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Incredibly Rare Film Footage Of Anne Frank
10.02.2009
03:47 pm
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Only 20 seconds long, but still tremendously moving.

The only existing film images of Anne Frank have been loaded on to YouTube by Amsterdam museum the Anne Frank House.

The footage, from 1941, is the only time Anne has been captured on film.  The 20-second footage uploaded to the museum’s recently launched Anne Frank Channel shows Anne’s neighbour on her wedding day.  A 13-year-old Anne is seen nine seconds into the video, leaning out of a second-floor window to get a better look at the bride and groom.  At the time of the wedding the bride-to-be lived at No 37 Merwedeplein, next door to the Franks at No 39.

The scene was filmed on 22 July 1941, just under a year before the Frank family went into hiding above the family business.  The family were discovered in August 1944 and Anne died in a Nazi concentration camp in March 1945.

In other Anne Frank news today, the NYT’s Janet Maslin praises Francine Prose’s Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife.  In it, Prose tracks the diary’s various permutations—book, play, film—and shows how, when it comes to interpreting something as culturally charged as Frank’s diary, controversy is never far behind.

 
Via The Guardian UK: Film Footage of Anne Frank Posted On YouTube

In The NYT: Tracing The Many Lives Of Anne Frank And Her Still-Vivid Wartime Diary

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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10.02.2009
03:47 pm
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No Apologies for the Truth: Rep. Alan Grayson Cedes No Ground to the Republicans
10.02.2009
03:45 pm
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I love this guy! Keep it up Congressman Grayson!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.02.2009
03:45 pm
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Julius Shulman’s Visual Acoustics
10.02.2009
03:12 pm
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I’m very much looking forward to Visual Acoustics, the 7-years-in-the-making documentary on Julius Shulman.  As today’s NYT says:

Julius Shulman, the prolific architectural photographer who died in July at 98, benefited in equal measure from talent and timing.  He was, of course, a gifted, inventive photographer; his introduction of real people into architectural images is considered groundbreaking.  But he also lived and worked in midcentury Los Angeles, an epicenter of Modernism and a canvas for architects like Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig and John Lautner, whose landmark houses Mr. Shulman captured.

Since he was based primarily in Los Angeles, expect to see glorious photographs of buildings that no longer remain.

 
In the NYT: The Lens That Loved Modernism

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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10.02.2009
03:12 pm
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Laramie Project adds Unrepentant Killer’s Words as Epilogue
10.02.2009
01:48 pm
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From the CBC:

New York’s Tectonic Theater Project, which created The Laramie Project, a theatrical work that examines the events surrounding a gay man’s murder, is creating an epilogue to the famous work. The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later will include new interviews with some of the residents of the town where university student Mathew Shepard was killed and an epilogue that represents an interview with his killer.

—-snip—

Greg Pierotti, a gay actor/writer who helped create the original docudrama, interviewed Aaron McKinney, who’s serving two consecutive life sentences at Wallens Ridge State Prison in Big Stone Gap, Va., for Shepard’s murder.

In 1998, McKinney and a friend picked up Shepard, then a 21-year-old student, in a Laramie bar, and robbed and savagely pistol-whipped him, then left him tied to a fence in a remote area. He wasn’t found until 18 hours later and died in a Colorado hospital on Oct. 12.

“The night I did it, I did have hatred for homosexuals,” McKinney said in the interview, though he said his initial motivation was robbery. “Well, he was overly friendly. And he was obviously gay. That played a part ... his weakness. His frailty. And he was dressed nice. Looked like he had money.”

Pierotti logged more than 10 hours of interviews with McKinney, but failed to get the killer to express any remorse.

“As far as Matt is concerned, I don’t have any remorse,” McKinney is quoted as saying in the script.

When pressed again on the question of regret, McKinney said he was sorry for Shepard’s family and that his life had taken such a bad turn.

“Yeah, I got remorse. But probably not the way people want me to,” McKinney said. “I got remorse that I didn’t live the way my dad taught me to live.”

Here is Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican from North Carolina and one of probably the two stupidest people ever be elected to the United States Congress had to say about this crime earlier in the year. What say you now, Rep. Foxx??

 


Via Mutate Web

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.02.2009
01:48 pm
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Charles Bukowski’s Historically Preserved Home
10.02.2009
11:21 am
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?
Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.02.2009
11:21 am
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Roman Polanski: No Matter How You Slice It, He Raped a Child
10.01.2009
10:14 pm
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I’m shocked—I shouldn’t be, but I am—shocked at all the Hollywood celebs who are standing up for Roman Polanski. I think Polanski is a truly great film artist, a genius, I really do and I have sympathy for a man who went through what he went through with the Manson murders, but this does not excuse what he did. Towering cinematic great, yes, but he’s also a man who drugged and anally raped a 13-year old child! Time doesn’t really erase a crime like that—or shouldn’t.

I thought it was poor taste when everyone suddenly had amnesia about Michael Jackson, too. Musical genius, sure, but it was the first time I ever found myself 100% in agreement with Bill O’Reilly, I just could not stomach the sight of people lauding this kiddly fiddler like he was fucking Gandhi!!!  It stank to high heaven and so does this Polanski episode. Once again, I find myself in agreement with O’Reilly and even with his guest, the utterly insufferable, Dennis Miller. I don’t like it any more than you do, but they ARE right:


[An old friend of mine, Michael Kurcfeld, introduced Polanski and Miller in Paris. Miller refers to this in the clip.]

Not long after I watched the above segment, I then read an article on the Daily Beast titled Polanski’s Victim And Me by the celebrated novelist Robert Goolrick. It’s a horrifying, eyes wide-open confessional so skillfully written it breaks your heart. Trust me, you won’t be on the fence about Roman Polanski’s fate after you read it. Bravo to Goolrick for the essay. I think it will set a lot of people straight on this one.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.01.2009
10:14 pm
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Delta 4-Heavy Rocket Launch Seen from Close Range
10.01.2009
09:57 pm
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Crazy! Launch photographer Ben Cooper used a sound-triggered camera to capture this intense shot of the launch of a Delta 4-Heavy rocket from close range. His lens was destroyed!

Via Gizmodo

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.01.2009
09:57 pm
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How Damaged is The Republican Party?
10.01.2009
07:20 pm
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Apparently plenty damaged! This gorgeous graph shows a public largely deaf to the Republican message, except for the crazies, the birthers, the religious fanatics and the tea baggers. How do you recover from numbers like these? By next year? No way! I mean, not even a guy as oblivious to FACTS as Sean Hannity could spin this one positively! The Republican party has all but been abandoned except for the lunatic fringe!

There were many, many times during this, our Summer of Discontent when I despaired of seeing any substantive change in this country because of the loud-mouthed turnips at the town hall meetings egged on by the likes of Glenn Beck and his FOX News buddies, waving teabags and clogging up the television airways with stupidity on a nightly basis. But I kept my sanity by coming back to the incontrovertible fact that the Republicans have been basically out-flanked by population trends and the demographic zeitgeist is decidedly not with them moving forward.

It’s a toxic brand and it’s burning itself out with the hate and ignorance. Smart people do not want to hang around with idiots. And minorities are not welcome and never have been (as if).  Forty-somethings who cast their first vote for Reagan don’t want to be associated with these fools they have nothing in common with. It’s embarrassing to be Republican! The GOP’s adherents with brains mutinied a long time ago to the Libertarian Party, or became independents or even Democrats. The only ones sticking around are the low IQ buffoons with misspelled signs we see on FOX News shouting “ACORN!” and other nonsense.  Most of them are old and when they die off, they’re gone. Keep that in mind when you see these sad, nutty, angry idiots on TV next time. These people won’t be around forever. And when they’re gone, they will not be replaced.

And that is just the way it is. Nature is quite kind in that regard.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel, progressive friends: No political party is immune from having a life-cycle and we’re about to see the end of the GOP’s. Good riddance, I say, I will piss on its grave.

Here’s an excerpt from a slightly less heated discussion about the above graph from Pollster:

The overall finding is simple—the GOP’s standing relative to the Democrats on both measures is worse than any opposition party in the sample. For instance, the Pew data show that the Republicans are currently viewed more negatively than any minority party in the previous four midterms in terms of both net favorables and the difference in net favorables between parties

The CBS results (not shown) are even more dramatic. In June, when the question was most recently asked, Republican net favorables were -30% and Democratic net favorables were 25%, which swamps the comparable results from the previous cycles.

In short, there’s no question that the GOP party brand is in worse shape than any opposition party in recent memory.

Assessing the GOP brand

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.01.2009
07:20 pm
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Hitler Learns About Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue”
10.01.2009
06:13 pm
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I’m an admitted sucker for the “Hitler responds” meme culled from Downfall.  Jump on this one while it’s still fresh.  Hitler’s not gonna be blurbing Rogue, that’s for sure!

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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10.01.2009
06:13 pm
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Extreme Grief And The Single Tear Catcher
10.01.2009
04:39 pm
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Fascinating article this week in the NYT that suggests it’s time for a more nuanced definition of extreme grieving, what Columbia University’s Dr. M. Katherine Shear calls a “loop of suffering.”  Unlike “normal” grief, or even depression, extreme grieving persists for six months or more and strips away from life any sense of meaning or purpose.  Grieving of this sort has been linked to higher frequencies of drinking, suicide, even cancer. 

But a recent study involving MRIs arrived at an even more provocative conclusion: when an extreme griever was shown photos of a loved one, their brain received a jolt of dopamine, indicating the possible addictive qualities of memories themselves.

When your grief, though, is of the more manageable variety, you no longer have to rely exclusively on head-to-toe black.  Artist Matthew Coombes has just come out with a grief-chic line that includes everything from a single tear catcher (see above) to special finger protectors designed to preserve your cuticles in times of stress and sorrow.

In the NYT:

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