Isegoria

I started to notice the rise of the @humblebrag recently, but I didn’t realize it had its own Twitter feed:

For instance, after he won his Academy Award for “Toy Story 3,” the director Lee Unkrich tweeted: “Just in case you think all this has gone to my head, within 36 hours of winning the Oscar, I was back home plunging a clogged toilet.” That ended up on Humblebrag.

There’s a “false humility” to these Tweets, said Mr. Wittels, that “allows the offender to boast his ‘achievements’ without any sense of shame or guilt.”

Naturally, committing a humble brag is a particularly Hollywood kind of offense. Many of the people Mr. Wittels re-tweets are known personalities, and now people email to alert him about them from all around the world. But there are also regular civilians who humble brag. A gentleman in San Diego with the handle TotesMcGotes who works in real estate recently tweeted, “I just realized I’ve only showered in ONE of my FIVE showers since I’ve moved in here. This must change.”
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There is the “It’s not a brag because I am just complaining” humble brag. Tila Tequila once tweeted: “I hate my lambo! Police is ALWAYS pulling me over just cuz its a lambo so they always think I’m speeding but I’m not!! Then they let me go!”

Then there is the “This isn’t a brag because I am being self-deprecating” humble brag. Nolan Gould, the kid from “Modern Family,” tweeted: “I just had my first screaming girl encounter. She probably had me confused with someone else.”

Really it’s a gut feeling. If I read it and feel this vague sense of annoyance by it, it counts.
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Actor LeVar Burton had my all time favorite. The tweet was “It’s a good night for natural light in LA” and then he posted a picture of his fireplace, but on the mantle above it were like 20 Emmy awards. A masterpiece! He did a follow-up one three days after Christmas where he tweeted “Stockings still hung…” and attached a picture of his family’s stockings all hung on his Emmys. That guy really seems to want us to know he won a bunch of Emmys for “Reading Rainbow.”

You find the same thing on Facebook, of course — fewer celebrities, I suppose, and a lot more references to people’s kids.

Geoff Boucher of the LA Times demonstrates his own geek cred while interviewing Andrew Stanton on his upcoming John Carter film:

This source material has such history and such a legacy, but all of that is lost on most people today. You’re not going to have a chance — at least not with the movie posters or television commercials — to really communicate the fact that this is the Rosetta stone for decades of off-world fantasies like “Star Wars” and “Avatar.”

In the story, John Carter is a Civil War veteran who finds himself mysteriously transported to Mars, where due to the gravity he is able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, so to speak, a conceit that would pop up in the 1930s in Superman. A battered, hardened solider, he learns of the alien culture and falls in love with a brightly hued princess, not unlike “Avatar.” In the Burroughs tales, leaders are called Jeddak, there are beasts called Banths, there’s a warrior rank of padwar — all of those seem to echo in the Lucas universe, as do key concepts and themes. Does any of that present a problem? Does it box you in or create the risk that “John Carter” will feel derivative to audiences that don’t know or don’t care about the chronology of the heritage?

Fables creator Bill Willingham does not draw his popular comic, he merely writes it, but that’s how he started out in the business:

I’ve wanted to write any sort of stories, prose, comics, plays, movies, or what have you, for as long as I can remember. To my regret, I started late though, assuming I could never make it as a real writer. I only finally started writing the comics I was drawing, because I quickly grew tired of some of the less than stellar scripts I was getting. Drawing a page of comics is so difficult, even more so when one has to do it day in and day out, that the effort should never be wasted on a bad script, so I became a writer as a kind of self-preservation. Later, as my confidence grew, along with my ambitions, I wanted to try ever more writing, and more types of writing, and here we are.

Honestly I didn’t recognize or remember his name from his earlier work:

With my Elementals series, I was one of the lesser known pioneers (at the same time as Frank Miller with Daredevil and then Dark Knight, and Alan Moore with Marvelman and then Watchmen) of serious, realistic takes on superheroes. As much as I like some of what I did back then, I’ve come to a complete turnaround on my philosophy of what makes a good superhero story. The more we tried to explain how this seemingly impossible thing works, to ground it more in reality, the more power we leached out of the concept. I now feel that superheroes should be treated more like fairytales and less like science fiction.

In fact, I should have known him from his even earlier work as an illustrator:

Willingham got his start in the late 1970s to early 1980s as a staff artist for TSR, Inc., where he illustrated a number of their role-playing game products. He was the cover artist for the AD&D Player Character Record Sheets, Against the Giants, Secret of Bone Hill, the Gamma World book Legion of Gold, and provided the back cover for In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords. He was an interior artist on White Plume Mountain, Slave Pits of the Undercity, Ghost Tower of Inverness, Secret of the Slavers Stockade, Secret of Bone Hill, Palace of the Silver Princess, Isle of Dread, In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, the original Fiend Folio, Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords, Against the Giants, Queen of the Spiders, Realms of Horror, and the second and third editions of Top Secret.

Now, 18 years after The Little Mermaid came out, Disney has finally opened Ariel’s Undersea Adventure — not at Walt Disney World, and not at Disneyland, but across the street from Disneyland, at Disney’s California Adventure.

Two of the lead Imagineers previously worked on pieces for the DisneySea theme park in Tokyo.

One-quarter of Wrestlemania VII’s performers have died in the 20 years since the 1991 show:

The list of wrestlers who have died since 1991 include some of the biggest stars in the sport like Savage, Andre the Giant, Miss Elizabeth and The British Bulldog. Causes of death include suicides, murder and heart attacks, some the result of years of anabolic steroid use. Savage died last week after suffering an apparent heart attack behind the wheel of his truck. His ex-wife, Miss Elizabeth, passed away after overdosing on a variety of drugs in 2003.

As wrestlinginc.com points out, none of the 44 starters from the Super Bowl played in 1991 have passed away and only two of 44 boxers who held a championship belt that year are gone.

Angus wall discusses how they created the Game of Thrones opening title sequence — which is far more clockwork-inspired than I would have expected for a high-medieval quasi-English setting:

One of the things we realized early on was that you couldn’t really tilt the camera up very far because it raised the question, what’s beyond the map? I kept thinking that if you had all the money and craftsmen in the world, and you could do whatever you wanted, what would you do? In my mind, you’d build the most intricate, beautiful map you could possibly imagine. You’d get the best craftsmen in the world, give them the materials they’d need and give them five years to make this crazy, working, super-detailed miniature.

Our goal was to try to replicate something that looks and acts like a physical object. Art Director Rob Feng referenced Leonardo’s machines which have a timeless sense of design. We wanted the title sequence to be rooted in world of the show, which is a technically unsophisticated place, but to also have a complexity that gives it life. It’s definitely not contemporary! Everything is made of wood, metal, leather, fabric, all natural materials… stuff you could see human hands hammering out and molding.

The fact that I wanted to be able to move the camera anywhere led us to the fact that this whole world had to exist on the inside of a sphere, which took us a while to figure out. I had initially thought, okay, the shape of this thing… imagine it’s in a medieval tower and monks are watching over it and it’s a living map and it’s shaped like a bowl that’s 30 feet in diameter and these guys watch over it, kind of like they would the Book of Kells or something… they’re the caretakers of this map. I quickly realized we were still going to shoot off the map. So the next thought was, what happens when you put two bowls together? You have a sphere. Next question was “how is it lit?” And obviously, If you have a whole world inside a sphere, what would be in the middle of that sphere? The sun! Or whatever the light source of this world is.

Harvard University Press is finally publishing an uncensored version of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray:

Wilde’s editor JM Stoddart had already deleted a host of “objectionable” text from the novel before it made its first appearance in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in June 1890, cutting out material which made more explicit the homoerotic nature of artist Basil Hallward’s feelings for Dorian Gray and which accentuated elements of homosexuality in Gray himself.

Deciding that the novel as it stood contained “a number of things which an innocent woman would make an exception to”, and assuring his employer Craige Lippincott that he would make the book “acceptable to the most fastidious taste”, Stoddart also removed references to Gray’s female lovers as his “mistresses”. He went on to cut “many passages that smacked of decadence more generally,” said Nicholas Frankel, editor of the new edition, for Harvard University Press.

The public outcry which followed the novel’s appearance – “it is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents – a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction,” wrote the Daily Chronicle – forced Wilde to revise the novel still further before it appeared in book form in 1891.

Some examples:

“It is quite true I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man should ever give to a friend. Somehow I have never loved a woman,” Hallward tells Dorian, in one passage which was changed. The censored version read: “From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me”.
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Among other restored passages, Hallward describes the feelings which had driven his portrait of Gray. “There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion”. Another restored line describes Gray walking the street at night; “A man with curious eyes had suddenly peered into his face, and then dogged him with stealthy footsteps, passing and repassing him many times.” Gray also reflects on Hallward’s feelings for him. “There was something infinitely tragic in a romance that was at once so passionate and sterile”.

In another instance, the question; “Is Sybil Vane your mistress?” was altered to “What are your relations with Sibyl Vane?” – one of three references to Gray’s “mistresses” that were cut by the editor.

The article’s a bit unclear on the novel’s editorial history. As some commenters added, Wilde made many additions and some revisions to the already edited magazine version to produce the finished novel, including introducing new characters; those additions and revisions won’t appear in the “uncensored” version.

David Foster notes the strengths of the series and the mini-series versus the feature film and names five recent favorites:

Once an Eagle, based on the novel of the same name, traces the careers and personal lives of two American army officers–men of very different characters–through both world wars. Sam Elliot stars as the courageous and compassionate Sam Damon; Cliff Potts is the manipulative careerist Courtney Massengale. The series was originally televised in 1976 and has only recently been made available in DVD format.

The Awakening Land, a 1978 mini-series adapted from Conrad Richter’s trilogy (The Trees–The Fields–The Town) tells the story of a backwoods family from Pennsylvania which moves to what was then the wild and unsettled territory of Ohio. Elizabeth Montgomery is the uneducated but intelligent Sayward Luckett; Hal Holbrook is Portius Wheeler, the iconoclastic lawyer she marries. This series was also made in the late 1970s.

Dresden, released originally for German television as a two-part mini-series, centers around a love affair in the doomed city. I reviewed this film here. Felicitas Woll is Anna Mauth, a nurse in a Dresden hospital; John Light is Robert Newman, a pilot with RAF Bomber Command.

The Wire, broadcast from 2002-2008, begins as a cops-versus-drug-dealers story set in Baltimore, but soon expands to encompass the Port of Baltimore and the relevant labor union, city politicians, the media, and the public schools. Some critics have called this the greatest television series ever made. Many great performances, including Michael Williams as Omar Little, who specializes in the dangerous trade of robbing drug dealers, Chris Bauer as union leader Frank Sobotka, and Aiden Gillen as the ambitious politician Tommy Carcetti.

Friday Night Lights is about a high-school football coach, his family, the players and other students, and their football-loving Texas town. Absolutely outstanding; I just finished it and was sorry to see it end. We’ve previously discussed on this blog the shortage of novels and films dealing realistically with work–this series is very much about work, both the coach’s job and that of his wife, a school counselor and principal. And while coach Eric Taylor’s job is all about football, the difficulties and rewards of his work will resonate with anyone involved in education or in management.

Erin O’Connor, while agreeing that the show is great on work, notes that “It’s also wonderful on what it is to actually be an adult — and on the constant challenge of making responsible decisions. We really don’t see that dramatized much at all, preferring to watch the fascinations of dysfunction in our TV dramas (The Wire, Sopranos, Mad Men, etc.). I also love the portrait of the Taylors’ marriage, and the way the show takes adolescence so seriously. There is something so searching about the show, and yet it never gets bogged down.”

I’ve been meaning to watch The Wire, past the first season, for a long time.

Naturally I currently recommend HBO’s Game of Thrones.