The Next Best Thing to Inviting Your Ancestors Over for Dinner

While we Earthmen may never invite our ancestors to dinner, Slate has a photo gallery called "Meet Your Hominid Ancestors" which is really neat. This is Australopithecus afarensis, not sure if it's Lucy or not.



Evolution hit a bum note somewhere along the way as life for parents of this species was remarkably easier: "Like chimpanzees, they had childhoods and adolescent periods of teenage angst that were brief compared with those of modern humans." I fail to see how several years of "You all hate me!" while sitting on the couch in front of the TV & computer and refusing to bathe is an evolutionary advantage. Perhaps beatings by parents increase genetic fitness.

East Side Development in Holding Pattern

In Business Madison reports that the development of the old Royster-Clark site is idling right now but that construction will get underway without too large a delay.

“The demolition is complete, all the contaminated materials have been moved off-site … in accordance with the DNR rules and regulations and the way it was planned,” said Dave Nelsen, who is overseeing development of the site as director of engineering and architecture for Ruedebusch. “So right now, we’re in kind of a little bit of a waiting mode. We’re taking test readings, we’re monitoring wells on-site to verify that the groundwater is getting better and improving, and that’s going to take several months to potentially a year. … But it’s anticipated that in a year we’ll likely know kind of where we’re at.”

Nelsen says that if all goes well, in the next two or three years people will begin to see some significant development on the site.

“We’re confident that the site will be cleaned up and ready to go, and from there it’s just going through the city processes, so I don’t see any large challenges,” said Nelsen. “Hopefully, the economy turns around and things start moving forward a lot quicker than they are right now, but other than that, it’s kind of just a normal process."

Good news. That site should have been developed long ago and it sounds like this project is being looked at as the first step in revitalizing that section of the Eastmorland neighborhood. Good news. (Maybe Cottage Grove Road can get some decent bus service after this project is done.)

The article also notes that the development "borrows heavily from the new urbanist models". If you watch the video about the project, you can get a glimpse of the vision for the site.



Aside from putting store fronts on the street instead of the parking lots, what's new urbanist about it? I don't really know much about new urbanism but, to my eyes, it looks like a slice of suburbia with a subdivision in back on a cul-de-sac and a huge chunk of area devoted to parking lots. It looks divorced from the surrounding area. People are going to drive to the place, park in back, shop, and then jump back in their car and drive away. I wonder how things would go if there were less parking lots in this plan but street parking available on Cottage Grove Road. This might provide incentive to get out of the development's bubble and explore other businesses in the area.

Regardless, it's nice to see at least some progress.

Henri's Halloween Ennui

Henri returns in time for Halloween. Best line: "No one ever dresses as crippling self-doubt."

Arbores Non Grata?

When Library Mall was given a make-over recently, several trees were taken out. When new pavement was laid, circles were left open in the sidewalk - presumably to plant new trees. I've been wondering when they (the city? UW? I think the area in front of the University Club is UW territory.) would plant saplings. Well, the answer came yesterday: never. Those holes were filled in with concrete yesterday.

That's a real bummer. College kids in 20 years would no doubt have appreciated the shade. What happened to the trees? Have they been permanently nixed or is that concrete going to be ripped up in the spring?

The Hideous Geometry of R'lyeh as Witnessed by Gustaf Johansen Explained

From io9: a mathematician named Benjamin K. Tippett from the University of New Brunswick has written a paper called "Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific" explaining the non-Euclidian geometry witnessed by Norwegian sailor Gustaf Johansen in H.P. Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu".

In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an extraordinary island. Johansen’s descriptions of his adventures upon the island are fantastic, and are often considered the most enigmatic (and therefore the highlight) of Thurston’s collection of documents.

We contend that all of the credible phenomena which Johansen described may be explained as being the observable consequences of a localized bubble of spacetime curvature. Many of his most incomprehensible statements (involving the geometry of the architecture, and variability of the location of the horizon) can therefore be said to have a unified underlying cause.

We propose a simplified example of such a geometry, and show using numerical computation that Johansen’s descriptions were, for the most part, not simply the ravings of a lunatic. Rather, they are the nontechnical observations of an intelligent man who did not understand how to describe what he was seeing. Conversely, it seems to us improbable that Johansen should have unwittingly given such a precise description of the consequences of spacetime curvature, if the details of this story were merely the dregs of some half remembered fever dream.

We calculate the type of matter which would be required to generate such exotic spacetime curvature. Unfortunately, we determine that the required matter is quite unphysical, and possess a nature which is entirely alien to all of the experiences of human science. Indeed, any civilization with mastery over such matter would be able to construct warp drives, cloaking devices, and other exotic geometries required to conveniently travel through the cosmos.

Celebrate Halloween with Horror Express

A classic starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Telly Savalas who plays a Cossack.

History Looks to Repeat Itself in Iran

Al Jazeera published a piece by Murtaza Hussain earlier this month called "Sanctioning society: From Iraq to Iran" which is both incredibly sad and infuriating. It begins:

After over three decades of service with the United Nations, working across the world on development and humanitarian assistance projects, in 1998 the UN Chief Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday turned in his resignation to the organisation. Upon spending years in Iraq and bearing witness to the results of the draconian sanctions regime which had turned a modern society into one of the most impoverished on the planet, Halliday wrote that he could no longer continue administering a programme which he said "satisfied the legal definition of genocide".

The piece goes on to note the devastation wrought on Iraq. The Iraqi currency, the dinar, collapsed and economic ruin for millions followed. Many children stopped going to school as they had to enter the labor force to help their families survive. An embargo on medical supplies demolished what was one of the best healthcare systems in the Middle East. Infant mortality increased more than fourfold and diseases like typhoid and malaria ran rampant. And so on.

Now America seems intent on laying waste to the citizens of Iran in the same manner.

Intensifying sanctions against the country have sent the Iran's rial into an unprecedented free-fall, causing it to plummet in value by 75 per cent since the start of the year; and, stunningly, almost 60 per cent in the past week alone.

Ordinary Iranians completely unconnected to the government have had their lives effectively ground to a halt as the sudden and unprecedented collapse of the financial system has rendered any meaningful form of commerce effectively impossible. In recent weeks, the price of staples such as rice and cooking oil have skyrocketed and once ubiquitous foods such as chicken have been rendered completely out of the reach of the average citizen.

The effects of months of steadily tightening sanctions have also begun to take their toll on the Iranian healthcare system; and as in any case of warfare, economic or otherwise, it is the poorest citizens who have borne the brunt of the suffering. Iranian doctors have already begun to report shortages in essential medicines such as those used for cancer, heart and multiple sclerosis patients, and the situation is forecasted to get worse as financial sanctions make the purchasing pharmaceuticals from abroad an effective impossibility.

In the disbelieving words of one Iranian woman, a mother to 12-year-old boy with haemophilia who is now facing the amputation of his left leg and whose life doctors' say is threatened by continuous nosebleeds due to an acute national shortage of anti-clotting drugs, regarding sanctions: "no human beings can be so brutal to patients".

As Barack Obama has been fond of saying, oh yes we can! Obama boasted in one of the presidential debates, "We then organized the strongest coalition and the strongest sanctions against Iran in history, and it is crippling their economy. Their currency has dropped 80 percent. Their oil production has plunged to the lowest level since they were fighting a war with Iraq 20 years ago. So their economy is in a shambles." Of course, there's no mention of 12-year olds having their limbs amputated because of those sanctions or of any suffering on the part of ordinary Iranians. Whenever the crash of 2008 is described here in the U.S., our media note the effect it had on ordinary Americans – losing jobs, drowning in debt, and so on – but we dare not do the same thing when we and our allies intentionally set out to destroy another country's economy. Hussain notes, "Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), the goal of the sanctions should explicitly be to 'take the food out of the mouths of the [Iranian] citizens'." He also quotes Democrat Brad Sherman: "House Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA), has said 'Critics of sanctions argue that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that.'"

Yes, because sanctions really did the trick in Iraq. When I read about a crippled economy and hyperinflation I think about the Weimar Republic. If you were an Iranian and you hear Barack Obama bragging about the misery being imposed upon your country (by the United States and Europe) and you hear American congressmen advocating for food to be taken from you and your family, for you and your family to be hurt, how would you feel? How would it feel to hear those words coming from the leaders of a country that helped overthrow a democratically elected government in your country and supported a country that invaded yours?

It seems like most Americans, even those of the bleeding heart liberal variety, have no interest in the implications of our foreign policy in Iran (nor probably in our foreign policy at all). How many of us actually know much of anything about Iran beyond its status as part of George Bush II's Axis of Evil?

Take a look at these pictures of Iran and Iranians. If they were shown to you out of the blue and asked where they were taken, would Iran ever come to mind?






With all the hoopla surrounding Ahmadinejad's comment supposedly saying that Israel should be wiped off the map and anti-semitism generally, Jews have a guaranteed seat in the Iranian Parliament. And, if this video is anything to go by, Jews are not exactly a persecuted minority. One Iranian Jew says that "Iran has the greatest population of Jews in the Middle East after Israel."



Take a listen to the wonderful BBC radio documentary Through Persian Eyes. Read a book like Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes to get an idea of the history of relationship between the West and the Middle East and between the United States and Iran. Looking back at history, try to view the situation from an Iranian point of view. The Iranian people showed great sympathy for Americans in the wake of 9/11 and then their country was labeled part of the "Axis of Evil" and now they are suffering because of sanctions and being threatened. (Obama: "As long as I am president of the United States, Iran will not get a nuclear weapon.") You can't blame them for wanting nuclear weapons. (Then again, we've been crying wolf over the prospect of Iran having such things since Jimmy Carter was president.) I would sure as hell want one. Israel has nukes. The U.S. invaded Iraq on its western border and Afghanistan on its eastern one. There are drones aplenty, the U.S. is leading an armada to the Persian Gulf, and it has been soliciting England for permission to use airbases in the UK and in UK territories in its standoff with Iran. The United States and Israel wage cyber-warfare against Iran. And the U.S. sells billions of dollars worth of advanced armaments to Saudi Arabia, a country hostile to Iran. Who is the aggressor here?

None of this is to say that I think the Iranian government is composed of saints. But maybe, just maybe we could try to understand a little about Iran and their perspective before accepting the apocalyptic proclamations of politicians, all of the demonizing, the sanctions and their attendant misery, and bombing the place.

"Obama Supporters Actually Hate Obama's Policies"

We've all seen the interviews with the dipshits that make up the Teabagger consortium so here's some Obama supporters making themselves look stupid. The policies at issue here are mainly civil rights ones.

This Gives a Whole New Meaning to "To Serve and Protect"

An NYPD officer has been arrested and charged with plotting to kidnap women and serve them - for dinner.

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) – Federal authorities have arrested a New York City police officer in connection with a failed plot to kidnap women and cook them.

According to the complaint, Officer Gilberto Valle used his home computer to discuss plans to “kidnap, rape, torture, kill, cook and eat body parts” of several women.

Lawrence O'Donnell on Third Party Candidates

An interesting commentary. I appreciated how he notes that people tend to say that voting for a losing candidate is a wasted vote only when that vote didn't go to a Democrat or Republican. Nobody claims that voting for Michael Dukakis or Al Gore is a wasted vote despite their losses.

The Life of Death by WildClaw Theatre

It was an overcast and rainy October afternoon – perfect for a trek to Chicago to see WildClaw's latest production, The Life of Death. The play is an adaptation of a Clive Barker short story and the move from the page to the stage was done by one of the troupe's founding members, Charley Sherman.

The story takes place in contemporary London where the latest iteration of Jack the Ripper is on the loose. We meet Elaine Rider, a young woman who has survived a brush with death in the operating theatre where doctors performed a hysterectomy. Out of the hospital she struggles in her quest to get her life back to normal. She is beset by torpor, barely eating and lethargic. Elaine rejects her boyfriend and is despondent that she is unable to give life. She is just plain seems lost.

One day at a cafe Elaine notices some smoke out the window. The waitress tells her that a nearby church is being demolished and that some of the debris is being burned. She wanders over to the site where she meets Kavanagh, a kindly older gentleman who watches the demolition work. Kavanagh explains that work is being slowed by a crypt there which the crews are waiting to open. Both Elaine and Kavanagh have a weird affection for the church. The former seems entranced by it while the latter has what is perhaps an unhealthy interest in them and their attendant crypts.

Curiosity eventually gets the better of Elaine and she investigates the crypt herself. It is littered with bodies and they don't appear to be vintage corpses either. Indeed, the body of a pregnant woman looks like it came right out of one of Elaine's frightful dreams.

The experience brings about remarkable changes in Elaine. She lets her hair down and recommences her social life. Her appetite returns. Something about seeing or being in that crypt amongst all the death has revivified her. This contrasts with Elaine's friends and co-workers who begin to fall ill. Coughs start to produce blood and soon enough lesions appear on skin. In addition to the changes in Elaine and the mysterious illness, Kavanagh takes a turn towards the creepier. In the first act he comes across as an eccentric individual with a fascination with the morbid but he becomes a bit more threatening.

The play picks up a lot of momentum at this point as people die and many questions arise. Is Kavanagh the serial killer that's on the loose? What is this disease ravaging the community? Is it really bubonic plague? Why are Elaine and Kavanagh unaffected by it? To its credit, the play didn't come out and give a lot of answers so you have to puzzle some things out for yourself.

Casey Cunningham played Elaine and was a delight as the show's emotional core. I feel she did a nice job of eliciting the audience's empathy in the first act when Elaine was bogged down in melancholy. She exaggerated some things for effect but never went overboard. In the second act Cunningham again excels. This time it's moving from a sexy, confident woman to one wracked by guilt for having introduced the plague to her friends and also a woman who is convinced that Death is stalking her. These are really three separate characters and Cunningham handled them all well. Steve Herson was Kavanagh and he too put in a wonderful performance. The guy can adjust the level of creepiness in his performance at the microscopic level so you could never really tell if he was evil or just odd until it counted. This ratcheted up the tension perfectly.

My crush on Michaela Petro, who plays Elaine's friend and co-worker Hermione, continues as does my man crush on Brian Amidei. Although each plays very different roles and have very different appearances, they both are commanding presences on the stage.

Speaking of the stage, I should also say that the set and staging was great. The set was gothic faux stone with bits on the sides of the stage opening up for the crypt scene. A projection screen was hanging in back which allowed for newscasts to be shown on it as well as visualizations of Elaine's dreams. There was some clever staging such as that for scenes on the Tube where the actors assembled in the center of the stage and the lights went down except for a couple directly over their heads which isolated them. Another highlight was the scene at a night club where time seems to slow down as Elaine sees the Grim Reaper. The sound crew was great too with subtle, eerie drones adding atmosphere as well as helping to create the subjective, dream-like world in the night club where everyone except Elaine is moving in slow motion.

Never having read the source material, I cannot say how closely WildClaw adhered to it. But, as it stands, I really enjoyed The Life of Death. It had horror but some emotional depth as well. Plus it played with the audience's expectations and wisely left some questions unanswered.

Meanwhile in the Crimea: The Life of Insects by Victor Pelevin

By the time I found myself in the middle of the second chapter of Victor Pelevin's The Life of Insects I knew I was in over my head. It's a fairly short book and the writing style is easy-going but I know much too little about Russia – its history and specifically what it was like in the aftermath of Communism's fall. It was originally published in 1994 and I assume that it comments upon life in Russia at that time.

The book starts at an old resort hotel "which seemed to have turned its back to the sea at the bidding of some crazed fairy-tale conjuror." Two Russian men, Arnold and Arthur, meet up with an American named Sam Sacker who is in the country to do business. After a short chat they are off and by that I mean they have metamorphosed into mosquitos and have flown away. Sam "cut a fine figure alongside the two simple Russian insects." They stop to allow Sam to sample the blood of a man who's sleeping only to discover that the guy apparently ran out of vodka and drank cologne instead. This throws Sam for a loop.

This first chapter didn't perplex me too much although I suspect I missed something. Communism has collapsed, and American capitalists are moving in. After decades of oppression and a command economy that has collapsed, Russians don't have all the fancy trappings enjoyed by Americans as they're moving towards a market economy. And alcoholism is a problem in Russia as it has been for centuries. When there's no vodka, some people turn to whatever alcoholic liquid is available.

The chapter ends with the men strolling the boardwalk as a man and his son emerge from the fog. And it is about them that the next chapter is concerned. (With one exception, all chapters are linked this way.) Here the story takes on a more philosophical bent with a father dung beetle teaching his son about dung. The elder beetle teaches the boy about his Ai, a blue-brown sphere that he is only learning to see. "Everything around you becomes dung once you have an Ai," the father says. "And then you'll have the whole world in your hands. And you'll push it along in front of you." I'm not sure if this story is about personal enlightenment or about Russians moving forward, both their lives and that of their country. Perhaps it's about all these things.

In other chapters we follow a fly named Marina who scavenges for food at a market afterhours and digs a burrow. We also meet Natasha who has a fling with Sam and we find out that she is Marina's daughter but that she is estranged from her mother. One of the more humorous chapters features Maxim and Nikita both of whom like to indulge in marijuana. Nikita explains that there are hemp bugs in the leaves and pulls out a magnifying glass to show Maxim. As the pair wander discussing theatre, specifically Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, they become paranoid and begin to fear that the police are going to show up so they seek refuge in a pipe. Soon a very strong wind is whipped up along with intense heat. It turns out that they themselves are in a joint.

The chapters with Mitya and Dima are probably the most philosophical. A translator's note tells us that both names are diminutive forms of the name Dmitry and so I had to wonder if both characters are really the same person. The pair are flying towards two lights on the horizon when they disappear. Mitya opines that perhaps the lights weren't real and Dima retorts, "And maybe we weren't real." Another chapter featuring them is concerned with darkness and meeting one's corpse which (I think) turns out to be a metaphor for self-understanding. Mitya does his imitation of Orpheus and emerges to find that Dima is gone but discovers himself in a mirror.

So, while I feel like I picked up on certain things such as the Russian love for the drink and food shortages, there's no doubt that most of the satire was lost on me here. I wonder if The Cherry Orchard is significant. Do Maxim and Nikita represent a lefty/artistic class in Russia? Does Natasha's estrangement from her mother represent a particular division in Russian society – a generational conflict? When I think of Russia I think of a country with one foot in the West and the other in the East. I think of claims of Moscow as being the Third Rome and of a people for whom freedom is either incredibly fragile or incredibly elusive. Russia seems to alternate between some semblance of democracy and autocratic rule. Pelevin seems to have mostly to have avoided these kinds of long views and concentrated on the immediate post-Soviet era. I think I would have benefitted from some annotations or at least some introductory remarks.

Gone With the Mind: My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner

The first thing that came to mind when thinking about how to describe My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is that it's nonsense in the same way as Jethro Tull's "Mother Goose". While Ian Anderson playfully sang "Then the chicken-fancier came to play --with his long red beard -- and his sister's weird - she drives a lorry", Mark Leyner writes sentences such as these:

Suddenly, the swinging doors burst open and a mesomorphic cyborg walks in and whips out a 35-lb. phallus made of corrosion-resistant nickel-base alloy and he begins to stroke it sullenly, his eyes half shut. It's got a metal-oxide membrane for absolute submicron filtration of petrochemical fluids. It can ejaculate herbicides, sulfuric acid, tar glue, you name it. At the end of the bar, a woman whose album-length poem about temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMJ) had won a Grammy for best spoken word recording is gently slowly rubbing copper hexaflouroacetylacetone into her clitoris as she watches the hunk with the non-Euclidian features shoot a glob of dehydrogenated ethylbenzene 3,900 miles towards the Arctic archipelago, eventually raining down upon a fjord on Baffin Bay.

There are 17 chapters of this kind of stuff with some of them lacking punctuation. The book was published in 1990 although parts of it were seen earlier in various magazines and anthologies dating back to 1984. This is the era which saw the rise of MTV and CNN along with all the attendant doomsayers decrying the erosion of the attention span. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is something like a literary equivalent of a music video with its rapid-fire descriptions of events and people that are loosely connected, at best. Plus there are the obligatory pop culture references. Here we get the movie Yentl, director John Landis, and singer Dionne Warwick, amongst others.

If you're looking for plot, look elsewhere. The titular cousin appears a couple times as does a monorail but there's not much here to tie things together. There is no protagonist-antagonist relationship and events jump around so much that there is no time to setup a narrative. Most of the story, such as it is, is told in the first person by a nebulous and morphing narrator. One page the tale is seemingly told by a woman who describes getting pregnant but a page later the person references a boyhood friend.

Despite being essentially gibberish, there were times that I chuckled to myself. For example, in one chapter the narrator notes that he/she enrolled at the Wilford Academy of Beauty whose principals are "Teamwork; Positive Attitude; Hair That's Swinging and Bouncy, Not Plastered or Pinned Down; and Hair That's Clean, Shiny, and Well-Nourished." Attendees went on "tactical missions" with packs loaded with "poncho, mess kit, C rations, canteen, first-aid kit, compass, lean-to, entrenching tool, rinse, conditioner, setting lotion, two brushes (natural bristle and nylon), two sets of rollers (sponge and electric), barrettes, bobby pins, plastic-coated rubber bands, and a standard-issue 1,500-watt blow dryer." There is also some interesting wordplay such as when the narrator describes a series of statements by other people with "she said sullenly" several times before the last one which gets "she said suddenly".

However clever and interesting My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is stylistically, I just couldn't appreciate it. If there had been a narrative thread to ground the proceedings or if perhaps the events didn't go off on tangents so quickly, I might have enjoyed it. Hell, one chapter would have been alright. But 150 pages was trying. There were funny parts but not enough of them to capture my attention or interest.

Oh the Humanities Building

Chicago architecture writer and photographer Lee Bey recently was on Chicago Public Radio discussing Brutalist architecture. The focus is on Chicago but much of the commentary is applicable to Madison as everyone loves to hate the UW's Mosse Humanities building.


(Photo found here.)

Bey notes the name "Brutalism" comes from a French term - beton brut - which means "raw concrete". And I here I thought it was because the buildings all look cold and brutal. He also says that the style is modernist but also tended to include plazas and gathering spots which offset the right angles and narrow windows. Humanities is a good example of this. The Humanities building is also proof of his statement that Brutalism became the architecture of schools and universities.

I Need Biscuits or Pancakes or Something

I've been doing some travel for work lately and have gotten to see some of the autumnal sights around southern Wisconsin.





Yesterday I took Horace Greeley's advice and went west.


The wind farm at Montfort.




Heading into the Mississippi River valley.





Hawks were flying over the bluffs by the river. Just beautiful. It was so calm and peaceful watching them fly in circles over the treetops and occasionally lunge at one another. One of them hovered perfectly still over an outcrop for several seconds. Show off.

I ended up going home with this:



Homemade sorghum syrup. I now have enough to tide me over for months, if not years. Anyone care to share some recipes that use it?

The Best Part of Mass

(h/t to Friendly Atheist.)

Star Wars Illuminated

From Chawakarn Kongprasert comes some great Star Wars images done in the style of medieval illumination. All they need are marginalia.

Madison Polish Film Festival Releases (Tentative) Schedule

The 22nd Annual Polish Film Festival here in Madison will be held 16-18 November with all films screened at the Marquee in Union South. The organizers from the UW Polish Student Association have released a tentative schedule. It looks interesting but I was hoping that The Hourglass Sanatorium would play here as it will be shown as part of the Polish Film Festival in America in Chicago next month. Perhaps a trek south is in order.

Nov 16 Fri 7 pm
80 MILLION / 80 MILIONÓW dir. W. Krzystek 2011, 102'
…an action feature film based on a true story, set in Wroclaw just a few days before the imposing of martial law in December 1981. Four young activists of “Solidarity” movement plot to with-draw all the funds from Union's account in National Bank of Poland before the communist regime freezes it. But how do you transfer and where do you hide 80 million zlotych in cash? Allied with Catholic Church officials and local money dealers, young heroes begin the race to outwit Security Service officers and their leader, arrogant and despotic captain Sobczyk. Waldemar Krzystek's film captures a period from Polish communist history in an original, satirical and universal way. The movie is this year’s Polish entry to the Academy Award in a foreign language category.



Nov 17 Sat 1 pm
ROSE / RÓŻA dir: Wojtek Smarzowski 2011, 94’
won the Grand Prix. “In the years following the Second World War, the indigenous inhabitants of the Mazurian lakes District became second class citizens to the new authorities. Through the eyes of a Polish Army officer, we follow the struggles of a nation doomed to annihilation by two competing nationalisms. It would seem that these hard times would leave no room for love, but love comes, and brings hope.” It is the story of the Mazurians, German-speaking Lutherans, who lived in East Prussia until the Potsdam Conference, when that borderland became part of Poland. Poles were resettled in the area, and Mazurians had to go through "national verification" to prove their ethnicity.



Nov 17 Sat 3 pm
Elles dir: Małgorzata Szumowska 2012, 95'
Anne (Juliette Binoche) is not only a mother and wife struggling with her domestic priorities, but a writer for ‘Elle’ magazine that is struggling to understand the subjects of her unfinished article – the young and beautiful girls that have opted for prostitution in order to maintain survival. Flipping through recordings and flashbacks of her interviews, Anne is forced to acknowledge her own emotions and womanhood. Viewers also come to see the forbidden and seductive nature of the girls who, in their innocent appearances, carry shadows of the taboo lifestyle. In the process of it all, the two girls stray away from remaining as subjects in Anne’s article and instead, shine as reflectors of Anne’s own desires.



Sun Nov 18 1 pm
The Courage / Wymyk dir: Greg Zgliński 2011 , 85’
Brothers Alfred (Robert Wieckiewicz, Best Actor winner)
and Jurek witness a helpless girl being mugged on a suburban train. Jurek stands up for her, while Alfred holds back. He later tries to cover up the truth at all costs…



Sun Nov 18 3 pm
My Name is Ki / Ki dir: Leszek Dawid 2011 93’
Ki is a portrait of a young mother who doesn't want to be perceived as a stereotypical lonely, anguished woman. She tries to lead a colorful, fast and intense life. Only when she meets Miko and starts a difficult relationship, she learns how to love and take responsibility for herself and her son

Everybody Just Loved a Train (in Fiscal Year 2012)

Amtrak has had a banner year.

Amtrak recently announced that the railroad broke their all-time annual ridership record for the ninth time in 10 years in fiscal year 2012, carrying 31.2 million passengers, surpassing the previous record, set last year, by one million trips. More people rode Amtrak trains in July 2012 than during any other month in the company's history.

Aside from increasing ridership, the average on-time performance of Amtrak trains also reached a new, all-time high.

Furthermore, Amtrak has made all of this progress while requesting less operating support from Congress each year. Amtrak is requesting 44% less federal funding for rail operations than it did in 2004 and now says that it covers 85% of its costs using ticket revenue.

Both routes which serve Wisconsin, Hiawatha and Empire Builder, saw ridership gains. Thanks to Governor Walker Madison has no prospects for rail service. Instead I 90/39 and I 94 will be widened to the tune of around $1 billion and $1.9 billion, respectively. We have millions to sink into new roads and the added maintenance costs but not trains. Plus the CEO of Talgo, the company hired to build and maintain the rail stock to have been used for the new service to Madison, said, “They should be careful of doing business here because Gov Walker does not keep his word. It’s like we’re talking about a Third World country, where people don’t have respect for their contracts.” That's not a reputation that Wisconsin wants to have.


(Photo by MSPdude.)

Auto Erotic: Crash by J.G. Ballard

What can I say about Crash by J.G. Ballard? Where to begin?

This 1973 novel is about a group of Londoners who gain sexual pleasure in car crashes and the punishment they give to the human body. James Ballard is a TV producer and one day is involved in an auto accident. He loses control with his car skidding into the other lane and crashing into that of the Remingtons. Mr. Remington is killed while his wife, Helen, survives with mostly minor injuries. While recovering from his own rather serious wounds, Ballard realizes that the crash let loose his "obsession with the sexual possibilities of everything around" him. From his bed he ponders the curve of his wife Catherine's thighs, casts eyes at the nurses, and imagines their thoughts as they look at Mrs. Ballard. He also feels an erotic attachment to Helen - "...almost as if I unconsciously wished to re-conceive her dead husband in her womb."

One day after leaving the hospital, Ballard is cruising around with his mistress Renata. They pull over to fool around. Well, he does, anyway, as Renata is too busy thumbing the pages of a magazine for photographic evidence of human misery. Ballard finds himself preoccupied with her thighs and the wetness between her legs when a car approaches theirs and flashes its headlights at them. A man steps out and begins taking photographs. This is Ballard's introduction to Vaughn.

Vaughn is also obsessed with the erotic potential of car crashes and the destruction they impose upon the human body. He is the ringleader of a small cadre of similarly inclined people which includes Seagrave, a stunt driver, and Gabrielle, a woman whose fetish for automotive destruction has left her wearing a myriad of braces. James, Catherine, and Helen fall into this group.

The book is narrated in the first person by Ballard and mainly concerns their relationship. Vaughn has a masterplan in which he dies in a head-on collision with a car containing Elizabeth Taylor. Ballard is producing a TV commercial in which she has a part and Seagrave is doing the stunt driving as her character and it occurs to Ballard that Vaughn is basically using everyone around him to bring his plan to fruition. For Vaughn, his death via car crash would basically ring in erotic apotheosis. At first Ballard is in awe of Vaughn but he finds that he is unable to commit himself as deeply as his mentor. Vaughn wants to use Ballard out of selfishness but he resists.

Crash is unusual, if not downright disturbing. The sexuality of the characters is mediated through the car as well as its attendant crashes. Things go from comparisons of a woman's anatomy to the design of a car to intimacy taking on an extra special patina when done in a car by people who can caress the marks left by the dashboard on someone's chest to the inability to be sexually around outside of a car. This hyperbolic progression comments on one's humanity being lost via a dependence on technology with the ultimate outcome being death as both Seagrave and Vaughn go out in a blaze of auto-erotic glory and the book ends with Ballard having taken their place and begun plotting a crash of his own. In addition to actions taken by the characters, the dehumanizing potential of technology is emphasized by Ballard's narration. It seems like every non-organic thing is made of chromium, adorned with chromium, or meant to work with something involving chromium in some way while people are often reduced to their orifices and mucus membranes.

Ballard seems to be saying that once you concede your humanity to technology, you're dead. Once technology becomes an end in itself instead of a means, eros is displaced by thanatos.

There were times when I reading the book that I was reminded of the days when I spent time hanging out with some members of Madison's kink community. The gatherings at Seagrave's home was reminiscent of some of the get-togethers I attended. On the minus side, just as the characters in the book found themselves in orbit around Vaughn, it seemed like many people were in the same position with regards to a particular figure in the Madison kink scene. On the plus side, the Madison kinksters I knew had a wonderful attitude towards sex. It was about pleasure, bonding with fellow humans, learning about oneself, breaking down stereotypes, etc. There are moments in Crash that are similar, where I wanted to praise its portrayal of sexuality as being positive, complex, and more like a spectrum than a set of fixed points, but they are offset by things going too far.

In the former category we have Ballard's feelings for Vaughn becoming sexual. It's a rare instance of attraction in the book that is about more than technology ruining eros. Sex can be part of a game about power and control and I interpreted this as being about the two men's power struggle and about Ballard's transformation. Having sex with Vaughn is like his final farewell. He's not going to be a pawn in the man's game. Instead it's almost an act of regicide. Ballard will take Vaughn's place.

On the other hand we have Seagrave who engages in low-grade sexual play with his young son. "Seagrave flicked at his son's miniscule penis." "...as Seagrave unbuttoned his shirt and placed the child's mouth on his nipple, squeezing the hard skin into the parody of a breast." I don't think that incest/paedophilia is really the issue here but rather this behavior signifies that Seagrave is past the point of no return – he's beyond help and totally consumed by his obsession. His death warrant has been signed.

Now I am going to have to watch David Cronenberg's film adaptation which I haven't watched in ages.