Isegoria

A Philistine Screed on Philistinism opens with “a wry line, aimed at the funny bone of the elite”:

“No passion in the world,” H.G. Wells declared, “is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

Another witty bit of intellectual condescension:

I remember one snobby professor who described the standards of his university to new faculty members with a practiced line.

“The admissions requirements of ____ University,” he liked to intone in comradely fashion, “can be found on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.”

Ostensibly, Carlin Romano is reviewing Frank Furedi’s Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism, but he has more to say on the topic of Philistines than on the lackluster text. I’d never heard of Hubbard’s The Philistine:

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), editor of The Philistine monthly magazine from 1895 to 1915. (At one point it boasted a circulation of more than 100,000 and published such writers as Rudyard Kipling and Stephen Crane.) A soap salesman and state-side admirer of William Morris who started the fabulously successful and semi-communal Roycrofters printing operation in Aurora, N.Y., Hubbard grew wealthy writing and publishing more than seven million, well, philistine words.

His aphorisms exuded middle-class, can-do common sense, apotheosized hard work and efficiency, and bristled at preachy promulgation or nit-picking by cultural mandarins. “The world is moving so fast these days,” Hubbard wrote, “that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.”

“A committee,” he observed, “is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.” Some credit him with the immortal, “Life is just one damn thing after another.” Hubbard’s business credo proclaimed, “I believe that when I make a sale I make a friend.” Perhaps more tellingly, for the history of philistinism from Arnold to shop-to-drop America today, he asserted, “I believe in sunshine, fresh air, spinach, applesauce, laughter, buttermilk, babies, bombazine, and chiffon, always remembering that the greatest word in the English language is ‘Sufficiency.’”

Roger Ebert’s Review of National Treasure brings back some of the biting sarcasm:

‘National Treasure’ is so silly that the Monty Python version could use the same screenplay, line for line.

Ebert considers the whole thing a rip-off of The Da Vinci Code — which he didn’t exactly like:

I should read a potboiler like The Da Vinci Code every once in a while, just to remind myself that life is too short to read books like The Da Vinci Code.

Notes from Antiquity explains that Greek poems and plays were actually musicals:

Greek poets and dramatists regularly set their work to music themselves, and from at least the fifth century B.C. on they used a highly sophisticated system of musical notation. The very idea of poetry, in fact, originally tended to imply music, and Athenian tragedy at its artistic peak, in the fifth century B.C., was a complex combination of poetic text, solo and choral song, recitation with instrumental accompaniment, and dance. This has an unsettling if little-recognized implication: watching a play by Euripides or reading poetry by Sappho is perhaps as incomplete an experience today as watching a ‘play’ by Wagner or reading ‘poetry’ by Stephen Sondheim would be.

(Hat tip to 2blowhards.)

Sigh. Angry Greeks Deny Alexander the Great Was Bisexual:

A group of Greek lawyers are threatening to sue Warner Bros. film studios and Oliver Stone, director of the widely anticipated film ‘Alexander,’ for suggesting Alexander the Great was bisexual.

This should surprise no one. From Bob Dylan Tops Rolling Stone’s Greatest-Song List:

‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ Bob Dylan (news)’s scornful, ironic ode to a spoiled woman’s reversal of fortune, was named the greatest rock ‘n’ roll song of all time on Wednesday by Rolling Stone magazine.

Rolling Stone magazine chose “Like a Rolling Stone” as the greatest rock song. Second greatest? The Rolling Stone’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” See a pattern?

For the past seven years, the American Film Institute has put together a special for CBS. This year, it’s AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes:

Previous programs within this series have included AFI 100 Years…100 Movies (1998), … 100 Stars (1999), … 100 Laughs (2000), . . . 100 Thrills (2001), … 100 Passions (2002), … 100 Heroes & Villains (2003) and … 100 Songs (2004).

This one sounds like fun:

Chronologically, the ballot spans from 1927-with the first full-length sound film, THE JAZZ SINGER: “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”-to 2002 and “My precious” from THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS.

CASABLANCA has seven quotes in AFI’s ballot, making it the most represented film.

THE WIZARD OF OZ is the second most represented film with six quotes.

Humphrey Bogart has 10 quotes on the ballot, the most represented male actor. Al Pacino and the Marx Brothers follow with six quotes each and Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro, James Stewart and Jack Nicholson are all represented with five quotes each. Funnymen Woody Allen, Peter Sellers and Mike Myers each have four quotes represented.

Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland and Vivien Leigh each have four memorable movie quotes on the ballot.

Billy Wilder is the top represented writer with 13 quotes, some co-written with I.A.L. Diamond, Charles Brackett and Raymond Chandler. Frances Ford Coppola has nine quotes represented, with seven coming from THE GODFATHER Trilogy. Mario Puzo, Coppola’s collaborator on THE GODFATHER trilogy, has a total of eight quotes. Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch each have seven quotes (all from CASABLANCA), followed by Woody Allen with six and Cameron Crowe, William Goldman and Stanley Kubrick with five quotes each.

1939 is the most represented year with 19 movie quotes. 1942 has 17 quotes and 1980 has 12.

Hollywood’s Odd Couple: Cage and Bruckheimer is a puff-piece on the oddball actor and the very Hollywood producer:

Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage (news), who had been specializing in quirky roles, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer first teamed for 1996′s ‘The Rock’ and hope to work the same magic in action-adventure film ‘National Treasure.’ Their previous movies — ‘Rock,’ ‘Con Air’ and ‘Gone in Sixty Seconds’ — have reaped $750 million in global ticket sales.

The Rock, Con Air, and Gone in Sixty Seconds — oh, right, all of Cage’s bad movies. OK, The Rock wasn’t bad, and National Treasure, their latest teamup, looks fun.

Nursery Rhymes Have More Violence Than Kids TV presents the findings of an amusing study on violence in the media:

Children’s nursery rhymes contain 10 times more violence than British television shows broadcast before the country’s 9 p.m. ‘watershed’ after which more adult content can be shown, research published on Thursday said.

As Billionaires Run Amok on TV? points out, Terry Southern wrote satire way ahead of its time:

Southern, the legendary novelist, journalist and screenwriter, died back in 1995, way too soon for him to savor the exquisite pleasure — or perhaps the hideous pain — of seeing one of his most outrageous comic ideas come to life as the latest craze in reality TV, which is, of course, sadistic billionaires tormenting money-grubbing weasels.
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Back in the ’50s and ’60s, Southern was famous, the author of “Candy,” a comic porn novel, as well as the screenplays of such classic movies as “Easy Rider,” “The Loved One” and, best of all, the brilliantly demented Cold War comedy “Dr. Strangelove.” Southern had a dark, sardonic wit and he traveled in the hippest of circles, hanging out with the Rolling Stones, Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce. He was so cool the Beatles put his face on the cover of their “Sgt. Pepper” album.

In 1960, Southern published a novel called “The Magic Christian,” the comic tale of Guy Grand, a billionaire who amuses himself by staging elaborate pranks that cause people to reveal how much they’re willing to degrade themselves for money.

In the book’s most famous scene, Grand buys a building in downtown Chicago, demolishes it and builds a gigantic vat perched atop a huge gas heater. He fills the vat with 300 cubic feet of manure, urine and blood purchased from the Chicago stockyards. When this hellish cocktail is nice and hot, he stirs 10,000 $100 bills into it and puts up a sign that reads “FREE $ HERE.”

And then … well, people will do just about anything for money, won’t they?

Dead Be Not Proud looks at the cultural lessons of zombie movies:

Romero’s unusual treatment of the subject matter, combining the zombie with the mummy and the ghoul, gave the zombie film what it had previously lacked: a threat to the general population. In Night of the Living Dead, it is not just a pretty young female who is threatened, but all of us — in fact, as the movie’s ending makes clear, civilization itself is at stake.

Romero’s film caught the imagination with its symbolism: the plague of zombies tearing a town to bits and eating people alive called to mind the rising disorder and social chaos of late ’60s, early ’70s America. The authorities were stupid and ineffectual, powerless to stop the horror, and people had no clue as to how to respond. Romero’s zombies evoked, on a symbolic level, ordinary people’s fears of being torn to shreds by a rising tide of crime and immorality.

As the title, Shaun of the Dead, suggests, Shaun is for all intents and purposes a zombie, as are most of his friends and associates:

Shaun is a classic underachiever, and it is clearly because there is little in the culture around him to inspire a person to work hard. With a minimum of effort, one can have a comfortable life, if a pointless and dull one, and that is exactly what Shaun has. Ed, who gets by without any job at all other than the occasional marijuana sale, serves as a caricature of Shaun’s aimlessness and a warning of what he could yet become.

But the threat wakes them up:

Shaun of the Dead brings back the stiff-upper-lip, muddling-through, stolid British attitude of years past, without any overload of irony, using humor and excitement to make it palatable and appealing to contemporary audiences.

Brad Bird discusses his role as executive consultant on The Simpsons:

Even though our animation was very simplified, our filmmaking was not. James Brooks and Matt Groening and Sam Simon asked me to be a part of it because they liked Family Dog — they liked the fact that it had a live-action sensibility in terms of camera angles and cutting. When I first got into it, the visual language of television animation was very, very rudimentary. There was a standard way of handling things, and that had gotten into the art form itself, to where people were doing this stuff by rote. The rule was, whenever you go to a new location, you do an establishing shot, whenever somebody’s moving, you have a medium shot, and whenever anybody’s talking, you cut to whoever’s talking. It’s all done at eye level. You never have high angles or low angles or anything like that. That’s TV animation; I’m not saying there weren’t great camera angles in Chuck Jones or anything else. But on TV, that’s the way they were doing it.

When I got in there with the storyboard artists, they were approaching things that way because that’s the way they were trained. I said, “No, come on, man! We’re doing a take on The Shining here. Let’s look at how Kubrick uses his camera. His camera always has wide-angle lenses. Oftentimes, the compositions are symmetrical. Let’s do a drawing that simulates a wide-angle lens. They’re deep focus. Let’s push things off and play on that.” At first they were completely bewildered, and very soon they were into it. I said, “Look, we can’t spend a lot of money on elaborate animation, but we can have sophisticated filmmaking.” So I think the show is very visually distinctive.