bates motel

One of the documentaries premiered at the Sundance Film Festival is managing—called “78/52” after the number of takes and how many ended up on the cutting-room floor as the director sought perfection for the iconic two-minute shower scene—to bridge that duplicity that the film Psycho has offered audiences since 1960 by deconstructing that very scene. The dual nature of the Hitchcock classic, which is explored by interviewing contemporary directors and actors who would gladly acknowledge the inspirational debts owed, comes as it was witness to such a departure in how we understood and consumed horror. Prior to Psycho, the monstrous was portrayed in the movies as something external—even if so allegorically, and one has to wonder what it was like for those first audiences to experience psychological terror and confront the realisation that it was all in a sense psychosomatic.  I doubt that the experience could ever be replicated for those who followed.  I want to check this out and the idea makes me think of the documentary Room 237 that also had a narrow focus and tales from behind the scenes with blocking that Stanley Kubrick limned for a particular suite at the Overlook.

mad libs or ready for prime-time

Writing for Kottke, Tim Carmody invites us to think broadly about the rhetoric television politics and how the different venues intersect and how the strategies of enabling agents wield their sophistry to blur, confuse and manipulate the normally distinct forums and platforms. Would that we could examine the quiver of the rhetorician academically with Lincoln-Douglas debate club stakes as it’s really a fascinating exercise that’s been debased to the regrettable but very necessary act of bullshit detecting and knowing when the weaker argument is made the stronger. Unfortunately, the ability to articulate how this is done is valued far less that the talent for making the specious or the deceptive believable. I wonder if Dear Leader’s majordomo is a better advisor and mouthpiece.

the pre-fab four

At a time when popular culture and entertainment in flush with reprisals and reboots, many of which are not deserving of our nostalgia and really defy explanation other than derivative vehicles for some marketing tie-in, it was refreshingly discordant to come across this appreciation of fifty years since the debut of the Monkees.
Like the narrator, I realised that I probably had not really spared a thought for the band for years until that moment but being confronted with the intimately familiar repertoire again, I found myself thinking that these numbers were actually really well performed and not just the floss that I had always dismissed them as. Maybe it was that TV show theme that haunted the group—who were originally conceived as a sitcom about an aspiring group of musicians to be like the Beatles—and how both arms of the franchise unfolded concominently, making the music literally incidental. No faulting the band for what they label expected them to do, but it’s strange how I was compelled to hold one opinion—with some conviction and made me think of the Berenstein/Berenstain phenomenon, which is the manifestation of a false or alternate memory—sometimes known as the Mandela Effect as significant portions of the population swore and still possibly maintain that they have vivid, shared memories of Nelson Mandela’s funeral years prematurely.

it’s in the white of my eyes

Atlas Obscura has a very thorough and well-researched tribute to the so-called leader-ladies or “China Girls” that appeared at the head of film reels in order to help projectionists and developers calibrate the colour saturation and contrast. Each laboratory, studio and cinema had their own signature but unbilled matinee idols that were never mean to be seen by the audience. With the transition from analogue to digital, of course (read about the development of the JPEG format here), this custom is falling out of practise but one archivist with the Chicago Film Society has become their champion with a big gallery of these unsung and mostly unknown models. There’s no consensus on the etymology of the term, however.

Atlas Obscura hat eine sehr gründliche und gut recherchierte Hommage an die sogenannten Leaderdamen oder China Girls, die an der Spitze der Filmrollen erschienen, um Projektoren und Entwicklern dabei zu helfen, die Farbsättigung und den Kontrast zu kalibrieren.  Jedes Labor, Studio und Kino hatten ihre eigene Signatur, aber nicht berechnete Matinee-Idole, die niemals vom Publikum gesehen werden sollten. Mit dem Übergang von analog zu digital, natürlich (gelesen über die Entwicklung des JPEG-Format hier), dieser Brauch ist aus der Praxis, aber ein Archivar mit der Chicago Film Society hat sich ihre Champion mit einer großen Galerie dieser ungesund und vor allem Unbekannte Modelle.  Es gibt jedoch keinen Konsens über die Etymologie des Begriffs.

designated survivor

Not that we’ve seen any evidence that this regime has a modicum of respect for protocol or slow governance, perhaps the first order of business ought to be amending the twenty-fifth amendment of the US constitution to change the presidential line of succession to something more aligned with taking the keys away from Peepaw (that’s ever an unenviable task), since as it currently stands, it’s really some awful Hydra in the making.
In descending order of this American carnage goes first to vice-president, then the presiding officer of the house of congress, next to the second in charge of the senate (as the vice-president is the highest ranking) who is by tradition the most senior elected official of the ruling party, and then, should no one be willing to handle that political hot potato, it falls to members of the cabinet in order of the creation of the office, with Secretary of State being the most venerable and Homeland Security the least tenured posting. The precedence is established in the US constitution but was really defined and codified by the twenty-fifth amendment ratified in 1965, responding to the assassination of JFK but grounded in the incapacitation of Woodrow Wilson in 1919 (a stroke caused by the strain of a combination of arguing for the Treaty Versailles and women’s suffrage and advocating against prohibition) that was covered up by her first ladyship Edith Wilson who was making the executive decisions on his behalf for two years.