Posts Tagged ‘Alfonso Cuarón’
New Year’s Links!
* A nice endorsement of Octavia E. Butler from Steve Shaviro. Some bonus Shaviro content: his favorite SF of 2016. I think Death’s End was the best SF I read this year too, though I really liked New York 2140 a lot too (technically that’s 2017, I suppose). I’d also single out Invisible Planets and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, both of which had some really good short stories. In comics, I think The Vision was the best new thing I’ve seen in years. There’s a lot I bought this year and didn’t have time to look at yet, though, so maybe check back with me in 2019 and I can tell you what was the best thing from 2016.
* Introducing the David Foster Wallace Society, including a CFP for the inaugural issue of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies.
* Call for Papers: The Poverty of Academia.
* Oh, fuck this terrible year.
* 30 essential tips for succeeding in graduate school.
* The University in the Time of Trump.
* Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme.
* Who’s Afraid of the Student Debt Crisis?
* Duke warns professors about emails from someone claiming to be a student, seeking information about their courses — many in fields criticized by some on the right. Some Michigan and Denver faculty members have received similar emails but from different source.
* The age of humanism is ending.
* The New Year and the Bend of the Arc.
* Marina Abramović and Kim Stanley Robinson perform “The Hard Problem.”
* Osvaldo Oyola reads Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther.
* Leia Organa Solo: A Critical Obituary.
* BREAKING: There Is No Such Thing as “White Genocide.” Academic Freedom, Again. Buffalo skulls.
* I don’t think Children of Men was ever actually “overlooked” — and I’m shocked it was considered a flop at a time — but it certainly looks prescient now.
* From Tape Drives to Memory Orbs, the Data Formats of Star Wars Suck. Remembering Caravan of Courage, the Ewok Adventure Star Wars Would Rather You’d Forget. Anti-fascism vs. nostalgia: Rogue One. How to See Star Wars For What It Really Is. And a new headcanon regarding the Empire and its chronic design problems.
* Good News! Humans No Longer Caused Climate Change, According to the State of Wisconsin.
* How did A&E let this happen?
* On fighting like Republicans, or, the end of America.
* Scenes from the class struggle in Berkeley. And in Chillicothe, Ohio.
* The seduction of technocratic government—that a best answer will overcome division, whether sown in the nature of man or ineluctable in capitalist society—slides into the seduction in the campaign that algorithms will render rote the task of human persuasion, that canvassers are just cogs for a plan built by machine. And so the error to treat data as holy writ, when it’s both easier and harder than that. Data are fragile; algorithms, especially when they aggregate preferences, fall apart. Always, always, power lurks. The technocrats have to believe in mass politics, believe for real that ordinary people, when they organize, can change their own destinies. Whether that happens depends on the party that gets built, and the forces behind it.
* Four Cabinet nominations that could blow up in Donald Trump’s face. Fighting Mass Incarceration Under Trump: New Strategies, New Alliances. Why Donald Trump Might Not Be All That Good for Art. How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler. This all certainly seems on the up-and-up. And today in teaching the controversy: Nuclear diplomacy via Twitter is a bad idea.
* Democrats: Time to Win! Why the Democrats’ 2017 comeback dream is like nothing we’ve seen before.
* The Russia Conundrum: How Can Democrats Avoid Getting Entangled in a Losing Issue?
* House Republicans will ring in the new year with a plan to permanently cripple government.
* The Great Harvard Pee-In of 1973.
* The UBI already exists for the 1%.
* The arc of history is long, but Google Search will not longer return Holocaust-denying websites at the top of page one.
* Same joke but about not being allowed to ban plastic bags in Michigan anymore.
* The Champions of the 401(k) Lament the Revolution They Started.
* “It was a pleasure to cull.”
* Geoengineering could ruin astronomy.
* Haiti and the Age of Revolution.
* A Utopia for the Deaf in Martha’s Vineyard.
* Why the ‘Ghost Ship’ Was Invisible in Oakland, Until 36 Died.
* Nine charts that show how white women are drinking themselves to death.
* It wasn’t just your imagination: more famous people did die in 2016.
* How long can Twitter go on like this?
* The Porn Business Isn’t Anything Like You Think it Is. The Attorney Fighting Revenge Porn.
* Special ed and the war on education.
* Happy Public Domain Day 2017.
* Intricate Star Trek Klingon Warship Using 25,000 LEGO Bricks.
Friday!
* ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. The power of #YesAllWomen. Media monsters gotta monster.
* Alternate Visions: Some Musings on Diversity in SF.
* Game Theory Is Really Counterintuitive.
* American jails have become the new mental asylums – and you’re paying the bill.
* “It was pretty much slave labor,” she says, “but there was nothing I could do about that. I needed stamps to write to my child. I needed hygiene products.” Modern-Day Slavery in America’s Prison Workforce.
* Scenes from the school reform scam in Newark.
In fact, not a cent of Zuckerberg’s money has gone toward hiring counselors, social workers or nurses. Meanwhile, “there have been DRAMATIC cuts to wraparound services,” wrote Mike Maillaro, Newark Teachers Union’s director of communication and research, in an e-mail. Last year, every attendance counselor in the district was eliminated.
Hawthorne Avenue reports losing eight support staff members since 2011, including a guidance counselor and two instructional coaches. The school has neither a music teacher nor a librarian.
Zuckerberg’s money would instead “create systemic education reform in Newark.” In 2011, it was reported that a full third of the foundation’s cash had found the pockets of consultants. As Dale Russakoff recently reported in a lengthy New Yorker article, that total now sits at about $20 million.
Though a smattering of grants have benefitted local causes—after-school yoga ($31,000), book drives ($1.2 million), new district schools ($2.1 million) and sundry others—over 40 percent of the money granted to organizations has left the state. Outside talent and recruitment agencies, for instance, raked in over $4 million to align district staffing with Anderson’s politics.
* In New Orleans, major school district closes traditional public schools for good.
* Black legislators in North Carolina are blasting a provision in the State Senate’s budget bill that they say is an attempt to force the closure of Elizabeth City State University, a historically black institution, WRAL News reported.
* The Intractability of Op-Ed Habits.
* Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say. Even Middle-Class Students Have Poor Odds of Graduating From College. 2 Years On, Two-Thirds of This Graduating Class Aren’t Financially Self-Sufficient. How to end the college class war.
* Making Olin’s problems worse, the school’s only subject, engineering, is very expensive to teach. Unlike other schools with a broader array of programs, Olin cannot subsidize engineering students by charging their classmates the same tuition for cheaper majors such as English and sociology. At many schools — although they may not know it — liberal arts majors are in effect helping to underwrite the high cost of science and technical education.
* All This: Mad Men and the Persistence of the Old Regime. As good as it gets: Mad Men and neoliberalism. Mad Men‘s Robert Morse on Dancing Into the Sunset. Mad Men’s Trudy Campbell is a KGB Spy. The Matt Weiner Interview. As fun as this show is, it’s about some pretty grimy shit.
* In an attempt to emphasize heterosexuality, fear or hatred of homosexuals and misogynist language developed. The bro, in short, is a culture-wide defense mechanism against the gay.
* Back to the top of the order: Let’s Debunk Scientific Racism, Again.
* Most Doctors Would Refuse Their Own Aggressive End-Of-life Treatments.
* Judge Orders Antitrust Suit Against NCAA to Go to Trial Next Month.
* BREAKING: The rule of law is a joke.
* Government files reveal official campaign of spying against Occupy Wall Street.
* Nobody Wants To Host The 2022 Olympics.
* So the Chamber is telling us that we can achieve major reductions in greenhouse gases at a cost of 0.2 percent of GDP. A Pushback on Green Power. What Will Climate Change Deniers Say…?
* The religious right, who liked to call themselves the “moral majority” at the time, actually organized around fighting to protect Christian schools from being desegregated. It wasn’t Roe v. Wadethat woke the sleeping dragon of the evangelical vote. It was Green v. Kennedy, a 1970 decision stripping tax-exempt status from “segregation academies”—private Christian schools that were set up in response to Brown v. Board of Education, where the practice of barring black students continued.
* Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature (2014). Just clap your hands if you believe in job training!
* It doesn’t get better: Sorry, nerds: Fraternity brothers have more fulfilling lives later on.
* Incoming Title IX Mess: Duke Student Sues For Diploma After He’s Expelled for Sexual Assault.
* Angus Johnston’s Content Warnings.
* Two great tastes! NCAA Teams Up With Defense Dept. on $30-Million Concussion Study.
* Cruel optimism watch: Hulu In Talks To Pick Up New Season Of Community.
* And nothing good will happen anymore: Alfonso Cuarón says he won’t be directing Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Harry Potter and the Title I’ve Never Really Cared For
We saw Harry Potter and the Title I’ve Never Really Cared For last night. I don’t have time for an especially long review, but I’m curiously of two minds about it. Visually I think it’s by far the most disappointing of the adaptations—David Yates gives every scene a washed-out, sickly color that, whatever his artistic intentions, is completely ugly, and there is almost none of the manic Hogwarts exuberance that characterizes the earlier films. (This time around Hogwarts is pretty much just a really old, dank castle with the Cloisters’ unicorn tapestry inside.) The script, too, tinkers with the original book in ways that are almost always to the story’s detriment, with foreshadowing so blatant it’s practically trolling the film itself—and several of the child actors seem alternatively bored with the material or unable to pull off what is required of them. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the film? Quite a bit, actually; there are a few really nice moments that are genuinely funny (as opposed to kid-funny or Harry-Potter-fan-funny) that by themselves almost single-handedly drag the film back towards “good.” None of the other films, for my money, have been able to hold a candle to Alfonso Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban—the only film in the series that I’d suggest is an objectively great film—but this one is good, or at least good enough.
Children of Men Coming to TV
David Eick (Bionic Woman, Battlestar Galactica) is working on a small-screen adaptation of Children of Men. The Alfonso Cuarón film joins Buffy, Ferris Bueller, Logan’s Run, Clueless, Highlander and Planet of the Apes in the coveted film-to-TV remake arena…
‘Shock Doctrine’
Via today’s Salon interview with Naomi Klein comes a link to the short film she made with Alfonso Cuarón, Shock Doctrine:
The other way that I look at torture is as a metaphor for disaster capitalism. Disaster capitalism is an attempt to push through policies in the chaos and disorientation that follow a disaster — policies that wouldn’t stand a chance during normal, non-disastrous circumstances. The move to turn New Orleans public housing into condos after Katrina is a classic example. So is the current campaign to push through a highly contested oil law in Iraq, even as the country spirals into civil war.
What I argue is that this attempt to take advantage of the window of opportunity opened up by crisis has some uncomfortable similarities to the techniques for psychological torture laid out in declassified CIA interrogation manuals, which I quote in the book. For instance, the infamous 1963 Kubark manual talks about how to put a prisoner in a state of shock, using various regression techniques like sensory deprivation and sensory overload. Then it states that “there is an interval — which may be extremely brief — of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world. Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply, than he was just before he experienced the shock.”
Gerry Canavan 