wants to regain its position in the world, we need to eat more Pate.
Here’s what’s being reported on the gossip (etymology = Gods’ Parents) web sites:
A French producer wants Britney Spears to play the Virgin Mary in a new satire called Sweet Baby Jesus. The producer says the film will start shooting in March and Britney is reviewing the script, according to the latest issue of Us Weekly:
“Spears, 26, would play a pregnant 19-year-old unsure of her baby’s paternity who goes into labor on Christmas Eve in Bethlehem, Maryland, as rumors swirl that the birth is Jesus Christ’s second coming.”
I have been to Bethlehem, MD, and I must say that beyond the city’s name, it is a perfect place to film the birth of Trailer Trash religion. Now if only they can get K-Fed to do a rap version of “Silent Night” for the soundtrack then my work on this earth will have been done. In the interim I’m lobbying for Lindsay Lohan to play Mary Magdalen, though I’ll settle for Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton. And if the film’s director doesn’t completely have his head up “sa cul,” he’ll cast Peter Doherty as BS’s “son” in the film. In terms of Joseph, I’m thinking Flava Flav. Oh, and as for the kid’s “Real” Dad, well I think Nick Nolte was born to play the role.
Dr.B.
Hey guys,
http://www.pianomagic.com/google.asp
So i’ve resolved to take piano lessons. It’s something that I have always wanted to do. I got the name of a woman through a friend, and although this is not her site, I found it while looking for her since she teaches the same way.
I have never played a musical insturment although it has always been a great ambition of mine. A big problem I always thought I had was the fact that I dont know how to read music.
considering a lot of things, ….it almost makes sense to me that music shalt be something you have to ….read.
In fact, most of the soul music and rap that we talked about at the beginning of the semester did not come from planned, written out, lyrics. The words themselves….as well as the notes that cooresponded with them….flowed from the inside.
The ear seems to be the dominant organ here. ………………….bah, ‘organ’.
Anyway, I also just recently saw the movie “August Rush.” I thoroughly enjoyed it, and much of these concepts are found within it. Although he eventually learns music in the literary context, I found it notable that he did not FIRST learn it through the eye, but the ear, and well the fingertips.
Scroll down and read a bit of the website if you would. The fellow talks about human language and the order in which we learn things.
See.. I’ve always thought that music is an exeption to any rules. Mainly because it will not remain bound to any ties we place on it.
Isnt it fascinating?
Wish me well with my piano endeavors! And if anyone has any reccomendations, do please send them my way.
Musically,
Nellie