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May 10, 2008
Movies worth watching: 'A Simple Curve,' 'Mantis Parable'
Friday night we watched a couple of good movies on the Cox Free Zone.
A Simple Curve
A Simple Curve has gorgeous scenery of the Kootenay Mountains of British Columbia and a good story. An American woodworker who went to Canada rather than be drafted remains a dogged perfectionist. But it's really the story of his son and business partner Caleb, raised on carob and late to rebel.
The arrival of an ecotourism entrepreneur who once vied with Caleb's father for his late mother's affections, and Caleb's own budding love life, change all that.
Great scenery, a tale of generations, and one answer to the question, "What ever happened to those earnest young men in exile since the '70s?"
The Mantis Parable
The second is the eight-minute, beautifully animated The Mantis Parable, winner of 17 festival awards, including Best Children's Film at the Rhode Island Film Festival. It's stunning on the Free Zone big screen, or you can watch all eight minutes of it below.
Created by veteran computer game designer Josh Staub (the Myst series), now a Disney artist, in his spare time, it's a totally charming and visually beautiful story of a a caterpillar and a praying mantis in a bug collector's home.
YouTube tourist safari video gets an hour on National Geographic TV Sunday night
On safari in South Africa's Kruger National Park in 2004, tourist David Budzinski captures eight minutes of lions and an alligator attacking a baby cape buffalo, and its rescue by its tribe. A fellow traveler asks for a copy, urging him to sell it. Animal TV won't buy tourist video. David had never heard of YouTube until fellow traveler shared the video there, eventually with 30 million people.
Last summer, National Geographic Channel relents, buys the video and prepares a one-hour documentary about it. A version professionally processed for TV ends "Caught on Safari: Battle at Kruger" (Sunday night, 9 p.m.), which includes taking the Texas tourist back to the scene where his wife's Canon ZR50MC video camera seized the moment.
The link goes to "Battle at Kruger" on YouTube -- the original low-rez, fuzzy version, a high-quality one uploaded three days ago, a trailer for the show, remixes, and all sorts of video responses.
Each Grain of Sand a Tiny Work of Art: A photo gallery at Discover Magazine of beach sand from various parts of the world. Artist/scientist Gary Greenberg examined sand under a microscope. The images are from his book A Grain of Sand.
We'll never know for certain how many women were raped in 1984, but one of them was Plain Dealer reporter Joanna Connors, who was then our theater critic. She was attacked on a deserted stage at Eldred Theater, on the campus of Case Western Reserve University.
Today, Joanna will tell you a story she kept quiet about for more than 20 years: her chance encounter with a dangerous felon on parole; the nightmare of the trial; her subsequent years of coping and denial; and, finally, her search to find the man who raped her so she could try, at last, to move on from an incident that changed and scarred her life.
With comments, sidebars and photos, including the mug shop of her rapist, who was arrested the next day, this one is headed for prize committees.
Jimmy Giuffre, the adventurous clarinetist, composer and arranger whose 50-year journey through jazz led him from writing the Woody Herman anthem “Four Brothers” through minimalist, drummerless trios to striking experimental orchestral works, died on Thursday in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 86 and lived in West Stockbridge, Mass.
Weekend gig: Ken Lyon & Tombstone unplugged Saturday
Tombstone today: From left, Justin Lyon, Joshua Lyon, Mark Taber, Adrienne West, Ken Lyon, Rick Bellaire, Gary "Guitar" Gramolini, Brenda Mosher Bennett, Don "D.C." Culp, Michael "Tunes" Antunes, Lori Lacaille Martin.
At the Blackstone River Theatre in Cumberland Saturday night, the usually hard-rocking R&B ensemble that is Ken Lyon & Tombstone plan two acoustic sets, including one of all-new material.
Here are some tunes recorded live at Chan's in Woonsocket last fall, part of an acoustic set devised to keep down the volume for the neighbors:
$1,000 house for do-it-yourselfers: The Art of Natural Building
$1000 house. How to build yourself one. Lots more photos at that link, as well as the budget:
$175 Home made tools (compass, stands, pounders, etc.)
$150 Plywood arch forms (reusable)
$120 Chicken wire
$150 Professional backhoe excavation (2ft. deep x 16ft. diam.)
$135 Straw for plaster/cob (20 bales)
$190 4-point barbed wire (2 rolls)
$150 40 tons reject sand (delivered)
$250 1000 bags (delivered)
TOTAL $920
Background:
In June 1997, more than one hundred natural building apostles and acolytes — professional builders, architects, academicians, and budding owner-builders — gathered at the Black Range Lodge in the tiny New Mexican hamlet of Kingston for the third annual "Natural Building Colloquium - Southwest." For one intense week, they traded ideas, learned new skills and fueled a nascent natural building movement.
Links on the left include other projects -- this one is the Honey House. If this interests you, you might start under "The Art" with An Overview of Natural Building Techniques;
This site feels like a part of the Whole Earth Catalog distributed to the Web -- that more informative subtitle was "Access to Tools. "
The Honey House looks like a nice place in which to live simply.
Although the story mentions options for a variety of climates, they might not include a New England winter in the range.
You might have to move to someplace warm and beautiful.
In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”
Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”
By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough.
It also explores a wonderful experiment at Kellogg in 1930 -- a six-hour workday:
Not only did Kellogg prosper, but journalists from magazines such as Forbes and BusinessWeek reported that the great majority of company employees embraced the shorter workday. One reporter described “a lot of gardening and community beautification, athletics and hobbies . . . libraries well patronized and the mental background of these fortunate workers . . . becoming richer.”
Dress rehearsal?
U2: Mountains And Deserts: Live at McNichols Arena, Denver, Colorado, November 7, 1987. High quality stereo MP3s from the soundboard of the entire concert the day before the one that was recorded as the soundtrack for Rattle And Hum
Food profiling: Zeer, which launched yesterday, is a review site for food -- the prepackaged products you buy in the grocery store.
Now it needs members to write reviews that will make it more than an inventory list. pf groceries available in the early 21st century. The toolbox is ready: Members can rate and review, love, hate or want a product.
From an editorial viewpoint, that's weird. Wouldn't people who've been buying and eating longer be able to contribute more reviews?
Also from TC,
"...each member’s profile page shows what products she loves and hates the most."
I'm all for review sites, but that last part does seem a little silly. And would you think less of me if I admit I love Cheez Waffies? (I haven't had one in years, but still love them.)
Six years ago the area around Samboja in Borneo was like much of the world's tropical rainforest: denuded. The trees had been cut for timber, the land burnt, and in place of what should be some of the richest biodiversity on the planet were thousands of acres of grass.
But from this ruined landscape a fresh forest has been grown, teeming with insects, birds and animals, and cooled by the return of moist clouds and rain. It is a feat that has been hailed by scientists and offers hope for disappearing and ruined rainforests around the world.
The secret was to use more than 1,300 species of local tree and a fertiliser made with cow urine, says Dr Willie Smits, the Indonesian forestry expert who led the replanting. 'The place became the scene of an ecological miracle, a fairytale come true,' says Smits, who has written a book (Thinkers of the Jungle: The Orangutan Report) about the project....
...Planting finishes this year, but already Smits and his team from the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation charity claim the forest is 'mature', with trees up to 35 metres high. Cloud cover has increased by 12 per cent, rainfall by a quarter, and temperatures have dropped 3-5C, helping people and wildlife to thrive, says Smits. Nine species of primate have also returned, including the threatened orangutans. 'If you walk there now, 116 bird species have found a place to live, there are more than 30 types of mammal, insects are there. The whole system is coming to life. I knew what I was trying to do, but the force of nature has totally surprised me.'
The goal is to re-introduce orangutans into the wild.
Rhode Island
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