From this dubious core, however, the film sprawls in improbable directions, becoming, among other things, Tarantino’s most explicit movie about the movies to date. A French Jew (Melanie Laurent) escapes a death squad and reinvents herself as the proprietress of a Paris movie house, only to find herself romanced by a young German war hero and budding film star (Daniel Bruhl) who plays himself in a Nazi propaganda film. Meanwhile, another German star, Bridget von Hammersmark (a very good Diane Kruger), is conspiring with the Allies against Hitler, her primary contact being a British commando (Michael Fassbender) who is also a film critic (!) and an expert on German cinema. (One of Tarantino’s better inside jokes is to have the German-born Fassbender playing a Brit who impersonates a Nazi and jeopardizes the mission with his imperfect accent.) There is a discussion regarding whether Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), who among other duties oversaw the German film industry, preferred to be compared to Louis B. Mayer or David O. Selznick. Several characters are named in homage to B-movie stars (Raine, a play on Aldo Ray, and Hugo Stiglitz among them), and the Italian western and crime-film director Enzo G. Castellari, who directed the original 1978 Inglorious Bastards (from which this movie borrowed its title but nothing else), has a cameo as a mid-century version of himself. The whole affair culminates with a massive, murderous set piece at the movie house, which testifies to the purifying power of film as a political medium and film stock as a combustion agent.

more from Christopher Orr at TNR here.

James Ensor is the master of the mask—literally. In Self-Portrait with Masks (1899), the artist paints himself in the middle of a carnival throng. Only the heads are visible in the perspective, the bodies blocked by an agglomeration of weird and scary faces. Near the center of the canvas is the artist himself, looking a little apprehensive, but very human in comparison to the ghouls, demons, monsters and skulls hemming him in on all sides. The painting begs questions about an artist who never managed to fit in. No wonder his anti-heroic stance inspired the alternative rock band, They Might Be Giants, to cut their 1994 single, “Meet James Ensor.” The song title isn’t ironic. Although Ensor is well known in Belgium—the old 100 Franc bank note even sported his portrait —his fame does not always spread beyond Northern Europe.

more from Dawn-Michelle Baude at artcrtical here.

A cinephile would have to delve deep into the industry vaults of spooled monochrome to find a more beautiful ongoing collaboration than that developed by director Guy Maddin and actress Isabella Rossellini. The best comparisons would, no doubt, include the sensual ennui of Monica Vitti reified through the lens of Antonioni or the baroque stare of Liv Ullmann captured in the snow-globe world of Bergman. Few images are more excitingor iconographic than the female form, frenzied or subdued. While this cinematic tradition has been explored in Roland Barthes’s ode to the face of Garbo—which he compares to “mystical feelings of perdition”—it is Jean-Luc Godard’s glib observation that is the most quotable: “The history of cinema is boys photographing girls.” In contrast to the patriarchal tradition that enjoined the elder, virile artist with his female ingénues, the Maddin/Rossellini relationship is a thoroughly postcoital affair. From their first collaboration in The Saddest Music in the World (2003) to their most recent loop Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair (2009), they have consistently traded gendered representations of masculine power for a bunco scam of sexual aporias. As a director and an actress whose bond might very well be called “epicene,” resistant to the psychology of the domineering male artiste but also shedding the habiliments of dowager feminism, their creative romance resides in androgyny.

more from the chat at Bomb Magazine here.

Veronique Greenwood in Seed Magazine:

In a famous set of experiments in the 1970s, children were observed trick-or-treating in the suburbs. Some were asked their names and addresses upon arriving at a door, while some were asked nothing. All were instructed to take just one piece of candy from the bowl, but as soon as the owner of the home retreated into the kitchen, the children who hadn’t provided their names and addresses shoveled the candy into their bags, sometimes taking everything in the bowl. Psychologists posited that anonymity made the children feel safe from the repercussions of their actions, an effect they call deindividuation.

Moral psychologists have since constructed myriad experiments to probe the workings of human morality, studying how we decide to cheat or to play by the rules, to lie or to tell the truth. And the results can be surprising, even disturbing. For instance, we have based our society on the assumption that deciding to lie or to tell the truth is within our conscious control. But Harvard’s Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton say this assumption may be flawed and are probing whether honesty may instead be the result of controlling a desire to lie (a conscious process) or of not feeling the temptation to lie in the first place (an automatic process). “When we are honest, are we honest because we actively force ourselves to be? Or are we honest because it flows naturally?” Greene asks.

More here.

A Music

I employ the blind mandolin player
in the the tunnel of the Mètro. I pay him
a coin as hard as his notes,
and maybe he has employed me, and pays me
with his playing to hear him play.

Maybe we're necessary to each other,
and this vacant place has need of us both
––it's vacant, I mean, of dwellers,
is populated by passages and absences.

By some fate or knack he has chosen
to place his music in this cavity
where there's nothing to look at
and blindness costs him nothing.
Nothing was here before he came.

His music goes out among the sounds
of footsteps passing. The tunnel is the resonance
and meaning of what he plays.
It's his music, not the place, I go by.

In this light which is just a fact, like darkness
or the edge or end of what you may be
going toward, he turns his cap up on his knees
and leaves it there to ask and wait, and holds up
his mandolin, the lantern of his world;

his fingers make their pattern on the wires.
This is not the pursuing of rhythm
of a blind cane pecking in the sun,
but is a singing in a dark place.

by Wendell Berry

From The Telegraph:

Margaret Atwood’s smiling face is extraordinarily close to mine. A fraction of a second later and it is further away, held at a different angle. I did not see it move. “I am talking to you remotely because we are social beings and we like to interact,’’ she says. “We like to look at other human beings a lot. Magazines, newspapers, video conferencing, television… spying.’’ We are conversing via a large screen, while an ocean apart; she is in Toronto where it is 6am. The image on my screen is not continuous; rather, it is like a fast sequence of still photographs. Atwood, her eyes bright and humorous, appears very much at ease with the whizz-bang technology.

The uses of technology figure large in her new novel, The Year of the Flood; it is a richly imagined vision of the near-future and is a sister volume to an earlier Booker-shortlisted work, Oryx and Crake. Indeed, some of the characters overlap. Here, through the eyes of two female characters, Toby and Ren, we learn of the days that lead up to a horrible pandemic that ravages humanity – forget coughs and sneezes, here people melt. There is enviro-religion, overweening science, hideous sex clubs, nightmare food, grotesque cosmetic surgery. And there are also bees.

More here.

From Science:

Adventure stories and horror movies ramp up the tension when hapless characters walk in circles. The Blair Witch Project, for example, wouldn't have been half as scary if those students had managed to walk in a straight line out of the forest. But is this navigation glitch real or just a handy plot device? A new study finds that people really do tend to walk in circles when they lack landmarks to guide them. The idea for the study came from a German science television show called Kopfball (literally, “head ball,” as in soccer), which tries to answer viewers' questions, says the study's first author, Jan Souman, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. The producers contacted Souman and his colleagues, who study perception and action, to find out if the common belief about walking in circles was true. “We didn't really know, but we thought it was an interesting question,” Souman says. So the researchers collaborated with the program, resulting in an episode that aired in 2007.

More here.

Neve Gordon in the Los Angeles Times:

The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state. For more than 42 years, Israel has controlled the land between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Within this region about 6 million Jews and close to 5 million Palestinians reside. Out of this population, 3.5 million Palestinians and almost half a million Jews live in the areas Israel occupied in 1967, and yet while these two groups live in the same area, they are subjected to totally different legal systems. The Palestinians are stateless and lack many of the most basic human rights. By sharp contrast, all Jews — whether they live in the occupied territories or in Israel — are citizens of the state of Israel.

The question that keeps me up at night, both as a parent and as a citizen, is how to ensure that my two children as well as the children of my Palestinian neighbors do not grow up in an apartheid regime.

There are only two moral ways of achieving this goal.

The first is the one-state solution: offering citizenship to all Palestinians and thus establishing a bi-national democracy within the entire area controlled by Israel. Given the demographics, this would amount to the demise of Israel as a Jewish state; for most Israeli Jews, it is anathema.

The second means of ending our apartheid is through the two-state solution, which entails Israel's withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders (with possible one-for-one land swaps), the division of Jerusalem, and a recognition of the Palestinian right of return with the stipulation that only a limited number of the 4.5 million Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to Israel, while the rest can return to the new Palestinian state.

More here.

Nina Shen Rastogi in Slate:

Back in the 1980s, when the Lantern herself was just a little penlight, acid rain was the environmental scourge of the day. Canada's environmental minister proclaimed it an “insidious malaria of the biosphere“; it menaced the Transformers; it turned Kimberly's hair bright green in an episode of Diff'rent Strokes. Toxic precipitation fell off the radar in 1990, when Congress passed an amendment to the Clean Air Act calling for major reductions in the types of emissions that lead to acid rain. Emissions have dropped significantly since then, but the problem is far from gone.

Acid rain occurs when sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides—gases released by the burning of fossil fuel—form acidic compounds in the atmosphere. These fall back to earth in rain, snow, or sleet or as dry particles or gases. (At high altitudes and along coastlines, bits of acid suspended in clouds or fog pose an additional threat.)

Back in acid rain's heyday as a public menace, scientists focused on how it wrecked lakes and streams, making the water toxic to fish and other organisms and threatening sensitive tree populations like the red spruce in the Northeast mountains. In later years, they began to understand how acidification can also cause imbalances in soil chemistry, exacerbating problems for watersheds and plant life.

More here.

Cassandra Willyard in Science:

Don't hate those people who are perky and efficient after only a few hours of sleep. They can't help it. New research suggests that a genetic mutation may explain why some people sleep less.

Researchers don't know exactly why some people do fine with as little as 4 hours of sleep a night, while others need 12. “We've believed for a long time that there's a genetic basis,” says Paul Shaw, a neurobiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. But scientists have only recently begun to ferret out which genes are responsible.

In 2001, geneticist Ying-Hui Fu and colleagues identified a mutation in a gene called Per2 that appeared to cause familial advanced sleep-phase syndrome (FASPS). People who have this condition sleep a normal 8 hours, but they go to bed earlier than most people, retiring at 6 or 7 in the evening and waking at 3 or 4 in the morning. “After that was published, a lot of these people [with unusual sleep schedules] came to us,” says Fu, who is now at the University of California, San Francisco. “So we started to collect DNA samples.” The team now has genetic information from more than 60 families.

More here.

Karan Thapar interviews Jaswant Singh in IBN Politics:

Monday sees the publication of a biography of Mohammed Ali Jinnah which challenges the way we in India have seen the founder of Pakistan. It reassess Nehru's role in Partition, it sheds fresh light on the relationship between the Mahatma Gandhi and Jinnah.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jaswant Singh’s book is likely to attract considerable attention and may be even a fair amount of controversy. Karan Thapar, in a special two-part interview with the author, discusses the book with Singh, a former defence, foreign and finance minister of India and also a former soldier.

Karan Thapar: Mr Jaswant Singh, let's start by establishing how you as the author view Mohammed Ali Jinnah? After reading your book, I get the feeling that you don't subscribe to the popular demonisation of the man.

Jaswant Singh: Of course, I don't. To that I don’t subscribe. I was attracted by the personality which has resulted in a book. If I wasn't drawn to the personality, I wouldn't have written the book. It's an intricate, complex personality of great character, determination.

More here. [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Cohen began his musical career suspended between song and speech. In 1967, “Songs of Leonard Cohen” introduced listeners to Cohen’s strong nasal tenor, which suited the casual roué he conjured on songs like “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne.” The production is spare: mostly acoustic instruments and, at Cohen’s request, no drums. Though he is working in Bob Dylan’s shadow, his manner is more relaxed and his visions are slightly less gnomic: “I lit a thin green candle, to make you jealous of me. But the room just filled up with mosquitoes—they heard that my body was free,” he sings, in “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong.” An unadorned style has served Cohen’s albums best, the voice clean and clearly audible. In 1977, for the album “Death of a Ladies’ Man,” Cohen’s uneasy collaboration with the producer Phil Spector—who excluded him from the final mixing sessions—resulted in a dreadful mix of pop, country, and some weird variant of disco. (Cohen later called it “grotesque.”) By the time of “I’m Your Man,” which came out in 1988, Cohen was composing on keyboard rather than on his nylon-string acoustic guitar. Synthesizers add a bright and lapidary quality that doesn’t always fit the lyrics. But the songs—about desire and aging—are stunning, and Cohen’s voice has shed its honking quality and grown darker and looser, like a tire ripped open.

more from Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker here.

Flaubert thought Stoke-on-Trent was called Stoke-on-Trend, a happy delusion which would have amused Arnold Bennett. Bennett admired Balzac, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Emile Zola, and wrote to André Gide in 1920 that he suspected the French tended to despise English fiction as “rather barbaric, lacking in finesse and civilized breadth”. (In correspondence with Gide, he displayed a tendency to defend his own artistic credentials and aspirations to modernity. With other correspondents, he sometimes adopted a worldlier stance, though he never lapsed into the philistinism which some of his comic characters so triumphantly display.) French realism and its successor naturalism were, when Bennett was young, the avant-garde, and some of their freedoms were deeply shocking to what he called the BP (the British Public). The BP lagged far behind the French. It is startling to discover that Bennett was asked to remove the line “I am going to have a baby” from the serialization of one of his later novels in 1922. It is true that Flaubert and Zola had run into serious trouble with censorship, but not quite of this simplistic nature. It was Bennett’s misfortune that during his lifetime realism came to be seen not as radical but as reactionary. Its groundbreaking efforts were dismissed en bloc by some younger critics, as a self-conscious modernism began to push towards the centre stage. Bennett was a very trend-conscious man, both for good and ill, and much disliked the notion of being classed as one of the old guard. He preferred the young.

more from Margaret Drabble at the TLS here.

Communion at the Gate Theater

This is the time of life when a woman
goes to Dublin to the theatre to get away
the night every Leaving Cert student in Ireland
is up from the country to see the same RSC production.

Hamlet is small and elegant and very English. What did
she expect – that after all those years
he would have grown really Danish, the lies
would be less eloquent, gestures less fluid?

Tonight she finds the prince tedious and self-obsessed.
You are thirty years old for Christ’s sake,
she shouts, startling the audience.
The students are disapproving, then delighted.

Now that they have stopped texting one another,
the girls are shaping some of the words.
There is Royal Shakespearean body language
between Claudius and Gertrude.

The boys whistle, applaud uneasily.
The woman thinks Gertrude is entitled to her lover’s kiss.
What kind of twisted little shit are you?
she asks Hamlet, but silently. Hamlet is relentless.

The actor fifty if he’s a day, torturing his mother
who is the same age. No one cares.
It is as bad as MacLiammoir playing Romeo.
The kids are loving it. We are rearing

a generation of throwbacks, she thinks,
without Latin to sustain them, much less history.
She checks the exits, measures her chances. She rises
in a crouch just as a hush is spreading through the house.

Here and there along the rows the students begin
To mouth Hamlet’s soliloquy. The half-formed faces
half-lit are devout. At What is a man if his chief good be…
but to sleep…the ungodly voices join in as at Mass.

by Mary O’Malley

from: A Perfect V; Carcanet, Manchester, 2006

From The Guardian:

After living and working in London for more than a decade, I moved back to Pakistan just over a year ago – and soon realised that the Pakistan I knew had migrated elsewhere. Mainly to the front covers of the sombre current affairs magazines you find in posh dentists' waiting rooms. The world's media had reached a consensus that I had boarded a sinking ship. Time, Newsweek and the Economist have all written an obituary of Pakistan, some twice over. The more caring ones are still holding a wake.

A couple of years ago when we decided to return, Pakistan wasn't exactly the world's safest destination. It was fighting its demons of poverty, the Taliban and a military dictatorship that fostered them. But it very much belonged in this world: a new bank was going up on every street corner and a new generation of media, telecom and property professionals was working overtime to sell bits of the country to each other. It seems that between us negotiating with the removal men and stocking up on jars of Marmite, the various editorial boards across the western world decided that the end of the world was nigh and it would all begin in Pakistan. Channan, my 11-year-old born-and-bred-in- London son, was so miffed by this that when he saw some white people at Karachi airport, he whispered furiously: “What are they doing here? Don't they know it's not a tourist country. They are always saying it's a terrorist country.”

More here.

Huda Akil in Science:

Among her many talents, my granddaughter Sophie, who has just turned 2*, has a clear vision of what would make her happy, coupled with the persuasive skills and executive function to make it happen. “Slide?” she says, cocking her head to one side, meaning the nearby park in New York City, which has slides, swings, and a sandbox. I'm tired and would really rather not, having planned a quieter evening of baby-sitting her, with books and toys. I try to distract her but to no avail. “Slide,” she repeats, forgoing the questioning tone and nodding her head repeatedly, as if to hypnotize me into agreement. To remove all obstacles, she fetches her sand pail, wedges her shovel and ball neatly into it, and repeats, even more assertively: “Slide, Tayta” (i.e., Grandma). “Go to slide.” She brings me my shoes and my purse and waits expectantly at the door. Of course, I succumb.

At the park, we hit the sandbox first. Sophie is delighted except for a pesky problem–the sand getting into her sandals, seeping between her toes. Intermittently, she stops her play to clean it off. A teachable moment, I think–if you can't get rid of it, embrace it! I persuade her to take off her sandals and dig her feet into the sand. She is hesitant at first but humors me and then starts wiggling her toes and laughing. She pours a bucketful of sand over her feet with glee. “Tayta, take off shoes,” she commands, with the repeated nodding. “In for a penny,” I think to myself, and off come my shoes. Of course, I'm persuaded to stick them in deeper as Sophie pours her bucketfuls onto them. Amazingly, the sand feels great on my tired feet. I would have never imagined sitting in the middle of New York City, wearing black business pants, with my feet bare, burrowed into the sand. But it makes her happy, I think to myself, with a smile. It makes me happy, I realize! Then I have an odd thought–where is “happy” in my brain?

More here.

Robert Mackey in the New York Times:

On Wednesday in Tehran, the reformist cleric Mehdi Karroubi asked to meet with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other senior Iranian officials to present “documents and evidence” supporting his claims that some protesters detained during post-election demonstrations in Iran had been raped in custody.

Mr. Karroubi, one of the candidates in the June 12 presidential election, which the opposition continues to insist was rigged, made his call for a meeting in a letter to Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament. He also published the letter online (in Persian).

According to a Reuters translation, Mr. Karroubi asked Mr. Larijani to organize a meeting with Mr. Ahmadinejad and other senior figures, including Mr. Larijani’s brother, Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani, who is the new head of Iran’s judiciary, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who leads a powerful clerical body and has supported the opposition. If the meeting were to take place, Mr. Karroubi promised he would “personally present my documents and evidence over the cases of sexual abuse in some prisons.”

More here.

Dale Keiger in Johns Hopkins Magazine:

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that livestock and poultry produce 335 million tons of manure per year, which is one way resistant pathogens get out of animals and into the environment. That's 40 times as much fecal waste as humans produce annually. Farms use it for fertilizer and collect it in sheds and manure lagoons, but those containment measures do not prevent infectious microbes from getting into the air, soil, and water. They can be transported off the farms by the animals themselves, houseflies, farm trucks, and farm workers, and by spreading manure on other fields. Out in the environment, they form a sort of bank of genetic material that enables the spread of resistance.

Kellogg Schwab, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Water and Health, refers to a typical pig farm manure lagoon that he sampled. “There were 10 million E. coli per liter [of sampled waste]. Ten million. And you have a hundred million liters in some of those pits. So you can have trillions of bacteria present, of which 89 percent are resistant to drugs. That's a massive amount that in a rain event can contaminate the environment.”

He adds, “This development of drug resistance scares the hell out of me. If we continue on and we lose the ability to fight these microorganisms, a robust, healthy individual has a chance of dying, where before we would be able to prevent that death.” Schwab says that if he tried, he could not build a better incubator of resistant pathogens than a factory farm.

More here.