"There is a lot of creative energy in Los Angeles not channelled into the film business. Florence and Venice have great surface beauty, but as cities they feel like museums, whereas for me Los Angeles is the city in America with the most substance, even if it’s raw, uncouth and sometimes quite bizarre." [ more › ]
The hundreds of thousands of chemicals that are packed into our homes and lives are what make modern consumerism possible, keeping our food fresh and our walls from molding. They are also, in many cases, completely untested and backed by giant corporations with a financial stake in their successful adoption.
There is bad news for those planning to go to Mars in the near future: a study in mice has suggested that radiation in space could cause cognitive decline in astronauts. However, we know from past research that mental, social and physical exercise can boost cognitive functions. With planned Mars missions moving ever closer, it might be be worth exploring activity as a way to counter radiation damage.
What would Kurt Cobain think about someone else’s Kurt Cobain documentary? Obviously it wouldn’t exist as Brett Morgan’s new film–or any other of the attempts, for that matter–were the Generation X legend still alive, but a thorough, multimedia story would always exist because of how effusively artistic the Nirvana frontman was. What becomes acutely evident within the first moments of Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck is that it is a documentary about the most self-conscious documentarian of all time.
Culling material from a seemingly unlimited stockpile, Morgan weaves together Kurt’s biography in a truly impressive fashion. After footage of Nirvana’s infamous 1992 Reading Festival performance, we begin with his early childhood, seeing pictures of his birth certificate and home footage of hyperactive young boy with a mischievous smile. This dovetails into illustrated journal entries from his adolescence which in turn dovetail into artfully animated segments that use field recordings of Kurt as he captured musings and nascent clipped versions of Nirvana tracks. Because Kurt’s artistic sensibilities are so diverse, Morgan makes you feel like this is the only responsible way to tell a story about the musician. The film’s namesake is an audio collage Cobain recorded while living with his first girlfriend that splices spoken word with gross visceral noises and snippets classic songs by Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and The Jackson 5. It is the kind of curio that perfectly captures the chronic thunderstorm that occupied the songwriter’s head. What was he possibly thinking about at any given time?
This brings me back to my original question. Of course, wondering what Cobain would think of his own documentary is inevitably fruitless, and potentially morose, but it’s compelling in its infinite open-endedness. Was he so concerned about his contentious media portrayals (the film also excavates plenty of critical articles and ad hominem polemics) that, perhaps, he would have at least preferred Morgan’s refracted, semi-autobiographical representations? Would Cobain have even trusted his own outdated journals, or would he have been mortified by the artifacts he left behind, like a contemporary 27-year-old blushing at his/her Facebook timeline from high school? Though I’d guess that he would simply detest the voyeuristic compulsion to dig up private missives to himself, there are no real answers to any of these questions.
However, what becomes clear throughout the course of this intimate collection of family testimonials, illustrated journal sketches and animated segments of audio recordings is that he had to document himself. It was a compulsory delay tactic. Were it not for these 200 hours of audio recordings and 4,000 pages of journal entries, lists, and sketches inevitable implosion would have happened sooner.
Like a fruitless, retroactive plea, the specter of his impending mortality permeates every medium showcased. One of many early audio recordings reveals a young suicide attempt after Kurt could not bear the shame of having taken advantage of a mentally challenged young woman. He was a young teenager then and decided to sit on the tracks of on oncoming train that switched tracks as it approached. This unsettling subject emerges again when Kurt discusses crippling stomach pain that led to his first flirtation with heroin in 1987. We see a note about suicide as a viable way out, and then quick flashed of journal sketches that are more violent than before, his penmanship now an unruly scrawl.
“You see his art, and a lot of those messages are as plain as day,” says former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic somberly.
After the SXSW premiere for Montage Of Heck, Morgan took the stage at the Paramount Theater in downtown Austin, TX, and fielded several questions from a generally impressed audience. After defensively answering a question about Dave Grohl’s absence from the film (it was a fair question), the director explained that he attempted to frame Kurt in the context of the family units of which he was a part and from which he was alienated throughout the course of his life. As the only “authorized” Kurt Cobain documentary in existence, this makes a lot of sense: Morgan interviewed a small pool of people whom Kurt considered family at one point in his short life including his parents and his wife. Kurt and Courtney’s daughter Frances Bean served as an executive producer for the film. There are parallels in the narrative that represent the full circle of Cobain running away from his family to create his own–different versions of “All Apologies” play during analogous montages of both Kurt’s and Frances’s respective baby footage (I cried a little bit during these moments because I am a sucker). Both Kurt and Courtney vocalize their desire to start a family of their own because they were fugitives from broken homes.
Family is a central in Morgan’s film, sure, but I would not confidently say that is what this film is about. Trying to find a single overarching conceit about Cobain’s life by soldering together these multifarious mediums of his art is an exercise in futility. You can extrapolate virtually anything you want from Cobain’s life because everything you would ever want to know or think about him already exists in the form of a primary source. No matter what you hypothesize about Kurt Cobain, the impossibly hypercritical luminary beat us all to it.
In this way, Montage Of Heck makes an exceptionally compelling argument about the act of documentation in the form of the people and artifacts we leave behind: they are not us, and they never were. And though we might be able to ply and influence either for a short time, a time comes when will they no longer conform to our wills.
So what would Kurt Cobain think about someone else’s Kurt Cobain documentary? In his own words: “There is nothing I can say that I haven’t thought before.”
—
Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck premieres tonight on HBO at 9:00 pm ET/PST.
Little Italy and Canton are two nearby neighborhoods in Baltimore. It's about 1.5 miles from one to the other, either seven minutes by car or a half-hour walk.
But for a newborn baby, the neighborhoods couldn't be further apart. Kids born in Little Italy are more than 10 times as likely to die before their first birthday as those born in Canton.
The death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray has touched off a new conversation about urban inequality, the huge economic and health disparities that can exist within a few miles or subway stops.
Chris Ingraham at the Washington Post recently looked at life expectancy in Baltimore, showing that there are 15 neighborhoods in the city in which residents can expect to live shorter lives than people born in North Korea.
But another, and in some ways more disturbing, disparity emerges when you look at infant mortality, a measure of how likely infants are to die in their first year of life.
Nationally, the United States does quite poorly. For every 1,000 babies born, 6.1 babies will die before their first birthday — the highest rate among wealthy countries. But that average hides shocking disparities between states, cities, and even towns. The infant mortality rate in richer Baltimore neighborhoods like Canton is barely distinguishable from, say, the infant mortality rate in Finland. But according to 2013 data collected by Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, in Baltimore's Little Italy neighborhood, about two out of every 100 children die before their first birthday — which puts infant mortality in Little Italy roughly on par with Nicaragua and Uzbekistan.
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Emily Oster, an economist at the University of Rhode Island, looked at infant mortality in the United States last year. Her research shows that high-income areas of the United States have infant mortality rates similar to European countries.
This shows up in Baltimore, too. If you look at the strip of lighter-colored neighborhoods in the northern part of the city — places like Roland Park and Mount Washington — they have an infant mortality rate just around 3.4 deaths per 1,000 births — slightly lower than France, but higher than Germany.
These are the wealthier neighborhoods in Baltimore; Roland Park, for example, has an average income of $106,770. Less than 2 percent of residents there live below the poverty line.
But there are two neighborhoods in Baltimore — Little Italy and Greenmount East — with infant mortality rates above 20. This means that for every 100 babies born there in 2013, two died before their first birthday. That's a higher rate than you find in the West Bank, Honduras, or Venezuela.
Unsurprisingly, Little Italy and Greenmount are some of the poorest neighborhoods in Baltimore. Average income in Little Italy is $31,547, and 41 percent of families live below the poverty line.
Oster has studied what separates high- and low-income populations in the United States — what might cause the disparities that exist here, but not in Europe. It's not, for example, worse vaccination rates; those tend to be similar among all kids in the United States, regardless of how much their family earns. Heath insurance status could matter, as low-income Americans are less likely to have coverage — and some data does show a correlation between no health plan and higher infant mortality rates.
One reason infants might face worse odds in low-income neighborhoods could be that they have worse access to health care at birth. But when Oster compared same-weight babies during the first month of life, she found little difference in outcomes. During those first four weeks, low- and high-income babies had equal odds of survival.
"You might think that lower-income babies have access to worse neonatal care, but we find that the place where there is higher mortality is actually the later part of infancy," Oster says. "When babies get home — when there are accidents and different sleep environments and those types of things — you see differences show up."
Oster's research shows that the most common causes of infant mortality tend to be accidents and sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. These are challenges that are difficult to target with specific policy responses — or least those that easily fit within a city budget.
"One thing that has gotten discussion is home visiting, and an effort to follow up with them when they're at home, to think about behaviors to create a safer environment," Oster says. "That's one kind of intervention where there's been some evidence that it works, but it also tends to be resource-intensive and expensive."
Discussions of poor neighborhoods often get caught in debates about responsibility. Some argue that disparities in longevity, for instance, are the result of young men making criminal choices, while others point toward failing urban policies, the destruction of manufacturing jobs, or the devastating effects of childhood lead poisoning. The culprit is contested because, depending on who is to blame, society may or may not morally be obligated to help.
Focusing on infant mortality clarifies the situation considerably: these children did nothing except be born on the wrong side of town, and many of them are losing their lives for it. The children born in Greenmount did not make bad choices, and they should not, in the richest country in the world, be abandoned to an infant mortality rate on par with a violent, developing nation.
Bridgetbest part of the internet last week for sure
That cool shiny Stormtrooper who appeared in the latest trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens is, as widely rumored, played by Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie, according to the latest issue of Vanity Fair.
The actor who plays Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones will portray Captain Phasma, a member of the First Order in The Force Awakens. She's also apparently a hell of a TIE Fighter pilot, as her character chases down the Millennium Falcon in the movie's latest teaser.
The First Order, we learned at Star Wars Celebration last month, is the sequel trilogy's incarnation of the Galactic Empire, and commands an army of Stormtroopers, Snowtroopers, Flametroopers and more in its battle against the Resistance.
Vanity Fair...
Bridgetthere is so much to love here. so much
Chrys watches GoT [x] [reddit]
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Soledad O’Brien to Journalists: Stop Saying ‘Thug’
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Pacifism is bullshit the world of Bloodborne. Yharnam is a place where people communicate through blood and murder—and one character learns this lesson in the most hilarious way.
Darth Heisenberg by PJ McQuade in Brooklyn, NY
May the 4th be with you. Check out more than 30+ BrBa/Star Wars mashups.
Bridgetmy new theory of "shit that doesn't happen in the book" is that cersie is going to fuck over petyr when he comes back to king's landing since pretty much every episode this season has had some scene where something shitty happens in a brothel and someone protests "this is petyr baelish's estate" and no one cares.
"this is petyr baelish's estate" & waxing poetic about how awesome rhaegar was have to be tied as "arbitrary stuff that has been ignored for the bulk of the series"
Spoilers for the newest episode of Game of Thrones are below.
This week's episode of Game of Thrones, "The Sons of the Harpy," killed off at least one character who doesn't die in George R. R. Martin's published books.
And that's not the only shocker. Several prominent characters — Sansa, Littlefinger, Brienne, Jaime, Bronn, and Loras Tyrell — have, at this point, completely left behind what's on the page. Others, including some important characters in Dorne we should have met by now, are nowhere to be found.
Even the plot lines of Daenerys, Jon, and Cersei — which are still basically following their book material from A Dance With Dragons overall — have some big surprises.
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(HBO)
Barristan Selmy's moving last words: "Aaaahhhh!!!"
It sure looked like the battle that ends this episode resulted in the death of Dany's most important adviser, Barristan Selmy — and perhaps also Grey Worm, the captain of Dany's Unsullied army. And now Entertainment Weekly's James Hibberd has confirmed that Barristan, at least, has met his demise.
In A Dance With Dragons, the Sons of the Harpy insurgents are indeed very powerful and dangerous. But they never kill anyone in Dany's inner circle — or any established characters the reader cares about. Barristan, in fact, grows even more important near the end of that book, becoming a point-of-view character for the first time. Grey Worm is a much more minor character in the books, but he's also still around.
I'd speculate that the showrunners decided to kill Barristan off for a few reasons:
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(HBO)
"What's going on? I don't get arrested in the books!"
Cersei's budding alliance with the High Sparrow pays off in this episode, as she moves against the Tyrells. She tricks Margaery's oafish father, Mace, into going to Braavos to deal with the Iron Bank — escorted by menacing Kingsguard Meryn Trant, who may be under orders to ensure his charge doesn't make it back. With Mace gone, Cersei then decides to take out her own fiancé — Margaery's brother Loras — by tipping off the newly empowered fundamentalists of the Faith to his homosexuality.
In the books, Cersei is never betrothed to Loras at all, because he's named to the Kingsguard (who are not permitted to marry). He's also never arrested by the Faith. In general, Loras's homosexuality isn't an overt plot point in the books — many readers actually miss Martin's subtle hints about it, in contrast to the show, where seemingly everyone in Westeros knows. In A Feast for Crows, Cersei instead gets Mace and Loras out of the city by sending each to take over an important castle still controlled by Stannis's forces. She does eventually use the Faith against the Tyrells, but in a different way (which we might get to later in the season).
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(HBO)
The Sand Snakes don't like Lannisters.
After a brief glimpse at Dorne two weeks ago, we finally get our first prolonged set of scenes in the kingdom in this episode. Jaime Lannister and Bronn sneak into the country, are quickly discovered, and barely win a fight with a small group of Dornishmen. Meanwhile, Ellaria Sand and the Sand Snakes, the paramour and three daughters of the late Oberyn Martell, have been tipped off to his arrival, as they scheme about how to use Cersei's daughter Myrcella to provoke a war between Dorne and the Lannisters.
The Dornish plotline in A Feast for Crows focuses on a similar scheme, but the characters involved are quite different. The Sand Snakes want war, but after they're introduced in an early chapter, Prince Doran immediately imprisons them before they can do anything about it. The book version of Ellaria, as I mentioned in week two, wants peace. And neither Jaime nor Bronn goes anywhere near Dorne in the books.
Instead, it's the prince's daughter Arianne Martell — a character who has apparently been cut from the show — who drives the action. She decides to crown Myrcella as the rightful ruler of Westeros, since she is older than her little brother King Tommen, and by Dornish law male children aren't preferred to female children in inheritance rights. Her true and more selfish motivation is a desire to compete with her brother Quentyn (another seemingly cut character). The showrunners have opted to simplify all this by focusing mainly on Oberyn's grieving relatives and giving them a unanimous desire for revenge.
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(HBO)
Jon Snow took a vow to father no children. That includes monstrous shadowbabies.
In an electric scene this week, Melisandre attempts to seduce Jon Snow. She first suggests that Jon ride south with her and Stannis to take back Winterfell from the Boltons. When he refuses, she disrobes, makes Jon touch her, and says that their coupling could unleash some formidable magic (as her affair with Stannis did in season two). After Jon again declines, obliquely citing his love for Ygritte, Melisandre shocks him by repeating his dead lover's catchphrase ("You know nothing, Jon Snow") — something she should seemingly have no way of knowing, other than by magic.
In the books, such an overt seduction doesn't take place — Melisandre's attempts to win over Jon are more subtle. But much of the dialogue here (including the "You know nothing") is straight from the books, making this more of a reworking than a wholesale change.
The underlying theme in both the books and the show is that Melisandre thinks Jon is hamstrung by his vows. "There's power in you. You resist it, and that's your mistake. Embrace it!" she says. In her simplistic good vs. evil philosophy, her allies shouldn't hesitate to embrace dubious methods, like magical assassinations and oathbreaking, to gain power.
Jon doesn't buy it. Though he truly despises the Boltons — as we see in his reluctance to sign Sam's letter asking them to send recruits for the Night's Watch — he wants to stay true to his vows, and stay out of the wars of Westeros.
Some people, though, might view this way of thinking as being as black and white as Melisandre's. "You're as stubborn as your father, and as honorable," Stannis pointed out to Jon last week. But, he added, "Honor got your father killed."
This article was updated with a link to James Hibberd's confirmation that Barristan was killed.
Bridgetthis scene was so touching obviously she's gonna die
You are my daughter.
Bridgeti've heard this is the showgirls of sci-fi which really makes me want to see it
Bridgethttp://ffaasstt.swide.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/kit-harington-shirtless-hot-gifs-pompeii-walk.gif
let's do this bitches! 30lbs of muscle, TOTALLY EASY
