Links

---the pros and cons of David Shield's Reality Hunger

---the best title sequences of 2009

---George Clooney as Major Tom

---time-lapse of a book cover design

---Matt Damon's inferiority complex and a scene in the anti-American(?) Green Zone

---Father Robert Barron interprets A Serious Man

---interview with Joe Eszterhas

---how to get out of being searched

---human-flesh search engines:

"The short video made its way around China’s Web in early 2006, passed on through file sharing and recommended in chat rooms. It opens with a middle-aged Asian woman dressed in a leopard-print blouse, knee-length black skirt, stockings and silver stilettos standing next to a riverbank. She smiles, holding a small brown and white kitten in her hands. She gently places the cat on the tiled pavement and proceeds to stomp it to death with the sharp point of her high heel.

“This is not a human,” wrote BrokenGlasses, a user on Mop, a Chinese online forum. “I have no interest in spreading this video nor can I remain silent. I just hope justice can be done.” That first post elicited thousands of responses. “Find her and kick her to death like she did to the kitten,” one user wrote. Then the inquiries started to become more practical: “Is there a front-facing photo so we can see her more clearly?” The human-flesh search had begun."

---remembering Auschwitz

---attempting to understand the RAF:

"Meinhof, by far the most interesting and culturally sophisticated character of the group, was herself struggling, ex post facto, with how to make rational sense of the RAF. She was arrested in 1972 for various terrorist-related crimes, and while in jail in late 1973 she started to write a history of the group. This was perhaps a sign of exaggerated self-importance, given that the group had been in existence for a mere two years before its core members were arrested. But it also demonstrates the need to reflect on and explain what they had done. Meinhof's foster mother, in her letter, had acutely pointed out that a "spirit of sacrifice and the readiness to face death become ends in themselves if one cannot make them understood." In her notes for the history, Meinhof, speaking in the third person plural, wrote:

Not because they were so blind as to believe they could keep that initiative going until the revolution triumphed in Germany, not because they imagined they could not be shot or arrested.
 Not because they so misjudged the situation as to think the masses would simply rise at such a signal.
 It was a matter of salvaging, historically, the whole state of understanding attained by the movement of 1967/1968; it was a case of not letting the struggle fall apart again.

She must have felt the need to deny the suspicion that the RAF's members were blind and wrongheaded, incapable of thinking rationally about what they were doing. Instead she claims they were aiming at something else that cannot be measured in ordinary terms. The exact nature of this something else, however, is unclear. There is a marked contrast between the searching questions implicit in her denials and the vagueness of her answer--"salvaging...the whole state of understanding." She seems desperate to rescue the RAF's project from going down in history as an episode driven by strategic lunacy."

---Cozzalio's notes on For the Love of Movies

---Scorsese's 10 essential movie posters

---lastly, the greatest movie scene ever

Comments

Daniel said…
That last link just blew my mind!
Thanks, Daniel. I always try to include something classy at the end of a link list.
Drew McIntosh said…
alot of great stuff here, thanks Dr.!