Moderator:
Jonathan Serviss, former KPCC Patt Morrison senior producer; current KNX 1070 Morning Drive writer/editor/producer.

Panelists:
David Simpson, author of 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration
Erin Aubry Kaplan, author of Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista

Notes:
-restorative vs retributive justice (see truth and reconciliation)
-consensus reality
-forgotten reality/history; who writes history? who remembers history?
-alternate historical universe

Gods, Graves & Scholars by C.W. Ceram:
“Humanity, which used to be so entirely absorbed in the daily assaults of contemporary events and future threats, has learned to be curious about its past and even fascinated by it.”

• that cummerbund was spelled with a “b” (as in cumberbund)
• that chartreuse was a shade of red (actually: green)
• that puce was a shade of green (actually: reddish to purplish brown)
• that myriad requires an “of” (as in “myriad of colors” not “myriad colors”)
• that the phrase was “another thing coming” (instead of “another think coming“)

I am Jack’s wasted life

I am legend

I am the walrus

I am that I am

I am I said

Will I am

call me Ishmael

call me Al

my name is Jonas

my name is Wakefield

my name is Slim Shady

my name is Asher Lev

my name is Trinity

Trinity is still my name

the man with no name

he-who-must-not-be-named

he who shall not be named

obscenity/vulgarity
fudgecicles

blasphemy/profanity
jiminy christmas
dangit
goshdarn
darnit
drat
consarnit
zounds
bejeebus
geez louise
egad
gadzooks
crikey
for pete’s sake
sacre bleu
gee whiz
jeepers creepers
sam hill
heavens to betsy

other
oy vey
oi va voi
ay ya
ay yi yi
huy

doppleganger
mantra
kismet
aeon (as opposed but related to eon)
mutation
symbiotic
chimera
gamma radiation
phoenix
clandestine

There is really no few quotes or list of facts to sum up this book. It’s all over the place, delightfully and frustratingly.

Here’s a link.

I’ll share one quote, though there are better others.

“[he] fell away into the bottomless abyss of the formerly known.” — “110 West Sixty-first Street”

I particularly liked “Chablis,” “Bluebeard,” “The Palace at Four A.M.,” and “Sentence.”

I particularly did not like “At the Tolstoy Museum,” “The Wound,” and “Conversations with Goethe” (even though the title was so promising).

a list of changes I wasn’t looking for, but have now made actual by witnessing them, r.i.p.:

• Rite Aid — closed, empty
• Hollywood Video — closed, empty
• Circuit City — all remnants of the red now gone
• Mann Festival on Lindbrook closed — “thanks for your patronage”
• National Theatre on Lindbrook closed and demolished (you can still see in on Google Maps street view for living in the past)
• Native Foods — you no longer order at the counter? it’s still as tiny as in memory though
• gift store on west side of Westwood Blvd. where i once bought a prism — closed, empty, along with nearly everything else on the block. There was once a Hawaiian BBQ place.

This is just recent changes. This is just in an accidental few-block tour of the mini-city.

There have been other slower and faster deaths through the years. There are other disappearances I didn’t bother to seek out.

“The years… when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.” — C.G. Jung reflecting on Liber Novus (The Red Book)

Intro: 21 films available to be nominated this year, and you must watch all to nominate at all; this year’s diversity: 2 “classic” animation, one CG and two stop motion

Coraline 3D clip #1 (into the other world)

Henry Selick Q&A:

This project came about because [said with slight irony] Neil Gaiman saw the credits of Nightmare Before Christmas and actually noticed that Tim Burton was not the director, so Gaiman contacted him while working on the book for Coraline.

How do you make a scary movie for kids? How do you sell it? Disney’s been doing it for years.

stop motion characters had “blocks” and “rehearsal”

Lenny Lipton helped with the 3D; it was different working with 3D. They tried to flatten the regular world a little and give the other world more dimensionality.

Jack Skeleton had 150 heads with different expressions. They wanted to make Coraline more expressive — they were able to have someone draw her expressions in 2D then have a computer render it to 3D, which could be printed out.

Coraline 3D clip #2 (escape)

Fantastic Mr. Fox clip #1 (courting)

Fantastic Mr. Fox clip #2 (Bean’s Secret Cider Cellar)

The Princess and the Frog clip #1a (“Almost There”)

The Princess and the Frog clip #1b (“Friends on the Other Side”)

John Musker and Ron Clements Q&A:

Disney had been talking about a version of this Grimm’s fairy tale for years, as had Pixar. Pixar envisioned a version set in Chicago at one point. John Lasseter wanted it set in New Orleans. John and Ron proposed a 1920s American fairy tale featuring an African American heroine set in New Orleans.

writing the music– the music should advance the story, you shouldn’t be able to take them out; they met with Randy Newman — this was different than the way he usually worked songs being integral to the movie; they showed him story boards w/ ideas and he filled in the rest

The clip we saw was the third version of almost there because they moved the location (and therefore the feel–optimistic / sad) of the song twice. Currently there’s a reprise where the song originally was.

The first clip’s style was inspired by Aaron Douglas from the Harlem Renaissance.

Parts of New Orleans today are similar to how they were in the 1920s. They went to visit 3 times for research (didn’t do this for most of their movies like Aladdin or The Little Mermaid). The first time they met a Voodoo priestess who showed them some sites. Their first tour guide Reggie was inspiration for the “Ron” character. They wanted authentic details — a valentine to New Orleans.

any cuts? no “soup eating sequence” as in Snow White

they call theirs a “self-inflicted partnership”

The Princess and the Frog clip #3 (swamp gumbo)

“the year’s ‘Hollywood story’ comes from Ireland”

The Secret of Kells clip #1 (in the forest)

Tomm Moore Q&A

The history of the Book of Kells

saw with Mulan and Hercules tat you can take indigenous art and update it and present it with animation

thought it would be funny kids going to their parents “mom, i want to see the story about the medieval monks and the manuscript”

work for the film done in Ireland, France, Belgium, Hungary, and Brazil

utilized triptychs, inspired by the styles of medieval manuscripts and artists such as Klimt

used variety of animation — if 2D is “dead” they wanted to make it as 2D as possible

The Secret of Kells clip #2 (Viking attack)

Up 3D clip #1 (courting and marriage)

Pete Docter Q&A
wanted to make a movie about a grouchy old man character — like his grandpa — can just say whatever he want

approached it the same as 2D — wanted it to look good in 2D and 3D; used 3D emotionally — so flattened the scenes where he’s sad or depressions and made more exciting scenes have more depth

Up 3D clip #2 (talking dog)

Q&A with whole panel: what they like most about directing these films, what they like least, why animation?, how do they relate to characters so different from themselves? (apparently it’s easy), etc.

The “Milgram Experiment,” along with the Stanford Prison Experiment, is probably one of the better-known sociological experiments of the ’60s / ’70s. While I knew the basics (a person goes in for a psychological experiment—supposedly about the affects of punishment on learning—and is told by an experimenter to shock the “learner” (actually an actor) with increasingly higher voltage), the book was good in explaining how they varied the experiment to delve into the reasons for people’s behavior. Milgram and his colleagues were surprised at the percentages of people who obeyed the experimenter and shocked the “learner” while he is strapped down to a chair and protesting in pain, so they did a thorough job of investigating the reasons for this unexpected behavior. They also went beyond proving that people tend to obey authority and tested out what constitutes “authority.”

Roles: “teacher” — the actual subject, the person who came in for the supposed learning experiment; “learner” — an actor supposedly getting shocked; “experimenter” — the person in charge of the experiment

In the most basic version the teacher and learner arrive, are told by the experimenter about the learning experiment, and draw assignments from a hat as to who will be learner and who will be teacher. The drawing is rigged, but it’s an important aspect of the experiment (one of very few topics that Milgram doesn’t address as much as I would have liked) that the teacher think that he/she could just as easily have been in the other role, getting shocked.

The book is well worth reading, and I won’t get into all Milgram’s explanations and findings, but here are the versions of the experiment:

Experiment (# of people) (explanation)

1 Remote (40) (learner in the other room, strapped down, but no feedback; only deterrent is that shock levels are labeled as dangerous)

2 Voice-Feedback (40) (learner in the other room, strapped down and yelling in pain after the 150v shock level)

3 Proximity (40) (learner in the same room)

4 Touch-Proximity (40) (learner in the same room and refusing to be shocked, teacher must hold his hand to shock pad to proceed)

5 More Meager Lab (40) (new version of same experiment — this lab is not as fancy looking)

6 Change of Personnel (40) (if the learner seems more dominating, would that change things?)

7 Experimenter Absent (40) (experimenter leaves the room, is available by phone to tell the teacher to continue administering shocks)

8 Women (40) (all other groups were men only; this is male experimenter, male learner, female teacher)

9 Heart Condition (40) (learner begins the experiment by mentioning he has a minor heart condition)

10 Office Building (40) (setting is local office building instead of university lab)

11 Subject Chooses Shock Level (40) (teacher does not administer shocks beyond the maximum level he feels comfortable shocking the victim at)

12 Learner Demands to Be Shocked (20) (experimenter says let’s stop, but learner says let’s go on)

13 Ordinary Man Gives Orders (20) (instead of the experimenter being in charge, another supposed subject (actually another actor) is involved — another rigged drawing puts the three in their roles)

13a Subject as Bystander (16) (if in 13, the teacher refuses to admister shocks, the third person says “If you won’t, I will”)

14 Authority as Victim (20) (learner refuses to be shocked until he sees the experimenter go through the situation first)

15 Two Authorities, Contradictory Commands (20) (two experimenters giving opposite commands — continue / stop)

16 Two Authorities, One as Victim (20) (combination of 15 and 14)

17 Two Peers Rebel * (40) (there are three co-teachers (two of them are actors), and the two opt out at certain points)

18 Peer Administers Shocks (40) (subject is in the room in teacher role, but co-teacher with someone else who has to actually push the button)

*This is the only one that’s not entirely satisfyingly explained, which Milgram admits. More of the “teachers” refused to finish the experiment in this situation, but is that peer influence, or realizing there are no repercussions for quitting, or the idea of quitting being introduced as an option, or feeling judged by the other two (who remain in the room) for proceeding when they didn’t, etc.

Notes (taken on a receipt that I managed to scrounge up (didn’t have a notebook with me) for something purchased 02-06-10 for *5.00 and *0.49 tx, which I now remember was a Norton Critical Edition of Death in Venice from Counterpoint):

Intro:
quote from the book comparing the growth of math to the growth of a city

Crease:

• inspiration for the book came from looking at a “e=mc^2″ ornament — how equations have become symbolic and taken on cultural meaning

.

• Pythagorean Theorem
• symbol of a proof
• c^2 = a^2 + b^2, rule known of well before Pythagoras, but the Greeks did the proof
• first extant example of the proof in Plato’s Meno
• people are still trying to discover new ways to prove this, there are hundreds of variations already; proving this anew is not about the contribution to mathematics but the joy of discovery
• anecdote of when Einstein was 12 and first saw this proof, idea of universal rules

.

• F = ma and gravity
• Galileo as bridge between Aristotle and Newton; his idea that mass is something separate from weight
• story of apple traced back to Newton himself
• Newton would ask how? not why? (had to do with his theology)

.

• e = mc^2 and general relativity
• why we know it in this form (with the corrective amount left off) due to a book on the Manhattan Project after the bombs had been dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• has become a symbol for knowledge itself
• Einstein wanted to combine seemingly disparate ideas of Maxwell’s and Newton’s

.

• e^(iπ) + 1 = 0
• evidence in Los Angeles trial
• (my note: see footnote pg. 199 Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea about Euler’s equation as the “paragon of mathematical beauty”)

.

• entropy
• referenced across disciplines in works, for example of Stoppard and Pynchon)

.

• uncertainty Heisenberg and Schrodinger
• Copenhagen play: Bohr vs. Heisenberg on making sense
• uncertainty and quantum in popular culture — painting, literature, scultpure, theology, literary criticism, humor (A cop pulls Heisenberg over. “Do you know how fast you were going?” “No, but I can tell you exactly where I am.”)
• people know that observations had and effect before Heisenberg

.

• Maxwell’s equations
• didn’t actually write the equations (as we know them) himself, Heaviside did that later

.

• how equations changed through history
• often given in words first, and becomes “catchier” later, such and Newton with F = ma
• at some point “=” and “+” etc. had to be invented

.

• Suggested reading: David Lindley’s Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science

.

• side note: several of these equations are on the steps outside of LAPL