“UH West Oʻahu professor publishes book on film noir - the university of hawai'i system” plus 3 more

UH West Oʻahu professor publishes book on film noir - the university of hawai'i system
Insane behavior in relationships - Examiner
Double Take Director Johan Grimonprez on Hitchcock, the ... - Village Voice
Poole: casualty of war - Ellwood City Ledger

UH West Oʻahu professor publishes book on film noir - the university of hawai'i system

Posted: 24 May 2010 04:15 PM PDT

University of Hawaiʻi-West Oʻahu

Posted: May. 24, 2010

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Insane behavior in relationships - Examiner

Posted: 25 May 2010 06:23 PM PDT

Comment

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" ~ Albert Einstein

This quote can be applied to many facets of life. However, it seems to be mainly pertinent in relationships. Candor is essential but often lost whereas over analysis is present among this rollercoaster we like to refer to as "dating".

Behaviorist B.F. Skinner developed the first three term contingency as a unit of analysis. Known as the ABC model, it is used to determine precipitating events to behavior or the antecedents (A), Consequences after the behavior (C), and or course the behavior itself (B). When it comes to dating, I have three words of advice; keep it simple! Women need to stop looking at the antecedent events and start looking at the behavior itself if eliciting a different response is desired for the future.

We as women like to investigate. Why did he do this to me? Is he scarred from childhood? Was he hurt in a past relationship? The answers to these questions become explanatory fictions in which the description of the behavior often becomes the explanation (i.e. He acts this way because he had a hard life). Big mistake! Perhaps as women we have that innate sense to nurture and take care of others. Well what about ourselves? If a person handed you a baseball bat and told you to repeatedly hit yourself in the head with it would you do it? I hope not! In situations where men continuously hurt women they may have many reasons as to why, but in all actuality, those reasons are irrelevant. The main rationale a man treats a woman that way is evident but often overlooked; BECAUSE THEY CAN! You'll often hear a woman say "I can't believe he did this to me again" when she should really be saying "I can't believe I did this to me again".

Allowing oneself to be hurt is very different from being blindsided. So ladies, for the future my suggestion to you is not to waste time investigating the A. Always be aware of the B and ultimately you will have a different C. Of course this can be applied to men as well. Happy dating!

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Double Take Director Johan Grimonprez on Hitchcock, the ... - Village Voice

Posted: 25 May 2010 04:42 PM PDT

Double Take Director Johan Grimonprez on Hitchcock, the Cold War, and Missing 9/11

By Graham Fuller

published: May 25, 2010

"If you meet your double, you must kill him, or he will kill you" is the eerie watchword of Johan Grimonprez's Double Take, which opens at Film Forum next week and is the third film directed by the Belgian gallery artist/academic following dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1998), his prescient history of skyjacking, and Looking for Alfred (2004), a short about Hitchcock look-alikes. A partly dramatized essay-doc, ultimately uncategorizable, the new film is nothing if not Hitchcockian in its droll but dread-laden analysis of how our culture of constant catastrophe originated in the convergence of the Cold War and television's newfound hegemony in the early '60s. The star—and the MacGuffin—of the film's romp through American-Soviet sparring is the eponymous prankster-emcee of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62) whose specialty, suspense, became the Cold War's sine qua non.

Double Take intertwines Hitchcock's movie cameos and television appearances with footage of Nixon, Khrushchev, Kennedy, the space race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Sputnik, Telstar, and, finally, Rumsfeld riddling "knowns" and "unknowns." It also folds in a conversation with the late Hitchcock impersonator Ron Burrage, and a mini-thriller, adapted by novelist Tom McCarthy from a Jorge Luis Borges story, that's cut around the historical collage. In the thriller, Hitchcock breaks from directing The Birds in 1962 to confront his deadly 1980 doppelgänger. One of them drinks from a poisoned cup of coffee (as did Ingrid Bergman's character in Hitchcock's Notorious).

The symbiosis between the USSR and America in the film echoes that of the two Hitchcocks. "They become doubles for each other," said Grimonprez, 47, in Manhattan last week. "One of the Hitchcocks says, 'I hate your face—it's such a parody of mine,' and the other one says, 'I hate your voice, because it's a mockery of mine.' That story of one Hitchcock trying to get rid of the other is played out metaphorically at the height of the missile crisis when Kennedy and Khrushchev are substitutes for each other."

Double Take's structuring absence is 9/11. Grimonprez strategically omits all news footage from that day—as he does the Zapruder footage from his coverage of the Kennedy assassination. "I initially had a shot of Kennedy descending into Dallas, and a long dissolve of that into one of the 9/11 planes," he said, "but I took out every direct reference. There's always an echo of today when we rewrite history, and that seeps through, but I wanted to work with the Hitchcock imagery and make a coherent film from that. We show a moment of Kennedy in the car, but then we cut to a shot of the birds coming into the house. What I like is that all the historical footage we use is recontextualized by The Birds, which is recontextualized by the politics—given that the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred when The Birds was about to be edited—and the rise of television at that moment, and by the anecdote that Kennedy invited Hitchcock to the White House and the letter was postmarked the day before Kennedy was shot.

If you take all these serendipities and put them into place, then you cannot but look at The Birds from that political angle. It has no ending, so it's always open-ended what the birds stand for."

When asked if he believes that images thus create reality, per French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, Grimonprez said, "It goes back and forth. WMDs were a fiction, but that became a horrible reality, and that horrible reality comes back through images that again propagate fictions. When you compare the Iraqi Riverbend blog [a now-defunct blog by an anonymous Iraqi woman who goes by the name "Riverbend"] with what's being shown on Fox, what's reality? There's so much manipulation, we don't know what is real anymore."

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Poole: casualty of war - Ellwood City Ledger

Posted: 24 May 2010 03:39 PM PDT

There might not be a better measure of this nation's changing attitude toward Vietnam veterans than the fictions attributed to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

Blumenthal is accused of spinning false tales of Vietnam combat service in a shameless effort to win votes. And, at least until Tuesday when the New York Times outed him as a liar, it worked.

In 1971, while Blumenthal was in the Marine Corps Reserve, the thought that a politician might earn public goodwill by promoting a Vietnam combat record would have been implausible, to put it mildly.

Blumenthal, a Democrat who had been the favorite to win the U.S. Senate seat held by the soon-to-be retired Christopher Dodd, didn't fight in Vietnam, but he's looking like a casualty of the war nonetheless.

I turned 10 the same month that the last helicopters lifted off from the U.S. Embassy in what was then Saigon, so I can't claim to have served in Vietnam any more than Blumenthal can.

But I do present myself as something of an expert on the subject. For more than a year in 2008 and 2009, I researched the war and interviewed veterans for a self-published biography on Vietnam War hero Leslie Sabo, an Ellwood City native.

Sabo was credited with saving the lives of at least a dozen, and possibly as many as 60, U.S. soldiers in an ambush 40 years ago last week. One of President Barack Obama's future orders of business is signing a Medal of Honor award for those acts.

Almost immediately after Sabo died on Mother's Day 1970, his comrades began a push to award him the Medal of Honor, this nation's highest award for combat valor. But the paperwork disappeared until 1999.

I devoted about one-third of my book to the question of how an American war hero could go completely unrecognized for what is now going into a fifth decade, and came up with a few answers.

But the greatest factor might be that 40 years ago, no one - either in the civilian community or the military establishment - was particularly interested in making sure the heroes of Vietnam received the respect and honor due to them.

Sabo's surviving comrades tell stories of insults - "baby killer" being perhaps the most common and egregious example - that they absorbed from their fellow Americans after returning home from combat.

That's not the kind of atmosphere in which a politician would publicize Vietnam service. National Public Radio reported Wednesday that accounts of Blumenthal's military record were accurate until around 2003, when the Connecticut Post reported that he had served in Vietnam.

Other articles called him a "Vietnam-era veteran," which would have been accurate, except that people might not know the distinction between a Vietnam veteran and a Vietnam-era veteran. The former would have been in Vietnam, while the latter might have served in the military, but not have been in the combat zone.

But the NPR report makes clear that by 2008 at the latest, Blumenthal himself was claiming to have served in Vietnam.

By then, Americans were more willing to give Vietnam veterans the respect they deserved.

After reading mistaken reports for years about his wartime activity, Blumenthal must have been sorely tempted to embellish that section of his personal history.

And the public's willingness to respect him for what it believed were stories of service in an unpopular war might amount, in a perverse sort of way, to a long-delayed "Welcome Home" that Vietnam veterans were denied so many years ago.

Eric Poole can be reached online at epoole@
ellwoodcityledger.com.

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Fiction

Selasa, 25 Mei 2010