What do you get for the father who has everything? How about a healthy dose of canonical resentment, in the form of Sylvia Plath’s most famous poem, read by Plath herself, from our list of Cultural Icons?
Or, if you’d prefer something that says “I love you” with a little less rancor, you might want to go with a video that’s guaranteed to make him smile.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
In 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney personally engineered a loophole in the U.S. energy bill exempting companies that use an oil- and gas-drilling procedure known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. As a result, tons of diesel fuel and assorted chemicals–some of them toxic, like benzyne–are injected at high pressure into the earth at the sole discretion of the companies doing the injecting. One of the chief beneficiaries of Cheney’s string-pulling is the company that invented the procedure, Halliburton, which employed Cheney as chairman and CEO just prior to his becoming vice president. (A coincidence?)
In the wake of the Halliburton Loophole, as it has come to be known, there have been a growing number of water pollution cases, from Pennsylvania to Colorado, associated with fracking. Some of those cases were documented in last year’s Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary, Gasland, by Josh Fox, who said in a PBS interview, “I could take a car battery and throw it in the watershed and go to federal prison, but these guys can take the same chemicals and inject it by the thousands of gallons, and they’re exempt. It makes no sense.”
It’s a serious issue involving two of America’s vital interests–the need for energy and the need for safe drinking water–but a group of journalism students in New York University’s Studio 20 master’s program, in association with the public-interest journalism group ProPublica, has taken a light-hearted approach, creating a music video to raise awareness of fracking. It’s called “My Water’s on Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song).” The purpose of the project, according to group leader David Holmes, is to encourage people to read ProPublica’s reporting on the issue. “We were concerned with building a better entryway into that investigation,” Holmes told Poynter.org, “and we figured a song would be the perfect way to do it–especially since it’s called fracking.”
If you were stuck somewhere far away from yesterday’s lunar eclipse, here’s some consolation courtesy of NASA. The Scientific Visualization Studio at the Goddard Space Flight Center has compiled this two and a half minute video from over a year’s worth of data recorded by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has been orbiting the moon at 50 kilometers above its surface for over a year.
The results are pretty spectacular, and might render the pain of missing a chance to watch the moon turn red a little more bearable, especially for all you heartbroken Cancers (we’ll get through this.)
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
The New York Times has posted A.O. Scott’s 3‑minute look back at the 1929 short film Un Chien Andalou. Scott describes the surrealist classic, a collaboration between painter Salvador Dalí and a very young first-time filmmaker Luis Buñuel, as an “old dog with an endless supply of new tricks.” The short’s procession of seemingly absurd, unconnected images, he adds, does not follow the logic of narrative but rather the “logic of dreams.”
Even though its most famous (or infamous) images — a severed hand, a hand covered with ants, and most finally a hand slicing into a woman’s eyeball with a razor blade — seem less shocking now than they did 80 years ago, Un Chien Andalou is still a pleasure. Our reality has changed since the 20s. Our dreams, less so.
You can watch Un Chien Andalou in its entirety, along with L’Âge d’Or, another Buñuel/Dalí production, in our collection of Free Online Movies. But proceed with caution: About 25 years ago, I slipped a copy into the family VCR, expecting a cute cartoon about an Andalusian dog. I’m still recovering.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Several weeks back, Go the F**k to Sleep, the irreverent new children’s book, gained national attention when pirated PDF copies went viral on the internet. But don’t feel sorry for the author and illustrator. The book is now #1 on the Amazon bestseller list; Samuel Jackson has narrated the official audio book (you can probably snag a free copy through this Audible.com deal); and Werner Herzog delighted fans when he read the (not safe for work) bookat the New York Public Library book party held earlier this week. And, yes, this is the real Werner Herzog — not the impersonator who passed around popular readings of Curious Georgeand Twas the Night Before Christmas on YouTube …
A new way to see the world. Give NASA seven minutes, and they’ll show you the Earth’s most impressive landscapes — as seen from space, in HD. The coasts of Namibia, Tunisia and Madagascar, they’re all on the itinerary, along with Sicily, China, Iran, and Utah. Plus you will see a giant hurricane over the Atlantic ocean. Not to be missed.
Ophir Kutiel, aka Kutiman, burst onto the digital scene with The Mother of All Funk Chords in 2009. Now he has resurfaced with a new video. This time, it’s a musical journey through Jerusalem, a mashup that weaves together the sounds of local musicians, creating a visual/aural composition that lets you tap into the unique sound of a city that lives partly in the past, partly in the future, always wavering between optimism and despair.…
But, no matter, you have to separate the philosophy from the person … or so many acolytes of flawed thinkers have argued. Right fans of John Edwards? All three of you? So here you have it, The Selfish Path to Romance, a love manual based on Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. The video almost screams parody, but it’s apparently not. You can snag a copy of the book on Amazon here…
You’re not squeamish, are you? A team of students at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, in Germany, has taken the aesthetic sensibilities of the horror and action movie genres and imported them into the realm of the microscopic, creating a stunning work of 3D animation called Loom, about a spider and a very unlucky moth. Directed by Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck and Csaba Letay of the studio Polynoid, Loom presents a highly stylized depiction of the the sort of violence that happens all around us in nature, usually beyond our notice. Loom and another short film (Der Besuch, by Austrian director Conrad Tambour) shared first prize in the animated film category at last month’s Sehsüchte International Student Film Festival in Potsdam. Despite its dazzling technical brilliance, you may find the film to be a bit … creepy.
The narrator of this rare clip describes James Joyce — arguably the greatest novelist of the 20th century — as a “small, thin, unathletic man with very bad eyes.” Ouch. And it gets worse. According to the voiceover, when Joyce and drinking buddy Ernest Hemingway faced a potential brawl, Joyce would hide behind his more imposing comrade and shout “Deal with him, Hemingway, deal with him!!!’
But we bet they were both just hiding behind Gertrude Stein.
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Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
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