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Signs Taken for Wonders
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
1:20PM - Other (lesser) entertainment news
New "Witchblade" Film In Development
I... just don't know what to say about this one.
"Cereal" Mascots Turn CG Superheroes
David Meinstein ("Portal") is writing the screenplay, which revolves around cartoon cereal box-mascots who are mistakenly brought to life when a plan to replace the world's fallen superheroes with characters from comic books goes awry.
Oh, Ironman, what hath thou wrought?
1:12PM - Ohmygod!!!!! This is the best news EVER!!!!
FRAGGLE ROCK: THE MOVIE
I think that really says it all, but for those who need more info I offer this:
The Weinstein Co. will turn the Jim Henson series "Fraggle Rock" into a live-action musical feature reports Variety.
Just like the 80's TV series, the film will be populated by a mix of human characters and Fraggle Rock puppets including the core characters of Gogo, Wembley, Mokey, Boober and Red.
I knew there was a reason that the Weinsteins fell from grace. It was so that they could rise like a phoenix from the ashes of a Disneyfied Miramax AND MAKE A FRAGGLE ROCK MOVIE!!!!
(And also so they could continue to make Project Runway great.
Which leads my overheated brain to hope that a Tim Gunn / Fraggle crossover could be in store for the future...)
Sunday, May 11, 2008
5:18PM - Entertainment update
I haven't done one of these in a while, so here goes:
Fans of the British tv shows "Spaced" and "Life on Mars" may be please (or disappointed) to hear that the America remakes seem to have hit roadblocks. FOX has decided not to pick up "Spaced" while the "Life on Mars" pilot is going to be completely reshot with an almost entirely new lead cast. Not a good sign.
Natalie Portman has apparently pulled out of John Maybury's upcoming adaptation of "Wuthering Heights". No doubt the frantic filmmakers will try to replace her in the role of Catherine Earnshawwith Kiera Knightly and her razor-sharp shoulderblades.
A big rabbit apparition warned me that an sequel to Donnie Darko that follows the vision-plagued misadventures of Donnie Darko's kid sister, Samantha. Richard Kelly is not involved.
"Bioshock" Movie to be directed by someone who isn't Uwe Boll. Gore Verbinski's done some good work in the past... You never know - this might not suck.
Friday, May 9, 2008
9:58AM - Santogold - L.E.S. Artistes [Official Music Video]
I like the new album by Santogold. She's like M.I.A... only different.
This tune is kinda 80s-sounding to my ears, but it's catchy. And the video shows what happens When Artists Attack. Disemboweling with vegetables, paint bleeding from ears... All that good stuff.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
3:00PM - And your poem of the day is...
Reading the Bible Backwards by Eleanor Wilner.
No reason for posting it; I just came across it again and thought some folks on this list might like it.
Friday, May 2, 2008
4:50PM - Random thoughts from the Work Room, as I wait for things to print
It's very green and wet today. I enjoy it.
Also, I just heard a rumour to the effect that Obama's favourite TV show is The Wire. I no longer have any excuse not to vote for the man. Except, of course, that it would be illegal.
Monday, April 28, 2008
8:35AM - Your Gothic News of the Day
Austria Says Man Jailed Daughter for 24 Years
Austrian police arrested a 73-year-old man who they say kept his daughter locked in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, three of whom never emerged into daylight from their prison until now.
Yrrrrrrch.
8:15AM
This article made me feel very sad: A Principal's Rise and Fall
Debbie Almontaser dreamed of starting a public school like no other in New York City. Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country’s elite colleges. They would be ready, in Ms. Almontaser’s words, to become “ambassadors of peace and hope.”
The school’s creation provoked a controversy so incendiary that Ms. Almontaser stepped down as the founding principal just weeks before classes began last September. Ms. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor’s office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda.
Last month, federal judges issued a ruling — related to a lawsuit brought by Ms. Almontaser to regain her job — stating that her words were “inaccurately reported by The Post and then misconstrued by the press.”
Particularly this part:
Then Mr. Bennett asked her for the origins of the word intifada, she said.
“The educator in me responded,” Ms. Almontaser said. She explained, with Ms. Meyer listening in on the three-way phone call, that the root of the word means “shaking off.” Ms. Almontaser then offered what she described as a lengthy explanation about the evolution of the word and the “negative connotation” it had developed because of the Arab-Israeli struggle.
The next day, The Post ran the article under the headline “City Principal Is ‘Revolting’ — Tied to ‘Intifada NYC’ Shirts.” The article quoted Ms. Almontaser as saying that the girls in the organization were “shaking off oppression,” words that The Post, according to a ruling by federal appellate judges, attributed to Ms. Almontaser “incorrectly and misleadingly.”
Friday, April 25, 2008
8:30AM - I hate you, msnbc
Woman, 19, becomes world's youngest college professor
Sabur, from Northport, N.Y., has clearly been ahead of the learning curve since an early age.
She started talking and reading when she was just 8 months old. She had elementary school finished at age 5.
She made the jump to college at age 10. And by age 14, Sabur was earning a bachelor’s of science degree in applied mathematics summa cum laude from Stony Brook University — the youngest female in U.S. history to do so.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
12:30PM - Oddest 18C poem titles so far
TO THE AUTHOR OF A DULL EPIGRAM.
ON AN INFLAMMATION IN A LADY's EYE.
HOW TO WRITE ONE's OWN LIFE.
Also, an "Ode to the Water Pumps at Bath." Proving that, even in an era before magnetic poetry, you really could write a poem about anything.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
11:30AM - Pop Levi - Sugar Assault Me Now
Nice to see Ringo step out from behind the drums.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
9:15AM - Sign petition to end evil
I had a dream a couple nights ago that I stole Uwe Boll's razzie award and that he came after me with ninjas.
Maybe it was a premonition of this article: Make the bad man stop, pleads the internet
Friday, April 4, 2008
9:41AM - Link o' the day
I found this interesting essay about authenticity and film via the NYT:
Play It Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part One)
“So, how is it that you managed to be on the roadway that night?” The question was posed by a reporter from the Dallas Morning News. This was in 1988, during an interview about my recently released film, “The Thin Blue Line.” I had decided for the first time as a documentary filmmaker to use slow-motion re-enactments in my account of the wrongful conviction of Randall Dale Adams for the murder of Dallas Police Officer Robert Wood.
The question seemed insane. The film was released in 1988. The crime occurred in 1976. Was this reporter suggesting that I had been out on the roadway with a 35-millimeter film crew the night of the murder, and just happened to be at the right place, at the right time to film the crime – over a decade earlier? Indeed, he was.
Just so there is no doubt about this: I wasn’t there.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
6:55AM - I must have missed this while I was struggling up Mount Doom
...at least, I don't recall having linked to it before:
LotR: a grad school allegory
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
3:00PM - Happy April Fools day
Too many people have linked to the flying penguins for me to do it too. Feh.
I am lethargic today. I don't like it much.
On the plus side, I have recently discovered the glory of The Wire. The only thing that could possibly this TV series more awesome is if it had a crossover episode with Battlestar Galactica.
Maybe it already did. Sunglass-wearing lawyer had to come from somewhere, after all.
contemplativeTuesday, March 25, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
8:24AM - Readings
This is just sad. An Agent, a Green Card, and a Demand for Sex
...The 16-minute recording, which the woman first took to The New York Times and then to the Queens district attorney, suggests the vast power of low-level immigration law enforcers, and a growing desperation on the part of immigrants seeking legal status. The aftermath, which included the arrest of an immigration agent last week, underscores the difficulty and danger of making a complaint, even in the rare case when abuse of power may have been caught on tape.
No one knows how widespread sexual blackmail is, but the case echoes other instances of sexual coercion that have surfaced in recent years, including agents criminally charged in Atlanta, Miami and Santa Ana, Calif. And it raises broader questions about the system’s vulnerability to corruption at a time when millions of noncitizens live in a kind of legal no-man’s land, increasingly fearful of seeking the law’s protection.
This New Yorker essay, on the other hand, is pretty amusing: Just the Facts, Ma’Am: Fake memoirs, factual fictions, and the history of history.
My favorite quote: In 1990, Sir Geoffrey Elton called postmodern literary theory “the intellectual equivalent of crack.”
(Bwa-hahahaha.)
But really it's about this:
Fiction, in other words, can do what history doesn’t but should: it can tell the story of ordinary people. The eighteenth century’s fictive history (not to be confused with what we call “historical fiction”) is the history of private life; the history of what passes in a man’s own mind; true to the Book of Nature; and written in plain, simple style, exhibiting both judgment and invention. And it is the history of obscure men. Who are these obscure men? Well, a lot of them are women.
For every Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe, there were a dozen Clarissas, Pamelas, and Charlotte Temples. If eighteenth-century novels are history, they’re women’s history. And they were adored, above all, by women readers. “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity” was the revealing title of an essay published in England in 1797 and in Boston five years later. Everyone from preachers to politicians damned novels as corrupting of both public and private virtue and, above all, of women’s virtue. “Novels not only pollute the imaginations of young women,” one American magazine writer insisted in 1798; they give them “false ideas of life.”
What, pray, was the remedy for this grave social ill? Reading history. “There is nothing which I would recommend more earnestly to my female readers than the study of history,” Hume wrote in “Of the Study of History” (which is why he gave his lady friend Plutarch’s Lives, and told her it was a novel). But, on the whole, women were not particularly interested in reading history. Hume attributed this to the fair sex’s “aversion to matter of fact” and its “appetite for falsehood.” Men “allow us Poetry, Plays, and Romances,” Mary Astell wrote in 1705, “and when they would express a particular Esteem for a Woman’s Sense, they recommend History.” But why read it? “For tho’ it may be of Use to Men who govern Affairs, to know how their Fore-fathers Acted, yet what is this to us?”
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
10:14PM - Anthony Minghella's death
Anthony Minghella Dead At 54
Wow. That makes me sad. The English Patient was a truly beautiful movie, and it owed more to Minghella than to the orginal book, imo. From "The Talented Mr. Ripley" to "Michael Clayton". everything he touched had an aura of quality to it.
Plus he bailed on his PhD program to work on Hensen's "The Storyteller." What's not to admire?
Anyway, I'm shocked and sorry to hear that he's died so young. I was looking forward to his future projects.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
1:52PM - Arcade Fire - Intervention
Your daily dose of music, this time cut to "Battleship Potemkin."
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
11:06PM - Well, this seemed like a good Spring Break song
Vampire Weekend - "Mansard Roof"
(I would have put up "Oxford Comma," but they don't have a good video for it yet.)
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