Will Mary Harron’s American Psycho turn out to be one of the most telling movies of the last decade?
Felix Salmon for Reuters as quoted by The Browser:
These shops deliberately go out to hire psychopaths, and then they fire the ones who go soft, while promoting the most aggressive assholes, keeping a few smooth-talking client-relationship types on hand to preserve some semblance of a respectable public face.
The NYT paraphrasing Tony Judt:
Oddly enough, Mr. Judt writes, the left and right have swapped political modes. The right has become radicalized, abandoning the “social moderation which served it so well from Disraeli to Heath, from Theodore Roosevelt to Nelson Rockefeller.” It’s the left that now has something to conserve, “the institutions, legislation, services and rights that we have inherited from the great age of 20th-century reform.”
More Judt, previously.
Doctors Without Borders: we’re not NATO’s agents, nor anyone else’s:
In conflict areas, MSF never works alongside, or partners with, any military strategy. The organization’s complete independence and neutrality is what helps negotiate access to populations in need of emergency medical assistance.
If NATO wants to champion its members as defenders of human rights, wouldn’t it do it better by providing a group like MSF with cover? Taking credit for charity is, well, not very charitable.
Frederic Filloux on the next industry likely to be shaken up by the Internet: advertising.
The fascinating Bill Gross, liberal billionaire investor:
Markets will be downsized by regulation, even if governments are slow in applying new laws. “The sun is not setting on Wall Street – there will always be sunshine on financiers – but high noon is in the past. It’s time for ordinary people to benefit.”
Governments should raise taxes on bankers, who “don’t deserve all this”, Gross says, including himself. “I don’t need so much,” he says. Economies such as the UK and the US should look to making “things, rather than paper” to prosper. “The bubble was reflective of wealth as a function of house prices and derivatives – that’s not wealth. The Chinese are showing us what wealth is: transforming creative and well-trained work into exportable goods.”
The other day someone asked me and some of my colleagues if the availability of shows on mobile devices is changing the way shows are shot. I answered not yet but perhaps someday yes.
This morning I watched a movie from the late 1940s. In scenes where characters were positioned far apart, the director seldom cut to closeups.
I wondered if in the 1940s and 1950s, film directors had more experience working on stage than on sets, and if that influenced what shots were set up to tell the story.
Did subsequent generations, having grown up watching television, favor more close shots?
And what will TV and movies look like when the generation that grew up on Nintendo DS and Apple Touch starts calling the shots?
update
My friend BB writes:
I’ll bet that had to do more with the limitations of those massive cameras they were using in the 40s/50s for TV. Admittedly, I don’t know a ton about this, but I guess D.W. Griffith is credited 30 years prior to that, with creating a cinema grammar when everyone else was basically doing the equivalent of filming staged plays.
The migration of the Mexican poor is the largest human movement across a border on the planet. It was triggered by the destruction of peasant agriculture at the hands of the North American Free Trade Agreement, by the corruption of the Mexican state, by the growing violence in Mexico, and exacerbated by the millions of Mexicans working illegally in the U.S. who send money home to finance their families’ trips north. It should be seen as a natural shift of a species. We need ecologists on the border; the politicians have become pointless.
via The Browser.
Update: And he won’t. He’s voting “yes.”
U.S. Congressman Luis Gutierrez may think he’s doing the right thing by revoking his support for health care reform because it excludes undocumented immigrants. He’s wrong. Not just politically, but morally.
The choice available to him is not between helping 30 million or 40 million people. It’s between helping 30 million people or no one at all.
A politician who refuses to seek the greater good is like a doctor who strives to do no harm by refusing to treat the sickest patients.
I spent a few minutes this afternoon trying to figure out if there is ever an instance where a false signal is better than no signal at all. I couldn’t think of any.
(I asked Ana, and she couldn’t either. In fact, she’s been waiting all week for a call from a prospective employer and she was quite sure that she’d rather continue waiting than be lied to about her getting the job.)
An hour later I decided that my question was flawed. No signal is a kind of signal and one of three that can be ranked, from most to least desirable:
1) true signal
2) no signal
3) false signal
This sounds pretty abstract but it’s a common preoccupation. For example, New Edition’s song “Mr. Telephone Man”:
Mr. Telephone man
There’s something wrong with my line,
When I dial my baby’s number
I get a click everytime
The narrator is willfully misreading a true signal (click) as a false signal (she can’t really be hanging up on him) and brings in a third party to entertain the possibility that there’s no signal (something is wrong with his line.)
In missing persons dramas on TV, grieving family members are often presented with a similar choice: they can accept a likely false signal — the discovery of unidentifiable remains — or they can stay in a state of indeterminacy with no sign of their missing loved one.
This may be a false choice as both options have the same outcome: keeping the case open.
“I’d rather believe a lie than not know” is a bit of a paradox. If you believe you’re being lied to, you know the truth of the matter is otherwise. Accepting a possible lie is a way to postpone the conclusion. It’s a way to bury the hope that one day the lie will be exposed by the arrival of the truth. What is presented as a way to “get closure,” is in fact quite the opposite. It’s a way to secretly keep the case open.
So why not just accept the lack of a sign? What’s so bad about no signal? Like the Telephone Man in the New Edition song, the families in missing persons dramas turn to a third party, the police, to establish the truth. Perhaps, it’s just too disappointing to accept that these arbiters of truth are unable to solve the case?
The worst possible outcome then is for the police to conclude there’s no signal. For order to be maintained, someone must know. Thus, the family member who accepts the possible lie is helping the police save face.
I should revise my list then: a true signal is better than no signal which is better than a false signal which is better than no signal is possible.
Nothing is worse than the possibility that something is unknowable.
I’m struck by the impact that The Thick of It has made on me. In the last two days, I’ve come across two real life stories of political ineptitude that I was able to relish because of that fictional series:
Meg Whitman Campaign Ejects Reporters For Asking Questions and the following:
Asked whether he has had shower encounters like the one Massa alleged, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) was interrupted by an aide — “Senator, we definitely have a speaking engagement” — and whisked away before he could respond.
I’m almost always behind the times when it comes to television and movies. Last night, I began watching Mad Men. (Go Maggie!)
It’s one of the darkest shows I’ve ever seen. I’m a sucker for suspense and greatly enjoy movies where there is a powerful undercurrent of violence (cf. Jonathan Glazer, Alfred Hitchcock, Days of Heaven, much of The Shining) so I was very much taken in by the first few episodes.
I hope the series continues to mine that vein. It’s a wonderful counterpoint to the hogwash about the past being a nicer, cleaner, happier place.
It’s not a vagary of history that the authors of the Bible corrected the mythical Garden of Eden with the notion of Original Sin.
My friend RC and I expand on yesterday’s post about a world with ubiquitous software translation.
Ten years ago, I used Babelfish language translation once in a blue moon and often for entertainment. For the last six months or so I’ve been using Google’s translation tool on almost daily basis. (I read a French and a Japanese blog as well as an Italian magazine.)
The prospect of cheap portable translation tools that are contextually savvy is thrilling. What it will do to culture, I can’t say. But these comments following a New York Times story on Google’s translation breakthroughs may illuminate the next few years.
Updated
My friend RC replies:
I watched most of War Games last night. That movie has barely aged. A wonderful story and awesome achievement.
People are amazing. Hence, the web is amazing. While looking for heavy duty cable ties in Los Angeles, I found this thread on how to use duct ties for corsets. Which you would want to do if you’re a goth mimicking Victorian fashion in 2010.
Cognitive psychologist Allison Gopnik suggests children see the world more clearly than adults, albeit without structure:
This heightened state of absorption is emblematic of what Gopnik calls “the evolutionary division of labor between children and adults.” In this collaboration, the child’s protracted period of immaturity is indulged because it allows him to perform uninhibitedly the sorts of experiments that will eventually enable the more plodding and deliberate adult to alter—or at least to manipulate—the reality of his world.
Behold: a comic book written by a five year-old but illustrated by a 29 year-old; via MetaFilter.
I could be wrong but isn’t this kind of collaboration common in the history of fables and the like?
An epistemological reason for Cheney et al’s contempt?
I seldom watch a movie twice, let alone an episode from a TV series. But that’s just what I did last night with the first episode of The Thick of It.
The kicker is that we’d just finished watching all three seasons in less than four days. It’s like getting off an epic rollercoaster and walking right back to the turnstile for another ride.
Think the original version of The Office meets season four of The Wire.
I’ve been sending this link out for the last week but had neglected to post it here. It’s the most cogent and far-reaching explanation that I’ve seen of the convergence between our networked digital lives and game mechanics.
That’s a mouthful but CMU professor Jesse Schell delivers the facts and their implications with verve and humor.
later
In almost all philosophies, the premise that play is at the heart of meaning is old news. But how we play changes meaning just as surely as language shapes it. The possibilities created by our new games would certainly have delighted the philosophers and theologians of yesteryear.
even later
The strongest parts of Schell’s presentation are about “psychological tricks” that get people to spend more money. And while spending money might seem like a shallow activity, it’s one of the ways we communicate what we value. It’s a vote of confidence. And to get someone to vote for you is not an insignificant pathway to explore.