Isegoria

Victor Davis Hanson on 300:

There are four key things to remember about the film: it is not intended to be Herodotus Book 7.209-236, but rather is an adaptation from Frank Miller’s graphic novel, which itself is an adaptation from secondary work on Thermopylai. Purists should remember that when they see elephants and a rhinoceros or scant mention of the role of those wonderful Thespians who died in greater numbers than the Spartans at Thermopylai.

Second, in an eerie way, the film captures the spirit of Greek fictive arts themselves. Snyder and Johnstad and Miller are Hellenic in this sense: red-figure vase painting especially idealized Greek hoplites through “heroic nudity”. Such iconographic stylization meant sometimes that armor was not included in order to emphasize the male physique.

So too the 300 fight in the film bare-chested. In that sense, their oversized torsos resemble not only comic heroes, but something of the way that Greeks themselves saw their own warriors in pictures. And even the loose adaptation of events reminds me of Greek tragedy, in which an Electra, Iphigeneia or Helen in the hands of a Euripides is portrayed sometimes almost surrealistically, or at least far differently from the main narrative of the Trojan War, followed by the more standard Aeschylus, Sophocles and others.

Third, Snyder, Johnstad, and Miller have created a strange convention of digital backlot and computer animation, reminiscent of the comic book mix of Sin City. That too is sort of like the conventions of Attic tragedy in which myths were presented only through elaborate protocols that came at the expense of realism (three male actors on the stage, masks, dialogue in iambs, with elaborate choral meters, violence off stage, 1000-1600 lines long, etc.).
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Fourth, but what was not conventionalized was the martial spirit of Sparta that comes through the film. Many of the most famous lines in the film come directly either from Herodotus or Plutarch’s Moralia, and they capture well, in the historical sense, the collective Spartan martial ethic, honor, glory, and ancestor reverence (I say that as an admirer of democratic Thebes and its destruction of Sparta’s system of Messenian helotage in 369 BC).

Of 300, Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of hellenistic history at the University of Toronto, says, Sparta? No. This is madness:

We know little of King Leonidas, so creating a fictitious backstory for him is understandable. Spartan children were, indeed, taken from their mothers and given a martial education called the agoge. They were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground. But future kings were exempt.

And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots were the Greeks indigenous to Lakonia and Messenia, reduced to slavery by the tiny fraction of the population enjoying Spartan “freedom.” By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job, to which end the Ephors were required to ritually declare war on the helots.
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300‘s Persians are ahistorical monsters and freaks. Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and garishly made up, but not disfigured. No need – it is strongly implied Xerxes is homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300, qualifies him for special freakhood. This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan’s education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb “to Spartanize” meant “to bugger.” In 300, Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.

I didn’t realize that the kara in karaoke is the same as in karate, meaning empty — te means hand — and that the oke is short for ?kesutora, the Japanese form of orchestra.

(It’s not too different from Pokémon, which is a Romanized contraction of pocket monsters (poketto monsut?).

Shocking event for Captain America:

After close to 60 years in print, Marvel Comics has killed off Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, one of its most famous and beloved superheroes amid an already controversial story line, “Civil War,” which is pitting the heroes of Marvel’s universe against one another.

In the comic series, Rogers was to stand trial for defying a superhero registration law passed after a hero’s tragic mistake causes a 9/11-like event.

Steve Rogers eventually surrenders to police. He is later mortally wounded as he climbs the courthouse steps.

More at Marvel’s site.

Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades:

Not only are teen book sales booming — up by a quarter between 1999 and 2005, by one industry analysis — but the quality is soaring as well. Older teens in particular are enjoying a surge of sophisticated fare as young adult literature becomes a global phenomenon.

All of which leads Cart to declare, “We are right smack-dab in the new golden age of young adult literature.”
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Take a look at the New York Times children’s bestseller list.

At No. 7, holding strong after 46 weeks, is “The Book Thief,” a Holocaust tale narrated by Death and written with stunning beauty by a young Aussie author, Markus Zusak. It was published in Australia as an adult title.

At No. 5 is Ellen Hopkins’ new novel, “Impulse,” the tale of three suicidal teens who meet at a psychiatric hospital. Like her meth-addiction novel, “Crank,” it’s written in a challenging format — free-verse poetry.

Then there’s “Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation,” the 2006 National Book Award winner for Young People’s Literature.

Set in Revolutionary War-era Boston, it’s a searing, audacious tale of racial experimentation that the author describes as part of “a 900-page, two-volume historical epic for teens, written in a kind of unintelligible 18th-century Johnsonian-Augustan prose.”

Obviously, teen lit is fast outgrowing its bobby socks.

The original title of the March of the Penguins was (in French) The March of the Emperor. You must watch the French ad.

Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?:

We’ve all heard the “official conspiracy theory” of the Death Star attack. We all know about Luke Skywalker and his ragtag bunch of rebels, how they mounted a foolhardy attack on the most powerful, well-defended battle station ever built. And we’ve all seen the video over, and over, and over, of the one-in-a-million shot that resulted in a massive chain reaction that not just damaged, but completely obliterated that massive technological wonder.

Like many Americans, I was fed this story when I was growing up. But as I watched the video, I began to realize that all was not as it seemed. And the more I questioned the official story, the deeper into the rabbit hole I went.

Read the rest for the amusing bits.

In Seeing things at Disney before they got rid of Eisner, Art De Vany shares a piece he wrote after Disney’s Treasure Planet failed to meet forecasts:

Where Disney went wrong is in having too much faith in their financial analysts. No one knows what a movie will gross. My research (Hollywood Economics: Chaos in the Film Industry) shows (and every movie fan knows) that motion picture revenues are not forecastable; the forecast error is infinite. There is no correlation between opening revenues and total revenues for any movies that are successful. Opening revenue is only a good predictor of total revenue for movies that die in their second or third week. All successful Disney movies (most of the animated ones are) enjoy long runs so that opening revenues become a small portion of their total revenue. And, all successful movies reach a point (about four or five weeks into the run) where they separate rapidly from the pack. This bifurcation point in the mapping is a signature of chaos in the non-linear dynamics of motion picture revenues.

Given how little information is contained in a movie’s opening, the weight studios place on it is troubling, particularly at Disney which is a studio where film revenues depend on long runs.

(Emphasis mine.)

When I cited a recent article on rediscovering He-Man, I assumed that the text of the He-Man Opening Monologue would be all over the Net, but it was surprisingly hard to find. Even the ludicrously complete Wikipedia entry didn’t have it:

I am Adam, prince of Eternia and defender of the secrets of Castle Grayskull.

This is Cringer, my fearless friend.

Fabulous secret powers were revealed to me the day I held aloft my magic sword and said, “By the power of Grayskull! I have the power!”

Cringer became the mighty Battle Cat, and I became He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe!

Only three others share this secret — our friends, the Sorceress, Man-at-Arms, and Orko. Together we defend Castle Greyskull from the evil forces of Skeletor.

I wasn’t at New York Comic Con 2007, but Stephen Colbert was, and he showed off the new Tek Jansen comic:

Stephen Colbert shows off Tek Jansen, an upcoming comic based on one of his characters’ characters, at New York Comic Con 2007. Here, he gives our photographer his “Comic Book Friend” pose, based on an inside joke from The Colbert Report.

Watch and learn where Daft Punk got their samples from:

Here’s where the samples on some of my favourite Daft Punk tracks came from. It’s all legit, paid in full, above board. Still strange to hear, though.

The samples were spotted by ishkur.com and the music was collected by palmsout.

Sam Anderson discusses Rediscovering He-Man:

The best part about rewatching He-Man, after the initial nostalgia-burst, was tracking the show’s hilarious accidental homo-eroticism — an aspect I missed completely as a first-grader.

In the ever-growing lineup of “outed” classic superheroes, He-Man might be the easiest target of all. It’s almost too easy: Prince Adam, He-Man’s alter ego, is a ripped Nordic pageboy with blinding teeth and sharply waxed eyebrows who spends lazy afternoons pampering his timid pet cat; he wears lavender stretch pants, furry purple Ugg boots, and a sleeveless pink blouse that clings like saran wrap to his pecs.

To become He-Man, Adam harnesses what he calls “fabulous secret powers”: His clothes fall off, his voice drops a full octave, his skin turns from vanilla to nut brown, his giant sword starts gushing energy, and he adopts a name so absurdly masculine it’s redundant.

Next, he typically runs around seizing space-wands with glowing knobs and fabulously straddling giant rockets. He hangs out with people called Fisto and Ram Man, and they all exchange wink-wink nudge-nudge dialogue: “I’d like to hear more about this hooded seed-man of yours!” “I feel the bony finger of Skeletor!” “Your assistance is required on Snake Mountain!”

Once you start thinking along these lines, it’s impossible to stop. (Clearly, others have had the same idea.) It’s a prime example of how easily an extreme fantasy of masculinity can circle back to become its opposite.