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INT. DAY. STACY KATCZINSKY'S PRIVATE OFFICE.
STACY is seated at a desk, lowering a tea bag into a styrofoam cup of hot water.
On the window behind her is lettered SPAY AND NEUTER CLINIC.
Stacy looks up as CHENDRA enters.
CHENDRA
There's a Miss Wanderlust
here to see you.
STACY
Show her in.
CHENDRA (leaving)
She'll see you now.
MISS WANDA WANDERLUST enters.
( Read more... )
--Barack Obama
July 14, 2008
"The Afro-American community must accept the responsibility for regaining our people who have lost their place in society. . . We must be a good example to our children and must teach them to always be ready to accept the responsibilities that are necessary for building good communities and nations."
--Malcolm X
June 28, 1964
as is also
love & basketball
and they must be right,
because i can only think of three[*] that i'm sure i like better...
and at the risk of being myself, william munny is a hero...
WHY is he killing for money? his children...
ned is there to help a friend, for whom he dies...
little bill is a villain...
he fails to protect a woman,
and compensates for this failure by protecting the men who harmed her...
part of what makes this movie so good is that first scene...
what's william munny doing?
separating diseased pigs from healthy pigs...
he looks like a pig himself,
but he's not...
that scene prepares us for the whole story...
and that motif is carried further when they come to town...
he has a fever, like some of his pigs did,
and he recovers...
that is to say,
he, too, was a diseased pig,
like the men he's tracking down,
but he has recovered...
i've mentioned before the meaning of little bill's house,
how he built it himself, but it's askew...
when the writer talks about hanging the carpenter?
first-rate foreshadowing...
and when little bill claims, just before dying,
that he doesn't deserve this,
that he was building a house?
eastwood the director is telling us that little bill did deserve this...
the social order he built and defended was seriously skewed...
had little bill adequately protected the women of the town,
william munny would never have arrived,
and had little bill interrogated ned appropriately and conducted a proper investigation,
william munny would never have killed him...
[*] The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, The Cheyenne Social Club, and The Big Country
i recently watched two seasons of the bob newhart show...
lately i've been watching the jack benny show...
the similarities betwenn newhart and benny are remarkable...
http://www.gazette.com/opinion/minoriti
(see also "Negroes With Guns")
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/negr
like i said,
the framers of the constitution recognized the value
of recourse to armed insurrection...
btw, Scalia is one thorough bean-counter, isn't he?
i should think that "keep arms" means to maintain functional weapons at or in one's home or place of work, and that to "bear arms" means to have them on one's person or within reach in the course of one's daily activities...
but i do like this paragraph:
In any event, the meaning of "bear arms" that petitioners and Justice Stevens propose is not even the (sometimes) idiomatic meaning. Rather, they manufacture a hybrid definition, whereby "bear arms" connotes the actual carrying of arms (and therefore is not really an idiom) but only in the service of an organized militia. No dictionary has ever adopted that definition, and we have been apprised of no source that indicates that it carried that meaning at the time of the founding. But it is easy to see why petitioners and the dissent are driven to the hybrid definition. Giving "bear arms" its idiomatic meaning would cause the protected right to consist of the right to be a soldier or to wage war--an absurdity that no commentator has ever endorsed... Worse still, the phrase "keep and bear arms" would be incoherent. The word "arms" would have two different meanings at once: "Weapons" (as the obect of "keep") and (as the object of "bear") one-half of an idiom. It would be rather like saying "He filled and kicked the bucket" to mean "He filled the bucket and died." Grotesque.
With a handshake,
ever yours,
Vincent.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=dipFMJckZOM
Or death.
http://www.vidarholen.net/contents/j
I'm not sure how I feel about this painting, except deeply conflicted. Yes, it's tragically beautiful, but to say that is to separate it from the appalling moment of its creation.
This is Jean-Paul Marat, the most paranoid of the revolution's fanatics. He's been assassinated in his bath. Marat was someone for whom there could never be enough killing. But for David, Marat isn't a monster, he's a saint. This painting transforms Marat into a paragon of virtue. Breathtaking? For sure. But maybe also just a little mad. . .
It's an apparition. Here was someone transfigured by goodness, honesty, and patriotic selflessness.
"Look upon him," David is saying, "and you will see the highest type of humanity."
He's cleaned Marat up of course. The skin has the colour of cool stone. The wound is unmissable, yet at the same time, almost delicate, like the incision in the side of Christ on the cross. The white sheets seem shroud-like, ghostly wrappings of the great man as he hovers between our world and posterity. The cult image. The first of the revolutionary icons, and it tells you to believe. Its genius lies in the fact that it is also a story for the people. For once, the hero isn't Roman, he's one of them. It's the first great work for the faces in the crowd. . .
There's no attempt to give a sense of Marat's room here, no crossed pistols hanging on the wall, no fake columns. Instead, the entire top half of the painting is filled with loose, feathery strokes, that could be wall, or just indeterminate space. The space of forever. But then, that box. Grainy, solid.
"He was one of you," the box says. "One of the poor and suffering. Now you can't reach him, no one can, except through this."
But even while you're held spellbound, another voice inside your head says, "Hold on a minute. This is the purest witchcraft. What David has done here is to glorify a paranoid, whose greatest satisfaction was the persecution of thousands of people whose only crime was to be lukewarm about politics. This is an accomplice of terror."
Of course, it never occurred to David that he was betraying art.
"Oh, no," he would have said, "I'm fulfilling its highest, noblest purpose. That of moral re-education. That's what all those altarpieces that once hung in churches did. But those were all lies and fairy tales. We have a new church now. The church of revolutionary virtue."
So--
Why do I like David?
Well, I don't.
He's a monster.
But he makes ideas blaze in dry ice. . .
If ever there was a work of art that says that beauty can be lethal, it's Jacques-Louis David's "Death of Marat."
--Simon Schama
