Busy, Busy, Busy

Lots and lots of important and time-consuming stuff going on at work lately. Two weeks worth of travel coming up w/probably limited Internet access. Items:

• Spike Lee's documentary on the flooding of New Orleans, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, was excellent.
• Lots of cool stuff to buy at Simple Memory Art. I just bought two periodic table shower curtains -- One for my friend's soon-to-be-married daughter, and one for ourselves!
• Freaky Muppet videos! Excerpt: The Muppets exploded into worldwide popularity in the 1970s as regular performers on Sesame Street. But as pop culture changed, Jim Henson and his company found even stranger creatures to parody by mingling with real-world celebrities. The five-year run of The Muppet Show set the weird tone for a tradition they’ve continued to this day. These 5 online videos show what a long strange trip it’s been.
• John Battelle interview with Web 2.0 YouTuber Michael Wesch (blogged about here). Excerpt: For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected. This is true on many levels. First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself. Second, everything is connected throughout all time, and so as anthropologists we take a very broad view of human history, looking thousands or even millions of years into the past and into the future as well. And finally, all people on the planet are connected. This has always been true environmentally because we share the same planet. Today it is even more true with increasing economic and media globalization.
• Vocabulary associated with the philosophy of knowledge. Example: Rationalism (a priori knowledge) and Empiricism (a posteriori knowledge). When someone burns their hand, they learn not to do it again. Has experience taught them, or by analysing the experience?

A Few Other Things I Watched Recently

Like I said the other day, we watched Spike Lee's Inside Man this weekend. Last night I watched Mr. Lee's commentary, and let me tell you what I love about this guy: He loves movies. This is a bank heist movie in which not only did the good guys and bad guys both take the lessons of Dog Day Afternoon to heart, but also one of the DDA hostages played an old lady being held hostage in Inside, and (mild spoiler) the undercover cop who dropped off the pizzas for the DDA bank robbers played a sniper who dropped off pizzas for the bank robbers here. Tres magnifique! Recommended to all, just don't try and disect every last thing.

I also watched a documentary on a documentarian Stan Brakhage, quite an interesting fellow. Kind of the John Cage of the movies. (Note: If you either don't know who John Cage is, or if you do and you can't abide him, you might want to take a pass on Brakhage. Just a guess.) Here's a quote attributed to him in a profile from the late 60s/early 70s, explaining why he used 8 mm film (which at the time was affordable enough for film buffs to keep at home): A man could own his films, and live with them, showing them when he wanted to see them, examining them bit by bit, the way one can look at a painting until he knew the work. Until it was no longer something esoteric, but something familiar and beloved. That's awesome! Brakhage died in 2003; I'm glad he at least got to see a glimpse of the popularity of the Internet and DVDs. That sentiment reminds me of a Norman Lebrecht article I blogged about last year, which I agreed with for the most part but also took to account on a couple things. Lebrecht excerpt: What this means, in cultural terms, is that film now takes its place beside literature, music and visual imagery as an art that can be owned and bookmarked. Where once you had to visit a cinema or spool through half a mile of clunky videotape in order to access a seminal scene in an essential movie, you now zone into it on DVD as quickly as finding a name in the index of an artist biography. Film has become fact on DVD. It has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms. Books and music have always furnished our rooms, but to have film as a point of home reference, like Oxford English Dictionary and the complete works of Shakespeare, signals a revolution in cultural reception and, inevitably, creation. Much more on Stan Brakhage here, including lots of enlargements of still frames.

Lastly, New York Doll is an interesting and sometimes poignant profile of one of the founders of glam/punk rock who went on to substance abuse (no!), bankruptcy/homelessness, and finally a seemingly contented life as a Mormon geneology librarian. Arthur "Killer" Kane was one of the founders of the New York Dolls, whose work stands with that of Iggy and the Stooges, Bowie as Ziggy, the Ramones, and a few others as paving the way for the punk, glam, gender-bender anarchy of the 70s and early 80s. (For certain bands, that is. That same era produced Air Supply and Foreigner -- Nothing against Foreigner, by the way.)

Long story short, Kane (no relation) got in way over his head when he was 19, had a few years of intense attention and hedonism, followed by about 15 or so years of the gutter, followed by about another 15 or so as a public-transit riding member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The movie has a lot of good interviews with his rock colleagues and his Mormon friends, and shows his participation in the NYD reunion show put on by Morrissey. The end is kind of sad (spoiler: he dies) but these two nice ladies that worked with him at the LDS library put things in perspective. If you are interested in the non-classic-rock scene, check this out.

Pick the future Mormon.

Office Coming Along; 101MIPWNL Updates; TV Streaming; GooTube; Spike Lee Movie; Dilbert Creator Fixes Own Brain

Hmmm... Haven't posted for a few days. Been busy with some sweet home-office reorganization. The ♥G♥ painted my office a couple weekends ago (she's a better neat painter than I am) and last week we got a couple of new office chairs which I assembled the other day, and today we moved a comfy chair from the living room in here. So, I'm going to finish the Deweyfication process on my books (finally) so that the 900s will still be in the living room and hallway, the fiction and 000s-600s (and either 700s or 800s) will be in the book room (aka her office) and the balance will be in my office. I can't decide whether I want the 700s (art, music, etc.) in here, or the 800s (literature and stuff).

A few things:

• I've been updating my post on the 101MIPWNL with some links and comments. Before I'm done, I also intend (for those listees of mine also listed by Karlan, Lazar, and Salter) to parenthesize their rankings of each overlapped listee. Interesting Google find while doing a little research about this -- It's already been done. The Fictional 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Characters in World Literature and Legend by Lucy Pollard-Gott bcame out back in 1998. Here's the official site. Among her other work: Finding fractal patterns in poetry.
• Get it while it lasts... Episodes of TV shows coming out the yingyang -- Not always everything from a given series, but tons of X-Files, Band of Brothers, Seinfeld, 24, Batman Beyond, and many many more.
• Annalee Newitz says that GooTube is dead. She says this in an article called "GooTube is Dead," in which the "I" in "Is" should be capped but is not. Excerpt: Another possible reason why Google bought YouTube is because it fits with the company's copyright reformist agenda. Google has already been testing the limits of corporate activism in the copy wars with its frankly awesome Google Book Search. This controversial project, which led to a lot of legal chest-thumping in the publishing industry, allows people to search the full text of thousands of books. Maybe YouTube will be a kind of Google Book for movies, with fully-searchable videos that allow artists, students, and film geeks to appreciate the motion picture in a whole new way.
• We watched the Spike Lee Joint Inside Man tonight. Not bad! Somewhat implausible, but it kept you thinking the whole time. I'm probably going to listen to the director's commentary tomorrow.
• Dilbert creator Scott Adams has successfully rewired his own brain!