Occupation of Independence

I'm about to praise a fairly new movie, but i n order to appreciate it fully, let's invoke some words from Samuel Johnson, in Adventurer # 67 :   Ha ppiness is enjoyed only in proportion as it is known; and such is the state or foll y of man, that it is known only b y experience of its contrary. Thus we must contrast this enjoyable movie with the cultural sinkhole that Hollywood has become. You must be brave enough to look into the abyss and appreciate how truly dreadful most movies are... ...the formulaic date movies, obligatory bedroom scenes, boring computer graphics, the F word in every other sentence, MTV-style of cut-cut-cut action trash... I really didn't know what to expect when I picked this DVD at the public library. It looked like some kind of furrin' or independent flick. During the opening credits there was mention of several French corporations or government funding agencies -- now that was a scary way to start a movie! (But actually, it w

i S chadenfr eude is ever ywhere! I t is another bad day for AAPL stock due to a slowdown in the Apple pipeline of orders. AAPL bears are rejoicing -- they want to see the stock fall down through $500 because of the psychological significance. Even though I am an Apple hater, I will try to take a philosophical look at the anti-A pple syndrome. First of all, why should any of us hate Apple? Is it just envy? How can we not be grateful for the innovations that Apple has brought forth, with some even benefiting the consumers of rival products? And what about all the jobs? (Some are even in the USA.) One of the more emphatic critics of Apple is Karl Denninger, who recently said: There are plenty of people who hate the linkage with iTunes that comes with Apple products... Everyone on Wall Street wants to talk about ecosystem , but what they're really talking about is a walled garden -- and the wall has razor wire and broken bottles embedded in the top.  It's a prison ,

I w a nt to follow up with some suggestions about conquering the Uni nterrupted Prose Syndrome, by making verbiage "breathe" with some kind of pictorial illustration, gotten somewhere . (Let's ignore the fact that music might be eve n better for this purpose, since it's pr obably more technically difficult to get it into the blog post.)  So off I will go, searching for shareable photographs in the great charnel houses for internet photographs, such as publicDomainPictures.net, Picasa, or Flickr. Blogs that have a Creative Commons License, such as a commenter's blog , are also worth a serious look. Oops. There is a likely problem that we must address before rolling up our sleeves. Recall the controversy that good ol' Leo Tolstoy got into in the Colorado arts scene, one summer not so long ago. (grin) By invoking his arguments on "What is Art?" (free on Google Books), I am not trying to con you with an "appeal to Authority," as it might

Now don't be sus picious or skeptical if I boast of progress in my de-internetting project by reading adulterous love triangles. Thanks to getting a library card from the Yuma library, I picked up the late-1940s movie, Anna Karenina , starring Vivian Leigh. She was good in the role and, let's face it, agreeable to look at. It served as inspiration for a rematch with Tolstoy's novel. It took about 40 pages for the main characters to start the soap opera, proper, after which I just rolled my eyes and put the book away. Ahh but wait. Maybe things are different when re-reading a book.  Let's try to learn something from rewatching a movie. Years ago I learned the trick of focusing away from the center of the screen. Without any special effort, you prob ably would be focusing dead center, where the action is an d the leading c haracters are.  Perhaps this could work for re-reading a novel? For example I am merely skimming the main chapters in Anna , all ghastly s