I had just watched Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds the night before Ash Wednesday (a raucous Fat Tuesday, eh?), and was reading through various online news Ash Wednesday morning when I saw the news blip that British TV Host, Kay Burley, mistook Vice-President Joe Biden’s Ash Wednesday forehead smudge for a bruise. Rounding out the story was the background that Biden is the first Catholic vice president, and the first Executive branch figure to appear in public with the Ash Wednesday mark. Kennedy, our only other “openly Catholic” executive was never photographed with a forehead mark of the cross, though his life perhaps is a cultural landmark of mortality.
Burley and her co-host wondered aloud whether Biden had run into a door or slipped on the ice at the Vancouver Olympics. When I saw the photo of Biden, I also didn’t think “oh right, Ash Wednesday mark,” my mind went right back to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which, I’d like to offer ain’t that far a jump.
Inglourious Basterds puts forth more than a few signifying foreheads. There is the central “let me give you something you can’t take off” carve a swastika in the forehead of the surrendering soldier scenes of course, but there is also a Golem story early on, and the “Indian Poker” game played in the bar scene (Native American riffs are everywhere in this film). [Continue Reading…]
Back in my adolescent narcissistic bubble, the months preceding December 8, 1982 was dark. Yeh, I was sixteen, had my driver’s license and pretty much unfettered access to a car. I had a girlfriend and my jump shot got me all kinds of attention in the halls and in the locker room; but I was spending hours upstairs locked inside my bedroom air guitaring for hours to The Who’s Quadrophenia, bathing my mind in the rock opera’s baroque amphetamine-fueled suicidal dreams and existential teenage angst.
The album is a weird, wonderful, conceptual mashup of identity and rage, mixing tensions between the four original band members with a progression of drug use and dissociative identity disorders: specifically schizophrenia and split/multiple personalities.
Back in November, Bruce Worden and Clare Cross offered up this updated, and creepier, version of the 1947 classic children’s picture book by Margaret Wise Brown. This parody features Keith Moon (1946-1978), the impish drummer for The Who.
Click the picture to wish all your little rockstars goodnight.
What might the Super Bowl look like if directed by Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, or Werner Herzog? Maybe it’s because I grew up in Chicago, maybe because I love Herzog, but the Herzog section at the end tickles (starting around 2:40).
Missing only from this pantheon is Guy Ritchie, who took his shot in this “football” commercial. Hit the jump to view his classic Nike spot. [Continue Reading…]
Recently deposed Sun Microsystems front man Jonathan Schwartz resigns with a haiku on Twitter, giving the world two things it needs: more poetry and fewer CEOs.
(though he gets a ding blaming the financial crisis for his company’s demise).
It’s fitting on a day in which a largish varmint shivs the meteorological time-space continuum that the popular U.S. show Lost returns to explode what’s left of our collective brains. When we last left the hapless survivors of Oceanic 815 they too had cut loose from the time-space continuum (ok, I’ll stop using that phrase cause I don’t really know what it means because it involves math and I have all the mathematical prowess of a weather-predicting whistle-pig).
He’s been gone for forty-four years, but today he passed over. Expect the mainstream media to wallow in the “J.D. Salinger” question for the next week: they’ll enshrine his absence from public life all these years and ask whether or not his life was good, or bad.
After reading Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Bruce Springsteen sat down, wrote, and recorded “Nebraska,” perhaps his best social and political work. Zinn once said he decided to write A People’s History after listening to Woody Guthrie’s lyrics about Colorado’s Ludlow Massacre. Guthrie goosed Bob Dylan towards political consciousness who in turn moved Springsteen to consider writing stories “from below” — stories against the grain of the “great men” theory of history.
So much of the news from Africa is depressing: famine, aids, wars, orphans, despots, you name it. It’s not just the mainstream media; I’ve been hit recently by a kind of “year-end giving blitz” when relief agencies scramble for your…
The swan song for traditional media is as incessant as it is unquestioned. Don’t tell that to San Francisco’s Dave Eggers or Liberia’s Alfred Sirleaf. In radically different ways, under radically different conditions, they both open a space for the newspaper’s relevance in a landscape of navel-gazing corporate media non-stop blather-a-thon (oh, and blogs, let’s not forget blogorrhea).
This summer, Glacier Park Magazine editor Chris Peterson undertook a photographic project to take photos of Montana’s Glacier National Park over 100 consecutive days, starting on May 1, 2009, for a traveling photo show in 2010 to commemorate Glacier’s Centennial. He used a mix of film and digital cameras, including an 8 by 10 field camera, a Kodak Pocket Vest camera, circa 1909, and a Speed Graphic, among others. His idea was to use the cameras that would have been used over the course of the Park’s 100 years.
Walt Young cut hair on East Colfax in Denver for 60 years. His chair was less than 6 feet from the sidewalk, a constant parade of homeless winos. Walt never let that thin sheet of glass get in the way. Everyone came in to his shop.
I had just watched Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds the night before Ash Wednesday (a raucous Fat Tuesday, eh?), and was reading through various online news Ash Wednesday morning when I saw the news blip that British TV Host, Kay Burley, mistook Vice-President Joe Biden’s Ash Wednesday forehead smudge for a bruise. Rounding out the story was the background that Biden is the first Catholic vice president, and the first Executive branch figure to appear in public with the Ash Wednesday mark. Kennedy, our only other “openly Catholic” executive was never photographed with a forehead mark of the cross, though his life perhaps is a cultural landmark of mortality.
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