erhebung

Explosions? Bay uses them the way that Bresson uses doors - liberally. Clarity? By Bay's lights an outmoded concept, fit for nursing homes. And flag-waving? My hand has flown to my heart just thinking about it. You don't have to know the stories about Michael Bay's North American landmass of an ego to get a clear picture of the man. You needn't have listened to his nasal voice on the commentary track for the Criterion Armageddon DVD, lovingly discussing his "style." Few filmmakers have revealed themselves so fully through their work. Bay is the filmmaker par excellence for the age of the CEO as hero - he is the Jack Welch of cinema, downsizing narrative coherence and capitalizing on his audience's urge toward mental statelessness, a renunciation of the ability to effect change in the world, let alone follow a story, or even an action.

Molecular Cloud Barnard 68
Credit: FORS Team, 8.2-meter VLT Antu, ESO

Explanation: Where did all the stars go? What used to be considered a hole in the sky is now known to astronomers as a dark molecular cloud. Here, a high concentration of dust and molecular gas absorb practically all the visible light emitted from background stars. The eerily dark surroundings help make the interiors of molecular clouds some of the coldest and most isolated places in the universe. One of the most notable of these dark absorption nebulae is a cloud toward the constellation Ophiuchus known as Barnard 68, pictured above. That no stars are visible in the center indicates that Barnard 68 is relatively nearby, with measurements placing it about 500 light-years away and half a http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question19.html">light-year across. It is not known exactly how molecular clouds like Barnard 68 form, but it is known that these clouds are themselves likely places for new stars to form. In fact, Barnard 68 itself has recently been found likely to collapse and form a new star system. It is possible to look right through the cloud in http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/ir_tutorial/discovery.html">infrared light.

The Neda "Myth"

Hanna Rosin chides me for posting an e-mail:

I do not begrudge this “doctor” his narrative. But it should not be reported by respectable American news sites as confirmation of a fact. It is an artifact in the construction of a martyr story, just like everything else in the story of Neda: Her name, which means “voice” in Farsi (now silenced), her age, first reported as 16, but actually 27, the final close-up of her face, blood streaming from her mouth, one eye opened. In their excitement over the role of technology in building democracy, American sites have been gullibly reporting every Twitter and post in support of Mir Hussein Moussavi, conveniently forgetting Moussavi’s own bloody past. Even in the age of Twitter, confirming a murder is not something we do by e-mail.

Here is the LA Times report on the death. It confirms the details from the email. I've premised all tweets as provisional.

New details of how Britain would have been governed in the event of a nuclear war from the 1960s into the 1990s have been disclosed with the publication of the secret War Book.

The document, over 16 chapters, gives precise plans and instructions for what would have been done by officialdom during the build-up to an international confrontation and after the bombs started falling.

There are indications that aspects of the arrangements have been adapted for use during other, domestic, emergencies since the cold war, including the fuel protests in 2000.

Although some of the plans have been revealed before – including earlier this year the scripts that would have been broadcast by the BBC in the event of a nuclear war, instructing the public not to panic – governments of the period left nothing to chance, including the censoring of private mail.

The country would have been divided into 12 regions, each governed by cabinet ministers with wide powers, aided by senior military officers, chief constables and judges and based in bunkers. Other senior figures would have retreated to a central government shelter under the Cotswolds.

The plans all assumed that the confrontation would be with the Soviet Union. Among the possible scenarios spelled out in the autumn of 1968 was escalating tension following a Soviet moon landing and troop movements in eastern Europe.

WHOLE THEORY OF BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE
posted 9:46 AM

'My whole theory of beautiful language holds that it comes from nameless, groups of people looking for a more expressive way to say something. I'm always thankful to get a note where someone praises a sentence I wrote. But what I really want is the kind of genius that takes "I'm leaving" and turns it into "I'm ghost" and then takes "I'm ghost" and turns it into "I'm Swayze." Seriously, what kid decided to pull "Ducat" out of obscurity (at least obscurity for us 80s city kids) and use it as easy as bread, or ends, or greenbacks? Who decided that a gun should be called a "heater" and then a "toaster" and then finally a "biscuit"?'

--Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Net Generation -- for whom social networking via the Internet is a birthright -- are probably too young to characterize adequately. They were in their teens and 20s in the Nineties (1994-2003; not to be confused with the '90s); and they are in their 20s and 30s now, in the Oughts (2004-2013; not to be confused with the '00s).

Not to be confused with the so-called Generation Y or Millennials (pop demography terms that refer to Americans born between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s), Netters aren't the parent-loving, resume-padding, squeaky-clean paragons of virtue we've heard their parents praise to the skies. Like OGXers, who were lumped in with Boomers but never felt part of that generation, Netters are a lost generation; older Netters have been lumped in with PCers (who, to make matters worse, were mistakenly called Xers), and younger Netters have been lumped in with Millennials. This trend stops here!

Of course, MSM pundits have bloviated about youth many times before... but I'd figured that members of my much-mischaracterized generation wouldn't make the same mistake, when we got to be middle-aged. Looks like I was mistaken. Netters, please drop me a line to tell me how wrong-headed I am about your demographic cohort.

Ha.

Norman Mailer was especially touched and perplexed by the problems of the astronauts. “They were virile men,” Mailer writes in Of a Fire on the moon,

but they were prodded, tapped into, poked, flexed, tested, subjected to a pharmacology of stimulants, depressants, diuretics, laxatives, retentives, tranquilizers, motion sickness pills, antibiotics, vitamins, and food which was designed to control the character of their feces. They were virile, but they were done to, they were done to like no healthy man alive…. On the one hand to dwell in the very center of technological reality . . . and yet to inhabit — if only in one’s dreams — that other world where death, metaphysics, and the unanswerable questions of eternity must reside, was to suggest natures so divided that they could have been the most miserable and unbalanced of men if they did not contain in their huge contradictions some of the profound and accelerating opposites of the century itself.

To Mailer, alienation was the century’s theme, and Apollo was but a grand fugue played on it. Certainly the revelatory power of the moon was at risk. Astronaut Pete Conrad admits to him that having “dreamed” of going to the moon for years, as an astronaut “now the moon is nothing but facts to me.

I know it’s a bold claim, but JOSEPH BRODSKY (1940-96) just might be the greatest poet ever to be rejected by the Soviet School for Submariners. (Tragically, there were no survivors of the School for Human Torches.) He was tried and condemned as a parasite (for writing poetry on the job), sent to a labor camp, then exiled from his home country. You need to force your imagination back to the Cold War to grasp the impact of Brodsky’s poetry, which had the force of moral law — adjudicating from the underground against the dull, grinding edge of a cruel Soviet century. Brodsky saw himself first as a Jew, then as a Russian, and there is something in his sensibility which is almost rabbinical: reasonable, passionate, questioning, tough, rooted, ethical. But it was Anna Ahkmatova’s early patronage of Brodsky which created an unbroken lineage in Russian poetry stretching from the Stray Dog Cabaret to samizdat. — David Smay

Blasted trees, Normandy, June 1944

A number of years ago, while researching a BBC documentary about World War Two, I paid a visit to Manuel Bromberg at his home in Woodstock, New York. Bromberg had waded ashore and onto Normandy’s Omaha beach in June, 1944. Like the other soldiers he carried an M-1 carbine. But unlike the other men he was packing some specialized equipment: a Leica camera was slung around his neck and a sketchbook was jammed into his back pocket.

Bromberg was one of a select few, a member of the now almost forgotten US War Artist’s Unit. His assignment was, in part, to cover the D-Day invasion. “It was an impossible sight. Bodies were still floating in the water. It was a combination of Dante’s Inferno and the biggest junkyard ever seen” he told me as we walked over to his painting studio, which was on the grounds of his house. Then eighty-seven he was a vigorous man with a gruff demeanor, a rangy gate and leonine hair.

ETHIOPIA. Ogaden region. Town of Harer. 1995. © Raymond Depardon/Magnum Photos

Raymond Depardon’s work has often explored native lands, and, particularly, the world of farmers, giving value to speaking and listening. His capacity to combine both the political and the poetic is clear to anyone familiar with his work. He is an exceptional artist, and his photographs capture the life of everyday human beings. Whether his subjects are the prostitutes of Saigon or small children in Ethiopia, or the veiled men of the Sahara desert or passersby in bustling cities such as New York, Cairo or La Paz, Depardon does not bother to strive for aesthetic effect or anecdote. Instead he relies on his miraculous ability to be right at home wherever his camera accompanies him. 

That photograph has really stuck in my mind.