Rarely has the phrase “man of the world” been more aptly applied than to the protean photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, the subject of a handsome and large — though surely not anywhere near large enough — retrospective opening at the Museum of Modern Art on Sunday.
For much of his long career as a photojournalist, which began in the 1930s and officially ended three decades before his death in 2004, Cartier-Bresson was compulsively on the move. By plane, train, bus, car, bicycle, rickshaw, horse and on foot, he covered the better part of five continents in a tangled, crisscrossing itinerary of arcs and dashes.
In addition to being exhaustively mobile, he was widely connected. Good-looking, urbane, the rebellious child of French haute bourgeois privilege, he networked effortlessly, and had ready access to, and friendships with, the political and culture beau monde of his time.
Nehru, Matisse, Jacqueline Kennedy, T .S. Eliot, Truman Capote, George Balanchine, Coco Chanel and Alberto Giacometti sat for portraits. And he created classic likenesses of them: the elderly Matisse in a dovecote of a studio; the wizened Giacometti caught in midstride like his sculptures; Capote with his amphibian stare; Chanel mummified in a suit of her own design.
The third and crucial constant in his career was, of course, a camera: in Cartier-Bresson’s case, a hand-held Leica, as neat and sleek as a pistol. Whether he was traveling as a journalistic eye for hire or sauntering through Paris of an afternoon, the camera went too. He shot thousands upon thousands of rolls of film at 36 exposures a roll, meticulously numbering each roll before sending it off to be developed — a process he had no interest in — by magazines or photo agencies. (He was a founding member of the Magnum Photos cooperative in 1947.)
Cartier-Bresson seldom saw his work until it was in print, and then sometimes had occasion to be appalled. Suffice it to say that the Modern’s display, with black-and-white prints (he hated color film), framed and hung against pristine white and gray walls, is a far remove from the hurly-burly magazine layouts in which many of these pictures first appeared.
Cartier-Bresson’s dematerialized working method, so focused on the shutter moment, set a model for modern photojournalism, a field he basically invented. Equally influential was the way he approached that moment: with a Zen combination of alertness and patience that allowed him to be absorbed by unfolding events as they absorbed him.
Some of these events were small and sweet: a man sailing over a puddle, lovers smooching, a kid zooming by on a bike. Others were huge. In 1945 he was in Germany to record the aftermath of World War II. (He had spent almost three years as a prisoner of war in German camps.) In 1948 he was in Shanghai when citizens were storming banks for gold in the last frantic days before Communist forces arrived. He witnessed the end of the British Raj. He photographed Gandhi just before he was assassinated, then documented the funeral.
There’s some of all of this in the MoMA retrospective, “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century,” organized by Peter Galassi, the museum’s chief curator of photography. The show unfolds in 13 thematic sections. All but the first are chronologically mixed, and the pictures in that opening section, almost all from the 1930s, are some of the freshest he ever made.
He was in his 20s then. Raised in Paris, he had ambitions to be an artist. He studied with a painter who worked in a late-Cubist style, but hung out in the Surrealist circle around André Breton, soaking up leftist politics and heterodox aesthetics.
In 1930, with his painting prospects looking dim (Gertrude Stein had dropped a discouraging word about his talent), he picked up a camera. An early piece at MoMA, a 1932 shot of a man passed out on a Paris street, might be taken as a formative experiment of street photography. And Surrealism naturally had its impact: his shots of light-bleached plazas and factory walls are pure De Chirico.
After seeing photos of Africa by an older colleague, Martin Munkacsi (1896-1963), Cartier-Bresson headed there in 1930, beginning a lifetime of perpetual motion. By middecade, he had gone from Africa back to France, then to Italy, Spain, Mexico and the United States. Many of his signature works are from this period: Mexico City prostitutes squeezing through narrow windows; a Spanish child seemingly gripped by an ecstatic fit (he was looking up at a ball thrown out of camera range); and a quartet of stout and at-ease French picnickers lounging by a river.
A Cartier-Bresson picture taken in Shanghai, 1948, shows people storming a bank for gold in the days before the Communist forces arrived.
He was given gallery shows, though he already knew he wasn’t making gallery art. He insisted that he wasn’t making art at all. His photographs were — what? A species of social commentary, journalistic illustration, diary keeping? They were certainly ephemeral and unprecious; he meant them for mass publication, for practical use. The brilliantly composed picnic scene was created as part of a campaign to win more vacation time for workers.
The experience of World War II confirmed his view of photography as an instrument for visualizing social change. And it fulfills this role macrocosmically in several of his magazine photo essays, no two alike in format. In 1958 he returned to China to document Mao’s Great Leap Forward in a pictorial series that is thorough without being revealing. He was under constant watch, and the images — upbeat and uptight — reflect this.
But two photo series that emerged from trips to the Soviet Union, in the 1950s and ’70s, have a different effect. They have distinctive individual moments: workers in bulky coveralls clowning and dancing under Lenin’s portrait; a somber Georgian family taking a roadside meal near an Orthodox monastery. But those moments form a whole: a big, perplexingly unresolved portrait of the Soviet Union, at once shabby and mighty, caught between a mania for progress and the pull of ancient tradition.
Tradition, wherever found, was dear to Cartier-Bresson’s heart, and apparently grew more so over the years. In the 1950s and ’60s, he seemed to view it as being increasingly under assault from aspects of modern culture — global commerce, the mass media — that he otherwise found rich and stimulating, precisely because they were modern.
His work softened. Shots of everyday life in France sometimes took on a travel brochure glow. (He gained an international reputation for being the most French of French photographers.) And images that might have been conceived as emblems of cultural excess (shots of St. Tropez, Le Mans, Club Med) felt easy and obvious.
Mr. Galassi has done well to gather works of various dates in each section, thus avoiding a stark comparison between early and late career. (Cartier-Bresson gave up photography, at least officially, in the mid-’70s in favor of drawing.) Chronological blending also helps to create a tonal balance throughout the show between coolness and charm.
What’s missing? Cumulative intensity. It’s present in isolation: in the throbbing 1946 shot of a mother and son reunited and weeping on a New York City dock, and in the exceptionally large, ashen print that opens the exhibition, a 1962 shot of a funeral in Paris for protesters killed in a demonstration for Algerian independence. But in the show over all, surprisingly little tension builds; ideas and emotions are diffuse.
Along these lines, it is interesting to compare, as Mr. Galassi suggests in the catalog, Cartier-Bresson’s pictures of the United States with those taken at roughly the same time by another European visitor, Robert Frank.
True, the two men were operating under quite different conditions. Cartier-Bresson visited America sporadically over several decades. Usually on assignment, he had to deal with editors, tight schedules and deadlines. Mr. Frank, supported by a Guggenheim grant, was on his own clock. He explored the country thoroughly in a few marathon campaigns geared to a self-assigned project, the creation of a photographic book called “The Americans.”
Mr. Frank was his own editor; he controlled — and wanted to control — every detail of his product. He spent a full year whittling down thousands of negatives into a fixed sequence of 83 prints. In that sequence each image assumed a singular force; together, they were morally and emotionally explosive.
Even with Mr. Galassi’s astute groupings, there are no such explosions at MoMA. Should there be? Are we talking about an impassible line that separates photojournalism (Cartier-Bresson) from art (Mr. Frank)? No, to both questions. I think we’re fundamentally dealing with temperaments and preferences. Mr. Frank’s preference was to compress, cut away, create weight; Cartier-Bresson’s was to keep moving, shooting, taking in more and more and more.
Forced to choose between the two modes, I would probably side with concision and density; though there are endless things to be said for the capacious, in-the-now eye and the sheer joie de vivre that were — are — Cartier-Bresson’s pioneering and sustaining strengths. At MoMA, he is so much and so everywhere that he appears to be nowhere. But while slipping from our grasp, he keeps handing us the world.
A Cartier-Bresson photograph from 1950 shows a woman taking food to cotton workers.
“Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century” runs from Sunday through June 28 at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org. It travels to the Art Institute of Chicago (July 24 to Oct. 3); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Oct. 30 to Jan. 30); and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (Feb. 19 to May 15).
Imagine if any Pakistani could send an anonymous text message to the authorities suggesting where to look. Each location could be plotted on a map. The dots
would be scattered widely, perhaps, with promising leads indistinguishable from rubbish. But on a given day, a surge of dots might point to the same village, in what could not be coincidence. Troops could be ordered in.
This kind of everyone-as-informant mapping is shaking up the world, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to the work of humanitarians and soldiers who parachute into places with little good information. And an important force behind this upheaval is a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi, which has become a hero of the Haitian and Chile
an earthquakes and which may have something larger to tell us about the future of humanitarianism, innovation and the nature of what we label as truth.
After Kenya’s disputed election in 2007, violence erupted. A prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, Ory Okolloh, who was based in South Africa but had gone back to Kenya to vote and observe the election, received threats about her work and returned to South Africa. She posted online the idea of an Internet mapping tool to allow people anonymously to report violence and other misdeeds. Technology whizzes saw her post and built the Ushahidi Web platform over a long weekend.
The site collected user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes and deaths and plotted them on a map, using the locations given by informants. It collected more testimony — which is what ushahidi means in Swahili
— with greater rapidity than any reporter or election monitor.
When the Haitian earthquake struck, Ushahidi went again into action. An emergency texting number was advertised via radio. Ushahidi received thousands of messages reporting trapped victims. They were translated by a diffuse army of Haitian-Americans in the United States and plotted on a “crisis map.” From a situation room at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, outside Boston, Ushahidi volunteers instant-messaged with the United States Coast Guard in Haiti, telling them where to search. When the Chilean earthquake struck, Ushahidi deployed again.
A lot of things could go wrong with this model. People could lie, get the address wrong, exaggerate their situation. But as data collects, crisis maps can reveal underlying patterns of reality: How many miles inland did the hurricane kill? Are the rapes broadly dispersed or concentrated near military barracks?
Ushahidi suggests a new paradigm in humanitarian work. The old paradigm was one-to-many: foreign journalists and aid workers jet in, report on a calamity and dispense aid with whatever data they have. The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: victims supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response.
Ushahidi also represents a new frontier of innovation. Silicon Valley has been the reigning paradigm of innovation, with its universities, financiers, mentors, immigrants and robust patents. Ushahidi comes from another world, in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less, rather than on selling you new and improved stuff.
Because Ushahidi originated in crisis, no one tried to patent and monopolize it. Because Kenya is poor, with computers out of reach for many, Ushahidi made its system work on cellphones. Because Ushahidi had no venture-capital backing, it used open-source software and was thus free to let others remix its tool for new projects.
Ushahidi remixes have been used in India to monitor elections; in Africa to report medicine shortages; in the Middle East to collect reports of wartime violence; and in Washington, D.C., where The Washington Post partnered to build a site to map road blockages and the location of available snowplows and blowers.
Think about that. The capital of the sole superpower is deluged with snow, and to whom does its local newspaper turn to help dig out? Kenya.
With every new application, Ushahidi is quietly transforming the notion of bearing witness in tragedy. For a very long time, this was done first by journalists in real time, next by victim/writers like Anne Frank and, finally, by historians. But in this instantaneous age, this kind of testimony confronts a more immediate kind: one of aggregate, average, good-enough truths.
“We’re moving beyond the idea that information is completely true or completely false,” said Patrick Meier, a student at Fletcher who directs Ushahidi’s crisis-mapping operation.
So what will it mean to bear witness in the future? They say that history is written by the victors. But now, before the victors win, there is a chance to scream out with a text message that will not vanish. What would we know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, between Germans and Jews, if every one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time: “I was here, and this is what happened to me”?
<Lillian Bassman shot this photograph, called "Fantasy on the Dance Floor," featuring model Barbara Mullen in a Christian Dior dress, for Harper's Bazaar in 1949. >
Lillian Bassman, the return of an icon
She helped define fashion photography before taking 20 years off. At 93, she is in the midst of a career renaissance.
By Julie Neigher
February 7, 2010
To set eyes on a photo by Lillian Bassman is mesmerizing. The image, usually that of a striking woman, hits with the force of an epiphany. Suddenly those heroin chic ad campaigns of the '90s
seem shopworn and flat. And the clunkily posed spread in this month's glossy feels oh-so-forced.
In the '50s and '60s, when Bassman clicked her shutter, she created a visual time capsule. One wonders, eyeing the elegant angle of a gloved arm or the mysterious tilt of a hat, "If I stare long enough at this picture, will I hear the rustle of taffeta and tulle swaying? The low and beckoning incantations of Sinatra?" It's as if the photographer had the ability to manipulate time.
Bassman was considered one of the preeminent fashion photographers of the 20th century when she suddenly withdrew from the scene. But, now, at age 93, she is in the midst of a renaissance, prompted back to work almost by accident. And renewed interest in her legacy has led to a new book and exhibitions around the world, including a stunning retrospective, "Lillian Bassman: Women," at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica. Her pictures, some not seen for decades, capture and immortalize the style of an era.
<"Le Bateau Mouche," model Barbara Mullen, Paris, 1960. Reinterpreted 2008. They say every picture tells a story. Here's Lillian Bassman's, in her favorite timeless black-and-white.>
Her parents, Russian Jewish immigrants, ascended to a middle-class life in the Bronx in the 1920s. One summer, her mother took 6-year-old Lillian to Coney Island. While there, Mom earned a few extra dollars waitressing for the Himmels, who were dear friends. And, because it was beshert -- meant to be -- Lillian met their son Paul, an older chap of 9, who, in time, became her betrothed and a respected photographer in his own right. But it was another man, design genius Alexey Brodovitch, who was to chart her future.
<"Paris: Dinner at Nine," model Barbara Mullen, dress by Piguet, Paris, 1949 (Harper’s Bazaar, 1949).>
After taking Brodovitch's prestigious design lab class, Bassman secured an internship as his assistant at Harper's Bazaar. She flourished, and in 1945, when Junior Bazaar debuted, she shared the masthead with Brodovitch as art director. Not only did she conceptualize layouts, but she too charted futures -- notably fostering the work of Richard Avedon (who would remain a lifelong friend).
Studying painters
Though Junior Bazaar would soon fold, Bassman wanted to master the professional aspects of photography. Avedon, away in Paris, offered her an assistant and the use of his studio. An apt and passionate pupil, she began to formulate her distinctive vision and style. She studied the great painters. She knew exactly what, in an El Greco, elicited a breath of awe, and she wanted to evoke that feeling in her own work. "I spent my life in the museums studying old masters from different periods," she said in a recent interview. "Elegance goes back to the earliest paintings. Long necks. The thrust of the head in a certain position. The way the fingers work -- fabrics work. It's all part of my painting background." In the darkroom she spent days using a brush, bleaching a print to create dream-like contrasts and abstract effects. To give her photos dimension, she often shaded faces and clothes. The process added mystery while affording her female subjects power and presence.
<A photo of Lillian Bassman by her husband, Paul Himmel, in the early 1950s. >
But not everyone got it. Carmel Snow, editor in chief of Harper's Bazaar (1934-1958), famously remarked to Lillian, "I didn't bring you to Paris to do art. I brought you here to do the buttons and the bows."
If only Snow were alive to eat her words. It's because buttons and bows weren't her thing that Bassman is now regarded as one of the most accomplished photographers of the 20th century.
Her "thing," it turns out, was the elegance of women. It was that aspect of femininity that became her source of inspiration.
Perhaps her most compelling guiding spirit was her favorite model, Barbara Mullen -- noted for her 20-inch waist. As Bassman recalls, "There are models that are not models but muses. She had everything marvelous: a beautiful neck, grace, the ability to respond to me. We used to get on the floor, and when I get excited , I take my shoes off. The two of us would dance. We understood each other."
Mullen speaks with equal effusion. "I moved very well in front of the camera. My arms, my legs -- I seemed able to do anything with them -- I felt absolutely wonderful when I moved with Lillian. I was like being free -- it was like being in heaven." It was poetry in black and white.
But poetry is, well, not a mass medium. And if you're a fashion magazine trying to flog clothing, the Bassman approach was a tough sell. In the '60s, a new species called the supermodel arrived on scene, striking diva poses. The clothes of the day, mod and hippie, ceased to be compelling. Sexuality lost its mystery. Soon, the work no longer spoke to her. She'd had enough, and she quit. In the '70s, Bassman destroyed most of her early work. Her darkroom went cold for 20 years.
Bassman's work, in turn, inspired the very fashion designers whose creations she photographed, such as Dior's John Galliano, who has said of her work, "It was the technique and spirit that I wanted to capture in the dressmaking process."
< "Tunic Suit," model Sunny Harnett, suit by Charles James, 1955 (Harper's Bazaar). Reinterpreted 1994.>
Her return
But it turns out that this is a kind of Cinderella
story. It even involves a carriage (well, ca rriage house). For years, Bassman had rented out the ground floor of her Man h attan carriage house to the painter Helen Frankenthaler. In 1990, Frankenthaler found bags stuffed with negatives.
She gave them to Bassman, who ignored them. In 1991, photo historian M artin Harrison spotted the exquisite negatives sitting in storage and pushed Bassman to work again. In no time, she was exhibiting at galleries. Neiman Marcus asked her to shoot a campaign. And she was dispatched to Paris, where she shot the couture collections for the New York Times Magazine. Glenda Bailey, editor in chief of Harper's Bazaar, says, "You have an emotional response to her photographs -- you can almost smell the lily, hear the phone ring, feel the fur. Lillian is a poet of photography." <This 2008 photograph is one of many on display now at Bassman's "Women" exhibit at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica. >
Nowadays, the poet no longer has to stand for hours in a darkroom inhaling noxious chemicals. She pursues her art using another medium -- Photoshop. This is where she reinvents her photographs, using technology that many 20-year-olds haven't mastered. The creative visions come to her, and she realizes them, this time with the swish of a mouse, not a paintbrush. She has embraced the new social media, interacting with fans through Facebook.
Bassman lost longtime love Paul in 2009. Himmel, whom she married in 1935, was a celebrated fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue (and also a student of Alexey Brodovitch's). Some of his nonfashion work was exhibited at MoMA, and in 1999 Assouline published a book on his career. But in the late '60s, a disenchanted Himmel left photography and learned psychotherapy as a profession instead. A homage to both their talents has been exhibited at the Deichtorhallen in Germany since November 2009. It's as it should be. The two kids from New York who met more than 85 years ago and just "clicked" were always side by side in life, supporting each other in their work, and it makes sense that they are on display together.
<"Barbara Mullen, Blowing Kiss" circa 1950, is part of Bassman’s "Women" exhibit at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica.>
Bassman's children, Lizzie (a photographer and archivist of the family work) and Eric (editor in chief of Abrams Books), have always formed a vital part of her life, and they are with her daily.
When asked how she feels about her newfound stardom, Bassman shrieks with delight.
"Astounded! I can spend hours doing my own thing and enjoying every minute. I live in my studio with my work, my kids -- it's like it's happening to someone else."
And in a way it is happening to someone else. Lillian Bassman remains the same flesh and blood woman. But, like her photographs, she has stepped from the darkroom into the spotlight. And, she too has been reinvented ever so slightly.
Don't miss this amazing Video Clip. First read it properly.
This video shows the winner of "Ukraine’s Got Talent", Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch.
The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears and she won the top prize of about $130,000.00
She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.
It is replaced by a woman’s face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman’s face appears.
She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.
This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.
In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.
The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.
Kseniya Simonova says: "I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And there’s surely no bigger compliment."
THE MOVIE OPENS WITH A MONTAGE SHOWING THE MAIN CHARACTER, AN EX-MARINE "JARHEAD", BEING RELEASED FROM A V.A. HOSPITAL, HIS FLIGHT IN SUSPENDED ANIMATION TO THE MOON-WORLD PANDORA, AND ALSO A BACK STORY OF WHY HE HAS BEEN SELECTED TO BE IN THE AVATAR PROGRAM.
SOME DOCTOR: So, basically, you had a twin brother who did stuff like "training", and had an "education", and was actually prepared for this job. But he died, so we got you to replace him, even though you're basically a dumb jock.
JUGHEAD: You will soon see that what I lack in "education", "training", "competence", "listening skills", "ability to obey orders", or any of that other stuff, I make up with by having "heart". But since you don't know that yet, why did you choose me to replace my brother?
SOME DOCTOR: Because of the genetic match, and the brain matching, or something... whatever... look, the point is that the audience doesn't want to see someone who worked hard to get where they are, because that that might make the audience feel inferior for being the fucking sheep that they are. What they do want to see is somebody just as stupid as them, who falls ass backwards into awesomeness by having some vague quality like "heart" that everyone believes is true for them too. That way they can fantasize about making something of themselves without having to earn it. And, amazingly, our technology creates situations that do just that!
CUT TO SCENES OF A SPACE SHIP ARRIVING AT PANDORA, AND THEN A TRANSPORT OF SOME KIND LANDING IN A MILITARY SAFE ZONE CARVED OUT OF THE JUNGLE - A "GREEN ZONE", IF YOU WILL. ALL THE TROOPS GET OUT. WHEN JUGHEAD GETS OUT, WE DISCOVER THE BIG REVEAL:
JUGHEAD: I'm in a wheelchair! Hah! You didn't see that coming, did you?
SOME SOLDIER: I bet that wheelchair is going to be a source of constant difficulty, dramatic tension, and an opportunity to heighten the risk in action scenes.
JUGHEAD: I think you'll be surprised at just how little a role my wheelchair will play in all this.
AS JUGHEAD IS MAKING HIS WAY THROUGH THE GREEN ZONE, HE MEETS TWO OTHER SCIENTISTS, RED-SHIRT AND SOME OTHER SCIENTIST
RED-SHIRT: Dude, do you have time for me to spout some exposition? It's really the only time my character will contribute anything meaningful.
JUGHEAD: Knock yourself out.
RED-SHIRT: Okay, so these over here are the bodies we call "Avatars". They're artificially created versions of the native Smurf creatures that inhabit this planet. While you sit in a modified tanning bed, you mentally hook up with the body that has been genetically matched to you. Well, to your brother, but that's good enough. Or something. Anyway, being in Smurf-mode takes a lot of training to be able to handle, but we're pretty much going to just throw you in because for some reason, we're in a super rush to get you into the program. Despite the fact that, precisely because you have no training, our lead scientist is going to regulate you to vague security duties you can't even perform because of the overwhelming difficulties of the hostile environment we're in. You won't even know how to handle the first creature you encounter while we do scientific studies you can't help us with.
OTHER SCIENTIST: I guess I won't have much to contribute to this scene.
RED-SHIRT: Yeah, get used to that.
CUT TO JUGHEAD MAKING A VIDEO BLOG
JUGHEAD: Hey, why do I have to do these video blog things?
RED-SHIRT: To provide a context for the voice overs you do where you explain to the audience things that should have been shown through action.
JUGHEAD: I get the lazy writing angle, but mostly I've been describing things that are already obvious.
RED-SHIRT: Oh, you want the justification used within the context of the story? It's for a complete recording of everything, for a complete scientific record. And completeness. Or something.
JUGHEAD: But if we have a level of technology where we can transmit our consciousness into another body, couldn't you just record that transmission and then you'd have all my thoughts and experience as they happen, making a more complete record than I could ever describe in words?
RED-SHIRT: Huh. Yeah, I guess we don't need you to do the voice overs then.
AUDIENCE: Yay!
JAMES CAMERON: Oh no you don't. I've got a scene later that hinges on what you say in your video blog.
AUDIENCE: Boo!
JAMES CAMERON: Sorry, can't hear you over the 1 billion dollars I'm grossing world wide.
AUDIENCE: We only have ourselves to blame.
JUGHEAD IS TAKEN TO SEE THE MAIN SCIENTIST, RIPLEY
RIPLEY: Hey Jughead, fuck you. Seriously, just... fuck you. Fuck you for being you, for being here, and for everything. Fuck. You.
JUGHEAD: So... you don't like me?
RIPLEY: I don't have to spend any time finding out about you to know I don't like you. Everybody knows that as a scientist, I am high and mighty and quick to judge. I wouldn't ever evaluate people by the observable evidence of their behaviour or anything sensible and in keeping with my training.
JUGHEAD: Whatever. Your dislike of me isn't going to slow me down... or the story... or have any impact whatsoever beyond expository dialogue.
RED-SHIRT: I'm in this scene too. Let me speak a little Smurf language just to highlight how untrained Jughead is.
RIPLEY: Who the fuck are you?
RED-SHIRT: I'm the actually trained scientist?
RIPLEY: Whatever. I don't really have any identifiable disposition toward you, so I'm just going to maintain a minimum of interaction with you for the rest of the movie.
RED-SHIRT: Okely dokely.
JUGHEAD: Anyway, I'm going to deflect all your legitimate concerns about my presence in the project with a whole bunch of smart ass responses, because it's quicker to inflate the tension between us that way than having any scenes where my lack of training actually causes any problems.
RIPLEY: Are you sure? Because if we took the time to develop your character by having you actually be not good at your job for even just a little bit, that would give a legitimate depth to the rift between our characters. It would also legitimize the established concept that somehow this Avatar program is difficult to do somehow.
JUGHEAD: Mmm... nah. I don't want to be anything less than totally awesome, so I'm not going to spend any part of this movie being un-awesome, except for one scene where I'll fall off a horse.
RIPLEY GETS FED UP AND GOES TO SEE THE BOSS OF THIS WHOLE OPERATION TO COMPLAIN.
RIPLEY: I'm tired of the Weyland-Yutani corporation dicking me around!
EMBODIMENT OF CAPITALISM: The Weyland-what now?
RIPLEY: When you sent me back to the colony on LV-426 ... oh, wait... sorry, elements of your symbolic purpose in this movie are so similar to that other situation that I got confused about who I was mad at.
EMBODIMENT OF CAPITALISM: Come into my office for a conversation that we would never have had before this in all the years we've been working together.
RIPLEY: About how the harsh realities of capitalism are what pay my salary?
EMBODIMENT OF CAPITALISM: Yes. See this hovering clump of rock?
RIPLEY: This is the first time you have ever showed that to me. Strange that you never did.
EMBODIMENT OF CAPITALISM: This is "unobtanium". It's a magic energy crisis solver. Back on Earth it has a high enough value that we can simply gloss over all the ridiculously high obstacles to an interplanetary profit making venture that would completely gut my character's motivations and the whole anti-capitalist message of this movie.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE LAB, JUGHEAD AND RED SHIRT GO INTO SMURF MODE FOR THE FIRST TIME.
SOME SCIENTIST: Wow, Jughead has a beautiful brain!
AUDIENCE: That was an awkward thing to say. What does it even mean?
SOME SCIENTIST: Don't sweat it. It won't come up again.
JUGHEAD: Never mind that, look at me! I'm such a fucking maverick that I won't even listen to a doctor who makes the perfectly reasonable request that I sit up slowly! And check this out! I'm already perfectly good at using this body in literally two seconds. Training? Fuck that. I'm running! And smiling! You see, because in my real body, I'm a cripple, so this already establishes how much I love being...
AUDIENCE: We get it. Move on.
RIPLEY: Hey there. Despite how much I was pissed with you for even being here, I'm not even going to mention the fact that three seconds into your Smurf body you're already blowing off instructions and proving that you're every bit as unreliable as I suspected. Instead, here, have a fruit.
LATER, AFTER JUGHEAD GOES TO SLEEP AS AN AVATAR, HE WAKES UP BACK IN HIS HUMAN BODY. THE AUDIENCE WONDERS WHEN EXACTLY DOES HE ACUALLY SLEEP. THIS WILL NEVER GET ANSWERED. THE AUDIENCE SUSPECTS THIS WON'T BE THE LAST UNANSWERED QUESTION.
JUGHEAD IS BEING SHOWN AROUND A FIGHTER PLANE BY THE ONLY NON-BLUE, NON-WHITE-ARYAN PERSON WITH A SPEAKING ROLE IN THE ENTIRE MOVIE.
OTHER SCIENTIST: Hey! I'm not white!
WOW... REALLY? HUH. WELL, ANYWAY, YOU COULD BE TRANSPARENT FOR ALL THE IMPACT YOU MAKE. SO, AS I WAS SAYING, JUGHEAD IS BEING SHOWN AROUND BY THAT HOT CHICK WHO PLAYED A TOUGH L.A. COP IN "LOST", AND LIKED THAT CHARACTER SO MUCH THAT IT'S PRETTY MUCH WHO SHE IS HERE, TOO. EXCEPT WITHOUT THE "CHARACTER" PART.
VASQUEZ WANNA-BE: So, even though the whole reason you're here is because of the outrageous expense of training people to do your job and genetically matching them to Smurf bodies, because we're short on staff we might need you to do high risk work as a gunner on my ship, which could get you killed.
JUGHEAD: The way this movie drops threads, I'm sure I'll never actually have to do any gunner duty anyway, so I'm sure I'll be fine. Hey, you're pretty hot, want to develop a love interest that will cause a visceral emotional conflict when I start to date a Smurf chick?
VASQUEZ WANNA-BE: That would be really exciting and dramatic. But no, I'm just going to wander away now. I have about as much impact on the story off screen as on screen anyway. Oh, the commander wants to talk to you.
JUGHEAD WALKS OVER TO WHERE A SUPER MUSCULAR DRILL SERGEANT TYPE GUY IS BENCH PRESSING ABOUT A TON OF IRON.
AUDIENCE: Is that a lot? Isn't the gravity different here? We're really not sure if that's a lot of weight or not.
JUGHEAD: You wanted to see me, sir?
SERGEANT STRAW MAN: Yeah, I've got a deal for you. If you basically spy for me so that I can blow up the big tree where the Smurfs live, I'll arrange it so that you can have your legs back. That should provide a suitable justification for your character's duplicity.
JUGHEAD: Yeah... I guess...
SERGEANT STRAW MAN: What, you don't want your legs back?
JUGHEAD: Well, it's just that I've already been a Smurf that can run and jump and move in ways that even a human can't, and the audience already knows from the trailer that I'm going to go totally native. It just seems like the whole incentive of getting legs in my human body is kind of null before it's even offered.
SERGEANT STRAW MAN: How 'bout we work it into the plot that later on, when it comes time to choose being a full time Smurf, your Smurf body is by that time crippled and can't walk, so it means giving up the chance of having legs as a human in order to be crippled as a Smurf?
JUGHEAD: Wow! Yeah, that would be an intensely dramatic dilemma! By forcing me to give up something instead of just becoming more awesome, that would show the love for my upcoming love interest and the sacrifice I make to be with her, as well as how deep my bond with the Smurf society has become. It would show real heroism, and conflict, and hard decisions, and...
JAMES CAMERON: Shut the fuck up.
JUGHEAD: Er... yeah, okay, I'll spy for you, Sarge.
LATER, JUGHEAD, RIPLEY, AND RED-SHIRT EXPLORE THE JUNGLE IN SMURF MODE
RIPLEY: This place is an extremely hostile jungle environment.
JUGHEAD: But if we can find the huge ape and bring it back to New York, we can call it the eighth wonder of the world and make a fortune on tickets.
RIPLEY: What?
JUGHEAD: Sorry, I got confused, because I have a feeling the next little while is going to be about wandering around a jungle being chased by one ridiculously hostile creature after another. Is there anything in this movie that isn't derived from other movies?
RED-SHIRT: I keep it straight by remembering that the animals here are way more colourful.
RIPLEY: Who the fuck are you again?
WHILE RED-SHIRT AND RIPLEY START POKING THINGS WITH NEEDLES AND DOING BORING "SCIENCE" SHIT THAT EVERYONE KNOWS IS STUPID AND DOESN'T TEACH YOU ANYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU HAVE "HEART", JUGHEAD WANDERS OFF. HE FINDS SOME PLANTS THAT ARE WAY PRETTIER AND DO THINGS WAY COOLER THAN ANY DUMB OLD PLANT ON EARTH WOULD EVER DO. THEN SUDDENLY HE IS FACED WITH A HUGE FOUR LEGGED ANIMAL THAT, LIKE ALL ANIMALS IN THIS ENVIRONMENT, IS RIDICULOUSLY FUCKING AGGRESSIVE
HUGE ASS ANIMAL: RAWR!
RIPLEY: Don't move! It's a much more comical interaction if you don't move!
JUGHEAD: Okay! But I'm going to add a touch of awesome so that I can claim this interaction as my own, and not based on anything you have ever "learned" by your stupid and boring "observations" or "studies".
JUGHEAD (TO HUGE ASS ANIMAL): RAWR!
HUGE ASS ANIMAL: RAWR!
JUGHEAD: RAWR!
HUGE ASS ANIMAL TURNS AND RUNS
JUGHEAD: Hah, I knew that eventually I would scare it off.
AUDIENCE: This must be one of those moments seen in every movie where he thinks it was him who scared it, but actually when he turns around...
AN EVEN MORE RIDICULOUSLY AGGRESSIVE SPECIES OF ANIMAL SNEAKS UP BEHIND JUGHEAD, COMING OUT INTO THE OPEN, GIVING JUGHEAD PLENTY OF TIME TO REACT, AS OPPOSED TO SIMPLY JUMPING OH HIM STRAIGHT AWAY
AUDIENCE: Ah, there we go.
JUGHEAD: I don't remember - what did they do in Jurassic Park when there was a situation just like this?
RIPLEY: Never mind that! Run! Run the other way, away from us and all the security protocols we don't have for this situation because we've never had anything like this happen in all the years we've been here!
JUGHEAD RUNS THROUGH THE JUNGLE, NARROWLY ESCAPING ONE RIDICULOUSLY CLOSE CALL AFTER ANOTHER
AUDIENCE: This would be a little more exciting if it weren't such a blur of leaves and motion so that I could actually tell where anything was.
JUGHEAD EVENTUALLY ESCAPES BY JUMPING OFF A CLIFF INTO A POOL AT THE BASE OF A WATERFALL
JUGHEAD: Thank god no body of water below a high dive off a cliff ever has shallow rocks.
LATER JUGHEAD IS MAKING A TORCH OUT OF STUFF.
JUGHEAD: Don't even ask me how I know this liquid I'm dipping my torch into is flammable when it's been clearly established that my character knows nothing about anything. I can't even identify the two largest species of ground animal, and yet I've got mad camping skills.
A PACK OF DOGS THAT AREN'T DOGS EXCEPT THAT THEY ARE DOGS ATTACK. BECAUSE THEY ARE RIDICULOUSLY FUCKING AGGRESSIVE.
JUGHEAD: Okay, one at a time now...
THEY ATTACK ONE AT A TIME
JUGHEAD (WHILE FIGHTING): Damn... I thought if a wolf pack showed up, I would dance with them, and win the hearts of the natives that way... But I suppose not everything will be like that movie...
JUGHEAD KNOCKS DOWN EACH DOG, UNTIL ONE FINALLY GETS THE BETTER OF JUGHEAD. IT LOOKS LIKE IT'S ABOUT TO BITE HIM WHILE THE OTHER DOGS STAND AROUND AND WATCH. THE JAWS GET CLOSER AND CLOSER... AND CLOOOOOSER... AND...
AUDIENCE: Cue the arrow or spear or dart or whatever the fuck it's going to be already!
SUDDENLY A SEXY BUT EMPOWERED FEMALE SMURF, POCAHONTAS, JUMPS IN AND SHOOTS AN ARROW, KILLING THE DOG ON TOP OF JUGHEAD. SHE THEN OPENS UP A CAN OF WHOOPASS ON ALL THE OTHER DOGS.
JUGHEAD: Nice.
POCAHONTAS: Not nice! Bad! Must respect nature!
JUGHEAD: I can literally hear the timer counting down to when you and I get it on.
SHE LOOKS AT HIM COQUETTISHLY, BECAUSE THE SUBTLE WAYS THAT PEOPLE SHOW AFFECTION AND ALL OTHER MANNERISMS ARE UNIVERSAL AMONG ALL SPECIES IN THE UNIVERSE.
AS HE FOLLOWS HER THROUGH THE JUNGLE, A WHOLE BUNCH OF DANDELION SEEDS LAND ON HIM, AND AT THAT MOMENT SHE KNOWS HOW AWESOME HE IS AND SHE TOO CAN HEAR THE COUNTDOWN TIMER TO WHEN SHE WILL GET IT ON WITH HIM. SHE DECIDES TO TAKE HIM BACK TO THE TO SMURF VILLAGE UNDER THIS HUGE TREE. THEY MEET THE CHIEF OF THE VILLAGE, PAPA SMURF
PAPA SMURF: Daughter, why have you brought this guy here?
JUGHEAD: So the chick who is totally crushing on me just happens to be the daughter of the chief? Awesome.
MAMA SMURF: Hang on, let me make some vague pronouncements originating in my ill-defined spiritual nature, which is sort of derived from the actual biological network of this planet so that more sceptical audience members won't be too put off by the new-age analogies, but is kind of an obvious analogy for mother Earth style Gaia spiritualism to appeal to people who read horoscopes.
JUGHEAD: So church and state are all bound up in this one family, and if I seduce the daughter, I've got a shot at running this tribe one day! Nice! Thank god nobody who makes films ever fantasizes about democracies.
MAMA SMURF: Okay, I know all I need to know after about ten seconds of waving my hands around. He can stay, but you, Pocahontas, must teach him everything about us.
JUGHEAD: Three months, tops.
JEALOUS BROTHER: Fuck you! You are an outsider! You don't know our ways! You can't be here! Fuck! You!
JUGHEAD: Hey, Ripley was kind of saying the same thing to m... ooohhhh, I get it. Parallels. Who exactly are you, anyway?
JEALOUS BROTHER: I have been chosen by the undefined and arbitrary rules of our traditions to lead this tribe, and as part of the package I get Pocahantas as my mate!
JUGHEAD: So, you're like, her fiancé? That's weird, because I am sensing, like, zero vibe between you two. I thought you were her overly concerned brother.
JEALOUS BROTHER: Don't tell me I can't impact the story just because Pocahontas doesn't show the remotest interest in me, nor do I to her! I'm also a big shot warrior or something, so I still have potential dramatic inroads to the story!
JUGHEAD: Oh yeah? I'd need an electron microscope to see how much influence you're going to have on the course of action for the entire rest of the movie. I'm willing to bet you just stand around like an uninvolved bystander and watch me be awesome, while gaining grudging respect for me, until ultimately I take your place as the most awesome member of the tribe.
JEALOUS BROTHER THROWS A HISSY FIT AND ATTACKS JUGHEAD. THEY FIGHT, JUGHEAD GETS KNOCKED DOWN. POCAHONTAS PROTECTS JUGHEAD BY USING HER POWERS OF FEMALE EMPOWERMENT.
LATER, JUGHEAD AND POCAHONTAS FALL ASLEEP WRAPPED UP IN HUGE LEAVES THAT THEY USE AS BEDS AND CAN EVEN BE WRAPPED AROUND YOU LIKE A SNUGGIE , BECAUSE IN THIS ENVIRONMENT, WHATEVER ISN'T TRYING TO KILL YOU IS A NATURALLY OCCURRING PRIMITIVE VERSION OF A USEFUL COMMODITY, SORT OF LIKE THE HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES ON THE FLINTSTONES.
JUGHEAD WAKES UP FROM SMURF MODE AND IS BACK IN THE LAB
JUGHEAD: I don't even know who...
RED-SHIRT: Wait! You don't say it yet.
JUGHEAD: Thought I'd get the obvious out of the way.
RED-SHIRT: If we give in to that thinking, this movie would be shorter than the trailer.
JUGHEAD: Right. Anyway, you'll never believe where my Smurf-me is. One fucking day out there, and I am already way past anything that anyone with an education has ever done. Simply by being as awesome as I am, I have been invited by the most awesome babe in their tribe to go back to the centre of their tree and start learning how to be the most awesome member of their tribe.
RIPLEY: Fuck you. But with slightly more respect.
RED-SHIRT: Aw, man, I am so fucking jealous!
RIPLEY: At least that gives you some kind of characteristic to identify you with.
UP IN THE CONTROL TOWER, JUGHEAD IS SHARING ALL SORTS OF INFORMATION WITH THE METAPHORICAL INDUSTRIAL MILITARY COMPLEX BY POINTING STUFF OUT IN A 3D DISPLAY.
JUGHEAD: You see, all the juiciest energy resources are directly underneath their home. What does that remind you of?
SERGEANT STRAW MAN: I give you three months before I basically ignore everything you learn and go ahead with a plan I have now anyway, because military people aren't ever interested in "information" or "options".
A MONTAGE ENSUES, SHOWING JUGHEAD AND POCAHONTAS JUMPING AROUND IN AN ENVIRONMENT THAT IS WAY MORE COOL THAN STUPID EARTH AND IT'S STUPID PLANTS THAT DON'T GLOW WHEN YOU TOUCH THEM.
JUGHEAD (VOICE OVER): Okay, over the next little while, Pocahontas taught me how to do stuff.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, we know. We can see you doing it.
POCAHONTAS: You must learn how we move through the forest.
POCAHONTAS: That's about it. Your training is complete.
CUT TO SCENES OF RED-SHIRT TEACHING JUGHEAD THE SMURF LANGUAGE
JUGHEAD (VOICE OVER): Red-shirt has been teaching me the language. Which I find hard, but it doesn't matter, because that's studying, and obviously studying isn't as important as being white, male, and good looking. And awesome.
JUGHEAD (TO RED-SHIRT): Hey, Red-shirt, aren't you jealous anymore that I am doing everything way better than you, even though you did so much training and I basically just wing everything but still win so fucking hard?
RED-SHIRT: No, I'm over it now.
JUGHEAD: Really? Because that seemed like a potentially awesome plot device, where your internal conflict could be developed into a morally ambiguous character that could make decisions that would challenge the audience by being unpredictable at key moments during the adventure.
RED-SHIRT: No, I'm good. Really.
JUGHEAD: Even with all the messages it sends to kids watching the movie that achievement is a matter of just being awesome, and that only losers actually work and study to try to attain goals that they'll never get because they weren't born with inherent awesomeness?
RED-SHIRT: It's a-ok, my friend.
JUGHEAD: Even though without that one defining characteristic, you're an amorphous blob of a character without a single identifying trait that would make the audience give the slightest shit what happened to you?
RED-SHIRT: I'm so fine with it that we'll never have to even mention it ever again for the rest of the movie.
JUGHEAD: Okay then.
CUT TO POCAHONTAS SHOWING JUGHEAD HOW TO RIDE A HORSE. IT'S NOT REALLY A HORSE, THOUGH. IT'S AN ALIEN HORSE LIKE THING. BUT NOT AN ACTUAL HORSE. LOOK, IT'S GOT MORE LEGS THAN AN EARTH HORSE. AND IT'S GOT THESE ANTENNAE TYPE THINGS. DEFINITELY NOT A HORSE.
AUDIENCE: ...
OKAY, IT'S A HORSE.
POCAHONTAS: Okay, take the USB connector at the bottom of your ponytail and connect it to the port on the horse's antennae.
JUGHEAD: Holy shit, you mean I can interface directly with the network of this planet directly by plugging into various connections that living creatures everywhere seem to have? That's fucking wild! And if you think about it, since we humans have the technology to remotely connect my consciousness by WiFi to this body, then that implies we have the ability to network our consciousnesses as well. There could be potentially all sorts of wild story elements of trying to use mechanistic technology to hack into an organic network, pitting an artificial neural network against a biological neural network and highlighting the diff...
JAMES CAMERON: Shut the fuck up.
JUGHEAD: Sorry... Uh... Oh - whoops! I fell of the horse! What an amusing comedic moment! Hah hah.
JEALOUS BROTHER: Hi, just riding through so I can look at you with a sneer. Sneer! Sneer! Okay, my work here is done.
JUGHEAD WAKES UP FROM SMURF MODE
JUGHEAD: I don't even kn...
RIPLEY: Not yet!
JUGHEAD: Oh, for crying out loud, we all know I'm going to say it.
RIPLEY: We have almost three hours to fill.
AUDIENCE: Really? These glasses are kind of uncomfortable for a whole three hours.
JUGHEAD, RIPLEY, AND RED SHIRT GO IN A HELICOPTER LIKE THING, FLOWN BY VASQUEZ WANNA-BE, UP TO A REMOTE CAMP WHERE THEY HAVE ALL THE TOOLS THEY NEED TO RUN THE AVATAR SYSTEM. TO GET THERE, THEY MUST FLY THROUGH THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE, AN AREA WHERE MOUNTAINS FLOAT, WHICH IS ACTUALLY KIND OF COOL LOOKING.
VASQUEZ WANNA-BE: You need to be a hot shit pilot like myself to fly though here, because this place scrambles all sorts of electronic transmissions, making my whole navigation computer and other types of scan not work.
JUGHEAD: But the WiFi signals that we use to control our Smurf bodies all still work just fine, right?
VASQUEZ WANNA-BE: Yeah, funny how that works.
JUGHEAD: What about our nifty walkie-talkie throat communicator things?
VASQUEZ WANNA-BE: Yep. We can do all the stuff we need to do, just not be tracked by anyone we don't want to be tracked by, if that situation should ever arise.
JUGHEAD: Gee, I wonder if that will ever happen.
THEY ARRIVE AT THE SHIPPING CONTAINERS ON TOP OF A FLOATING MOUNTAIN WHERE THEY HAVE THEIR REMOTE STATION.
JUGHEAD: So... why was a remote station ever made if our WiFi Smurf Control system seems to have absolutely no problem broadcasting to anywhere and everywhere on the planet?
RIPLEY: Um...
BACK IN SMURF MODE, JUGHEAD IS TAKEN TO THE TOP OF A FLOATING MOUNTAIN SO THAT HE CAN CATCH A DRAGON THING TO BECOME HIS RIDE. WE'RE TOLD THAT HE MUST CHOOSE ONE AND THEN FIGHT IT, AND THEN HE CHOOSES ONE AND FIGHTS IT. SINCE THERE IS NO CHANCE IN HELL THE MAIN CHARACTER WILL LOSE ANYTHING AT THIS MOMENT IN THE STORY, AND WE WERE TOLD EXACTLY WHAT WOULD HAPPEN, IT'S ABOUT AS EXCITING AS WATCHING AN EQUATION BEING SOLVED.
WE ARE THEN TREATED TO LENGTHY SCENES OF JUGHEAD AND POCAHONTAS FLYING AROUND TOGETHER ON THE MOST AWESOME FLYING PET THAT YOU COULD NEVER GET ON EARTH BECAUSE EARTH SUCKS AND NEVER LETS HUMANS HAVE AWESOME ANIMALS THAT BASICALLY EXIST TO BE OUR PERSONAL EXTREME SPORTS EQUIPMENT. STUPID EARTH AND IT'S STUPID EVOLUTION.
JUGHEAD (VOICE OVER): Everything became blurry... the time I was in Smurf world was becoming more real to me than my life as a person...
AUDIENCE: Dude, we're watching the same movie you're telling us about. If you're going to tell us stuff, tell us what we don't know.
JUGHEAD: Hey, you can't see into my soul to know how I feel.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, you're sooo hard to read. Just fucking say the line we've seen coming since the start.
JUGHEAD: "I don't know who I am anymore".
BACK IN HUMAN FORM, JUGHEAD TELLS RIPLEY THAT HE AND HIS GIRLFRIEND FLEW TO THE TREE OF SOULS, AND RIPLEY IS JEALOUS, BUT NOT JEALOUS ENOUGH TO DO ANYTHING THAT CHANGES ANYTHING ABOUT HER CHARACTER OR THE STORY IN ANY WAY. THEN JUGHEAD TALKS TO SERGEANT STRAW MAN.
SERGEANT STRAW MAN: Hey, great news! I got you that whole operation we talked about. The one that will get your legs back.
JUGHEAD: You got what...? Oh! The legs... yeah, I forgot about that offer.
AUDIENCE: Us too.
JUGHEAD: Uh, well... um... can I go back in one more time? Because they are going to officially make me the most awesome member of their tribe. I mean, I was from the start, but tonight it's going to be official.
SERGEANT STRAW MAN: Oh, alright. You get one more chance to try achieve a peaceful resolution that I am so obviously going to disregard anyway. I'm a military man, so I hate peace.
BACK IN SMURF MODE, THERE'S A CEREMONY WITH LOTS OF ARBITRARY RITUALS OR WHATEVER. AFTERWARDS, POCAHONTAS TAKES JUGHEAD THROUGH AN AREA FULL OF GLOWING THINGS, AND THE PATCHES OF GLOWY STUFF ON THE GROUND LIGHT UP UNDER THEIR FOOTSTEPS, WHICH MAKES THE PEOPLE IN THE AUDIENCE WHO ARE OLD ENOUGH BE AWKWARDLY REMINDED OF MICHAEL JACKSON'S VIDEO FOR BILLY JEAN
JUGHEAD: Just want to be clear on something... you guys have all your weird alien ways that take our scientists so long to figure out and all... but... you guys still kiss, and show affection, and all your flirtations, and ways of sending "signals"... and... uh... stuff... it all works just like humans do, right?
POCAHONTAS: What are you getting at?
JUGHEAD: Fucking... there's fucking, right? Just like humans?
POCAHONTAS: Oh, yeah. It's just like human fucking, and we sort of hiss and stuff like cats so in a weird way it's kind of hot even though we're blue cat people.
JUGHEAD: Thank god it's all basically the same. I thought I might actually have to learn an actually different mode of behaviour instead of just a few arbitrary rituals and shit.
POCAHONTAS: Then you are one of us.
THEY FUCK.
PEOPLE AT FURRY CONVENTIONS : Thank you, James Cameron, for the highest budget masturbation material ever made.
THEY GO AT IT FOR KIND OF A LONG TIME. ESPECIALLY CONSIDERING THAT THERE ARE SCENES THAT STRANGELY GET NO TIME AT ALL, LIKE THE UPCOMING TAMING OF THE BAD ASS FLYING THING. ANYWAY, NEXT MORNING POCAHONTAS WAKES UP TO THE SOUND OF HUGE ASS BULLDOZERS COMING TO DESTROY THE FOREST. SHE TRIES TO WAKE JUGHEAD, BUT HE'S NOT IN SMURF MODE, SO HIS SMURF BODY WON'T WAKE UP. SHE SCREAMS AT HIM TO WAKE UP BUT HE DOESN'T FOR A LONG TIME. BUT THEN JUGHEAD FINISHES HIS BREAKFAST AND GETS BACK IN THE TANNING BED AND SMURF-JUGHEAD WAKES UP.
JUGHEAD: What the fuck is going on?
POCAHONTAS: It's the start of the third act! We have to run!
THEY GO BACK TO SMURF VILLAGE AND JUGHEAD AND RIPLEY TRY TO CONVINCE THE SMURFS TO RUN BECAUSE SHIT IS ABOUT TO RAIN DOWN REAL HARD. RIPLEY ACTUALLY GETS A PRETTY FUNNY REACTION SHOT WHEN SHE FINDS OUT JUGHEAD HOOKED UP WITH POCAHONTAS.
PAPA SMURF: Pocahontas! You bonded with this guy?
POCAHONTAS: It's okay! I did it before the whatever-it-is ceremony that would have bound me to that other dude who I'm supposed to hook up with. And, so far as anyone can tell, there are no reprocussions for completely disregarding our traditions like this, so we're all good.
JEALOUS BROTHER: Ooooh... you're so lucky you hooked up with her before she hooked up with me, because if you had, I'd be a hundred times more jealous!
JUGHEAD: Meh... a hundred times zero is still zero. Anyway, it seems that I've managed to avoid yet another potentially dramatic challenge without even really knowing what the fuck is going on. Go me!
SUDDENLY JUGHEAD AND RIPLEY FALL DOWN BECAUSE BACK AT BASE THEIR TANNING BEDS HAVE BEEN DISCONNECTED BY THE MILITARY, FORCING THEM BACK TO HUMAN MODE.
JUGHEAD AND RIPLEY ARE TAKEN TO GO TALK TO SERGEANT STRAW MAN AND EMBODIMENT OF CAPITALISM
RIPLEY: Listen, the whole planet is wired up by ethernet, and everything links through The Great I.S.P., and it's totally fucking amazing if you think about it. If we could learn about this, we could exploit the learning to develop technologies that would make us richer than any mineral resource. Especially considering that mineral resources are potentially all over the fucking universe on uninhabited planets, but the life forms here are certain to be unique, and thus far more valuable...
EMBODIMENT OF CAPITALISM:NAH NAH NAH... I CAN'T HEAR YOU AND YOUR POTENTIALLY HUGE BIOTECH STUDIES THAT I COULD MOST LIKELY EXPLOIT WITHOUT KILLING ANY NATIVES AND MAKE ME INSANELY RICH WITHOUT ANY MORAL PREDICAMENTS...
SERGEANT STRAW MAN: Here, look at this vlog of Jughead saying that the Smurfs will never leave their home. That pretty much seals the deal. Good thing James Cameron insisted you keep recording your vlogs!
EMBODIMENT OF CAPITALISM: Ah, fuck it... let's give them one more hour anyway, for no good reason.
JUGHEAD AND RIPLEY GO INTO SMURF MODE AND TRY TO CONVINCE THE SMURFS TO LEAVE.
JUGHEAD: Hey, Smurfs, we have to go because...
POCAHONTAS: You lied to me! I had sex with you and everything! I hate you now!
JUGHEAD: Hey, how come when everything is good, we can link up with our ethernet, or have all this spirtual bonding or whatever, but now when I need you to understand me most, you won't even let me finish one fucking sentence of explanation. Seems like fair-weather spiritual bullsh...
POCAHONTAS: Fuck you! Smurfs - tie them up!
JUGHEAD AND RIPLEY GET TIED UP AND IT LOOKS LIKE THEY ARE ABOUT TO HAVE THEIR HEARTS CUT OUT TEMPLE OF DOOM STYLE OR SOMETHING
JUGHEAD: Huh... Maybe this society isn't so idyllic after all. Seems they have some pretty rough justice when you look past all the pretty rituals, and glowing 'shrooms, and shit.
THE POTENTIALLY SAVAGE EXECUTIONS THAT RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT JUST HOW AWESOME THIS SOCIETY REALLY IS ARE CUT SHORT BECAUSE SUDDENLY A WHOLE BUNCH OF MILITARY FLYING SHIPS SHOW UP AND START SHOOTING AT THE BIG TREE. VASQUEZ WANNA-BE, WHO IS FLYING ONE OF THE HELICOPTER THINGIES, REFUSES TO FIRE AND BREAKS FROM FORMATION. THE AUDIENCE IS A LITTLE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THE POSSIBILITY THAT THE ONLY REASON THIS CHARACTER IS CAST AS A NON-WHITE-ARYAN IS BECAUSE THAT'S SUPPOSED TO BE ENOUGH EXPLANATION AS TO WHY SHE HAS SYMPATHY WITH THE NATIVES, SINCE NO OTHER EXPLANATION IS EVER OFFERED.
THE TREE FALLS OVER, AND LOTS OF SMURFS DIE, INCLUDING PAPA SMURF. POCAHONTAS IS SAD, JUST LIKE THAT EWOK THAT WAS SAD WHEN THAT OTHER EWOK DIED.
BACK AT THE GREEN ZONE, MILITARY DUDES TAKE RIPLEY, RED-SHIRT, AND JUGHEAD TO A PRISON
RED-SHIRT: Aw man, now we're in prison in the middle of a military complex swarming with people with combat ability. I can only assume that the place is covered in surveillance technologies. And no offense, Jughead, but even though I respect that up until this point your wheelchair has been a complete non-issue, it seems like it would be a serious hindrance in the middle of a jail break. All it would take is a couple of stairs to maybe create tension through the possibility of getting captured...
VASQUEZ WANNA-BE, WHO IS MYSTERIOUSLY NOT IN PRISON HERSELF DESPITE HAVING DISOBEYED ORDERS IN THE MIDDLE OF A COMBAT MISSION, SHOWS UP AND BREAKS THEM OUT.
RED-SHIRT: Huh. I really thought the wheelchair might have actually come into play that time.
OTHER SCIENTIST: Hey guys, remember me?
AUDIENCE: No.
JUGHEAD: Dude, you need to stay here because we need someone on the inside.
OTHER SCIENTIST: Why? It's not as if me staying here will make any difference. All events are going to proceed from this point like a freight train without brakes. It's because my character is completely extraneous in every way, isn't it? Be honest.
JUGHEAD: Yeah, pretty much. But hey, you can call us by Skype video later if you get lonely.
VASQUEZ WANNA-BE: Okay, we're all on board my helicopter thing and we're flying away from this surprisingly unattended air hanger. Wow, that was easy. What did that take us? Like, a minute?
RIPLEY: Hey, it wasn't that easy. I got shot. Not in any way that would slow down our escape or anything, mind you. Just at the end there.
THEY FLY OUT TO THE REMOTE STATION WHERE THEY DETACH A MODULE AND THEN FLY IT TO ANOTHER SPOT DEEPER WITHIN THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE. JUGHEAD THEN TAKES RIPLEY'S HUMAN BODY TO THE TREE OF SOULS AND CONVINCES MAMA SMURF TO TRY AND USE THE GREAT I.S.P. TO PERMANENTLY TRANSFER RIPLEY'S MIND TO HER SMURF BODY. MAMA SMURF IS DOWN WITH THAT, BUT JUGHEAD THINKS HE DOESN'T HAVE ENOUGH STREET CRED WITH THE SMURF SOCIETY, SO HE DECIDES TO GO OUT AND DO SOMETHING THAT WILL NOT ONLY RECOVER ANY LOST AWESOMENESS, BUT ACTUALLY CRANK HIS AWESOMENESS UP A FEW NOTCHES FROM IT'S PREVIOUS HIGH LEVEL.
JUGHEAD: Okay, I think I'll do this incredibly difficult task of catching one of these super bad-ass red flying dragon things that only two people in the history of their civilization have ever been able to tame.
THE AUDIENCE GEARS UP FOR A FIGHT THAT WILL CONVEY THROUGH ACTION THE IMMENSE DIFFICULTY OF THE STRUGGLE THAT JUGHEAD MUST UNDERTAKE TO SUBDUE THE...
JUGHEAD: Done!
AUDIENCE: What the fuck?
JAMES CAMERON: I've got director's cut DVDs to sell later on, bitches.
JUGHEAD RETURNS TO THE BIG GLOWING WILLOW TREE WHERE ALL THE SMURFS ARE TO SHOW OFF HIS NEW RIDE. THEY ARE SUITABLY IMPRESSED BY HOW FUCKING AWESOME IT IS.
MAMA SMURF PROCEEDS TO TRY AND TRANSFER RIPLEY'S MIND TO HER SMURF BODY.
RIPLEY: Watch what happens to me very closely.
JUGHEAD: Huh? Why?
RIPLEY: Foreshadowing, moron. It's obvious at this point that by the end of the movie you'll...
RIPLEY DIES
JUGHEAD: What? What happens to me?
AUDIENCE: You want us to tell you?
JUGHEAD: Nah, I've got a Braveheart style speech to give to rally all the tribes to fight the invading army.
AUDIENCE: Is there anything in this movie that isn't from another movie?
JAMES CAMERON: Umm.... no.
JUGHEAD: Hear me Smurfs! I am pretty much complete in my awesomeness! I am better at being you than even you are! White man's burden isn't just for primitive human cultures anymore, we're taking it galactic now, bitches!
SMURFS: Yay...?
JUGHEAD: Now go gather more people to bask in my awesomeness. Bring the ones who live on the plains, the ones who live on the rocks, and the ones that... um... wherever there are people who are not yet aware that I have arrived to show them what true awesomeness is!
MONTAGE OF SMURFS FLYING AND RUNNING AROUND EVERYWHERE GATHERING MORE SMURFS TO ENGAGE IN A BATTLE THAT WILL ULTIMATELY GLORIFY THE NEW GUY.
MEANWHILE SERGEANT STRAW MAN IS SPEAKING TO A ROOM FULL OF SOLDIERS.
SERGEANT STRAW MAN: This is going to be tough! Really tough! Lots of you might die! But we are going to go in there and unleash an orgy of violence that I am going to masturbate to before, during, and after. Because I love fighting. As anyone, military or not, who has not ever experienced direct combat themselves knows, all military people just love to get into war. We are impervious to post traumatic stress disorder, we love to fight! We love death and violence! Because we are military! Hoo-rah!
SOLDIER: Couldn't we just bomb from orbit? Instead of flying the bombs in and risking having our asses handed to us, we could just press a button from a satellite and obliterate the enemy without a single loss of life on our side.
ANOTHER SOLDIER: Hey, since they have this whole bio-electronic network that for some reason we're not at all interested in, doesn't that open up the possibility that we could use a large electromagnetic pulse to knock out all their communications and leave them defenseless? Seems like the battle might be a lot easier that way.
YET ANOTHER SOLDIER: Ooh, ooh... what about some kind of gas attack? Germ warfare is probably unfeasible since they have an entirely different biology here, but toxic gases could probably suffocate every living thing within miles, and then we could go in and the engineers could clear the land.
ANOTHER SOLDIER: I'm kind of surprised we don't have any crowd suppression technologies, like microwave guns or sound waves that we can use to repulse the natives. We could potentially make the area unbearable long enough to force them out.
YET ANOTHER SOLDIER: Yeah, it seems like there are definitely lots of ways that this could be handled without putting any of us in harm's way, and some of them might even leave the natives mostly, if not entirely unharmed as well. Did you really think through this operation? Seems to me that there is only the pale imitation of what military strategy looks like from a watching movies, and no actual thought about what would work.
SERGEANT STRAW MAN: ...
SOLDIER: Ooh! Hey! Hey! I just had another idea! How come we haven't already started a siege to blockade their resources...
SERGEANT STRAW MAN: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! We go in and fight with guns. Got it? Guns. Guns are symbolic of military excess, and bombs from space aren't!
MEANWHILE THE OTHER SCIENTIST STILL BACK IN THE GREEN ZONE CALLS TEAM JUGHEAD BY SKYPE VIDEO.
OTHER SCIENTIST: Guys, they're about to head on over and blow shit up. It's some serious shock and awe stuff.
JUGHEAD: Dude, did you just say "shock and awe"?
OTHER SCIENTIST: Uh... yeah. So?
JUGHEAD: I don't know... that just lacks subtlety. Obviously there are some Afghanistan and Iraq parallels being made here, but to just say it outright like that...
OTHER SCIENTIST: Says the dude who is fighting to protect a literal fucking tree of life. A LITERAL TREE OF LIFE. And you want subtlety? Suck my balls.
JUGHEAD: Fair point.
THE HUMAN FORCES FLY THEIR HUGE ASS BOMBER THING INTO THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE, SURROUNDED BY LOTS OF SMALLER FLYING HELICOPTER THINGIES. MEANWHILE, SOME GROUND FORCES ARE ALSO DEPLOYED, DESPITE NEVER IN THE HISTORY OF MODERN WARFARE ANY MILITARY THAT HAD SUFFICIENT AIR RESOURCES EVER SENDING IN GROUND FORCES WITHOUT FIRST ESTABLISHING AIR SUPERIORITY. THESE PEOPLE, HOWEVER, ARE TOTALLY FINE WITH THE HIGH LIKELIHOOD OF BOMBING THEIR OWN TROOPS.
SERGEANT STRAW MAN: Mmm... nothing like a sip of Starbucks hazelnut latte as I go into battle, symbolically representing my position as the violent arm of capitalist excess while making me look callous about violence at the same time.
SOME SOLDIER ON THE GROUND: Why do we even need a ground offensive if our only objective is to bomb the tree and destroy it?
SERGEANT STRAW MAN: Shut up and get ready to kill some natives.
SOME PILOT OR GUY ON THE GROUND OR SOMEONE: My scanner thing shows movement.
AUDIENCE: How come yesterday in the military briefing you were able to scan this area from orbit and determine how many hostiles there are, but today you can only scan with enough range to see them two seconds before they attack?
JAMES CAMERON: It's different places. Or something.
AUDIENCE: Wait, but... are they attacking in the Burmuda Triangle or not? And where were the Smurf forces amassing if not there? I'm not sure I understand where everything is... if the ground forces are underneath the flying things, then don't they risk being bombed, and if they aren't, then where are they attacking...?
JAMES CAMERON: Uh... Hey, look! A big fight has started!
AUDIENCE: Oooooh! Exciting!
A FIGHT IN THE AIR AND ON THE GROUND STARTS. IN THE AIR, JUGHEAD NOT ONLY GETS TO BE ON THE MOST BAD-ASS FLYING DRAGON THING, HE ALSO HAS A HUGE MACHINE GUN, GIVING HIM WAY MORE EDGE THAN ALL THE BULLET CATCHERS AROUND HIM.
VASQUEZ WANNA-BE, IN HER STOLEN HELICOPTER THING, GETS A FEW SHOTS IN, AND FOR A MOMENT IT LOOKS LIKE SHE MIGHT DO SOMETHING LIKE CRASH HER HELICOPTER THING INTO THE BIG BOMBER THING AND MAKE HER DEATH A HUGE HEROIC ACT THAT EFFECTS THE STORY, BUT INSTEAD SHE JUST GETS SHOT DOWN.
VASQUEZ WANNA-BE: But it's sad, though, isn't it? I mean, I demonstrated that I had a conscience by not shooting at the tree. That makes me a good guy, and you should be sad when a good guy dies.
AUDIENCE: Maybe if we knew a single fucking thing about you, like why you sided with the Smurfs other than a vague sense of sympathy.
JUGHEAD JUMPS ON THE MAIN SHIP WITH SERGEANT STRAW MAN IN IT, BECAUSE EVEN BEGINNER SCRIPT WRITERS KNOW THAT REALISTIC BATTLES WHERE THE COMMANDERS NEVER MEET FACE TO FACE LACK HUMAN DRAMA.
MEANWHILE, ON THE GROUND, THE SMURFS ON HORSES BASICALLY ALL GET SHOT IN THE FACE AS THEY RIDE STRAIGHT INTO THE BULLETS OF THE HUMAN FORCES. RED-SHIRT DIES IN A BLAZE OF... ACTUALLY, HE PRETTY MUCH JUST GETS SHOT IN THE FACE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. NOBODY NOTICES OR CARES, AND WHY SHOULD THEY? ONCE HIS SMURF BODY DIES, HE IS SAFELY BACK AT HIS TANNING BED, HIGHLIGHTING THE FACT THAT FOR HIM, AND FOR JUGHEAD, IT'S ALL JUST A BIG AWESOME VIDEOGAME, AND OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES AND CIVILIZATIONS ARE AT STAKE.
POCAHONTAS: Hey, shouldn't we have maybe tried some different tactics? I thought this was going to be more like the "Battle for Endor" scene at the end of Return of the Jedi, but actually it's more Last Samurai, and the guys in that movie expected to get all shot to pieces. Isn't it standard that if you're a local force resisting against a technologically superior and more organized military that you use asymmetrical battle tactics, like guerrilla warfare and running and gunning? At least the fucking Ewoks used the environment to their advantage and set traps and shit. Our plan doesn't even have the level of military competance you get from fucking teddy bears!!
JUGHEAD (VIA THROAT WALKIE TALKIE): Whatever. I skipped military history classes when I was learning to become a marine. Studying is for losers. Fuck strategy. I am awesome, and that's all you need to know.
POCAHONTAS: I'm not looking for a wildly detailed strategy that might confuse the audience, I'm just saying... running straight at people who have machine guns and grenade launchers is obviously fucking retarded! Everyone around me is fucking dead now!
JUGHEAD: Wait! Everyone else is dead? Well, that's different if now it might be my future trophy wife who dies. Do not engage the enemy! Do you hear me! Do not engage!
POCAHONTAS: No, I must. You see, I have some fucked up sense of primitive honour code or something, so I'm going to make a futile gesture of fighting even though it means my certain death. No sense of self preservation. We primitives are silly that way.
SUDDENLY, HORDES OF THE VARIOUS SPECIES OF ANIMALS THAT WE WERE INTRODUCED TO IN THE FIRST ACT SHOW UP AND WIN THE FIGHT. IT'S THAT EASY.
POCAHONTAS: Hey, couldn't The Great I.S.P. have pulled that move, say, 15 minutes earlier? Would have been nice for us to not have been massacred and all... We did fucking tell the Great I.S.P. about the whole plan yesterday, so what the fuck was it waiting for?
JAMES CAMERON: Shut the fuck up.
EVENTUALLY THE HUMAN FORCES ARE ALL BUT DESTROYED, EXCEPT FOR SERGEANT STRAW MAN IN HIS ARMOURED BATTLE SUIT THING, WHICH IS ACTUALLY PRETTY BAD ASS, AND HE IS IN A FIGHT WITH POCAHONTAS AND JUGHEAD. POCAHONTAS AND JUGHEAD WIN BY USING THEIR POWERS OF PREDICTABILITY. HOWEVER, DURING THE FIGHT, WHICH TAKES PLACE RIGHT BESIDE THE REMOTE STATION WHERE JUGHEAD'S TANNING BED IS, JUGHEAD'S TANNING BED GETS DAMAGED AND HE LOSES HIS LINK TO HIS SMURF BODY.
JUGHEAD STUMBLES OUT OF THE TANNING BED AND NEEDS TO GET AN OXYGEN MASK TO SURVIVE THE PANDORAN ATMOSPHERE, BUT SINCE HE'S CRIPPLED, IT'S KIND OF TOUGH. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE WHOLE MOVIE, HIS HANDICAP SORT OF MAKES A DIFFERENCE, EXCEPT THAT EVEN A GUY WITH FULL USE OF HIS LEGS WOULD ALSO BE DISORIENTED AND DISADVANTAGED BY BEING ABRUPTLY CUT OFF FROM SMURF MODE AND THROWN INTO AN ATMOSPHERE WITHOUT OXYGEN, SO IT'S NOT REALLY THAT BIG OF A DIFFERENCE.
FORTUNATELY, POCAHONTAS REALIZES WHAT'S GOING ON AND JUMPS OVER TO THE TANNING BED AND GETS AN OXYGEN MASK ON JUGHEAD, AND EVERTYHING IS COPACETIC.
JUGHEAD: How did you know I was over here? Even looking past the fact that it's entirely unclear how much you know about how whole WiFi Smurf Control technology works, how did you know I would be here in this tanning bed just now?
POCAHONTAS: Maybe I heard you crashing around?
JUGHEAD: Maybe... except that with all the blowing up going on and machines falling apart, how did you know it was me and not just another piece of debris falling down?
POCAHONTAS: Um... I could sense you?
JUGHEAD: Yeah, but you never seemed to have a sense of where exactly my consciousness was before. Like when we woke up to the bulldozers, you thought I was asleep...
RED-SHIRT: Maybe I called her over, without the audience hearing or seeing me, since when my Smurf body got shot I would have been right here in the same remote station that you were in. I guess I could have helped you with your oxygen mask myself, but then I'd have been a third wheel in your special moment. So instead I'm remaining inexplicably and completely absent...
JAMES CAMERON: Shut the fuck up!
JUGHEAD: Oh... uh... I see you. Get it? "I see you" is what we say to mean we really connect, but it's more poignant because I'm in my human body... or something... what a tender moment!
CUT TO A SCENE OF THE REMAINING MILITARY FORCES AND EMBODIMENT OF CAPITALISM BEING FROG MARCHED OFF THE PLANET.
EMBODIMENT OF CAPITALISM: Um... we could still bomb you from orbit...
JUGHEAD: Let us have this moment.
AUDIENCE: Is this over then? The glasses are hurting my nose...
CUT TO A CEREMONY JUST LIKE THE ONE WHERE THEY FAILED TO TRANSFER RIPLEY'S MIND TO HER SMURF BODY. JUGHEAD MUST PASS THROUGH THE EYE OF THE SOMETHING OR OTHER, WHICH MIGHT BE DIFFICULT SINCE NEAR DEAD RIPLEY WASN'T STRONG ENOUGH TO DO IT, BUT WE HAVE NO IDEA BECAUSE WE NEVER SEE ANYTHING THAT HELPS US UNDERSTAND THE STAKES INVOLVED.
JUST LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE, JUGHEAD SIMPLY DOES IT IN TWO SECONDS, AND HE IS OFFICIALLY MADE PERMANENTLY THE MOST AWESOME MEMBER OF THIS AWESOME ADVENTURE WONDERLAND SOCIETY THAT IS SO MUCH MORE BEAUTIFUL AND COOL THAN ANY LIFE HE WOULD HAVE HAD OTHERWISE. IT'S ESPECIALLY AWESOME FOR HIM BECAUSE ONLY PEOPLE THAT BOTH HE AND THE AUDIENCE HAD NO CONNECTION TO MADE SACRIFICES, SO THE WHITE MAN WINS FUCKING HARD, BITCHES!
SMURFS (SINGING): It's the circle... The Circle of Life!!
SUDDENLY THE ENTIRE AREA IS BOMBED FROM SPACE
MICHAEL BAY: Planet go boom! Whee! Explosions! Now that's a movie!
GEORGE LUCAS: Oh, man, I can't wait to get my hands on this technology. Did you see what I did with Jar Jar Binks? Imagine that, but times a billion!
PARIS — Just as Le Corbusier’s white cruciform towers once excited visions of the industrial-age city of the future, so Vélib’, Paris’s bicycle rental system, inspired a new urban ethos for the era of climate change.
Residents here can rent a sturdy bicycle from hundreds of public stations and pedal to their destinations, an inexpensive, healthy and low-carbon alternative to hopping in a car or bus.
But this latest French utopia has met a prosaic reality: Many of the specially designed bikes, which, when the system’s startup and maintenance expenses are included, cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.
With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche.
“The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” Le Monde mourned in an editorial over the summer. “The Vélib’ was aimed at civilizing city travel. It has increased incivilities.”
The heavy, sandy-bronze Vélib’ bicycles are seen as an accoutrement of the “bobos,” or “bourgeois-bohèmes,” the trendy urban middle class, and they stir resentment and covetousness. They are often being vandalized in a socially divided Paris by resentful, angry or anarchic youth, the police and sociologists say.
Bruno Marzloff, a sociologist who specializes in transportation, said, “One must relate this to other incivilities, and especially the burning of cars,” referring to gangs of immigrant youths burning cars during riots in the suburbs in 2005.
He said he believed there was social revolt behind Vélib’ vandalism, especially for suburban residents, many of them poor immigrants who feel excluded from the glamorous side of Paris.
“It is an outcry, a form of rebellion; this violence is not gratuitous,” Mr. Marzloff said. “There is an element of negligence that means, ‘We don’t have the right to mobility like other people, to get to Paris it’s a huge pain, we don’t have cars, and when we do, it’s too expensive and too far.’ ”
Used mainly for commuting in the urban core of the city, the Vélib’ program is by many measures a success. After swiping a credit card for a deposit at an electronic docking station, a rider pays one euro per day, or 29 euros (about $43) for an annual pass, for unlimited access to the bikes for 30-minute periods that can be extended for a small fee.
Daily use averages 50,000 to 150,000 trips, depending on the season, and the bicycles have proved to be a hit with tourists, who help power the economy.
But the extra-solid construction and electronic docks mean the bikes, made in Hungary, are expensive, and not everyone shares the spirit of joint public property promoted by Paris’s Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë.
“We miscalculated the damage and the theft,” said Albert Asséraf, director of strategy, research and marketing at JCDecaux, the outdoor-advertising company that is a major financer and organizer of the project. “But we had no reference point in the world for this kind of initiative.”
At least 8,000 bikes have been stolen and 8,000 damaged so badly that they had to be replaced — nearly 80 percent of the initial stock, Mr. Asséraf said.
JCDecaux must repair some 1,500 bicycles a day. The company maintains 10 repair shops and a workshop on a boat that moves up and down the Seine.
JCDecaux reinforced the bicycles’ chains and baskets and added better theft protection, strengthening the mechanisms that attach them to the electronic parking docks, since an incompletely secured bike is much easier to steal. But the damage and theft continued.
“We made the bike stronger, ran ad campaigns against vandalism and tried to better inform people on the Web,” Mr. Asséraf said. But “the real solution is just individual respect.”
In 2008 , the number of infractions related to Vélib’ vandalism rose 54 percent, according to the Paris police.
“We found many stolen Vélib’s in Paris’s troubled neighborhoods,” said Marie Lajus, a spokeswoman for the police. “It’s not profit-making delinquency, but rather young boys, especially from the suburbs, consider the Vélib’ an object that has no value.”
Sometimes the bikes are also victims of good old adolescent anarchic fun. These attitudes are expressed by the “freeriders,” and a bicycle forum, where a mock poll asks riders whether the Vélib’ can do wheelies, go down stairs and make decent skid marks.
It is commonplace now to see the bikes at docking stations in Paris with flat tires, punctured wheels or missing baskets. Some Vélib’s have been found hanging from lampposts, dumped in the Seine, used on the streets of Bucharest or resting in shipping containers on their way to North Africa. Some are simply appropriated and repainted.
Finding a decent one is now something of an urban treasure hunt. Géraldine Bernard, 31, of Paris rides a Vélib’ to work every day but admits having difficulties lately finding functioning bikes.
“It’s a very clever initiative to improve people’s lives, but it’s not a complete success,” she said.
“For a regular user like me, it generates a lot of frustration,” she said. “It’s a reflection of the violence of our society and it’s outrageous: the Vélib’ is a public good but there is no civic feeling related to it.”
Still, with more than 63 million rentals since the program was begun in mid-2007, the Vélib’ is an established part of Parisian life, and the program has been extended to provide 4,000 Vélib’s in 29 towns on the city’s edges.
So despite the increasing costs, Paris and JCDecaux are pressing on. The company invested about $140 million to set up the system and provides a yearly fee of about $5.5 million to Paris, which also gets rental fees for the bikes. In return, the company’s 10-year contract allows it to put up 1,628 billboards that it can rent.
Although JCDecaux will not discuss money figures, the expected date for profitability has been set back. But the City of Paris has agreed to pay JCDecaux about $600 for each stolen or irreparably damaged bike if the number exceeds 4 percent of the fleet, which it clearly does.
In an unsuccessful effort to stop vandalism, Paris began an advertising campaign this summer. Posters showed a cartoon Vélib’ being roughed up by a thug. The caption read: “It’s easy to beat up a Vélib’, it can’t defend itself. Vélib’ belongs to you, protect it!”
A Ralph Lauren window display in Sydney, Australia, shows a digitally altered image of a model.
The Issue
A Ralph Lauren ad, featuring a model with hips narrower than her head — so cartoonish, so grotesque, so right for Halloween — has become the latest focus of the already ongoing criticism of digitally altered fashion spreads, even though it ran only in Japan. Foes see such images as harming women by promoting a standard of beauty so false that it can be achieved solely by manipulating a photograph of an already slender model. This image is an extreme example of what happens to many ads, a practice that has become so dubious that some governments are taking action. Should ads using electronically altered images be banned?
The Argument
Yes, say Britain’s Liberal Democrats. At their party conference in September, they called for the prohibition of faked photos that present “overly perfected and unrealistic images” of women in ads aimed at children and warning labels on similar ads aimed at adults. Jo Swinson, a member of Parliament, noted the damage done to women by an unceasing flow of such images, citing rising rates of cosmetic surgery and eating disorders and the anxiety of women constantly judged on their appearance.
She has a point. It is commonplace that women are pressured to meet an artificial standard of beauty. These ads affect men too, giving them false expectations of how women look. Now technology makes that standard unobtainable even by professional beauties, as is evident in paired photographs, pre- and post-Photoshop, of Jessica Alba, Keira Knightley and even, anomalously, Andy Roddick.
French parliamentarians have called not for a ban but for warning labels on manipulated images. The representative Valérie Boyer, a leading proponent of such a law, sees it as an ordinary matter of truth in advertising. “Rules on food-labeling let consumers know the origins of the contents and the presence of things like additives and preservatives,” she said. What’s wrong with “informing them when photographs have also been modified from their original form?”
For us Americans, a ban on such ads might clash with our ideas about free expression, even when what’s expressed is that a particular mascara will lengthen your eyelashes, perhaps by as much as six inches, like twin fans glued to your eyelids, if I catch the implied promise. But we already accept labels that list a product’s ingredients or assess its nutritional value or warn of dangers in its use. Similar transparency should apply to phony-baloney advertising photographs.
There is the counterargument that fashion ads are inherently false: preternaturally beautiful models are worked over by makeup artists and hair stylists, illuminated by lighting designers and shot by sophisticated photographers. In such a context, where can we draw the line on deceit? Here’s where: with the electronic manipulation of a photograph. It may be an arbitrary limit, but we set arbitrary limits all the time. The 55-mile-an-hour speed limit draws on the knowledge of traffic engineers, but it is not a manifestation of some immutable law of nature.
It could also be argued that a labeling law, equitably applied, would require warnings on nearly all ads, including those that alter reality in other ways. For example, few roads are as serenely traffic-free as those in car commercials (and indeed some automobile ads on TV already note that they were photographed on a closed course). But here’s the distinction: Although that open road deliberately conveys a bogus sense of driving delight, the road itself is not the product. The car is the product. In fashion ads, however, whether for clothes or makeup or shampoo, the model’s beauty is the product, or at least the direct result the product is meant to achieve. Because that beauty cannot be obtained via the proffered merchandise but only through a tricked-out photo, this is a case of false advertising.
Even if the sort of labeling law proposed in France and the U.K. proved to be the camel’s nose in the tent and proliferated to govern all sorts of ads, in all sorts of ways, that’s fine. There is an ethical case for pasting a label on, for instance, overly optimistic beer ads: “Use of this product will not win you the love of magnificent women, unless they drink the beer. And plenty of it.”
It’s easy to imagine even broader warnings that would flag beauty achieved not only electronically but also medically, denoting the particular bits on a model that have been surgically enlarged, reduced or smoothed out. Eventually lingerie ads might require a page of boilerplate, like the ads for prescription drugs, but without restrictions on wearing any particular underwear while operating heavy machinery. Big pharma survived such requirements; big bra can do likewise.
A tougher charge to refute is that such warnings are ineffectual. Simply being told that you’re watching an ad, even a deceptive ad, does not inoculate you against its effects. We like to think we’re too savvy to be seduced by, say, a soda commercial, yet at the supermarket, we are strangely drawn to Coke. Or Pepsi. Or whichever cola ad includes adorable polar bear cubs. Apparently they’re quite thirst-quenching.
Yet it’s still worth posting those alerts. That’s one way ideas percolate through a society. Social change is achieved by battling on many fronts: studying gender roles, learning about health and nutrition and calling attention to bogus photos. That is how we can move toward a less creepy concept of female beauty than the one promulgated by Ralph Lauren and, more ambitiously, resist the sexist assumption that beauty is a commodity women are obliged to provide to men. This is not to deny the delights of allure, of playfulness, of flirtation, of sexual attractiveness: bring them on. But don’t make it all the woman’s burden only, don’t make it contingent on what she buys and don’t lie to get her to buy it.
A spokeswoman for Polo Ralph Lauren has apologized for the photo of the stick figure with the freakishly out-of-proportion head, albeit after the company tried and failed to suppress dissemination of this image on the Web. But the story has a final twist. Last week the company fired the model in the ad, Filippa Hamilton. She says she lost her job because the company thought she had grown too fat. She’s a size 4, 120 pounds on a 5-foot-10 frame. The company says it ditched her because of her “inability to meet the obligations under her contract with us.” Just a crazy coincidence, I’ve no doubt.
KIMCHI, CHUTNEY, ADOBO Purple Yam in Brooklyn has an eclectic menu and clientele.
ROMY DOROTAN, the chef and an owner of Purple Yam, stood at the bar of his restaurant, looking out at Cortelyou Road in the rain. It was just after Christmas, and there were still holiday songs playing on the stereo behind him. It was early afternoon and the place smelled of fresh flowers, vinegar and fried pork. He looked a bit like a ship’s captain: formidable, intimidating, kind.
There was a long brick wall behind him reminiscent of the one that dominated his last restaurant, Cendrillon, in SoHo, for more than a decade. Mr. Dorotan and his wife, Amy Besa, closed it in March. They moved to Brooklyn, to Ditmas Park, a neighborhood of Victorian houses and discount stores, to start again.
There was a family eating lunch at one of the booths in the back of the restaurant, across from its partly open kitchen, under a bead-board ceiling.
Purple Yam serves lunch on weekends only. It makes the most of the opportunity. There was a spread on the table: eggs, garlic-fried rice and tocino, the sweetened cured pork known sometimes as Filipino bacon; thin rice noodles with chicken, pork and swirls of vegetable; Balinese fried chicken and a purée of taro and sweet potato as rich as softened butter. The kids were drinking mango juice. The adults were drinking chai lattes.
Mr. Dorotan turned and regarded these people as an artist might a sketch. He went into the kitchen. A few moments later, he emerged with a small bowl of sambal, a kind of Malaysian ketchup, that he had cooked thick with coconut milk, brightened with lime. “This is for the chicken,” he said, and returned to his post by the window.
The chicken had been served with two dipping sauces already: one sour and soylike, the other with the peppery kick of a traditional American hot sauce. These were excellent. The sambal number, however, provoked happy gibberish from those who ate it over the chicken, who spooned it into their mouths like fiery yogurt.
Mr. Dorotan remained expressionless. He trimmed a few poinsettias at the bar, then returned to the kitchen. The dinner rush would be coming in less than six hours. He had work to do.
Purple Yam is not precisely Filipino. Mr. Dorotan’s vision is too wide for such easy characterization. At Cendrillon, he used the Philippines as a point of reference for his cooking — Malay by nature, Chinese and Hispanic by curious nurture — and added European flavors to it. At Purple Yam, the menu has those old favorites but also looks widely across Asia for inspiration, most notably toward Korea, the cuisine of which provides both kimchi and flavored sojus, a mean bibimbap and a spicy tofu soup.
As at Cendrillon, the result is more than the sum of its parts. Purple Yam is a perfect neighborhood restaurant.
True to its aesthetic, the menu is resistant to easy division into appetizers and main courses. There are kimchis and chutneys to order. There are vegetables and side dishes. There is pig — almost every part of it. And there are Cendrillon classics, ranging from a sublime chicken adobo to a faintly ridiculous wild-boar pizza.
Ms. Besa can be found most evenings at the restaurant’s door, in front of the crowded dining room, making small talk with her guests and, when necessary, apologizing for the long waits for a table or for food. There are date-night renters at the bar, kids from Ocean Avenue flats sharing an entree and a beer; local home-owning families eating out with neighbors; Filipinos who’ve driven in from other parts of bedroom Brooklyn; a few bewildered travelers off the Q train.
The menu is studded with the sort of offerings that inspire craving. (Cravings are a key component to a successful neighborhood restaurant.)
There is that chicken adobo, for instance. Adobo is a national dish of the Philippines, with probably as many recipes for it as there are islands in the archipelago. Some are soupy braises of chicken or pork in soy sauce and vinegar. Others are cooked down until almost dry.
This is Purple Yam’s version: the chicken braised in rice vinegar, soy sauce, garlic and Thai chili pepper, and served in a vastly reduced pool of that liquid, now cut through and softened with coconut milk. Eat it with a bowl of fried rice anointed with bagoong, a kind of fermented shrimp paste, and it’s possible to imagine it on the level of a neighborhood staple, up there with pizza or rotisserie chicken.
Other necessities include those glassy rice noodles with chicken and pork, a plate of oxtails stewed in tomatoes and peanuts and another of deep-fried pork belly with pickled papaya. There ought to be sisig on your table as well, the restaurant’s fantastic, crisp meat salad: chopped pig snout, ears and jowls, crisp and fatty at once, in a slightly fiery lime dressing. (Go on: try it.)
You’ll want some kimchi. Maybe a salad of jicama and green papaya, too. In a depressing nod to market trends, there are “sliders” on the menu, Korean-style meatballs in small buns flavored with purple yams. (These aren’t necessary. Nor are the restaurant’s Chinese-style ribs.) There is slow-cooked duck leg, almost a confit, wrapped in banana leaves.
And there are marvelous desserts: rice pudding flavored with coffee and chocolate; flan rich with the nutty flavor of pandan. Best of all, there is halo halo, the Philippines’ answer to an ice cream sundae: a parfait glass of sweet beans, palm seeds, all manner of coconut products and jackfruit, topped with flan and purple yam ice cream. The combination is hilarious, like an umbrella drink gone mad, and extremely delicious.
Years ago, well before Cendrillon, Mr. Dorotan lived in Key West. There is something of that place in his restaurant, even now.
Key West is where the American experiment sees its glorious proof: the poor living amid the wealthy; the gay amid the straight; the eccentric amid the strait-laced. Democrats eat side by side with Republicans in the Conch Republic, Latinos by whites by blacks by Asians. All humans swoon in the presence of a glorious sunset. (And a lot of alcohol.)
At Purple Yam, a similar effect is achieved with adobo and halo halo. That is something worth experiencing, even if you’re not moving in down the block.
WINE LIST There are wonderful flavored sojus, a kind of Korean vodka, as well as a moderate wine list and a number of decent bottled beers.
PRICE RANGE Dinner courses run $6 to $18, with side dishes $3 to $3.50 more; brunch is $6 to $16.
HOURS Monday to Friday, 5:30 to 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, 12:30 to 3:30 p.m., 5:30 to 11 p.m.; Sunday, 12:30 to 3:30 p.m., 5:30 to 10 p.m.
RESERVATIONS Calling a few days ahead is a wise investment of time, particularly if you’re traveling more than a block or two.
CREDIT CARDS All major cards.
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Restaurant is all on one level.
WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.
Tama Na, Sobra Na, Ipasa ito sa Bawat Marangal na Pilipino!
I am forwarding two emails for your consideration and even just to call your attention to what is being circulated around.
The first one contains a petition in this link: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/oustferrernow/.I signed the petition (signature # 31). I do not subscribe to every statement in the email, but I agree with the intent and the spirit of the petition. At this writing, there are 405 signatures; we need thousands more to make an impact.
The second one raises lots of points for our serious consideration.
The forthcoming May 10, 2010 election figures to be a crucial one for our homeland; I hope and pray that the JUANA CHANGE videos will help make a difference.
May God bless and save the Philippines .
Best regards.
Greg
Greg Mariano, Jr.
Hollidaysburg , PA , USA
EMAIL # 1
Tama Na, Sobra Na, Ipasa ito sa Bawat Marangal na Pilipino!
Today we mourn the death of democracy once again as President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her no-good allies continue to spit in our faces with the obvious and demoralizing actions they have recently undertaken. This year alone, the scandals that have rocked the administration should have been enough to make any person with a conscience and moral principles hide from shame and embarrassment.
Not this one. Apparently, our President is totally devoid of any kind of moral dilemma that she and her cronies feel that they can get away with blatantly stepping on the law without regard for consequences. Because we know that in this administration, there are no consequences. At least, not if you're an ally.
With the COMELEC's 2nd Division's ruling against Isabela Governor Grace Padaca, a Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Government Service last 2008 and Co-Founder of Kaya Natin! Movement for Good Governance, the administration has once again proved its ability to bypass moral and legal issues and still keep a smiling face. Soon, we expect this same division to also rule against Pampanga Gov. Among Ed Panlilio.
These latest actions spearheaded by known PGMA ally Commissioner Nicodemo Ferrer reeks of indecency and corruption; it can't even be considered to have an "ulterior motive," because the motive behind it is so painfully obvious that it is already offensive and derogatory to the entire Philippine nation, to the values of our hard earned democracy.
'Wag nating hayaan na makalusot sina Ferrer at GMA sa mga pinaggagawa nila, lalo na't ngayon at malapit na nating palitan ang pangulo natin! Siguraduhin natin na ang tunay na mananalo ay iyong inihalal ng taongbayan tulad ni Governor Padaca, Pampanga Governor Ed Panlilio, at iba pang mabubuting taong patuloy na binibiktima ng administrasyong Arroyo. Sobra na ang pambabastos na ginagawa ng administrasyon sa ating lahat! Wala ba tayong gagawin habang patuloy lantaran na tayong niloloko ng administrasyong ito?
Panahon nang iwasto natin ang katiwalian, iparinig sa ating gobyerno ang totoong saloobin ng bawat Pilipino!
Kung isa kayo sa mga Pilipinong naniniwala sa integridad nila Governor Padaca at Governor Panlilio at na sila ang tunay na pinili ng mga tao, pumirma na sa online petition laban kay Commissioner Ferrer na siyang pasimuno sa lahat ng mga nakakagalit na mga pangyayaring ito.
Isang marangal at mahalagang posisyon ang pagiging COMELEC Commissioner at hindi ito dapat napupunta sa mga taong lantarang ibinabasura ang katotohanan para sa sariling kapakanan. Hindi sila ang kailangan natin bilang pinuno ng ating bansa, kundi ang mga katulad nila Governor Padaca at Panlilio na tunay na naglilingkod ng mabuti at maayos sa taong bayan.
Suportahan natin sila habang sila'y pilit na itinatanggal sa posisyon, sapagkat iisa-isahin na nilang ipapabagsak ang iba pang mabubuting tao sa gobyerno na ayaw ng katiwalian. Hindi dapat ito mangyari. Hindi ngayon, hindi magpakailanman.
Ginagawa namin ito hindi bilang miyembro ng kahit anong organisasyon ngunit bilang mga ordinaryong Pilipinong handang tumaya para sa katotohanan, kabutihan at nagmamahal sa ating Inang Bayan.
Para sa mga Pilipinong handa ring tumaya para sa tunay na pagbabago, pumirma tayong lahat rito sa:
By Ellen Tordesillas Monday December 7, 2009 11:13 am PHT
Let us beware. Let us not be lulled into another legal shortcut by Gloria Arroyo.
We should learn our lesson from what happened in January 2001 when we closed our eyes or even aided her in grabbing power from an elected, although incompetent, president.
Since then, she has made a mockery of the Constitution and perverted democratic institutions. And we allowed her. She got away with subverting the will of the people in the 2004 elections. She got away with multi-billion scandals. Why then would she stop?
Last Friday, she issued Proclamation 1959, another proof of her contempt for the law and condescending attitude towards the Filipino people. If she gets away with 1959, she would be encouraged to impose Martial Law in the whole country.
Proclamation 1959 declares a state of Martial Law and suspends the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in the province of Maguindanao .
The Constitution provides only two grounds for the imposition of martial law: rebellion and invasion.
Rebellion is defined in the revised Penal Code as “rising publicly and taking arms against the Government for the purpose of removing from the allegiance to said Government or its laws, the territory of the Philippine Islands or any part thereof...”
Invasion is entrance of an armed force into a territory to conquer. Surely, there was no invasion by foreign forces.
Proclamation 1959 is supposedly to restore order in Maguindanao caused by the massacre perpetrated allegedly by the Ampatuan clan, political allies of Arroyo. In 2004, the Ampatuans helped Arroyo tamper with the results of the 2004 elections in her favor. In 2007, the Ampatuans also helped some of Arroyo's candidates become senator.
In the Nov. 23 massacre, 58 persons were killed identified as members of family and supporters of the Mangudadatu clan, political rivals of the Ampatuans but also allies of Arroyo. Thirty-one of those killed were members of media. Others were innocent motorists who happen to be in the area when the abduction happened.
The charges filed against Mayor Andal Ampatuan, Jr., who was identified by witnesses as the one who directed the massacre, was murder by several counts. It was not rebellion or invasion.
As correctly pointed out by Rep. Didagen Dilanggalen (Maguindana0, 1st district), the Ampatuans are allies of the Arroyo government. They did not take up arms for the purpose of removing allegiance from the Arroyo government.
Proclamation 1959 provided an exception. It states that Martial Law is not operative in areas identified as territory of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which advocates secession.
The irony of the exception was not lost on a Muslim lawyer who quipped, “The Philippine Government declared martial law in Maguindanao to quell rebellion except in places where there are rebels.”
The Supreme Court took exception to “whereas” number five of Proclamation 1959 saying “that local judicial system and other government mechanisms in the province are not functioning.” Lawyer Midas Marquez, Supreme Court deputy court administrator and spokesperson said that the cases filed in the Cotabato trial court in connection with the Maguindanao massacre continued to develop over the past days. Search warrants out of the Kidapawan regional trial court also made the police raids on the Ampatuan houses possible. “This is far from a picture of a non-performing judicial system,” he said..
Justice Secretary Agnes Devanedara has come up with another tack: “brewing rebellion.”
What Constitution are Malacañang legal advisers using? The 1935 Constitution?
The 1935 Constitution, has included “imminent danger thereof” as basis for declaration of martial law in addition to invasion, insurrection and rebellion. But “imminent danger” has been removed and dies not appear in the 1987 Constitution.
The Philippine National Police yesterday reported another seizure of high powered guns and arrest of 47 persons led by the patriarch of the Ampatuan clan, Maguindanao Governor Andal Ampatuan Sr.
The PNP press release said, “Those arrested and undergoing investigation for involvement in armed resistance against the government as indicated by the massing of forces in several towns, mobilization of local government employees for a stand-off with government forces and stockpiling of weapons.”
So, the case is now “armed resistance”. What happened to the murder charges?
One discerning lawyer/blogger, SaxnViolins, said,” Stroke of evil genius na naman.The government has a less than weak case for rebellion against the Ampatuans.Is this a setup for an acquittal?”
There were talks the past few days of an ace still being held by the Ampatuans against Arroyo: the original copies of the 2004 Election Returns and Certificates of Canvass which would prove Arroyo's biggest act of thievery. With the sweep of Maguindanao by the military and police, chances are the election documents are out of the hands of the Ampatuans.
There was also an observation by one of those in touch with the Ampatuans of their reluctance to use the 2004 election cheating as leverage.
Gloria Arroyo, the evil genius, is shooting several birds with one stone. Her allies, the Ampatuans get away with murder, the evidence of her crime is destroyed. Next: martial law in the whole Philippines .
Ellen Tordesillas is a Manila-based journalist who blogs and writes columns for daily newspaper Malaya and Abante, a Filipino tabloid. Her articles published on Purple Thumb are syndications of articles published on her blog.Currently, she writes articles "relevant to strengthening democracy and making life worth living." She is a trustee and writer of VERA Files, a group that undertakes in-depth reporting on current issues.
The photographer Miroslav Tichy became known in the Czech Republic only recently, after he achieved major success abroad. His unusual photographs have been exhibited in galleries in London, New York, Zurich and although they are of very poor technical quality visitors and critics are impressed. The photographs are now sold for up to ten thousand euros.
Nearly 80 years old, Ti chy is regarded as a real eccentric by his neighbors in Kyjov, a small Moravian town. His work reflects his obsession with the female body. But while other photographers ask women to pose, and use the best equipment and store photographs with a big care, Tichy did the opposite.
He used to hide in bushes and take pictures of unaware women and girls with his home-made cameras. Once developed they were thrown away and Tichy didn't care about them anymore.
"They are all very careful observations of women from Kyjov and of everyday trivial activities. But soon you realize that these trivial situations such as someone sitting on a bench, women waiting for a bus, someone taking a T-shirt off at a swimming pool, are somehow extraordinary. Tichy managed to give this banality a feeling of exceptionality and rarity. Just part of a female body in his pictures can look very esoteric. There are so many magazines that offer much more nudity than Tichy but his photographs are different. A woman's tights between a knee and a skirt or a swimming costume in his pictures look somehow mysterious."
Says Radek Horacek, the director of The Brno House of Art which is currently running an exhibition of Tichy's photographs.
"It is like when an eleven years old boy falls in love, steals a photograph of his classmate and cherishes it in his notebook. Tichy even sketched on it, drew frames with a pen or a pencil. Some of the photographs were taken from TV, some were just thrown here and there. Some romantics say that there even are traces of mice nibbling at pictures in the unbelievable mess."
In the 1940s Tichy studied at Academy of Fine Arts in Prague but after the communist takeover in 1948 he dropped out of the school and returned to Moravia. The solitary artist started with
paintings, figurative drawings and settled with photography, sticking to his main motive - women. Back in the 60s he used to make about 90 pictures a day. Unnoticed and unknown he behaved like a voyeur trying to capture a precious moment.
"When I was a little boy, my grandmother used to tell me: "Wash your hands - otherwise you are going to be like Mirek Tichy." For my grandmother he was a forbidding example. For me he has always been a magnet," says Roman Buxbaum, the person who introduced the name Tichy to the world.
The photographer's friend from childhood, he emigrated to Switzerland with his parents. When he after many years returned to his birthplace he discovered the photographs and started exhibiting them abroad.
"These days there are plenty of artists that take photographs. They have the most modern digital equipment and the best computer software. They all try to make their pictures look crude. They want something like a document of a reality. But can you believe a thirty-year-old university graduate? Does he really know what is crude? It is simply impossible, especially in comparison to Miroslav Tichy. He lurks in a horrible worn out coat and - from behind bushes and walls - takes photographs of fragments of female nudity or the steps of a woman walking down a street."
The exhibition in Brno has created a lot of interest, especially among locals. Some of them come hoping that they will recognize one of the many women and girls captured in the photographs. Others come to see what has made that strange old alcoholic man so famous.
The photographs are puzzling. They are not focused, not well developed and damaged by weather and careless handling. They were never meant to be exhibited and even now Miroslav Tichy objects to the success and fame. He carefully chooses the people he talks to and shares his opinions with. He has described exhibitions as a waste of time and says this world is nothing more than "a double shit".
"He had to take such bad photographs to be the best photographer. You can't take good photographs to be the best - but you have to take the worst to be the best.
"Pavel Vancat the author of a monograph about Miroslav Tichy paraphrases the photographer's own words about his approach and continues with his opinion.
"I think these pictures have a really special atmosphere of the time when they were made. They have a special magic as work that has arisen from one man's endeavor. It is like a tombstone to one very special life. It might influence a lot of people. On the other hand, he stands quite aside from any other group of artists. And he is a quite solitary person. Many people might like it and many people do like it but I doubt that there will be something like a 'Tichy school'."
To find out more information about the exhibition visit www.dumb.cz
Analysis of the Ampatuan massacre by Bertini "Toto" Causing
An analysis, in the wake of the Ampatuan murders, by Bertini "Toto" Causing, a member of the board of the National Press Club of the Philippines and also legal consultant for the National Press Club. Mr Causing is columnist both of Hataw and Police Files Tonight. With the kind permission of Paul Brinkley-Rogers
The Analysis
You must know that Norberto Gonzales as Defense Secretary is a "terror" operator and if he is to work with political operator Ronaldo Puno, they become a dreaded pair.
Remember that Gonzales came from National Intelligence Security Agency, from where came the Vidal Doble who taped Garcillano's talks with Gloria. Also remember that Puno (the bad one) was instrumental in making Miriam Santiago lose to FVR and in Garci operations in Mindanao.
You must also know that before the Ampatuan massacre, there were hell- bent planning sessions on how Gloria could possibly hold over, de facto or de jure.
They were looking at how they can foment war in Muslim areas to have a justification for sinister plots.
Instead of launching war against MILF and MNLF which is expensive, what Gonzales did was to make "chismis" circulating between two possible warring clans. The timing was perfect because Datu Andal Sr. was so worried how he can stay in power because of the three-term limit. Andal Sr. even went to the Comelec in the Province of Maguindanao to ask what should he do to enable him to run again for the 2010 elections. A "bobo" Comelec official advised him to take a leave. Another Comelec official advised him to resign. Confused, Andal Sr. went to Malacanang and asked an Arroyo confidante what to do. And Andal was told that the only way for him to hold on to power is to prevent elections there from happening. And he was advised to do what is necessary. I do not know what was the advice; but I surmise that he was egged on not to give in to the Mangudadatus who were hell bent on grabbing power from him. In short, "binatirya" or "tsinismis patalikod ang mga Mangudadatu kay Andal na aagawin ang poder sa kanila." And once the power is taken over, the Mangudadatus would take revenge for the earlier raids done on them resulting in seizure of firearms.
Obssesed with desire to keep power revved up by "chismis", the Ampatuans harbored deep hatred and extreme fear of losing power. And to ensure that no election shall occur, the killings should be done with extreme brutality to justify "martial law," a condition when no election can be held in the province. They were only looking at killing and burying to nowhere the Mangudadatus and families so that they would only be recorded as missing and would be charged against the rebels or Abu Sayyaf, not thinking they would be including 30 journalists in their plan for they did not think that Mangudadatu would ask for the help of media men. And if there would be martial law, the Ampatuans stay in power under the hold-over principle. But their game plot failed during the execution. Thank God: before they knew it, Toto Mangudadatu was able to know the abduction because his wife was able to call him up, prompting Toto Mangudadatu to call for Army assistance; the soldiers responded quick enough that forced the killers to escape even though the other victims were not yet buried, leading to the discovery of the plan; thus, the execution failed. The original plot was just to make it appear that the victims disappeared mysteriously so that it can be blamed to heightened rebellion that would justify attacks on MILF which, in turn, would justify martial law.
Until here, I believe I have answered now the question why it should be as brutal as this. It was the Ampatuans who did the act and planned the act. The Gloria government only happened to have benefited from it to justify martial rule.
What would be the net effect when martial law gains momentum in Maguindanao? It will embolden the Gloria machines to do the same in other Muslim provinces: (a) Wahab Akbar's family vs Gerry Salappudin's in Basilan; (b) Sakur Tan clan vs Tupay Loong clan in Sulu; (c) Jaafar clan vs opponents in Tawi-Tawi; (d) Dimaporo clan in Lanao Norte against a challenging clan; and (e) Many clans in Lanao Sur.
If Norberto Gonzales would have his way, he wanted all of them to fight each other to justify martial law in the rest of Muslim provinces.
Remember that the total number of votes in these provinces is substantially big enough to cause suspension of proclamation of winners in Presidential, Vice-Presidential and Senatorial races.
So that when proclamation cannot be had and it will be aggravated and prolonged by creative petitions and protests to be filed before the Comelec, the Speaker of the House (Gloria) would act as Acting President. Why? Since there would be no president, vice president and senators who would be proclaimed, the Speaker takes over under the Constitution. Gloria would argue that the 12 present senators cannot choose a Senate President because it needs at least 13 votes to elect the Senate President.
Another plus or bonus for them: the House of Representatives will approve to extend martial law by means of them voting together with the Senators where the senator's vote is only one. A dummy petition shall be filed to question the act of "voting jointly" by means of outnumbering the Senators; and hoping the Gloria-appointees- dominated Supreme Court would rule that "voting jointly" means lumping together the senators and the congressmen and each of them has only ONE VOTE. And when the Supreme Court would go Gloria's way, they would now implement House Resolution 1109 calling for the senators and congressmen to "vote jointly" for a CON-ASS to pave the way for a parliamentary government. This PLUS or BONUS may happen before or after the 2010 elections. If it happens after elections, the picture that you would see is that the leading candidates for president, vice- president and senators cannot be proclaimed because their margin of leads can still be overturned by the total votes in areas where voting would be deferred till eternity by Martial Law.
Ask most people what they think of when they hear the word Bauhaus, and they’re likely to come up with tubular steel furniture, prefabricated housing, ranks of naïve utopians and Tom Wolfe’s withering disdain for all of the above. A show about the Bauhaus? No thanks. Who, after all, really needs to see another Breuer chair?
Which is why “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,” opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is such an unexpected treat. The kind of exhibition that comes around once in a rare while, it takes a sledgehammer to the clichés, particularly the notion that the Bauhaus marched in lockstep to a single vision.
Organized by Barry Bergdoll, the museum’s chief curator of architecture and design, and Leah Dickerman, a curator of painting and sculpture, the show makes much of the ideological and creative clashes that rocked this German school during its brief but remarkable history — between commercial and creative values, pragmatists and idealists, social activists and aesthetes. It makes a convincing case that the remarkable creative output of the Bauhaus had as much to do with this constant discord as with the individual genius of any of its members.
A big surprise is how much of the school’s mission still feels relevant, from the effort to come to terms with mind-bending technological advances to the desire to serve an audience beyond the usual cultural elites. It’s true this mission was pursued with an optimism that would be hard to conjure today, but if the show has a message, it’s that a little naiveté can be productive.
One of the many revelations here is the quasi-religious mysticism that infused parts of the Bauhaus in its earliest years. The first image you see when you step into the galleries is an Expressionist painting from 1919 by Johannes Itten, who ran the school’s introductory course. Its colorful abstract forms, which break down into a dense pattern of overlapping triangles, circles and rectangles, evoke the refracted glass of a stained-glass cathedral window.
Just below it is a design for a coffin lid drawn in 1920 by Lothar Schreyer, a director of the Bauhaus theater, for his wife (which, in a nice Freudian twist, was used for his mother’s burial instead). A woman’s figure, composed of interlocking circles and laid over a vibrant background of gray and blue, is framed by the lid’s trapezoidal outline. Farther along you come up against Marcel Breuer’s 1921 “African” chair, whose crudely chiseled wood frame looks so out of place with conventional images of the Bauhaus that you may wonder if you’ve walked into the wrong show.
These works reveal an ambivalence about the machine age and what was being left behind. Even as Walter Gropius, the school’s founding director, was promoting a mass-production aesthetic, Itten and others were advocating a more atavistic approach, one that was rooted in the skills of the medieval craftsman. (Itten even began his classes on abstract art with a series of yoga exercises that were meant to reawaken the physical senses and bring the students in closer contact with their work.)
Such conflicts, central to the experimental nature of the Bauhaus, were never fully resolved. In 1923 Gropius replaced Itten with the Hungarian painter Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who brought with him the agenda of the Soviet Constructivists, whose pure abstract forms were meant to form the building blocks of a new world order.
His paintings known as “EM1,” “EM2” and “EM3,” compositions of lines on a white surface that were produced in a factory by applying porcelain and enamel to sheets of steel, are among the most radical works in the show, and still have the power to startle 86 years after they were made. They fit perfectly with Gropius’s vision of the artist as someone who worked in partnership with the machine.
In Gropius’s mind that system would soon be applied to the entire range of industrial products, from architecture to graphics, textiles, lighting and furniture design. The alliance between designers and leaders of modern industry would spread his message around the world.
Yet even in Moholy-Nagy’s work the message is more mixed than it at first seems. The steel paintings, inverted crosses in primary colors, evoke their own brand of spiritualism. In a more conventional oil painting he made the same year, hanging on a nearby wall, the overlapping lines and planes bring to mind the quasi-religious subtext found in some of Konstantin Malevich’s works. Is it an architectural plan? A child’s rendition of a plane in flight? Or a fallen cross?
The most heart-warming objects in the show are often those where you feel the presence of the artist’s hand. These include a series of puppets that Paul Klee, who taught a color and form class, made for his son from 1916 to 1925. The puppets, which include a scary clown with protruding ears and a figure of Klee himself in a black robe, look as though they were crudely patched together out of papier-mâché and leftover pieces of wool while Klee was sitting at a kitchen table.
Harder for the show to convey is the mischievous spirit that was such a fundamental part of the Bauhaus experience. There is a very funny photo of a performance workshop, with students dressed up in expressionless masks and padded costumes — human machines. Another image, a blown-up version of which adorns the exhibition’s entry, shows students packed inside a towering grid of wooden crates: a reference to the Gropius-designed dormitories that was ceremoniously handed to the director on the eve of his departure from the school.
But the show doesn’t capture the general tumult: the crazy costumes, the political rallies, the spontaneous parties that often spilled out onto the streets and scandalized its buttoned-up middle-class neighbors.
It wasn’t until Hannes Meyer created the architecture department in 1927 that the school’s messy, playful energies, as well as the wild back and forth of ideas they gave rise to, began to be contained by academic categories. Like Gropius, Meyer, who shortly became the school’s director, envisioned the Bauhaus’s studios as industrial workshops that would not only train modern artisans but also forge alliances with the commercial world. (A collection of textiles released in 1929 was the most profitable line in the school’s history.) But his architectural philosophy was more overtly political, stressing humble materials over sleek forms, and small clusters of human activity over the large geometric compositions favored by his predecessor.
It is worth spending some time with his drawings for the ADGB building, for instance, a trade union school in Bernau. (They are the only technical drawings in the show.) In contrast to Gropius’s Bauhaus dormitory, with its taut glass shell, the ADGB is broken down into small, color-coded blocks. The sleek built-in furniture favored by Gropius and Breuer is replaced by inexpensive wood pieces, made to fold up and roll away in tight spaces.
The Nazis despised Meyer’s leftist outlook, and in two years he was forced out by the region’s right-wing government. And one of the first things that Mies van der Rohe did when he took the school over was to force students to sign a declaration that they were not Communists. An aesthete to the core, he was convinced that creative issues were above politics — and anything that might advance his agenda was within bounds.
Mies pushed architecture to the fore, and his enormous presence quickly began to crowd out other voices. In the last room of the exhibition there are a series of student drawings made during his tenure, glass-and-steel compositions that look uncannily like reproductions of Mies’s own work, as if the students were now there to worship at the master’s feet. Whatever mysticism was left was sublimated behind enormous sheets of reflective glass.
Mies, of course, didn’t fare much better with the Nazis than Meyer had, and on April 11, 1933, the school’s doors closed forever. Its most prominent figures scattered to different countries, some to Moscow, others to the United States. Three-quarters of a century later its most famous objects — chairs, lamps, a chess set — can be found in the MoMA gift shop, harmless examples of what was once a radical vision.
Yet for a moment at least the show allows you to glimpse just how wild that creative roller coaster really was. The school’s creative clashes were a reflection of how much their participants had at stake, both aesthetically and politically. All of them lived somewhere between the world as they saw it and the world as they wished it could be. Their yearning, never fulfilled, haunts you long after you leave the show.
“Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity” runs from Sunday to Jan. 25 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400; www.moma.org.
AT high schools and colleges across the country, students are hard at work, tilling their land and harvesting their vegetables.
“It is clear this obsession with FarmVille is an issue, especially since it is taking away time from studying and schoolwork,” Danielle Susi wrote this month in The Quad News, a student newspaper at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn.
Adults, too, are blaming their problems on FarmVille, an online game in which people must tend their virtual farms carefully. On blogs like FarmVille Freak (slogan: “I can’t stop watching my crops!”) and others, people share tips on fertilizer and complain about, for example, a spouse’s addiction. An anonymous blogger who said she was pregnant wrote: “I was starving ... and he told me I’d have to wait a few more minutes so he could HARVEST HIS RASPBERRIES! I waited ... in the car and waited for his stupid raspberries to be harvested.”
That there are actual farmers who spend less time on their crops is beside the point. FarmVille has quickly become the most popular application in the history of Facebook. More than 62 million people have signed up to play the game since it made its debut in June, with 22 million logging on at least once a day, according to Zynga, the company that brought FarmVille into the world.
Crazes on Facebook seem to come in waves — remember sheep-throwing, Vampire Wars and lists of “25 Random Things About Me?” — but devotion to FarmVille has moved beyond the social network. Players gather online to share homemade spreadsheets showing which crops will provide the greatest return on investment. YouTube is rife with musical odes to the game, including versions of its theme song. There is a “Farmville Art” movement, in which people arrange crops to resemble the Mona Lisa or Mr. Peanut. And many a promising dinner date has been cut short to harvest squash.
“I can’t hang out with any of my friends without talk of apple fields and rice paddies,” said Taylor Lee Sivils, a student at the University of California, Riverside, in an e-mail message. “I have to wait for my friends’ soybeans to grow, because we can’t chill until they’ve been harvested. All I want is to be able to go back to talking about anything tangible, but FarmVille overcomes.”
The game starts off simply: You are given land and seeds that can be planted, harvested and sold for online coins. As you accrue currency, you can buy things, from basics like rice and pumpkin seeds to the truly superfluous, like elephants and hot-air balloons. Impatient players can use credit cards or a PayPal account to buy more money, although purists tend to frown on the practice.
But like The Sims and Tamagotchi pets, FarmVille soon becomes less of a game than a Sisyphean baby-sitting assignment. Crops must be harvested in a timely fashion, cows must be milked, and social obligations — like exchanging gifts and fertilizing your neighbor’s pumpkins — must be met.
The game seems to have mesmerized people from all walks of life. Every night for the last two weeks, Jil Wrinkle, a 40-year-old medical transcriber in the Philippines, has set his alarm for 1:30 a.m., when he will wake up, roll over and harvest his blueberries.
“I keep my laptop next to my bed,” he explained by phone. “The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is harvest, then I harvest again at 10 in the morning, then again in midafternoon, then in the evening, and then again right before going to bed.”
Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, said he had seen the craze firsthand among his students.
“Just like Guitar Hero lets you feel a little like being a rock star — you get to pose and dance a little while you’re doing it — with FarmVille there is a real sense that you’re actually doing something that has a cause and effect,” he said. “The method of dragging food out of the ground and getting something for it is really satisfying.”
FarmVille isn’t the only popular farm-theme game on Facebook. MyFarm and FarmTown, which are made by different companies, also have huge followings. Some academics have gone so far as to suggest that their collective popularity points to a widespread yearning for the pastoral life.
“The whole concept of ‘I’m sick of this modern, urban lifestyle, I wish I could just grow plants and vegetables and watch them grow,’ there is something very therapeutic about that,” said Philip Tan, director of the Singapore-M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab, a joint venture between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore to develop digital games.
Of course, real-life farming is quite a bit messier and more dangerous than FarmVille (perhaps just one reason that FarmVille players outnumber actual farmers in the United States by more than 60 to 1). Yet some of the game’s biggest fans are farmers.
“I was having all these deaths on the farm and hurting myself on a daily basis doing real farming,” said Donna Schoonover, of Schoonover Farm in Skagit County, Wash., who raises sheep, goats and Satin Angora rabbits (real ones!). “This was a way to remind myself of the mythology of farming, and why I started farming in the first place.”
Zynga, which is based in San Francisco, specializes in games that are easy to learn but hard to walk away from. It also makes Mafia Wars (25 million players) and Café World (24 million), the second and third most popular games on Facebook, respectively.
Mark Pincus, the founder and chief executive, said that Zynga earns money from advertising, sponsorships and players who buy in-game cash. Zynga has been profitable since 2007, he said.
“It’s really the same formula that makes Facebook successful,” Mr. Pincus said, “the ability to connect with your friends, to express yourself, and to invest in the game.”
FarmVille takes advantage of Facebook by allowing — nay, nagging — players to become “neighbors” with their friends, even those who have not joined the game. Players can earn points by helping with their neighbors’ work. They can also irritate friends who don’t want to play FarmVille with endless notifications and invitations to join, which has led to a vocal backlash.
Cropping up alongside fan blogs like Farmville Freak, which after just one month is getting 25,000 unique visitors a day, are Facebook groups for people who are tired of listening to their friends talk about their eggplants. On “I Hate FarmVille,” the largest of the anti-Farmville affinity groups on Facebook (it has more than 17,000 members), one person commented, “No, I will not give you a tree! No, I will not be your neighbor!”
Is there any human invention more duplicitous than the personal computer? These machines were manufactured and initially marketed as devices to help us at work. We were told they would perform amazing feats of office derring-do — adding up rows of numbers effortlessly, turning our musings into beautiful magazine-quality documents, and letting us collaborate with one another across continents.
Boy, that turned out well, didn’t it? Sure, you could use your PC to analyze stats for the annual sales report due in two days. But hey, look at this — someone wants to be your friend on Facebook! And wait a second: A zany couple decided to start off their wedding by dancing down the aisle, and lucky for everyone, they posted the video on YouTube. And did you hear what that ignorant congressman just said about health care? Now you’ve got no choice but to spend the next five minutes crafting an impassioned tweet to express your outrage.
And so it goes: You get to your PC every morning with hours of productive time ahead of you. Next thing you know, it’s 5 p.m. and you’ve frittered the day away on Digg, Hulu, Wikipedia and your fantasy football league. And no wonder — how can anyone expect to get anything done when you’re plying your trade on one of the most distracting machines ever invented? With so much available on your PC — your friends, blogs, games and even TV shows — working in a modern office can often seem as rattling as working on the floor of a Las Vegas casino.
During the last few weeks, I’ve been using a slate of programs to tame these digital distractions. The apps break down into three broad categories. The most innocuous simply try to monitor my online habits in an effort to shame me into working more productively. Others reduce visual bells and whistles on my desktop as a way to keep me focused.
And then there are the apps that really mean business — they let me actively block various parts of the Internet so that when my mind strays, I’m prohibited from giving in to my shiftless ways. It’s the digital equivalent of dieting by locking up the refrigerator and throwing away the key.
The first category is epitomized by a program called RescueTime, which keeps track of everything that happens on your computer, and then reports your habits in a series of charts and graphs. I found the software’s analysis tremendously illuminating. I learned, for instance, that during a typical month I spend more than 70 hours surfing the Web, much of it on news and social-networking sites.
By comparison, I spend only about half as much time in Microsoft Word, which, as a writer, is where I do my work. Seeing these stats knocked me over; clearly, I wasn’t using my time very wisely. (RescueTime offers a free limited version; an upgraded plan with deeper usage stats costs $8 a month.)
So what to do? Over the years, several friends have suggested that I might stay more focused by ditching Word in favor of a so-called minimalist writing tool. These programs, like Hog Bay Software’s WriteRoom for the Mac ($24.95) or the free Dark Room for Windows, essentially take your computer back two decades in time. Each presents you with a full-screen, monochrome window absent of taskbars and menus; the experience is that of typing on an old-fashioned dedicated word processor, with every other function of a modern PC hidden from view.
But the procrastinator’s mind is not so quickly deceived. I found that I could easily switch from working in Dark Room to wasting time in a Web browser — and that was a problem.
Time for stronger medicine: I loaded up LeechBlock, a free add-on for Firefox whose main function is to save you from yourself. LeechBlock works like a stern nanny: You tell it which Web sites to keep you away from, and at the appointed hour, it stops you cold. Try to go to Facebook and you get back a warning to go back to work.
The software is quite flexible. You can let it block out different sites at different times of the day, or set a maximum daily or hourly limit for certain sites. For instance, I asked LeechBlock to restrict my time on Twitter and Facebook to no more than five minutes an hour, and on news sites to no more than 10 minutes an hour. This gave me a little bit of time to goof off, but not enough that I’d lose sight of my larger purpose.
But LeechBlock suffers a crucial limitation: if you really want to get around it, all you have to do is load up another browser. One Mac app that has found a way to solve this problem is called Freedom, which blocks all of your computer’s networking functions for a pre-determined number of minutes. In other words, once you set it, you’ve got no Web, no instant messaging, no e-mail — and the only way to undo Freedom’s block before the time runs out is to restart your machine.
I wish I could say that using these digital nannies has revolutionized the way I work. They didn’t, really. Though blocking time-sucking Web sites did keep me from goofing off on my computer, I found that my brain quickly compensated by wasting time in other ways: As I’m writing this paragraph, for example, I’m also eating a peach. But not just eating it without thinking — I’ve been using a paring knife to try to cut perfectly cubical pieces to pop into my mouth.
Perhaps this kind of unconscious fidgeting — whether online or off — is inevitable. The mind is a restless place, and creative pursuits like writing seem unsustainable in long bursts; perhaps the mind just needs frequent breaks.
But I did notice that net-blocking software was helpful in getting me to at least consider all the ways that I was wasting my time. When LeechBlock threw up a roadblock in my path, it gave me pause; when I went around it, I was at least conscious that it wasn’t the right thing to do. Sometimes a little shame is all you need.
LOS ANGELES — Movie studios, desperate to return their home entertainment divisions to growth, are scrambling to shape the post-DVD era.
Until very recently, most Hollywood heavyweights were loath to speak too openly about the promise of digital entertainment — the downloading and streaming of movies and television shows on computers, Internet-enabled televisions and mobile devices. Nobody wanted to anger retail partners like Wal-Mart or do anything that might slow the DVD gravy train.
But business currents have shifted. While DVD and Blu-ray will remain a huge profit center for years to come, studio executives are finally confronting an uncomfortable reality: little silver discs — for reasons of convenience, price and consumer burnout — may never recover their sales power. To grow, studios need to figure out digital distribution.
Disney announced last week that it had developed a system to track digital ownership, so people won’t have to buy the same movie or television show multiple times for different devices. But that’s just the latest, most likely not the last, approach.
“I expect these guys to try many different ways to figure out an endgame to digital entertainment,” said Doug Creutz, a media analyst at Cowen and Company. “In the meantime, you will find a lot of false starts.”
Everyone is trying to solve one problem: consumers, the industry believes, will be reluctant to open their wallets for digital movies and TV shows until they get more portability and can watch the same content on several devices. Studios want to make consumers collect digital entertainment the way they would DVDs or books.
In the third quarter, studios’ home entertainment divisions generated about $4 billion, down 3.2 percent from a year ago, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, a trade consortium. But digital distribution contributed just $420 million, an increase of 18 percent.
Standing in the way are technology hurdles — how to let consumers play a video on various devices without letting them share it with 10,000 close friends on a pirate site — and the reluctance of studios to cooperate too closely with rivals for reasons of antitrust scrutiny and sheer competitiveness.
The Walt Disney Company in the coming weeks will introduce its new system for tracking digital ownership, which it calls Keychest. It would allow consumers to buy permanent access to digital entertainment — a specific film, for instance — that then could be watched on computers, cellphones and cable on-demand services. Analysts speculate that Apple will be a partner.
A mother could start streaming “Toy Story” on a laptop for her kids, continue the film on an iPhone at a restaurant and finish it at home with a video-on-demand cable service.
Details remain sketchy — and it is still anyone’s guess when consumers might see it — but Keychest has two other promising features, Disney says. The system would work with various digital formats, so competing companies could maintain disparate business plans.
And piracy, at least conceptually, would be less of a worry. The technology rests on cloud computing, in which huge troves of data are stored on remote servers so users have access from anywhere. Movies would be streamed from the cloud and never downloaded, making them harder to pirate.
“We have a better mousetrap and have a higher chance of getting companies to participate than do other schemes out there,” said Bob Chapek, president of home entertainment at Walt Disney Studios.
A consortium of movie studios (basically everyone but Disney) have joined with companies like Comcast and Intel to pursue a different strategy. Their initiative, called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, or DECE, involves coming up with a common set of standards and formats.
“We can start to develop a digital service where it’s better than free because it offers consumers more convenience and choice,” said Mitch Singer, chief technology officer of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is leading the DECE effort. “We can reduce the cost of digital delivery, enabling more services to flourish,” he said.
Mr. Singer said it was unfair to position Keychest and DECE against each other. “We are all going in the same direction,” he said. “We’re trying to give consumers more choice and greater ease of use when it comes to buying digital entertainment.”
Other ideas are floating out there, too. Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, is promoting something called TV Everywhere, to offer consumers a vast array of television online and on devices — provided they are paying cable-TV customers. Add in digital entertainment competition from companies like Apple, Amazon, Netflix and upstarts like Mspot, a mobile media provider that streams rented movies to smartphones.
As always, the pressure to be first is considerable. “The last thing studios want is a third party coming up with a solution, because that party would take a big chunk of the revenue with them,” said Mr. Creutz, the Cowan analyst. Indeed, movie executives blanch when they recall the way that Apple came to dictate pricing to the music business with its iTunes Store.
The movement of video, whether it is movies or television shows, to the Internet and mobile devices is increasingly hanging over the share prices of media companies, analysts say. The worry is that the economics could be overturned, just as it has for newspapers and music.
“Investors are concerned about media companies’ continued ability to monetize their films in the home video window,” wrote Michael C. Morris, a UBS analyst, in a recent research note. “DVD purchases are increasingly being replaced by new delivery methods.”
Consumers have adopted digital video more readily than studios have. Ripped DVDs and illegal downloads are not only playable on computers, TVs and smartphones without the hiccups of streaming but also can be passed along to a friend, like the tapes and discs of yore. This works for viewers, but not for Hollywood, which earns no extra revenue and has no control.
Studios have a spotty track record when it comes to lassoing new technology. A few years ago, when video on demand was just getting started, Disney and several partners weighed in with Moviebeam, a service through which films were sent wirelessly to homes via set-top boxes. It was widely considered a huge failure — the connections were fickle and people wanted more control over the movies available — and Disney ultimately left the business.
“Studios are always interested in going direct, and then they see that it’s really hard,” said Reed Hastings, the founder and chief executive of Netflix.
A variety of factors have influenced Hollywood’s new aggression on the digital front. This year, Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers started cutting the amount of shelf space they devote to DVDs, and some other retail partners, like Circuit City, have gone out of business. So movie studios now worry less about angering them by pulling digital levers.
Studios are also paying attention to predictions about an increased adoption of video-friendly electronics by consumers.
“With significant growth expected in the penetration of Internet-connected TVs and consoles in the fourth quarter of this year, demand for digital movie consumption suddenly looks very promising,” said Thomas Lesinski, president of Paramount Digital Entertainment.
But the slumping DVD business is by far the biggest motivator. Consumers have been buying fewer DVDs, partly because their family rooms are now cluttered with discs they rarely watch and partly because the recession drove them to lower-priced rental and digital options — or to forgo home video entirely.
In the first six months of 2009, revenue from disc sales declined 13.5 percent, to $5.4 billion, according to Mr. Morris’s evaluation of Digital Entertainment Group data. A $200 million uptick in Blu-ray sales partly offset a $1 billion decline in DVD sales. Over all, home video revenue declined just 4 percent, helped by a spike in rental revenue.
That bleak picture has studios now openly discussing what they have known privately for a long time: DVDs will continue to play a role, but it may be a supporting one to digital.
“DVD is going to remain very viable, but you’ve also got a strong base of interest in digital consumption,” Mr. Chapek of Disney said. “I see a peaceful coexistence.”
OVER the course of six years Zhao Dayong, an independent filmmaker from Guangzhou, China, spent many months living among the residents of Zhiziluo, an impoverished and forgotten village in the rugged mountains near the Myanmar border, and filming their lives.
Using his own money and simple digital filmmaking equipment he made “Ghost Town,” a quiet, hypnotizing, three-hour documentary that provides an extraordinary and intimate portrait of Chinese life.
Like independent filmmakers everywhere, Mr. Zhao worked with no guarantee of an audience, or even a place to show his work. By his estimates only a few thousand people have seen “Ghost Town” in China since he finished it last year. Several hundred more are scheduled to see it Sunday afternoon when the film has its international premiere at the New York Film Festival.
But what makes Mr. Zhao’s commitment particularly noteworthy is that his project was apparently illegal.
The Chinese government has decreed that all films must be approved by government censors before being distributed and screened, including in overseas film festivals.
Mr. Zhao, 39, said getting the approval of the censors was never a consideration. “It’s like asking to be raped,” he said this month in an interview here. “The government certainly has its own agenda. They want us to stop. But at the same time we know we’re doing something meaningful.”
This mixture of defiance and principle defines China’s nascent yet highly dynamic crop of independent filmmakers who pursue their art in apparent violation of the law.
For decades the Chinese government had nearly full control over all aspects of the film industry, from celluloid filmmaking technology to financing to distribution and screening. An underground filmmaking subculture emerged in China in the late 1980s, but it began to flourish only about a decade ago with the advent of inexpensive digital cameras and postproduction computer programs that helped put filmmaking further out of reach of the government authorities.
Many of this latest generation of Chinese filmmakers have no formal film training and shoot on minimal budgets, often with small crews, or alone. Ying Liang, whose films have won numerous prizes on the international circuit, shot his widely celebrated debut film, “Taking Father Home,” using a borrowed camera. Relatives and friends were his cast and crew.
“Unlike in previous generations, the stars of this generation are not only Beijing Film Academy graduates,” said Karin Chien, a film producer in New York and president of dGenerate Films, a company she founded last year to distribute this new crop of independent Chinese films outside China. “They’re journalists, they work at television stations, they’re painters, they’re people who just picked up a camera and made a film for $1,000.”
Output is still small. Several leading filmmakers put the annual production of unsanctioned, independent films at fewer than 200. But this work has provided unusual ground-level views of China that possess an unvarnished authenticity often missing from mainstream, government-sanctioned films.
“There’s been an extraordinary explosion of young filmmakers — quite a few of them are quite talented — who are dedicated to record and tell the real story of what’s going on in China,” said Richard Peña, program director for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which produces the New York Film Festival. “That story is really more fascinating than the story that the regime wanted to be told.”
These achievements have come at a price.
About 20 filmmakers have been banned from making films for two to five years, according to Zhang Xianmin, an independent film producer and a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. Others have received intimidating phone calls, had tapes confiscated or been detained and interrogated.
But according to several filmmakers and film scholars both here and abroad, the government recently appears to have adopted a somewhat hands-off, though highly watchful, posture toward this film vanguard, leaving it to operate in an undefined gray area.
It seems that as long as certain incendiary topics are not broached — among them the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibet, the Cultural Revolution, the outlawed religious group Falun Gong — then independent filmmakers are allowed to work.
Yet no one is absolutely sure where the boundaries are, or whether the government will start to clamp down more fiercely.
“You don’t know where that limit is,” said Zhang Yaxuan, a critic and documentary filmmaker who is organizing an independent film archive for the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. “You have to try to touch it. In the process of trying, you know.”
Huang Wenhai, a documentary filmmaker in Beijing, said that the process of filmmaking here “is the process of conquering your fear.”
Despite this pressure and uncertainty, there are now at least four major independent film festivals around the country and at least two theaters, both small, dedicated to showing Chinese independent films.
Meanwhile Chinese audiences largely remain out of reach. With cinemas and television off limits to their unsanctioned films, independent moviemakers are mostly restricted to screenings in front of small audiences in art galleries, bars, universities and homes.
As a result the most accomplished filmmakers have found their largest audiences overseas, especially at international film festivals.
“I feel very frustrated,” Mr. Zhao said. “I’m a Chinese filmmaker, and of course my audience should be the Chinese people, especially since my films are about ordinary working Chinese people.” He added, “That would be more valuable than winning an international film festival.”
Mr. Zhao began his career in the fine arts. He studied oil painting at an art academy before dropping out and working as a professional artist and advertising director in Beijing and Guangzhou. He eventually founded his own advertising firm as well as a journal for contemporary arts, and he opened a gallery in Shanghai.
His first documentary was “Street Life,” a portrait of recyclers on the streets of Shanghai, which had its premiere at the Viennale in Austria in 2006. “Ghost Town,” his second film, is a series of vignettes and scenes that explore the economic struggles, religious beliefs and relationships of the residents of Zhiziluo, which had once been a local county seat for the Communist Party but was largely abandoned by the government.
Mr. Peña said he had heard about the film for some time but finally viewed it in the 11th hour of the festival’s film-selection process. “It’s one of those films that, when we saw it, there was little question in our minds that it should be included,” he said. “Ghost Town” is the first documentary from China’s new generation of digital independent filmmakers to be included in the New York festival.
Mr. Zhao, who continues to support himself by shooting television advertisements, said he had no illusions that his films would ever make him much money.
“For me, making films is a way of life, not the means to it,” he said. “And I really enjoy this life.”
For more than 500 years the book has been a remarkably stable entity: a coherent string of connected words, printed on paper and bound between covers.
But in the age of the iPhone, Kindle and YouTube, the notion of the book is becoming increasingly elastic as publishers mash together text, video and Web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment.
On Thursday, for instance, Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, is working with a multimedia partner to release four “vooks,” which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read — and viewed — online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch.
And in early September Anthony E. Zuiker, creator of the television series “CSI,” released “Level 26: Dark Origins,” a novel — published on paper, as an e-book and in an audio version — in which readers are invited to log on to a Web site to watch brief videos that flesh out the plot.
Some publishers say this kind of multimedia hybrid is necessary to lure modern readers who crave something different. But reading experts question whether fiddling with the parameters of books ultimately degrades the act of reading.
“There is no question that these new media are going to be superb at engaging and interesting the reader,” said Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” But, she added, “Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot? Do you have the patience?”
The most obvious way technology has changed the literary world is with electronic books. Over the past year devices like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader have gained in popularity. But the digital editions displayed on these devices remain largely faithful to the traditional idea of a book by using words — and occasional pictures — to tell a story or explain a subject.
The new hybrids add much more. In one of the Simon & Schuster vooks, a fitness and diet title, readers can click on videos that show them how to perform the exercises. A beauty book contains videos that demonstrate how to make homemade skin-care potions.
Not just how-tos are getting the cinematic work-up. Simon & Schuster is also releasing two digital novels combining text with videos a minute or 90 seconds long that supplement — and in some cases advance — the story line.
In “Embassy,” a short thriller about a kidnapping written by Richard Doetsch, a video snippet that resembles a newscast reveals that the victim is the mayor’s daughter, replacing some of Mr. Doetsch’s original text.
“Everybody is trying to think about how books and information will best be put together in the 21st century,” said Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books, the Simon & Schuster imprint that is releasing the electronic editions in partnership with Vook, a multimedia company. She added, “You can’t just be linear anymore with your text.”
In some cases, social-networking technologies enable conversations among readers that will influence how books are written.
The children’s division of HarperCollins recently released the first in a young-adult mystery series called “The Amanda Project,” and has invited readers to discuss clues and characters on a Web site. As the series continues, some of the reader comments may be incorporated into minor characters or subplots.
Susan Katz, publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books, predicted that “there is going to be a popular kind of literature where the author is seen as the leader of a large group and will pick and choose from these suggestions” by readers.
Bradley J. Inman, chief executive of Vook, said readers who viewed prototypes of “The 90-Second Fitness Solution” by Pete Cerqua or “Return to Beauty” by Narine Nikogosian “intuitively saw the benefits of augmenting how-to books with video segments.” Mr. Inman said readers then “warmed to” the fictional editions.
Jude Deveraux, a popular romance author who has written 36 straightforward text novels, said she loved experimenting with “Promises,” an exclusive vook set on a 19th-century South Carolina plantation in which the integrated videos add snippets of dialogue and atmosphere.
Ms. Deveraux said she envisioned new versions of books enhanced by music or even perfume. “I’d like to use all the senses,” she said.
Brian Tart, publisher of Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, which released “Level 26,” said he wanted the book’s text to be able to stand on its own, but the culture demanded rethinking the format. “Like everybody, you see people watching these three-minute YouTube videos and using social networks,” Mr. Tart said. “And there is an opportunity here to bring in more people who might have thought they were into the new media world.”
Readers of “Level 26,” which Mr. Zuiker wrote with Duane Swierczynski, have had a mixed response to what the publisher is marketing as a “digi-novel.”
“It really makes a story more real if you know what the characters look like,” commented Fred L. Gronvall in a review on Amazon.com. The videos, he wrote, “add to the experience in a big way.”
But another reviewer, posting as Rj Granados, wrote, “Do you really think cheesy video vignettes will IMPROVE the book?”
Some authors believe the new technologies can enrich books. For his history of street songs in 18th-century France, Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, will include links to recordings of the actual tunes.
But Mr. Darnton, author of “The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future,” warned that reading itself was changing, and not necessarily for the better. “I think we can see enough already to worry about the loss of a certain kind of sustained reading,” he said.
Mr. Doetsch, the author of “Embassy,” said the new editions should not replace the traditional book. He has written a forthcoming novel, “The 13th Hour,” that he thinks is too long to lend itself to the video-enhanced format. The new editions, he said, are “like dipping a novel into a cinematic pool and pulling it out and getting the best parts of each.”
Some authors scoff at the idea of mixing the two mediums. “As a novelist I would never ever” allow videos to substitute for prose, said Walter Mosley, the author of “Devil in a Blue Dress” and other novels.
“Reading is one of the few experiences we have outside of relationships in which our cognitive abilities grow,” Mr. Mosley said. “And our cognitive abilities actually go backwards when we’re watching television or doing stuff on computers.”
ASTONISHINGLY, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” the groundbreaking BBC comedy series, is 40 years old this year, almost as ancient as the Beatles. As Terry Jones, one of the six-member troupe who created and acted in the show, said recently: “Time just seems to get quicker. You look in the mirror in the morning and you think, ‘I’m already shaving again!’ ”
The principals are all in late middle age now, jowly and graying, and have in some ways become the very sorts of people they used to poke fun at. Michael Palin makes travel documentaries. Mr. Jones makes documentaries and writes scholarly books about the Middle Ages, the period the Pythons so memorably sent up in their film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Terry Gilliam, animator turned filmmaker, is still quixotically obsessed with making a movie about Don Quixote. Eric Idle, who’s mostly responsible for the long-running Broadway production of “Spamalot,” writes musical shows, many of them recycling Python material. And John Cleese, who at 70 is the oldest of the group, in addition to appearing in movies and sitcoms and making golf-ball commercials, sometimes turns into a cranky old buffer complaining about cultural decline and Britain’s tabloids. He doesn’t watch much comedy anymore. “As you get older you laugh less,” he says, “because you’ve heard most of the jokes before." The show, on the other hand, hasn’t aged a bit. In the United States, “Flying Circus” didn’t catch on until 1974, when it was pretty much off the air in Britain and the members had started to go their separate ways. Hugh Hefner was an early fan. Go figure.
The unusual suspects, 1969: top row from left, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam; bottom row from left, Terry Jones, John Cleese and Michael Palin.
But the show has had a surprisingly durable afterlife in this country, giving rise to second and third generations of fans who watch it on DVD and on YouTube, where it’s so popular it now has its own dedicated channel. Mr. Cleese said recently that in England he is far better known these days as Basil Fawlty, the title character in his post-Python series “Fawlty Towers,” than for his role in “Flying Circus.” But even in American middle schools now, there’s often a smart aleck or two who can do Mr. Cleese’s Silly Walk and know the Dead Parrot sketch by heart. When they get to high school in a few years they will also have mastered the sketch about the man with three buttocks and know all the words to the gay lumberjack song.
On Oct. 15 all five surviving Pythons are appearing in a rare reunion at the Ziegfeld Theater. (Graham Chapman, the sixth member of the troupe, died of throat cancer in 1989.) And starting on Oct. 18 the Independent Film Channel is devoting a whole week to Pythoniana and will broadcast one episode a day of “Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut),” a new six-hour documentary about the troupe, along with some of the “Python” films and episodes from the first season of “Flying Circus.”
There will almost certainly be squabbling at the reunion. “They love getting angry and shouting at each other,” Ben Timlett, a director and producer of the documentary, said recently. There were (and are) genuine differences among the Pythons, which they sometimes exaggerate for comic effect now, and there have been so many books, articles and previous documentaries that there is no truly reliable account of practically anything associated with the group. Partly for this reason, a number of the Pythons were initially reluctant to take part in the documentary.
“I was very dubious about it,” Mr. Cleese said. “I thought we had flogged this horse to death — way past death, in fact.”
Referring to the fact that Mr. Jones is separated from his wife and is now expecting a baby with his much younger girlfriend, he added, laughing: “We did it because Jones needed money. He’s about to have a baby, and we felt for the guy. Anyone entering on fatherhood at age 67 needs all the help he can get.”
What really helped win the group over was that another of the director-producers is Mr. Jones’s son Bill, who practically grew up with the Pythons. He remembers answering the phone as a child and hearing Mr. Cleese ask to speak with Little Plum. “That’s what John called my father, Little Plum,” he said. “It used to really annoy him.”
And to the surprise of even Mr. Jones, the documentary managed to turn up a lot of new insights and information about the group, especially in the first hour, where with the help of newsreels, family photos and interviews with classmates it chronicles the early lives of the members. With the exception of Mr. Gilliam, the sole American, the Pythons all grew up in middle-class families in provincial towns and were very much a product of postwar British culture: cautious, decorous, respectable, nice. They wanted to blow it up.
“That culture wasn’t hard enough to be rigid,” Mr. Cleese recalled in a telephone interview from California, where he lives now. “It was more stuffy — it was like wrestling with a sponge. I remember going to see ‘Beyond the Fringe’ in 1962 and hearing screams of laughter. They were screams of liberation.”
“Beyond the Fringe” — a stage revue starring Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller that frequently made fun of the royal family, the Church of England, even Shakespeare — was a huge influence on all the British Pythons, it turns out, and so was the earlier “Goon Show” on radio, one of the first to satirize government figures. But the Pythons’ comedy was in its way more subversive than those models, lampooning the very idea of authority, even as it was more absurdist.
Above from left, Mr. Jones, Mr. Gilliam, Mr. Cleese, Mr. Idle and Mr. Palin at the premiere of “Spamalot.
Oddly, for a show so popular in America, a lot of Python humor takes on the British class system, poking fun at upper-class twits and handbag-toting matrons, invariably played by Pythons in drag and speaking falsetto. (The show, so revolutionary in other respects, clung resolutely to the old British tradition of cross-dressing comedy.) Another frequent target is the BBC itself, which comes to stand for all that is stiff, stuffy and pretentious.
The third hour of the documentary, called “And Now the Sordid Personal Bits,” explores some of the rifts and fissures within the group. Mr. Idle says now, “We didn’t have the slightest interest in each other as people,” and it does seem that their relationships were more professional than personal.
There was, to begin with, the Oxford-Cambridge split, with Mr. Jones, Mr. Palin and Mr. Gilliam (whom they made a sort of honorary Oxford man) on one side and Mr. Cleese, Mr. Chapman and Mr. Idle, all of whom belonged to the Cambridge Footlights troupe, on the other. And then there were the subgroups: Mr. Palin and Mr. Jones were a writing pair, as were Mr. Cleese and Mr. Chapman, even as Mr. Cleese (and everyone else) grew increasingly exasperated with Mr. Chapman’s unreliability. Somehow it escaped their notice that he had become a ruinous alcoholic who had to use a double in the rope-bridge sequence of “Holy Grail” because he was suffering from the shakes that day. And yet he was the natural leading man of the group, the only one who might have gone on to become a genuine movie actor. Mr. Cleese, who spoke affectingly of Mr. Chapman at his memorial service, says in the documentary: “Graham should have been sent back to the factory and fixed. He was not an efficient creature.”
The two Terrys — Gilliam and Jones — were natural allies until the troupe started making movies, and then they squabbled because each wanted to direct. Mr. Idle always preferred to work alone. Mr. Palin seems to have been the group conciliator, while Mr. Cleese and Mr. Jones were chalk and cheese to each other, temperamental and artistic opposites. Mr. Cleese, who had by then achieved the most personal fame and success, left the group at the end of the third TV season, while Mr. Jones vainly tried to keep it together.
The movies — “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” an Arthurian parody; “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” a spoof of the Gospels, which in New York was picketed by both rabbis and nuns; and “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life,” a collection of sketches that deal with everything from contraception to death by overeating — gave the group a brief but very profitable second life until, with “The Meaning of Life,” the members reached a kind of creative impasse, spinning off in too many different directions.
Some enterprising graduate student someday will doubtless trace the various strains that went into Python comedy. The Chapman-Cleese sketches tended to originate in confrontation, as in the parrot piece, for example, while the Oxford stuff was sillier and more notional. It was Mr. Jones and Mr. Palin who dreamed up the idea of having the Spanish Inquisition turn up in a middle-class living room. And Mr. Gilliam’s instinct was, as he says, to “get rid of all the weak bits” and fill in the gaps with his surreal, sometimes Dada-like animation. Partly through his influence the troupe subverted the sketch form itself, dispensing with beginnings or endings, sometimes walking off the set (or being stomped by a giant foot) right in the middle of a scene.
“The one thing we all agreed on, our chief aim, was to be totally unpredictable and never to repeat ourselves,” Mr. Jones said. “We wanted to be unquantifiable. That ‘pythonesque’ is now an adjective in the O.E.D. means we failed utterly.”
Hardly. The documentary includes several interviews with younger comics like Steve Coogan, Jimmy Fallon and Russell Brand, talking about how much the Pythons meant to the them. And yet the Python example is so hard to imitate that the group’s influence on contemporary comedy is less than one might imagine. Traces of Pythonist absurdity manifest themselves on “The Simpsons” and “South Park,” whose creators are avowed “Flying Circus” fans, and Stephen Colbert’s posture of clueless authority may owe something to the Cleese and Chapman model, yet a show like “Saturday Night Live,” which owes its existence in part to the success of “Flying Circus,” is still locked into the traditional self-contained sketch. To find the equivalent of the Pythons’ kind of wordplay and punning (verbal and visual) you have to turn to written humor, which may be where some of the Pythons’ inspiration came from in the first place. You could make a case, for example, that “Tristram Shandy” is the most pythonesque book in all of English literature.
“A lot of contemporary comedy seems self-conscious,” Mr. Palin said. “It’s almost documentary, like ‘The Office.’ That’s a very funny show, but you’re looking at the human condition under stress. The Pythons made the human condition seem like fun.”
He added: “I’m proud to be a Python. It’s a badge of silliness, which is quite important. I was the gay lumberjack, I was the Spanish Inquisition, I was one-half of the fish-slapping dance. I look at myself and think that may be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”
Mr. Cleese and Mr. Jones, in rare agreement, both suggested that one reason the Pythons have never been successfully imitated is that television executives nowadays would never let anyone get away with putting together a show like theirs. When they began, they didn’t have an idea what the show should be about or even a title for it. The BBC gave them some money, and then, Mr. Cleese joked, the executives hurried off to the bar.
“The great thing was that in the beginning we had such a low profile,” he said. “We went on at different times, and some weeks we didn’t go on at all, because there might be a show-jumping competition. But that was the key to our feeling of freedom. We didn’t know what the viewing figures were, and we didn’t care. What has happened now is the complete reverse. Even the BBC is obsessed with the numbers.”
So obsessed, Bill Jones pointed out, that in the case of “Monty Python: Almost the Truth” some people encouraged the documentarians to see if they couldn’t squeeze the six hours down to one.
"We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, and little by little, we went insane." Francis Ford Coppola in an interview about the making of Apocalypse Now.
It was almost a year to the day since I had flown over the Philippines aboard a U.S. Navy aircraft on my way out of Vietnam, following the collapse of Saigon in April of 1975.
The ancient Commercial Air Transport DC3 I was riding on bumped and bucked its way down through torrential tropical rain onto a dirt strip carved out of the jungles of Luzon. The runway lights were kerosene lanterns. I was arriving at the most unlikely movie location imaginable. I had been invited to spend a week documenting the making of Apocalypse Now.
Photographing on movie sets was nothing new to me. As well as being a Time contract photographer covering news, features, and The White House, I would regularly work as a "special" photographer for the movie industry. Going in, though, I had no idea how very different a project this would be from anything I had known. I was entering a strange world where art and reality were confused, and the professionalism of a big budget movie unit, which I was used to, would be threatened by delusion and madness.
In the late 1960s, America was becoming ever more bogged down in the quagmire that was Vietnam. Writer John Millius, at the request of director Francis Ford Coppola, wrote a screenplay based on Joseph Conrad's 19th-century book Heart of Darkness. The story of a ship captain who journeys up a river in the Congo searching for an ivory trader named Kurtz. In the process he finds himself not only leaving civilization, but also entering the dark realm of evil that resides in people's souls.
Coppola wanted to reset the story in Vietnam and draw the characters from that war. At one point, he even considered shooting the film in Vietnam, using 16mm cameras. He assembled a talented cast and crew who were more than willing to risk their lives to make the film. However, it was more than Warner Brothers could tolerate, and the project was put on the back burner. In the years that followed, Coppola went on to produce The Godfather and The Godfather II, and in the process became one of the richest and most powerful filmmakers in the world.
In early 1976, Coppola decided to try again. United Artists put up $18 million as a budget. Production was scheduled to start in February of 1976 on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.
In order to convince UA to put up the money, Coppola had signed a contract with Marlon Brando to play the role of Colonel Kurtz, a former Green Beret commander who has gone mad. Brando was to get a million dollars a week for three weeks of work. It was a classic "Play or Pay" deal, which meant that Brando would be paid regardless of whether he actually worked or not. This deal pushed pre-production ahead much faster than normal. Also, in order to get the cooperation of the Philippine military which controlled the helicopters, tanks, and planes, a financial agreement had to be put in place, and a firm start date had to be set. The shooting schedule for principal photography was to run about sixteen weeks. But it was 2 years and 238 shooting days later before Apocalypse Now was finally in the can.
I awoke before dawn to the sound of roosters and pigs. My bedroom was on the second floor of the house belonging to the Mayor of Luzon. Coppola had taken it over as his production offices, and to house occasional guests. There was no air conditioning. Even at that early hour the temperature was in the nineties, and the humidity was 100%. There was not even a hint of breeze.
Groggy, I stumbled out of the house as dawn started to streak the sky. All of a sudden there was a roar overhead I hadn't heard for a year. It was the unmistakable drone of UH-1B military helicopters coming in to land. I blinked as I looked up and saw the familiar olive-drab colors and insignia of the US Army 1st Cavalry Division on the sides. Helmeted door-gunners were clearing their M60 machine guns as the choppers sat down in the town square. A jeep came roaring around a corner, another gunner standing behind its machine gun. Orders were being barked as troops came spilling out of their barracks and formed into lines to prepare for inspection. Vietnamese civilians were boiling the broth for their morning pho in front of their hootches. There wasn't a movie camera in sight. Somehow, overnight, I had been transported through time and space back to Vietnam in the 1960s.
What Coppola had done was to send his scouts to every bar across the Philippines, and signed up any expatriate who looked like he could be a US soldier. There were Germans, Norwegians, Brits, and Americans who signed on for months of living in cold-water barracks so they could play soldier.
To whip them into shape, his military advisors, including Lt. Col. Peter Kama (US Army, Ret.), were brought in. They achieved a remarkable transformation in these would-be grunts during a two-week drill. At breakfast in the mess hall, I sat across from a young man who had worked as an editor for City Magazine in San Francisco. During the Vietnam War he had fled to Canada to avoid the draft. Yet here he was, dressed in tropical fatigues, dog tags dangling from his neck. There was a strange gleam in his eyes as he told me that his "platoon" was the best in the unit. They had perfected jumping from hovering helicopters, digging in, and setting up a defensive perimeter in minutes. They called their group "The Donald Ducks." He proudly exclaimed, "If we had been in Vietnam we would have won that war!" Coppola had also done more than his part in relieving the Philippine authorities by caring for hundreds of Vietnamese refugees that had come to their shores. He moved them to Luzon. They set up their own villages right on the set. Meanwhile, up the river, 600 Filipino workers were busy constructing Kurtz's temple out of 300-pound dried adobe blocks, under the direction of production designer Dean Tavoliarius. To play the headhunters Kurtz had recruited in his jungle stronghold, Coppola transported a tribe of Ifugao Indians from the south. It was rumored that until recently the tribe had still practiced headhunting for real.
My visit coincided with the start of the biggest "set piece" of action in the film. This was the famed Air Cavalry attack on the Vietcong village. Production on the film had already been underway for little more than a month, and already Francis was bedeviled by circumstances that were spinning out of his control. Harvey Keitel was his first choice for the actor playing the lead role of Capt. Willard who makes the long journey up the river to find Kurtz and to "terminate with extreme prejudice." Keitel was fired after a week of shooting, which meant the first week of film was now useless. Coppola flew to Los Angeles and signed Martin Sheen to replace Keitel.
Meanwhile, the Philippine Air Force was becoming increasingly difficult as far as keeping their promises. After Coppola had paid enormous sums to rent, and in many cases, re-equip their helicopters, they would suddenly disappear in the middle of filming to fly off to engage real-life rebel forces in the hills.
My first day on the set, the attack on the village was being shot. Coppola acknowledged this was the most complicated sequence of filming in his career. Explosive charges had been wired throughout the village. As Coppola called "Action!" Vietnamese extras ran toward machine gun emplacements and opened fire on the oncoming helicopters. Buildings exploded, bullets ripped up the ground. As the helicopters, spewing rockets, machine guns blazing, roared overhead, the Assistant Director yelled, "Cut!" Director of Photography Vittorio Storaro complained that the helicopters were too high. They were not in the shot.
For the next four hours, the set was prepared again. New charges were put in place. With the light beginning to fade, Coppola yelled "Action!" and once more the guns began to fire and Vietnamese ran across the long bridge that had been rigged to explode. Then, suddenly, the lead Huey veered off to the south, followed by the rest of the squadron. As the choppers disappeared into the distance, the Philippine Air Force Liaison Officer told Coppola that they had been called off the filming to attack a rebel force.
"This film is a 20-million-dollar disaster. Why won't anybody believe me? I'm thinking of shooting myself!" (Francis Ford Coppola, April, 1976)
Coppola was discovering that he was unwittingly replicating the American experience in Vietnam, with all this equipment, all these people, he was losing every day, and he was the commanding general. He had to beg United Artists to put another $3 million in the budget, which the studio agreed to do, but only on the condition that if the film made less than $40 million, Coppola would be held personally responsible for repaying the extra money.
Marlon Brando insisted he play his role according to the original schedule, or he would simply cash the million dollars a week he had been promised. But Coppola was a long way from that point. The original script had been made irrelevant. Daily call sheets for cast and crew would simply say "scene unknown." Now he was directing by the seat-of-his-pants. He was starting to commit the worst crime a director can be accused of, he was shooting impulsively, letting things "happen." In the process he was throwing away narrative structure. He had moved too far up the river in his own mind to turn back.
"My greatest fear is to make a really shitty, embarrassingly pompous film on an important subject, and I'm doing it. I confront it. I acknowledge, I will tell you right straight from the most sincere depths of my heart, the film will not be any good." (Francis Ford Coppola in an interview with his wife Eleanor)
Drugs, alcohol, and delirium became the norm. Actors and crew were dropping acid or taking speed. At times, this resulted in astonishing performances. While preparing to shoot what would become the opening scene for the movie, with Martin Sheen playing Willard, Coppola had been told by an advisor that a real green beret would be a vain, narcissistic man who would likely spend hours looking at himself in a mirror. After making this suggestion to Sheen, who was already feeling the effects of the long shoot in the jungle, he decided to go for his own style of "method acting." After consuming prodigious amounts of liquor, he started the shot, doing karate moves, naked, in front of a mirror. As the alcohol took over, he lunged forward and shattered the mirror with his hand. It split open his thumb. Coppola immediately called "Cut," and shouted for a doctor. Sheen, however, insisted the filming continue. Over the next half hour, the bleeding actor slouched against a bed cursing at the camera and the director. Crew members feared Sheen might become violent. The resulting performance is one of the most gripping in acting history.
Then came the storm. In May, a giant typhoon smashed the Philippines. It wrecked many of the sets. The film was forced to shut down for two months. By now, Coppola had hocked many of his assets, including his home in Northern California. By July, filming restarted, but where the story was going was anybody's guess. Coppola did a major scene, which took place on a French plantation that the crew of the River Patrol Boat encounters on their trip up the river. The plantation and its owners represented the colonial history of Vietnam. Meticulous attention was paid to every detail. The white wine would be served at 50 degrees, and the red at room temperature after breathing for an hour and a half. It was one of the most evocative scenes of the movie, but Coppola hated it. Because of his budget pressure, he couldn't afford the French cast he wanted, and after a week of shooting he decided to kill the entire scene.
In the motion picture industry, wags began to talk about "Apocalypse Later." There were rumors that Coppola had suffered a breakdown. Bizarre stories circulated. Had real body parts been taken from cemeteries to be used in the Kurtz-temple scenes? And then, in July of 1977, Martin Sheen had a major heart attack on the set. He was out of action for six weeks. During that time the director and crew would spend days on the boat, wandering the river, trying to conceive of shots. Each day they would go further up the river. Coppola would lay down clouds of smoke, which made each trip seem further and further from reality.
Then there was the tiger scene. Francis came up with the idea that the crew of the PBR would get off the boat to find some mangos. Frederick Forrest and Martin Sheen suddenly came face to face with a charging tiger. The trainer, Marty Cox, who had been severely mauled by one of his charges, told the crew that he had not given the tiger anything to eat for a week, and he was "plenty hungry." A small pig was dragged toward the camera to make the tiger charge, but once the animal burst through the jungle, the cast and crew panicked. Frederick Forrest later said "I was never so scared in my life. It was so fast, man...guys were running everywhere...climbing trees. To me, that was the essence of the whole film in Vietnam. The look in that tiger's eyes...the madness...there was no reality any more...if he wanted you, you were his." As they said in the movie, "Never get off the goddamned boat!"
Then, into all this chaos, came Brando. It was the event Coppola feared the most. Finally, he would be forced to confront the ultimate narrative of his story. How was all of this going to end? When he had been hired two years earlier, Brando was already overweight, living a life of indulgence on his Pacific island paradise. He had promised to get into shape for the film, but when he finally arrived on the set he was heavier than ever, and extremely sensitive about his girth.
One way out of the Brando predicament for Coppola was to use the fact of Brando's weight as a physical example of how living outside civilization, in the jungle, had caused this Green Beret to let himself go. But Brando wouldn't hear of it. Somehow, they would have to shoot him in semi-darkness.
Next problem, what was he going to say? There was no script. For long days, with the Brando million-dollar-a-week meter running, the star and director would huddle on the set trying to come up with anything that they could shoot. Finally, Coppola decided to let Brando improvise. He figured that if he just kept shooting, sooner or later something would make sense.
"This movie was not made in the tradition of Max Ophuls or David Lean. It was made in the tradition of Irwin Allen. I made the most vulgar, entertaining, actionful, sense-a-ramic, give them a thrill every five minutes, sex, violence, humor, because I want people to come see it. But the questions I kept running into and facing every 5 seconds was the stupid script! Going up the river to kill a guy, but that was the story! The questions that story kept putting to me, I couldn't answer, yet I knew I had constructed the film in such a way that not to answer would be to fail. (Francis Ford Coppola in an interview with his wife Eleanor.)
Finally, Francis was forced to call it quits in Luzon. But the film still did not make sense. More scenes were scripted and shot in Northern California. Michael Herr, an author who had written one of the best books about the Vietnam War, was hired to construct a narrative that would link the scenes. It was largely Herr's words that Martin Sheen speaks as the PBR goes up that river.
On August 19, 1979 the movie opened. I was in the audience at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City. Until that point, no one had ever made a movie about Vietnam that I thought was right. Details might be correct, the history solid, but they had all missed something crucial. Perhaps it was the rock-n-roll we all associated with that time and place. But sitting in the dark, looking up at that screen, I knew Coppola had got it right. Maybe the reason was that the war had made no sense, and in his own search to sort it all out, he came to the only real truth of that struggle, that everyone was mad.
The movie won three Golden Globe Awards, two Academy Awards, and the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or. It made $150 million at the box office. Oh, but the story wasn't over. Coppola knew it.
Over the next 20 years, he would think about all the unused material from the original 4-hour assembly. What about the plantation scene? What ever happened to the Playboy Bunnies that entertained the troops? There were many unanswered questions.
This month some of those questions will be answered. A new version, nearly an hour longer than the original, opens in theaters around the country. Will the changes make this classic film even better? I don't know. But maybe now Francis Ford Coppola can finally "get off the goddamned boat."
Dirck Halstead is the Editor and Publisher of The Digital Journalist monthly webmagazine. In 1976, he was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the Fall of Saigon for Time Magazine.
