How The Other Half Lives
Brian Beutler: "It occurs to em that if an Iranian leader with great visibility--say, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad--had been videotaped singing 'Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb America,' (which, yes, sounds foolish but you get the idea) it wouldn't be taken lightly here. Fox News would treat it as a sign that the regime was unstable and dangerous and, voila, we'd allow it to bring us a step closer to war." This is probably the single largest foreign policy-related failing among American politicians and members of the policy and media elites: A failure to make a serious effort to ask how things look from the perspective of other countries.
Friday Monkey-God Blogging
Bethlehem Shoals observes: "Duncan's deviousness has been obscured because his game is all old-school fundamentals, causing the media to inaccurately label Duncan the individual as stoic and wholesome. Indeed, his Chinese fans call him the 'Stone Buddha'. In reality, Duncan is more similar to Sun Wukong, the Chinese Monkey King, who liked to play pranks and acheived greatness through craftiness." Indeed. Which seems like as good a time as any to mention Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book which, unfortunately, I was first assigned to read as part of a tedious "let's read books by minority authors" course and toward which I therefore adopted the knee-jerk hostile attitude of the 19 year-old white dude.
In fact, it's a great book that, yes, is about the perplexities of Chinese-American identity but also so much more. The motif of Sun Wukong the Monkey God-King is, suffice it to say, important to the narrative. As is Vertigo. Googling around I see that there's a website with the funny name: "Tripmaster Monkey: Home of Yellow Journalism." It's a "cheeky news site for the Asia-savvy" and I'm not sure I really qualify as Asia-savvy.
UPDATE: That's Brown Recluse I'm quoting, not Shoals. Apologies for the error.
The Future
Via Tom Lee, a clip from what's apparently an even longer CGI-produced drama, made on an amateur basis by an Italian group called Cee-Gee.
I'm coming around to Tom's view that cinema can and will be made on an amateur peer-production basis and that at some point the sort of obviously competent techies who did this will hook up with some less-inept actor and writer types and produce something with more merit. One obstacle to hobbyist production of this sort, however, is that you need a confluence of interests to put it together. Commerical cinema is driven by the interaction of cost and consumer demand. Amateur cinema would be driven by producer interests. Your stereotypical techie interests -- Star Wars sequels, giant robots, etc. -- aren't the kind of projects that are likely to attract a ton of skilled actors sufficiently passionate about the endeavor to work for free.
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