Category: the petri dish

Ruminator magazine just posted a longish and quite funny excerpt of an interview with Fran Lebowitz, from their upcoming fall issue.

SM: I find [Vincent D’Onofrio’s] monologue at the end of every episode [of Criminal Intent]-where he wraps everything up neatly and corners the bad guy into confessing’comforting, even if it’s the most unrealistic part of the show.

FL: You know, the reason it’s comforting is that it provides people who are disturbed with how idiotic the world is, with the idea that’should there be a very smart person in a terrible situation’ that person would be listened to. That’s the thing that really attracts me to this show. Now, we all know that this guy would never be a cop. But we also know something much, much worse than that: anytime a person that smart appears someplace useful in society, they are not going to be listened to. Whereas, on this TV show, everyone, including his superiors, listens to him. More than that, they completely defer to him’ the D.A., his captain. Why? Just because he’s smarter. We know the world works in exactly the opposite way. So, this kind of show provides a parallel universe for people who wish that were true. If life were anything like that TV show, George Bush could never be President. It just couldn’t happen if exceptional intelligence were highly valued. In fact, we live in a culture where intelligence, exceptional or not, is reviled.

Alex forwaded me a message from Audioslave‘s mailing list, in which the band announces that they will be performing in La Havana, Cuba.

[A]udioslave are set to become the first U.S. rock band to perform outdoors in Cuba, sharing the stage with their Cuban music counterparts.

The group, currently touring in support of their upcoming sophomore release, “Out of Exile,” accommodated their touring schedule to be able to give a special performance May 6 at La Tribuna in Havana, Cuba. The concert will be free and open to the Cuban public. In the past, the open air venue has accommodated up to 1 million people.

The performance, the first open air concert by a U.S. rock band in Cuba, was authorized by the U.S. Treasury Department and the Instituto Cubano de la Musica.

All I can say is, lucky bastards.

Wired Magazine reports that legislation that would allow viewers to automatically skip over what is considered “objectionable content” in DVDs passed through the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property and looks to be “on the fast track”

The legislation would essentially affirm the legality of software such as ClearPlay, which automatically edits supposedly objectionable scenes out of popular movie titles. Several DVD players now come ClearPlay-enabled and work with more than 1,000 movie titles.

Some Hollywood directors and studios have complained that such filtering violates their copyright by altering their works without permission. S167/HR357, however, would sanction the practice.

And if it can soon be done with movies, how long before it happens with books?

Thanks to David for the link.

Salam Pax has parlayed his blog into a documentary film about Baghdad, which has recently been screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival.

Following the fascination with the writing of Salam Pax – not his real name – he began a regular column in The Guardian newspaper and was given a crash course in documentary film-making.

For the film he travelled Iraq to document the changing landscape of the country and the problems it has faced since the invasion, speaking to ordinary Iraqis about their experiences.

Washingtonienne, call your agent.

Blogging Sundance is a cool little blog with lots of on-site coverage of the festival. A couple of days ago, for instance, there was an item about filmmaker Jacqueline Salloum who’s there to present her short film, Planet of the Arabs, which is based on the (must-read) book by Jack Shaheen–Reel Bad Arabs.

For those who may not have noticed, the latest example of cliche-ridden portrayals of Middle-Eastern people comes courtesy of TV series 24, except now the bad Muslims happen to be an entire family (Mom, Dad, and Kiddo terrorists). Just in case you were wondering whether you should trust the people next door, 24 gives you the answer.

On the other hand, the writers of the ABC drama Lost managed to craft a credible, complex Arab character (played by British-Asian actor Naveen Andrews) that keeps me tuning in every Wednesday. But for every Sayid in Lost there’s a hundred other characters like the Arazes in 24. I guess that means we have to go to a deserted island instead of a suburb to find some good A-rabs.

In a fascinating article for the SF Chronicle, Jonathan Curiel examines Islamic inspirations in modern American architecture, including the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco and the Civic Center in San Rafael, California. The influence dates back at least to the late 19th century, earlier if one counts Moorish trends, which came to the Southwest by way of former Spanish citizens. The slide show for the article contains a shot of the Berkeley City Club, which was designed by one of my favorite architects, Julia Morgan. Morgan’s best-known building, Hearst Castle, also contains patterns drawn from Moorish/Islamic architecture.

But perhaps the most interesting bit of information in Curiel’s article is that Minoru Yamasaki, the man who designed the World Trade Center in 1965, spent considerable time in Saudi Arabia, and used patterns he’d seen in Mecca in his own work, including in the famed Twin Towers. (It’s highly ironic that some thirty-five years later, religious fanatics would consider the building, designed by a Japanese American architect, using Islamic designs at the base and in the plaza, and housing people of a multitude of backgrounds and faiths, to be the symbol of the America they wanted to destroy.) The work was an example of cultural cross-pollination; Muslim architects themselves had borrowed from Byzantine designs.

“Cultures have constantly mixed and seen one another, either in war or peace,” [MIT Professor Nasser Rabbat] says. “It used to be that people thought of the world in terms of purely, independently developed cultures each having its own language, whether it’s culinary, visual, literary, architectural.

“But there are those of us who subscribe to the multicultural method, where we no longer believe in the notion of a purity and insularity of a cultural development. … The influence is continuous, mutual and never ceases. ”

Read the rest of this article, and find out how the city of Opa-locka, Florida, came to be known as the Baghdad of the South.