MISCELLANEOUS
Red clay time.
It’s been featured on TV and in art books. That painting of a black sailor standing before a clipper ship, circa 1776. But now a small problem...
British men are healthier than American men. Why?
Despite being richer, people are not happier than in earlier times. Only government can solve the problem, with a more caring attitude. And more therapists...
The most exciting baseball pitcher to arrive in the Big Leagues in years.
A 'Da Vinci Code' That Takes Longer to Watch Than Read By A. O. SCOTT, NY Times
CANNES, France, May 17 —
It seems you can't open a movie these days without provoking some kind of culture war skirmish, at least in the conflict-hungry media. Recent history — "The Passion of the Christ," "The Chronicles of Narnia" — suggests that such controversy, especially if religion is involved, can be very good business. "The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence, arrives trailing more than its share of theological and historical disputation.
The arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not been going on for millennia — it only feels that way — but part of Columbia Pictures' ingenious marketing strategy has been to encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone to see the picture until the very last minute. Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus and Mary Magdalene's prenuptial agreement to the secret recipes of Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised: Is Christianity a conspiracy? Is "The Da Vinci Code" a dangerous, anti-Christian hoax? What's up with Tom Hanks's hair?
Luckily I lack the learning to address the first two questions. As for the third, well, it's long, and so is the movie. "The Da Vinci Code," which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take longer to watch than to read. (Curiously enough Mr. Howard accomplished a similar feat with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.)
To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only on the page.
To be fair, though, Mr. Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive murderers," Audrey Tautou hisses to Paul Bettany (who play a less than enormous, short-haired albino). "He burns them!"
Theology aside, this remark can serve as a reminder that "The Da Vinci Code" is above all a murder mystery. And as such, once it gets going, Mr. Howard's movie has its pleasures. He and Mr. Goldsman have deftly rearranged some elements of the plot (I'm going to be careful here not to spoil anything), unkinking a few over-elaborate twists and introducing others that keep the action moving along.
Hans Zimmer's appropriately overwrought score, pop-romantic with some liturgical decoration, glides us through scenes that might otherwise be talky and inert. The movie does, however, take a while to accelerate, popping the clutch and leaving rubber on the road as it tries to establish who is who, what they're doing and why.
Briefly stated: An old man (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is killed after hours in the Louvre, shot in the stomach, almost inconceivably, by a hooded assailant. Meanwhile Robert Langdon (Mr. Hanks), a professor of religious symbology at Harvard, is delivering a lecture and signing books for fans. He is summoned to the crime scene by Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a French policemen who seems very grouchy, perhaps because his department has cut back on its shaving cream budget.
Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer and also — Bezu Fache! — the murder victim's granddaughter. Grandpa, it seems, knew some very important secrets, which if they were ever revealed might shake the foundations of Western Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, one of whose bishops, the portly Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) is at this very moment flying on an airplane. Meanwhile the albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.
A chase, as Bezu's American colleagues might put it, ensues. It skids through the nighttime streets of Paris and eventually to London the next morning, with side trips to a Roman castle and a chateau in the French countryside. Along the way the film pauses to admire various knickknacks and art works, and to flash back, in desaturated color, to traumatic events in the childhoods of various characters (Langdon falls down a well; Sophie's parents are killed in a car accident; Silas stabs his abusive father).
There are also glances further back into history, to Constantine's conversion, to the suppression of the Knights Templar and to that time in London when people walked around wearing powdered wigs.
Through it all Mr. Hanks and Ms. Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Mr. Hanks twists his mouth in what appears to be an expression of professorial skepticism and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality. Ms. Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of worried fatigue.
In spite of some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.
But thank the deity of your choice for Ian McKellen, who shows up just in time to give "The Da Vinci Code" a jolt of mischievous life. He plays a wealthy and eccentric British scholar named Leigh Teabing. (I will give Mr. Brown this much: he's good at names. If I ever have twins or French poodles, I'm calling them Bezu and Teabing for sure.)
Hobbling around on two canes, growling at his manservant, Remy (Jean-Yves Berteloot), Teabing is twinkly and avuncular one moment, barking mad the next. Sir Ian, rattling on about Italian paintings and medieval statues, seems to be having the time of his life, and his high spirits serve as something of a rebuke to the filmmakers, who should be having and providing a lot more fun.
Teabing, who strolls out of English detective fiction by way of a Tintin comic, is a marvelously absurd creature, and Sir Ian, in the best tradition of British actors slumming and hamming through American movies, gives a performance in which high conviction is indistinguishable from high camp. A little more of this — a more acute sense of its own ridiculousness — would have given "The Da Vinci Code" some of the lightness of an old-fashioned, jet-setting Euro-thriller.
But of course movies of that ilk rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Jesus or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema such matters are best left to Monty Python. In any case Mr. Howard and Mr. Goldsman handle the supposedly provocative material in Mr. Brown's book with kid gloves, settling on an utterly safe set of conclusions about faith and its history, presented with the usual dull sententiousness. So I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.
Speaking of movies, I wonder if Florida was placed in this picture strategically:
Check this out to see architecture that only exists in British Columbia. Hit refresh.
And if It's a Boy, Will It Be Lleh?
Chances are you don't have any friends named Nevaeh. Chances are today's toddlers will. In 1999, there were only eight newborn American girls named Nevaeh. Last year, it was the 70th-most-popular name for baby girls, ahead of Sara, Vanessa and Amanda.
The spectacular rise of Nevaeh (commonly pronounced nah-VAY-uh) has little precedent, name experts say. They watched it break into the top 1,000 of girls' names in 2001 at No. 266, the third-highest debut ever. Four years later it cracked the top 100 with 4,457 newborn Nevaehs, having made the fastest climb among all names in more than a century, the entire period for which the Social Security Administration has such records.
Nevaeh is not in the Bible or any religious text. It is not from a foreign language. It is not the name of a celebrity, real or fictional. Nevaeh is Heaven spelled backward. The name has hit a cultural nerve with its religious overtones, creative twist and fashionable final "ah" sound. It has risen most quickly among blacks but is also popular with evangelical Christians, who have helped propel other religious names like Grace (ranked 14th) up the charts, experts say. By contrast, the name Heaven is ranked 245th.
"Of the last couple of generations, Nevaeh is certainly the most remarkable phenomenon in baby names," said Cleveland Kent Evans, president of the American Name Society and a professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska.
The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh. "Heaven spelled backwards," he said. Among the many inspired by Mr. Sandoval's appearance was Jade San Luis, who named his first daughter Nevaeh two years later. "It felt original," said Mr. San Luis, 26, of Cerritos, Calif. "Now, not anymore." Today Mr. Sandoval is introduced to and photographed with baby Nevaehs all the time. His own Nevaeh, now 6, skateboards and, when introduced, pipes up that her name is Heaven spelled backward. Does she understand the meaning of heaven? Mr. Sandoval replied, "She knows that is where her grandmother is."
So true:
from fittedsweats.blogspot.com
You and Me Against The World
I often wonder how my life would be different if I weren't exposed to the music of Helen Reddy and Anne "Little Snowbird" Murray at such a young age. I think the pangs of massive depression I experience on occasion would all but disappear. I got a Helen Reddy Greatest Hits CD in the mail recently -- it is released today, as it has been about every 3-5 years for the last 30.
Pretty much every song depicts some kind of struggle that as a 5 year-old, I didn't know quite what to do with. All I know is it made me sad. And that it was on the stereos of any of my mom's friends who were divorced and whom occasionally came over and chainsmoked and drank coffee at our kitchen table for 1 to 16 hours at a time. Maybe people who were more savvy, say, anyone over about 15, knew what women's lib was, and could sort of contextualize Reddy's lyrics in the "cultural mosaic" of the 1970s. (I would never use this term, by the way) All I knew about women's lib in the 1970s was the show Maude. And that everyone on it was pissed off. The only other things I really remember about the 70s is that sharks were really popular. And that everything in the 1970s except the sky was burnt orange. Pants, sofas, cars, coffee cups. Unless of course it was plaid. And not a happy plaid. It was a plaid resembling what might be at the bottom of Lindsay Lohan's toilet after a night of heavy boozing. A-frame houses were really popular. So was beer. So was divorce, which my parents never did, but anytime the songs below came on, I pretty much felt it was coming. Here's a brief look at the Reddy repetoire:
"I am Woman" -- all I knew about this song was that women--and the only one I knew at the time was my mom--were being fucked with, and had to rise up "in numbers too big to ignore." Thanks a lot, world.
"You and Me Against the World" -- Speaking of the world, me and mom have no fucking allies anywhere. We're just a couple of fire hydrants that the world, and, most likely the entire universe likes to relieve themselves upon.
"Leave Me Alone" -- some guy from Tennessee raped a woman, now she is nuts.
"Ain't no Way to Treat a Lady" --detecting a theme yet? Again, a woman is being treated poorly. A relationship is ending.
Then the Anne Murray songs came on. Try listening to "You Needed Me" once without wanting to drink a whole bottle of bar rail brandy and doing a swandive off an overpass into rush hour traffic. Then hoping that the EMTs could save you so that you could pour a bottle of arsenic into each of your eyeballs and then wrestle a a grizzly bear with rabies. Helen Reddy is fucking DEVO compared to Anne Murray.
And it is not just women singers. Try Gordon Lightfoot, or Paul Williams (he was the 4'6" guy on Hollywood Squares and Muppet shows) or Leo Sayer. Leo Sayer is fucking satan. Who were the A&R people at record labels in the 1970s? And what type of meds were they on? The worst is Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. (even though "too good to be true" is alright) Frankie Valli is the kid who gets beaten every day in gym class. And it is not because he is different or cool. It is because he is annoying as shit. And people who bitch about music and lyrics today should really go and spend a little time with these classics. I would sooner fill my kid's sippy cup with crunk juice than play one second of Anne Murray to him. It is pornography in my household. He will not know it exists. Then, if he wants to rebel in later life, his wild and dangerous act will be to purchase a split-level ranch home and get some burnt orange berber carpetting and blast Helen Reddy or Anne Murray. I will of course begin smoking crack. Which I intend to do, either way, at age 65.
END
Red clay time.
It’s been featured on TV and in art books. That painting of a black sailor standing before a clipper ship, circa 1776. But now a small problem...
British men are healthier than American men. Why?
Despite being richer, people are not happier than in earlier times. Only government can solve the problem, with a more caring attitude. And more therapists...
The most exciting baseball pitcher to arrive in the Big Leagues in years.
A 'Da Vinci Code' That Takes Longer to Watch Than Read By A. O. SCOTT, NY Times
CANNES, France, May 17 —
It seems you can't open a movie these days without provoking some kind of culture war skirmish, at least in the conflict-hungry media. Recent history — "The Passion of the Christ," "The Chronicles of Narnia" — suggests that such controversy, especially if religion is involved, can be very good business. "The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence, arrives trailing more than its share of theological and historical disputation.
The arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not been going on for millennia — it only feels that way — but part of Columbia Pictures' ingenious marketing strategy has been to encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone to see the picture until the very last minute. Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus and Mary Magdalene's prenuptial agreement to the secret recipes of Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised: Is Christianity a conspiracy? Is "The Da Vinci Code" a dangerous, anti-Christian hoax? What's up with Tom Hanks's hair?
Luckily I lack the learning to address the first two questions. As for the third, well, it's long, and so is the movie. "The Da Vinci Code," which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take longer to watch than to read. (Curiously enough Mr. Howard accomplished a similar feat with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.)
To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only on the page.
To be fair, though, Mr. Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive murderers," Audrey Tautou hisses to Paul Bettany (who play a less than enormous, short-haired albino). "He burns them!"
Theology aside, this remark can serve as a reminder that "The Da Vinci Code" is above all a murder mystery. And as such, once it gets going, Mr. Howard's movie has its pleasures. He and Mr. Goldsman have deftly rearranged some elements of the plot (I'm going to be careful here not to spoil anything), unkinking a few over-elaborate twists and introducing others that keep the action moving along.
Hans Zimmer's appropriately overwrought score, pop-romantic with some liturgical decoration, glides us through scenes that might otherwise be talky and inert. The movie does, however, take a while to accelerate, popping the clutch and leaving rubber on the road as it tries to establish who is who, what they're doing and why.
Briefly stated: An old man (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is killed after hours in the Louvre, shot in the stomach, almost inconceivably, by a hooded assailant. Meanwhile Robert Langdon (Mr. Hanks), a professor of religious symbology at Harvard, is delivering a lecture and signing books for fans. He is summoned to the crime scene by Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a French policemen who seems very grouchy, perhaps because his department has cut back on its shaving cream budget.
Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer and also — Bezu Fache! — the murder victim's granddaughter. Grandpa, it seems, knew some very important secrets, which if they were ever revealed might shake the foundations of Western Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, one of whose bishops, the portly Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) is at this very moment flying on an airplane. Meanwhile the albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.
A chase, as Bezu's American colleagues might put it, ensues. It skids through the nighttime streets of Paris and eventually to London the next morning, with side trips to a Roman castle and a chateau in the French countryside. Along the way the film pauses to admire various knickknacks and art works, and to flash back, in desaturated color, to traumatic events in the childhoods of various characters (Langdon falls down a well; Sophie's parents are killed in a car accident; Silas stabs his abusive father).
There are also glances further back into history, to Constantine's conversion, to the suppression of the Knights Templar and to that time in London when people walked around wearing powdered wigs.
Through it all Mr. Hanks and Ms. Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Mr. Hanks twists his mouth in what appears to be an expression of professorial skepticism and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality. Ms. Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of worried fatigue.
In spite of some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.
But thank the deity of your choice for Ian McKellen, who shows up just in time to give "The Da Vinci Code" a jolt of mischievous life. He plays a wealthy and eccentric British scholar named Leigh Teabing. (I will give Mr. Brown this much: he's good at names. If I ever have twins or French poodles, I'm calling them Bezu and Teabing for sure.)
Hobbling around on two canes, growling at his manservant, Remy (Jean-Yves Berteloot), Teabing is twinkly and avuncular one moment, barking mad the next. Sir Ian, rattling on about Italian paintings and medieval statues, seems to be having the time of his life, and his high spirits serve as something of a rebuke to the filmmakers, who should be having and providing a lot more fun.
Teabing, who strolls out of English detective fiction by way of a Tintin comic, is a marvelously absurd creature, and Sir Ian, in the best tradition of British actors slumming and hamming through American movies, gives a performance in which high conviction is indistinguishable from high camp. A little more of this — a more acute sense of its own ridiculousness — would have given "The Da Vinci Code" some of the lightness of an old-fashioned, jet-setting Euro-thriller.
But of course movies of that ilk rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Jesus or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema such matters are best left to Monty Python. In any case Mr. Howard and Mr. Goldsman handle the supposedly provocative material in Mr. Brown's book with kid gloves, settling on an utterly safe set of conclusions about faith and its history, presented with the usual dull sententiousness. So I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.
Speaking of movies, I wonder if Florida was placed in this picture strategically:
Check this out to see architecture that only exists in British Columbia. Hit refresh.
And if It's a Boy, Will It Be Lleh?
Chances are you don't have any friends named Nevaeh. Chances are today's toddlers will. In 1999, there were only eight newborn American girls named Nevaeh. Last year, it was the 70th-most-popular name for baby girls, ahead of Sara, Vanessa and Amanda.
The spectacular rise of Nevaeh (commonly pronounced nah-VAY-uh) has little precedent, name experts say. They watched it break into the top 1,000 of girls' names in 2001 at No. 266, the third-highest debut ever. Four years later it cracked the top 100 with 4,457 newborn Nevaehs, having made the fastest climb among all names in more than a century, the entire period for which the Social Security Administration has such records.
Nevaeh is not in the Bible or any religious text. It is not from a foreign language. It is not the name of a celebrity, real or fictional. Nevaeh is Heaven spelled backward. The name has hit a cultural nerve with its religious overtones, creative twist and fashionable final "ah" sound. It has risen most quickly among blacks but is also popular with evangelical Christians, who have helped propel other religious names like Grace (ranked 14th) up the charts, experts say. By contrast, the name Heaven is ranked 245th.
"Of the last couple of generations, Nevaeh is certainly the most remarkable phenomenon in baby names," said Cleveland Kent Evans, president of the American Name Society and a professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska.
The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh. "Heaven spelled backwards," he said. Among the many inspired by Mr. Sandoval's appearance was Jade San Luis, who named his first daughter Nevaeh two years later. "It felt original," said Mr. San Luis, 26, of Cerritos, Calif. "Now, not anymore." Today Mr. Sandoval is introduced to and photographed with baby Nevaehs all the time. His own Nevaeh, now 6, skateboards and, when introduced, pipes up that her name is Heaven spelled backward. Does she understand the meaning of heaven? Mr. Sandoval replied, "She knows that is where her grandmother is."
So true:
from fittedsweats.blogspot.com
You and Me Against The World
I often wonder how my life would be different if I weren't exposed to the music of Helen Reddy and Anne "Little Snowbird" Murray at such a young age. I think the pangs of massive depression I experience on occasion would all but disappear. I got a Helen Reddy Greatest Hits CD in the mail recently -- it is released today, as it has been about every 3-5 years for the last 30.
Pretty much every song depicts some kind of struggle that as a 5 year-old, I didn't know quite what to do with. All I know is it made me sad. And that it was on the stereos of any of my mom's friends who were divorced and whom occasionally came over and chainsmoked and drank coffee at our kitchen table for 1 to 16 hours at a time. Maybe people who were more savvy, say, anyone over about 15, knew what women's lib was, and could sort of contextualize Reddy's lyrics in the "cultural mosaic" of the 1970s. (I would never use this term, by the way) All I knew about women's lib in the 1970s was the show Maude. And that everyone on it was pissed off. The only other things I really remember about the 70s is that sharks were really popular. And that everything in the 1970s except the sky was burnt orange. Pants, sofas, cars, coffee cups. Unless of course it was plaid. And not a happy plaid. It was a plaid resembling what might be at the bottom of Lindsay Lohan's toilet after a night of heavy boozing. A-frame houses were really popular. So was beer. So was divorce, which my parents never did, but anytime the songs below came on, I pretty much felt it was coming. Here's a brief look at the Reddy repetoire:
"I am Woman" -- all I knew about this song was that women--and the only one I knew at the time was my mom--were being fucked with, and had to rise up "in numbers too big to ignore." Thanks a lot, world.
"You and Me Against the World" -- Speaking of the world, me and mom have no fucking allies anywhere. We're just a couple of fire hydrants that the world, and, most likely the entire universe likes to relieve themselves upon.
"Leave Me Alone" -- some guy from Tennessee raped a woman, now she is nuts.
"Ain't no Way to Treat a Lady" --detecting a theme yet? Again, a woman is being treated poorly. A relationship is ending.
Then the Anne Murray songs came on. Try listening to "You Needed Me" once without wanting to drink a whole bottle of bar rail brandy and doing a swandive off an overpass into rush hour traffic. Then hoping that the EMTs could save you so that you could pour a bottle of arsenic into each of your eyeballs and then wrestle a a grizzly bear with rabies. Helen Reddy is fucking DEVO compared to Anne Murray.
And it is not just women singers. Try Gordon Lightfoot, or Paul Williams (he was the 4'6" guy on Hollywood Squares and Muppet shows) or Leo Sayer. Leo Sayer is fucking satan. Who were the A&R people at record labels in the 1970s? And what type of meds were they on? The worst is Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. (even though "too good to be true" is alright) Frankie Valli is the kid who gets beaten every day in gym class. And it is not because he is different or cool. It is because he is annoying as shit. And people who bitch about music and lyrics today should really go and spend a little time with these classics. I would sooner fill my kid's sippy cup with crunk juice than play one second of Anne Murray to him. It is pornography in my household. He will not know it exists. Then, if he wants to rebel in later life, his wild and dangerous act will be to purchase a split-level ranch home and get some burnt orange berber carpetting and blast Helen Reddy or Anne Murray. I will of course begin smoking crack. Which I intend to do, either way, at age 65.
END
posted by D @ 7:08 AM
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