Gloom, despair and agony on me

Lately I've been watching an alarming number of documentaries about awful stuff. Nuclear proliferation. The Zimbardo experiment. Rwandan genocide. And of course Nazis and the Holocaust. Rewatching Blood in the Face left me particularly curious about how such obvious marginal stupidity could ever have ensnared an entire nation. Surely the German version in the 1930s must somehow have been more appealing than the Michigan version from the 1980s.

To test the question, I sat through Triumph of the Will. And no. It has more polish on it. The choreography is better. It's considerably larger. But otherwise it's painfully obviously the exact same blend of overdeveloped ability to hate and underdeveloped ability to think.

And worse, as a hideous side effect I now have the Horst Wessel Song stuck in my head. Thank goodness I don't actually know the lyrics. So it goes something like

Lift up the flag
And rotten Nazi bullshit
Don't know the words
So yakka blabba blah

On a happier note, last night at dinner I got a fortune cookie fortune that said "Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film." Normally I like fortunes to be fortunes, something more like "You will make a journey over water." But this one was actually fine with me.

Buck: I'm a pickin'

Roy: And I'm a grinnin'

All: Nyah ya ya nyah nyah, nyah ya ya nyah nyah nyah

Roy: Hey Buck, did you know I've got a photographic memory?

Buck: Yeah, Roy. Too bad you forgot to buy film for it.

All: Nyah ya ya nyah nyah, nyah ya ya nyah nyah nyah

And for those of you fortunate enough to have no idea what that last bit just was, feast on the bygone video horror that was Hee Haw.

Review – Triumph of the Will

After recently watching a string of documentaries about racism, genocide and the like, I started to seriously wonder exactly why Nazism ever seemed attractive to the Germans. After watching this documentary by legendary propaganda artist Leni Riefenstahl – the Nazis’ best ever sales pitch – I don’t consider myself much the wiser. Some of the big party rally sequences are impressively choreographed. But then a lot of the movie is given over to what I like to think of as Fuhreryakkenblabben sequences, extended shots of nothing but Hitler and his henchmen rattling on about their stupid nonsense. That and parades. Oh my lord the endless parades. So I found myself searching the backgrounds for any possible distraction from the sad spectacle upon which the picture focuses. Occasionally one gets a particularly Manson-google-eyed follower or an army general struggling to stifle a yawn. But for the most part this is just relentlessly dull. Oh, and fair warning: if you do decide to take this on, prepare to have the Horst Wessel Song stuck in your head for a day or two. See if desperate

Review – Dracula's Widow

If you’re married to someone who’s been killed as often as this guy, you must spend a lot of time wearing black (which at least shouldn’t be a big problem for a vampire). The undead body of Dracula’s wife Vanessa gets shipped to a run-down Hollywood wax museum. She wakes up hungry. Crap proceeds from there. See if desperate

The Media Survival Guide is now officially underway

Okay, truth be told I've been working on this project for awhile now. A lot of the initial planning took place last fall, and of course I had to have at least some idea of what I planned to do in time for my sabbatical proposal two months ago.

Perhaps I shouldn't get ahead of myself. The 8sails Media Survival Guide is a replacement for the textbooks I've been using in my JOUR 175 Intro to Mass Comm class. Books published via the traditional route tend to be boring, expensive, inflexible and slow to update, all ills I think I can cure by rolling my own.

So that's what I'm working on. Though the serious labor won't begin until after the end of the spring semester, I'm trying to get a lot of the groundwork (outlines, design, etc.) done before the start of the summer. Even though I have between the middle of May and early January to do nothing but work on the MSG, it's going to be a ton of work. Thus my antsy nature prompts me to do as much as I can as early as I can.

When I first started thinking about the project, I organized my thoughts in outline form in a Word file. Since then I've created a wiki to keep my notes in one place where I can get at them easily no matter where I happen to be. This morning's task was to transfer notes from the Word file to the wiki. Mission accomplished.

Oh, and I started this blog.

Review – Mr. Klein

I’ve found that when I watch a movie recommended to me by my father that it’s often possible to pinpoint the exact “ah, that’s why he liked this” trigger. In this one it’s the spot late in the show when the title character and a friend accidentally plunk out “The International” on a piano in the presence of the police. The bigger picture is about an unscrupulous art collector who profits from Jewish people who have to sell their possessions on the cheap in order to escape Nazi-occupied France. But the tables turn on him when someone frames him as a member of the group he’s been callously exploiting. The foreground story is as boring as watching paint dry, but the background – the slow, meticulous run-up to the implementation of the Final Solution in France – is fascinating stuff. Mildly amusing

Review – Martin Luther

At least this PBS production was a little better than the one bankrolled by Thrivent. Though it significantly underplays the less savory parts of Luther’s story, it at least acknowledges his questionable responses to issues such as the Peasant Rebellion. On the other hand, it still fails to draw the ultimate connection between his theological stance and his political fortunes. Overall this was about what one would expect from a public television attempt to cover a man who all these centuries later remains controversial. Mildly amusing

Review – Forgiving Dr. Mengele

How could anyone – particularly a direct victim of his vile “experiments” – ever possibly forgive Josef Mengele? For the answer to that we must turn to Eva Mozes Kor, the subject of this documentary. Kor and her twin sister somehow managed to survive Auschwitz, but unlike many other survivors she somehow found it in her heart many years later to heal some of the pain by forgiving the Angel of Death and his fellow mass murderers. The resulting consideration of the issues raises – without fully resolving – some fascinating questions about the nature of forgiveness. Worth seeing