Ditchweed wildfire. The US Government's War on Drugs became a War on California, when a narc helicopter started a wildfire that burned 56,000 acres (that's roughly 22,000 hectares in metric-speak). Here's the official explanation from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, in Word and PDF formats. No word on whether they saved any burn victims from the dangers of cannabis.

{ 1:19 PM }

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I live in Chicago not too far from where the stockyards immortalized by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle used to be. Now the area is mostly vacant land and random industrial park tracts. But this is what it used to look like:



This image was shot in about 1907 and may give you a sense of the scope of the slaughter. If you click on the image, you'll see that each of those pens (the word "cubicles" also comes to mind) is filled with animals. Vegetables suddenly seem so much more appealing.

Update: The blogmeister at bad things informs me that the links above do not work and I can't figure out why not. So you'll have to poke around for yourself in the Prints and Photographs Online collections at the Library of Congress, and here's another point of entry. The above image came from a collection of historical panoramic photography. Fascinating stuff.

{ 9:44 AM }

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Grief porn. You want to stop seeing the images of September 11, 2001. You want to turn away from the spectacle of grief. You want not to hear another heart-rending story.

And yet you must. The prurient urge to watch it all again will be tempted over and over and over for the next five days. Television gives us what little there is left of a sense of national community, of epic tragedy, of human loss. It pays such shallow tribute that these catastrophes which eclipsed our imaginations for the last year must be relived through such a paltry, irresistible medium as TV, but maybe that's the only way we can reinvigorate the memory of those lost.

I remember the couple of days following the attacks as the only times I felt that television approached anything resembling honesty. Within a week, the standard manipulations (elegiac musical themes, flag-draped graphics, wiping of tears from cheeks in dramatic slow motion) had returned with full force, and cheapened the titanic emotions we all felt.

My fear now is that a new sophistication among television producers will amplify the artificial poignancy to new heights, while the genuine poignancy will remain locked away, grieving, in millions of beating hearts, invisible and mute as the souls we lost.

{ 11:03 AM }

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The exhibition Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting offers a career-spanning overview of the German artist's dizzying disloyalty to style. Ironically, out of freedom from style he has managed to create a uniquely personal style: one that combines technical deftness with independence from the movements, manners and genre traps that afflict many of the most celebrated visual artists.

As with all the best paintings, the pictures simply do not reproduce correctly in photographs (the scale, color, and delicate surface effects are always lost) and must be seen in person. Richter's seemingly dispassionate approach may strike some as chilly, but his ideology-free intellectual and technical rigor are amazing to behold.

The exhibit closes its Chicago run this week, but then moves on to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn in Washington.

{ 11:21 AM }

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Annals of Unintended Results. Over the weekend as I was driving on the highway like every other patriotic American, I noticed a police car pull out of a speed trap (Labor Day weekend being the final bonanza of the year for quick revenue) in such a way that there was almost a fifteen-car pile-up. A law enforcement officer, sworn to uphold the peace, nearly killed or injured dozens of peaceful people in an accident provoked by doing his job. Which led me to the question: Of all that we do, how much actually produces the exact opposite of what we intended? How many tragic ironies are avoidable? How many are we doomed to endure?

Iatrogenic illnesses and injuries are those unintentionally caused by doctors or medical treatment. Attempting to heal makes the sick sicker. Is ignorance caused by our system of education? Is hunger or, metaphorically, emptiness caused by our culture of abundance? Is terrorism caused by our infrastructure of defense and foreign policy? Are we, in our self-assigned role of World Cop, inadvertently setting ourselves up to cause more misfortune than we relieve?

{ 8:43 AM }

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Movie reviews. This weekend we watched three films on video.

Naked, released in 1993 and directed by Mike Leigh (who later directed Secrets and Lies), confirms my opinion that he is one of the most overrated directors currently working. These structureless, pointless exercises in film improvisation must be unbelievably exhilarating for the actors, who chew the scenery and rape each other with great abandon, but tedious for any audience members who might not welcome the nihilistic masturbation provided by Leigh's methods. Yes, David Thewlis does a wonderful job as lead villain, and there are occasionally stirring scenes, but so what? The world depicted is simply uninteresting. 3 out of 10.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, adapted from the Milan Kundera novel of the same name, is a boring apology for adultery directed in a ham-fisted sitcommy style which contrasts with some pretty hot love scenes. Starring a bedroom-eyes Daniel Day Lewis and an adorable Juliette Binoche, the story feels stagey and arch whenever there's no sex going on. Nearly three hours is too long to tell this poorly reduced version of the book. 4 out of 10.

The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 masterpiece, is one of those prior-generation movies that not only holds up under the weight of time but might even look a bit better for its psychological insights and sociological prophesies. Gene Hackman dazzles in his quiet way and the acting ensemble is equally outstanding. The beautiful balance between the human and the technical elements of the film help to project it higher than almost any other psychological thriller fare. This movie builds the kind of complex tension that makes you want to watch again -- immediately after having seen it. 9 out of 10.

For a second opinion, here are Roger Ebert's reviews of each of these films. He gave all of them 4 out of 4 stars. The Ebert take: Naked, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Conversation.

{ 5:15 PM }

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