Tag Archives: Meryl Streep

by | June 28, 2012 · 6:43 PM

Tea With Chris: Disorienting Pleasures

Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Thursday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:

Margaux: B.F. Skinner, the villainized behavioral scientist, is the ghost behind the most recent issue of the Atlantic. I pulled B.F. Skinner’s “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” years ago from a random bookshelf scan because I thought the title was funny. All I knew about B.F. Skinner was that, as an experiment, he put his young daughter in a box. The title seemed appropriate for such a man. Though when I read the book, it was surprisingly thoughtful and interesting, and B.F. Skinner kind of seemed more like a friend than a comical monster. Since then, I’ve always had warm feelings towards Principal Skinner, the good-intentioned principle on The Simpsons who continuously gets abused.

The Atlantic‘s headlining article “The Perfect Self” by David H. Freedman is about how B.F. Skinner’s behavioral science is in the lead for the  figuring-out-how-to-combat-obesity race. David H. Freedman reminds us that B.F. Skinner was strongly against punishment in the area of behaviorial modification and that, to date, the most sinister manifestation of his findings is Weight Watchers.

B.F. Skinner’s main theory: “All organisms tend to do what the world around them rewards them for doing. When an organism is in some way prompted to perform a certain behaviour, and that behavoir is ‘reinforced’ – with a pat on the back, nourishment, comfort, money – the organism is more likely to repeat the behaviour,” is echoed in other neighboring  articles.

It’s a challenge to make your own positive behavioral boxes or to spot the boxes that others have put you in. The Atlantic explores some of these puzzles with an Editor’s Note from James Bennet, a short story on the evils of good students desperate for the right awards by Molly Patterson, “Honors Track”, and a short text on “Dumb Kids’ Class” by Mark Bowden, who discusses the benefits of being underestimated. Mark Bowden himself bounced back between dumb and smart class as did I and probably lots of kids do around the age of eleven – as you try to work out which is your more advantageous option (or your teachers try to work out which is their more advantageous option).

I always love  dumb or stupidity as a subject. Like in some of John Currin’s work,

or in this this exceedingly pleasing 2003 documentary by Albert Nerenberg, Stupidity. You can see the full documentary here. If I remember correctly the best parts of it were short interviews with the very few acedemics in the world who study stupidity – attempting to talk about it still seems to be a curse or a taboo, something that can get you in all sorts of trouble. During the interviews, when the academics made any mistakes in speaking, they would look around slowly and cautiously as though someone was about to accuse them of being a moron. Such disorienting pleasures!

Speaking of disorienting pleasures, I just went to the contemporary museum in Bentonville, Arkansas that Alice Walton of the Walmart family founded, Crystal Bridges.

Carl: I am going to use Natalie Zina Walschots’ prose-poem-like “Postcards from the Polaris Prize” (parts One and Two) to help me decide how to fill the final space on my ballot, because they’re the best things the Polaris ever made happen except for the prize itself.

Maybe I will vote for Fucked Up’s David Comes to Life, because Natalie wrote: “David fires a rock at the forehead of Goliath. David is seventeen feet tall and made of marble. David is willing to send a soldier to his death after watching a woman bathe. David is an award-winning environmentalist and broadcaster. David is sometimes called Ziggy Stardust, sometimes the Goblin King. David is married to a Spice Girl. David has been frozen, buried, and locked in a plexiglass case suspended above the River Thames.” Or maybe Marie-Pierre Arthur’s record, because Nat says, ” In every movie that ever brushes against the narrative of a young woman coming-of-age, there is a scene is which she is sitting in the passenger seat of a car, the window rolled down, holding her hand out in the wind like it is a smooth bird.” Though I think that might be a very subtle insult.

This week I discovered Jenny Woolworth’s Women in Punk Blog, which only has a post every four or five months, but one of those posts is an 86-page including interviews with Alice Bag and Liliput, and other posts are entire mixtapes. So quit yer complaining. Also, this is a good list. And so is this. And the Supreme Court didn’t strike down health-care reform, so Happy Canada and/or America Day, or neither if you prefer.

Chris: I’m always reticient to link to my B2TW comrades here, because it can seem a little too incestuous, but Margaux’s Paris Review advice column response to the misguided query “What books impress a guy? What should I read to seem cool, sexy, and effortlessly smart?” was so impious and wise: “The only way to be cool, sexy and effortlessly smart without just being seemingly so is to build your own stupid house of books. Feel free to use all the wrong books in all the wrong ways, but the house really has to be real and you need to know why the house is there, in that specific location, in that specific configuration.”

“I am going to write a poem about using Meryl Streep’s laugh as a ringtone. / I’ve bookmarked an LA Times article from 1989 / in which her giggle eruptions are explored with great amazement. / I’ve tweeted extensively on the tone and timbre of/ each particular laugh.”

Up here Canada Day shares its 24 hours with Pride, a happy coincidence indeed. I’ll be at Shame, wearing a Will Munro pin, and this week Sarah Liss explained why.

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by | July 20, 2010 · 10:16 AM

Wild Ocean (2008) – from GIANT SCREEN FILMS

by Margaux Williamson

(I went to two screenings this week. One was at Ontario Place (an artificial island of amusements jutting out over a small section of Toronto’s waterfront). There, on the island’s Cinesphere, I saw a section of “Wild Ocean”. The other screening was an evening of short works curated by Jon Davies (including scientific and novelty films and contemporary art videos). It was called “Animal Drag Kingdom” and was screened at night outside in a downtown Toronto courtyard.)

At the water park in Ontario Place, there are only three rides and really no place to swim (the fences keep you out of the lake). So after we went down all of the rides, my boyfriend and I walked around the made-for-human-amusement island. The island has beer stands and donut tents, an exhibit on cute animals and an extensive and confusingly obvious exhibit on “The Weather”. The attendants at the most promising amusement, the Cinesphere, at first didn’t let us in because we only had bathing suits on, but we wore them down.

We walked into the spherical theatre maybe 20 minutes in to “Wild Ocean”. The screen, filled up with the ocean, was enormous. It was a little disorienting to suddenly see dolphins, sharks, humans, penguins and sardines running wild. It was like the opposite of an aquarium. The movie’s narrative was about how the dolphins, sharks, humans and penguins were after the sardines.

I went alone to the “Animal Drag Kingdom” because I like animals. I sat in a folding chair 3 rows back from the free standing screen. There were about 9 videos. It was a really beautiful night.

Movies always involve seeing things through someone else’s eyes.. unless you make the movie yourself. It is very effective to see something through someone else’s eyes – even though it is always hard to tell how great or how little someone else’s eyes are connecting with your brain – or how successfully someone else’s brain is connecting with your eyes.

In “Animal Drag Kingdom”, we run through a lot of eyes very quickly. We move from being an animated pig in a bonnet mourning the random hit and run of our trench-coat clad neighbour chicken – that chicken went down as tragically as Meryl Streep would have, we think (Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis’ animation “When the Day Breaks”) / to looking at 1960s black and white film footage of families at zoos with our 1960s professor who is doing his best to find platonic meaning in the gestures of the universal family man. If you don’t know what the hell is going on, we think, you might as well start at the zoo (experimental anthroplogical lecture “Microcultural Incidents in Ten Zoos”) / to being the humorously clunky or painfully indifferent camera stuck in the woman-who-is-afraid-to-die’s apartment. We cannot run away when the cat vomits in front of us and the woman is talking to the psychic on the psychic hot-line because we have no legs (Kathy High’s “Everyday Problems of the Living”)/ to watching a family play-act a surgical procedure that turns their little girl into a cheetah. Then we are a little girl walking around her house with her new cheetah eyes. We think, things look different now that we are a little girl-cheetah waking up from play-acting surgery (Kristen Lucas’s “Smaller and Easier to Handle”) / to thinking we are watching an art video of a man filming himself and a crow, a crow that is tied to a tree branch, then realizing we are a director filming an animal trainer train a crow, then realizing we are watching a director train an animal trainer to train his crow, and finally realizing we are our ordinary selves and the crow is gone and there is only one man training another man, and we feel for the other man like we first felt for that crow. When the human gets the directions from his trainer wrong here, we think, we love that human’s nature as much as we love that animal’s nature (Guy Ben-Ner’s “Second Nature”).

The further we wade into shifting perspectives, appropriation and increasing instincts towards empathy, the more likely it is that we’ll get things amazingly wrong. We are sometimes warned away from an empathy that extends beyond the loyalty of our families and communities and radiates to foreign communities and onward towards animal kingdoms and plant kingdoms – and we are sometimes encouraged towards it. In any case, moving towards empathy and moving away from it is the thing that makes us most human.

And, in any case, I am bound to get a family member’s feelings as wrong as I would a dolphin’s, but that doesn’t mean that I should stop trying.

We didn’t stay for long in the Cinesphere (because we promised the attendants that we wouldn’t) but from my limited time and specific perspective, I think “Wild Ocean” was about freedom.

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