Video: Julie London – Cry Me a River
Video: Julie London – My Baby Just Cares for Me
Video: Julie London – You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To”
Video: Julie London – Bye Bye Blackbird
Sunday Playlist: Julie London
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Monthly Archives: January 2010
Film flashback: Born Yesterday
William Holden & Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday
The highlight of my weekend was seeing a classic film I hadn’t seen before: Born Yesterday, starring Judy Holliday and William Holden. I’m not sure how I missed this one in the past. Judy Holliday is outstanding in this, coarse (check out her shouting “What?” in the clip above) yet sexy and sweet, and smarter than anyone thinks. She’s the prototype for all the not-so-ditzy blondes in film — Legally Blonde, Clueless, any early Goldie Hawn movie.
The plot hasn’t aged too well. With its focus on the evils of business trying to influence government, it looks pretty naive these days — or maybe it could serve as a reminder of how things ought to be. But the characters are as fresh as ever.
The gin game scene from Born Yesterday
One Too Many Mornings — new indie film, new indie film distribution strategy
Trailer for One Too Many Mornings
Each year it becomes harder for an independent filmmaker (or anyone) to release a movie. Making a movie is hard; distributing it is nigh on impossible.
So it’s interesting to see a filmmaker taking the simplest approach and releasing a movie straight to DVD and to web purchase and download. John August featured the micro-budget One Too Many Mornings on his blog and highlighted their distribution strategy (brief overview post; brief review post), and in the comments of the first post he, blog readers, and the film’s director Michael Mohan are having a discussion about how the film was financed and made, the web software being used to market and distribute the film, and more. Terrific info for anyone in indie film, but also thought-provoking for anyone creating media and considering alternative or straight-to-the-public distribution (fiction and nonfiction, video, podcasts, art).
I particularly love the bundles in which you can buy the DVD. In the Limited Edition Deluxe Package ($34.99) for example, you get a piece of the film’s set: “Yes, literally a scrap from the upholstery of the couch used in the main set of One Too Many Mornings.” It comes with a certificate of authenticity. Buy it now!
Bringing Mr. Sandman back to life
The first horror movie I saw in a theater was Halloween 2. I had seen nothing as terrifying before, and it scarred my psyche. One major result was that I could no longer hear the song “Mr. Sandman,” which was featured in the movie. Previously I thought of it — if I thought of it at all — as a light pop hit; now it had become a harbinger of extreme danger.
Today on last.fm I heard for the first time a newer version of the song, performed by the San Francisco band Oranger. “Hey,” I thought, “this is pretty good. Kinda rockin’. Maybe now I can finally overcome my irrational fear of Mr. Sandman.”
Then I looked up the video:
Oranger – Mr. Sandman (Stubbs the Zombie)
It seems that Oranger’s “Mr. Sandman” is on the soundtrack for the Stubbs the Zombie video game.
I may never sleep again.
There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ‘ya ’bout the raising of the wrist
I had dinner last night with a friend visiting from out-of-town, and eventually the conversation turned, as it will, to philosophy.
Which philosopher’s view is closest to yours? my friend asked.
I said I can’t remember any more which philosopher said what, but that I probably agreed with the thinking of one of the guys in Monty Python’s “Philosophers Drinking Song.”
Never heard of it, my friend said.
Never heard of it? Shock, surprise, lamentation! A classic Monty Python sketch, and so useful if you need a sing-along during a long car ride.
“The Philosophers’ Drinking Song,” Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl
Of course, this doesn’t address the question of which philosophy comes closest to what I believe. Fortunately, the Internet is here to help us answer that question:
| See more Philosophy selector quizzes @ SelectSmart.com® Ethical Philosophy Selector Quiz Here’s my top result for this selector quiz by SelectSmart.com Staff: |
|
| John Stuart Mill | |
My “Ethical Philosophy Selector Rankings”:
1. John Stuart Mill (100 %)
2. Epicureans (90 %)
3. Aristotle (87 %)
4. Jeremy Bentham (82 %)
5. Aquinas (75 %)
6. Ayn Rand (75 %)
7. Kant (71 %)
8. Jean-Paul Sartre (67 %)
9. Spinoza (65 %)
10. Prescriptivism (58 %)
11. Cynics (51 %)
12. David Hume (51 %)
13. Stoics (51 %)
14. St. Augustine (47 %)
15. Ockham (45 %)
16. Thomas Hobbes (42 %)
17. Nietzsche (41 %)
18. Nel Noddings (38 %)
19. Plato (37 %)
Interestingly (to me), John Stuart Mill has always been the name I have trouble remembering in the Pholosophers Drinking Song. After today, I shall never have that problem again.
Which philosopher do you most agree with?
UPDATE: If you can’t quite recall what it is that John Stuart Mill proposed, his philosophy is known as utilitarianism. Summary from Wikipedia:
Mill’s famous formulation of utilitarianism is known as the “greatest-happiness principle”. It holds that one must always act so as to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, within reason. Mill’s major contribution to utilitarianism is his argument for the qualitative separation of pleasures. Bentham treats all forms of happiness as equal, whereas Mill argues that intellectual and moral pleasures are superior to more physical forms of pleasure. Mill distinguishes between happiness and contentment, claiming that the former is of higher value than the latter, a belief wittily encapsulated in the statement that “[i]t is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”
Happy (belated) birthday, David Bowie
The law of small numbers
“People’s intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well.”
From “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers,” an article by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, quoted in Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)
Those were the days
The big blogs all have theme days, and I need to get in step.
I have a plan to start Tuesday Shoe Review, in which I’ll blog footwear worthy of note. I have a great pair of shoes — boots, really — that I planned to write about tonight. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring home the cable to download photos from my camera, and i can hardly do a shoe review without a photo, can I?
So for today, we’ll instead have TV Tuesday, a new recurring theme in which I’ll write about TV shows that changed my life.
Actually, that’s all blather to introduce something that actually did affect my life. Today I saw this photo:
(via “If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger….“)
All in the Family was one of few sitcoms showing on TV when I was growing up, so I didn’t appreciate how unusual it was. And of course I couldn’t guess how influential it would be, how it would affect me and the way I thought, how it would change how sitcoms worked. For me then, it was just funny.
It still is funny. Here’s a stellar episode — the one where Maude (played by the amazing Beatrice Arthur) is introduced as a prime opponent to Archie.
Cousin Maude’s Visit: part 1 | part 2 | part 3
* Well, the Tuesday Shoe Review thing is real. I’ll start next week. !!
This will be our year
For the last few years, I’ve greeted the new year with relief … not so much a sigh of relief but more like an exhausted collapse.
My go-to song for the past few New Year’s Eves and New Year’s Days has been “What a Year for a New Year,” by Dan Wilson. Pretty song, and well-matched to that sense of exhausted relief I mentioned:
What a night for a sunrise
And we thought the dark would never end
Reaching out to try to find a friend
What a night for a sunrise
Sunrise
This year, I find a different song stuck in my head. It’s “This Will Be My Year
Counting down from ten it’s time
To make your annual prayer
Secret Santa in the sky
When will I get my shareThen you tell yourself
What you want to hear
Cause you have to believe
This will be my year
Here’s the thing: I’m feeling more hopeful this year than I typically do. It’s not clear why 2010 looks brighter than past years have. I just have a sense the universe and I are heading in the same direction right now.
So why am I humming a dryly cynical song about self-delusion at the start of a new year?
This won’t do. I’ll do better to start the year with a theme song that is upbeat, hummable, and carries no whiff of cynicism. Have any suggestions?
