Several readers have asked my opinion of Sin City. I liked the look of the film and thought Mickey Rourke was remarkable as Marv. But, on the whole, I found the movie less than compelling. It was too stylized to be emotionally gripping, and that's just as well because it was all about torturing depraved, evil people. I liked Kill Bill, but I have my limits.
For another point of view, see this review, done in Sin City's graphic style. (Via Design Observer.)
In related news, the best theory for my unknown teen idol photo comes from reader Diana Day, who writes:
The unidentified "celeb" in the last photo is Matt Czuchry, who plays the love interest of Alexis Bledel (Becky in the movie) on the TV show Gilmore Girls. I don't know who his girlfriend is in real life; it's embarassing enough that I can identify him.
There did seem to be a lot of Gilmore Girls fans in the crowd at the premiere, prompting a middle-aged woman--i.e., someone like me--to comment that she had no idea who these people are because she's too old for that show.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 07, 2005 • Comments
For non-Catholics, even more than for Catholics, I suspect, "the pope" will mean John Paul II long after his successor has been crowned. Anne Applebaum's column on what John Paul II actually did to "defeat communism" is must-reading. The conclusion: "He didn't need to man the barricades, in other words, because he had already shown people that they could walk right through them."
Arguably, a contemporary pope need never leave Rome. With television, radio, and the Internet--not to mention plain old ordinary print--why take the trouble to travel? Your message, your voice, your image can be anywhere in the world in an instant. Yet John Paul II left Rome 104 times, "more than all previous popes combined," notes Newsweek in a graphic that unfortunately doesn't appear to be online, and traveled more than 775,000 miles.
The pope understood extraordinarily well was that in an age of pervasive media, personal presence is not less valuable but more so. He didn't need Esther Dyson to teach him. He had Catholic theology--a church that preaches the incarnation of God as man and the real presence of Jesus in the bread and wine of the Mass. These doctrines may not be true (I certainly reject them) but they do contain important wisdom: Human beings exist, even in their most spiritual moments, as tactile, physical beings. There is no substitute for personal presence.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 07, 2005 • Comments
Here's a bizarre story involving teachers at two schools in my neighborhood:
A North Dallas High School teacher was arrested and placed on paid administrative leave after an attack last week on a middle school teacher in front of students.
Paulette Baines was charged with assault with bodily injury in connection with the beating Friday, Dallas County Jail records show. Ms. Baines, 45, was released from jail early Saturday after posting $2,500 bail, a jail official said.
She could not be reached for comment. A man who answered the telephone at her home and said he was her husband said they had no comment.
Mary Oliver, a teacher at William B. Travis Academy/Vanguard for the Academically Talented and Gifted, said she suffered several injuries, including bruises to her face, a concussion and two broken ribs. Ms. Oliver, 45, who teaches seventh-grade science, was recovering from her injuries at home Sunday.
The reason for the attack: Ms. Oliver had told Ms. Baines's daughter and other students that they weren't supposed to be at their lockers during class.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 04, 2005 • Comments
PatentRoom is a new online "museum of early 20th Century industrial design uncovered in U.S. Patent Office archives," featuring lots of fun (and inventive) stuff. It also has a blog highlighting one or two sketches a day. The site was created by Ken Booth, who also has a site called Adventure Lounge, featuring aircraft designs.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 04, 2005 • Comments
Candy Sagon of the WaPost reports that "We've become a nation of Popeyes. We are eating record amounts of spinach -- five times more fresh spinach than we did in the 1970s and the highest levels since the 1950s, when parents urged their kids to eat spinach to be strong, just like the animated cartoon sailor."
This is a trend--arguably an aesthetic one--near and dear to my heart. Since my father loves spinach, as a child I faced the dreaded vegetable three or four times a week. We had to eat two bites of our vegetables to get dessert. So I developed the unusual ability to swallow a bite of spinach whole with a swig of milk. I hated spinach so much that I wouldn't even try spinach pasta until I was about 30.
Now I'd happily eat spinach every night, and often eat it three or four times a week. But the spinach I eat isn't the frozen kind my mother used to boil up for dinner. And I'm not alone. Sagon explains:
According to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, annual consumption of all kinds of spinach -- fresh, frozen and canned -- jumped 66 percent in the decade between 1992 and 2002. Canned spinach slipped to a minuscule portion of the market, but fresh spinach has exploded.
U.S. per capita consumption of spinach has reached 2.4 pounds a year, USDA researchers said in a January 2004 report. This is small compared with some other vegetables -- per capita fresh tomato consumption is almost 18 pounds per person, for example -- but still a huge jump considering that, in the bad ol' days of 1975, we barely choked down 5 ounces of the vitamin-rich, dark green leaves.
What's driving the growth is the popularity of those plastic bags of triple-washed spinach in the supermarket and, in particular, the "explosive growth in . . . baby spinach." Baby spinach increasingly shows up in salads at restaurants, salad bars and at home, says the government.
Even as a spinach-loathing child I liked the stuff as salad greens, but back then the only way to get fresh spinach was to grow it yourself, pick it early before it got bitter, and spend a lot of time washing the dirt out of the leaves' many wrinkles. The process was all very bioregionally correct but not exactly a recipe for year-round consumption.
For a great exploration of the nexus between good food, good nutrition, and technological and business innovation, read the whole article. And for more produce blogging, see this old post on grape tomatoes and this one on regulatory barriers to their spread.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 31, 2005 • Comments
Thanks to distinct looks and lots of customizable options, Toyota's funny-looking Scion is paying off big-time, attracting the young customers the car was designed for. The Dallas Morning News reports:
The new division enters its second year with momentum. Last year, Scion--pronounced sigh-on--had sales of 99,259 vehicles, about 30 percent more than Toyota expected.
In addition, Scion says it's reaching young buyers. That's a significant accomplishment in the auto industry, which is dominated by baby boomers who keep the average age of buyers for most vehicles above 40.
Scion customers are among the youngest in the industry, with the average age ranging from 26 to 38 on the three models of vehicles the division sells, said Jim Farley, vice president of the Scion division at Toyota Motor Sales USA. Moreover, 85 percent of the buyers are new to Toyota, with most coming from Honda.
Those successes are important to Toyota, but the company is also learning something that may be more important: how to sell cars to finicky Gen Y. Over the next decade, the 63 million members of Generation Y--people born after 1980--will replace their baby boomer parents as the largest and most influential population group in the United States.
"These are people who customize their lives," Mr. Farley said. "They grew up with the Internet and high technology, and going to Best Buy and using liberal return policies. They are impervious to mass media."
Mr. Farley calls Scion a laboratory for understanding their quirks and demands. All three models--the amorphous xA four-door hatchback, the intriguingly odd xB four-door hatchback and the stylish, more mainstream tC coupe--cost less than $18,000. All are compacts that weigh less than 3,000 pounds and are powered by economical four-cylinder engines.
A big part of Scion's allure is the dealer accessories. There are dozens of ways to customize — from spoilers and LED interior lights to custom graphics, leather interiors, engine-performance parts and custom wheels.
About 80 percent of Scion buyers purchase at least one accessory, dealers say.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 30, 2005 • Comments
A rather important "not" was omitted in the post below on what Richard Thaler's work on Sweden's private retirement accounts says about private social security accounts here. The sentence should read: "It does not suggest we shouldn't have them." Thaler's work implies that a relatively small number of options, with defaults set to provide proper diversification, would be better than a one-size-fits-all politically administered plan.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 29, 2005 • Comments
The entry on the movie premiere took a full hour to put together, and that's with the Thorp quote handy. (I just typed notes from her book yesterday.) That time does not include photo manipulation, which I did last night.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 29, 2005 • Comments
I'm in LA, where I'll be publicly fielding questions about The Substance of Style from Dwell editor-in-chief Allison Arieff tomorrow. (This and other Westweek programs at the Pacific Design Center are free and open to the public; details here.)
Last night, on my way to dinner in Westwood Village, I ran across the premiere of Sin City. It wasn't exactly Hell's Angels, but there were definitely screaming fans, mostly of the young, female persuasion--not what I expected for a Frank Miller movie. Standing in the crowd, I realized what a Latino cast the movie has, and what a huge appeal Robert Rodriguez and these actors have for the Americanized Latinos who make up much of younger Los Angeles. (Not that they aren't impressed by the non-Latino actors--though a young woman near me did lose interest in Rutger Hauer when she realized he wasn't Donald Trump.)
In his 2002 book American Skin, Leon Wynter highlights a scene in Rodriguez's Spy Kids where it suddenly becomes unmistakably clear that the kids are not just played by Latino actors but are, in fact, Mexican-American characters in a movie clearly intended for a mainstream audience. The movie simply assumes that its audience will see the family not as Other but as Us--only better. When, he wondered, will African-Americans have a similar Everyman experience?
Back in 1939, Margaret Farrand Thorp's America at the Movies examined the movies' appeal to their audience, an appeal based largely on escape and identification--on glamour. The movies then didn't feature black characters in sympathetic leading roles, she suggested, because the mostly white 85 million [!] Americans who went to the movies weekly neither identified with blacks nor fantasized about enjoying their lives:
Then there is the case of the screen negro. The eighty-five million are primarily white and no white American, the industry maintains, would ever make his escape personality black. "Stardom," Terry Ramsaye wrote in the Motion Picture Herald (July 8, 1939) is
a job of vicarious attainment for the customers. The staring player becomes the agent-in-adventure for the box-office customer. The spectator tends to identify himself with the glamorous and triumphant player, just as the tense, weakling little ribbon clerk in the last rim of seats clenches his fists and wins with the winner at the prize fight.
Inevitably the motion picture tends to place the negro in the screen drama in the same relation as that which he occupies in the nation's social and economic picture. In other words the screen public takes the negro as the average of 135,000,000 takes him.
With all due respect to Eddie Murphy's Dr. Dolittle, I think the movie that actually broke the Wynter-Thorp barrier was last year's Collateral, in which Jamie Foxx played Everyman, in a very, very bad situation but not one where race was crucial. That Foxx so dominated the Oscars this year--"It's Jamie Foxx's world. We just live in it," was a common commentary--drove home the point. Race is slowly but surely turning into ethnicity, a cultural, personal identity but not a barrier to empathy. And, to take things back to Rodriguez, despite the best efforts of race-mongers left and right, Mexican-Americans are just another ethnic group.
I took some photos, but the lighting you see on TV, which is daylight bright, was only available to credentialed press. The rest of us had to make do with digital camera flash in the dark and a little photo manipulation after the fact:
Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez posed for the crowd just as a car drove by and blocked the view. If you think the quality of this photo is bad, you should have seen it before I fooled with it. Frank Miller has a big, happy smile, and Robert Rodriguez is holding the video camera that he was using earlier to shoot his adoring fans.
Robert Rodriguez gives an interview.
This guy came by and signed autographs and talked to the crowd, to the delight of fans. From the conversation, I take it that his girlfriend is more famous than he is. But I have no idea who he is--thus demonstrating my extreme age.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 29, 2005 • Comments
Jack Shafer eviscerates David Shaw's latest anti-blog ravings. I particularly liked this point, since it jumped out at me when I read the story--and should have jumped out at Shaw's editors. (You do have editors, don't you?)
According to Shaw, regular journalists strive harder than bloggers for accuracy because of their greater legal exposure. He writes: "If I'm careless — if I am guilty of what the courts call a 'reckless disregard for the truth'--The Times could be sued for libel...and could lose a lot of money." Doesn't Shaw appreciate that Joe Blogger can be sued, too, and that if he loses his case could be forced to forfeit his house, his bank account, his car, and his Fiestaware collection? On the face of it, Joe Blogger would seem to have a greater incentive to avoid libel than Shaw, whose employer will cover his legal bills and take the financial hit in case of a legal judgment.
The chances of the LAT or any big newspaper losing a libel suit are virtually nil, given the difficulty of proving a reckless disregard for the truth. The cost is in fighting the suit, something the typical blogger couldn't afford.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 29, 2005 • Comments