A Gilded Planet

I greedily consume my day-old Krugman while living as a researcher that gets inside the minds of psychopaths. I ñeet somethyng, but not quite a work by Hans Henny Jahnn. Rather like  The Man Who Lived . I ain't any kind of maven, you know? I'm just bread and butter and blood and soil; I'm halfway through a Craiglist queer recovery. Feeling queasy in this sphere of pure reference. So Letts works towards world's peace, women's rights and a face without freckles. Letts quashed the hoot pop writing session. We thank various machine guns for their roles in this neon charade. Letts fired Miskimin from his supervisory role. But Miskimin, that old confidence trickster, he got rehired to play the role of my beastly manservant. Sway gently the rafters, plumbers, we embrace callipygian vixens. And I had just finished reading  Ten thousand things relating to China and the Chinese : an epitome of the genius, government, history, literature, agriculture, arts, trade, manners, c...

This summer, Hollywood Star Charlton Heston has not only set temperature records across the Midwest, he is also intensifying drought conditions -- and relief isn't on the horizon for most areas, the National Weather Service reported Thursday. Drought conditions brought on by Heston's sere presence exist in 56 percent of the continental U.S., according to the weekly Drought Review. That's the biggest effect the former president of the NRA has had on the country since his death four years ago, topping the previous record of a large spike in viewings of the 1959 movie Touch of Evil on the streaming service Netflix in late 2010. Charlton Heston absorbing all of the groundwater in The Omega Man . Heston's ability to significantly impact the climate of North America is believed to be linked to the run of movies he made in the 1970s, beginning with Antony and Cleopatra . The drought hasn't been long enough to rank up there with Ben-Hur or Planet of the Apes as...

A Dangerous Method 2011. 99 minutes. Canada. Directed by David Cronenberg. Watchdate: 1/3/2012. What a disappointment! Rarely have I seen so much potential greatness squandered. Fassbender is great, he plays it understated more than I would have expected and it works very well. I don't think I've seen Viggo Mortensen do better work. Even Keira Knightly does a fairly good job. But the movie just doesn't go anywhere. It's so internalized, yet it seems like Cronenberg didn't take the time to figure out a good way to shoot the internalization which I know he can be great at doing. Very frustrating! I know people wrote lots of longhand letters in those days but come on, Cronenberg, you can do better than a bunch of mirthless voiceovers to dramatize such things, really.

If I read any more stories about bankster malfeasance I'm going to have an aneurysm.  The Guardian reports that American and European authorities are close to arresting some of the bankers involved in the egregious Libor Rate Rigging Scandal : American prosecutors and European regulators are close to arresting individual traders over the Libor scandal and charging them with colluding to manipulate global benchmark interest rates, according to sources familiar with the investigation. If we don't start arresting banksters, they are just going to keep stealing from us in every way that can be imagined. Colluding to manipulate global interest rates amounts to stealing from nearly everyone at once in a stunningly diabolical worldwide skimming conspiracy. But if they can't steal from us that way, JPMorgan has most recently shown they have plenty of other ways to steal from us. JPMorgan is clearly taking its competition with Goldman Sachs for the title of most vile vampire...

A reader and friend writes in to tell me that the OED traces 'immersive' from as far back as the seventeenth century, or much earlier than I acknowledged in the previous post . Clearly the OED's SEO needs improvement, Merriam Webster is fucked, and I need to be a bit more thorough in my researches.

Update: I'm an idiot. 'Immersive' is not a word according to the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. Wait. I know what you're thinking: but then how do I describe my experience with Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim ? How do I do that, huh? Luckily, less reputable online dictionaries do define 'immersive' as a word in the following way: noting or pertaining to digital technology or images that deeply involve one's senses and may create an altered mental state For some reason, I find it very surprising that it took digital technology to motivate us to come up with the word 'immersive.' Did earlier generations not imagine novels or movies to be immersive experiences? Is there another word out there that I'm forgetting which does the same work as 'immersive'? I would like to know this synonym.  

Guildford Damford Shingleton Archibald Horace Shuckburgh Edward Teshmaker Busk Francis Saxon Snell Basil Scarisbrick Walker Hugh Urquhart Scrutton Montague Hayes Bythway Henry Burrows Gallimore Leonard George Colbeck Francis Kennard Bliss P.C. Bentley Blair Cecil Weston Dawswell Arthur Creasy Roscoe Bertram Hopkinson Chubb Neville Eustachius Wallingford Thurgood Ambrose Cumberbatch Bertrand Benedict Beauchamp Rawson Maynard Lincoln Marshall Langtoft Dinsdale Dudley Thurber Banvard Leland Carleton Muggeridge

The little man wearing wire-rimmed spectacles invents words in his spare time but right now he asks for too many samples at the ice cream shop. All the other customers feel hung up by how long they have to wait for him to pick his flavor. A couple passes by the shop and ducks into a movie theater two doors down in order to be spontaneous; they see a movie based on play written by a famous man of letters they first read about in a museum located an ocean away. The usher rips their tickets before directing them to theater number seven. The usher used to save the stubs of every movie ticket he purchased but when he started working at the movie theater his collection became grim reminder of the job he enjoyed less by the day. He muses to himself about burning all the stubs while tearing the ticket of a tall old man who frequented the theater so regularly that the usher felt mild embarrassment that he didn't know the old man's name. He directs the elder cinephile to theater number ...

The Doors 1991. 138 minutes. USA. Directed by Oliver Stone. Watchdate: 3/27/2012. Oliver Stone makes these lurid, charmless fever dreams that pretentiously shove a bunch of half-baked ideas down your throat in the most over the top way imaginable. Yet in some cases I'll defend his work, especially when he recklessly somersaults so far overboard it's impossible to believe he's trying to be taken seriously. Platoon , Talk Radio , and Wall Street all seem to aspire to lucidity and respectability and thus end up being boring trash even if there are a couple worthwhile elements in each. But The Doors , Natural Born Killers and particularly the highly underrated Nixon are so wild, twitchy and crass they might qualify as a hazy sort of pop surrealism. They are almost like madhouse ravings of a hobo with too big a budget to spend and too much message to polemicize. However, there's something to be said for too much madness. At times they can actually be engaging a...

Review of  Bouvard and Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert Philip Roth has argued that if one takes more than two weeks to read a novel, one hasn't really read the novel. I don't know if Roth would allow an extra week or two for Don Quixote , War and Peace or Finnegans Wake but I suspect he wouldn't as he's pretty old and set in his ways at this point. In any case, under that definition, I haven't really read Bouvard and Pécuchet . It's taken me almost a year to finish it, and it isn't nearly as long or as difficult as any of my proposed exceptions to Roth's rule. Last summer, I found a copy of Bouvard and Pécuchet among stacks of books in a cabin in northern Wisconsin. This happened a few weeks after Andy Holden's art installation,  Chewy Cosmos Thingly Time, made me aware of Gustave Flaubert's final work about the intellectual misadventures of two Parisian copy clerks. A fabricated library within the Chewy Cosmos Thingly Time exhibit incl...

Bernstein & Garfunkel Laverne & Bullwinkle Abbott & Hardy Starsky & Hooch Donnie & Cher Gilbert & Hammerstein Itchy & Kumar Romeo & the Sundance Kid Thelma & Luigi Bonnie & The Brain Penn & Stimpy Seals & Oates Ike & Cleopatra Bill & Silent Bob Siegfried & Rosencrantz Batman & Butthead Leiber & Gretel

The heat! The heat! Oh how could we possibly consider ignoring the aching fever and vicious intestinal malaise to face the Greek heat in all its unforgivable Apollonian glory? What could compel our bodies, trembling with putrid illness, to traipse through the invincible sunshine of Athens? Only the vision of the Parthenon, that proudest dream of Pericles, the long lost world of Classical Greece from which we still draw intellectual succor. Only that. As we approached the ancient theatre of Dionysus, god of wine, celebrations, ritual madness and ecstasy, Zeus smiled down on us (or was it Athena herself?) in at least one way. For some reason, admission to the Acropolis was free on this sweltering Monday, June 3rd. Despite this welcome largesse, the Acropolis was not choked with vistors or the dreaded touring groups that descend like locusts from cruise ships at any grand sight near enough to the sea. All praise be to the Olympian deities for this fortunate turn of events. ...a...

Well, no, of course not. Rape is terrible. But George Carlin, one of the most revered American comedians of the 20th century, says that rape can be funny. So it's cool when Daniel Tosh makes fun of a heckler by saying how funny it would be if like five guys raped her, right? Well, no. The difference is that George Carlin, along with Louis CK and other people who have wrought comedy from the sensitive subject of rape, are extremely sophisticated comedians to the point where you could call them social satirists, social commentators, or (almost) stand-up philosophers (to paraphrase Mel Brooks). Daniel Tosh was, is and always will be extremely unfunny, lazy, obnoxious, tasteless, artless, pandering, juvenile, anti-intellectual, and idiotic to the point of being submental. What happened in the recent incident at the Laugh Factory just highlighted these qualities in the starkest terms. Like Michael Richards, and many others before him, Daniel Tosh has a right to say whatever he wa...

To Have and To Have Not 1944. 100 minutes. USA. Directed by Howard Hawks. Watchdate: 3/6/2012. At least at the level of political allegory, To Have and To Have Not almost plays like a straightforward reworking of Casablanca . I can imagine Hollywood wanting to reproduce the universal success of Casablanca and giving the assignment to the second most workmanlike director after Michael Curtiz. But To Have and To Have Not is the bad boy, the class clown or cut up to Casablanca 's model student. Ingrid Bergman / Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman / other dude are two variations on an ideal relationship. By contrast, the Humphrey Bogart / Lauren Bacall relationship is far from ideal, it's characterized by a lurid dependency but it is also unrelentingly sexy. It crackles for me in a way that the Bogie / Bacall pairing never quite did in The Big Sleep or Key Largo . Bacall in particular does her fair share to carry the movie on charm alone.

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño Robert Bolaño excites my imagination not just because he writes combustive, mesmerizing prose, not only because he creates worlds so intricate that they manage to be as idealized and fantastic as they are realistic and autobiographical, not simply because his sense of humor is so wild, absurd, acrid and filthy that it feels like a guilty pleasure - no, his gifts go far beyond that, and they might be most tightly focused in this slim novella he wrote just over a decade ago. With By Night in Chile , Bolaño reveals again that for all his bitter satire, incisive political rage and opinionated lunacy, he pursues with vigor that most humane project of trying to understand the Other, to seek out the villain within himself and to reveal the souls of those he might perceive to be villainous. At barely 130 pages, By Night in Chile is the shortest work I've read by Bolaño, and it makes an impressive case for the possibility of containing the magic...

Mitt Romney has announced a plan to hand out billions of dollars of taxpayer money for free to banks indefinitely. As president, he would reinstate an egregious student loan policy that subsidizes banks at the expense of taxpayers. The Obama Administration and Congress agreed to eliminate this policy just over two years ago. Tracy Jan at the Boston Globe has the story: Mitt Romney promises to usher private lenders back into the federal student loan market...The prime beneficiaries, critics say, would be banks and loan companies that stand to reap a financial boon through subsidies to make nearly risk-free, government-backed loans. They are the same firms that benefited from the system that existed for decades before 2010, when President Obama required that the government issue all federal student loans. Unfortunately, Ms. Jan tries to play objective by writing "critics say" in the middle of her explanation. But this policy solely benefits banks at the expense of taxpaye...

The Curious Fundamentalist The Reasonable Anarchist The Principled Democrat The Lucid Republican The Empathetic Libertarian The Pragmatic Socialist The Thoughtful Militarist The Adamant Liberal The Relevant Nationalist The Tolerant Conservative The Agreeable Progressive The Triumphant Trade Unionist The Useful Independent The Casual Authoritarian The Reluctant Interventionist The Traveling Isolationist

CAPPADOCIA, 5/26/12 -- We ended up on a wild ride to the airport. Some kind of gong show ding dong gumball fuck up caused our shuttle to wait too long at a hotel where we picked up no one before eventually pulling over to the shoulder of the freeway to wait for another shuttle that brought two people the shuttle was supposed to have picked up earlier. We don't know if the two passengers weren't in the place they were supposed to be or if the shuttle wasn't. The two passengers denied everything and the shuttle drivers explained nothing as they spoke very little English. On the freeway, we got a taste of insane Turkish driving, where passing is a game of chicken and close calls, horns are employed liberally, tailgating is a way of life based on intimidation and anything is fair game on the shoulder. It didn't help that multiple roads were closed. Each detour ratcheted up the intensity even further. We made our flight, praise Allah.

Petulia 1968. 126 minutes. USA. Directed by Richard Lester. Watchdate: 2/3/2012. In Petulia , Richard Lester rejects the familiar and conventional in exchange for a simultaneous embrace and interrogation of the strange and unstable social fabric of its coincident period. It's like a shopworn melodrama stumbled into San Francisco during the Summer of Love by accident and found itself transformed into a deeply sad but occasionally very funny (and at all times) peculiar tragicomedy (or comic tragedy depending on your mileage). Or it could be surrealism unaware (or uninterested) in its own surreality. Lester gets away with it because he's at the peak of his creative powers, working with a team (including Nicolas Roeg as Director of Photography) that is nonchalant about innovating even further beyond the cinematic vocabulary Lester had already helped transform earlier in the decade, but just as importantly because he had his cameras rolling in the right place at the right time ...

If Facebook is any indication, my generation associates the fourth of July primarily with heroic efforts of Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman to save the world from the alien menace. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I woke up this morning to fratboys blaring country music as if that's an appropriate way to celebrate the most American of holidays. To be fair, they also played a couple of Creedence songs and a Bob Dylan tune.  In any case, contemporary country music is in no way an appropriate way to celebrate Independence Day, aliens or otherwise. Country music is about waving the Confederate flag, a piece of fabric representing the heritage of a failed white supremacist slave state that was founded with the intention of destroying the unity of the North American republic founded on July 4, 1776. Country music is antithetical to the fourth of July, as it is the music of the stars and bars, not the stars and stripes. The appropriate music for Indepe...