“Tim Burton, in his element - Los Angeles Times”

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Tim Burton, in his element - Los Angeles Times Posted: 31 Dec 2010 09:06 AM PST If, as William Carlos Williams wrote, "The pure products of America / go crazy," where does that leave Tim Burton, a pure product not just of America but also of Southern California, land's end of our national phantasmagoria? Hollywood, maybe, where Burton — born in Burbank, raised on TV and the films of Ray Harryhausen, educated at the California Institute of the Arts — landed in the late 1970s. Or London, where he now lives with the actress Helena Bonham Carter and their two kids. Really, though, the landscape Burton occupies is one of the imagination, a territory marked by whimsy and darkness, in which the visuals are the main event. "My background is animation," he says by phone from his home in England. "Early on, I was essentially a nonverbal person." Even now, the director of "Beetle Juice," "Batman," "Corpse Bride" and "Edward Scissorhands" seems not completely comfortable in conversation; he pauses, backtracks, like someone speaking in a second language, as he discusses "The Art of Tim Burton," a lavish art book featuring more than 1,000 images, some of which go back to childhood. "The Art of Tim Burton" first came out in 2009, to coincide with the opening of a Burton retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. That show arrives at LACMA in May, but in the meantime, Burton has released a new limited edition of the book, with bonus material, including a signed lithograph. The book is self-published, available from Burton's website. "Publishers approached me, but they didn't seem too enthusiastic," he says, "so we decided to do it independently. That way, the whole point was the process, the joy of making it, doing it, seeing it develop. It was a more fun and positive experience." Burton is no stranger to books. In 1997, he published a collection of macabre fictions called "The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories"; he also wrote the children's picture book adaptation of his stop-action animation classic " The Nightmare Before Christmas." More recently, he — along with writer Leah Gallo and designer Holly C. Kempf, who did much of the heavy lifting on "The Art of Tim Burton" — has produced commemorative volumes for the films "Sweeney Todd" and "Alice in Wonderland," to be given to the cast and crew. "Instead of crew jackets," Burton says, "we'd do these books: yearbooks, personal books. So in some way, this book grew out of that." That's a fine analogy, for "The Art of Tim Burton" is as personal as a scrapbook, full of reminiscences and previously unseen work. A childhood crayon drawing of the Creature from the Black Lagoon leads to the image of an early (and unpublished) picture book called "The Giant Zlig" and a poster Burton designed as a teenage employee of the city of Burbank for an anti-litter campaign. There are character sketches from his movies (Jack Skellington, the Joker, Sweeney Todd) and surreal cartoons that work as visual puns. In "A Tongue Twister," a noxious insect twists a man's tongue so tightly that it looks like a corkscrew; "Mr. Happyface remembers better days" presents the iconic yellow "Have a Nice Day" face turned in on itself, frowning over empty bottles and a half-drunk glass of wine. Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Winona Ryder, Pee-wee Herman and even Harryhausen all weigh in on Burton and share anecdotes. Particularly resonant is old friend Rick Heinrichs' "Short Montage of Early Personal Impressions of Tim," which includes this telling recollection: "Pulling up to his Burbank apartment to pick him up on our way to see a film at the Cinerama Dome and observing him completely absorbed by something at ground level: the micro-world of an anthill." Here, we get a glimpse of Burton in his element, which is what "The Art of Tim Burton" offers, as well. "It's not showing me as a great artist," he says. "It's just showing my weird mental process, the way things grow. Whether I'm working on a movie or doing a drawing, my favorite time is making it. When I finish, there's a nice sense of accomplishment, but really, it's about the process for me." Part of that process is physical, a hand's on interaction between Burton and the work. This is why he was drawn to animation, and it's also why he wanted to produce a book. "I love books," he says, "their tactile nature. Like stop-action animation, there's nothing else like them. In this age, when everyone is looking at screens, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to make a book — big, heavy, hard to hold sometimes. I wanted it to be a physical experience." david.ulin@latimes.com This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

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“Tim Burton, in his element - Los Angeles Times” plus 1 more

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Tim Burton, in his element - Los Angeles Times Posted: 30 Dec 2010 06:39 PM PST If, as William Carlos Williams wrote, "The pure products of America / go crazy," where does that leave Tim Burton, a pure product not just of America but also of Southern California, land's end of our national phantasmagoria? Hollywood, maybe, where Burton — born in Burbank, raised on TV and the films of Ray Harryhausen, educated at the California Institute of the Arts — landed in the late 1970s. Or London, where he now lives with the actress Helena Bonham Carter and their two kids. Really, though, the landscape Burton occupies is one of the imagination, a territory marked by whimsy and darkness, in which the visuals are the main event. "My background is animation," he says by phone from his home in England. "Early on, I was essentially a nonverbal person." Even now, the director of "Beetle Juice," "Batman," "Corpse Bride" and "Edward Scissorhands" seems not completely comfortable in conversation; he pauses, backtracks, like someone speaking in a second language, as he discusses "The Art of Tim Burton," a lavish art book featuring more than 1,000 images, some of which go back to childhood. "The Art of Tim Burton" first came out in 2009, to coincide with the opening of a Burton retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. That show arrives at LACMA in May, but in the meantime, Burton has released a new limited edition of the book, with bonus material, including a signed lithograph. The book is self-published, available from Burton's website. "Publishers approached me, but they didn't seem too enthusiastic," he says, "so we decided to do it independently. That way, the whole point was the process, the joy of making it, doing it, seeing it develop. It was a more fun and positive experience." Burton is no stranger to books. In 1997, he published a collection of macabre fictions called "The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories"; he also wrote the children's picture book adaptation of his stop-action animation classic " The Nightmare Before Christmas." More recently, he — along with writer Leah Gallo and designer Holly C. Kempf, who did much of the heavy lifting on "The Art of Tim Burton" — has produced commemorative volumes for the films "Sweeney Todd" and "Alice in Wonderland," to be given to the cast and crew. "Instead of crew jackets," Burton says, "we'd do these books: yearbooks, personal books. So in some way, this book grew out of that." That's a fine analogy, for "The Art of Tim Burton" is as personal as a scrapbook, full of reminiscences and previously unseen work. A childhood crayon drawing of the Creature from the Black Lagoon leads to the image of an early (and unpublished) picture book called "The Giant Zlig" and a poster Burton designed as a teenage employee of the city of Burbank for an anti-litter campaign. There are character sketches from his movies (Jack Skellington, the Joker, Sweeney Todd) and surreal cartoons that work as visual puns. In "A Tongue Twister," a noxious insect twists a man's tongue so tightly that it looks like a corkscrew; "Mr. Happyface remembers better days" presents the iconic yellow "Have a Nice Day" face turned in on itself, frowning over empty bottles and a half-drunk glass of wine. Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Winona Ryder, Pee-wee Herman and even Harryhausen all weigh in on Burton and share anecdotes. Particularly resonant is old friend Rick Heinrichs' "Short Montage of Early Personal Impressions of Tim," which includes this telling recollection: "Pulling up to his Burbank apartment to pick him up on our way to see a film at the Cinerama Dome and observing him completely absorbed by something at ground level: the micro-world of an anthill." Here, we get a glimpse of Burton in his element, which is what "The Art of Tim Burton" offers, as well. "It's not showing me as a great artist," he says. "It's just showing my weird mental process, the way things grow. Whether I'm working on a movie or doing a drawing, my favorite time is making it. When I finish, there's a nice sense of accomplishment, but really, it's about the process for me." Part of that process is physical, a hand's on interaction between Burton and the work. This is why he was drawn to animation, and it's also why he wanted to produce a book. "I love books," he says, "their tactile nature. Like stop-action animation, there's nothing else like them. In this age, when everyone is looking at screens, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to make a book — big, heavy, hard to hold sometimes. I wanted it to be a physical experience." david.ulin@latimes.com This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

Curing and preventing a hangover this New Year's - AZCentral.com Posted: 30 Dec 2010 02:22 PM PST by Andrea Aker - Dec. 30, 2010 01:09 PM Special for azcentral.com New Year's Eve, and the weekend that precedes it, is a beer-drinker's heaven, as it's the unofficial drink of the holiday. As hoards enjoy beer after beer, many drinkers will experience the inevitable the following morning: a killer hangover. But we want to keep your Irish eyes smiling, so we've come up with a guide to sussing out the facts from the fictions when it comes to beating hangovers. According to the how-to Web site Howstuffworks.com, the formal term for a hangover is veisalgia, derived from the Norwegian word for "uneasiness following debauchery." (How cool is it that they even have a word for that?) Most of us know the drill, dehydration, a throbbing headache and nausea, among a slew of other uncomfortable symptoms. "When you're drinking you dump a lot of water that would normally be recycled into your body," said Howstuffworks.com, founder Marshall Brain. "Most folks who have been drinking a lot get dehydrated and that's one of the big factors in creating a hangover." But, is it possible to avoid this painful fate without passing up the bottle? Brain helps us break down the science behind popular hangover remedies, but first a word about prevention. You can help to lessen your chances of the hangover with some prevention products such as Xo3, made by Phoenix-based Dietblends, Inc. This supplement contains multiple mineral complexes and Glutathione, a peptide that is essential to the liver in accelerating detoxification and eliminating toxic byproducts of alcohol metabolism, which cause hangovers. But Dietblends owner Peter Dobler says his product doesn't replace the liquids lost to alcohol dehydration, it can help. "The term hangover cure is oxymoronic because there is no real cure for a hangover," he says. "We're trying to prevent it from happening. Once you have the hangover it's going to take time, rest and nutrition to bounce back." But Xo3 is just one of countless supplemental, vitamin-filled waters and juices marketed to help drinkers recover. There are vitamin, fit, smart and urban waters all promising that their special blends of carbohydrates, vitamins and protective antioxidants will "rejuvenate the body, boost its recuperative powers, offset dehydration, and promote liver health." Or at least that's what the makers of Springbac promise. And whether it helps or not, it's already got celebs hooked, including Los Angeles DJ Samantha Ronson, who had a case delivered to her house recently to help her fight post-gig hangovers. But if hangover remedies espoused by hipster West Coast DJs aren't your thing, here's a look at the effectiveness of other hangover-fighting food and drink. FATTY FOODS True/False Eating fatty foods is all about the timing. Chow down before you start drinking to prevent a hangover. Fatty foods stick to the stomach lining and slow down the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream. But gorging on fatty foods the morning after could upset your stomach further. Eggs - True Eggs provide energy and contain large amount of cysteine, which breaks down toxins that cause hangovers. So, it's possible a serving can aid the symptoms. Bananas - True The popular fruit does harness hangover-cutting power. Bananas replenish electrolytes and potassium, which are keys to recovery. Kiwi fruit and sports drinks have a similar effect. Juice vs. Water - Both Not all liquids are created equal. Water fights dehydration and dilutes its byproducts. It's best to alternate alcoholic drinks with water during the night, as opposed to chugging it all in the morning. That might make you sick. Juices high in vitamins can also give the body a boost of energy, and studies have proven that it also increases the rate at the body gets rid of toxins. Brain says it's best to opt for juices high in electrolytes such as orange. Painkillers - True Over-the-counter painkillers can ease hangovers, but choose carefully. If you're plagued by a headache, Excedrin may be a good. However, Excedrin combines acetaminophen with caffeine. A prolonged combination of alcohol and acetaminophen has been shown to cause liver damage. Plus, caffeine is a diuretic that can dehydrate you. Aspirin, on the other hand, is a non-caffeinated pain reliever, but if you have a sensitive stomach, it could make that worse. Remedy: Hair of the Dog - False Brain says that drinking alcohol to make it through a hangover may temporarily mask the side effects, but the liver still needs to break down the toxins, and drinking more prolongs the time your system needs to clear itself. Burnt Toast - False This so-called remedy is actually based on scientific facts, yet Howstuffworks.com explains why the cure itself is fiction. It's been said the carbon in the charred bread acts like a filter. While it is true that activated charcoal, which is a treated form of carbon, is used to treat some types of poisonings, it's not used to treat alcohol poisoning. Plus, the carbon/charcoal found in burnt toast is not the same as activated charcoal. Black Coffee - False Coffee is loaded with caffeine, which will keep you awake, but once the caffeine wears off, you'll be ready to climb back into bed. Caffeine can help alleviate a pounding headache because it reduces the size of blood vessels, reversing the swelling effect alcohol has on vessels. But caffeine is also a diuretic and as such can dehydrate you further. So really, coffee can make hangovers worse. OVER-THE-COUNTER-REMEDIES Enh. Not great. Remedies such as Chaser, Sob'r-K Hangover Stopper, RU-21, Berocca and Rebound are considered dietary supplements and their ingredients vary greatly. The remedies that include carbon, like Sob'r-K, are said to reduce the number of impurities the body has to process. This is a different carbon than the kind found in burnt toast, which is not proven to aid hangovers. Other supplements include different kinds and amounts of vitamins. They're basically multivitamins. "You would be better off eating a big meal and drinking liquids," said Brain. Editor Megan Finnerty contributed to this story. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

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“Just Follow Jesus: Interview with Christian Singer Derek Webb - Huffingtonpost.com”

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Just Follow Jesus: Interview with Christian Singer Derek Webb - Huffingtonpost.com Posted: 25 Dec 2010 10:42 PM PST Derek Webb isn't your prototypical evangelical Christian -- but he hopes that someday, he might be. A long-time darling of the contemporary Christian music scene, Webb has flirted with controversy a number of times since launching his solo career, most notably with his 2009 album Stockholm Syndrome and its lead single "What Matters More," which found him openly addressing homophobia in the Christian church. Given his willingness to reach across dividing lines, I asked Webb about his religious identity and how it relates to his work and his positions on issues relating to LGBT people, Muslims and atheists. Tracking the arc of your career, it seems to me that you've become increasingly vocal about your opinions on certain social issues. What's behind that? My wife and I are both artists. Part of the luxury of being an artist is that you not only can but kind of have a responsibility to think long and hard about things on behalf of those who might listen to your music. You can give them a jumping off point for subject matter that might be too tangled for most people in the busyness of their daily lives. I think there are a lot of smart people out there who honestly just don't have the time to think through some of these issues, and it becomes easier to watch CNN, to watch Fox News, to read some random blog and just get your answers and talking points from those kinds of places. Sometimes all people need is a little shove, and I feel like artists can play a really unique role by taking advantage of the luxury of being able to think through these issues of culture and life and then distill those thoughts down into just a couple minutes, put a little melody with it -- something to help the medicine go down -- and give people something to react to, [so] that they might begin to form their own opinions. What was the reaction to "What Matters More" and, more largely, Stockholm Syndrome? Were you concerned about the risk of taking a stand on such a heated issue? It was honestly pretty predictable. The part of it that I didn't really expect was the response from those that are at the business end of the church's judgment, especially around the gay issue. But what was surprising in a good way -- what showed me that I picked the right kind of trouble to get into -- was the response from a lot of people who were really struggling spiritually because they had no language for being who they actually were and believing what they actually believed. For their whole lives they had people telling them they couldn't be a certain kind of person. I was really gratified to be able to provide some small bit of sanity to a handful of people. That was worth whatever judgment or misunderstanding that might've come from the record itself. In terms of my being fearful or not [about the] reaction; I take my job really seriously, and I have tried to make a habit over the years of not listening to people who either criticize me or praise me. Spirituality is a really mysterious thing, and I feel as though I have received various coordinates from God over the years in terms of what I need to be spending my time and my work on, and that's really what I'm listening to. If following faithfully along those coordinates puts me in a season of praise with a certain group of people, that's fine -- but I don't do it to get in those graces, and neither am I upset if that also costs me some people along the road. I would much rather be faithful than successful, and I think that's a real professional difference [from] how some people do it. How do you think the Christian community can build bridges to the LGBT community? Initially, Christians can stop pretending that they're so different. I think there would be an immediate change in the conversation if we all realized how similar we are and the common language we share. Another thing that would really change the conversation between the church and the broader gay community -- and it so desperately needs changing -- is the church's response. The church has spent so many years dealing publicly in the morality of the issue, in a way that misrepresents the response that I believe Jesus would have, that Christians have forgotten, or maybe never really [knew] in the first place, that whether your moral response to the gay issue is that it is perfectly permissible in the eyes of the Bible, or that it is totally reprehensible, your interpersonal response should be absolutely no different to gay people. The response, by the way, is love. Period. It's love and open arms, regardless of your position on the morality. Your latest LP, Feedback, is a worship album. Yet it's a different kind of worship album in many ways, including the fact that it's mostly instrumental. How do you respond to people who say you've "gone soft" or that you're "not Christian enough"? And, conversely, to people that say you're "too explicitly Christian" -- that you should just "keep your religion to yourself"? I certainly get some of those [comments]. You can't please everybody, and I don't do this to please everybody. But the job of any artist is to look at the world and tell you what they see. Every artist, whether they acknowledge it or know it, has a grid through which they view the world and make sense of what they see. Even if it's a grid of unbelief -- that you don't think there is anything orchestrating the world and that everything is completely random -- that is a grid through which you make sense of the world. A lot of "Christian art" is about the lens they're looking through, rather than the world they see through it. I'm not going to criticize anybody for doing that, but I would rather look at the world through the grid of following Jesus and tell you what I see. But that doesn't presume that all the art I'm going to make will be about following Jesus. The year I made Stockholm Syndrome, there were a lot of triggers that brought issues of race and sexuality to my mind. I have a lot of friends and family that have suffered because of the church's judgment; my best friend in the world is gay. I felt a lot of people around me drawing lines in the sand, and that year I decided: I don't want to draw lines and have to be on one side or the other, but if someone's going to push me to one or the other side of the line, I'm going to stand on the side of those being judged because that's where I feel Jesus meets people. Making Stockholm Syndrome was about that journey. That same lens, this year, brought Feedback to life. They are very different pieces of art, but the exact same ethic brought both of those records out. What place do you see Christians having in such a religiously diverse culture? How should Christians respond to things like anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence? Again, my first response is that Christians need to see ourselves as the same as those we're pointing our fingers at. The exact same thing goes for the conversation on religious diversity. We have got to see ourselves as the same as those we might perceive as our enemies. Not only is that a good idea; I think it's a direct commandment from Jesus. That is counterintuitive to me, but Jesus says we are to be preemptive about how we love. I think Christianity has a very unique position in these arguments to demonstrate what we believe, to where we might not even have to tell people about [Jesus] and that his primary message was love, if we demonstrated it better. I think this is an especially important moment and conversation. At a time when everybody in our culture is talking about tolerance, it seems that tolerance has the highest premium of any response -- "If we just tolerate one another..." But my feeling is: Who wants to be tolerated? People don't want to be tolerated; they want to be loved. I don't want to be tolerant of people. I want to move toward and love people, to know them and know their stories, and to tell them my story. I think, if we did more of that, we'd all learn that our stories aren't that different, and that there might even be a bigger story -- a meta-narrative -- that we're all tied up in together. As an atheist working to engage the religious and the nonreligious around positive dialogue and action, I wonder what you think can be done to bridge what is perhaps the biggest interfaith divide -- that existing between some atheists who want to see the end of all religion and seem to reserve a special malice for Christianity, and some Christians who believe that atheists are leading to the destruction of our values? I believe that it's going to take going beyond tolerance, to love and care for those who are not like us and don't believe like us. That's a spiritual discipline, for Pete's sake. One of the hallmarks of following Jesus is to pursue and love people who are different than we are and have different beliefs than we do, and to live our lives loving, understanding and coming into common ground with those people. This is going to be one of those untelevised revolutions; it's really going to take all of us, individually, getting to know one another better. What changes people's minds and changes people's language is relationships. I personally don't think that any Christian who doesn't have a friend -- not just a token friend, but someone they love and care about -- who is gay should speak out about the gay issue. I think that should almost be a requirement to publicly voice your opinion, because I can't tell you how it changes your posture and your language when you're not just talking about a "behavior" or a "faithless" group of people, but a family member or loved one -- someone who, when you're done saying what you're going to say, you'll have to deal with. I'm not saying that we should change our positions on things we think are absolutely true, but it should bear some weight on what we say and how we say it. Everything would change if we actually knew each other. That's really what it's going to take. What is your vision for the future of Christianity? What kind of Christian community do you want to see? Honestly, I would just love to see Christians following Jesus. He was not an easy guy to follow, especially when he started talking about loving neighbors and loving enemies and going beyond tolerance to live your life with people who are nothing like you and disagree with you. I really want to hammer on some of these points, because I think they are the hallmarks of following Jesus. I don't think that Christianity, Jesus or the Bible have failed; I think that Christians have failed to believe it and to do it. If Christians would just look at the life and the words, and pursue Jesus, I think they would suddenly find that it's incongruent with a lot of cultural Christianity and Christian practice. I would love to see Jesus lead all of us out of this ghetto of Christian subculture. Even if that happened, we'd still be diverse members of one body, so it doesn't mean we'd suddenly become homogenized. We'd all still have our particular personalities and gifts. Those differences are good. But the most primary and basic ethics that compel us as followers of Jesus should change, and it would change everything and reorient us back to what it actually means to be a Christian: to love.   Follow Chris Stedman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NonProphetStat This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

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“Kirsten Gillibrand and Oprah Winfrey, get your guns: Frontier women in modern American life - New York Daily News”

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Kirsten Gillibrand and Oprah Winfrey, get your guns: Frontier women in modern American life - New York Daily News Posted: 27 Dec 2010 12:42 AM PST DelMundo for News U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has proved she's up for a hard fight in the Senate. While recently watching the Coen brothers' new movie, "True Grit," I thought of how the story of a 14-year-old girl functioning in a world of rough and ruthless men conforms to the longstanding American myth of the pioneer woman - a myth that is especially relevant today, in the wake of congressional legislation that would have perished without a woman's strong leadership. American women were central to pushing the country westward and managing frontier towns of men who would've been happy drinking, shooting and killing each other if the female desire for order and tranquility had not been imposed upon them. Women prevailed through a hornet's nest of miseries, from death during childbirth to gun battles on the prairie to the ravages of disease. In addition, pioneer women learned to shoot guns and do many things that their sisters in big cities did not know about. It is unimaginable that an extraordinary sharpshooter like Annie Oakley would have thrived in Boston. All of this has been sentimentalized and reduced to a barrel of purple clichés. Any serious American artist has to avoid hollow platitudes because, when delivered well, the story of a pioneer woman not only captures the 19th century, but speaks directly to our time. That's why "True Grit" is so relevant today. The movie reminds that our national myths are very different from the propaganda passed off as fact by Fox News. Myths like that of the frontier woman are not only grounded in historical reality, but recur often enough to elevate us beyond the cynicism of well-advertised and well-packaged lies put forth by the right. Because it is about a genuinely American woman who learns terrible things about life but prevails over all obstacles, "True Grit" will be a sure success. And it will likely benefit from our shared affection for the person from whom nothing is expected, but who nevertheless manages to persevere. There are fine examples of pioneer women in our own time, the kind who are willing to endure what they must in order to achieve important things. These include, among many others, the billionaire queen of national goodwill, Oprah Winfrey, and New York's junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand. Some would even put the narcissistic balloon of hot air known as Sarah Palin into this group. At the moment, Gillibrand is the most talked about of this bunch because of the impact she has had since Gov. Paterson appointed her to take the seat of Hillary Clinton, who left the Senate to serve as secretary of state. Little was expected of Gillibrand, but she came through in the way that American women often do, regardless of color, class, religion or sexual orientation. Gillibrand seems to have gone into training for political battle when she lost 40 pounds. Like it or not, men take women more seriously if their good ideas pair with good looks. Gillibrand made herself crucial to repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell. She was also central to passing the Zadroga bill to help ailing 9/11 first-responders. Not too shabby for someone who was branded as so insignificant by so many. When the remarkable heroine of "True Grit," Mattie Ross, finally gets the drop on the film's villain, a look of great conviction flashes across her face as she points a rifle at him. I am sure that it is a look Gillibrand and all women of her type, whatever their political persuasion, will recognize easily in themselves. crouch.stanley@gmail.com   the frontier endures in, of all places, Congress This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

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“Kirsten Gillibrand and Oprah Winfrey, get your guns: Frontier women in modern American life - New York Daily News”

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Kirsten Gillibrand and Oprah Winfrey, get your guns: Frontier women in modern American life - New York Daily News Posted: 27 Dec 2010 01:03 AM PST DelMundo for News U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has proved she's up for a hard fight in the Senate. While recently watching the Coen brothers' new movie, "True Grit," I thought of how the story of a 14-year-old girl functioning in a world of rough and ruthless men conforms to the longstanding American myth of the pioneer woman - a myth that is especially relevant today, in the wake of congressional legislation that would have perished without a woman's strong leadership. American women were central to pushing the country westward and managing frontier towns of men who would've been happy drinking, shooting and killing each other if the female desire for order and tranquility had not been imposed upon them. Women prevailed through a hornet's nest of miseries, from death during childbirth to gun battles on the prairie to the ravages of disease. In addition, pioneer women learned to shoot guns and do many things that their sisters in big cities did not know about. It is unimaginable that an extraordinary sharpshooter like Annie Oakley would have thrived in Boston. All of this has been sentimentalized and reduced to a barrel of purple clichés. Any serious American artist has to avoid hollow platitudes because, when delivered well, the story of a pioneer woman not only captures the 19th century, but speaks directly to our time. That's why "True Grit" is so relevant today. The movie reminds that our national myths are very different from the propaganda passed off as fact by Fox News. Myths like that of the frontier woman are not only grounded in historical reality, but recur often enough to elevate us beyond the cynicism of well-advertised and well-packaged lies put forth by the right. Because it is about a genuinely American woman who learns terrible things about life but prevails over all obstacles, "True Grit" will be a sure success. And it will likely benefit from our shared affection for the person from whom nothing is expected, but who nevertheless manages to persevere. There are fine examples of pioneer women in our own time, the kind who are willing to endure what they must in order to achieve important things. These include, among many others, the billionaire queen of national goodwill, Oprah Winfrey, and New York's junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand. Some would even put the narcissistic balloon of hot air known as Sarah Palin into this group. At the moment, Gillibrand is the most talked about of this bunch because of the impact she has had since Gov. Paterson appointed her to take the seat of Hillary Clinton, who left the Senate to serve as secretary of state. Little was expected of Gillibrand, but she came through in the way that American women often do, regardless of color, class, religion or sexual orientation. Gillibrand seems to have gone into training for political battle when she lost 40 pounds. Like it or not, men take women more seriously if their good ideas pair with good looks. Gillibrand made herself crucial to repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell. She was also central to passing the Zadroga bill to help ailing 9/11 first-responders. Not too shabby for someone who was branded as so insignificant by so many. When the remarkable heroine of "True Grit," Mattie Ross, finally gets the drop on the film's villain, a look of great conviction flashes across her face as she points a rifle at him. I am sure that it is a look Gillibrand and all women of her type, whatever their political persuasion, will recognize easily in themselves. crouch.stanley@gmail.com   the frontier endures in, of all places, Congress This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

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“Julian Assange Assails Fox News, Mike Huckabee, Palin On MSNBC (VIDEO) - Huffingtonpost.com”

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Julian Assange Assails Fox News, Mike Huckabee, Palin On MSNBC (VIDEO) - Huffingtonpost.com Posted: 22 Dec 2010 02:24 PM PST Julian Assange gave his first cable news interview since his release from jail to MSNBC's Cenk Uygur on Wednesday, and he had harsh words for both politicians and the media -- especially Fox News. Speaking from the English manor where he is under house arrest after his release on bail over sex crime allegations, Assange insisted that he was as much of a journalist as any mainstream reporter, and said that the reason more mainstream media figures had not spoken out in support of him was because they thought they could avoid the government attacks that Assange himself has faced. "They believe that if they sell us out, if they say, well he's not really a journalist, they can have the Washington authorities target us and destroy us and somehow steer clear of the crossfire..but I have a message to them: they're going to be next,"he said. Next, Assange addressed the plethora of American politicians--from Joe Biden to Sarah Palin to Mike Huckabee, who he called "another idiot trying to make a name for himself"--who have either dubbed him a "terrorist" or called for his assassination or execution. He said anyone who had done the latter should be prosecuted for incitement to murder. Assange also strongly condemned Fox News' Bob Beckel, who called for Assange to be "illegally" killed by American special forces earlier this month. "Just a few days ago on Fox, that was the phrase that was used: 'illegal,' he should be illegally murdered," Assange said."What sort of message does that send about the rule of law in the United States? That is conducting violence to achieve a political end...or the threat of violence to achieve a political end...and that is the definition of terrorism." WATCH: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Assange also said that Bradley Manning, widely presumed to be the leaker of secret documents to WikiLeaks, was a political prisoner. "This man acted for political reasons," he said. "He is a political prisoner in the United States. He has not gone to trial." Get HuffPost Media On Twitter and Facebook! Know something we don't? E-mail us at media@huffingtonpost.com This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

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“Resilience in the darkest of times - Washington Post”

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Resilience in the darkest of times - Washington Post Posted: 25 Dec 2010 09:56 AM PST Resilience in the darkest of times By Ann Hornaday Saturday, December 25, 2010 How do you recover from the death of a child? The movie "Rabbit Hole" eloquently posits the only correct answer to that question: You don't. Based on David Lindsay-Abaire's acclaimed 2006 play of the same name, "Rabbit Hole" focuses on a grieving couple eight months after their young son was killed by a car while chasing his dog into the street. What on the surface seems to possess all the melodrama and photogenic suffering of a banal prime-time weepie instead becomes a lucid, tough, deeply sensitive examination of emotional fortitude. It's important for viewers to know that it's okay to laugh during "Rabbit Hole." Thanks to Lindsay-Abaire's mastery of difficult tonal shifts and John Cameron Mitchell's alert, nimble direction, laughs and tears co-exist, if not comfortably, at least recognizably as equally necessary to surviving life's most devastating moments. In Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart, Mitchell has found actors who gracefully pull off that psychological high-wire act as Becca and Howie, an attractive, prosperous couple who have reached the point in their mourning where most of their friends and neighbors think it's time to be moving on. Howie tries to do this by attending support-group meetings and contemplating another child. Becca cooks compulsively, repels the efforts of friends to get together and goes about daily life with crisp matter-of-factness, even when it comes to removing their son's drawings from the refrigerator. Becca reserves her cruelest barbs for her mother, Nat (Dianne Wiest), who lost a grown son to drug addiction but whose attempts at empathy Becca resents as unearned comparisons. (Sandra Oh and Tammy Blanchard, as a support group member and Becca's sister, respectively, provide welcome comic relief for the film's most discomfiting encounters.) Becca eventually discovers solace in the most surprising place imaginable, but "Rabbit Hole" resists facile catharsis or easy equivalencies. Thanks in large part to Kidman's refusal to soften her character's most fascinating sharp edges, as well as Mitchell's superb command of the material, "Rabbit Hole" gives the lie to such comforting fictions as closure and transcendence. As Wiest suggests in her character's moving soliloquy, sometimes the best thing to do with feelings isn't to "process" or "work through" them, but simply to feel them. "Hanging in there" can often seem like a meaningless cliche, but in "Rabbit Hole" the phrase takes on newfound meaning as perhaps the hardest, most heroic thing in the world to do. Contains mature thematic material, drug use and profanity. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

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“Poetry: High praise for Elizabeth Bishop's artistry and humanity - Oregonian”

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Poetry: High praise for Elizabeth Bishop's artistry and humanity - Oregonian Posted: 24 Dec 2010 01:39 PM PST Published: Friday, December 24, 2010, 1:39 PM All year I've been highlighting the ongoing dialogue among poets in English from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Today's column will mark the final entry in this series. Beginning with Philip Sidney and George Herbert, moving through John Milton and Anne Bradstreet and Alexander Pope, then to William Wordsworth and John Keats, to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, we have watched poets talk back and forth across the centuries about the meaning and role of the imagination and poetry. We've seen: Philip Sidney's poems suffused with the heart's desires, George Herbert's poems about the physical pleasures of faith, Alexander Pope's poems about society's foibles, William Wordsworth's poems about the emotional centers of experience, John Keats' poems about the perfection of art, Walt Whitman's manifest cosmic ranges and Emily Dickinson's fierce domestic stances. Last month, we saw Wallace Stevens write about the supreme fictions of the imagination. This month's poet, Elizabeth Bishop, writes about the sturdy facts of human existence. One side for art, the other for life. One side for the dominance of language, the other for the dominance of experience. One side for responding directly to humanity, the other for inventing a mask to vivify human consciousness. These dichotomies detail the give and take poets have engaged in for hundreds of years and across multiple generations. American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) falls on the side of responding directly to humanity. She has become one of the most widely praised poets of our era as a chronicler of the fusion of self and culture. Critic David Orr could not contain his praise in 2008 when he wrote in The New York Times: "You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces -- Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray -- but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop. That she worked in one of our country's least popular fields, poetry, doesn't matter. That she was a woman doesn't matter. That she was gay doesn't matter. That she was an alcoholic, an expatriate and essentially an orphan -- none of this matters. What matters is that she left behind a body of work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, 'a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever.'" Where Wallace Stevens' method is to be inventive, Bishop's is to be attentive. She never once affects a rhetorical flourish, never affects a voice that is anything but conversational, never confesses the chatter of her life. Instead, she writes with distilled, shy discretion. She is a poet of restraint, subtlety and manners -- so unlike Alexander Pope's crassness and Walt Whitman's bombast and even, at times, Emily Dickinson's sharp-tongued retorts. She is a poet who holds back -- holds back herself, the forces of nature and the burdens of her times. In this sense, she is more like George Herbert striving for poise in the face of spiritual chaos or William Wordsworth offering the insights into the "spots of time / Which with distinct pre-eminence" enliven and define our consciousnesses. Below is the opening stanza of her masterpiece, "At the Fishhouses." Bishop's best poems run long. The entire poem is printed at oregonlive.com. Notice the immersion into fact, the trust in knowledge and the sharpness, clarity and fine filigree-made imagery of a poet in the thrall of what exists right in front of her eyes. -- David Biespiel Excerpt from "At the Fishhouses" Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water. The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up to storerooms in the gables for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls. The big fish tubs are completely lined with layers of beautiful herring scales and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail, with small iridescent flies crawling on them. Up on the little slope behind the houses, set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass, is an ancient wooden capstan, cracked, with two long bleached handles and some melancholy stains, like dried blood, where the ironwork has rusted. The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. He was a friend of my grandfather. We talk of the decline in the population and of codfish and herring while he waits for a herring boat to come in. There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb. He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, the blade of which is almost worn away. Down at the water's edge, at the place where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp descending into the water, thin silver tree trunks are laid horizontally across the gray stones, down and down at intervals of four or five feet. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals ... One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening. He was curious about me. He was interested in music; like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." He stood up in the water and regarded me steadily, moving his head a little. Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug as if it were against his better judgment. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy water ... Back, behind us, the dignified tall firs begin. Bluish, associating with their shadows, a million Christmas trees stand waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. --Elizabeth Bishop This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

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“Sarah Palin, Kim Kardashian and our poisonous celebrity culture: Shame, fame and the American way - New York Daily News”

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Sarah Palin, Kim Kardashian and our poisonous celebrity culture: Shame, fame and the American way - New York Daily News Posted: 20 Dec 2010 01:55 AM PST Cozolino/Everett; Gerber/Getty; Las Vegas Metro Police Dept Kim Kardashian, Sarah Palin and Paris Hilton have all found fame instead of experiencing shame. In our time, we do not so much get a blast from the past as we are prodded into reflection by something we cannot ignore. High-profile events take place, blasting us back to a time less clouded with constant lies and distortions than our own. Though I have disdain for suicide, I was impressed by Mark Madoff, son of Bernie, for hanging himself because it was too painful to carry that name around. He was obviously deeply affected by all those who had suffered at the hands of his father, the high-stakes hustler who bilked many of their nest eggs and hard-earned savings. Suicide is often described as an act of fatal rage that leads to self-destruction. However, deep shame of the sort felt by Bernie Madoff's son has been replaced in our so-called celebrity culture with self-promotion and heavy panting in pursuit of television cameras. Even fine actresses want the chance to dress like happy hookers while male stars prefer looking like gigolos or clowns. In a more civilized age, Paris Hilton would've remained sequestered while doing charity work in order to redeem herself and be forgiven for drunkenly performing sex acts on tape, along with other lewd behavior. But forgiveness moves in the express lane now. No penance was required, and Hilton never felt the deep shame Madoff experienced. In fact, Hilton inspired childhood friend Kim Kardashian to make her own sex tape. It led to a reality show, and now Kardashian is more popular than Hilton. And just as shameless. That's how our culture works. Fame next found the perky Sarah Palin, one of whose great gifts is the unwillingness to ever admit a significant mistake. She has a reality show, too. Palin's outlook is no different from that of Enron executives who pretended nothing was wrong until their financial house of cards came crashing down. That investigation into Enron's hanky-panky was followed by the suicide of Cliff Baxter, who had a high position in the company's command chain. Baxter was troubled in the way that Madoff's son was. Unlike the Paris Hiltons of this world, he could feel shame - and did. We don't expect that from the men who brought Wall Street to its knees in 2008, but are now thinking once again about where they would spend their huge, undeserved bonuses. Most important to Wall Street's corporate culture is maintaining a relationship with the Republican shills who victoriously presented them as no better off than the millions of middle class people in need of the Bush tax cuts. What does the addition of $700 billion to our national debt mean when we have the chance to do right by our wealthiest Americans? As oil baron Nelson Bunker Hunt once said, "A billion dollars isn't what it used to be." Americans must be more discerning about the low-down ways of the financial world and the speed with which celebrities will sell out to pornography and self-exploitation. But our time is so decadent that vulgarity - whether it comes from Wall Street or Hollywood - is wrongly thought a sufficient rejoinder to a corrupted culture. As our nation looks forward to the holidays and the new year, we can remain confident that as the cookie crumbles, stale bits in the form of lies and excuses will shower down from the right and left. That is why the Constitution is based as much in paranoia about the potential abuse of power as it is in anything else. The Founding Fathers were more right than they could have known. crouch.stanley@gmail.com Stanley Crouch's column appears in the Daily News every Monday. Stanley, who has written for the paper since 1995, has received many awards for his writing, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. His books have been widely praised and he was recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

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