Acephalous

How to remove a ring from your finger without a firearm

[An astute reader brought the sad tale of Alfredo Malspini III to my attention, and lest any of you shoot off a finger to spite a ring, I thought I'd share some practical advice about ring-removal that I wrote up a few years back.]

There you are on a Saturday night, futzing with your wedding ring because your wife thinks your trichotillomania makes you look mangy: off your left ring finger, onto your right pinkie; off your right pinkie, onto your left pinkie; off your left pinkie, onto your right ring finger; off your right ring finger, off your right ring finger, OFF YOUR RIGHT RING FINGER, non et cetera. You pull and you twist; you pull while twisting and you twist while pulling all to no avail.

You look at your wife and you tell her, “I’ve misplaced my wedding band.”  She will look at you, j’accuse burning in her eyes, until you hold up your right hand. She will then enter the kitchen and return with the ingredients required to perform Step One:

1. Apply cold water and a little soap.  Gently work the soap under the ring and twist. If the ring still does not come off, massage the area of the finger below the knuckle to remove some of the fluid from the finger. Wait a few minutes, then repeat. Continue until the finger is good and chafed.

After fifteen minutes of repeated failure, your wife will walk back into the kitchen and return with the materials needed for Step Two:

2. Dry the chafed finger with hand towel, then apply the following in any order: water-based lubricants, oil-based lubricants, semi-solid fats, hydrogenated vegetable oils, as well as any lard, suet, ghee, tallow, or schmaltz you find lying around. As with the soap and water, work the slippery substance under the ring and twist and turn. Carefully slip a knife under the ring and try to slide it over the knuckle. If the ring-bearer cries in pain, ascertain whether its source is the ring jamming on the knuckle or the knife slicing into it.

This too will fail. Your wife will walk back into the kitchen yet again. Take this opportunity to try to wash your hilariously lubed finger. The water-based lubricants will dissolve quickly, but the oil-based lubricants, semi-solid fats, suet, schmaltz, &c. will take some time. Expect to find an oily residue scumming the top of the bucket used in Step Three:

3. Thrust your hand into the bucket of ice water which your wife has brought in from the kitchen. Leave it in there until the ring-bearer screams. When he does, shoot him a look of unconcealed embarrassment with a hint of disappointment, then allow him to “tough” it out for another three minutes. Once he passes out, remove his hand from the bucket and check to see that the desired amount of vasoconstriction has occurred, then repeat steps one and two.

You may notice that despite the intense cold and vigorous oily massaging, the area above the ring becomes increasingly swollen. This is normal. God designed the human body intelligently: when you unsuccessfully attempt to remove a ring from a swollen finger, your body responds by further swelling the finger. It may also turn begin to turn dark as more and more blood rushes to into the injured finger. Now would be a good time to consult the Internet. Find the Ask MetaFilter thread on “ring removal” and proceed to Step Four:

4. Do what the jewelers do: spray Windex on the finger and twist and pull. Do it again. Then again. The trick is to do this repeatedly so as to unlock the magical lubricative power of Windex. Then consider the probable reason jewelers use Windex: a jewelery shop consists almost entirely of display cases and Windex is sort of wet. At this point it will be past midnight. There is nothing more you can do. Put away the Windex and have the ring-bearer proceed to Step Five.

5. What you need to do now, ring-bearer, is drink enough vodka to catch a few hours of restless sleep in which you alternate between dreams in which you are Hans Brinker, son of a sluicer, and Hans Brinker, son of a space station captain. Alcohol is a diuretic, which should help with the swelling. Eat some pistachio nuts too, since salt absorbs water. There is also the chance that your finger may mysteriously unswell during the night.

6. You will awake to discover that your finger has not mysteriously unswollen during the night. That it has, in fact, swelled larger and darkened ominously. You should consult the Internet to learn that 1) fingers are naturally more swollen in the morning, 2) your body responds to a) alcohol-induced dehydration and b) the massive amount of sodium found in pistachio nuts by swelling. Now panic.

You may want to panic for a good long while. Remember, this is your right ring finger, and although you are ambidextrous, relearning how to do everything with your left hand will still be unthinkably inconvenient. Once you can breathe again, go online and learn what you need to do for Step Seven:

7. Elevate the hand above your heart for 15-20 minutes, then repeat steps one and two. When that fails to work, place a bucket of ice water on a chair, sit on the floor, then elevate it into the bucket and repeat steps three, one and two in that order. Pine for the mangy days of yore, then consult the internet again and proceed to Step Eight.

Step Eight will require string or dental floss, but have no fear, for it is endorsed by The Harvard School of Medicine.

Step Eight, Part the First:

“Pass an end of fine string or dental floss under the ring. With the other end, begin tightly wrapping the string around the finger. Ensure that the string is wrapped evenly and smoothly past the lower knuckle.”

Step Eight, Part the Second:

“With the end that was passed under the ring, begin unwrapping the string in the same direction. The ring should move over the string as the string is unwrapped.”

It should, but it will not. In fact, the act of wrapping the fluid-engorged finger will cause pain the likes of which reasonable people compare to birth-pangs. This will make your move to Step Eight, Part the Third particularly daring.

Step Eight, Part the Third:

Repeat variations of Step Eight, Parts the First and Second with packing tape, then Saran Wrap. When you regain consciousness, consider picking up the telephone and calling your local jeweler or emergency room. Exhausted interns and jewelers both keep one of these handy for just such an occasion.

Now pony up the $35 it costs for the jeweler to repair it, and resume plucking the hairs from your beard one at a time. If your wife complains, remind her of what happened the last time. If she insists on reminding you about your mother’s favorite story—about the time you got your head stuck in a toilet seat and the rescue squad had to be called in, and since your father drove an ambulance with that very squad, all the paramedics knew you and teased you  as they used the jaws of life to extricate your head,[*] and did your mother mention she has a picture of you bawling, the toilet seat around your head, which she took while she waited for the paramedics to arrive, because she does and it is around here somewhere—if she insists on reminding you of that, turn up the television and pretend you can’t hear her, because you can’t win this one.

Of course Obama is Satan

Whether you believe that Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni, the man portraying Satan in the Hitler Channel’s adaptation of The Bible, looks like President Obama depends on a number of factors, foremost among them your familiarity with people of other races. If, like many white conservatives, the majority of your interaction with people darker than you occurs when you watch the evening news, you see this image and are shocked by the similarity:

Just look at his skin! The deep set eyes! The wide nose! His ears aren’t visible but surely they’re identical too! Except they aren’t. This is why I force my students to pay very close attention to the actual frames they’re analyzing instead of relying on an uncritical sense of what’s being represented on screen. To wit:

I chose this comparison because it’s the one in which the likeness, such as it is, seems greatest. It’s important to note that it’s from the conservative Newsbusters site, meaning that it’s been selected in order to heighten the featural similarities between them. The President’s lips aren’t always pursed, and choosing an image in which they are creates some features that wouldn’t otherwise be there, but for argument’s sake I’ll pretend this is how the President always looks.

We’ll start our comparison with the forehead: not only is Ouazanni’s deeply furrowed, the muscles above his eyebrows are far more defined. Moving down to the glabella — the bit between the eyebrows — Ouazanni’s contains both vertical and horizontal furrows, whereas the President’s is smooth. Both have deep-set eyes, but Ouazanni’s are hooded and appear almost rectangular, whereas the President’s are almond-shaped. Beneath both of their eyes is a pronounced lower eyelid furrow which combines with an intraorbital furrow to create downward facing triangles on their cheeks. In this image, they both also have well-defined nasolabial furrows descending from the tips of their nostril wings out and around their lips to their chins, both of which are squarish. There are significant differences: Ouazanni’s cheeks are sunken, whereas the President’s are puffed; the shape and presentation angle of their nostrils is completely different, etc.

In other words, a simple description of the features of their face makes it possible to believe that they look somewhat similar — or that, as many on the right are arguing, Ouazanni looks like an older version the President. Except they don’t. The number of specific features a viewer needs to overlook — or be race-blind to — in order to claim a holistic similarity between the two is just too high.*

If you want to see a connection, enough featural similarities exist for you to do so, but only if you make a conscious decision to equate an image of Satan in a hoodie with the President. The number of distinctions you must overlook is equaled by the number your cross-racial identification bias prevents you from seeing. Factor in whatever intuitive model of aging you use to crease the President’s forehead and wrinkle his cheeks and it’s clear that quite a bit of cognitive processing has gone into the “intuitive” association between these faces. Which means you ought to ask yourself:

Why do I want to overlook these distinctions and age him in this way? The answer, obviously, is that you want to see what you think you see, and are probably upset that I’ve demonstrated how your “plain observation” has been filtered by political and racial recognition biases. So much so that your rebuttal will amount not to a refutation of the features I’ve identified, but by linking to the image again and insisting that anyone with eyes agrees with your holistic judgment. As Allahpundit admits, he now has “a new front-page thumbnail for when Obama pushes an especially terrible policy.” That’s all he really wanted in the first place.

*I’m not saying there’s no resemblance. Only that judgments about human faces are highly susceptible to suggestion, as analyzing them in detail, feature by feature, demonstrates.

Steven Crowder and his “funny” rape “jokes”

CPAC supporters are very upset that The Huffington Post “lied” about  “comedian” Steven Crowder’s criticisms of Ashley Judd. Here’s the “funny” rape “joke” that caused the fuss:

As you know, Ashley Judd has recently been heard equating both mining and purchasing Apple Products to “rape.” So my commentary at CPAC on her stupid, and insensitive comparisons was exactly this “This just in, Ashley Judd just tweeted that purchasing apple products is akin to rape … from her iPhone.”

Crowder was, according to himself, “Clearly taking aim at Ashley Judd for her stupid rape comments.” Which is all well and good, had the comments Judd made remotely resembled the ones Crowder attributed to her. Before getting to Crowder, let’s look at our favorite Confederate’s defense of him:

By tagging Crowder as a “Fox News contributor,” the writer of the HuffPo item signaled to liberal readers that the young comic is a hate-object.

It’s wrong to call Crowder a “Fox News contributor,” according to McCain, because it “signal[s]” something to liberal readers. You know who that criticism should be aimed at? The person who runs “stevencrowder.net” and identifies him “FoxNew’s brightest, funniest young Conservative mind.” Doesn’t that person know what he’s signalling?

His affiliation with Fox notwithstanding, Crowder’s comment is clueless for the simple reason that Judd never claimed that purchasing an Apple product was “akin,” metaphorically, to rape. She said, according to that bastion of liberal propaganda, The Daily Caller:

I am financing mass rape as I enjoy these ridiculously Global North ultra-efficiencies and conveniences, for large scale rape is the preferred predation mining interests use to humiliate and terrify local populations, in order to control resource areas.

The relationship she describes there isn’t one in which purchasing an Apple product is “akin” to committing rape, but one in which purchasing material something built with “conflict minerals” makes one complicit in the brutal tactics of the regimes who mine them. The difference between Crowder’s summary and Judd’s actual statement couldn’t be more stark: he thinks she equates all evils with “rape,” you know, like liberals do; whereas she’s specifically identifying how rape is used in a particular cultural context to “convince” people to work for slave-wages.

I’m not saying that Judd hasn’t made outlandish statements in the past, but this strikes me as Crowder doing what John Nolte and Jeff Goldstein and every other anti-political correctness crusader loves to do: telling jokes that white men are forbidden to tell by the dark and womanly multicultural establishment. Because it’s just as bleeding edge now as it was in ’77.

[x-posted and vigorouly commented upon at LGM.]

Don't invite strangers into your home, it's not safe. Neither is this puppy.

Remember that commercial I mentioned last week that some thought an outright fabrication, others an episode of Too Cute seen through a zolpidem scrim ? It's worse than I originally intimated:

Call him now, or the puppy gets it! What are you waiting for? Unsafe strangers from the Internet?

The Racists & The Shoe-Shine Boy

I'm still waiting for reputable conservatives to repudiate Scott Terry's statements, but I understand if they're reluctant because I couldn't prove that the Scott Terry whose reading list I linked to is the same Scott Terry from CPAC. Now I can:

Many of you are visiting this blog due to the recent CPAC controversy, where my friend Matt Heimbach and I, made national news by showing up and asking (in civil, articulate tones, mind you) a few simple questions.

What was our main concern?

There is a lot of rhetoric in the conservative movement about reaching out the mestizo demographic, or reaching out to the homosexuals and blacks.

Our question: why not reach out to whites?

In case you had any doubt about whether his concerns were racialist or racist in origin, here's how he answers that question:

This is exactly what the GOP needs to do, as a matter of fact.  Steve Sailer and the guys at VDARE have done an excellent job in pointing this out.  Please educate yourself about the Sailer Strategy.

It's not that he hates black people, he's merely upset that

The GOP wants us all to blend together into a mocha-colored, capitalist utopia!

And he's working on more reading lists! Here he is trying to define the "Kinist" canon. What's so bad about that? So long as you also believe that God ordained the social order and advocate that man's first duty is to "love one's own kind," absolutely nothing! And Terry takes "lov[ing] one's own kind" very seriously. Just look at his alarm clock:

A beautiful white girl was slaughtered while taking a ride in the top of a double-decker school bus; the cry was heard:  “Wake up!”

Another beautiful white girl, the more beautiful because she was in the late stages of a pregnancy, was attacked by a gang of twelve savage animals.  A white lawyer stands in passionate defense of one of the animals.  The sane yell “Wake up!”

If I were a professor of rhetoric, I might have something to say about Terry's choice of unnecessary adjectives here, if only because he seems as obsessed with the deaths of "beautiful white girl[s]" as a latter-day Nancy Grace. But that's not to say Terry doesn't have culture. He goes to the theater to see

a half-descent [sic?] portrayal of a group of Godless pagans, prancing around in their celebration of the downfall of Western Civilization.

Is that a pun or one of those Aryan-equivalent-of-Freud's slips? Doesn't matter. This man, with his belief in the separation of races and the divinely ordained social order (which he just so happens to sit atop), is clearly an outlier in the modern conservative movement. No real or respectable conservative holds these beliefs, or at the very least, no real or respectable conservative would air them this unabashedly.

A real or respectable conservative like National Review's Jillian Kay Melchior would write a paean to "[t]he simple shoe shine" in which, through great effort, she managed to avoid using the word "boy." She would write nothing of the divinely inspired social order, but instead  let the accompanying photograph say a little something about it:

And unbeknownst to Mechior, this shoe-shine man, Dino Wright, knows exactly which game he's playing when he "creat[ed] this entrepreneurial activity":

CPAC and events like it boost business for Wright. He says he thinks it’s because he “provides a very important service to this very image-conscious group.”

You'd have to be as dense as Melchior to believe the "service" he's paying to "this very image-conscious group" has anything to do with shining shoes.

You can tell Scott Terry's a liberal plant

Because he claims to have studied literature:

Or maybe not. Maybe he’s this “Southern gentleman and blogger,” also named Scott Terry and also from North Carolina, who is “working toward a degree in Philosophy and English, likes long walks on short beaches, fishing and breaking liberal talking-points into tiny pieces (then spreading nasty rumors about those pieces!).” Because they seem to have quite a bit in common. Both, for example, are very concerned about “standing up for our [sic] heritage as Christian white men.” Even if that’s a different Scott Terry, I will say this about the self-professed “Southern gentleman”: it’s about damn dime someone created “a conceptual ladder” that prevents Christians from “betraying [their] God and Father” on “[a]ll of [their] positions, from abortion to alien abduction.”

Get your Rashomon on

Aaron thinks this confrontation between a law professor and student protestors warrants an exercise in ideological self-reflection, but I don’t know. It seems to me more like an undergraduate film project designed to lure a wretched — though utterly harmless — beast from its natural environs so that the entire world might point and laugh at it.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see the final cut of Concern Troll: The Movie.

Because the alternative is he’s just an asshole who doesn’t know what “antagonist” means.

Why do I teach comics?

I don’t know, why don’t you just ask me? Because apparently

I fool [students] into acquiring a decent approximation of expertise by providing them with source material that they believe they can become expert in. They’ll happily read eight chapters from Understanding Comics and memorize the 70 odd bits of critical vocabulary contained therein, whereas if I asked them to do something similar with Ciceronian rhetoric their anxiety would preclude the possibility of them ever feeling like they could master the material.

Or so I say!

I take it most of you are already familiar with my work on the medium, but for those who aren’t, I’ll throw some links below the fold.

True nerds micturate...

...in urinals that only just happens to be down the hall from where I regularly teach. The first coincidence:

And the second:

I like to think this one’s meant for me, because if someone’s scribbling “BADWOLF” on the walls that means I must be the …

Mrs. Malkin, giving in can be wrong.

The other night I dreamt I was nine years old, on stage, singing "There's No Easy Way Out" for assembled parents on the last day of summer camp. It was a horrifying dream made all the worse by the fact that it was a memory. My camp counselors forced me to belt out songs from the Rocky IV soundtrack because, I assume, they are terrible human specimens.

Just the worst.

But as humiliating as it is to admit to having been some failed lifeguard's dancing monkey, I take comfort in knowing that I didn't choose to sing that song or the Diet Coke jingle that preceded it: a seventeen-year-old man-child made me do it because of something he mistook for "reasons." All of which is only to say that Michelle Malkin's parents need to sue whatever camp they sent her to for this: I mean, her counselors even made her title it a "parody video," like they knew how few mad props and scrip dividends her version of "Raise of the Roof" would've netted at the next PTA meeting sans the signposting. Or with it even. But when I watch that video -- which I only did once, for the purpose of research -- all I see is this: SHE'S NOT CRYING. SHE'S NOT CRYING.

Except obviously on the inside, which is almost enough to make you feel sorry for her.

Almost.

Poor Skyfall, it deserved better

Sam Mendes is the Don Delillo of contemporary cinema, in that he’s as beloved as he’s banal and otherwise right-thinking people seem incapable of recognizing him as such. A few years ago I wrote of my hatred of the flat affect (or affected flatness) that characterizes Delillo’s prose, and I’m going to be making a similar argument about Mendes. I can make that argument directly, in that both blame the postmodern condition for the flattening and both think that finding meaning in meaninglessness is the proper aesthetic response to it. To wit:

To understand all this. To penetrate this secret. The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers … a unique cultural deposit … and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the landscapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and eroded object of desire.

To understand Delillo. To penetrate his secret. The appeal is there, everyone sees it when they think about it, everyone knows it is “a unique cultural deposit,” taken by Delillo on the chest of Americans who want to believe they belong to an esoteric order, that they are the adepts and seers of literature. Only they aren’t. They read a big book full of moments, as above, in which characters look at “garbage” and are struck by an epiphanic bolt named “recycling.” Don Delillo writes “deep” thoughts for stupid people. Mendes traffics in similar crap:

I don’t care if it could be mistaken for a two-shot of people in a museum, that thing they’re looking at is still a plastic bag, not a reminder that everything is connected. Or if it is a reminder that everything’s connected we’re back to the profundity that it is modern recycling. It’s not evidence that there’s “this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid.” It’s not an ontological proof of the existence of a non-denominational Kindness that communicates through gusts of trash. It’s a fucking plastic bag. But it gets worse. It’s a plastic bag “that was just, dancing with [Ricky], like a little kid begging [for him] to play with it—for fifteen minutes,” meaning that it’s a plastic bag that Ricky didn’t recycle. He befriended it in the name of the non-denominational Kindness who speaks through trash and filmed the encounter so we all could meet said Kindness through Art. It’s first-order Art in the film, when Ricky shows it to Jane, but it’s second-order Art when Mendes presents us Ricky showing it to Jane, so we experience their experience of Art because in the postmodern world one can never experience The Thing Itself only mediated versions of It through Art. This is a Baudrillard-bruised insight from ’70s masquerading as profundity and everyone fell for it. The Academy declared it the Most Unique Cultural Deposit of 1999 and Mendes the Most Unique Cultural Depositor of the same.

Which brings us to Skyfall. I watched it last night and thought it a fine little Bond film. But it was not the Art it thought it was. Mendes comes from a theatrical background and directs his movies like old episodes of Masterpiece Theater: he positions the camera at some distance from the action, checks that every element of the frame is in focus, then walks away. The result is a reliance on shots that are longer than they need to be:

He seems not to know that when every element of a shot is in focus, the result is a flatter looking shot. There is foreground only in the literal sense that some people are closer to the camera, but because the people in the background as are crisp those in the foreground, the frame feels short and flat, like someone learned how to stage a scene in a theater. Just so you don’t think I’m unfairly knocking filmed versions of theatrical productions, here is a screen capture from something you know I’m inclined to love:

The Doctor and Captain Picard in Hamlet. Brilliant! Marvel at the spectacular set design! Glory in the deftly composed theatrical lighting! Are you done yet? Good. Now look at the shot itself: the spectacular acting and stunning design and artful lighting are all undermined by the manner in which they appear on film. That’s not a criticism, just an acknowledgment of difference. Plays must be filmed at this scale (an extreme long shot here)  because the alternative is that the performance is halted every time an in-frame element or the camera needed adjusting. In which case the play would cease being a play and become a movie. Saying that Tennant and Stewart’s Hamlet looks like a play isn’t an insult, merely an acknowledgment of what it is. But Skyfall is not a play. It’s a film too often shot like one. Even the action scenes:

That’s an establishing shot, so I can forgive Mendes its scale and depth because he needs to indicate the important elements of the scene. Now that we know where the Bond element is in relation to the others we’ll probably cut to a close-up:

The close-up allows the audience to see both the mental focus and physical toll that this chase is having on the Bond element. The establishing shot informs us where he is and the close-up tells us how he’s coping with the chase. Where to next?

A re-establishing shot that’s more extreme than the initial one? The charitable reading of this decision would be that Mendes wants to communicate the confusion rooftop-motorbiking necessarily entails, but such a reading would be pre-undermined by the close-up he just cut from, in which Bond looks like he’s facing down danger with the unperturbed cool with which Bonds face down dangers. The decision to increase the scale from extreme-long to extreme-longer combined with the one to keep the entire frame in focus results in flat shot in which no elements—not even the Bond one—are afforded more significance than any other. Just as the audience of the Tennant Hamlet know they should be paying more attention to Tennant as Hamlet, the audience of Skyfall knows that Bond is most important element in that frame. But thanks to Mendes they can’t see him well enough to care.

Someone seems to have informed Mendes that his propensity for deep shots only makes them seem all the more flat and shallow, but because he’s as talented a director as he is a thinker, he responded to this criticism by overcompensating. The shots in the film that aren’t made shallow by the depth of their focus are deliberately shallow when they need not be, as when Bond home-invades M’s apartment:

Given that M and Bond are the only two people in this shot, there’s no need to add shallow focus to this one-shot to remind the audience who’s important here. It’s gratuitous. The odds of anyone in the audience focusing on a non-central and non-facial element are slim because her face is right in ours and it’s a face. Humans seek out faces. They see them in clouds and oil slicks and burnt toast. Put a face in front of a person and they’ll pay attention. But at least there’s some real depth to this shot: the warm lighting makes her (and Bond in the reverses) appear human, even as the slight shadow on her face makes her look less than entirely trustworthy. But Mendes’s greatest sin may be against the palette. The first shot from the film above is representative of every work-related shot in the film in that it’s tinted blue. Work is tinted blue. Because Bond is blue:

Get the feeling Mendes likes that shot? Me too. Bond is always some shade of blue because work is blue:

But didn’t I just say that Bond was talking to M above? And wasn’t that scene warmly lit? Yes I did and yes it was. Because there was a woman in it. Women change the color of the world, you see, as in that last shot above. Bond is blue, but the woman he’s looking at?

She takes his blues away. Not really, since when the shot reverses it’s to the blue room the blue Bond just vacated, but you see my point. I don’t mind aggressive palettes—I’m a huge fan of Kieslowski’s work—but Mendes’s seems to verge on sexist here. Or they’re just stupid in the Bond-is-blue-without-a-woman-in-life, which still verges on sexist, being that woman are reduced to things-that-make-Bond-not-blue.

It's the lines! She hates the lines!

It is 1 p.m. SEK will be spending the next five hours in his office helping STUDENTS revise their essays. At no point will there not be a line of STUDENTS outside his door.

STUDENT #1: I have a class at 1 p.m. Can I just drop this off, have you comment on it, and pick it up after class?

SEK: I’ll try to have it done by then, but six of your classmates are waiting in line, and I have to get to them first.

STUDENT #1: See you at 2 p.m.

SEK spends the next hour in conference with the STUDENTS who waited patiently outside his office. It is 2 p.m.

STUDENT #1: I’m here to pick up my paper.

SEK: I’m sorry, I haven’t had a chance to get to it yet. Do you have any more classes today?

STUDENT #1: No.

SEK: So if you can just wait, I’ll get to you as soon as I finish talking with your classmates.

STUDENT #1: I’ll just come back at 3 p.m. See you then.

SEK spends the next hour in conference with the STUDENTS who waited patiently outside his office. It is 3 p.m.

STUDENT #1: I’m here to pick up my paper.

SEK: I’m sorry, I haven’t had a chance to get to it yet. Since you don’t have any more classes, maybe it’d be best to take your place in the queue and we can talk as soon as I’m done with your classmates.

STUDENT #1: I’ll just come back at 4 p.m. See you then.

SEK spends the next hour in conference with the STUDENTS who waited patiently outside his office. It is 4 p.m.

STUDENT #1: I’m here to pick up my paper.

SEK: I’m sorry, I haven’t had a chance to get to it yet. If you’ll just—

STUDENT #1: Come back at 5 p.m.? Yes. See you then.

SEK spends the next hour in conference with the STUDENTS who waited patiently outside his office. It is 5 p.m.

STUDENT #1: I’m here to pick up my paper.

SEK: Have a seat, there’s only one person in line at the moment so it’ll just be a—

STUDENT #1: Fine. I’ll come back at 6 p.m.

SEK spends the next hour in conference with the last of the STUDENTS who waited patiently outside his office. It is 6 p.m. SEK has just finished what he thought was his final conference of the day. STUDENT #2 is packing up her stuff and preparing to leave.

STUDENT #1: I’m here to pick up my paper.

SEK: Good timing. STUDENT #2 and I just finished so—

STUDENT #1: I’m here to pick up my paper.

SEK: We can go over it right now.

STUDENT #1: It’s too late.

SEK: I’m more than happy to stay a few extra minutes and look over your paper with you.

STUDENT #1: No, it’s too late. Give me my paper back.

SEK: ?

STUDENT #1: !

SEK: I can send you comments via email if you’d—

STUDENT #1: IT’S TOO LATE. JUST GIVE ME MY PAPER.

STUDENT #1 grabs her unmarked essay and storms out of SEK’s office. STUDENT #2, who hadn’t finished packing up yet, looks as confused as SEK feels.

STUDENT #2: What the—

SEK: Your guess is better than mine. You kids don’t make any sense anymore. I just don’t understand—

STUDENT #2: The things we do on your lawn?

SEK: Out!

"I'm only racist on my mother's side. My father's people were misanthropes."

That Brevard Community College will be firing Sharon Sweet for compelling her students to vote for Obama is, of course, evidence that such indoctrination is ubiquitous in contemporary academia. The first comment on that Daily Caller link states the case in its strongest form:

Liberal fascism at home on every campus.

Exactly! Those two words always belong next to each other on campus. Goes without saying. What I find interesting about this story is that there’s no racial angle to it. Sweet’s race is never mentioned in the article nor does a search turn up an image that’s unequivocally of her. But Jim Hoft knows what she must look like, so when he did a Google Image search for “Sharon Sweet” he carefully considered all of the faces that might be hers and went with his gut.

That it told him she must be the black woman in the mug shot doesn’t make Hoft himself a racist—just his gut. Which makes him, what? About thirty percent racist?

The first forty-five were mistakes, the forty-sixth an accident

The headline at the LA Times reads "Torrance neighborhood edgy after mistaken shootings," and the phrase "mistaken shootings" refers to the fact that there have been multiple incidents in which Los Angeles and Torrance police officers have opened fired on people who don't remotely resemble proud cop-killer Christopher Jordan Dorner: two Latina women delivering papers for the Times and a white man sneaking in a morning surf. But calling these incidents "mistaken shootings" downplays both the extent of the mistake and the severity of the shootings. Consider the state of the truck driven by the Times employees:

I'm not sure what I find more disturbing: the fact that two members of the LAPD put at least forty-six bullets in the back of that truck or that the barrage only wounded the two women in the truck. Not that I wish them further injury, mind you, only that I'm uncomfortable with the level of incompetence such "marksmanship" seems to suggest, because the police are out in terrible force and they are angry. If you live where I do, you don't need to watch the news conferences or know that over 50 members of the force (and their families) are in protective custody to notice, and feel unsettled by, the heightened police presence in Riverside and Orange and LA counties. I literally can't go to the doughnut store without having to stand behind four grumpy sleep-deprived cops.* I understand why the 15 and 91 were crawling with police vehicles last Thursday, as Dorner shot the officers in Corona a few miles from my apartment, but given that the search is now centered around Big Bear, I'm not sure why the continued police presence is necessary.

Especially when, since the "mistaken shootings" that happened last week, people who drive pickup trucks of any make and model are being encouraged to find alternative means of transportation until Dorner is dead or custody.** Because you never know when an angry sleep-addled cop who can barely hit the back of an SUV will open fire on you because of who you could be, but clearly aren't. Having a standing army of incompetent shots occupy a few counties may not be the best way to calm civilian nerves. This strikes me as generally true, but even more so when the only stated targets are cops and the only victims unrelated to law enforcement personnel have been shot, mistakenly, by law enforcement personnel.

*By which I mean, when I went to the doughnut store this  morning, I had to stand behind four grumpy sleep-deprived cops.

**This despite the fact that the burnt husk of the truck in question was located on Saturday night.

Peter Jackson and "Competitive Realism"

January 28, 2013 | SEK

An old (and far more talented) friend of mine responded to the discussion Rob and I had about frame rate:

The choice to go from 24 fps to 48 fps was that some filmmakers really hated the strobing effect when the camera pans in 3-D versions of movies. Their solution was to up the frame rate—giving the filmmaker more information to play around with. Honestly, the 24 fps strobing never bothered me, cause if you are telling your story right, little nitpicks like the don’t enter the mind of your audience.

For reasons unclear even to me, I responded to his gentle correction with A Brief and Inadequate History of Special Effects:

I didn’t want to get too technical in the podcast, but I was hinting at that: 3-D created a problem that didn’t previously exist, and the solution is worse than the original problem. No more strobing, but now the effects are so obviously “special” that we may as well be watching the original Clash of the Titans. An incredible film, don’t get me wrong, it just required a superhuman suspension of disbelief. Which at the time was fine, because “special effects” like George Reeves flashing across the sky were meant to be “special,” outside of the ordinary, and didn’t need to look as if they were of this world or obeyed its laws of physics.

I tend to think George Lucas ruined this fantastical acceptance of the specialness of “special” effects when he married recognizably modernist styles with space stations and star ships—the Millennium Falcon could’ve been a Le Corbusier, the stormtroopers come from the mind of an Italian fascist, and half the scenery consisted of the same brutalist style that litters my campus. Point being, his realist aesthetic made “special” effects look quaint, the people who loved them rubes, and that’s where we’ve been ever since. Realism or naught! Realism or naught! (With a few exceptions, Del Toro notably among them.)

So I could understand why Jackson wanted The Hobbit to accede to the demands of the regnant style, but in doing so he utterly ruined his film. I mentioned in the podcast that the best scene in the film, Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum, looked like exactly what it was: Martin Freeman in front of a green screen talking to a man in ping-pong ball covered suit. (I know that’s not how they do it anymore but you know what I mean.) It looked like Jackson had decided to avoid the uncanny valley by introducing its monstrous child to an actual human being and hoping the audience wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I’m not going to say it made me want to cry, but I’m not going to deny I teared up a bit at the sheer waste of it all.

Like you, I’m more interested in the story, so if the technological advances can be integrated into it—like the conference tables in Avatar—I’m fine with that because it complements the narrative. But I don’t even think we need 3-D. It took us millions of years to develop the particular sort of stereoscopic vision we have, and our brains react to an “occupied periphery” the same way now as they did before: by flooding our bodies with hormones that make us nervous, tense, excited, afraid, etc. Since our eyes still point forward, you don’t need anything more fancy than an IMAX to occupy our peripheries, and I’m fine with that.

I thought I was talking about special effects and their more cloyingly “special” forbears, but the real sore spot for me here is the blind lionization of a limited definition of “realism.” Don’t misunderstand me: I find relocating fantastic narratives to a world that resembles ours an admirable endeavor. Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the “Joker” outstrips Jack Nicholson’s because we don’t need a vat of quasi-mystical chemical slurry to believe that a child of neglect and poverty might come to resent those he believes kicked him down to choke him out. I’m all for grounding narratives that occur in fictional worlds in ones that mostly obey the rules of ours. I’m on board with Battlestar Galactica and (though I’ll never admit it) I even watch Arrow. But the “reality” of “realism” has to amount to more than a little extra grease smeared on the walls of some backlot “Brooklyn.” Because when “competitive realism” becomes a sport the audience always loses. Embracing filth for love of the slop as an ethos would be one thing, but embracing it as an aesthetic out of devotion to an empty notion of what constitutes “realism” is more than just a thing:

Where to download and how to subscribe to Lawyers, Guns & Money: The Podcast

If for some inconceivable reason you prefer your podcast clean-shaven, you can skip watching Rob and I debate the merits of The Hobbit and download it in .mp3 format or listen to the whole Lawyers, Guns & Money crew discussing all sorts of things in the years to come by subscribing to the RSS feed for the new podcast

If you're partial to my blather, though, have no fear: I'll link to any I participate in. Also, since I'm the one running the show over there, I may take the initiative and do a few odd podcasts of my own. I have some ... ideas. Stay tuned.

An Awesome & Mighty Thing, This First Ever Lawyers, Guns & Money Podcast (In Which I Appear) Is

It features Yours Truly and the Farley fellow you see primping there in preview—or wearing a hat, now that I had to re-upload the video—and we're talking about The Hobbit. You're ... welcome?

It goes without saying that there are kinks to work out—if only because I'm in charge of the production—and that while many Internet Traditions are honored, some are violated. Case in point: the blog's beloved ampersand is a monstrosity in the font the rest of the credits need to be in. (I promise that sentence will make perfect sense once you watch it.) An "enhanced" audio file will be available shortly, though I can't vouch for the quality of said "enhancements" because we haven't figured out what they'll be yet outside of "enhanced."

But fear not! You'll learn many things in this podcast, including (but not limited to) which of you lot inspire us to invent gang signs just so we can throw some in your honor. And also many things about The Hobbit. Enjoy!

Fellowship of the Ring: Conventions of Genre, Sorta Kinda Part the Second

(Actual Part the First can be found here.)

The answer to the question of why some films are more re-watchable than others seems, to me, a matter of unpredictability of shot selection. We can all watch episodes of Law & Order half-asleep because we all know that any close-up of one character's face will reverse to a close-up of his or her interlocutor's. (The possibility of deviating from the script-bible is basically asymptotic: the staleness of the formula makes it look increasingly likely but it can't ever actually happen.) And despite my general objections to Fellowship I'll admit that its iconic scenes are rightly remembered because Peter Jackson bucked his horror roots and embraced an unpredictability that verges on randomness. To wit, consider the scene-setting that preceded Gandalf's most infamous exclamation, which begins half-way through the mines of Moria with a close-up on Gandalf:

Did I say "close-up"? I meant "extreme close-up," because Jackson's lopped off the top of his head. That might not seem so important, but consider it in more mundane terms, for example, if this were a picture you took of a friend at a party. How happy would your friend be with a photograph in which he'd been a "bit" beheaded? How would you feel about framing your friend's face such that it shared the spotlight with a few lines of mortar and some unfocused negative space? This shot feels wrong because it violates the conventions that makes Law & Order and the like such successful soporifics. It's an ugly and unbalanced shot, but I'd wager it's meant to discomfit, if only because Jackson's going to repeat it so frequently in the next three minutes that this is the last time I'm going to mention it. Just remember that it's wrong to borrow chunks of people's heads for rhetorical effect. From here Jackson cuts to Frodo:

I'm not even going to say it, but you see it. The expectation here is three-fold: you assume that this shot's going to be followed by 1) an eye-line match, 2) a point of view shot, and 3) a reverse shot, and you're not disappointed:

But because you assumed that this would be a reverse shot, you also assumed that you'd reverse back to your point of origin, Frodo, so that you could gauge his reaction to what you've just observed while cohabitating his head. Only:

Jackson upset the implicit continuity of the reverse shot in order to make it more difficult for us to predict shot sequence. This might not seem like such a significant achievement, but that's only because you underestimate the power of convention. Imagine you're watching a medical procedural in which a doctor, in a medium close-up, addresses an ill patient and says "Blah blah blah kidney transplant." You'd expect a reverse shot of the patient, possibly in a close-up to better capture the pain of this revelation, but what if instead of that you were hitched into a roller coaster backwards and yanked thousands of feet into the air? Because that's what Jackson does when he violently zooms from Gandalf's face to, well, this:

The screen shots don't do it justice. Few currently available experiences are comparable to the ride Jackson subjects you to there outside of 47 seconds into this, and even though your mind knows you're just watching a movie, your eyes and brain are subject to a few hundred thousand more years of evolution and react differently. You may not be scared for your life, but you're not entirely comfortable with your current perspective. Jackson will exploit this feature of perspectival preference for the remainder of this scene, much of which will involve placing the viewer in places no one not named "Clark Kent" can achieve. But he won't do that quite yet:

He yanks you thousands of feet into the air, then punches you in the face by following that shot with a medium close-up of some hobbits looking frame-left. Note that when he was previously mid-air panning he was drawing your eye to the right, and that when he cuts to this shot, he knows your eyes will re-set frame-center, find nothing, focus on action, see Sam glancing backwards, and then follow his eyes to whatever they'll be matched to. In short, he's directed your eyes right-right-right, then center, then center-left, then left-left-left, then:

Here, to a canted shot, presumably from Sam's point of view, of whatever's following. It's canted because some people aren't that bright and hadn't gathered that the Fellowship might be in a tight spot. Or because Jackson wanted to marry content and form in such a way that the knowledge of the narrative peril was heightened by the manner in which it was depicted. For our purposes, all that matters is that when he's using conventional sequences (like eye-line matches) he's doing so in a dictatorial fashion, yanking our eyes from one side of the screen to other with a disregard bordering on callousness. But when he's not using conventional sequences, he's creating an environment of uncertainty of the sort I mentioned at the beginning of the post: because there's little logic in the shot sequence, the film becomes more re-watchable simply because it defies our defaults. For example, what do you think follows the above eye-line match from Sam's point of view? Back to Sam?

Nope. So we'll stick with Frodo?

Well, at least now we know who to follow, right?

God damn it. Jackson's gone all MTV and started editing like a meth-addict, which clearly indicates that we're in for a further succession of quick edits as the action intensifies and—

For fuck's sake, really? Three quick edits followed by a head-level camera gently drifting rightward to capture the action? Speeding us up and slowing us down, are you, bartender? Serving us the cinematic equivalent of vodka and Red Bull, so now we're—wait—we're not feeling so good. Weren't we level-headed with Gandalf before that CGI column obstructed our view? We were, and now we're still following the Fellowship, only from a lower angle of framing, and—

He didn't look that big before, or so up. Why's he so up?

The dwarf too? The dwarf is up? Where are we? What happened to us? We were all level-headed with them, and now they're all up, like we've—

That's the ceiling. We're lying with our backs to the floor, aren't we? We most certainly are. It's difficult to tell with the screen shots, but if you look at the film itself, it's clear that as we passed behind the CGI column Jackson tripped us because that's the fucking ceiling. But at least now we know where we are and can predict what shot'll come next. We'll get a slightly low-angled shot of the fellowship abandoning us to our inevitable—

Or Jackson'll take a page from New Age out-of-body narratives and hover us a half-mile above our proxied body like the ignorant chump he's proving us to be with every subsequent shot. Why is this sequence (and what follows) so re-watchable? Because even if you break it down before a class so often you think you can reconstruct it in your sleep, convention is the default, and you can't escape it. So every time you watch it, you think you'll know what it'll be like, and every time you watch it, you're wrong.

Tomorrow I'll finish this up by writing more about how uncomfortable Superman's director's boots are and why wizards are more intimidating than 500 foot tall fire monsters.

Damn it, Bill

I defended Obama against Althouse et al.‘s unfounded and visually illiterate accusations, but I just can’t bring myself to back the Big Dog when he’s so obviously enjoying the view:

Because nobody has any other reason to read.

LITTLE KID comes to SEK's door to retrieve the basketball he launched onto SEK's porch.

LITTLE KID: Hi. My basketball landed on your—WOW. You have so many books!

SEK: I know, I'm a tea—

LITTLE KID: ARE YOU A WIZARD?

SEK: Why else would I have so many books?

LITTLE KID: (turning around) MOM HE'S A WIZARD! I MET A WIZARD!

SEK: Let me get you your—

LITTLE KID: WIIIIIIZZZZZZAAAAAARRRRRRDDDDDD!