I LOVE the animation on this website.
I’ve discovered Dim Matter!
Having attended a very PC college, I heard plenty of complaints about anthrocentrism, but this may be the greatest bit of self-centeredness ever:
New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.
The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the cosmos to revert to an earlier state when it was more likely to end. “Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe,” Prof Krauss tells New Scientist.
Running down that Hill
I guess the Wall Street Journal has a vested interest in throwing Hillary Clinton through the Drew Friedmanizer like this:
Note: I added a “Drew Friedmanizer” category to the site, so now you can check out all the posts with these wacky WSJ pictures.
Unrequired Reading: Nov. 23, 2007
It’s time for some post-Thanksgiving links, dear readers! Happy Black Friday! Go buy me stuff!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Nov. 23, 2007”
Happy Thanksmisting!
Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers! The official VM wife is preparing some infernal Brussels sprouts recipe for our hosts. I baked my super-amazing bestest-ever chocolate chip cookies last night while we, um, listened to Abba. So the holiday weekend is in full swing, is what I’m saying!
While Amy got ready to stink up the house with those sprouts this morning, I decided to take a walk around the block. As you can see, Dimension Studios put together a great product tie-in for this weekend’s new Stephen King movie.
No Theater for Old People
After Monday, I took the rest of the week off. Today I decided to catch a matinee of the new flick from the Coen Bros., No Country for Old Men. Before I comment on the movie, I should point out that I rarely go out to the theater. Why? Because other people suck. In this instance, the audience of perhaps 20 people got treated to THREE incoming cellphone calls to the old couple sitting in my row.
Of course, they didn’t want to be rude and answer their phone. Instead, the let the incoming calls ring out, including the one that occurred during the closing monologue. Thanks, you old fuckers! I loved listening to your ringtone instead of the movie! Be glad I didn’t wait for the lights to come up so I could ask you for $9 to make up for the moviegoing experience that you wrecked.
Despite those interruptions, it was an awfully good movie. Looking over his filmography, it appears that I’ve never seen a Josh Brolin flick before, so I don’t know if he’s known for anything besides bagging Diane Lane, that lucky so-and-so. What I do know is that he played a tough role very naturally, without pulling any “Look! I’m acting!” moments.
Tommy Lee Jones also did a fine job as an old sheriff. The role called for an extinguished spark, which he provided. Strangely, his role mirrored that of Frances McDormand in Fargo, as a cop/sheriff who’s always trailing the mayhem, and trying to make sense of it all. In McDormand’s case, the character’s pregnancy catalyzes questions of evil and life. For Jones, his family’s history in law enforcement chronicles an abyss that looms ever closer.
That abyss is brought to you courtesy of Javier Bardem, who was utterly frightening as a killer possessed of a moral vision. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the character. When I write “moral vision,” I don’t mean some pat line of “I kill people because they’ve been asleep all their bourgeois lives” or somesuch. Rather, the character really seems to consider issues of fate and will, notions that I’m sure attracted the Bros. to adapt the novel into this movie.
Plus, one of the attacks enabled the Coens to throw in a little Miller’s Crossing homage (a character has to escape out a window a la Albert Finney in the great Danny Boy sequence). Of course, longtime readers of this blog know that I adore that movie over all others. Because of this affection, I usually give the Coens the benefit of the doubt. (Except with The Ladykillers, which looked pretty awful.) It’s a very restrained movie for them, with only a couple of their trademark weird moments, and that’s just fine. The story and the characters are vivid and eerie enough that any preciosities would demolish the tension that carries throughout.
I’d recommend that you go out and see this flick ASAP, but only if you buy out the movie theater, so you don’t have to deal with idiots and their goddamn cellphones. Or buy one of those jammers and block everybody from getting calls.
(Bonus: Conversation with Joel & Ethan Coen and Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men! And Joel dismisses Miller’s Crossing as a ripoff! Thanks!)
First Snow of the Season
It didn’t add up to much, but it was snow! Bam!
More office funnies
One of my coworkers had his two sons in this afternoon. They looked around 8 and 5 years old. I was walking by when the younger one got a pretzel stick out of the communal barrel (don’t ask) and then said to big brother, “Look! I’m smoking!”
I said, “Kid: smoking is cool. Don’t let anyone tell you different,” and then headed back to my office.
Missingthepoint.net
I was going through our office’s mail just now, so I could grab my industry-specific magazines before they get filed. I have to keep up with some of our competitors, like Genetic Engineering News and Pharmaceutical Processing. We’re all on each other’s mailing lists, usually under funny names and fake companies. I also keep an eye out for general business magazines that have pharma-specific editorial, to see how much they get wrong.
Today, I came across one of the great business magazines of all time: Messaging News, The Technology of Email and Instant Messaging.
I chuckled over the idea of a print magazine devoted to instant electronic communication, but I really laughed when I discovered that it comes out bi-monthly.
The Man Who Wasn’t There, or The Mystery of Pittsburgh
Saturday night before my San Diego trip, we watched Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture
I think discussions of Warhol’s work tend to center more on “the art world” than on art per se, and whether he was perpetrating a massive fraud on such. Unfortunately, I’m not versed enough in art history to give you guys a real critique of Warhol; I’m sure some of you have enough knowledge of it to beat any of my assertions to death on the rocks of my ignorance. Since the documentary raised enough questions about Warhol as a person, I’m gonna follow that lead.
The early stages of the movie — chronicling Warhol’s family history in Pittsburgh, his work as a commercial artist in NYC, and the rise and significance of pop art — tease out a number of elements that hint at the “boy behind the myth.” Perhaps it was a simplification of his formative years, but at least it yields a singular idea of who Warhol was. It’s a straightforward story, described mostly by his brothers, of a kid who was overly attached to his mother and didn’t really fit in at school.
(Note: I’m really want to see a documentary about the lives of his two brothers. It seems that they knew their brother was an artist in New York City, but had no clue as to how famous he was. One is filmed in a Harley-Davidson trucker cap, and it seems that he and Andy talked often, if not daily. At his death, Andy left each of the brothers $250,000, but his estate ended up valued around $600 million. No word on how they felt about that.)
What piqued my interested was the explicability of that young Warhol as contrasted with the ambivalence of the later edition(s).
Once Warhol becomes famous, there’s an explosion in the number of perspectives on him — understandably, since many more people knew him — but the figure they describe becomes much less clear. The more material there is, the less it makes for a coherent picture. This phenomenon seems to arise partly from the nature of the interviewees — artists and hangers-on, in a particularly drug-addled era — and partly from some elusive aspect of Warhol himself. The more they had to say, the less of a Warhol there was. I found myself wondering how this multiplicity of self paralleled one of his main forms of art: silk-screening. Do these prints, meaningful in their repetition and reduction, tell us something significant about the life of this artist?
Watching the documentary, I kept trying to resolve this issue of identity, especially as Warhol becomes a stand-in for the concept of celebrity and fame throughout the ’70s and ’80s. One of the interviewees talks about watching O.J. Simpson’s low-speed chase in 1994 and how similar it was to Warhol’s movie Empire, which consists of eight hours of a static shot of the Empire State Building.
Flipping through websites like the Superficial, I wonder what he would’ve made of today’s celebrities — even the marginally talented ones — who are followed by dozens of photographers every time they step outside. I suppose Paris Hilton, famous for being famous, would’ve made perfect sense to him. But that “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” aspect of Warhol doesn’t describe him.
What perplexes me about this is the fact that Warhol was an obsessive recorder of his activities, a “recording angel.” One of the interviewees considered this an attempt at staving off death; that is, by accreting so many moments, they can never really be lost (there’s a reason I call this blog Virtual Memories). The downside of such voluminous recording is that the task of sorting through it all becomes overwhelming. And, as Kierkegaard tells us, we need to be able to forget. (I think he said that.)
Even though there are mountains of tapes, I think the documentary only has one brief segment of Warhol’s voice: after his mother’s death in 1972, he calls his brother and tells him that he won’t be coming out for the funeral and that she would’ve wanted the cheapest arrangements possible. Occurring near the end of the film, it’s a perplexing choice. The only time we get “the man” in his own words, he’s essentially tossing his mom into a cheap pine box. (He was buried next to his parents at the “Byzantine Catholic Cemetery.” According to Wikipedia, he was buried in a solid bronze casket with gold-plated rails and white upholstery. And, of course, a platinum wig.)
As Virtual Memories go, I saved the answering machine tape of my dad informing me of his mother’s death. I’m not sure why I did that, but the likeliest reason was because of the emotion in my dad’s voice. Warhol, on the other hand, could almost be making a call to a caterer, for all the feeling he shows on that tape.
Far be it from me to judge how someone relates to his family. Cutting off his family and excising his past would’ve been explicable — I’ve known enough artists and poseurs who’ve followed that route — but that’s not who he was. Warhol kept his mom with him in NYC from around 1949 to 1971 or so. There’s a cute anecdote about how some visitors to his apartment assumed this elderly woman with the heavy accent was Warhol’s cleaning lady.
I know this is getting all over the place, but that’s what I’m trying to get at, this electron-cloud of self. The movie portrays a man who starts out somewhat “normal” and winds up bifurcating over and over into a range of human experience that no one can put a finger on. While this isn’t such an extreme phenomenon — I’ve written about the impossibility of biography before — it raises the question of whether there was an “essential” Warhol behind all the mysteries.
Far too early, the documentary mentions how Truman Capote once described Warhol as a “Sphinx without a secret.” I thought it was an ingenious metaphor for the man. When I looked up the phrase, I found out that Oscar Wilde used it first.