An Entreaty for the New Year

I posted this on Facebook, but not all of us are on Facebook . . .

For all of us who have ever "shared" politically-themed links, or forwarded them via email, there is this timely reminder that we might be full of shit (Plus, see the Errol Morris Op-Doc link I posted not long ago [here]). May our resolutions for the New Year include endeavoring to attempt to try to strive to be less credulous, particularly when our egos & ideologies are involved!

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When the un-repressed play the "I'm being repressed!" card

Jon Stewart had a great show on a few weeks ago that provides yet another example of a group with plenty of political, economic, and social power trying to play the "I'm being repressed!" card:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
GOP - Special Victims Unit
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

It seems even in the nearly-meaningless world of sports that representatives of certain groups who most certainly are not being repressed in the U.S. -- but who seem to have a deep-seated need to try to convince people otherwise -- are playing this card.

This is ridiculous. Here's an historically accurate representation of real repressive violence inherent in the system:

It Seems So Long Ago . . .

. . . because it was!

Cave bear skull placed atop stone in Chauvet cave, ca. 25,000 years ago.

 

Some time about 20,000-40,000 years ago, people created the amazing art inside the cave at Chauvet Pont d'Arc. About 20,000 years ago, the entrance to the cave was sealed, and it was not discovered until 1994.

The people who created the cave art were part of what we now refer to as the Aurignacian culture, a

toolmaking industry and artistic tradition of Upper Paleolithic Europe . . . marked by a great diversification and specialization of tools . . . The art of the Aurignacian culture represents the first complete tradition in the history of art, moving from awkward attempts to a well-developed, mature style."

Werner Herzog has made a 3-D film of the inside of this cave, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams." Read a review from Slate.com here, and listen to Terry Gross' interview of Herzog here. See images at the official Chauvet Cave website here.

Watch the trailer below . . .

Answers to two Very Big questions

I can write with the utmost confidence and without qualification that you, reader, have asked yourself the following two Very Big & Important questions:

1) Certainly there are many alternate universes, but how good is the band Joy Division in the Playmobil universe?

2) What does God look like?

As soon as you look below the fold, lucky reader, you'll have answers to both pressing questions.

Hiding the beer from Mom

Tom Scocca has provided a fascinating interpretation of a topic that has baffled me for quite a number of years: Why macrobrewery beer commercials (from the likes of Budweiser, Coors, etc.) are so ridiculously asinine. The way Scocca outlines it, many of these beer commercials (for the past twenty years or so, in my experience) revolve around the following two-point narrative:

1. Beer—cheap, common, domestic beer—is a rare commodity that drives men mad with the desire to have it, at any cost.

2. Women are the great obstacle between men and the fulfillment of this desire.

"Taken literally," Scocca writes, "this is baffling" because "beer is cheap and easy to find" and "many single adult heterosexual men seek out female company when they're drinking."

Why do the big American Lager breweries perpetuate the same two-point narrative, then? Scocca asserts that they do so because their target audience is sixteen-year-old males:

The girls [in the commercials] aren't really girls; they're Mom. And Mom is the first hurdle in the thrilling obstacle course that makes up the world of the teenage beer drinker.

The big American Lager brewers perpetuate this dynamic purposely:

That's what the beer commercials are going after—the enthusiastic desperation of the underage drinker.

Fascinating.

The comment thread on Scocca's post is also worth reading.

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Film footage of Market St., San Francisco, April 1906

The video above shows a fascinating bit of analysis on film footage shot in San Francisco shortly before the April 18, 1906 earthquake and fire devastated the city:

Morley Safer reports on a mystery that was solved about a 100-year-old film that we now know was made on San Francisco's Market Street just days before the 1906 earthquake. (link

This film is another in a series of early films that I've commented upon. Such films are fascinating to me, as are early color photographs such as these.

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Narration to 1940 silent film "Willamette River Pollution"

I recently received an email query from someone researching Willamette River pollution about the location and content of the narration to William J. Smith's 1940 film "Willamette River Pollution." I blogged about the content of this film here and here, but I haven't yet written anything about the narration. Therefore, below the fold I'll provide my interpretation of the film's narration, by way of providing the substance of my response to that email query.

Also, below this, I've pasted the partial transcription of the narration that I made from a copy with rather poor audio.

1898 (1898!) film footage of the USN battleship U.S.S. Oregon

U.S.S. Oregon in dry dock, Brooklyn Naval Yard, 1898.

(Library of Congress)

Among the many amazing things available on the Internet are the resources at the Library of Congress, and among this sub-category of amazing things is a short film clip of the battleship U.S.S. Oregon (BB-3) from 1898.

I tried to embed this footage in this post, but could not figure out a way to do that. I also wanted to provide a permanent link to the information page, but could not figure out how to bring up the page using anything but a temporary link. I think the LoC staff doesn't want people to do these things, for whatever reason. In any event, the metadata for this film clip is below.

Carronade Beach

Watch the full episode. See more History Detectives.

I was recently reminded of something really neat and fascinating: the Feb., 2008, discovery of two carronades from the U.S.S. Shark at Arch Cape (near Cannon Beach), Oregon. The History Detectives episode above provides an overview of this discovery, and the initial research that went in to determining whether or not the discovery related to the Shark. Greg Shine, who is featured in the History Detectives episode, wrote an article on the life & times of the U.S.S. Shark: ""A Gallant Little Schooner": The U.S. Schooner Shark and the Oregon Country, 1846," Oregon Historical Quarterly 109:4 (Winter 2008), 536-565.

The Oregon Parks & Recreation Department also has a page on this topic: "Arch Cannon Updates."

Also: Nancy Burke, "USS Shark opens portal to the past, Oregonian, Aug. 17, 2008.

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Veracity in the movies: Oregon Trail

There comes a movie, every now and again, that reflects the historical record so accurately and so thoroughly that nothing more needs to be said beyond the movie's trailer.

Enjoy.

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Thanks to dana @ EotAW for bringing this video to my attention.

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Portland civil defense, 1940s-1950s

Portland's Civil Defense program of the 1940s and 1950s was once a national model. In 1956, Portland became the first city in the nation with an underground emergency response headquarters, built inside Kelly Butte. The CBS networked featured the city's civil defense program in their 1957 film A Day Called X. By the early 1960s, however, state and city leaders deemed this civil defense project a waste of funds and canceled the program.

A Day Called X, Part I:




A Day Called X, Part II:



Here are some additional sources on this topic:

Harry Rasky, dir., A Day Called X, CBS Television, 1957. [IMDB]

Peter Ames Carlin, With nuclear annihilation imminent, Portland keeps its cool, Oregonian, May 9, 2009.

Scans from 1955 Portland Civil Defense pamphlet.

Historical and recent images of the Kelly Butte Civil Defense Center, Portland.

Trudy Flores and Sarah Griffith, "Civil Defense Underground Headquarters", Oregon Historical Society's Oregon History Project, 2002.

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Blueprint America on PBS

I haven't yet gone into any depth on the materials associated with PBS' Blueprint America project, but there does seem to be some fascinating stuff there.

From the Introduction:

Blueprint America is a precedent-setting multi-platform initiative — developed and produced by Thirteen/WNET, and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation — that will harness the power of public broadcasting’s most prestigious programs, primetime documentaries, community and educational outreach, and the web to shine an unyielding spotlight on one of the most critical issues facing our country, yet one that has been under-reported by the traditional news media: America’s decaying and neglected infrastructure. We hear about infrastructure only when it results in a catastrophic bridge collapse or levee failure, but in fact, it is placing our quality of life and our ability to compete in a global economy at risk.

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Willamette River pollution film, 1940

A version of the film above was shown at the April 14 Portland Harbor CAG meeting. I wrote a brief post in November 2009 about the Willamette River film. In this post today I'm going to expand on what I wrote previously to clarify the film's provenance and provide a bit more historical context for the film.

My very own Avatar review!

Preface

I just recently (and finally) watched Avatar, and I've been trying to craft this commentary for weeks now. Rather than dilly-dally any longer, I've incorporated some final thoughts and present it in all it's imperfections:

Introduction

There are many fascinating threads of analysis that course through the movie. I've read a small portion of reviews and analyses found in my not-at-all-systematic Internet meanderings. A conclusion I've drawn from this research is that I haven't been able to find much written about what seems to me two very important points that connect Avatar with its other relatives in the blockbuster fantasy and sci-fi categories: 1) Why is it (nearly) always the white guy who saves the day? 2) Why is violence so often the solution to violence?

Quite funny indeed

I just got turned on to The Armstrong & Miller Showthrough a recent EotAW post, and just have to share the links below.

This is some of the funniest stuff I've seen in many, many years . . . I'm writing this from the floor of my office in the midst of convulsive fits, with at least three of my ribs broken from laughing . . .


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEle_DLDg9Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGp4DvFEgh8&NR=1&feature=fvwp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ9yj_BXRp0&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeaN8UBwg2M&feature=related

(Reminiscent, a bit, of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rKYL0tW-Ek&NR=1&feature=fvwp)

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Fun close reading of Star Wars

There's a fun close reading of the Star Wars narrative over on EotAW.

One of the contributors linked to this interesting comparison between the Star Wars and Star Trek universes.

Good stuff.

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The Crusades (as relayed to us by Terry Jones)

Has anyone yet seen this documentary series on The Crusades narrated by Terry Jones?

If so, I'd like to hear what you think about it.

I'm not a historian of The Crusades, and I haven't seen this series in many years, but I was enthralled when I did watch it, as it provided a fascinating overview of the topic interspersed with Terry Jones' creativity, lightheartedness*, and reverence for the specific topic, for history in general, and for the desire to communicate complex topics to as wide an audience as possible.

I need to see this series again.

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* Seems almost blasphemous to say this about The Crusades.

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Why deviate so obviously from historical truth?

Ok. Joy Division is one of my favorite bands of all time, so I was excited when Control came out in 2007. I like the movie a lot, too, because I'm part of a "small circle."

I have three critiques, however. The first is that the movie cast didn't record an entire sound track -- they sounded so good together when they played in the movie, why not record an entire covers soundtrack?!?! Second, why didn't New Order record a couple more songs, in the same vein and in tribute? It seems like this would have been a fitting thing to do.

Finally--and more in-line with the purpose of this blog--why did director Anton Corbijn record the cast doing the song "Transmission" for Tony Wilson's Granada Reports television show, when, in reality, they performed "Shadowplay" on that pivotal day in September 1978?

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