Gerry Canavan

Devotees will recall I listen to a lot of podcasts. An especially good one that has just arrived on the scene is Matt Gourley’s I Was There Too, which interviews people who had bit parts in great movies. All the episodes have been great, but I’d especially recommend Paul F. Tompkins (more or less cut from There Will Be Blood), Johnny Williams (the guy who buys his wife a fur coat and a new car after the Lufthansa heist in Goodfellas), the one with all the bus passengers from Speed, Paul Rust (one of the Basterds in Inglourious Basterds), Eileen Dietz (Captain Howdy in The Exorcist), Jenette Goldstein (Lt. Vasquez in Aliens), D.C. Pierson (the Apple Store Guy in Captain America 2) and especially especially today’s entry, Stephen Tobolowsky (the immortal Ned Ryerson, Groundhog Day). Go listen!

Written by gerrycanavan

April 15, 2015 at 11:10 am

Tagged with aliens, Captain America 2, film, Goodfellas, Groundhog Day, I Was There Too, Inglourious Basterds, Matt Gourley, Paul F. Tompkins, podcasts, Speed, Stephen Tobolowsky, The Exorcist

A Whole Lot of Sunday Night Links

* Batman should never have revealed his secret identity.

* SNL wins a game: Djesus Uncrossed.

* Dan Harmon explains his Joseph-Campbell-influenced theory of the “story circle,” in a few posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6

* For the first time in its 120 year history the board of the Sierra Club has authorized the use of civil disobedience, to protest the proposed construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

* 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.

* Speechless:

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.

* Senator Warren, not bad.

* 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…

Written by gerrycanavan

February 17, 2013 at 8:47 pm

Tagged with academia, academic jobs, Alberta, apocalypse, autoimmune disorders, banking, Barack Obama, Batman, capitalism, Catholicism, civil disobedience, climate change, coastal flooding, College of Cardinals, comics, community, conservatives, Cooper Union, crime, Crohn's disease, dams, Dan Harmon, data, deregulation, Django Unchained, ecology, education, Elizabeth Warren, equality, forward to the nineteenth century, Great Recession, How the University Works, Iceland, immigration, impermanence, Inglourious Basterds, Joseph Campbell, Keystone XL, Kill Bill, lesbocracy, Lord of the Rings, Maddaddam, Margaret Atwood, myth, neoliberalism, Netherlands, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nineteenth Amendment, Occupy Gotham, opportunity, Oryx and Crake, papal conclave, pedagogy, physics, pornography, prison-industrial complex, prisons, race, Rachel Summers, rape, rape culture, regulation, science, science fiction, Sierra Club, Snapchat, SNL, solitary confinement, story circle, superheroes, tar sands, Tarantino, the cosmos, the digital, the penny, the Pope, the Vatican, The Year of the Flood, Tolkien, torture, tuition, voting, woman's suffrage, worst financial crisis since the last one, writing, WTF University, X-Men, Yale, zunguzungu

Finally Back in Milwaukee Links

* Arrested Development Season 4 episode titles revealed.

* 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.

* 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?

* Women’s gangs of India.

* 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 Pickpocket’s Tale.

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.

Written by gerrycanavan

January 2, 2013 at 9:38 pm

Saturday Pre-Epic-Road-Trip Links

* 6 Places You’ll Recognize from the Background of Every Movie.

* An und für sich considers Django Unchained. I haven’t seen this yet either.

* Peter Frase: Occupy Beyond Occupy.

* “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.

Written by gerrycanavan

December 29, 2012 at 10:05 am

Unexpected Boxing Day Links!

with 3 comments

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.

Written by gerrycanavan

December 26, 2012 at 8:53 pm

Wednesday Night

* Quentin Tarantino’s The Inglorious Mr. Fox.

* Roger Craig had never been on Jeopardy! before, but by the end of his first day of taping, he’d won five games in a row, the most lucrative day for any contestant in the show’s history, including the most lucrative game in the show’s history. His secret? A web app that modeled the show’s all too predictable question sequences.

* From Think Progress: According to a new study conducted by Stanford University, “the portion of American families living in middle-income neighborhoods has declined significantly since 1970” due to rising income inequality. While 65 percent of families used to live in middle-income neighborhoods, now just 44 percent do, while one-third of families live in either upper- or low-income areas (up from 15 percent). The data used in the study only goes through 2007, so didn’t even take into account the effects of the Great Recession.

* A worrying sign: Public Opinion Turning Against Occupy Wall Street.

* A better one: Poll shows most favor recall of Wisconsin governor.

* And Oregon tries out voting by iPad. Which Angry Bird is the right choice—for the children?

Written by gerrycanavan

November 16, 2011 at 11:54 pm

* Matt Taibbi vs. the Tea Party in Rolling Stone.

Tagged with Angry Birds, apps, class struggle, Fantastic Mr. Fox, income inequality, Inglourious Basterds, iPads, Jeopardy, Occupy Wall Street, Oregon, politics, polls, recalls, Scott Walker, Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Wisconsin

Tuesday Night

with 18 comments

* You may have heard that Quentin Tarantino’s longtime collaborator, Sally Menke, died while hiking in Los Angeles’s extreme heat yesterday. Here are there “Hi Sally” outtakes from Inglourious Basterds and Death Proof.

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit.

* Also in Rolling Stone: a lengthy interview with Barack Obama that makes the case he’s done everything right and you’re all just haters. Personally I wish White House had thought this utterly boneheaded “Vote for us, you jerks!” message through for ten seconds before running with it. Greg Sargent:

But the point is, it’s entirely counterproductive for the White House to rail in some generalized way about the left’s “whining.” Far better to think clearly about what these arguments actually are, and to grapple with them head on.

If the Dem base is unenthusiastic, give Dems something to get excited about, or effectively tell them why they should be excited. If you disagree with Maddow or Greenwald on what’s possible in terms of policy, or if you disagree with the Adam Greens of the world on politics, explain why they’re wrong, rather than spewing epithets in all directions. Above all, don’t vaguely question the right of these various parties to make those arguments. This is, after all, democracy, and as Obama himself has repeatedly said, democracy is a messy business.

More highlights from the interview from TPM. At least he hates Fox News too.

* And then there’s this: Is Obama Trying To Indoctrinate Your Children With Muslim Comic Books?

* Please, something that doesn’t make me miserable: The Absurb Logic Behind Some of the Most Famous Banned Books.

Written by gerrycanavan

September 29, 2010 at 12:06 am

Tagged with Barack Obama, books, comics, Death Proof, Fox News, Hi Sally, Inglourious Basterds, Islamophobia, Matt Taibbi, obituary, progressives, Sally Menke, Tarantino, Tea Party, the Left, vote for us you jerks, voting

Pulp Fiction Inglourious Basterds

13 pulp Inglourious Basterds posters.

Written by gerrycanavan

March 7, 2010 at 2:28 pm

Tagged with film, Inglourious Basterds, movie posters, pulp novels, Tarantino

Really, Wednesday Already?

* Select Criterion Collection films are now streaming on Netflix.

* The 15 Worst Comics of the 2000s. The Mark Trail entry, while unexpected, is pretty amazing all by itself.

* “Avatar and the American Man-Child: ‘Don’t you want to be an Indian little boy?'” My piece, as well as SEK’s, gets mentioned.

Where the movie goes wrong, then, is in making the sociopathic immaturity of a spoiled Western brat into the ideal form for the child-human that it wants anti-modernity to be. After all, while even your Rousseauvians understand the noble savage as a contradiction of modernity, as a cleansing bath washing away its discontents, the Na’vi only confirm Sully’s most childish presumptions of privilege: their world turns out to be nothing but toys to play with, nothing but one long summer camp fantasy of being the fastest, bestest, most awesomest ninja-Indian ever, and then a big giant womb to hide in when it all gets to be a bit much. There are no consequences there, nothing you can do to make mommy stop loving you (though Lord how he tries!). Like toys and parents to a three-year old, it is unthinkable that they say no or exist without you, and all they can ever ask is that you play with them.

* Polls prove the American public hates and loves the Afghan War as it hates and loves itself.

* Peace, tolerance, due process, oh my: Conservatives discover Star Trek is a Utopia.

* Tarantino is reportedly writing a prequel to Inglourious Basterds. I feel almost entirely certainly this is a terrible idea, and may in the end prove that those of us who liked the movie were fooling ourselves about its depth all along.

* Andrew Breitbart goes deep inside the anti-American conspiracy that is the White House Christmas tree. Not a hoax!

* FiveThirtyEight.com’s Most Valuable Democrats of 2009.

* And, via Chutry, a nice encapsulation of what blogging is for.

Here’s my single favorite thing about blogging: being able to educate oneself in public. Going through this process—trying to move forward, stumbling, groping, occasionally finding—in full view of the world does not always stroke one’s ego. Each week you find yourself writing not about what you know but about what you perhaps hope to learn from the process of watching, reading, and struggling to think through and articulate.

Written by gerrycanavan

December 23, 2009 at 3:54 pm

Tagged with 2000s, 2009, Afghanistan, America, Avatar, Barack Obama, blogging, Christmas, comics, conservatives, Democrats, Don't mention the war, due process, film, Inglourious Basterds, lists, modernity, Nate Silver, Netflix, peace, politics, polls, race, science fiction, Star Trek, Tarantino, the closing of the frontier, tolerance, Utopia

Tarantino as Godard

with 7 comments

Cut Basterds open, and you’ll find the Godard gland pulsing, secreting, hyper-charged. It is exactly this reality about the film, and about Tarantino and so much of the best modern movies, that goes unacknowledged in our culture; a paradigm shift is required that’s feared by the broader populace, not unlike the manner in which they fear learning anything substantial about public policy and choose their political alliances instead by way of “liking” Bush or Obama or Sarah Palin.

….I’d hate to see Tarantino get any more messianic than he seems to be already, but he might just be the salvation of movies, as the art form we’ve come to love over the last century and miss so very much. Via @DanHF.

Written by gerrycanavan

December 15, 2009 at 11:12 am

Tagged with film, Godard, Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino

Remember Remember the Fifth of November

Remember remember the fifth of November.

* Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Michele Bachmann has her party primed and ready to go; how are you celebrating?

* Ezra Klein, with an assist from the CBO, tackles the Republican health care “plan.”

The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process. It’s already been shown to interest groups and advocacy organizations and industry stakeholders. It’s already made its compromises with reality. It’s already been through the legislative sausage grinder. And yet it saves more money and covers more people than the blank-slate alternative proposed by John Boehner and the House Republicans. The Democrats, constrained by reality, produced a far better plan than Boehner, who was constrained solely by his political imagination and legislative skill.

This is a major embarrassment for the Republicans. It’s one thing to keep your cards close to your chest. Republicans are in the minority, after all, and their plan stands no chance of passage. It’s another to lay them out on the table and show everyone that you have no hand, and aren’t even totally sure how to play the game. The Democratic plan isn’t perfect, but in comparison, it’s looking astonishingly good.

* Will New Hampshire become the first state to break the streak on marriage equality? Allow me to repeat myself: I’m pessimistic but hopeful; minority civil rights shouldn’t be subject to popular vote.

* But I think what makes [Inglourious Basterds] Tarantino’s best film, actually, is not just that he’s finally found an argument to put his obsessive film-nerd intertextuality in service of, but because it’s a good argument: by making his movie a deconstruction of the WWII-movie genre,**** he makes it about the ways that cinematic project retroactively placed coherent meaning (“the good war”) on a thing which was actually unthinkable and nonsensically violent and destructive. And because they did it by transforming history into myth, by reveling in fantasies of the past as meaningful and coherant, he can avoid getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of actual causes and causation, making a virtue of his total inability to bother with any of that stuff. Tarantino’s movie, in other words, has much more in common with Slaughterhouse Five than the movies it was actually responding to, but while Vonnegut insisted on the horrible subjective experience of violence’s senselessness, I think Tarantino’s movie is (on some level) about how an objective truth can be imposed on our subjectivities, how we come to believe that the war was, in fact, a good one.

* How polluted is China?

* Will anti-intellectual habits and authoritarian administrative practices kill Wikipedia?

Written by gerrycanavan

November 5, 2009 at 3:18 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with China, ecology, Guy Fawkes, health care, Inglourious Basterds, Michele Bachmann, politics, pollution, Republicans, Slaughterhouse Five, Tarantino, V for Vendetta, Vonnegut, war, Wikipedia

Thursday!

* 68 Sci-Fi Sites to See in the U.S.

Thursday!

* I’ll be posting this year as a HASTAC Scholar at the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboatory. My first post is about status update activism of the sort that is all over your Facebook newsfeed today.

* Speaking of health care, Olympia Snowe now runs your health care.

* LRB makes an impressively desperate bid for my attention with Fredric Jameson’s review of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood alongside reviews of Inglourious Basterds and Inherent Vice.

* Madoff-mania: The SEC—which he claims he was shortlisted to chair (!)— now admits it badly mishandled multiple investigations of his company. Still more here.

* Kevin Carey nicely notes the difficulty inherent to blogging about a book you’re two-thirds through with. Another post or two on Infinite Jest soon. The total collapse of blogging at A Supposedly Fun Blog is one of the great disappointments of Infinite Summer, I think.

* Hiding adjuncts so the U.S. News rankings can’t find them. Meanwhile, this year’s Washington Monthly undergraduate rankings leave Duke out of the Top 25.

* So you’ve invented a board game. (via)

* And Gawker declares the Michael Cera backlash has officially begun.

Written by gerrycanavan

September 3, 2009 at 10:42 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with adjuncts, Bernie Madoff, colleges, Duke, Facebook, HASTAC, health care, How the University Works, Infinite Summer, Inglourious Basterds, Inherent Vice, Jameson, Margaret Atwood, Michael Cera, Olympia Snowe, politics, Ponzi schemes, science fiction, status update activism, the SEC, The Year of the Flood, U.S. News

Thursday Morning