life imitates parody

In the underrated You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, John Turturro’s character retires from battling the Israelis to open a chain of shawarma restaurants called Muchentuchen. Yesterday, Hugo Chavez opened a shawarma restaurant in Beirut, Lebanon:

The restaurant, it seems, is quite patriotic indeed — decorated with flags and pictures of the Venezuelan president and, nearby as the press release from the Embassy put it (my translation), “instructions of our head of state relating to the fight for the sovereignty of the oppressed people of the world against the pretensions of potential imperialists.”

What atmosphere! Add the waiters’ red shirts and hats, clothes traditional to Venezuela, and you’ve go the whole deal.

people

movies

Street Fight, a documentary about Corey Booker’s first mayoral campaign in Newark, is gripping, raw and full of can’t-believe-they-got-that-on-tape moments. Made for television, it’s a bit short and certainly biased but it’s also as dramatic as fiction. You could splice it with scenes from The Wire and not a miss a beat.

Towards the end of the movie, as candidate Booker is canvassing from house to house, a small group of kids tags along, giddy at meeting a celebrity – or, at least, an adult who plays along. A girl, maybe seven, tells the camera: “I’m not going to wash my hand.” The filmmaker asks her why and she replies that she shook Booker’s hand and doesn’t want to wash off the smell. The filmmaker asks what Booker smells like and the girl answers: “The future.”

things

thank you

A big heartfelt, teary-eyed, ecstatic “thank you” to the activists who are criticizing Sotomayor for her ethnicity. The best way to accelerate the development of a pan-Latin Latino identity is to target a few million Americans with vile bigotry. Ace work.

ideas

treading water

More Berlusconi:

Much of Mr. Berlusconi’s success has stemmed from his uncanny ability to read the national mood. Now many wonder if he has finally miscalculated it and is pushing tolerant Italians too far, and whether his late-career reputation may increasingly resemble the Roman imperial decadence of Fellini’s “Satyricon.”

…And yet, Mr. Berlusconi still governs virtually unopposed. “The problem is simply that the Italians can’t imagine who could replace Berlusconi at the moment,” said Tim Parks, a novelist and commentator on Italy…

In what many see as a sign of Mr. Berlusconi’s grip on the levers of power in Italy and the Vatican, the Italian Bishops Conference this week essentially gave him a pass, or at least a no comment, calling for “adult behavior,” but saying that each person’s conduct was a matter “of individual conscience.”

Previously.

people

who do you know?

Jonathan Haidt: “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

From the same op-ed, Nicholas D. Kristof writes: “Thus persuasion may be most effective when built on human interactions.”

In other words, it may be easier for us, on a cognitive level, to understand the “who” rather than the “why.” Thus making theater the most effective rhetoric.

ideas/movies & television/play

dry humor

Chris Beam:

No doubt the new political appointees can handle the job. Roos, as CEO of a global, technology-focused law firm, understands trade issues likely to arise in Japan. Rivkin has international experience as a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. And Obama’s appointee to Great Britain, Louis Susman, speaks fluent English.

via Blake Hounshell

journalism/people

timing

Hulu releases Hulu Desktop, its own “free, lean-back video-watching experience.” Like Roku and Boxee, Hulu Desktop will exclude the peanut gallery. The navigation, however, looks excellent.

things

making content for everyone is making content for no one

Nancy Franklin in The New Yorker:

I was puzzled by how a show that’s such a nothing even got made. It turns out that “Mental” is Fox’s first co-production with international partners in an effort to develop and package series for both the United States and the world market, and shoot them outside the U.S. in order to save money. “Mental” was filmed in Bogotá, in Fox’s Colombia studios. It has already been sold to three dozen other countries. Beyond the reduced cost (and “Mental” certainly does look cheap), it’s easy to see why this production method has appeal. Such a generic show, one with few complications, with no sense of place and a bland personality, can be slotted into just about any programming hole until something else comes along. Creatively speaking, this system has the advantage of allowing producers to develop a show to their own satisfaction, without the networks’ meddling. But no such blossoming took place with “Mental”; it’s an artificial flower that can be shipped all over the world without dying, because it was never alive in the first place.

ideas

angles

Today’s viewer sits at many different angles. Sometimes she leans forward to interact with the action. Other times, she leans back and lets the action take her away. There are many other possible angles in between.

The next generation is likely to enjoy more narratives that invite several angles, just as some of today’s best video games use meaningful cut scenes to organize the improvised, user-driven plot.

Already, fans of the TV series Lost are rewarded for leaning in (and huddling up) to decipher the show’s elaborate plots. Fans of American Idol not only determine the show’s outcome, their taped reactions are becoming part of the show’s narrative.

ideas

more of less

Twitter has succeeded in large part because it imposes limits on what can be said and what can be done with that utterance. At least one of these limits is based on the pre-existing and similarly arbitrary character limit that defines the SMS or txt message.

Just as boundaries create space and laws create society, filters create meaning. People will increasingly take to filters because filters create meaning out of an increasingly data-rich world.

The future is more of less.

ideas