Via Josh at Thoughts from Kansas, here is the Blog Meridian Theme Song:
| Your Theme Song is Back in Black by AC/DC |
 "Back in black, I hit the sack, I've been too long, I'm glad to be back" Things sometimes get really crazy for you, and sometimes you have to get away from all the chaos. But each time you stage your comeback, it's even better than the last! |
Over at Sine.qua.non, Nancy has assurred me via this post that my native state is just as clueless about how (not to mention "whether") to fund public schools properly as the state where I currently reside. I see from the article Nancy links to that, like Kansas, Texas is under a court order to address how its schools are funded. The specifics of the funding are different, though: In Texas, the court ruled that funding is too dependent on property taxes (amazingly, schools there have plenty of money in the eyes of the court, but whether that's true or not is something I can't speak to and certainly doubt); here in Kansas, the schools are just plain old underfunded. A lot.
Details, and some borrowed thinking from others, below the fold.
A rushed reminder to those of you who have any sort of relationship whatsoever with the Sunflower State--natal, residential, wistful, angst-ridden, etc.--that EMAW_KC at 3 O'Clock in the Morning would appreciate your submissions to the next weekly installment of the Kansas Guild of Bloggers' Blog Carnival. Here, for your convenience, is the link to the Submission page.
My own submission has nothing to do with Kansas, just so you're wondering. So neither does yours have to.
Though I'm a great admirer of the TV show Law & Order, I've always found NBC's favorite teaser for that show's episodes, "Ripped from today's headlines," to have a crassness of tone considerably at odds with the quality of its writing. The show's appeal lies not in the fact that many of the show's plots are indeed based on cases that have recently occurred, but in the fact that, even years after our memory of the news accounts of those cases has faded, the show's treatment of that material still retains a weight, an oomph that, sorry, you AP wireservice writers out there, those news stories lost long ago. It's not the events but their telling that we remember and admire.
But Law & Order's narratives are about local matters, no matter how nationally- or culturally-pertinent their themes. National narratives, especially traumatic ones, are another matter entirely. Over at Cup o' Joel, a well-written blog worthy of your visits, fellow Kansan Joel Mathis recently posted a commentary on the soon-to-be released film United 93. Well, not so much the film as the context in which it's being released. I happen to agree with his sentiments; indeed, just before I read his post this morning, I had posted the following over on the House of Leaves boards, where a small discussion about the film has begun:
My wife and I saw a trailer for the film night before last--as we've been seeing them for the past couple of weeks now--and she asked me what I thought about "all that."
In principle I'm not opposed to the idea of making films about events such as this--I'm not sure about Marsjams' tone above, but I'll just say here that I do think some things are worth dying for and it's valuable to be reminded of that--but my own feeling is that in the case of this film, it's just too soon. Not that one can or should ever be truly objective and clinical in one's thinking about national traumas, but my personal sense of things is that we're still trying to clarify for ourselves just how that day has affected us as a nation and, even more important, what our proper response(s) should be to it. I have doubts that this or any film about that day, right now, will help in that process, and the making of money off this only makes "all this" more, not less, problematic.
And with regard to the appealing of the "R" rating and all that that implies: Here's a suggestion: if the makers and studio truly want to honor the event depicted, I propose they put their money where their collective mouth is and not charge admission. Show their film in stadiums and throw the doors open. What SHOULD matter for them is an audience, not a paying audience. What's the never-to-be-recovered expense of a few tens of millions of dollars compared to paying tribute to the never-to-be-recovered lives of the thousands of people who died that day?
Though we no longer have to think of novels as totalities, fully realised worlds in which no element is otiose and all contributes to the perfection of the form, we retain the (perhaps outmoded) conviction that a novel should represent a unity, an aesthetic whole. I think that the intrusion of the present, in all its stupid, brute meaninglessness, fractures that unity irreparably. It is not only a problem of perspective – of our blindness towards outcomes distorting our view of things – it is a question of form. If vision is style (and it is: ‘Le style,’ wrote Flaubert (I think), ‘est une vision du monde.’), I might call this an astigmatism of form.
Specifically, a fedora and a black trenchcoat.
Le Samouraï (1967; dir. Jean-Pierre Melville; starring Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, Cathy Rosier) is the sort of film where you think, If I dressed like that guy, I could BE that guy. That is just how powerful, how iconic, wardrobe becomes here. It does this film no disservice to say that its style IS its substance.
Because that is so, this film, visually spare and with long stretches of no dialogue (no one speaks a word for the film's first 9 minutes and 52 seconds), demands our close, attentive watching as few films of any genre require of us these days. This is a film in which surfaces do not deceive but reveal to us all we need to know to follow what's happening--if we're paying attention, that is. Thematically as well, those surfaces reveal two worlds, two manners of living, in conflict with each other.
Vermeer, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
John William Waterhouse, The Crystal Ball
I don't have anything profound to say about these paintings except to note their (to my mind) striking similarities, down to their analogous compositional principles (the vertical and horizontal lines in the woman's room in the Vermeer mirroring the straight edges of the letter; the rounds in the woman's room in the Waterhouse echoing the crystal ball. Also, as the post's title indicates, I like the sense of these paintings' intertextuality: the suggestion that Vermeer's woman's pregnant roundness gives birth to the roundnesses in the Waterhouse.
And I just happen to like both of them, each on its own terms.
Technorati tags:
Art, Painting, Vermeer, Waterhouse, Intertextuality
(Contextual material here)
And, regarding the cartoon (hat-tip: Cartoon Stock): Pet-doors:cats::decision-letters:____?____
I have not posted in some time about Mrs. Meridian's successes or failures regarding the law schools she's applied to. In truth, as long-time readers know, I've only spoken of this in passing here, here, and here. But we have good news on this front: we have yet to hear from 3 schools, but of the ones we've heard from, Mrs. M. has been wait-listed only once; all the rest have accepted her.
But.
It's the three best schools she's applied to that we've not yet heard from. She doesn't want to jinx things and, seeing as it's always been good news so far when she's opened the letters, this morning we had something like the following conversation:
Mrs M: Don't open any mail today.
Me: Oh?
MM: No--I want to be the one who opens it.
Me: Why?
MM: I'm afraid that if you open the decision letters, they'll have bad news.
Me: So if YOU open them, they'll have good news?
MM: Yes.
ME: So, so long as the letter remains closed, the potential exists for the letter to simultaneously contain good news AND bad news?
MM: Yes.
Well. Who am I to argue with a basic principle of quantum mechanics? After all, I've linked to the proof of this before.
You'll know sometime after we do.
Technorati tags:
Law School, Schrödinger's Cat
Over at 3 O'Clock in the Morning, EMAW_KC is the current host of the Kansas Guild of Bloggers' weekly Bloggers' Carnival. A blog carnival, for those who don't know (it's a relatively new term for me, too), is a compendium of links to recent posts by participating bloggers. The two more altruistic purposes are to share work you're pleased with and read that of others; the more selfish one is to increase traffic to your site, if you're into that sort of thing.
The deadline for this Monday's posting of the Carnival is Sunday the 23rd at 3 pm CST, so don't dawdle.
The name of the Guild DOES have "Kansas" in it; but, as EMAW puts it, even if you've driven through or flown over Kansas (or, I would add, thought wistfully or maybe even disdainfully about Kansas), your posts are eligible for inclusion.
Shake some dust an' git yerselfs over there.
Technorati tags:
Weblogs, Blogs, Blog Carnivals, Kansas, Kansas Blogs, Kansas Guild of Bloggers
As I bet you can tell from this image, a picture on an old postcard, our stretch of the Little Arkansas river usually doesn't have a smell. This morning, though, it has that (to me) wonderful smell the rivers and creeks of my Texas childhood had that reminds me a bit of tarragon with the sharp edge of something like basil or perhaps rosemary--I can't decide which. It's the smell of spring, so strong that even we olfactorially-challenged humans can smell it, the smell of pollen and new leaves and already-fallen early blooms.
It is also the smell of somthing I keep wanting to call "wildness."
Nature is at its wildest in the spring, even along this ostensibly urbanized stretch of river. Spring is all about procreation, of course, and that is the single most crucial act of perpetuation. So--there is wildness, a kind of fierceness, in the spring, even in the passive yet open invitations the flowers extend to the bees. The plants, the animals, are driven by impulses and urges whose ends don't benefit them as individuals but help to ensure a future for the species of which they are a part. The mallards have been paired off, males with females, for over a month now, and just a couple of days ago I saw the first brood of ducklings. But not all the males have found mates; for the past month, those males have tried to mate with the females, only to be driven off by the females' mates. So now, the "single" males congregate off by themselves in a little indentation of the riverbank like the awkward kids at the high school dance who show up because that's what they're supposed to do but whom no one will dance with. I initially see some humor in their situation, knowing that there's always next year, but with a little thinking I have to recognize that they probably can't know that. They see only this one season, and their failure. There is a poignancy in that, no?
But precisely because of this stretch of river's now-sharp, human-managed edges, we've lost much of our ancient ability to see all this on Nature's terms. We're too busy thawing out from the winter and wondering how it could have passed so quickly (especially this past, very mild winter). Even the used condom I saw in the park a few weeks ago, the morning after our first cool-but-not-cold night of the season, was, for me at least then, more the potential subject for a joke-y blog post ("What were you expecting--Walden?") than, as I think about it now, a human expression of this wildness.
Oddly enough, it's been Scruffy who has been calling my attention to all this.
I've not had time in a while to write up something decent on my own, so to give your visit here some value I thought I'd send you to some friends and acquaintances who HAVE had time to write posts--and pretty good ones, at that.
Serious stuff first: Gregory Djerejian of Belgravia Dispatch is, it seems to me, THE fellow to read these days on Iraq: long, thoughtful, well-sourced posts from a former diplomat with a long view and a long memory. He is still of the belief that something good can yet be salvaged from that adventure, but he is not blind to the fact that things must change dramatically and soon if that good is to be salvaged. This post is a long meditation on the retired generals who have made public their anger with Donald Rumsfeld's conducting of the war, on those who are impugning the reputations of these generals, and the general state of the relationship between civilian and military leadership at the Pentagon. This is the sort of writing for which adjectives like "searching" are reserved. This one, meanwhile, examines the cries of "wild speculation" emanating from the White House regarding attack plans aimed at Iran and hears a distinct echo of vintage late-2002/early-2003 rhetoric regarding Iraq.
Cheerier stuff now:
Nancy over at Sine.qua.non has this eloquent post about the value of the arts in/for society. As the proud father of two daughters who love to paint, draw, read, sing and, in my older daughter G.'s case, play the violin--all of this facilitated at least in part by the public school they attend--I could not agree more with Nancy's sentiment.
Over at Musings from the Hinterland, intrepid world traveller R. Sherman braves the wilds of northwestern Arkansas with his lovely wife and two children who might have questions of a rather awkward nature . . . Oh, just go read.
Belle Lettre over at Law and Letters ruminates on the advantages and disadvantages for academic types regarding pseudonomynous blogging--especially for those who, like her, don't quite have Ann Althouse's rep.
Do we talk about reality in only subjective terms, or can we ever achieve objectivity? Over at Epiphatic Exhaustion, Overlyconscious, putting on his best Socrates, would like to know.
And speaking of Socrates, at Delights for the Ingenious, Fearful Syzygy begins to suspect that, when it comes to conveying to others his version of haircut-ness, the language for that might not exist.
And, for the thinking-person's pugilist: Chess-boxing.
Enjoy.
Today is Joan Miró's birthday. What better excuse is there for posting one of my favorite paintings of his?
Wichita can be fairly surreal, too, in a Great Plains sort of way, but this Miró mural over the entrance to Wichita State U's Ulrich Museum of Art is a very public exhibition of our surrealist street cred.
Technorati tag:
Joan Miró
First of all: a belated Happy Passover and Happy Easter to my readers. I hope your holidays were happy and safe and blessed.
Long-time readers of this blog know that I have a thing about Vertigo. It is such a strange film: the plot isn't terribly complicated, but as the mysterious Madeline tells us regarding her mystery, "There is no way to explain it." That's probably true, and I should be happy with that. But while I can't fully explain Madeline (or Scottie, either, for that matter), I can at least take a stab at describing and speculating about four quick shots in Vertigo, widely separated in time that would never be missed if they weren't in the film but nevertheless ARE there and thus must matter in this otherwise carefully-shot film.
Below the fold you'll find some tedious speculation about, of all things, shots of cushions and pillows in Hitchcock's masterpiece.
Via Thesaurus Rex (and a friend of HIS) by way of Auntie Marianne at Tomato and Basil Sandwiches (this credit-where-credit-is-due stuff is real complicated sometimes), this imagined but entirely plausible conversation between P. Diddy and Björk as they plot musical domination. Or something.
Enjoy.
Technorati tags:
P. Diddy, Björk
. . . because, well, I don't live by MacArthur Park (much less in Los Angeles).
And it's not raining.
And the cake (rectangular, from a grocery store) is covered, even if it WERE raining.
And it's sitting on a bridge railing as though it's thinking about jumping, perhaps precisely because someone had left it there.
And I'm pretty sure I can take it, since I didn't bake it and thus never had its recipe, much less the opportunity to lose it.
And, seeing as it's from a grocery store, I'm pretty sure THEY still have the recipe. Whew! THAT's a load off my mind, let me tell you.
So, now that I think about it, that cake with the green icing that's sitting there on the bridge railing (and it's been there since before 6:30 this morning), seeing as its particular context bears almost no relation to that of the green cake in Jimmy Webb's song, isn't all that remarkable after all.
Sorry to have bothered you.
I have things to do for the next few days which are decidedly NOT blog-updating related. I look forward to returning "here" this weekend.
My good on-line friend Nancy of Sine.qua.non has asked me to help promote an online exhibition of artists and musicians whose work she has championed for some time now. She has also been a long-time friend of good old Blog Meridian, so I am only too happy to oblige.
In the next few days, I'll be posting some comments on these artists' works. In the meantime, you can find the ad over there in the right gutter, below the Amazon search box (What?? You mean you didn't know that was there??). Go and click and see and hear . . . and maybe buy something, too. Nancy and I thank you.
As I write this, it's less than two hours before the tip-off between George Mason(!!) and Florida, the first of the two semi-final games (LSU vs. UCLA is the other game) that will determine which two teams will play Monday for the championship of this year's NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. And I am perplexed about something.
From what I have read, CBS is worried that the ratings for these games will be lower than before because none of the teams is nationally prominent or was expected by many people to be in the Final Four. And while that's true, I am either too naïve or too dense to understand why such a thing would affect the ratings. Indeed, as Frank Deford argues here, the very myth of the tournament--that any team in it has a shot at winning it--is, with the presence of George Mason and not UConn, as close to coming true as has ever happened. It's like Hoosiers in real life--and in Indiana, too, no less. I figure, who wouldn't want to see this play out for real?
Mrs. Meridian doesn't, for one.
As my regular readers have probably noticed, it's been a while since I've posted here. The chief reason for that is that I've had other things to do, like my job. But Thursday afternoon marks the de facto beginning of my weekend, so I have a bit of time to post.
This post, in fact, has to do with something that was said in class this morning. As an option for their research papers, students can write about some paintings of their choosing by a painter of my choosing: the idea (the hope, actually) is for them to choose paintings that have something in common and offer and support an opinion about what they think the painter wants to convey via this whatever-it-is that recurs in the paintings they've chosen. So today, I talked through how that might work by showing them three paintings by Velázquez (who, by the way, isn't on their list of painters). Two of them, Las Meninas and Venus at Her Mirror, I've posted images of before and so won't here, but the third one is 
this one, The Supper at Emmaus. They are very different, to my mind, in terms of style, but what they have in common, and what we as a class have spent time discussing, is the presence of mirrors in each. We spend some time speculating as to why Velázquez has them in these paintings, functioning, as they do, as something more than mere detail; we've also meditated a bit on what mirrors themselves do and so begin to get at the implications of words such as "reflection" and "image." Ultimately, though, the goal has been simply to model for them how to get started on this task of writing about the paintings they've chosen.
Anyway, in the course of discussing The Supper at Emmaus this morning, a student said something interesting that I found interesting about a possible theological reading of the painting. That, if you're interested, appears below the fold.
to one of Caravaggio's treatments of the same theme. A student immediately said No. When I asked him why, he said that the serving woman provides an implicit message about Christ himself: specifically, his humility ("The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve"). Also, there's something in the serving woman's manner--her looking down, the overturned dishes--that suggests a sort of rushedness to attend to the men, and should that not also be our response when guests arrive? So, then, the painting is really more about our response to the event than it is the event itself.Courtesy of this NPR story about a festival celebrating Minimalist music:
A: Knock, knock.
B: Who's there?
A: Philip Glass--Knock, knock.
B: Who's there?
A: Philip Glass--Knock, knock.
B: Who's there?
A: Philip Glass . . .
(etc.)
"The enjoyment of art remains the only ecstacy that is neither immoral nor illegal." Thus sayeth Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb), an aging, effete but dangerous gallery owner in The Dark Corner (1946), a solid example of film noir. My colleague Larry the movie guy (who else?) lent this to me after he told me that Lucille Ball(!) stars in it. Who wouldn't be curious to see her in a dramatic role? I frankly wasn't expecting much. But Ball is quite good in it, reminding me a little in her delivery of Lauren Bacall, though she's not as scorchingly sexy as Bacall. I also thought that Joseph MacDonald's cinematography, especially interior shots, was quite good: some of those scenes would have made Edward Hopper smile.
The film's plot is classic noir fare: private eye with a checkered past (Brad Galt, played by Mark Stevens) thinks he's being hassled by someone from that past (Jardine, played by Kurt Kreuger), when in fact Galt is the unwitting means to Cathcart's end of doing away with Jardine, Galt's lawyer. Jardine, it seems, is having an affair with Cathcart's very lovely, very young wife, Mari (Cathy Downs). Ball plays Kathleen, Galt's secretary, who loyally aids him in extracting himself from this mess and, of course, ends up falling for him.
The reason I'm posting about this film, though, is its fascinating use of art and its appreciation (not to mention the potentially corrupting influence of that appreciation) as a solid subtext for the plot. Or, as Galt puts it as he becomes aware that he's being set up, "I can be framed easier than Whistler's Mother."
