Posts Tagged ‘Django Unchained’
Center for the Advancement of Saturday Links
* Some unexpectedly big news at President Lovell’s inauguration today: Marquette will be developing a new Center for the Advancement of the Humanities as a result of a multimillion dollar gift from an alumna.
* The Science Fiction Working Group at the University of Florida.
* Cost of living map: What is $100 worth in your state?
* Does Louisiana have a future? Bobby Jindal says it’s an open question about which reasonable people can disagree.
* Working With Quentin Tarantino On The Django Unchained Sequel, Django/Zorro.
* Couple Who Let Homeless People Sleep On Their Porch Threatened With Daily Fine.
* Pennsylvania High School Suspends Student Editor For Refusing To Print The Word ‘Redskins.’
* Nightmares: In 2010, a teacher’s aide and the assistant principal at Sparkman Middle School in Huntsville, Alabama carried out a plan to use a special needs student—a 14-year-old girl—as “bait” to catch another special needs student who was sexually violent. The plan failed, and the 14-year-old girl was raped in the school’s bathroom. Earlier this year, that assistant principal got promoted.
* More horrors: Fraternity Allegedly Used Color-Coded System to Roofie Girls.
* It’s been [hastily switches sign] 0 days since the last fact-free trend piece on paying for college through sex work.
* Meticulous Visual Recreation Of Moon Landing Shows It Wasn’t A Hoax. OR SO THEY WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE
* How to Get Into an Ivy League College—Guaranteed.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Ohio Supreme Court: It’s OK To Strip Mine State Wildlife Areas.
* And 9/19/1984: Never forget.
Sunday Super Sunshine Hit Links
* “The professional backgrounds of many of the defendants is troubling,” said James T. Hayes Jr., a special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations. “We can no longer assume that the only people who would stoop to prey on children are unemployed drifters.” WHY WERE YOU ASSUMING THAT?
* Adjuncts are not considered “full time” or “part time” mostly because no one still bothers to accurately keep track of hours. It’s a choice; not an impossibility.
* Breaking: Alt-Ac Isn’t the Answer.
* The Unpaid Intern Economy Rides on the Backs of Young Women.
* The Art of Screenwriting: Matthew Weiner.
* Boston Public Schools to Eliminate History & Social Science Departments. But there’s money for a laptop for every student and computer coding in the curriculum.
* The Case for Reparations. Reparations: What the Education Gospel Cannot Fix. On Whose Shoulders The Research Stands.
* For Hire: Dedicated Young Man with Down Syndrome. From Michael Bérubé.
I knew Jamie would not grow up to be a marine biologist. And I know that there are millions of non-disabled Americans out of work or underemployed, whose lives are less happy than Jamie’s. I don’t imagine that he has a “right” to a job that supersedes their needs. But I look sometimes at the things he writes in his ubiquitous legal pads when he is bored or trying to amuse himself — like the page festooned with the names of all 67 Pennsylvania counties, written in alphabetical order — and I think, isn’t there any place in the economy for a bright, gregarious, effervescent, diligent, conscientious and punctual young man with intellectual disabilities, a love of animals and an amazing cataloguing memory and insatiable intellectual curiosity about the world?
* They proposed that we genetically engineer a species of cat that changes color in the presence of radiation, which would be released into the wild to serve as living Geiger counters. Then, we would create folklore and write songs and tell stories about these “ray cats,” the moral being that when you see these cats change colors, run far, far away.
* Pope Francis and climate change.
* 10 Years of Pollution, $2 Million in Penalties. As always, that’s barely noticeable on Citgo’s balance sheet.
* This 9/11 Cheese Plate May Be The 9/11 Museum’s Most Tasteless Souvenir. Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark.
* Buzzfeed’s list of underrated towns includes both Milwaukee and Burlington.
* “For reasons that I really don’t understand Durham is an outlier,” said Baumgartner. “Where we found a 77 percent disparity across the state between blacks and whites and their likelihood of being searched, in Durham, it’s about 260 percent. So that is truly astounding.”
* Richard Dawkins: “I am a secular Christian.” Oh, New Atheism, what have you become!
* Moral panics, chess edition.
* Jessie White, a 99-year-old woman from Belfast, Maine, was finally granted her college degree from Bangor’s Beal College after the college’s president stepped up and paid the $5 transcript fee she’d not been able to afford in 1939.
* Today in free speech: This Drug Defendant Spoke Her Mind, Then A Judge Told Her She’d Stay In Jail Until She Retracted Her Statements To The Media. Meanwhile, Utah Man Facing Hate Crime Charges Says Threatening Black Child Was ‘Just My Opinion.’
* Today in the competency and wisdom of our armed forces.
* Congress Reluctant To Cut Funding For Tank That Just Spins Around And Self-Destructs.
* Ohio Replaces Lethal Injection With Humane New Head-Ripping-Off Machine.
* Cruel optimism watch: Could Scott Walker lose in November?
* David Wittenberg reviews a whole lot of time travel for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
* A Brief History of The Shawshank Redemption.
* A Brief History of “All Good Things…”
* Zombie properties in Milwaukee.
* Quentin Tarantino wants to recutDjango Unchained as a miniseries.
* And Marvel has made its first DC-level big mistake. What a bummer.
Even More Sunday Links!
* Unleash the unschools: How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses.
* Whether intentionally or not, At Berkeley not only toes the administration’s line but faithfully brings to life the administration’s way of seeing. Students and workers are rendered (if, that is, they appear at all) as anonymous data points, the personification of tasks (e.g. mowing the lawns) and economic flows (e.g. scientific research), and occasionally inconvenient, illegible, and irrational obstructions.
* On Chronic Illness, Disclosure, and Impostor Syndrome.
* In The Real World, Revenge Porn Is Far Worse Than Making It Illegal. But the abstract principle at stake…
* An army of robot baristas could mean the end of Starbucks as we know it.
* The Royal Mounted Police send snipers to an anti-fracking protest.
* Stop worrying: Hungry Animals Would Take Down a Zombie Invasion.
* And Henry Louis Gates pitches a Django Unchained / 12 Years a Slave double feature. Sounds good to me.
‘Spaghetti Westerns Questioned the Underpinnings of Civilization’
Django Unchained is not so much the evil twin of the saintly Lincoln as its nasty, more clever kid brother, fighting for recognition against the favorite, acting out. If I prefer it to Lincoln it’s because I prefer the Tarantinian project, flaws and all, to Steven Spielberg’s entire career. Lincoln may be the culmination of the Spielberg-Lucas reimagining of the American cinema as family entertainment, a transcendent work beyond the blockbuster form that reimagines the official national myth of an official national father for current and future generations.
Tarantino is more interested in a pre-consolidated cinema that pre-dates Spielberg, in which national myths were put to use in tawdry, violent, and grandiloquent ways, and myth was open to interpretation by genre filmmakers outside the US. So however Tarantino has failed the actual history of slavery in the United States, the way he has opened it up for discussion strikes me as far more remarkable than the storybook of Spielberg’s Lincoln, which closes with a thump and sends us off to bed.
n+1 previews the Oscars. Via Twitter, Jesse Williams has, at length, a somewhat different take on the film.
A Whole Lot of Sunday Night Links
* SNL wins a game: Djesus Uncrossed.
* Batman should never have revealed his secret identity.
* Dan Harmon explains his Joseph-Campbell-influenced theory of the “story circle,” in a few posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6
* The politics of the Papal Conclave are fascinating.
* Pope Benedict XVI’s leaked documents show fractured Vatican full of rivalries. Pope blesses thousands at Vatican as details of ailments emerge.
As early as this April, Yale plans to welcome a training center for interrogators to its campus.
The center’s primary goal would be to coach U.S. Special Forces on interviewing tactics designed to detect lies. Charles Morgan III, a professor of psychiatry who will head the project, calls these tactics “people skills.” These techniques would be honed using New Haven’s immigrant community as subjects.
* Cooper Union will probably not be free anymore.
* Roopika Risam on breaking the silence of the job search.
* Freddie deBoer: I’ve been making the case (again and again and again) that the constantly-expressed notion that we’ll have full employment if people are just smart and go into STEM fields is empirically indefensible. Adam Kotsko: What is education actually for?
* Margaret Atwood teases Maddaddam:
“Maddaddam begins where The Year of the Flood finishes and goes on from there,” she says. “It explores what happens when the conventional humans and the new creations find themselves in the same space. You can see that there might be some cultural misunderstandings.”
* Comics explained: the backstory of Rachel Summers. It couldn’t be simpler!
* Aaron Bady on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s In the House of the Interpreter.
* The New York Times profiles flood management technology in the Netherlands.
* Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe? And that universe is on the back of an even larger turtle…
* Forest Whitaker Accused of Shoplifting, Frisked at Upper West Side Deli.
* Obama says kill the penny. He would say that. He hates capitalism.
* Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth.
* Kidding on the square: another National Review blogger calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment.
* Gasp! Deregulation May Not Have Lowered Air Fares After All.
* The phenomenology of solitary confinement.
* Surveying self-confessed rapists.
* How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity.
* Data-crunching the Internet Adult Film Database.
* Data-crunching the Lord of the Rings.
* The Internet has finally developed impermanence technology.
* And Iceland might ban Internet porn.
Halla Gunnarsdóttir, an adviser to the interior minister, explains the country’s anti-smut rationale to The Guardian:
“We are a progressive, liberal society when it comes to nudity, to sexual relations, so our approach is not anti-sex but anti-violence. This is about children and gender equality, not about limiting free speech…”
This is Iceland, after all. Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir is the first openly lesbian government head in the world. It’s already illegal to print and distribute porn within the country, and since 2010, strip clubs have been prohibited as well…
Saturday Night Links
* The headline reads, “Glenn Beck Building Ayn Rand-Inspired Utopia.”
* Grief for Aaron Swartz: The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime.” Prosecutor as bully. How to Get a Job Like Mine.
* Aaron Bady saw Zero Dark Thirty.
* Quentin Tarantino talks to himself.
* And the US Treasury agrees with me about the trillion-dollar coin. It’s enough to make me rethink my whole position…
Slave Rebellions and History
I was talking with Traxus the other day about how slave rebellions mark an interesting difference between knowledge and belief. Everybody who is historically informed knows slave revolts happened, and moreover is perfectly eager to say so—but all the same nobody believes in them. They exist in history only to be bracketed: “Of course, there were slave rebellions, but…”
Two reviews of Django Unchained take this up. First, the New Yorker:
It is precisely because of the extant mythology of black subservience that these scenes pack such a cathartic payload. The film’s defenders are quick to point out that “Django” is not about history. But that’s almost like arguing that fiction is not reality—it isn’t, but the entire appeal of the former is its capacity to shed light on how we understand the latter. In my sixteen years of teaching African-American history, one sadly common theme has been the number of black students who shy away from courses dealing with slavery out of shame that slaves never fought back.
It seems almost pedantic to point out that slavery was nothing like this. The slaveholding class existed in a state of constant paranoia about slave rebellions, escapes, and a litany of more subtle attempts to undermine the institution. Nearly two hundred thousand black men, most of them former slaves, enlisted in the Union Army in order to accomplish en masse precisely what Django attempts to do alone: risk death in order to free those whom they loved. Tarantino’s attempt to craft a hero who stands apart from the other men—black and white—of his time is not a riff on history, it’s a riff on the mythology we’ve mistaken for history.
Second, Jacobin:
It’s a shame, because the history of North Atlantic slave revolts offers up a lot of interesting material. Try this: “For our declaration of independence, we should have the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.” That’s Boisrond-Tonerre, Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ aide. Tarantino certainly couldn’t write that.
Finally Back in Milwaukee Links
* The fact that animals were for a long period of European history tried and punished as criminals is, to the extent that this is known at all, generally bracketed or dismissed as amere curiosity, a cultural quirk.
* Arrested Development Season 4 episode titles revealed.
* H.P. Lovecraft’s Advice to Young Writers.
* January 1, 1946: two Marine divisions faced off in the so-called Atom Bowl, played on a killing field in Nagasaki that had been cleared of debris.
* The future is bright at Monsters University. I agree wholeheartedly with my Marquette colleague who hopes there’s a ton of confusion about MU in the future.
* Traxus and Kotsko on Django Unchained. Bonus Kotsko New Year’s Resolution! Stop paying attention to non-stories.
* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2013?
* The Death of the American Shopping Mall.
* The Penn State shitshow continues: Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett will announce a federal lawsuit against the NCAA tied to the historic sanctions levied against Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Corbett will hold a press conference on Wednesday morning in State College, Pa., to announce the suit, which will be filed by the state.
* “I don’t think I would do a terrible job at a Han Solo backstory. I could do that pretty well. But maybe that would be better as a short.” An interview with Wes Anderson.
* The Macroeconomics of Middle Earth.
* Could going to Mars give future astronauts Alzheimer’s disease?
* Can being overweight actually make you live longer?
A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”
Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.
“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.
Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.
* A moment of dreaming about higher education.
* And Jaimee has some new poems up (with rare audio!) at Unsplendid.
Saturday Pre-Epic-Road-Trip Links
* An und für sich considers Django Unchained. I haven’t seen this yet either.
* Peter Frase: Occupy Beyond Occupy.
* 6 Places You’ll Recognize from the Background of Every Movie.
* “Finally, a drone story that ends in less blood being spilled”: Dallas Meat Packing plant investigated after drone images reveal pollution.
* Debtmageddon vs. the Robot Utopia.
* Epic MetaFilter commente explaining the general screwed-uppedness of graduate admissions.
* And superheroes across history.
More Sick Baby Day Links
* Ladies and gentlemen, the very worst “Should I Go to Grad School” piece ever written.
* Samuel Delany and Wonder Woman.
* Letter from a Chinese labor camp?
I don’t know exactly when I’m going to do it, but there’s something about this that would suggest a trilogy. [The next part would follow] a bunch of black troops, and they had been f–ked over by the American military and kind of go apeshit… [The] black troops… kill a bunch of white soldiers and white officers on a military base and are just making a warpath to Switzerland.
* Philip Pullman will continue the His Dark Materials series.
* The headline reads, “Physicians in China treat addictions by destroying the brain’s pleasure center.”
* The cold hard facts of freezing to death.
* Presenting the Royal Mail’s Doctor Who stamps.
* Why is Congress so terrible? Nate Silver says it was gerrymandering that done it.
* And just one piece from the latest Jacobin: The Soul of Student Debt.
Unexpected Boxing Day Links!
My baby’s selfish decision to start vomiting ruined my plans to finally see The Hobbit. So instead I’ll clear some tabs:
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine me and @adamkotsko arguing about revenge in Tarantino, forever.
* The End of the Community College English Profession.
* Jeopardy! is running its online contestant search again.
* Meritocracy watch, from the archives: In both data sets, Krueger and Dale, like other researchers, find that students who attended more selective colleges tend to earn higher salaries later on than those who attend less selective colleges. However, the researchers not only looked at the schools that students attended but also where they were accepted and rejected. They found that where a student applies is a more powerful predictor of future earnings success than where he or she attends.
* The Heat, The Avengers, and the peculiar American love of the overdog.
* Surreal Illustrations for Fairy Tales that Don’t Exist Yet.
* Eminem, master of Donkey Kong.
* Wikipedia’s timeline of the far future.
* Thomas Frank blames academia for Occupy’s failures. Now the lead editorial of the next Jacobin is devoted to denouncing Frank.
* A report from NRO’s annual cruise.
* FBI Considered It’s A Wonderful Life Communist Propaganda. Don’t ever change, you lovable scamps!
* 12 Obvious Science Findings of 2012.
* Could a captive tornado power an entire city? What could possibly go wrong?
* STUDY: Antarctica Is Heating Up Even Faster Than Previously Thought.
* Pulp Scifi Under Japanese Totalitarianism.
* And a few days late: Santa’s privacy policy.
Wednesday Night Links
* David Graeber in the Baffler: Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.
* Brian Thill: “Drone-Strike the Jobless.”
It would be foolish indeed to have invested so much in these technologies only to watch them molder as mere weapons of war-force and terror. Like all modern technological artifacts, at rest they are value-neutral; it is only the uses to which they are put that defines them. In sum, to strike the jobless from the common ledger is, in its way, to aim for benevolence. The enormous costs to build, upgrade, and maintain ready fleets of drones of all manner and variety will be more than offset by the broad economic health benefits to be derived by purging the state of significant portions of its jobless population. In fact, if we might be permitted a moment of utopian thought, the likely growth in demand for these services (offered perhaps to interested parties along subsidized or graduated rate scales) will necessitate a process of vigorous hiring and training for remote-pilot operators, which may in appropriate instances be drawn from the ranks of the jobless themselves, thereby solving the problem of joblessness even more swiftly and decisively. Rather than a salaried position, however, these hires might best be negotiated as much needed ‘work experience’ and accordingly organized as internships of various types. This internment might even provide a stepping-stone toward their being struck themselves in turn more quickly. Remote piloting centers that will happen to have fallen victim to inflated overhead or health care costs, or the vagaries of local real estate crises, might themselves be recast as new targets for drones whose home bases are elsewhere.
* Wisconsin postmortems from Josh Eidelson, Doug Henwood, and LGM,
* Earth Is Headed for Disaster, Interdisciplinary Scientific Review Concludes. NB: That’s the actual headline. More climate apocalypticism via MetaFilter.
* Three Ways Climate Change Could Impact The Game Of Baseball. NB: Each of these will tend to increase people’s enjoyment of baseball. Forget I said anything!
* Voter Fraud Extremely Rare In Florida: ‘More Likely To Get Hit By A Bolt Of Lightning.’
* Florida Governor Rick Scott Officially Defies Justice Department, Vows to Continue Voter Purge. Someone should really tell him there’s actually no crisis!
* Michael Hardt on WUNC’s The State of Things.
* Mom Locked Up For Cheering Too Loudly at High School Graduation.
* The trailer for Tarantino’s Django Unchained is out. The film itself looks fine, but that final tag—”Django is off the chain”—is simply unforgivable.
* And In Focus catches Transit-of-Venus mania (and there’s only one cure).
Gerry Canavan 