If Mrs Doubtfire were a horror film. // There’s a boat at the end of the road. // A short film about a man and his big wooden balls. // Monkey orchids. // Autonomous lawnmower. // Painting a whale. // Your weight in outer space. (h/t, Coudal) // A catalogue of cigarette rolling papers. // Taken apart. // A photographic record of the Great Depression. (h/t, Anna) // Prepared face. // Storage for the slightly obsessive. // Ray Bradbury sits in a time machine. // A detailed look at cutting through steel. (h/t, MeFi) // Franklin’s oils. // Watermelons need vodka. // Dining at altitude. // Kuwaiti cleric explains buggery and other works of the devil. 

For newcomers and the nostalgic, three more items from the archives.

Above Them, Only Sky.

The Guardian pines for radical pop stars who “threaten” the establishment. Like the peacenik who bankrolled the IRA.

Lennon also found time to lend his pop star gravitas to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, a Trotskyist cult apparently financed by those moral colossi Muammar al-Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, and which entranced such artistic luminaries as Corin and Vanessa Redgrave. The WRP’s ambitions included socialist revolution, the overthrow of private property and the replacement of the police by a “workers militia.” Imagine that. And hey, who wouldn’t feel threatened by a millionaire pop star sprawled on his peace bed high above Manhattan, singing a hymn to global totalitarianism and a world with “no possessions,” while his sidekick Yoko collected fur coats? 

Socialist Hearts Are Just Bigger Than Ours.

Zoe Williams denounces charity fundraiser and spits at people who don’t have “normal salaries.” 

Normal salaries won’t of course cut much ice at an Ark Gala, where ticket sales alone raise millions of pounds. Even Zoe, whose former school sends well-heeled little socialists on trips to Rome, Morocco and Barbados, would be out of her league. Still, Zoe’s personal resentments are the important thing and these “obscenely” rich people should stop “creating inequality” while giving money away. Given time, the orphans of Romania will doubtless learn to do without while sharing in Ms Williams’ moral satisfaction.

Don’t Bother Me With Details. 

Diversity hustler Linda Bellos, a thinker for our times. 

It’s always good to see moral one-upmanship and complaints of “the same sad old stereotypes” coming from a woman who abandoned her own children to live in a separatist lesbian commune. 

There’s more of course in the greatest hits. 

John Ellis on cultivated victimhood and the Angry Studies racket: 

Just as Pinocchio went off to school with high hopes, only to be waylaid by J. Worthington Foulfellow, minority students are met on the way to campus by hard-left radicals who claim to have the interests of the newcomers at heart but in reality prey on them to advance their own selfish interests. Of course, what black students need is the same solid traditional education that had raised Irish, Italians, and Jews to full equality. But that would not serve the campus radicals’ purpose. Disaffected radicals wanted to swell the ranks of the disaffected, not the ranks of the cheerfully upward mobile. Genuine progress for minority students would mean their joining and thus strengthening the mainstream of American society – the mainstream that campus radicals loathe… 

As thinkers, campus radicals are poor role models for students. Their ideas are simple and rigid, and they rely heavily on conspiracy thinking that infers far too much from too little. They are powered by emotional commitments that are highly resistant to the lessons of experience. As a result, their cherished ideas are now virtually obsolete, and strike any reasonably well-informed observer as downright silly. The minority students that they attract into their orbit are dragged down to this low intellectual level.

Which may explain why disagreeing with Obama is, for some, always, always racist. 

And I’m sure it’s purely coincidental that Laurie Penny rails against the “small, ugly ambitions” of bourgeois advancement, and shrieks “fuck social mobility,” while so many of her leftist colleagues want to block off escape routes on ideological grounds. Because they care so very, very much.

For more on cultivated grievance and its degrading effects, see this lecture by David Horowitz.

Kay Hymowitz on social mobility and feedback loops: 

You can’t grasp what’s happening at the lower end of the income scale without talking about family breakdown. In fact, the single-mother revolution, as I’ll call it, takes us a long way toward understanding the socioeconomic problems on everyone’s mind these days: poverty, inequality, and the inability of those at the bottom to move up… As of 1970, 11 percent of births were to unmarried mothers; by 1990, that number had risen to 28 percent. Today, 41 percent of all births are non-marital. And for mothers under 30, the number is 53 percent… 

The single-mother revolution has left us with the following reality. At the top of the social order is a positive feedback loop, with kids raised in stable, high-investment and relatively affluent homes going to college, finding similar mates, and raising their own children in stable, high-investment and relatively affluent homes. At the bottom is a negative feedback loop, with kids raised by single mothers in unstable, low-investment homes finding themselves unable to adapt to today’s economy and going on to create more unstable, single-mother homes.

See also Heather Mac Donald on poverty and behaviour. 

And Fabian Tassano on being labelled right-wing:  

I do not think of this blog as right-wing, though others may. If I had to file it under anything, it would be under {critique, genuine}. This in contrast with {critique, phoney}, meaning the kind of critique you currently get from the cultural establishment (e.g. Britart is “challenging,” literary theory is “deeply questioning,” contemporary sociology “analyses prejudices”), in which the original sense of the word critique has become inverted. […] To pretend the cultural landscape is not at present utterly dominated by leftist sentiment (pro-state, pseudo-egalitarian, anti-capitalist) is just silly. The fact that such sentiment tends no longer to be referred to as leftist is merely a sign of how hegemonic it has become. 

See, for instance, these intellectuals of tomorrow, their educators, and almost anything here tagged ‘academia.’ And then of course there’s “our” artistic and cultural establishment, whose “debates,” “critiques” and “interrogations” have entertained us no end. 

By all means add your own.

Chicken footstools. You heard me. // Deboning chickens with robots. // Distil your own sugar beet vodka. // Avengers tech design. // The plumes of Enceladus. // Underpants of note. // Photographs by Shikhei Goh. // Fun with Photoshop. // Flavoured envelopes. // From tadpole to toadlet. // The Sun is not your friend. // Sunlight in Europe. (h/t, rjmadden) // Venus and the Sun. // In Search of Steve Ditko. // This is one of these. // This is Coffee, 1961. // Coping with loss in Wisconsin. // When the answer to narcissism is even more narcissism. (h/t, dicentra) // And remember, folks. Aaron Sorkin does not have a political agenda. 

Robert Hodgin’s real-time instant fat suit. 

Above, Noomi Rapace tries to escape from a really shit film.

Spectacular digital effects, of which there are plenty in Prometheus, are complicated, time-consuming and expensive. Likewise, impressive sets and cinematic hardware cost money. Orchestral scores and booming sound design aren’t cheap either. Had Ridley Scott dropped the ball in these departments, it might at least have been understandable, given the number of people to be coordinated and the sums of money involved.

But the script, on which everything else in a film has to hang, is one of the cheapest parts to get right. It typically involves a handful of people, not hundreds of technicians racing against the clock. Not getting the basic story and dialogue presentable, or even close to presentable, is much harder to excuse.

And yes, this applies to any number of other films.

Update:  The particulars of its badness can be found in the comments. Spoilers, obviously.

Tokyo transsexual cooks and serves own genitals. // Self-stirring saucepan. // Assorted rattlesnakes. // Fly ablutions. // Robot spiders coming soon to hazardous environs. // Unmade beds and sailing boats. // Essential beach accessory. // Stop-motion crochet portrait. // The museum of endangered sounds. // Coin-operated mortuary. // Zombie gnomes. // The mysteries of Guinness. // Gummi bears infused with chilli. // British newspaper archive. // Fugu & Tako. // Found in Lapland. // Parked 747 encounters quite strong winds. // And for those who haven’t seen it, and you should, all eight episodes of The Planets (1999). 

Further to my exchange with TimT in the comments, I thought I’d post this 2009 lecture by David Horowitz. 

See also this. 

It’s been a while since we’ve had an addition to our series of classic sentences, so let’s fix that right now.

Ken Loach is the least egotistical of cinema directors.

Yes, today’s Guardian editorial - In Praise of Ken Loach – would have us believe that an ossified Trotskyist who regards the rise of anti-Semitism as “perfectly understandable” is the yardstick of humility and self-effacement. He’s also, we’re told, a moral visionary: 

“Another world is possible,” Mr Loach told the Cannes audience this week. Not everyone will always agree with Mr Loach’s own politics, but the possibility of a better world is integral to the morality of art, nowhere more so than with Ken Loach. 

Being a devout socialist, a one-time Respect party candidate and a hagiographer of Irish republican terrorism, Mr Loach’s moral credentials are somewhat peculiar. Loach has said that he wants to make the British “confront their imperialist past” and in 1977 he famously rejected the offer of an OBE, supposedly on principle, denouncing the honour as “despicable… deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest.” However, as Prodicus noted over at Orphans of Liberty, this principled adamance did not inhibit the director’s 2003 acceptance of the Praemium Imperiale – the World Culture Prize in Memory of His Imperial Highness Prince Takamatsu. His Imperial Highness was of course the brother of the 124th emperor of Japan, Hirohito, whose activities and ambitions were, it seems, altogether more moral and glorious. 

The flavour of Ken’s complicated moral calculus was captured earlier this year over at House of Dumb:  

Nothing sums up the demented nature of the modern left better than a soi-disant socialist party that supports taxing janitors in Leeds to give money to millionaire luvvies in London, so they can make films about how folk in Yorkshire are ignorant bigots. 

Mr Loach had been holding forth on the publicly funded BBC, as he often does, grumbling about “Tories” and once again taking umbrage with multiplex cinemas and the “very narrow” range of films they find viable to screen. The proposed solution to Ken’s problem was, inevitably, greater public funding of independent filmmakers – much like Mr Loach, in fact – and the public funding of a chain of independent cinemas in which these publicly funded films could then be screened, having been selected by publicly funded people much like Mr Loach. This, he said, would “fulfil the possibility that cinema has.” Writing in the Guardian in October 2010, Loach suggested that cinemas should be owned collectively, i.e., by the state, and “programmed by people who care about films – the London Film Festival, for example, is full of people who care about films.” The term “people who care about films” is used frequently by Loach yet is never quite defined, though one doesn’t have to reach far to find the implication. Clearly, he isn’t talking about thee or me, no matter how many times we may excitedly visit a cinema. Bums on seats are not his bottom line. No, our tastes must be guided and elevated, until they conform to the expectations of our professional aesthetes and socialist betters. See? No ego at all. 

And so, what cinemas show should be determined by people who care, as determined by Ken Loach. Such caring, enlightened people might even be inclined to show films made by Ken Loach, and by the friends of Ken Loach, regardless of whether those screenings would find an audience or be economically viable. (If you already have the punters’ money via coercive public subsidy, why fret about ticket sales and those ghastly popular appetites? He’s above such base urges. He’s a socialist, remember?) Central to Ken’s appeal for further subsidy and unearned influence is a belief that the size of the market for art-house / foreign language films, around 2% of total UK ticket sales, is not in fact a reflection of the public appetite for such things, but rather evidence that art-house / foreign language films are in some way being suppressed, presumably on account of their terribly radical content. And this must not stand: 

Those of us who work in television and film have a role to be critical, to be challenging, to be rude, to be disturbing, not to be part of the establishment. We need to keep our independence. We need to be mischievous. We need to be challenging. We shouldn’t take no for an answer.  

However, they will take our money – and not through voluntary ticket sales, as is generally the custom, but with the force of government and taxation. That being what independent, challenging, anti-establishment types do.