Life of Pi

~ Mark

Life of Pi. Awesome special effects and photography, almost worth watching simply for the spectacle. (Reminds me of The Fall in that way). I’d like it sooooooooooooooooooooooooo much more overall without the (blunt, preachy) narrative wrapper. I DNFed on the book several years ago. Not sure how it compares.

John Carter

~ Mark

John Carter. Easily the most teal-and-orange movie I’ve ever seen. I feel like there’s a good movie hiding in here somewhere. Overhaul the terrible dialogue, trim judiciously. It has some decent-enough swashbuckling action (and one really effective battle), and thankfully doesn’t rely on dumb one-liners or dopey comic relief characters or modern-day allegory. It’s really straightforward, for all its excess in other ways (effects, cast, milieu) Andrew Stanton directed a dud here, but at least he’s still got Finding Nemo and Wall-E on his resume…

~ Mark

I don’t remember exactly when this dawned me — far too late, definitely — but I started enjoying sad/sappy movies a lot more when I let myself cry when the movie seemed to expect it of me instead thinking I was somehow beating the system or proving my superiority by resisting it.

Rob Horning.

Bach’s Music, Back Then and Right Now

~ Mark

Beethoven specialists are known as great musicians, great interpreters, whereas Bach specialists tend to be viewed vatically, as mediums. I found myself connecting Casals’s moaning and Gould’s humming—for a composer who is supposed to be pure, we sure enjoy a lot of extraneous noise!—the musical equivalent of speaking in tongues, channeling, a kind of cultish signal, a sonic signature of being on the right occult frequency to communicate with the master.

This essay reminded me of this excerpt from Steppenwolf that I’ve tumbled before

It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it now and then.

Bach’s Music, Back Then and Right Now

The Killing

~ Mark

The Killing. I’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey four or five times at least, and it’s fantastic, but watching The Shining a few years ago really killed my interest in Stanley Kubrick’s work. This one resurrects it. Awesome camera and soundtrack and a great set of characters. Multiple perspectives and time cuts. Also touches on some of the practical aspects of dealing with piles and piles of money.

Serpico

~ Mark

Serpico. I like how Pacino embodies the role here, and how you can pick up on the passage of time from the way his look and behavior changes. Also, 1970s hospitals are TERRIFYING.

~ Mark

Supply of Per Capita Football Talent.

This chart comes from a paper presented by Theodore Goudge, an associate professor in the department of geography at Northwest Missouri State University, at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers. It pretty clearly shows what Goudge referred to as the “pigskin cult” of the south.

The paper in question is “The Geography of College Football Player Origins & Success: Football Championship Subdivision (FCS)”, here’s an abstract. Featured in On Urban Meyer’s Ohio State, Wisconsin, and the Big Ten expanding to include Maryland and Rutgers – Grantland.

Why We Shouldn’t Treat Rap As Poetry | The Awl

~ Mark

Consider this proposition in reverse to see how absurd it is: For my graduate thesis, I am going to give Calvin Trillin a bunch of half-assed instrumentals and have DJ Drama help him put together a Gangta Grillz mixtape, and then we’ll evaluate him alongside Gucci Mane and Cam’ron, and other rappers who have made Gangsta Grillz mixtapes. That would be awesome, but it would not provide any more insight into the how and why Calvin Trillin does what he does. It would simply provide me the opportunity to take someone else’s work, put it in a different context, and call it something different.

Why We Shouldn’t Treat Rap As Poetry | The Awl

~ Mark

My Review of Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within Seminar.

What was very interesting is that the words Tony writes are 90% illegible. He is expressing ideas and scribbling with the marker but does not have time for accuracy. For example, on one slide that I remembered, I saw that the word FINANCE was not even slightly legible, SUCCESS looked like a jumbled signature, then there were lots of swirly lines and arrows. Without the context of Tony, it would have made no sense. But the ideas were conveyed better with the aid of these notes.