People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

What Kept Grandpa Up

Great new video from anticon's The Bomarr Monk:

The Best Trial Movies

The following list is by Patric M. Verrone, in an article from the ABA journal/November 1989.

THE 12 BEST TRIAL MOVIES

1 The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
2 "M" (1931)
3 Twelve Angry Men (1957)
4 The Wrong Man (1957)
5 Paths of Glory (1958)
6 Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
7 Inherit the Wind (1960)
8 Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
9 The Trial (1962)
10 To Kill a Mockingbird (1963)
11 A Man For All Seasons (1966)
12 The Verdict (1982)

Very interesting list; I tend to agree, although I haven't seen all yet (Wrong man, Anatomy of a murder, Inherit the wind & A man for all seasons).

The one I would include as well though would be Adam's Rib. A light trial comedy but definitely top 5 material.

Lots of love to Jason Schwartzman's genes

Jason Schwartzman is a little genius in the making.

Not only is the 26-year old a fabulous actor, he also co-wrote the upcoming Wes Anderson pic The Darjeeling Limited with Wes himself and Schwartzman's cousin Roman Coppola (yeah, son & brother of). These pics were taken in India where they have just wrapped up filming the movie. Hopefully it will hit the theatres before the year is over.

But to make things even worse, I also discovered Jason's myspace page which features probably one of most fun & poppy songs of the year so far: West Coast.

So the boy can sing as well? Damn you Jason, damn you!

R.I.P. Jean Baudrillard

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images: murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacit of represenations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the real. All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on represenation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this excahnge--God, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which atttest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weighteless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.

How To Re-Interpret Old Forgotten Instruments.

Watch this enchanting palindrome performance by Dutch lute player Jozef Van Wissem and check his albums at the BVhaast online store.

Soul.

The first essential, the life and soul of Tragedy, is the plot; and then the characters come second. Compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid on without order (unity) will not give one the same pleasure as a simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait.

-- Aristotle