Puhnner Blog

The Lambeth Walk

Puhnner — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:34:12 GMT

The entire film is a gem, but I loved seeing the full clip of 'Germany Calling' , the Lambeth Walk in the special features section.

here is a rather grainy clip of it from YouTube; the supplemental features clip is outstanding

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6vCIEG0Bxc

this is another great one on the Lambeth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGNfNYpfH74

Use 'em and eat 'em

Puhnner — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 12:59:16 GMT

an interesting review here, with all sorts of 'spoilers', but worth a read before or after watching Trouble Every Day...

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/troubleeveryday.htm

Plaintive and sad, Claire Denis' remarkable Trouble Every Day is a rare combination of honesty, beauty, and maybe even genius. It isn't enough to say that the picture captures the barbarism festering at the core of gender dynamics; nor is it sufficient to express my frank amazement at how Denis subverts genre in ways perverse and powerful. Here's a canny director who knows the vocabulary of cinema as well as the cruel poetics of sexual anthropology--perhaps it's enough to say that Trouble Every Day captures something ineffably true about the sex act with images vital, frank, and unshakable.

We first see Coré (an oddly feral Béatrice Dalle) in a black nightie and an overcoat, standing in a field of winter wheat in a Paris landscape next to a rusted-out van. We first see Shane (a familiarly feral Vincent Gallo) on an overnight flight to Paris with his newlywed wife, June (Tricia Vessey). Because there's almost no dialogue in Trouble Every Day, we must surmise from early images that Coré has seduced and murdered--and perhaps partially consumed--a lascivious truck driver. We also uncover wordlessly Coré's husband Léo (Alex Descas) cleaning up her mess before locking her away in the attic of their Paris home.

The attic, of course, is the place for Victorian women accused of sexuality and hysteria--Jung would know it as a place of the animus and the rational. Because Coré is the very embodiment of the animalistic irrational, she spends much of her time breaking out of her room or, in one of the film's most disturbing sequences, seducing a young lad through slats of wood like a Poe mistress. We also know that Shane probably suffers from the same malady because of the odd dream that he has in the airplane's toilet, and the way he nervously takes pills whenever his lovely young bride bats her eye. A bite mark on June's arm and, later, a wound on her lip, suggest that sometimes the pills aren't enough.

Trouble Every Day is about sexual frustration, infidelity, and the pain of keeping a secret from your spouse or the loneliness of keeping one with her. (As a journal of a plague born of base urges it reminds of Larry Fessenden's inspired Habit.) The violence of the picture is as graphic as the eroticism: there's a poignancy to that equation just as there is something to be made of the fact that for the most part Denis locates the violence and the eroticism outside of both marriages. Legendarily gruesome and almost unwatchable in parts, the moments stickiest are the quiet ones: when Léo gently sponges his wife clean after one of her rampages, or when a green scarf is carried off by the wind after a day Shane and June spend like ordinary tourists.

There is much unspoken melancholy in Trouble Every Day, all of it carried in the chasm opening between and beneath two couples with the capacity to love one another unconditionally. Even the title speaks to the drudgery of living with uncontrollable urges that have no place in polite society; the conventions of eating and fucking already skewered in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover get a brutal updating here that is less political than universal. When Coré chews off a paramour's face to his pathetic yowls and excruciating death rattles, there is something so familiar--so archetypal--in the imagery that it's at once breathtaking and disturbing for its exhilaration.

Trouble Every Day causes one to examine the place of the self amidst social niceties as it satirizes the hubristic illness that allows people to separate themselves from animals--to repress base desires in ways unhealthy and unwise. It is a provocative film not for its indelible images, but for the unbearable weight of ferocious right embedded in those images. Note the crosses and arcs drawn in gore during one of Denis' and cinematographer Agnés Godard's immaculately composited tableaux, the amazing trust in the instructive power of silence and the gaze, and the extreme close-ups of the human body as it's reduced to landscapes of imperfect flesh. Denis' gift here is her ability to articulate the ways in which the creative process intersects with the procreative instinct: religious iconography described in charnel, inexpressible sacrifices demonstrated with mute gesture, and maps of strange geographies drawn on fields of skin. This is Clive Barker territory, or David Cronenberg reduced to image and totem.

Trouble Every Day is a tone poem of transgression. Its themes are grounded in the existential divide between head and body and the ways that "consumption" and "knowledge" are consecrated words that attempt to leash unlearned compulsions under the yoke of civilization. It inspires such deep shifts in the personal fundament because it's absolutely right, even if the question is too complicated and unsavoury to articulate. It's disturbing because its essence is concerned with love, passion, and devotion: how it differs between the sexes (compare Coré's transgression with Shane's) and how, ultimately, it rules us even when we rail against it. Mesmeric and entrancing, intuitive and impossibly intimate, the picture is alive with craft, intelligence, and the absolute courage of its macabre vision. Trouble Every Day is among the finest films of the year, but handle it with care.-Walter Chaw

Watching Films so I don't have to.

Puhnner — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:23:56 GMT

Caution! Spoilers!!!

from David Rees' 'Get Your War On' site:

http://www.mnftiu.cc/2009/02/05/mnftiu-movie-review-taken/

It’s movie review time! Movies are the lifeblood of our culture. In these troubling economic times, we must support Hollywood more than ever. Throw all your books in the garbage and go to the movies TODAY.

Yesterday I saw “Taken,” starring Liam Neeson.

If you liked the Bourne movies — but thought they weren’t xenophobic enough, or sexist enough, or monotonous enough, or just plain ol’ shitty enough — you’ll love “Taken.”

Seriously? I couldn’t believe what a preposterous heap of turdly, rightwing discombobulation this thing was. Liam Neeson should chop off his own toe for starring in it. And also? His hair? Worst dye job I have ever seen. You can’t tell me that’s his natural color. Colors like that don’t even occur naturally in outer space. “Manic Panic in the house!”

Liam Neeson’s huffing and puffing around Paris, driving cars backwards and breaking into lairs and judo-chopping Albanians, trying to be Matt Damon — are you kidding me? Take your 9-foot-tall ass back to Shakespeare camp and leave action movies to the young people, you AARP-wannabe interloper. (Honestly, Liam Neeson could be 30 years old for all I know, but this movie has such a pathological “cranky old man” vibe — I thought maybe I was watching a John McCain fever dream — that you have to add 52 years to the age of anyone involved with it.)

read the whole thing...the review is worth it.

make no mistake

Puhnner — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:35:37 GMT

Make no mistake about this film. It is grim and ghastly and I am not only talking about the transfer to DVD and the dubbing. All the characters talk with an inexplicable mock english accent, all vaguely similar, complete with the phrasing, delivery, and accentuation, but minus the farting noises, to Terrance and Philip's on Southpark. You will want to look away more than a few dozen times.

What occured at Unit 731 matches or exceeds anything doled out in shovelfuls and the boatload during the WWII conflict and I suspect any other conflict, you wish to name. Then it all ended, and those in command of Unit 731, for the most part 'walked', much like some of the Germans, with their own newfound value, did too... thanks to the global cooling of the developing Cold War. Their crimes buried away somewhere, for the good of the national interests.

see http://www.ww2pacific.com/unit731.html and other sources on the Web and elsewhere for more information about this fun factory. As much as you may care not to believe it so, Men behind the Sun may just as well have been a documentary. I doubt whether the circumstances could have been protrayed with any more horror than you will see here.

WARNING! there are some extremely gruesome scenes..

Fear of Clowns, sure and fear of Puppets too!

Puhnner — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:12:49 GMT

I hope that this film is as good as having Coulrophobia...at least, from the promises at the end of this post, there IS a cure for Pupaphobia

'...Several theories attempt to explain the origins of the phobia, though none seem definitive. One of the more interesting comes from Kathryn Cillick. She believes most people are afraid of clowns because it's impossible to gauge a clown's true emotions. Thanks to painted-on smiles, people can't distinguish if the clown is as happy as he seems or if he's actually about to bite somebody's face off. ...'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulrophobia

Coulrophobia is an abnormal or exaggerated fear of clowns. It is not uncommon among children, but is also sometimes found in teenagers and adults as well. Sufferers sometimes acquire a fear of clowns after having a bad experience with one personally, or seeing a sinister portrayal of one in the media. A design study carried out by the University of Sheffield found that children are frightened by clown-themed decor in hospitals. This fear can come quickly just by seeing a clown in person or by how they look in pictures.^[1]

Coulrophobia in Fiction

The animated series The Simpsons; see "Can't sleep, clown will eat me."

and John Wayne Gacy's Pogo the Clown Picture

Pupaphobia: Fear of Puppets

http://www.changethatsrightnow.com/problem_detail.asp?SDID=1157:1811

Trusted, Effective Treatment for Fear Of Puppets

Our board-certified team specializes in helping individuals overcome fears, phobias & anxiety of all kinds, and is particularly focused on problems such as fear of puppets. With a success rate close to 100% we offer a lifetime guarantee to our clients.

To learn more about our 24-Hour Fear Of Puppets Program, please call us at 1-800-828-7484 (+1-650-249-5120 from outside the USA) for a complimentary consultation to discuss the problem, or contact us using the form below.

How do we do it?

We won't actually do anything: you will. Our practitioners will teach you to regain control of your emotions and conquer your Fear Of Puppets. Working with us, you'll rapidly train your unconscious mind to connect different, positive feelings to the stimuli that triggers the phobia. And you will learn quickly now to stop the root cause of your Fear of Flying: those awful thoughts, images, movies or sounds.

We are an ABNLP
Approved Program

We don't use hypnosis for Fear Of Puppets but our modern techniques are equally relaxing and enjoyable. Clients immediately notice that they feel different. Once the unconscious mind feels safe and learns how to respond appropriately, it will always know - so the results are permanent. Fear Of Puppets is gone. Forever.

I hope it is that easy...

Halsey's howling Hooliganisms

Puhnner — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:30:40 GMT

From Sea of Thunder; Four Commanders and the last great Naval Campaign 1941-1945; by Evan Thompson

...Halsey sought consolation in other ways.

In his role as sea dog, he had a well deserved reputation for seeking a girl in every port. One of Week’s, jobs was to keep Halsey and his staff entertained off-duty. "I'm running a little party for the Admiral and getting some nurses from a hospital ship---God help them, the nurses I mean!" Weeks wrote his wife from Ulithi after the difficult visit to see the wounded aboard the hospital ship on November 11. A week later, Weeks wrote his wife, "The nurses were grand, good sports---they'd been working very hard with the wounded and were just as ready for a break as we were."

The nurses needed to be good sports. An Admiral’s aide to the chief of nursing aboard a hospital ship described a nurses’ party with Halsey and his staff: After the meal, one of the celebrants flipped a live cigarette in the wastebasket, which caught fire, whereupon an officer grabbed a CO2 bottle, stuck the cone in the basket, and quickly extinguished the flames. Then he pushed the nozzle up the dress of one of the nurses and squirted her between the legs. She let out a scream as the dry ice burned. Other schnockered officers grabbed CO2 bottles and started chasing nurses around the wardroom.

Though Halsey claimed his nickname "Bull" had been bestowed by newspapermen, in fact he had been dubbed "Bull" by fellow officers for his conquests ashore. Carnes Week’s son Carnes Jr., a Marine corporal, was invited to have drinks with Halsey at the St. Francis Hotel during a home leave in 1944. "When he partied, he really let himself go," Weeks recalled. "He always had a Marine guard outside his door, and I was asked to stand guard there that night. Inside, I could hear them down on all fours barking like a dog with this nice lady who was his friend for the evening."

Good Germans wrapped up with paperclips

Puhnner — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 10:10:00 GMT

Ho hum...

I wish this film had explored the subtext (at least as it seems to me to be shown, but really when examined, the drive behind the film narrative and the action itself ) more, the 'Operation Paperclip' side, but as noted in the article below, the original name was 'Operation Overcast.' Various nastiness was cast aside for the advancement of the national goals to quickly and quietly extract those Germans of 'value'. The Cate Blanchett, while seeming to be channeling Deitrich in Touch of Evil, Lena character and that of her husband Emil Brandt, who would expose the operation make much more sense to me knowing the reasons behind their seemingly contradictory and crosspurposed motivations and actions and ultimate ends.

Quite a bit of information exists on the program that is worth a look into. Here is a link and a brief telling of the story...go to the link and others available on the net and in books if you are interested in more...

http://www.operationpaperclip.info/

...'Operation Paperclip was the codename under which the US intelligence and military services extricated scientists from Germany, during and after the final stages of World War II. The project was originally called Operation Overcast, and is sometimes also known as Project Paperclip.

Of particular interest were scientists specialising in aerodynamics and rocketry (such as those involved in the V-1 and V-2 projects), chemical weapons, chemical reaction technology and medicine. These scientists and their families were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for Hitler's Third Reich, NSDAP and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats also disqualified them from officially obtaining visas. An aim of the operation was capturing equipment before the Soviets came in. The US Army destroyed some of the German equipment to prevent it from being captured by the advancing Soviet Army'...

as to what Soderbergh was trying to do here, I just don't know. I would love to hear his commentary...but hell, the score was pretty good though and I enjoyed the melding of newsreel footage with the various portions of the film. It seems like it would be very interesting to bookend this film with Wilder and Marlene Deitrich and Tyrone Power in Witness for the Prosecution and do some speculating about the characters.

an interesting article on Slate

Puhnner — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:53:32 GMT

Here is a link to a pretty interesting article on Slate describing both the film and the film-making; I think it is worth a reading and a post:

http://www.slate.com/id/2172678/pagenum/all/#page_start

here is the text, there are some embedded videos available with the link that could not be linked to this post

dvd extras

David Lynch Goes Digital

Why Inland Empire is better on your TV than it was on the big screen.

By Dennis Lim
Posted Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007, at 10:34 AM ET

In recent years, David Lynch has emerged as a tireless proselytizer—of organic coffee, transcendental meditation, and, perhaps most surprising for a onetime celluloid fetishist, digital video. While other veteran filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh) have dipped their toes in the chilly electronic murk of DV, Lynch has jumped right in. "Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit," he told me when I interviewed him last fall.

Lynch's latest feature, Inland Empire, is his 10^th, and his first to be shot in digital video. The movie was an overwhelming experience on the big screen, a three-hour waking nightmare that derives both its form and its content from the splintering psyche of a troubled Hollywood actress, played by Laura Dern. But the natural home for this shape-shifting epic may in fact be the small screen. Watch Inland Empire on the DVD that came out last week and you sense that this lurid, grubby fantasy springs from deep within the bowels of YouTube as much as from inside its heroine's muddy unconscious. The DV that Lynch has come to cherish is the medium of home movies, viral video, and pornography—the everyday media detritus we associate more with television and computer monitors than movie theaters, more with intimate or private viewing experiences than communal ones.

And not only does Inland Empire often look like it belongs on the Internet, it also progresses with the darting, associative logic of hyperlinks. Indeed, parts of the movie originated on Lynch's Web site, davidlynch.com, itself a labyrinth of wormholes and worlds within worlds. The rare major filmmaker who caught on early to the potential of streaming video, Lynch has been creating short films specifically for an online audience since 2001. One of his more popular Web series, Rabbits, in which a rabbit-headed family recites Beckettian non sequiturs (to the sound of canned sitcom laughter), actually made its way into Inland Empire.

The practice of shooting feature films on video only goes back a decade or so, to the introduction of the cheap, compact MiniDV format. The Dogme '95 movement, led by Danish troublemaker Lars von Trier, kicked off the digital revolution, and before long, DV was the default mode for indie filmmaking the world over. Broadly speaking, the first wave of MiniDV films can be grouped into two categories: those that treat video as a language in itself, with its own expressive potential (the first Dogme film, The Celebration, for instance, or even The Blair Witch Project), and those that attempt to disguise or neglect to accommodate the video-ness of video and use it simply as an affordable substitute for film.

High-definition video, which now often closely approximates film, has become an increasingly common format for studio productions (David Fincher's Zodiac being a recent example). But Lynch is not interested in simulating celluloid with a state-of-the-art video camera. He shot Inland Empire with the relatively primitive Sony PD-150, a consumer-grade model that was introduced in 2001 (eons ago in techie years) at a retail price of less than $4,000. Lynch's love of video has much to do with the freedom it grants. Shooting with a camcorder removes the strictures of a traditional film production, allowing for a smaller crew, less setup time, and no accountability to money men. The lightweight camera, along with the low cost and high capacity of videotape, generally means more and longer takes. Video permits Lynch to indulge fully his taste for improvisation—to make things up as he goes along. Inland Empire was written a scene at a time and shot piecemeal over a period of three years.

But Lynch being Lynch, aesthetic concerns presumably outweighed practical ones. Compared with film, video typically looks harsh and almost hyperreal, with a narrower range of colors and weaker contrast, but it's precisely those qualities that Lynch revels in. While a lower-resolution film stock, like Super 8, has a grainy, romantic allure, lower-resolution video, characterized by fewer pixels per inch, merely looks fuzzy. For Lynch, who has likened low-res video to film stock before the emulsion process was perfected, the murkier the image, the more "room to dream," as he puts it. It's no wonder this master of the enigmatic would prize video for its literal lack of information.

The deeper you get into Inland Empire, the more logical the video aesthetic seems. The bleeding colors and the unstable image are a perfect fit for the fugue state that the movie gradually sinks into. Simply put, Inland Empire is the story of a grave identity crisis. The trouble begins when actress Nikki Grace (Dern) lands a part in a hokey melodrama called On High in Blue Tomorrows. As actor merges with character, and film and reality violently intersect, space and time also begin to fissure. One minute we're in sunny Southern California, the next in snowy, old-world Poland.

Inland Empire shares with Lynch's previous feature, Mulholland Drive (2001), a morbid fascination with the destructive machinery of Hollywood. Both regard acting as a threat to the stability of the self. The earlier film, ingeniously reconstructed from an aborted TV pilot, was a poisoned valentine, ruefully enthralled by the promise and magic of old Hollywood. Inland Empire strips off the patina of glamour. In every respect—from its experimental ethos to its unconventional economics (it was partly self-financed and eventually self-distributed)—the film is Lynch's defiant rebuke to the industry that has never fully embraced him. At one point, one of Dern's characters (she seems to be playing three or four) is stabbed in the gut and staggers along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, leaving a trail of blood.

Video, as Lynch uses it here, is the language of the subconscious, somehow more and less real than plain old filmic reality. DV looks more lifelike than film (its frame rate, the frequency at which successive images are captured, is higher than film's and closer to how the human eye operates), but it also seems unnaturally heightened, since it's not what celluloid-trained eyes are used to.

Lynch started his career as a painter—earlier this year the Fondation Cartier in Paris mounted a show of his photographs, digitally tweaked erotica, and massive, crude, roughly textured oil canvases—and he uses video with the curiosity and resourcefulness of an innate visual artist. He pays attention to its flickers, its shadows, its susceptibility to distortion from under- or overexposure. In this remarkable scene, for instance, he achieves a multitude of textures with an amusingly low-tech flashlight-in-the-dark method.

Bodies and faces, meanwhile, are repeatedly abstracted with an unforgiving lens or light source. Dern fearlessly offers herself up to one disfiguring wide-angle shot after another. The extreme close-up is a Lynch trademark, and here, using his DV camera like a new toy, he peers even more intently than usual, as if he's stumbled on an entirely different way of looking.

Whether or not Lynch intended it to, Inland Empire in the end conveys a techno-existential insight worthy of William Gibson. Film is a physical process, dependent on the interaction of light and chemistry. Video is by definition more remote, more spectral, a cluster of data in the electronic ether. And while mortality is a defining trait of film, a medium that degrades and disintegrates over time, video—quickly and endlessly reproducible—conjures a spooky sense of the infinite. In Inland Empire, truly a horror movie for the digital age, it's not that the ghost is in the machine. The ghost is the machine.

Dennis Lim is editorial director at the Museum of the Moving Image and a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2172678/

sure it is possible, what isn't?

Puhnner — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:36:04 GMT

an interesting article from the science section of the new york times; grab a cup of something:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/science/14tier.html?_r=1&ref=science&pagewanted=print

Findings

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch

By JOHN TIERNEY

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations.

“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real.

David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.

You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.

Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation. (For more on survival strategies in a computer simulation, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it).

Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime Designer?

If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation.

It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.

If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists who think we’ll have a computer this century with the power to simulate all the inhabitants on earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new virtual world, but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer.

It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game Over.”

Arthur Schnitzler saw it first

Puhnner — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 16:51:00 GMT

In Clive James recent book Cultural Amnesia; he writes about people who matter, most of them though, I am very sad and embarrassed to say, I never heard of ( for that matter, I just noticed that I had been reading his works for years in the New Yorker, but never noticed the ‘by-line’ until the other day ) but well I should have.

The book is set up in alphabetical order and its subjects include such persons as Louis Armstrong, Dick Cavett, Miles Davis, Sergei Diaghilev, Francois Furet, Chris Marker, Michael Mann, Thomas Mann, Erik Satie, Margaret Thatcher, Isoroku Yamamoto, Aleksandr Zinoviev, and many others. Each person’s section begins with a brief biographical introduction followed by an essay of sorts on that particular person. The biographical information is terse and leaves a feeling of wanting to know much more of the person. The essays provide the most interest, relating the person in question with all sorts of other persons, other arts, and simple, often times intensely personal observations. I cannot say that I agree with all his observations, for who could ( I do not share his perception of John Coltrane’s music and the music of that period of Jazz in particular that he sets down in his essay on Duke Ellington ) but there is certainly something about Clive James way of weaving one bit to another and another and another.

A portion of the section on Arthur Schnitzler follows below and how James weaves an isolated quote into an examination of the manifest absurdity within the mentioned films, the blockbuster, a few actors ability and personal idiosyncrasies, the nature of a ‘star’ to an actor, historic detail, and more…

Of the great unknowns, Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) has his section and in the essay portion contains a marvelous review of sorts on ‘Where Eagles Dare’ a wonderously hilarious World War II adventure. I quote at length ( it is lengthy but can be read in convenient sections without missing much at all ), because Clive James tells and writes it all so well:

‘Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931 ) was a giant of literary Vienna in its most fruitful era. A practicing physician before he turned professional writer, he brought a view steeped in the harsh realism of the consulting room and the surgery to his stories, novels, and plays. The most conspicuous, and most enduringly controversial, element in this clinical realism was his exploration of the erotic. As a physician he knew a lot about it at secondhand…’

‘there are all kinds of flight from responsibility. There is a flight into death, a flight into sickness, and finally a flight into stupidity. The last is the least dangerous and the most comfortable, since even for clever people the journey is not as long as they might fondly imagine.’-Arthur Schnitzler, Buch Der Spruche und Bedenken, p. 78-

‘… Schnitzler’s flight into stupidity might look like the only explanation for the sort of newspapers, magazines, television programs and movies that make us ashamed to be living in the West. At first blush, the mass media seem to offer the ideal chance of examining stupidity in isolation. But once again, the trick is not easily worked. There is a possibility, amounting to a probability when the really big money is involved, that the stupidity is being manufactured by clever people whose commercial motives put their case, scope and integrity into abeyance. This non-anomaly becomes most obvious in the case of Hollywood's blockbuster movies, or the long haul of creative intelligence takes a spiral route towards the big haul at the box office. Every onlooker fancies his power of discrimination has a wonderful time when a blockbuster flops on the opening weekend. But the blockbuster that we actually have a wonderful time watching is a more equivocal case. Where Eagles Dare has always been my favorite example: since the day I first saw it, I've taken a sour delight rebutting pundits who so blithely assume that the obtuseness on screen merely reflects the stunted mentalities behind the camera, and I go on seeing its every rerun on television in order to reinforce my stock of telling detail---and, alright, in order to have a wonderful time. There's something precious about the intellectual squalor of Where Eagles Dare: it is a swamp with the surface of green pulp squeeze from emeralds. You can't get the same charge from Delta Force movies, or from the adventures of Jean-Claude Van Damme and the brainless universe where men with guns are helpless against a man fighting with his feet. Where Eagles Dare is the apex of a form: it shows that there is somewhere to go beyond The Guns of Navarone, a numbskull stratosphere in which not even The Wild Geese could fly. Where eagles dare, the sense of the ridiculous winks out to a dot, and the vision is filled with the vaulting pretensions of latter-day schoolmen who believe, if only ad hoc and pro tem, its cinematic sense can exist in vacuo: detached, that is, from any other sense; a voluntary brain-death. The whole complex phenomena is epitomized by Richard Burton's hairstyle.

Schnitzler, let us remember, said that the flight into stupidity is a flight away from responsibility. But soaring beyond any human absurdity that even Schnitzler could imagine, Richard Burton's hairstyle in Where Eagles Dare is a flight into stupidity and away from the barber. Burton plays a British agent who is possibly also a German agent, although we can be fairly sure that he will turn out to be a British agent in the end, because Richard Burton's agent would never agree to a deal by which his client was shot at dawn. Burton the almost certainly British stage is sent, with Clint Eastwood and other agents---some of who actually do turn out to be German agents—on a mission to a castle deep behind German lines, there to rescue, or possibly confirm the credibility of, or perhaps betray the real identity of an actor pretending to be an American general in possession of the plans for a Second Front. The actor playing the actor need not detain us, and considering how he acts it is a wonder that the Germans have detained him. (There is a lot more to wonder about the behavior of the Germans, but we'll get to that later.) The actors who matter are Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. Clint, already a top box office draw at the time, has been cast as a simple, straight-talking American assassin who helps a fiendishly ingenious British spy: it's the same relationship as Felix Leiter to James Bond, but beefed up to equal status to meet the requirements of the American marquee. Apart from saying "hello" so as to make Germans turn around before he shoots them with the silenced pistol---if he had merely mouthed "hello" before shooting them in the back, it would have been a different kind of movie, i.e., a realistic one ---Clint's character has nothing anachronistic about him except his cataleptic taciturnity, which we are glad to recognize as a minimally equipped actor's career-long habit of overdoing the understatement. Burton's own style of acting is equally dissonant with the time, but in the opposite direction: he always overdid the overstatement, and from the beginning to the end of his career on screen he looked exactly like a stage actor projecting to the upper circle, except when a director with animal-training skills (Martin Ritt in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, to take one of the few examples) either whipped him into submission or else slipped a sedative into his morning triple. Burton always moved his lips so much when he enunciated that they would stick out past the end of his nose, and there are episodes in Where Eagles Dare in which they practically leave the frame, as if yet another triple was waiting out there, begging to be imbibed.

It isn't the stuff he does with his face, however, that makes Burton look out of place in this castellated anteroom of World War II. It is the stuff on top of his head. It's his hairstyle. It was probably still all his own hair at that stage, but it's a hairstyle: an item, that is, which not even women found it easy to obtain during World War II, and which for men was unknown. (In the movie, Mary Ure has obviously taken a hairstylist into action with her, but we never see him: although if he'd wandered into a shot holding a crimping iron he would have looked no more futuristic than her miraculously smooth coiffure, shining with a blonde luster that Eva Braun, even with her connections, could only dream of.) The high command of the Romanian army did indeed issue an order that no officer below the rank of major could wear makeup, but the British army and the German army both made a policy of short back and sides for all ranks, and the German army was particularly close-cropped. Yet Burton, intending to be accepted as a German officer in order to penetrate the enemy redoubt, has gone to action sporting a page-boy hairstyle so fulsome that it spills abundant curls and waves below the back of his collar. Burton had a big head anyway. I interviewed him once, and found out why he always looks so stocky on screen: it was because his upper works were so broad you had to lean sideways to see past him. Even if close-shorn he would have had to wear a cap rare for its size in the whole of the Wehrmacht. But with his hairstyle added to his massive cranium, his cap has to be big enough for a buffalo, and it still does nothing to disguise---does a lot, indeed, to emphasize,--- the anomalous abundance of hair protruding at the back. On several occasions in the movie has to pass a German checkpoint, and you can only deduce that the garrison has been recruited from an institute to for the blind. Later in the war, when regular German forces were in a state of collapse, Volksstrum units were organized from the old, the adolescent, the lame and the sick, but I can't remember that very many sightless people were issued with the Panzerfaust and asked to shoot in the direction of the noise kicked up by Allied tanks. Here at the castle there is no discrimination against the optically handicapped.

Whether as a single, double or triple agent (“Triple, please," you can imagine him saying) the Burton character would have been barely free of his parachute harness before being placed under arrest. He would have been locked up on the basis of his appearance alone. Every other anachronism is explicable, within the screenplay’s purely cinematic parameters. In the German pub below the castle, Burton, Eastwood and the other agents---the others are notable chiefly for their expandability---talk very loudly in English. Yes, English is their chosen language when they discuss their plans about fooling the Germans, and they do not lower their voices when members of the garrison pass by closely behind them. It could be said, however, that a convention is being observed here, and that our agents are really speaking German. (It could also be said that if they were speaking German, the closely attendant Germans would be even more likely to notice that plans to fool them were being loudly discussed, but let that pass.) There is also the consideration that English seems to be the adopted language of every German in the area. Similarly, it could be put down to an equally hallowed cinematic convention when the German commandant arrives in the castle courtyard by helicopter. There were no operational helicopters in World War II, but there were no operational cannon ancient Rome either, and Shakespeare still put a few in. Shakespeare pioneered Hollywood's flexible attitude to temporal authenticity, as any what Hollywood mogul with a tertiary education will be glad to tell you. For every howler in the movie there is a good justification, the principal one being that the people who made the movie must have known it was howler, but correctly judged that nobody they cared about would notice. In the majority of big-budget war films since World War II, and all the small budget ones, the enemy has always fired a special kind of bullet that goes around, instead of through, the actors on our side, occasionally penetrating only at the shoulder or in a sexually neutral section of the upper thigh. In Sands of Iwo Jima John Wayne finally got killed by Japanese bullet while he was sitting down, but only after the Japanese machine gunners had vainly fired thousands of bullets at him when he was running very slowly. In Where Eagles Dare, whole German machine-gun nests equipped with multiple examples of the lethal MG42 (rate of fire: 1200 rounds per minute) are unable to graze Richard Burton's hairstyle. Big enough for slowly moving cow to graze it, for cinematic reasons it is impervious to speeding lead. But there are precedents for that. There is no precedent for the hairstyle per se.

This is where the pundit clinches his seemingly open-and-shut case for Schnitzler’s flight into stupidity as the principal motivation of the film’s creators, or perpetrators. He might concede that some of the perps are technically clever, but in that case he will insist that there is still a collective purpose: the system itself. And he will be right, but not as right as he thinks. He has overlooked the factor of star power, which is what made him see the movie in the first place. Letting Burton keep his everyday or hairstyle was a studio’s only chance of getting them into this sector of World War II. (He kept a less a bit less of his thatch for his cameo appearance in The Longest Day, but it still wasn't buoyant enough to get him arrested by his own side, let alone by the enemy. ) And Burton wasn't being stupid either. He realized that the point was not to look like a British agent plausibly pretending to be a German officer: the point was to look like Richard Burton. The reality of star power depends on exactly that. Malleability is for actors. For screen stars, recognizability is what matters. Much later, and in a better movie, Robert Redford proved it all over again by declining at the last moment to adopt an English accent when he played Denys Finch Hatton in Out of Africa. He was right. Out of Africa was a serious venture, but it was still a blockbuster and it needed Redford as a draw on the marquee, not as a paragon of authenticity on the screen. Redford was content to leave all that to Meryl Streep and Klaus Maria Brandauer. He wasn't just content, he insisted. And it was by making such demands that he became Robert Redford. If we doubt the value of that, we should remember that he would never have been in a position to set up the Sundance Festival, and thus alter the whole course of independent and intelligent film-making in America, if he hadn't been Robert Redford in the first instance. He is a very clever man, and so, between drinks was Burton, who could recite English poetry by the mile. Burton was clever enough to intuit a deeply awkward truth, and incorporate it in the hairstyle he carried into action in one of the most lucrative movies he ever made. To one side of the world's great events, there is the interpretation of them. To one side of the interpretation, there is entertainment. And to one side of entertainment, there is absurdity. But if the absurdity is correctly judged, he will be found entertaining, even by those who are well aware of the real importance of the events being travestied. There can be a willing, mass participation in the flight into stupidity, because there can always be an agreed moment when the flight away from responsibility becomes irresistible. To pick that moment takes a kind of talent, it might be a spoiled talent, but mediocrity will never make it…’

Quite a bit remains within the remainder of this essay and for that matter the book in its entirety.