David Kern Tumbls

theatlantic: China Censors ‘Men in Black 3’ for Referring to...

Thu, 31 May 2012 22:53:49 -0400

China Censors ‘Men in Black 3’ for Referring to Chinese Censorship

A few weeks ago we were thinking about Chinese censorship of American movies, wondering if the practice will increase as China’s movie market opens up, and now today we hear word of the latest example of government meddling. The Chinese censors have gotten to Men in Black 3, a big hit in the movie-mad nation, possibly because they were concerned about perceived references to… censorship.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire. [Image: Sony]

On Episode 11 of Mad Men Season 5

Tue, 29 May 2012 23:46:15 -0400

From Matt Zoller Seitz, at Vulture:

Something Sgt. Peppers-level major is happening on Mad Men this year, a seismic creative flowering comparable to season one of The Sopranos and season three ofBreaking Bad. Every season five episode is a creative experiment that draws on the cumulative power of every episode that preceded it. We’re nearing the point where everything on Mad Men seems to connect to everything else — not just from episode to episode within season five, but backwards, as if the new episodes are somehow unfurling tendrils into the past, fusing the whole run ofMad Men into a fiendishly intricate mega-story. It’s just extraordinary.

Spot on.

"This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what..."

Tue, 29 May 2012 09:31:47 -0400

“This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed ahold of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.””

- Walker Percy (via mysteriousandmundane)

THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS

Mon, 28 May 2012 10:11:37 -0400

Marina Keegan just graduated from Yale University. Tragically, she died Saturday in a single car accident. But before that she penned a beautiful piece for the Yale Daily News called The Opposite of Loneliness.

Here is an excerpt:

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.

Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers — partner-less, tired, awake. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts.

This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.

But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us.

Read the rest here. Please.

theatlantic: What Does Your Favorite Wes Anderson Movie Say...

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:39:37 -0400

theatlantic:

What Does Your Favorite Wes Anderson Movie Say About You?

With the advent of Wes Anderson’s latest entry into his compendium of eight—the movie Moonrise Kingdom, out in New York and Las Angeles Friday—there’s enough of a catalog to ensure that there’s one for each of us. So, what’s your favorite Wes Anderson film? You would be amazed at what your preferences say about who you are, at least according to this entirely unscientific but completely authoritative exploration:

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

You like bands that other people like, but you only like their really obscure stuff. When you describe a piece of art or something as “difficult,” you mean it as a compliment. You probably have a graduate degree in something specific or you just work at a used book store. You want to move to Portland but you just haven’t done it yet. Sometimes people call you an asshole and you respond, “All I’m saying is that it’s important to understand what the term ‘craft beer’actually means.” If you’re a straight guy (and you probably are) you have a girlfriend named Cara who is a research assistant and wants to move to France, but not Paris. When you have a kid (not with Cara), it will have, for a first name, the last name of a writer you like. (Maybe Wallace, because you love Infinite Jest.) One summer when you were a kid you spent a month with your cousins at their island house in Maine and something big happened that you never told anyone else.

Read more.

Completely silly. But which is ur favorite Wes Anderson movie?

Here in the South, we don’t hide crazy We parade it on the...

Wed, 23 May 2012 09:22:08 -0400

Here in the South, we don’t hide crazy We parade it on the front porch and give it a cocktail.

Via someecards

The trailer for the newest film from my second favorite...

Mon, 21 May 2012 20:08:12 -0400

The trailer for the newest film from my second favorite currently working filmmaker…

braiker: well played flavorpill: Yes.

Fri, 18 May 2012 23:21:47 -0400

braiker:

well played

flavorpill:

Yes.

"I acknowledge that I have used four-letter words familiarly all my life, and have put them into..."

Fri, 18 May 2012 16:19:07 -0400

“

I acknowledge that I have used four-letter words familiarly all my life, and have put them into books with some sense that I was insisting on the proper freedom of the artist. I have applauded the extinction of those d——d emasculations of the Genteel Tradition and the intrusion into serious fiction of honest words with honest meanings and emphasis. I have wished, with D. H. Lawrence, for the courage to say shit before a lady, and have sometimes had my wish.

Words are not obscene: naming things is a legitimate verbal act. And “frank” does not mean “vulgar,” any more than “improper” means “dirty.” What vulgar does mean is “common”; what improper means is “unsuitable.” Under the right circumstances, any word is proper. But when any sort of word, especially a word hitherto taboo and therefore noticeable, is scattered across a page like chocolate chips through a tollhouse cookie, a real impropriety occurs. The sin is not the use of an “obscene” word; it is the use of a loaded word in the wrong place or in the wrong quantity. It is the sin of false emphasis, which is not a moral but a literary lapse, related to sentimentality. It is the sin of advertisers who so plaster a highway with neon signs that you can’t find the bar or liquor store you’re looking for. Like any excess, it quickly becomes comic …

Some acts, like some words, were never meant to be casual. That is why houses contain bedrooms and bathrooms. Profanity and so-called obscenities are literary resources, verbal ways of rendering strong emotion. They are not meant to occur every ten seconds, any more than—Norman Mailer to the contrary notwithstanding—orgasms are.

”

- Wallace Stegner on Profanity - Magazine - The Atlantic. In the forty-seven years since Stegner published this piece — the whole of which is not online anywhere, as far as I can tell, which is a shame, because it’s a brilliantly funny and insightful essay — the situation have gotten far worse. Swearing is now a lost art. I should know: I grew up under the tutelage of a virtuoso. I’ve never heard anyone curse as rhythmically, poetically, and polysyllabically as my father did.

But the key to successful cursing is restraint: saving the most powerful words for the occasion when they are needed. As Stegner comments elsewhere in the essay, if you “say shit before a lady,” what do you say when your car breaks down at rush hour on the Santa Monica Freeway? Presumably, in those days, you would take that opportunity to drop the f-bomb, but to judge by my Twitter feed, many people now use that word fifty times a day, which leaves them with absolutely nothing in reserve when something genuinely bad happens. Not only is it not the f-bomb any more, it’s not even the f-sparkler. The word has been eviscerated. I am not speaking in moral terms here, just linguistic ones: the spread of cursing into more and more situations where it once would have been forbidden has been one more form of linguistic inflation, like calling everything that’s even mildly pleasant “awesome.” It betokens a lack of judgment, a failure of assessment, and it leaves us with limited or no linguistic resources in the hour of need. We need to clean up our language, if for no other reason than to have room to make it dirty when dirty is really called for.

(via ayjay)

Watching HBO\'s \"Girls\" and trying to figure out how I feel about it

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:41:44 -0400

whatshouldwecallme:

The Bagshot Row: Discussing Eternal Things

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:34:00 -0400

The Bagshot Row: Discussing Eternal Things:

I’ve recently start contributing to a new website call the BagShot Row, the goal of which is to foster discussion, imagination, and camaraderie. Check it out.

JOSH RITTER: A GOOD MAN This is one of my very favorite Josh...

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:16:47 -0400

JOSH RITTER: A GOOD MAN

This is one of my very favorite Josh Ritter tunes. Notice how happy he appears; it’s refreshing.

NEW BEACH HOUSE ALBUM STREAMING ON NPR

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:03:52 -0400

NEW BEACH HOUSE ALBUM STREAMING ON NPR:

Check it out - it’s great!

hitfix: Check out clips of the best of Perd Hapley. SPOILER...

Fri, 11 May 2012 17:09:09 -0400

hitfix:

Check out clips of the best of Perd Hapley. SPOILER ALERT: There are some clips from last night’s Parks and Rec finale.

"Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without..."

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:08:25 -0400

“Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.”

- Blaise Pascal, Pensees

Interjection!: The real soul-mate

Fri, 11 May 2012 01:10:20 -0400

Interjection!: The real soul-mate:

garbandier:

No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial. Too few are told that — even those brought up ‘in the Church’. Those outside seem seldom to have…

10 famous fiction writers and their cocktails, from the kitchn.

Thu, 10 May 2012 18:03:18 -0400

10 famous fiction writers and their cocktails, from the kitchn.

The Atlantic on the 10th Anniversary of YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT

Thu, 10 May 2012 15:53:57 -0400

In which Spencer Kornhaber of the Atlantic calls YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT the album of the new millenium:

…the album endures because of its music, not its mythology. And that’s not just because of the often-cited fact that it mixed folk and rock with other genres—Wilco and plenty of other alternative-leaning bands had already gone experimental in the ’90s. Rather, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s triumph was in how it captured a facet of human nature: the way we all send signals, hoping that someone will understand them but also anxious about what happens when someone does. You’ll sometimes hear the album get called cryptic, or self-conscious, or difficult. And that’s fine. It’s really a soundtrack for the ways in which people ask to be misunderstood.

And later he says this:

A big part of the band’s genius here was in translating Tweedy’s lyrical conceit into sound. Wilco’s first three albums had proven that its members could write catchy, complicated folk-pop songs—the same kind of songs that make up Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But as the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart showed, the band took those unvarnished tracks and reverse-engineered them to be weird: to float along uneasily on “Radio Cure,” to sputter maniacally as in “I’m the Man Who Loves You,” to disintegrate and rebuild as on “Pot Kettle Black.” The fuzziness of how people relate to one another was in that weirdness; the reasons people bother trying to relate in the first place was in the pop.

The rise of the Internet over the past decade would seem to lend Tweedy’s lyrics even greater resonance. “All my lies are always wishes”; “I’m down on my hands and knees every time the doorbell rings”; “It’s become so obvious you are so oblivious to yourself”—these could be the drunken tweets of the poster-child for, say, the recent Atlantic cover story about how social media can isolate people and screw with relationships. But Tweedy’s really singing about a universal, timeless crisis of communication. That’s why so many people continue to take Yankee Hotel Foxtrot very personally. In high school, it sounded like Tweedy was speaking for me: This is how shy guys talk to people. In the time since, I’ve realized that no, this is how everyone talks to everyone. Saying what you mean is hard. What’s astonishing about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is that it actually did it.

Read the whole article here.

NT Wright sings WHEN THE SHIPS COME IN at the Rabbit Room

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:30:27 -0400

NT Wright sings WHEN THE SHIPS COME IN at the Rabbit Room

thebagshotrow: Don’t usually go for covers but this one is...

Tue, 08 May 2012 15:30:43 -0400

thebagshotrow:

Don’t usually go for covers but this one is great. Birdy covers a classic Postal Service track.

Rdio: Listen