viz.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from YouTube

When my friend Lauren pointed out to me the following TED video on “photos that changed the world,” I thought that it would be good material for viz.  What I hadn’t realized was where Jonathan Klein’s claims would take my thinking.

Image Credit: Josh Viertel for the Atlantic

Last week, I came across an article on Civil Eats by Curt Ellis (on the left in the photo above) about the mobile farm he and Ian Cheney (on the right) spent last summer cultivating in the back of Cheney's 1986 Dodge Ram pickup truck. All three of these characters (Ellis, Cheney and the old gray Dodge) will be familiar to anyone who saw their 2007 documentary feature King Corn. In that film, the men grew a single acre of corn in a small Iowa town that had coincidentally been home to former generations of Cheneys and Ellises. This time around, they are operating what is probably the world's smallest CSA on the streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn. More on trucks, farms and films after the jump.

Image Credit: Empire Movies

There has been some controversy—though less than might be expected—about the racial politics of the new Twilight movie, New Moon.  I went to see the film the other night and while I was prepared for smoldering gazes, repressed embraces, and some retrograde gender relations, I was not prepared for its representations of race.  While several critics have protested the casting of predominately non-Native American actors in Native American roles, far less comment has been made about the portrayal of Native American characters as bare-chested pack animals that morph into wolves when they become angry. The main character in this storyline is Jacob Black who falls in love with Bella Swan and then comes down with puberty-induced werewolfism.  He and the other wolves are all members of the Quileute tribe, which long ago signed a territorial treaty with the vampires.  Sound familiar?

If you haven’t yet heard about Sita Sings the Blues, then I’ll let Roger Ebert introduce you to it:

It hardly ever happens this way. I get a DVD in the mail. I'm told it's an animated film directed by "a girl from Urbana." That's my home town. It is titled "Sita Sings the Blues." I know nothing about it, and the plot description on IMDb is not exactly a barn-burner: An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Uh, huh. I carefully file it with other movies I will watch when they introduce the 8-day week.

After Ebert decides to watch it he writes:

I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord. You might think my attention would flag while watching An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Quite the opposite. It quickens. I obtain Nina Paley's e-mail address and invite the film to my film festival in April 2009 at the University of Illinois, which by perfect synchronicity is in our home town.

To get any film made is a miracle. To conceive of a film like this is a greater miracle. How did Paley's mind work? She begins with the story of Ramayana, which is known to every school child in India but not to me. It tells the story of a brave, noble woman who was made to suffer because of the perfidy of a spineless husband and his mother. This is a story known to every school child in America. They learn it at their mother's knee. Paley depicts the story with exuberant drawings in bright colors. It is about a prince named Rama who treated Sita shamefully, although she loved him and was faithful to him.

Despite rave reviews like this one,--and winning a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival--Paley’s film has remained unavailable to most people because she was unable to clear the rights to the songs she used in the film, and the cost securing those rights scared off most distributors. Fortunately, some of these issues have been resolved, and the film is now being released to a wider audience.

If you live in New York, WNET/NY will be airing Sita on Saturday, March 7 at 10:45 (thereby atoning for this). In the meantime, you can watch the entire film online via WNET’s streaming player or download the film to watch at your leisure.

Update: here's the trailer from YouTube:

Charles Burnett’s little known and nearly plotless masterpiece, Killer of Sheep, offers a tender yet realistic vision of life in 1970s Watts, the racially segregated suburb of Los Angeles where poverty, racism, and riots doomed the area to generations of social and economic oblivion. Inspired by Italian neo-realism, Burnett’s camera lingers on characters—many played by non-actors—to reveal situations of familial intimacy and communal identification.

Made in 1960, Inherit the Wind is a closely rendered version of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" of 1925, with most of the courtroom arguments being taken straight from the trial transcripts.

Today I was introduced to Jack Nicholson's video endorsement of Clinton. It is currently making the rounds on YouTube:

Here's the problem I see with his montage-style endorsement: Nicholson lets his fictional characters do the talking and the most obvious problem here is that Nicholson rarely plays sympathetic characters. When the Joker asks me "Who do you trust?" and Col. Jessop from A Few Good Men tells me how military leadership should work, I don't feel benevolent towards their recommendation. Then there's the appalling moment when we return to Jessop to hear him talk about the sexiness of a woman in power. Is speaking through the mouths of liars, murderers, and psychopaths the best strategy to forward an endorsement?

Are these the cultural icons one wants associated with one's campaign?

At least, to follow up on Tim's post about the Devil and Hillary Clinton, we have no Witches of Eastwick

Gerry Canavan has posted a collection of images of the Statue of Liberty taken from science fiction stories and films.