Friday Train Ride Links!

* I accidentally said something that went viral and now Twitter is absolutely useless to me.

* Seven-year-old Guatemalan girl dies of dehydration after being arrested by US Border Patrol. ICE Arrests 170 Immigrants Trying To Save Babies From Baby Jails. Trump is pushing Vietnam to accept deportees who have lived in the US for over 20 years.

* The New Authoritarians Are Waging War on Women.

* Is a Green New Deal Possible Without a Revolution?

According to the @climateactiontr, current climate policies have the world headed toward roughly 3.3°C of warming. Not a single major developed country has policies in line with 2°. https://t.co/lMbSnRMYar pic.twitter.com/UuhU4Iok68

— David Roberts (@drvox) December 13, 2018

As I keep saying, you're a climate change denier if you think it's going to happen in 50 years and isn't going to affect you or your children in a profound, civilization-ending way, without action. Fiction writers who write shit like that…same thing. https://t.co/Q4j53qNyw8

— Jeff VanderMeer (@jeffvandermeer) December 14, 2018

* ‘Carbon removal is now a thing’: Radical fixes get a boost at climate talks. Earth on course to match climate from 3 million years ago by 2030, UW study says. You, Too, Are in Denial of Climate Change. 40 million Americans depend on the Colorado River. It’s drying up. Harvard Quietly Amasses California Vineyards—and the Water Underneath. Urban Flooding Is Worryingly Widespread in the U.S., But Under-Studied. Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps. ”You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children.”

* University of California System is playing hardball with Elsevier in negotiations that could transform the way it pays to read and publish research. But does the UC system have the clout to pull it off?

* Can the liberal arts survive neoliberalism? Serving at Cross’s Purposes.

* Wall is good. Build wall!

* We can’t pull down statues of slaveowners, while out there they’re pulling down statues of Gandhi.

* Got to have some mixed feelings.

* Over the last decade or so it seems like very police forensic technology has been revealed to be complete and utter bullshit, which people believe in simply because they believe whatever cops say.

* Nice work if you can get it: insider trading is legal when you’re in Congress.

i’m a socialist, although in america this mostly just means “i think it’s bad that you die broke when you have cancer” and “poor people should eat” and “it’s bad that corporations literally write laws”

— Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev) December 12, 2018

* Employers should have to bear the costs of at-will employment if they want to reap the benefits, so to the extent that this “ghosting” is actually happening that is very, very good.

* Elsewhere in hyperexploitation: Uncompensated Special Assistant U.S. Attorney (one-year term).

* How The US Left Failed Brasil. You’re not going to pin this on me!

* Teach the controversy: It’s ridiculous that it’s unconstitutional for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president.

* Why women have better sex under socialism, according to an anthropologist.

* There’s some wild shit going on in the far corners of the Game Of Thrones map.

* Totally normal.

* Fossils of the 21st century.

* Union solutions / management solutions.

* Twilight of Netflix.

* We did it!

* And it was 20 years ago (yesterday).

I Regret to Inform You

The Wes Anderson Power Rankings 2018:

1. Rushmore (1998)
1. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) (tie)
3. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
4. The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
5. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
6. “Hotel Chevalier” & The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
7. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
8. Bottle Rocket (1996)
9. Isle of Dogs (2018)

I thank you for your support at this difficult time.

UPDATED with some thoughts from Twitter this morning:

I expected ISLE OF DOGS to be fun, but #problematic. I was not at all prepared for how joyless and charmless it is; it’s depressing and grotesque, aggressively unpleasant. I honestly found Anderson’s willingness to be so ugly an intriguing artistic ambition, but didn’t enjoy it.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 10, 2018

I feel a bit betrayed by reviews that posit a “zany fun but Orientalist” dichtomy. Like GBH Isle of Dogs is a Holocaust film, but unlike GBH it doesn’t hide the horror and doesn’t swamp that theme w/ playfulness. I could almost conclude it is good on this basis—but so unpleasant.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 10, 2018

ISLE OF DOGS reminds me a little bit in this respect of HATEFUL EIGHT, which I can’t really read except as a sort of anti-cinematic metacommentary on Tarantino’s other films. (“This is the eighth one, the one you don’t like.”)

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 10, 2018

I don’t see why a person would be interested in ISLE OF DOGS except that Anderson made it, and driven to somehow incorporate it into a body of work that mysteriously includes it. Auteurship as get out of jail free card.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 10, 2018

As a last note I do think the Orientalism is genuinely unsurmountable here. The point of DARJEELING in some way was these (white) men go to a new place but can only ever find themselves; there are clearly problems w/ this as a creative concept but it is at least meta-Orientalist.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 10, 2018

In ISLE OF DOGS the idea of Japan is deployed for the Western audience to blur the lines of sympathy between human and animal. That’s plainly a no-go in 2018 even if the film *does* speak (as they say) to the Japanese-speaking audience in different way. Fundamental original sin.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 10, 2018

Day-Old Weekend Reading, Still Perfectly Good

* Deadline getting very close: CFP: Foundation, special issue on Science Fiction and Videogames (30 Apr 2014).

* CFP on Iain M. Banks. CFP for the Journal of Ghosthumanities.

* “It Continues Not To End”: Time, Poetry, and the ICC Witness Project.

* The work of torture in video games. Is it immoral to kill video game characters? Video games as ideological training.

* Rare Indian Burial Ground Quietly Destroyed for Million Dollar Houses.

* Chris Newfield goes inside Georgia Tech’s financials to figure out if MOOCs really save any money. You’ll never believe what happened next!

* Is a key piece of Faulkner scholarship a hoax?

* In what English departments is Baldwin falling out of favor? They should lose their accreditation!

* “The reason for eliminating the Kindergarten show is simple. We are responsible for preparing children for college and career with valuable lifelong skills.”

* Driver Who Fatally Injured Teen Now Suing Dead Teen’s Family.

* It was recently brought to public attention that of the UK’s 18,510 university professors, only 85 are of black origin.

*Amateur sports is a relation that has existed for so long, with the general public’s acquiescence if not outright approval, that it’s hard to imagine an alternative. Even the most rational commentators struggle for another way to do business, not just cartoonish right-wingers like Alexander — a man who’s clearly happy to keep making less than the football coach, but not so enamored with the idea of a Tennessee running back being able to feed himself.

* Neoliberalism and the rise of the sports management movie.

* …Tuesday, five former Buffalo Bills cheerleaders filed suit against their own team, alleging that the Buffalo Jills were required to perform unpaid work for the team for about 20 hours a week. Unpaid activities included: submitting to a weekly “jiggle test” (where cheer coaches “scrutinized the women’s stomach, arms, legs, hips, and butt while she does jumping jacks”); parading around casinos in bikinis “for the gratification of the predominantly male crowd”; and offering themselves up as prizes at a golf tournament, where they were required to sit on men’s laps on the golf carts, submerge themselves in a dunk tank, and perform backflips for tips (which they did not receive). The Buffalo Jills cheerleaders take home just $105 to $1,800 for an entire season on the job.

* Alyssa Rosenberg continues her exploration of how the Game of Thrones show differ from the novels, including reference to the improved script for last week’s Jaime-Cersei scene.

* How the Military Collects Data on Millions of High School Students. How Big Data Hurts the Poor.

* 21 Things You Didn’t Know About Rushmore. I must confess I knew nearly all of these.

* Jedediah Purdy reviews Capital in the Twenty-First Century at LARoB.

* Rape culture horror at Brown. At Swarthmore. College Campuses Are Treating Rape Like A Crime Without Criminals.

* Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court.

* As Atwood said: Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.

* Scenes from the class struggle at Disney World.

* Studies the charter school scam collapsing in record time.

* The special exemption preventing unionization at religious universities appears to be a thing of the past. The Fight To Unionize College Athletes Could Also Expand Union Rights For Graduate Students. A specter is haunting precarity. End College Legacy Preferences. We Refuse to Accept That Violence Against Us Is Necessary to the Sustenance of Our Education. Give the Customers What They Want.

* The workplace: prison or sanctuary?

* Lawrence & Wishart & the Marxists Internet Archive.

* For North Dakota, drones a possible growth market. But in possible upside news: Kenya’s new drone program could put a virtual end to poaching. How We Read a NYTimes Story on Drone Strikes in Yemen.

* Everybody knows the college debt regime is insane–but is it insane enough? Vox reports.

* Peak Voxplaining: “The real world is marred by terrible killing, including death by drone-fired missile. But it’s much, much better than the world of Game of Thrones.”

* EXPLAINER: Is China a communist country?

* It’s official: Justice League will be a terrible film. Elsewhere in nerd mourning: the Star Wars Expanded Universe is officially dead.

* How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future.

* Great progressive hope Elizabeth Warren on why she used to be a Republican until ugh just forget it.

* Bring on the mass pardons.

* Fineable Offenses for Naughty 18th-Century Students at Harvard.

* The bleaching of San Francisco.

* “Life: It’s literally all we have. But is it any good?” Spring’s best new comedy is free on YouTube.

* Fascinating. The devices appear to stimulate the reward centers of their tiny brains.

* Google goes back to its core competencies.

* And the Internet is doomed. Enjoy your BUFFERING BUFFERING BUFFERING HAVE YOU TRIED THE NEW KFC DOUBLE DOWN? DOUBLE DOWN ON FUN! BUFFERING week.

Wes Anderson Movies Power Ranking 2014

1. Rushmore (1998)
2. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
3. The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
4. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
5. “Hotel Chevalier” & The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
6. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
7. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
8. Bottle Rocket (1996)

In general I would say that Anderson’s career seems to me to be divided between two clear periods: films about failed genius (Bottle Rocket through Darjeeling) and about fairy-tale genius (Fantastic through Hotel.) That is: in the first period we find characters whose attempts to realize their creative potential are hamstrung by their inability to move past sadness, with the arc of the movie generally allowing them to expiate that sadness and move on (Max finds love and can write again; Royal’s children forgive him; Zissou grieves; the brothers literally abandon the baggage they’ve been carrying around the entire film). But the films of the second period, unlike the first, are dominated by characters who cannot lose: Mr. Fox is temporarily troubled but ultimately unflappable, always fantastic; Suzy and Sam are able to bend the unforgiving adult world to the service of their love; M. Gustave’s poise, control, and total mastery over social convention never fail him except in the face of maximum fascism in the moment of his heroic death. The all-pervading sadness of the first films persists in the fairy tale films, but only in the background, in the side characters who threaten to, but never quite, take over the main narrative: F. Murray Abraham’s adult Zero; The Bishops and Captain Sharp; Fox’s less-than-fantastic son. My gloss on Anderson’s recent “fairy tale” films is that they feel, generally, like the stories the characters from the “failed genius” period attempted, but failed, to craft about themselves. Moonrise Kingdom feels very strongly like one of Max’s or Margot’s plays; the story the Reader reads of the Author’s recounting of Zero’s telling of M. Gustave’s life feels like a cut from one of the films from the heroic era of Zissou Society, and is quite literally the lie Royal gets engraved on his tombstone: “Died tragically rescuing his [friend] from the wreckage of a [country sinking into fascism].” The ironic cruel-optimism gap between potential and reality that dominated the early films, that crucial space of failure, is strongly pushed off center stage in the later ones — and I think that’s why, while I love them all, I think the later ones are generally a bit worse.

But I wonder if The Grand Budapest Hotel won’t improve a bit, in my estimation, upon subsequent viewings; while a strong sense of entropic breakdown runs throughout the setting, especially in the subtle architectural sublime of the Budapest itself as it falls into ruin, the anti-climatic “shock” of the abrupt ending permanently hurls us out of the fairy tale back to a world structured by failure and loss. Unlike Fox and Moonrise, which never deviate from the inner logic of a children’s story, The Grand Budapest Hotel can really only be viewed that way once. When M. Gustave’s magic finally fails at the end of the film, as it always had to, the fairy tale dispells and only the elegy is left; we’re actually left at the end of Hotel in a world darker and sadder than any found in the earlier films, a world where we seem to have neither the compensations of art nor friendship, where grief never fades, where the intricately constructed dollhouse becomes instead a tomb.

Finally My Condition Has a Name

“Wes Anderson,” by I Cani. Via MeFi.

‘I Don’t Know What You’ve Got Here, Wes’

When Pauline Kael watched Rushmore.

Find Something You Love and Do It For the Rest of Your Life

…for me, that’s going to Hogwarts. A little too long and a bit rough around the edges, but still pretty good.

 
(spotted on Reddit)

So Good I Had to Break Radio Silence

Movie Posters from an Alternate Universe. Via io9.

Some Links for Tuesday

* In the wake of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies have announced new plans to screw sick kids for money. As the Eschaton link notes, strategies to deny coverage to their captive customers are always, necessarily, a huge part of the business model for these companies. This is why they’re so hard to effectively regulate. I sincerely wish we could find the political will for single payer, if only to stop Nicholas Sarkosy’s taunts.

* Job growth in March? That’s not just good news for March, that’s good news for Democrats in November.

* How to repossess an airplane. Via MeFi. Also via MeFi:

* Cuba in the 1930s.
* Back to the Hugos and Blogging the Hugos.
* Scarface as school play. This seemed so much more endearing in Rushmore.
* Change we can believe in: Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announces “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.”

* Will Smith to make two totally unnecessary Independence Day sequels. The title? Of course, it’s ID4-Ever. This is the monster who is ruining Foundation. He must be stopped.

* And the end of independent bookstores. Lots of factors here, of which the iPhone/Droid “barcode scanner” is just the latest. It’s terrible to watch.

Wes Anderson Cornell Boxes

Photos of Jaimee’s Wes Anderson Cornell boxes, at Flickr.

Science Fiction Awaits Its Max Fischer

Natasha Tripney: Shouldn’t there be more sci-fi on stage?

Rushmore… IN SPACE!

Rushmore… in space!: “I’d like to do a movie in space,” Wes told AccessHollywood.com on Friday at the Hollywood premiere of his latest film, the animated Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox. “If possible I would like to try to actually shoot some of it on location in space. That’s my preference.”

Infinite Summer #9: A Brief Comment on the Narcissism of Grad Students and My Own Arrested Adolescence

The salience of this particular moment fades a bit as we get further and further from Friday’s spoiler-line, but I feel compelled to comment briefly on the conversation between Marathe and Steeply that begins on page 638. How can I, or anyone who has chosen a life in academia, read this week’s material without feeling interpolated by it? How could any academic, would-be or otherwise, avoid asking him- or herself more than once just what it is that separates us from Steeply’s M*A*S*H-obsessed father beyond the razor-thin veneer of professional legitimacy? It’s my job, allegedly, to develop intricate and sometimes bizarre readings of pop-culture artifacts, which means it’s perfectly okay for me to (still) spend all my time reading science-fiction novels and watching science-fiction movies just like I did when I was twelve. Heck, I wouldn’t be doing my work if I didn’t! And if I can just trick somebody into paying me to do it I’ll never have to stop.

Herman Blume:What’s the secret, Max?
Max Fischer: The secret?
Herman Blume: Yeah, you seem to have it pretty figured out.
Max Fischer: The secret, I don’t know… I guess you’ve just gotta find something you love to do and then do it for the rest of your life. For me, it’s going to Rushmore.

Intellectually, of course, I’ve always been able to recognize the tragic irony of this exchange—Rushmore, you’ll remember, doesn’t offer a post-graduate year—but I wonder sometimes whether deep down I’ve ever really come to terms with it.

Is this addiction? Does pursuing a academic career studying literature and pop culture—a preoccupation which over the years has diverted me from any number of more financially lucrative pursuits—mark me as the writerly equivalent of a functional alcoholic? Do I even qualify as functional? And it occurs to me now, reading this section against not only my own life and those of my grad student associates but against the life of anyone who has ever been a “fan” of anything—anyone, that is, who can recognize themselves in the way Steeply’s father looked at M*A*S*H—that the danger DFW is highlighting is central to the construction of modern subjectivity. If everything is at least potentially bad for us—even/especially the things that give us pleasure, the things that make life appear to be worth living—just what is it we’re supposed to be doing? Where is the authentic, healthy, free life, if there was ever such a thing to begin with? When even the things we love conspire to destroy us, what is left?

Friday Afternoon Linkblogging

Friday afternoon linkblogging!

* 28% of Republicans claim to believe Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and another 30% “aren’t sure.” Results for the South are even worse. So it’s official: our national discourse is completely broken.

* Entertainment Weekly asks: Was 1984 the greatest year in movies ever? I’ve always been partial to 1999: Rushmore, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, Magnolia…

* Vanity Fair has your sketchbook history of the drug war.

* Steampunk monkey nation.

* Jericho may be returning once again as a TV movie to wrap up loose plot points. My recollection of the finale was that there weren’t very many loose plot points left, but your memory may vary.

* Chris Hedges: “The Rise of Gonzo Porn Is the Latest Sign of America’s Cultural Apocalypse.”

* And Scientific American explores the quiet end of the Neanderthals.

Happy Monday

Happy Monday. The summer is dying. We have to face it.

* With the Institute for Gifted Youngsters shut down I returned to Infinite Summer blogging over the weekend with a post on maps and territories.

* The issue of Polygraph I contributed to on study, students, and the university is available from Amazon, or will be soon.

* Time-lapse video of the construction of Disneyland at (where else?) Boing Boing.

* Colin Marshall sings the praises of my favorite film, Rushmore.

Because thousands of a certain generation’s cinematic lives have been changed by this film, its territory is best approached with caution. Mine, however, happens to be among those thousands, 1998 marking as it did the opening of my prime window of cultural absporpton. Cinephilic teenagers of the 1960s had The 400 Blows, Breathless, Dr. Strangelove; cinephilic teenagers of the 1970s has Harold and Maude, Chinatown, Taxi Driver; cinephilic teenagers of the 1980s had Repo Man, Blue Velvet, Stranger than Paradise; cinephilic teenagers of the 1990s had Rushmore.

*Revisiting the Rosenhan experiment. Via MeFi.

* And fair warning: Toy Story 3 will break your heart.