One of the commenters has some interesting photos from a North Korea trip earlier this summer.
What’s It Like to Be a Tourist in North Korea? – Foreign Policy
Overcoming Bias : Opinion Warning Signs
“Signs that your opinions function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth.” (via)
Thirty days as a Cuban: Pinching pesos and dropping pounds in Havana – By Patrick Symmes (Harper’s Magazine)
A journalist experiences a month of eating on the official rations and the black market. Probably my favorite from this month’s issue. [$]
Recent juxtapositions
A cluster of articles that came up in life and/or the RSS reader within the span of a couple days, without my looking for them. There are no coincidences:
- Caglia on Gaga. [sigh]
- A friend was semi-outraged by the NPR review of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”. “Singing in a clear, strong voice about how exhilarating it is be clear and strong about what you want.”
- American Electra: Feminism’s ritual matricide – Harper’s Magazine. [$] The generational divide in the feminist movement(s).
- Critic’s Notebook: Lady Gaga, sexuality and 21st century pop. “Pop is where sex lives most openly in our culture, and that it’s not just a matter of surfaces, […] but of the depth and breadth of desire, frustration, satisfaction.”
(via)
http://videos.nymag.com/embed/player/?content=KWN4D022280LSM25&widget_type_cid=svp&title_height=24
Acting School With Will Arnett: His Video Tips for Playing an Arrogant Idiot. The Mickey Rourke look-away is brilliant.
(Source: http://videos.nymag.com/)
Race and ethnicity: Atlanta by Eric Fischer.
I was astounded by Bill Rankin’s map of Chicago’s racial and ethnic divides and wanted to see what other cities looked like mapped the same way. To match his map, Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people. Data from Census 2000.
At The End Of The Grosse Freiheit: The Beatles In Hamburg – The Quietus. Photo by Astrid Kirchherr, I believe, girlfriend of Stuart Sutcliffe.
When I Grow Up: Kids’ Dream Jobs – Forbes.com
The kids we surveyed show very little understanding about how much money different jobs actually pay. Younger children tend to grossly underestimate–on average, the 5-year-olds figure police officers make $29 annually, lawyers make $59, and dancers pull in a comparatively huge $165 a year.
Sword-and-sandal – Wikipedia
Basically, Sword-and-sandal : Hollywood epic film :: Spaghetti Western : Hollywood Western. And this is fascinating: “A number of English-dubbed Italian films that featured the Hercules name in their title were never intended to be Hercules movies by their Italian creators. [List of 8 examples]” Italian imitations of Hollywood that were later twisted and repackaged by the American movie industry. I love it.
Sergio Leone: Unrealized Projects – Wikipedia
Working ideas included a “Don Quixote” film starring Clint Eastwood with Eli Wallach as Sancho Panza; a Siege of Leningrad epic with Robert De Niro; and a remake of “Gone With the Wind”. Damn.
Table for One
Photos of people eating solo. Interesting that when you post things without explanation, the reactions can be unpredictable.
Rear Window
Rear Window. Good Lord. This is a near-perfect movie. Better than any other Hitchcock I’ve watched, by far. This is in must-see territory.
At last R gets down again to his score, though he still has no pen which he likes.
Cosima Wagner. I have no idea who is behind the tweeted diaries of Richard Wagner’s second wife, but it’s one of my favorites. It’s a great inside view of a married couple, 19th-century upper-crust German social life, creative struggle, random dreams, etc. Here are a few other favorite excerpts.
All Paris Review Interviews Now Online (!!!)
This is fantastic:
To mark the debut of Lorin Stein’s first issue of The Paris Review, the publication has put its entire interview archives online….Moreover, they’ve replaced the old PDF format with normal HTML pages, meaning that they can be Instapapered or Apple-Fed for those in a rush to find the secrets of good writing (e.g. find all: “ideas,” “where do you get them”).
Vonnegut, Larkin, Burroughs, Williams, Amis, Baldwin, Barthelme, Maxwell, Allen, Calvino, Wilder, Karr, Ryan, Tate, Crumb…
Oh, my stars and garters. Where to begin?
Marginal Revolution: Does the well-off law professor have cause to complain?
Tyler Cowen: “Doesn’t everyone who might suffer a loss have a potential claim to complain? At what percentile of wealth does your claim to complain go away or diminish?” And also: “Beware of moral arguments which do not address ‘At which margin?’”
Marginal Revolution: Does the well-off law professor have cause to complain?
Suddenly, Last Summer
Suddenly, Last Summer. Good movie. Its roots are in the Tennessee Williams play, so it’s very, very, very mono- and dialogue-heavy. You could probably just listen to this one and get a lot out of it (and so maybe not the best use of the medium?). The cast is why you watch it, though. Katharine Hepburn owns the first half-hour. Elizabeth Taylor owns the last. Montgomery Clift is the stable (and somehow not boring) guy in the middle who gently keeps the story moving forward.
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold – Esquire
“Ava didn’t want Frank’s men hanging around all the time,” another friend said, “and this got him mad. With Nancy he used to be able to bring the whole band home with him, and Nancy, the good Italian wife, would never complain – she’d just make everybody a plate of spaghetti.”
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? – Magazine – The Atlantic
Good article. One of the best ever, they say.
[An opinion poll on diamond purchases] noted, for example, “A woman can easily feel that diamonds are ‘vulgar’ and still be highly enthusiastic about receiving diamond jewelry.” The element of surprise, even if it is feigned, plays the same role of accommodating dissonance in accepting a diamond gift as it does in prime sexual seductions: it permits the woman to pretend that she has not actively participated in the decision. She thus retains both her innocence—and the diamond.
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? – Magazine – The Atlantic
There’s always something more interesting going on than whether I like something or not.
À bout de souffle (Breathless)
À bout de souffle (Breathless). This was Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature-length film and one of the first of the French New Wave. At least it’s a trim 90 minutes. I didn’t find it all that interesting but some viewers think otherwise.
Mark Larson 