Joshuah Bearman

Never trust

AutoFails

Ursula Andress in a badass headdress

From the Hammer classic, She, as Ayesha (She Who Must Be Obeyed): 

Moving moment (as always) from WWII-era obituary

Rabbi Herschel Schacter, US Army Chaplain who liberated Buchenwald, died at 95. His encounter with a young boy he finds hiding in the camp: 

“What’s your name, my child?” he asked in Yiddish.

“Lulek,” the child replied.

“How old are you?” the rabbi asked.

“What difference does it make?” Lulek, who was 7, said. “I’m older than you, anyway.”

“Why do you think you’re older?” Rabbi Schacter asked, smiling.

“Because you cry and laugh like a child,” Lulek replied. “I haven’t laughed in a long time, and I don’t even cry anymore. So which one of us is older?”

 

These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live. Or to go into the dark.

I hadn't seen the Daisy Ad in a while, and it really is a terrifying effective 30 seconds. 

Next Level DIY Video Practice

So I missed the early YouTube emergence, in 2008, of Fred and Sharon, two Canadian retirees with a full service videographer solicitation: "Who Needs a Movie?"

I love it, and not for the obvious reasons. OK, for the obvious reasons, but also some other reasons (see below).

Failing to get much business, I'm guessing, Fred and Sharon decided to embark on a very productive filmmaking adventure themselves, posting 165 videos over the past five years or so. Some are songs, some are serialized relationship advice, some are interviews with strangers, some feature recurring cartoon characters. Many of them feature Fred's signature animation, and weirdness. One is an exhortation to treat addicts well, and includes an interview with a very handsome crack addict superimposed over mountain scenery. 

Come and see Me is the one floating around more recently, as it is a new creating, posted just six days ago. Fred cuts loose with a free style rap, accompanied by animated dancers, and the appearance of a diminutive cartoon hype man character. (Fred should consider giving that guy his own spin-off album.)

 

Outsider rap has its moments. I like Fred's verve, but it's fundamentally silly. Although I must admit I rather like the sentiment of Fred's Ode to Spring:

What lions, tigers, cheetahs, and leopards look like when you've maybe only seen one once, from far away

Re-R.I.P. William Safire, for the words you wrote in case of an Apollo 11 disaster

In the event that Apollo 11 failed, William Safire wrote a speech for Nixon to deliver: 

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

Note: it assumes that Neil and Buzz died, but Michael Collins in the orbiter, comes out just fine!

 

By request: that Oscar, close up

The evolution of Copperplate to penmanship: A Foucauldian function of 19th century standardization

Or so says The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting, a book I'd like to read (just ordered), in this New York Times review. That's not the main thrust of the book, or anything, but is apparently part of the historical narrative: 

Once the domain of the leisure class, penmanship — in a popular style called “copperplate,” modeled on the printing of engravers — had long been a luxury pastime, the more curlicued and ornate the better. The growth of industry brought pens into the hands of the masses. Copperplate “was no longer a leisured, artistic activity,” Hensher observes, “but a crucial way in which people should learn to communicate for practical, business purposes.”

I am ready for Game of Thrones. As is this little critter.

Netflix Teen Drama Binging as essay as worldview as metaphysics

Writer, Rumpus editor, and funny woman Elissa Bassist has written an essay for New York about her addiction to frenzied television consumption on Netflix. It made me laugh out loud, three times. I have thought similar things before myself, talked about such feelings at length with other desperately confused people, and read similar essays before, and yet this deeply personal telling drove the idea home anew. What's the idea? This excerpt summarizes:

Auto-play seamlessly transitioned to episode twelve, to Tara saying to her friend, "I think I have a boyfriend," and my first reaction was, "You dumb idiot, of course you don't," because I knew, from life, a kiss does not mean a relationship.

Wrong! In the next episode, she introduces Ethan to her parents as her “boyfriend," and he doesn't flinch. For the next three episodes — while I ate lunch — they are a couple, and he's perfect and she'sperfect and they are perfect and at peace, and for the first time in a long time, I felt perfect and at peace, like I had love in my world. Watching television reminded me that living could be more exciting, more interesting than watching television. I had a lightness and a thrill in me as I waltzed around my apartment, washing my dishes. Of course I had to remind myself these feelings came from the Australian teen dance dramedy Dance Academy. My happiness was absolute and tangible and transformative, but it wasn’t real. 

Although I don't go for shows like Dance Academy, I do find myself similarly affected at times. I am a sap, and have been known to cry watching dog food commercials -- which I don't see so much anymore now that I watch TV on Netflix or HBO GO.

Point is: I get it. Except Elissa's last point, because sometimes I wonder -- and this is where it gets metaphysical -- why isn't it real? Or, more properly, why can't it be real? We articulate our own internal emotional lives in relation to external narratives all the time. So, why not Dance Academy? Or Girls (for an obvious example)? Or Friday Night Lights? (Which features in one of the laugh out loud moments in this essay.)

I love FNL. The first season, anyhow. Unlike, Elissa, I was able to kick the compulsion and not move forward to seasons two and beyond because I'd heard that it was a disaster and I loved the show so much I didn't want to sully what I'd constructed in my mind as a perfect thing. And that brings me to weltschmerz, which is where Elissa lands in this essay. Somehow, I did not know until now, reading Elissa's story about Dance Academy, that weltschmerz describes the pain one has upon realizing that the idealized world in one's mind cannot be matched by reality. I speak German and somehow I did not know this. I thought, like most casual Weltschmerzers, that it just meant the pain of realizing that life, the world, maybe existence, is fundamentally tragic. But come to think of it, that's just a default state of awareness. The true meaning weltschmerz, the full Byronic sense, is for advanced lament.

And I guess that's the danger of opening yourself up to the joys of Dance Academy. (Making matters worse, not only do you invite weltschmerz, but it's a weltschmerz inspired not from poetry but from an Australian teen dance drama.) But why not open yourself up whatever glories can be found therein? If you accept that happiness derived from Dance Academy is not real, maybe it's a worse tragedy, because then you undo the idealized realm too. And without that, you are left with only the failings of reality. Sure, you don't have weltschmerz; instead, you're stuck with schmerz.

Ever wonder what demolishing a bridge with explosives looks like?

And in slow motion. 

News-adjacent vintage animation: please enjoy Miroslav Sasek's quaint, illustrated Israel of 1960

This galaxy looks delicious, and there's a huge black hole in the middle of it

Just plain badass

Real Magick in Theory and Practice

I don't know what this is but I like it. 

Stained glass disco lighting effect in the Tehran Bazaar

(Would have been period-appropriate for Argo.) Via The Atlantic.

R.I.P. Harry Weathersby Stamps, ladies' man, natty dresser, accomplished traveler, hater of Daylight Savings Time

A wildly entertaining obit from the Biloxi Sun Herald:

He despised phonies, his 1969 Volvo (which he also loved), know-it-all Yankees, Southerners who used the words "veranda" and "porte cochere" to put on airs, eating grape leaves, Law and Order (all franchises), cats, and Martha Stewart. In reverse order. He particularly hated Day Light Saving Time, which he referred to as The Devil's Time. It is not lost on his family that he died the very day that he would have had to spring his clock forward. This can only be viewed as his final protest. 

My favorite collection of ewok sounds