Alan Jacobs

Is it a good movie? No, not if you want plots you can follow and visuals that don’t seem to be maiming themselves. (On the other hand, why would you?) But it’s greater and stranger than most conventionally good movies because of this bizarre thematic Möbius strip: Welles tried to make a personal artistic statement out of a B-movie thriller, and the thriller became the exact nightmare he was trying to make a statement about. In a way, the art was more self-aware than he was; it refused to stop being life. He had built the hall of mirrors, then found that he’d wandered into it. Audiences in 1948, when Columbia released the film in America, were not prepared for something this opulently broken. The movie flopped.

— Brian Phillips on The Lady from Shanghai

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Is it a good movie? No, not if you want plots you can follow and visuals that don’t seem to be maiming themselves. (On the other hand, why would you?) But it’s greater and stranger than most conventionally good movies because of this bizarre thematic Möbius strip: Welles tried to make a personal artistic statement out of a B-movie thriller, and the thriller became the exact nightmare he was trying to make a statement about. In a way, the art was more self-aware than he was; it refused to stop being life. He had built the hall of mirrors, then found that he’d wandered into it. Audiences in 1948, when Columbia released the film in America, were not prepared for something this opulently broken. The movie flopped.

— Brian Phillips on The Lady from Shanghai

newberrylibrary:

Happy National Tourist Appreciation Day!

“Yosemite and the Big Trees of California”

This advertisement, created in 1881, encouraged tourists to visit Yosemite in California. Yosemite was first visited by tourists in 1855 and was declared a U.S. National Park in 1890.

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newberrylibrary:

“Yosemite and the Big Trees of California”

This advertisement, created in 1881, encouraged tourists to visit Yosemite in California. Yosemite was first visited by tourists in 1855 and was declared a U.S. National Park in 1890.

thingsmagazine:

‘Bauer 8mm’, a French lithographic poster, circa 1960

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thingsmagazine:

‘Bauer 8mm’, a French lithographic poster, circa 1960

What Rod Dreher calls the Benedict Option has been getting a lot of pushback from critics — and Rod hasn’t even explained in any detail what he means by it! So before you develop your own premature opinion about it, or even if you have already given your premature opinion about it, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. The Benedict Option, whatever form it ultimately takes, arises from a concern for strengthening the church of Jesus Christ. If you don’t really care about strengthening the church of Jesus Christ, you have no skin in this game, so you’d be doing everyone, including yourself, a favor by, you know, just moving along to other things.

2. Christians, by commandment and by experience, have a complicated relationship to “the world” — the saeculum. In his farewell talk to his disciples, Jesus prays to the Father: “I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world … I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” And St. Paul writes, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” None of this is easy to parse; there can be great disagreement over how to implement this vision of believers who are in the world but not of it. It would be foolish to expect unanimity.

3. Moreover, from the very beginnings of the church it has been understood that Christians will not fulfill this divine vision in a single way, but rather in very many ways, according to particular vocations: “many members [organs] of one body” and all that. So if other Christians are discerning a calling that you do not discern for yourself, there’s no need to be consumed by agita — even if the New Benedictines are running for the hills, you can just wish them well and return to whatever calling you perceive to be your own. Nobody is going to make you run for the hills, so relax. (N.B.: the Benedict Option, whatever it is, is not about running for the hills.)

4. Whatever else it is, the church is ekklesia — assembly — and koinonia — community, fellowship. It is therefore a shared culture, or subculture, or counter-culture. Christians cannot simply and wholly offload the responsibility for culture-making to non-Christian members of society. So if you are a Christian, and you don’t think the Benedict Option, whatever you believe it to be, is a valid model of culture-making, then you have an obligation to articulate an alternative model. “I don’t like it” is Not. Good. Enough.

The term “Internet Of Things” is a desperate attempt to make a pointer for a field that barely exists yet.  We do this a lot these days.  We use the word “television” to point at a field of industry that doesn’t particularly use television sets anymore.  We use the word “telephone” for a class of mobile devices that we very rarely use telephonically anymore.  And we act like the term “Internet Of Things” makes sense for the field we’re trying to define.  And, unless the modern internet was originally biological in nature, it was always an internet of things.  I always got my internet out of boxes of various kinds.  Didn’t you?  If you think Internet of Things is a good name, did you previously obtain your connection through whalesong or echolocation?  Did you pour Soylent on your Internet Lobe to get online?  Did you send your packets by raven? It’s always been an internet of things, and those people have never been any good at naming stuff, and that’s how we ended up with “tweets.”

- Warren Ellis

The problem that I and many other Baptists had with Carson speaking at the Pastors’ Conference is not primarily that he is an Adventist. My problem is that evangelicals need to stop platforming political candidates at denominational functions. This goes not only for Carson, but even for someone like former Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee.

By highlighting the political insiders of the week at Kingdom-oriented events, we keep giving the watching world the impression that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is inextricably connected to voting Republican. And that our talk about Jesus, grace, and forgiveness is really just pious window-dressing for a core political agenda. Annual denominational meetings for pastors should attend to issues such as the best preaching practices, evangelism, missions, reaching and discipling young people, praying for revival, etc. – isn’t that enough to do without giving keynote space to random presidential candidates?

—Thomas Kidd

The term “Internet Of Things” is a desperate attempt to make a pointer for a field that barely exists yet.  We do this a lot these days.  We use the word “television” to point at a field of industry that doesn’t particularly use television sets anymore.  We use the word “telephone” for a class of mobile devices that we very rarely use telephonically anymore.  And we act like the term “Internet Of Things” makes sense for the field we’re trying to define.  And, unless the modern internet was originally biological in nature, it was always an internet of things.  I always got my internet out of boxes of various kinds.  Didn’t you?  If you think Internet of Things is a good name, did you previously obtain your connection through whalesong or echolocation?  Did you pour Soylent on your Internet Lobe to get online?  Did you send your packets by raven? It’s always been an internet of things, and those people have never been any good at naming stuff, and that’s how we ended up with “tweets.”