Blowhard, Esq. writes:
Click on the image to enlarge.
“The Battle of the Milvian Bridge” by Giulio Romano. A key moment in Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, it can be said to mark the beginning of the end of the ancient world and start of the medieval order.
epiminondas writes:
Theodore Dalrymple explores the curse of modern television:
“In my opinion, televisual entertainment is by far the most important cause of boredom in the world, and since the attempt to relieve boredom is a much underestimated cause of social pathology of all kinds, television is ultimately responsible for the squalor in the midst of wealth that is so remarkable a feature of our modern existence.”
Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
I’ve never been a fan of M. Night Shyamalan’s brand of high-concept solemnity. Yet his latest, the sci-fi fantasy “After Earth,” is so measured — so delicate and quiet and grave — that I found myself rooting for it almost immediately. The plot centers on the family of Cypher Raige, played by Will Smith. He’s a warrior who, as his name suggests, has developed the ability to mask his emotions. He uses this trick to render himself invisible to future humanity’s greatest enemy, a nightmare species of bugaboo that can see only fear. His son Kitai, played by Smith’s son Jaden, is a young teen trying in vain to reach his impervious papa. When the pair are stranded on their ancestral world, now an overgrown wilderness crawling with beasties, it’s up to Kitai to save them — and in the process prove his worth.
The screenplay, by Shyamalan and Gary Whitta, is anything but surprising, but the movie treads so carefully that you may end up appreciating its straightforwardness — it has the clarity and inevitability of a fable. The look is fable-like, too. Veteran cinematographer Peter Suschitzky gives his images a somberness and tactility that is at times almost sensual; like the Ballard-Deschanel “Black Stallion,” it’s a movie you want to touch. There’s plenty here to explore: the design is an evocative combo of future-tech sleakness and organic irregularity. When Kitai leaves his injured father in the crashed ship, the contrast between the floating-touchscreen aesthetic of the cabin and the eerie, verdant growth of the forest gives the theme of transformation a neat visual corollary. (Fittingly, the environments are separated by a valve-like partition, which flaps and pulsates like a biological membrane.)
Smith fils isn’t much of an actor, and his few big emotional scenes are an embarrassment. Fortunately, Shyamalan rarely allows the movie to settle on him. He leans instead on the elder Smith, whose presence in the downed ship is a near constant. The strategy works: the star gives a marvelously controlled performance. Reining in his usually radiant charisma, Smith projects a seriousness that’s just barely breached by his paternal sympathies. These we absorb subconsciously, through the quaver in the deeper registers of his voice and the light at the bottom of his eyes. Smith is so good at playing the movie star game that it’s possible we’ve underrated him as an actor. Here, as in “I Am Legend” and “The Pursuit of Happyness,” he shows himself capable of sustaining a complex blend of emotions, almost without assistance.
For Smith, the film’s conceit may have real-world significance. Stranded inside the wreck, his Cypher is forced to coach his son through dangerous terrain, all the while monitoring the boy’s every move via remote cameras and a panoply of screens. If the story of “After Earth” involves a test of Kitai, the movie’s existence is inseparable from Jaden’s ongoing assessment as a media figure — and it’s hard to imagine that Smith isn’t hip to the possibility of this reading.
“After Earth” is not a great film. The direction and editing sometimes fail to live up to the potential of the action set-pieces. And certain suspense gimmicks — a network of hot spots that Kitai must locate before nightfall, a series of oxygen boosters that he must inhale in order to breathe — have not been satisfyingly worked into the narrative. But these seem like minor quibbles when balanced against the movie’s charms. As corporate-minded fantasy has colonized the multiplex, jumbled franticness and gross gigantism have become the norm in blockbuster filmmaking. The problem is so extreme that even a traditionally staid and character-focused franchise like “Star Trek” has been rejiggered to out-whoosh, out-blam, and out-stupid the competition. “After Earth,” a simple little film by contemporary standards, offers respite to fans of the genre. It’s shelter from the storm.
Related
epiminondas writes:
Photomicrography is an interesting, and growing, field. With the advent of high quality digital photography, we’re able to see small things with never-before-seen clarity and beauty. Click on the main photo, then up top go the “next” button to scan the others. Fascinating stuff here. And a lot of it…over a hundred pics. So take your time.
Paleo Retiree writes:
Fun to see that friend-of-this-blog and expert organizer Jill Duffy has pulled a lot of her tips together into an ebook. It’s also a nice chance for me to share to my own masterly method:
Jill, who’s reliably smart and helpful, writes about about software and organizing for PC Magazine. Here’s her personal blog.
Paleo Retiree writes:
In Iraq
On June 18, 2013 The Question Lady and I learned that a friend of ours had died in Los Angeles in a very peculiar car crash. His name was Michael Hastings, and he’d been a celebrated war correspondent and investigative journalist.
At the time of his death Mike was just 33 years old. We were friendly with Mike when he was in his early 20s and had just arrived in the New York City media world. I was working for Newsweek magazine at the time, and one day Mike — a new intern — showed up in my office and introduced himself. We had someone in common, Mike’s older brother Jonathan Hastings, whom The Question Lady and I knew via the professor and critic Steve Vineberg. (Jon had been one of Steve’s favorite students.)
I liked Mike immediately. He was wiry, dark-haired, bright and intense, he was full of nutty gusto, and he had an explosive and dirty sense of humor. At the magazine he was doing low-level stuff — unsigned research, reporting and writing — and he was putting in long hours in a quest to out-excel his fellow interns.
For a couple of years Mike and I had a fun friendship. He stopped by my office regularly to blow off steam, to talk about girls and writing projects, and to ask for tips about how the innards of the magazine — its personalities and politics — worked. (Mike was frighteningly — if also amusingly — ambitious.) He’d monologue with great urgency, and often hilarious ruefulness, about the books he wanted — no, needed — to write, and we’d gossip and compare notes about movies. Brazen, hard-working and smart, Mike reminded me a bit of the British journalist Toby Young (who I also like a lot), and he became friendly with The Question Lady too.
Mike’s career soon took off. After Newsweek hired him fulltime, he did more and more ambitious work. Eventually, at his request, he was sent to Iraq; he sent back a lot of first-class frontline reporting from that war-torn country. For Rolling Stone, Mike published a profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, NATO commander in Afghanistan, that resulted in McChrystal being forced to resign. He won a George Polk Award for that story.
Mike was so daring that within a few years he’d acquired near legendary status among journalists and journalism fans. And in 2008, Mike finally did publish his first book: “I Lost My Love in Baghdad,” about his girlfriend Andi Parhamovich, who was ambushed and killed while working in Iraq for the National Democratic Institute. In 2012 he followed that book with another one, “The Operators,” a behind-the-scenes look at the U.S.’s war in Afghanistan.
By then, The Question Lady and I had mostly lost touch with Mike. For all his brains, talent and irreverence, and despite his roguish charm and spirit, Mike was sometimes reckless in ways that could really startle us. Besides, he was on his way up in a world we had nothing to do with. And meanwhile, The Question Lady and I were growing closer to Mike’s brother Jon, a brilliant pop-culture critic and movie buff.
In the weeks that followed the news of Mike’s death, The Question Lady and I followed developments in the story and raked over our old friendship with Mike. How strange that his Mercedes seemed to have exploded on impact. Rumors were thick: Had Mike been murdered? Were drones and bombs involved? Mike had been doing some dicey reporting on the CIA after all. And how had Mike wound up in L.A. anyway? We were bugged as well by the way a lot of the news reports — and even the memoirs that colleagues of Mike’s published — missed out on dimensions of Mike Hastings as we’d known him.
Then one day we looked at each other and asked, more or less at the same moment, “Why not ask Jon if he’d be willing to do a q&a about his brother for the blog?” Why not indeed? It’d be a great opportunity for us — and for the world generally — to learn more about Mike, as well as a chance to add to the general discussion about Mike and his work.
We contacted Jon and were thrilled that Jon — who’s a, shall we say, close friend of this blog — was willing to talk, and to talk frankly, for the record. I think you’ll find the results very interesting and informative. (The words “unforgettable character sketch” come to mind.)
Here’s the Uncouth Reflections interview with Michael Hastings’ older brother, Jonathan Hastings.
Blowhard, Esq. writes:
I semi-enjoyed this newish Teaching Company series on the history of the medieval Crusades. I hesitate to fully endorse it because, while I think Daileader’s 3-part, 72-episode series on the Middle Ages (all of which are on sale now) is one of the best things I’ve ever heard, this series had too much detail for me.
The first 17 lectures are a narrative history of the eight major Crusades plus digressions into some of the minor Crusades. It’s interesting stuff, but there are so many characters, institutions, actors, and shifting alliances that I found it a wee bit hard to keep up. I quickly tuned out much of the facts and tried to focus on the broad outlines.
The last 7 lectures, though, eschew the who-what-where sequence of events and instead look at the social impact of the Crusades, while the last 2 lectures assess their long-term impact on history. Ultra-brief distillation: the Crusades, which lasted from 1098 to 1291, began when the pope issued a call for Catholic Europeans to come to the aid of Byzantine Christians who were being overrun by Muslim Turks in the East. Christian Europe also decided it was time to take back Jerusalem. Over the decades and centuries, the goals and reasons for the Crusades changed. Eventually, there would be Crusades against the Byzantines themselves, Crusades against heretics in Europe, and even Crusades against European Christians who had fallen out of favor with the pope.
Why were the Crusades so popular and long-lived? Many factors of course, but a major reason was that all Crusaders were entitled to a plenary indulgence. The plenary indulgence entitled the bearer to the remission of all punishment in purgatory for their sins. Who wants to be stuck in a celestial way station for tens of thousands of years waiting for their souls to be purified? The plenary indulgence erased all your penance, thereby ensuring that upon your death you’d go right to God’s side.
An example of an indulgence.
One of the ways the Crusades changed history was by leading to the Protestant Reformation. This is one of the great ironies of Western history: a campaign intended to unify Christianity by healing the rift between Western Catholics and Eastern Byzantines actually resulted in Christendom being further fractured.
You’ll recall that one of Martin Luther’s major beefs with the Catholic Church was over the issue of indulgences. At the beginning of the Crusades, plenary indulgences were only available to Crusaders, but over the centuries, “indulgence inflation” occurred until it got to the point that the Church was basically selling tickets to heaven. Some of this indulgence inflation was humanely motivated. For example, if Crusading knights were leaving their wives and children for years at a time, why shouldn’t the wife be given an indulgence too for all the sacrifices she had to endure? Conversely, some of indulgence inflation was basically a cash grab. Remember Chaucer’s scathing portrait of the Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales?
The sale of indulgences shown in A Question to a Mintmaker, woodcut by Jörg Breu the Elder of Augsburg, circa 1530.
In discussing indulgence inflation, Daileader notes:
Too much money came from indulgences and too many livelihoods depended on the indulgence market. The livelihoods of those who granted indulgences, those who served at pilgrimage sites to which indulgences came to be attached, those who bought the right to distribute indulgences on behalf of those who granted them expecting to get a profit and return on their investment; the preachers, the pardoners, the local officials and rulers who demanded a cut of the take in return for allowing the indulgences to be distributed in their territories; parish priests who demanded a cut in return for allowing pardoners to speak during mass; the list of those who were profiting from this went on and on and on.
So we had a situation in which a massive centralized project, which has likely outlived any usefulness it may have had while resulting in diminishing returns, creates an economy upon which legions of people are dependent. I couldn’t help but think of this:
How many politicians, government bureaucrats, police, lawyers, judges, prison contractors, prison guards, unions, mental health professionals, experts, and other consultants continue to rely on the criminalization of drugs?
Paleo Retiree writes:
I don’t know how Federer dreams up these shots, let alone executes them.
Incidentally: a big tip of the hat to YouTube user (and major Federer fan) MrSeba1670. I’m very grateful to the tennis fans who go to the trouble of creating these highlight reels. Even among them, MrSeba1670 is a standout.
Fenster writes:
“Come to my room in a half hour . . . and bring some rye bread!”
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
