You are viewing page 4 of 15.
Jun 7, 2011
By David Brown | Posted at 8:14:5
Sympathy for Monsters: Reflecting on the Film 'Let Me In' (3 Quarks Daily 6-6-11)
In his treatise, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke wrote: “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” The extent to which this is true is beyond our concern, but there is little doubt fear often puts rationality in a cage, chains the door and kicks it into a silent corner. It is this reaction that great horror writers, from Edgar Allan Poe to Clive Barker and Stephen King to John Ajvide Lindqvist, have sought in their works. It is not the alien beings or giant monsters which terrify us as readers, but often human characters portrayed in vulnerable positions fighting to escape the horror of their sudden environment.
May 20, 2011
By David Brown | Posted at 15:14:57
Man admits having sex with 1,000 cars (UK Telegraph 5-21-11)
Edward Smith, who lives with his current “girlfriend”— a white Volkswagen Beetle named Vanilla, insisted that he was not “sick” and had no desire to change his ways.
Mr Smith, 57, first had sex with a car at the age of 15, and claims he has never been attracted to women or men.
But his wandering eye has spread beyond cars to other vehicles. He says that his most intense sexual experience was “making love” to the helicopter from 1980s TV hit Airwolf.
May 9, 2011
By David Brown | Posted at 15:53:23
Kiev's Topless Protestors—'The Entire Ukraine Is a Brothel' (Der Spiegel 5-5-11)
Inna Shevchenko, 20, a student from Kiev, is a “Topless Fighter,” as activists with the women's rights group Femen call themselves. For two years, the organization has been fighting against sex tourism and prostitution in Ukraine, a country that even Google automatically associates with “dating agencies” and “women.” The advertisements to the right of a Google search for “Ukraine” are for “Single Ukrainian Ladies,” “Women From Ukraine,” or “Partner Search Ukraine.” Although the group has only a few dozen activists like Inna and around 300 supporters, the topless protests have established a global reputation for Femen.
By David Brown | Posted at 15:8:11
Slutwalking phenomenon comes to UK (UK Guardian 5-9-11)
Thousands of women are set to take to the streets in cities across the UK after the remarks of a Canadian police officer, who advised women “to avoid dressing as sluts” if they did not want to be harassed, sparked a worldwide protest movement.
Apr 20, 2011
By David Brown | Posted at 10:47:33
Buster Keaton and the World of Objects (LA Review of Books 4-19-11)
You know where you are with a baseball bat. It's not that way with books. (It's not that way with many things.) And sometimes, when it suits him, it isn't even that way with baseball bats either. There are times when, for the sake of a laugh, or a charity game, or in the movie One Run Elmer, Keaton will put on a show with a bat made of plaster of Paris, or he'll pack explosive in the tip so that it blows up on contact with the ball, but that's OK: this is only appearance. It's all part of the show, and he's the one running it.
And that's how it is with the rest of Buster's universe. Things are clearly not to be trusted. The chair will collapse, the plank will hit you in the face, the gun will misfire, the car will die on the railroad tracks, the boat will sink, the balloon will escape gravity and take you with it. The only answer is to make sure those objects are in fact props. Once things are scripted, then everything's all right, he's in control, the objects will do his bidding. People less so.
By David Brown | Posted at 10:34:29
Dangerous Arts by Salman Rushdie (NY Times 4-19-11)
Last October the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei covered the floor with his “Sunflower Seeds”: 100 million tiny porcelain objects, each handmade by a master craftsman, no two identical. The installation was a carpet of life, multitudinous, inexplicable and, in the best Surrealist sense, strange. The seeds were intended to be walked on, but further strangeness followed. It was discovered that when trampled they gave off a fine dust that could damage the lungs. These symbolic representations of life could, it appeared, be dangerous to the living. The exhibition was cordoned off and visitors had to walk carefully around the perimeter.
Art can be dangerous. Very often artistic fame has proved dangerous to artists themselves. Mr. Ai's work is not polemical—it tends towards the mysterious. But his immense prominence as an artist (he was a design consultant on the “bird's nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics and was recently ranked No. 13 in Art Review magazine's list of the 100 most powerful figures in art) has allowed him to take up human rights cases and to draw attention to China's often inadequate responses to disasters (like the plight of the child victims of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province or those afflicted by deadly apartment fires in Shanghai last November). The authorities have embarrassed and harassed him before, but now they have gone on a dangerous new offensive.
By David Brown | Posted at 8:42:29
What makes Americans and Europeans happy? (PhysOrg 4-19-11)
According to a new research study, Europeans are happier when they have a day off and work less, while their American counterparts would rather be working those extra hours.
By David Brown | Posted at 8:39:20
Martin Amis bemoans England's 'moral decrepitude' (UK GUardian 4-18-11)
The novel Amis is currently working on, State of England, will, he believes, “be considered as the final insult” to his country. The story of a violent criminal, Lionel Asbo, who wins the lottery, it's “a metaphor which translates well, I think, our state of moral decrepitude: a huge reward for no effort”.
“You can have no talent, no ambition, and you win all the same. All young people dream of that. Young girls dream of becoming models. Celebrity is the new religion,” said Amis. “So it's a book about the decline of my country, about the rage, the dissatisfaction, the bitterness, all unconscious, caused by this decline … One can have the impression that life in London is pretty pleasant. But all is rotten inside.”
Amis is made most angry by Britain's “superficiality”, by its tabloids, by “all these excited models and these rock stars in short shorts”. But he “adores” the English themselves: “they have spirit, they are tolerant, full of good humour”, he said, also praising Shakespeare – “an absolute giant”, and the UK's “very advanced” political system. “We had a revolution 100 years before France, and our civil war was not so horrible.”
By David Brown | Posted at 7:56:56
Young people would miss mobiles and web more than TV, Ofcom survey says (UK Telegraph 4-20-11)
People aged 16 to 24 say they would miss their mobile phones and the internet more than television, according to research by communications regulator Ofcom. The result is the first time that young people have indicated that television is not their most important type of media.
Although TV remains the media that would be missed the most for the UK as a whole, its popularity is declining: 44 per cent of the population said they would notice its loss the most, compared to 50 per cent in 2009.
By contrast, 16-24 year-olds already value mobile phones and the web more than television. Approximately 28 per cent said their phones and 26 per cent said the web were the media they would miss most, compared to 23 per cent citing television.
Apr 18, 2011
By David Brown | Posted at 15:34:41
Why our happiness begins all over again at 50 (UK Daily Mail 4-18-11)
For those aged in their 30s and 40s feeling down in the dump, don't worry—happiness is just around the corner.
Economists have found that despite a mid-life dip, people start to feel more content with their life after the age of 50.
The 'U-shaped' happiness curve shows that being satisfied with life starts to fall while in the early 20s and does not improve until after 50, where it goes on to rise higher than before.
But despite those who are aged 65 or over generally believing it is nicer to be 25, they are happier than when they were at that age.
You are viewing page 4 of 15.
