Bridget

Scientists in California have spent the past six years carefully tracking and mapping 29,777 instances of roadkill across the state.

The reason? The animals we kill on the roads, it turns out, can tell biologists a lot about the animals living in the wild as a whole.

(California Roadkill Observation System)

This map, from the California Roadkill Observation System — a detailed database of volunteer-submitted information on roadkill — shows all observations from just the past 90 days. The medium-size mammals (dark blue) are mostly possums, raccoons, bobcats, and skunks, while the smaller ones (light blue) are mainly squirrels and rabbits. The large mammals (orange) are almost all deer.

If you go to the interactive map and zoom in, you can see all sorts of interesting patterns, such as a concentration of snakes and other reptiles near Santa Maria (you can also click on each recording, and in many cases see an actual photo of the animal):

(California Roadkill Observation System)

"I think of roads as a continuous wildlife sampling device," says Fraser Shilling, the UC Davis professor who operates the database. "Our system is the largest, most taxonomically broad wildlife monitoring system in the state."

Most wildlife-monitoring systems focus on specific species, often using motion-detecting cameras or people manually counting. But because virtually all species are prone to getting run over from time to time, mapping roadkill instead can give you information about a huge range of animals: the UC Davis system, the largest of several around the country, includes roadkill data on 350 of California's 680 native vertebrate species.

What's more, in any given specific area if a particular species starts showing up far more (or less) often as roadkill, it's usually a reflection of that species' changing abundance in the wild. As a result, counting roadkill has given Shilling and other researchers a few interesting insights into the ever-changing state of California's wildlife.

Mapping roadkill can reveal the spread of invasive species

Shilling has used the database to map the spread of the Eastern gray squirrel and Eastern fox squirrel in California, among other invasive species:

Observations of the Eastern fox squirrel as roadkill in Northern California. (California Roadkill Observation System)

"They're both invading different parts of the Western gray squirrel's habitat, and we can see that in the roadkill data," he says.

Elsewhere, other ecologists have used roadkill data to map the spread of the red fox in Tasmania and Burmese pythons in the Everglades.

California's wildlife corridors don't seem to be working

Across California, state officials have mapped out wildlife corridors: strips of relatively undeveloped, sometimes protected land that connect parks and other wildlife reserves. In theory, these corridors could allow wildlife to travel between habitats, instead of having to thread their way through suburbs or industrial areas.

Except for one thing: according to the roadkill data, animals don't seem to be using them. When Shilling analyzed data along more than 4,000 miles of California highway, "there was really no difference between the areas inside and outside corridors, in terms of roadkill," he says.

Shilling is far from the first to critique these corridors' effectiveness, but despite some being in place for decades, there's extremely little hard data on how effective they really are. "It's tempting to draw lines between habitat patches or reserve areas," he says, "but for the vast majority of species in the world, there's no ecological meaning to the term 'wildlife corridor.'"

Is California's drought taking a toll on wildlife?

California is in the midst of a truly historic drought — perhaps the worst it's seen in the past 1,200 years. And it appears to be affecting the overall abundance of wildlife.

Shilling's observations on this are preliminary, and haven't yet been published and peer-reviewed. But early on in the drought, he and the other researchers saw a spike in the amount of roadkill, especially deer. Shilling speculates this might have been driven by the animals' increased migration as they looked for food sources in a wilting environment.

More recently, however, the data has shown the opposite trend. "We've seen a significant decline in roadkill rates across all species," he says. "It's probably because we have a decline in wildlife populations in general."

How you can help track roadkill

The California system — along with a partner system in Maine — relies heavily on citizen observers (that is, everyday, normal people) to provide data. If you live in one of these areas, these scientists want you to stop and take note the next time you see roadkill, and enter the data here.

It helps to have some training or familiarity with wildlife, so you can accurately identify the correct species. But even if all you know is that the animal is some type of rabbit, you can write that in, and it still helps. If you're the kind of person who enjoys taking pictures of roadkill (who isn't?), you can also upload a photo.

This post originally appeared on Allen Downey's personal blog.

Last fall I taught an introduction to Bayesian statistics at Olin College. My students worked on some excellent projects, and I invited them to write up their results as guest articles for my blog.

One of the teams applied Bayesian survival analysis to the characters in A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series by George R. R. Martin.  Using data from the first 5 books, they generate predictions for which characters are likely to survive and which might die in the forthcoming books.  

With Season 5 of the Game of Thrones television series starting on April 12, we thought this would be a good time to publish their report.

Bayesian survival analysis in A Song of Ice and Fire

By Erin Pierce and Ben Kahle

The Song of Ice and Fire series has a reputation for being quite deadly. No character, good or bad, major or minor is safe from Martin's pen. The reputation is not unwarranted; of the 916 named characters that populate Martin's world, a third have died, alongside uncounted nameless ones.

In this report, we take a closer look at the patterns of death in the novels and create a Bayesian model that predicts the probability that characters will survive the next two books.

Using data from A Wiki of Ice and Fire, we created a dataset of all 916 characters that appeared in the books so far. For every character, we know what chapter and book they first appeared, if they are male or female, if they are part of the nobility or not, what major house they are loyal to, and, if applicable, the chapter and book of their death.  We used this data to predict which characters will survive the next couple books.

Methodology

We extrapolated the survival probabilities of the characters through the seventh book using Weibull distributions. A Weibull distribution provides a way to model the hazard function, which measures the probability of death at a specific age. The Weibull distribution depends on two parameters, k and lambda, which control its shape.

To estimate these parameters, we start with a uniform prior.  For each alive character, we check how well that value of k or lambda predicted the fact that the character was still alive by comparing the calculated Weibull distribution with the character's hazard function. For each dead character, we check how well the parameters predicted the time of their death by comparing the Weibull distribution with the character's survival function.

The main code used to update these distributions is:

class GOT(thinkbayes2.Suite, thinkbayes2.Joint): def Likelihood(self, data, hypo): """Determines how well a given k and lam  predict the life/death of a character """ age, alive = data k, lam = hypo if alive: prob = 1-exponweib.cdf(age, k, lam) else: prob = exponweib.pdf(age, k, lam) return prob def Update(k, lam, age, alive): """Performs the Baysian Update and returns the PMFs of k and lam""" joint = thinkbayes2.MakeJoint(k, lam) suite = GOT(joint) suite.Update((age, alive)) k = suite.Marginal(0, label=k.label),  lam = suite.Marginal(1, label=lam.label) return k, lam def MakeDistr(introductions, lifetimes,k,lam): """Iterates through all the characters for a given k  and lambda.  It then updates the k and lambda distributions""" k.label = 'K' lam.label = 'Lam' print("Updating deaths") for age in lifetimes: k, lam = Update(k, lam, age, False) print('Updating alives') for age in introductions: k, lam = Update(k, lam, age, True) return k,lam

For the Night’s Watch, this lead to the posterior distribution in Figure 3:

The distribution for lambda is quite tight, around 0.27, but the distribution for k is broader.

To translate this back to a survival curve, we took the mean of k and lambda, as well as the 90 percent credible interval for each parameter. We then plot the original data, the credible interval, and the survival curve based on the posterior means.

Jon Snow

Using this analysis, we can can begin to make a prediction for an individual character like Jon Snow.  At the end of A Dance with Dragons, the credible interval for the Night's Watch survival (Figure 4) stretches from 36 percent to 56 percent. The odds are not exactly rosy that Jon snow is still alive. Even if Jon is still alive at the end of book 5, the odds that he will survive the next two books drop to between 30 percent and 51 percent.

The credible interval closely encases the data, and the mean-value curve appears to be a reasonable approximation.

However, it is worth considering that Jon is not an average member of the Night's Watch. He had a noble upbringing and is well trained at arms. We repeated the same analysis with only members of the Night's Watch considered noble due to their family, rank, or upbringing. There have only been 11 nobles in the Night's Watch, so the credible interval as seen in Figure 5 is understandably much wider, however, the best approximation of the survival curve suggests that a noble background does not increase the survival rate for brothers of the Night's Watch.

When only noble members of the Night’s Watch are included, the credible interval widens significantly and the lower bound gets quite close to zero.

The houses of ASOIF

The 90 percent credible intervals for all of the major houses. This includes the 9 major houses, the Night’s Watch, the Wildlings, and a "None" category which includes non-allied characters.

90 percent credible interval for Arryn (Blue), Lannister (Gold), None (Green), and Stark (Grey)

90 percent credible interval for Tyrell(Green), Tully(Blue), Baratheon(Orange), and Night’s Watch (Grey)

90 percent credible interval for Martell(Orange), Targaryen (Maroon), Greyjoy (Yellow), and Wildling (Purple)

These intervals, shown in Figures 6, 7, and 8, demonstrate a much higher survival probability for the houses Arryn, Tyrell, and Martell. Supporting these results, these houses have stayed out of most of the major conflicts in the books, however this also means there is less information on them. We have 5 or fewer examples of dead members for those houses, so the survival curves don’t have very many points. This uncertainty is reflected in the wide credible intervals.

In contrast, our friends in the north, the Starks, Night’s Watch, and Wildlings have the lowest projected survival rates and smaller credible intervals given their warring positions in the story and the many important characters included amongst their ranks. This analysis considers entire houses, but there are also additional ways to sort the characters.

Men and women

While A Song of Ice and Fire has been lauded for portraying women as complex characters who take an a variety of roles, there are still many more male characters (769) than female ones (157). Despite a wider credible interval, the women tend to fare better than their male counterparts, out-surviving them by a wide margin as seen in Figure 9.

The women of Westeros appear to have a better chance of surviving then the men.

Class

The ratio between noble characters(429) and smallfolk characters (487) is much more even than gender and provides an interesting comparison for analysis. Figure 10 suggests that while more smallfolk tend to die quickly after being introduced, those that survive their introductions tend to live for a longer period of time and may in fact outpace the nobles.

The nobility might have a slight advantage when introduced, but their survival probability continues to fall while the smallfolk’s levels much more quickly.

Selected Characters

The same analysis can be extended to combine traits, sorting by gender, house, and class to provide a rough model for individual characters. One of the most popular characters in the books is Arya and many readers are curious about her fate in the books to come. The category of noblewomen loyal to the Starks also includes other noteworthy characters like Sansa and Brienne of Tarth (though she was introduced later). Other intriguing characters to investigate are the Lannister noblewomen Cersei and poor Myrcella. As it turns out, not a lot noble women die. In order to get more precise credible intervals for the specific female characters we included the data of both noble and smallfolk women.

While both groups have very wide ranges of survival probabilities, the Lannister noblewomen may be a bit more likely to die than the Starks.

The data presented in Figure 11 is inconclusive, but it looks like Arya has a slightly better chance of survival than Cersei.

Two minor characters we are curious about are Val, the wildling princess, and the mysterious Quaithe.

Representing the survival curves of more minor characters, Quaithe and Val have dramatically different odds of surviving the series.

They both had more data than the Starks and Lannisters, but they have the complication that they were not introduced at the beginning of the series. Val is introduced at 2.1 books, and so her chances of surviving the whole series are between 10 percent and 53 percent, which are not the most inspiring of chances.

Quaithe is introduced at 1.2 books, and her chances are between 58 percent and 85 percent, which are significantly better than Val’s. These curves are shown in Figure 12.

For most of the male characters (with the exception of Mance), there was enough data to narrow to house, gender and class.

The survival curves of different classes and alliances of men shown through various characters.

Figure 13 shows the Lannister brothers with middling survival chances ranging from 35 percent to 79 percent. The data for Daario is less conclusive, but seems hopeful, especially considering he was introduced at 2.5 books. Mance seems to have to worst chance of surviving until the end. He was introduced at 2.2 books, giving him a chance of survival between 19 percent and 56 percent.

The survival curves of different classes and alliances of men shown through various characters.

Some characters who many wouldn’t mind seeing kick the bucket include Lord Walder Frey and Theon Greyjoy. However, Figure 14 suggests that neither are likely meet untimely (or in Walder Frey’s case, very timely) deaths. Theon seems likely to survive to the bitter end. Walder Frey was introduced at 0.4 books, putting his chances at 44 percent to 72 percent. As it is now, Hoster Tully may be the only character to die of old age, so perhaps Frey will hold out until the end.

Conclusion

Of course who lives and who dies in the next two books has more to do with plot and storyline than with statistics. Nonetheless, using our data we were able we were able to see patterns of life and death among groups of characters. For some characters, especially males, we are able to make specific predictions of how they will fare in the next novels. For females and characters from the less central houses, the verdict is still out.

Our data and code are available from this GitHub repository.

Notes on the Data Set

Most characters were fairly easy to classify, but there are always edge cases.

1. Gender - This was the most straight forward. There are not really any gender-ambigous characters.
2. Nobility - Members of major and minor Westeros houses were counted as noble, but hedge knights were not. For characters from Essos, I used by best judgement based on money and power, and it was usually an easy call. For the wildlings, I named military leaders as noble, though that was often a blurry line. For members of the Night’s Watch, I looked at their status before joining in the same way I looked at other Westeros characters. For bastards, we decided on a case by case basis. Bastards who were raised in a noble family and who received the education and training of nobles were counted as noble. Thus Jon Snow was counted as noble, but someone like Gendry was not.
3. Death - Characters that have come back alive-ish (like Beric Dondarrion) were judged dead at the time of their first death. Wights are not considered alive, but others are. For major characters whose deaths are uncertain, we argued and made a case by case decision.
4. Houses - This was the trickiest one because some people have allegiances to multiple houses or have switched loyalties. We decided on a case by case basis. The people with no allegiance were of three main groups:

   — People in Essos who are not loyal to the Targaryens.

   — People in the Riverlands, either smallfolk who’s loyalty is not known, or groups like the Brotherhood Without Banners or the Brave Companions with ambiguous loyalty.

   — Nobility that are mostly looking out for their own interests, like the Freys, Ramsay Bolton, or Petyr Baelish.

When the Department of Justice concluded that it had found evidence of racism within Ferguson, Missouri’s police department, the official probe alluded to racist emails exchanged between two police officers and a court clerk.

The officers, police captain Rick Henke, and police sergeant William Mudd (pictured above), resigned after the release of the DOJ report and the court clerk, Mary Ann Twitty, was fired.

The Guardian has obtained and published 14 pages of emails between the officers and Twitty and they are really fucking horrifying. The emails contain an image of a chimpanzee comparing it to Barack Obama, and a photo of a tribal celebration labeled “Michelle Obama’s high school reunion,” among countless other tasteless jokes lampooning immigrants, Muslims and black people.

Here are some screenshots, courtesy of The Guardian:

This one was sent from Mudd to Twitty:

And then Mudd received this nightmare from Twitty. It came with the subject heading “MICHELLE OBAMA’S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION !!!!!!!!”:

Twitty sent this out to a redacted person:

 

Like I said, there are 14 pages of this garbage amassed over seven years.

[h/t Gawker| Image: St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

In the wake of the HBO premiere of the documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, many peoples' eyes have been opened to the secretive and sometimes dangerous history of the relatively young religion of Scientology. 

Leave it to Saturday Night Live to give us a short takedown in the form of a music video about the "Church of Neurotology," a thinly veiled parody of the Church of Scientology. 

Take a look:

Source: YouTubeThe sketch starts out with the lines: "In 1990, the Church of Neurotology made the following music video. Read More

michaeldennis33:

Cool puppy!

nevver:

Alien

Don’t worry California, I got you

UPDATED: Next year’s WonderCon will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center on March 25-27, 2016

Holy cosplay, what a con! Yes, we just got back from a whirlwind weekend at WonderCon, where we spent a few days meeting some of you guys, hosting and attending industry panels, snapping photos in our shared booth with our pals at Geek & Sundry, buying trinkets and prints and all manner of baubles, and of course, appreciating all the wonderful cosplay on display. Now, it looks like we won’t have to leave the lovely City of Angels next year for our annual trip. That’s right, WonderCon will be held in Los Angeles, CA in 2016!

Details and specifics are still to come, but what we DO know is that the convention will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center March 25-27, 2016. The annual convention has been on the move ever since it left its original location, San Francisco, where it first began in 1987. The show moved to Anaheim in 2012 due to construction on the Moscone Center, but has been in SoCal ever since. Now that the convention is making the hop to Los Angeles, we have to wonder (pun intended): is this the new home for WonderCon? From what we understand, it’s only a one-year contract, so who knows what the future will hold.

We’ll keep you updated as more details become available, but in the meantime, make sure you stay up to date on all our WonderCon 2015 coverage, check out our LIVE WonderCon episode of Nerdist News, and let us know what you think of the move in the comments below!

Another Coachella artist playing in between weekends is Swans! On tour in support of newest release To Be Kind, Swans will team up with fellow festival performer Angel Olsen for a show at El Rey Theatre on Tuesday, April 14....

asylum-art:

Beth Cavener Stichte: rExtremes of Human Nature Explored through Hand-Built Stoneware Animals

Washington-based artist Beth Cavener Stichter sculpts human-sized animals from clay and other materials in both dramatically overt and subtly ambigous displays of emotion. Hung from ropes or pinned to walls, the anthropomorphic sculptures are infused with juxtapositions that depict the extremes of both human emotion and animalistic behavior: predator and prey, love and hate, fear and peace. “On the surface,” shares Stichter, “these figures are simply feral animals suspended in a moment of tension. Beneath the surface, they embody the consequences of human fear, apathy, aggression, and misunderstanding.”

Stichter collaborates with a variety of artists in her work, including Alessandro Gallo, who designed and painted the ornate Japanese tattoos on the nineteen-foot long anaconda snake depicted in Tangled Up in You seen below.

Call me

Dan Harmon, Justin Roiland
Signing Rick and Morty #1
at Meltdown Comics on April 12th

Legendary Meltdown Comics to Host Signing with Show Creators

LOS ANGELES, CA April 2nd, 2015 – Oni Press, Portland’s premier independent comic book publisher, announced today a signing for Rick and Morty #1 at Meltdown Comics with show creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon on April 12th at 5 pm.

This will be the first time the show creators sign the comic book adaptation of their hit adult swim show since the first issue’s release on April 1st, 2015. The signing will be hosted by Los Angeles’ mecca for all things comic book, comedy, podcasting and pop-culture related, Meltdown Comics. Dan Harmon’s wildly popular comedy podcast, Harmontown, is recorded on a regular basis in the store’s NerdMelt Showroom and will follow the comic book signing at 8 pm on April 12th.

Rick and Morty is created and executive produced by Dan Harmon (Community, Channel 101) and Justin Roiland (House of Cosbys). After missing for nearly 20 years, Rick Sanchez (Justin Roiland) suddenly arrives at his daughter Beth’s (Sarah Chalke) doorstep looking to move in with her and her family. Beth welcomes him with open arms, but her unremarkable husband Jerry (Chris Parnell) isn’t too thrilled about the tearful reunion as Rick’s arrival serves to shake things up quite a bit around the household. Rick converts the garage into his personal laboratory and gets to work on all sorts of dangerous sci-fi gadgets and contraptions. That wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact that Rick continues to involve his grandchildren Morty (Roiland) and Summer (Spencer Grammer) in his insane adventures. The newly released comic from Oni Press based on Rick and Morty is written by Zac Gorman (Costume Quest, Magical Game Time), illustrated by CJ Cannon and colored by Ryan Hill (Terrible Lizard, Stumptown, Stringers).

About Meltdown Comics

The mecca for all things comic book, comedy, podcasting and pop-culture related bits, Meltdown hosts a blockbuster line-up of events and programs that in the past have garnered such accolades as “Best of LA” LA Weekly, “Best of LA” LA Magazine, “Best Comedy” LA Weekly, “Top 50 things why LA kicks ass?” LA Weekly, “Best Store” Playboy Magazine, etc.
About Oni Press

Oni Press has been Portland’s premier indie comic book publisher since 1997. Home to a range of rad comics including Scott Pilgrim, The Sixth Gun, Invader Zim, Rick and Morty, Stumptown, Princess Ugg, Letter 44 and The Bunker, Oni Press strives to create comics for you.

###

Contacts:

fred@onipress.com

kr0npr1nz:

Tetsuo sketch! 

https://www.patreon.com/creation?hid=1678908

Hailing from the outskirts of Sao Paulo, Brazil, L7M began making art as a child. Spray paint, his preferred medium for street art, entered his life at the age of 13, and he quickly became proficient in it while also experimenting with china ink, latex, pastel, and acrylic. Currently, L7M spends his time traveling the world to paint murals that feature birds fractured into a flurry of colors and abstract shapes. Neon colors dominate his compositions, with varied styles of paint strokes that add depth to the abstract color fields. Recently, L7M traveled around Europe to put up new pieces. Take a look at his new street work as well as a few paintings from his studio below.

With a rich history in dark myth and legend, pagan pasts and raw wilderness, Ireland is slowly unfolding its roots to grasp onto a new generation of dark and macabre art. Beginning in the depths of Dublin, GalleryX have been filling the void in Ireland’s modern art scene, reconnecting the land to a style of art which unleashes our innermost thoughts and feelings through a mixture of attraction and repulsion equally intertwined.

In its most exciting venture yet, GalleryX has collaborated with Macabre Gallery on ‘The Macabre Gallery Show I’ group exhibition, featuring work by Saturno Buttò, Tomasz Alen Kopera, Michael Hutter, Christine Morren, Trëz, Jean-François Bouron, Sandra Yagi and Arturo Esparza 

Preview & more details here: https://beautifulbizarre.net/2015/03/30/the-macabre-gallery-show-i-galleryx/ and here: http://macabregallery.com/en/the-macabre-gallery-show-i-dublin/

Organizers say they're expecting 500 corgis, at least. [ more › ]

The opening reception of Ransom & Mitchell's 1st EVER solo exhibition in Japan 'The Darklings' is on at ヴァニラ画廊(Vanilla Gallery) in Tokyo from 4 - 6pm this Saturday 4 April.  Both Stacey Ransom & Jason Mitchell will be in attendance, don’t miss this opportunity to see their incredible work in person and to meet the fabulous artists in person! 

Preview & details here: https://beautifulbizarre.net/…/ransom-mitchell-vanilla-gal…/ and here: http://www.vanilla-gallery.com/archives/2015/20150330ab.html

Frozen little pink Sidewinder being held by taxidermist Tim Bovard at @nhmla (at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)

Jackson Pollock's studio in 1991. (Susan Wood/Getty Images)

You can always recognize the work of Jackson Pollock. Even when it's a floor.

This 1991 photograph of Jackson Pollock's East Hampton, New York, studio shows that it was maintained decades after Pollock died. And because Pollock used the noted drip painting style, in which paint and other materials fell onto the canvas, there were a few spills left over.

Another shot of Pollock's studio in 1991. (Susan Wood/Getty Images)

If you want to read more about Jackson Pollock — and decide if he was "the greatest living painter in the United States" — the original Life magazine profile remains a classic.

You can find this street art, but only if you embark on a quest. [ more › ]

How many of you watched Marvel’s Agent Carter this winter? The eight-episode series aired during Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s hiatus, and it was brilliant. Beyond the action and danger and fabulous hats, the story was inspiring.

Peggy Carter is a remarkably well-written character, and she had some memorable and meaningful quotes. Sometimes I would hear them and think, “That line would make an excellent tattoo.” One of those lines was from the season finale when Peggy told a co-worker, “I know my value.” It resonated with many people, and one of them turned the quote into ink:

Peggy Carter (Agent Carter) | Source: Alexandria Mattingly

Be sure to flip through the rest of the gallery for Inked Wednesday to see Guybrush Threepwood from Monkey Island, Bluntman and Chronic, and more.

—

Have geeky ink of your own you’d like to share with the class? Leave a link to photos of your tattoos in the comments or send them to me on Twitter. Be sure to let me know the name of the tattoo artist!

Hal Hartley has been one of the most respected independent filmmakers since coming onto the scene with his romantic dramas The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, both starring the late Adrienne Shelly in her first leading roles. Eight years later he had his biggest success with Cannes Award Winner Henry Fool (best screenplay), the story of an ex-convict (Thomas Jay Ryan) who squats under the home of the Grim family and befriends siblings Simon (James Urbaniak), a garbage man Henry convinces to take up writing, and sister Fay (Parker Posey) whom Henry eventually marries.

Hartley continued the story of the Grim family’s dark, tragically-comic life with Fay Grim, with the leads returning alongside Jeff Goldblum and Saffron Burrows. Liam Aiken takes the lead in Ned Rifle as the son of Henry and Fay. Returning at 18 from witness protection a devote Christian on a mission to kill his father, and meets a young women (Aubrey Plaza) who is just as desperate to find Henry. Former child star Aiken started his career with Hartley, playing Ned in Henry Fool 18 years ago, making him one of many Hartley’s regular actors along with Martin Donovan, Bill Sage, Robert Sean Burke, Karen Sillias, Ryan, Posey, and Urbaniak; returning for the final chapter of the Grim Family Trilogy.

Hartley spoke to us of finishing the family drama, the upcoming tribute hosted by LA’s Cinefamily, and some of the fascinating female characters he’s put on film.

[Editor’s Note: Spoiler Alert – This interview contains some plot discussion about Henry Fool in regards to Plaza’s character. The information is necessary going into Ned Rifle and addressed in the trailer.]

The Mary Sue: Before speaking with you, I re-watched Henry Fool and immediately watched Ned Rifle. Watching the movies, I have to admit, it was emotional to see Liam as Ned as this little kid and then as an 18 year old. It kind of gets to you.

Hal Hartley: Yeah, I’m just so happy he grew up and still wanted to be an actor. When we made Fay Grim, he was 16 or 17 and I took him out to lunch to reconnect and find out what his plans were for the future. And at that time, he wasn’t so sure. He was in a rock band but he was still acting. But trusting my own instincts, he looked to me like someone who would grow up to be an actor.

TMS: When you decided it should be a trilogy, did you know it had to end with seeing who Ned became?

Hartley: Oh yeah, definitely. When I decided I would make more films about these characters, I imagined it should be three films, not two. And if the second would be about Fay, the third one should be about their son Ned.

TMS: And it provides a nice book end because you can see in the character all the influence the people in his life have had on him; his dad, his mom, his uncle Simon, the foster family.

Hartley: Definitely. And I always loved the scenes between Ned and Simon, way back in Henry Fool, and especially in Fay Grim when they have a lot of scenes together, being the detectives back at the house in Queens.

TMS: Liam turned into a really good actor, but directing a child actor is not the same as directing an adult actor. Were you at all concerned that he or Aubrey, being new to your style of filmmaking, would have trouble with your style of directing?

Hartley: It was a concern, not for very long though. She got attached very late, after I raised the money, and I was announcing everywhere very loudly, “I’m looking for the new leading lady.” And I spent months auditioning women, and put at least 60 or 70 on tape both in New York and Los Angeles. And I met some great actress, and a lot of them show up in the movie in other places. But I just didn’t find anyone who was right for the role of Susan. But my conversations with her agents led to them suggesting her, and I watched what I could of her and decided I should speak with her. We had a conversation on the phone after she read the script and she was very excited to do it, but I asked her, “do you know anything about my films?” and she said “I’ve seen The Unbelievable Truth”, which is from 25 years ago. And then she told me a friend told her about Henry Fool which she was planning to watch the next weekend. And I told her that I do something particular with the lens.

My films are not improvisational, so you really have to know the text, and my direction is about moving very specifically, we block very specifically. And she said she was game. And before she came to set, she called Parker Posey, who she knows somehow, and asked “what do I need to know about this guy?” and Parker said “you have to know your dialogue inside and out, he’ll take care of everything else, but you have to know your dialogue.” So she did. The first day, I think she was a little nervous when we did start blocking, because I was telling her when to move here arm and sit down or stand up. But it’s not like I’m impose it, I’m seeing it in the way the characters move. But she was a little breathless after a couple of takes, and at the end of the day, I showed her the monitor and she got it.

TMS: The character she plays, Susan, was mentioned in Henry Fool, when he explained why he went to prison. Why did you decide to finally show Susan as a real person and make her a main character in this film?

Hartley: In Henry Fool, all of the time in that movie, he’s a lovable slob. Except that moment when he confesses to Simon that he was in prison for having sex with a 13 year old girl named Susan. And especially the way he talks about the girl, as someone who took advantage of him. It’s what I wrote, but some combination of the script and what Tom and I did with that scene, brought up ideas which were never really addressed. The creepiness of this man saying he had been wronged by this kid. And I always thought, re-watching the film over the years, that it was a subject matter that we could have expanded on, but didn’t. And maybe it wouldn’t have been the right time to dive into that, but it stayed with me.

But I kind of forgot about it over the years, until I was working on the script for Ned Rifle and most of the plot was there; the idea that Ned was now a Christian but was going to go out and try to kill his father for everything he’d done to his family. But it still didn’t have something, it needed some weight, so I went back to watch Henry Fool again and this time decided, we needed to go all the way back, seven years before that movie starts when Henry went to prison for having sex with this kid, and let the girl have her say. And I always suspected, funny to say you suspected something you wrote, but I suspected that Henry became Henry Fool the intellectual in prison. He invented the misunderstood genius because of the shame, regret, and embarrassment over what he’d done. He invented that persona, and that was how he played it, so when he realizes who Susan is, that persona drops.

TMS: Did the fact that the film focused on the two kids whose lives were impacted by the choices and mistakes of adults we’ve been following in the other films impact the tone or style of the film?

Hartley: I think it did, whether it’s terribly obvious or not. A character like Ned provided me with a good tool to reassess these characters, because I gave him a very different sense of morality than his dad or mom or uncle. And because of that, he can ask these really straight questions that go to the core, such as the conversation he has with his uncle Simon about the standup comedy, when he asks “why are you doing this?” It’s as if no one cared or thought it was there right to suggest to Simon that this was a waste of his talent. But because he has this willfully simple morality, and he’s righteous at that point in the film, Ned can ask those questions. In the really part of the film he’s a righteous Christian so he doesn’t hesitate to speechify. So there is something about that. And I liked the way James played those scenes with Liam. Simon is essentially the center of this universe, he’s the poet, and he’s having some kind of nervous breakdown and wants to be stand-up comic. But if you bang his head around, he’ll come back to the important things and he’s never judgmental. He says to Ned “wow, you found God, I would never do that, but I’m curious.” and that’s how he gets back.

TMS: The women in your films have become somewhat iconic of women from a certain era in film, starting of course with Adrienne Shelly and later Parker Posey. Did you notice any similarities that Aubrey fit into that describe the type of female characters you create?

Hartley: Yeah, I definitely do. When I saw the movie she did, Safety Not Guaranteed opposite Mark Duplass, that’s when I said to myself “this girl has the charisma I’m used to.” It’s hard to describe, but it’s not an over emphasis on interpretation. What a lot of people call deadpan, although I never use that term. But it can be kind of a neutral trust of the words, and not underlying the words with some kind of verbal expression. But also she had a certain look; a certain kind of prettiness.

TMS: Knowing your film, there is always a scene of women putting on make-up, at the very least lipstick. Is that some kind of shield you give them, because they tend to put it on somewhat aggressively, as if it’s a kind of war paint?

Hartley: You’re onto something there. It’s an announcement of their kind of intentions at that moment. Adrienne Shelly’s scene in The Unbelievable Truth, I just thought would be hilarious that she is trying to seduce an older man and has no idea that she has this streak of lipstick on her face as she’s trying to be sophisticated. I think it took on a different intensity or color in this film, because when I wrote Susan, I didn’t think of her as being as overtly sexual as Aubrey played her. Aubrey came to town with her own clothing, and after working with our costume designer, she said she had her own ideas for how Susan should look. She wanted to wear high-high heels and leggings and stockings. And I said okay, you look great, let’s go with it. I think my idea in the script was that Susan was kind of more inept. You see those characters a lot in movies, the people so busy thinking, they don’t button their shirts the right way and put their lipstick on wrong. But this time, it became almost a mania. I guess she just took that line, Parker’s line “she’s addicted to lipstick” and ran with it, treating the lipstick like an alcoholic, who can’t help but put the lipstick on.

TMS: There is also something kind of sad about watching this young woman trying to present herself as a put together adult and pretty much failing.

Hartley: Yeah, she’s not entirely within herself a lot of the times.

TMS: One of the things I’ve read, and I have to paraphrase, is that the men in your films won’t speak until they’ve formulated the exact words and intentions, which is why many men are rather silent, whereas the women start talking and find the meaning as they’re talking, and seem like such extroverts. Is that true of your writing process?

Hartley: I don’t think I’m organized about that, but it does sound like something I think about when writing, because it’s always a struggle when writing dialogue, asking yourself she or he wants to say at this moment? Are they trying to answer the question or get around the question? Or are they not listening when pursuing their own thoughts. I know I’ve done things like that, even in this film. Susan never knows what she wants to say at the start of a sentence or when she’s going to finish.

TMS: And it’s certainly true of the Grim siblings Fay and Simon. Fay can’t shut up, even to her own detriment, and he can never get the words out.

Hartley: She’s totally instinctual. And James and I have always discusses Simon that way, as a man who has to think every word though before he speaks. He has to visually see the idea he wants to express, and that started all the way back with Henry Fool, when discovering things about the way Simon moved or spoke, and in the early part of the film didn’t speak.

TMS: Cinefamily is hosting a month long retrospective of your films, including a gallery of film stills and photographs. Have you been a part of the plans for this event?

Hartley: They got all the images from me. The images were made by this artist named Philip Reilly, who makes these collages and sculptures, but also prints photographs to a massive level. And a couple of years ago he approached me, knowing I had a huge archive of photographs, and said “I’d like to take about 200 photographs and make them big and make objects out of them.” And he has a space in Williamsburg Brooklyn, and he put on a show for about two weeks. And what was left over were about 30 images, so that is what will be on display. Cinefamily approached me about the movies they’d like to show, and then asked “are there any images you can provide” and I said “well, I have these.” And I think they might be showing some drawings I make during production as well.

TMS: This being a retrospective of your work over the years, were there trends or themes that you realize you touched on repeatedly that you hadn’t noticed or thought about before?

Hartley: I don’t think so. As I’ve made films over the years, its become clear over the years, that my core ideas and themes I’m interested in address, doesn’t deviate that much. Somehow, in the 80s, when I first started making movies, I saw the light and haven’t really deviated that much. That’s why felt confident in the early 2000s to experiment with genre, and made a sci-fi movie, a monster movie, an espionage thriller. Because I knew they weren’t really these genres. I was just using superficial elements from these genres as a kind of short hand, which I thought would be kind of fun and lighten up the treatment of fairly heavy subject matter.

TMS: On the top of the monster movie No Such Thing, which was my first exposure to your films, soon after you worked with Sarah Polley she directed Julie Christie (also in No Such Thing) in Away from Her and has become a very talented writer director herself. Adrienne Shelly became a writer director soon after you worked with her. Have you provided guidance to up-and-coming writer-directors?

Hartley: Probably not on their level. I’ve taught filmmaking in a classroom environment and some of those students have become filmmakers or TV directors or documentarians. But probably the closest creative collaborator I’ve had is my editor Kyle Gilman, who was a student of mine, who intended to become a filmmaker, but he outgrew that and learned to edit and became very gifted at that. But besides Sarah and Adrienne, I haven’t really worked with people who became writer-directors. Besides Martin Donovan who did direct a movie called collaborator and directs some TV.

___

Ned Rifle is available on demand on Vimeo today and the Cinefamily honors start Friday.

Lesley Coffin is a New York transplant from the midwest. She is the New York-based writer/podcast editor for Filmoria and film contributor at The Interrobang. When not doing that, she’s writing books on classic Hollywood, including Lew Ayres: Hollywood’s Conscientious Objector and her new book Hitchcock’s Stars: Alfred Hitchcock and the Hollywood Studio System.

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

Plants and Animals

Hummingbirds are aerial acrobatics that dart, swoop, flit and fly at super fast speeds, their wings flapping up to 80 times per second and their heart racing at 1,200 beats per minute. When feeding, they zip from flower to flower, sipping sugary nectar and dashing off again. This high-energy lifestyle requires lots of calories, which means they need to drink their weight in nectar every day to survive. 

Not helping

Step aside dancing fountains and community gardens, it’s the age of the urban swing set. I’m not talking about playgrounds. These are swings designed for adults, enticing the tushes of office workers, college students, and tourists—city dwellers young and old who all want to take a turn kicking their legs up into the sky.

Read more...