20/06/2008 The Telegraph UK

Christopher Bray reviews Everything is Cinema by Richard Brody
# Anne Billson reviews Everything is Cinema

Too many critics who came after him were so convinced by his arguments for the virtues of classical Hollywood that they have never been able to see beyond it. As a result, Godard’s movies have been misunderstood - or, worse, ignored - by the very people whose careers he engendered.

Hence, perhaps, Godard’s near-Oedipal desire to slay the beast that bore him. Shooting the raucously joyful Une Femme est une Femme in 1960, Godard described the picture as a lament for the fact that life wasn’t a Hollywood musical.

A few years later, he was to be found lecturing an increasingly Marxian Paris that “it wouldn’t be bad to ban American cinema for a while. People must become aware that there are other ways to make films.”

Fed up as we all now are with contemporary Hollywood, it is hard not to sympathise. But it is harder still to sympathise with contemporary Godard - a man who in one breath can compare himself to Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, and in another claim to be engaged in work as important as that of any scientist and therefore deserving of public funding.

At times like this, one wants to grab Godard by the lapels and remind him that movies are already publicly funded: make a movie that the public wants to see and the funds will flood in.

He of all people ought to know. For his first 10 years as a director, Godard turned out masterpiece after masterpiece - À Bout de Souffle, Le Mépris, Bande à Part, Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou, Weekend. The cinemas couldn’t print tickets fast enough.

Then, almost overnight, the punters stopped coming. As Brody points out, Godard’s decline set in just as France’s post-war faith in Sartrean commitment and self-determination was giving way to the more formal concerns of Roland Barthes: it wasn’t what you did, it was the way you did it.

Godard being Godard, he went the opposite way, abandoning the high jinks of his early work for the hectoring anti-bourgeois dirges he has served up since the late Sixties.

Even after his return to something like narrative with Sauve qui Peut (la Vie) in the early Eighties, Godard has too often sacrificed the pleasure he takes in the surface of film for the putatively more serious depths of his philosophising.

Preaching only to the converted, he doubtless sees himself as a prophet without honour. And maybe he is, but he is a prophet without profits, too.

All of this might change with the publication of Brody’s monograph. While I shook my fist at Everything is Cinema almost as much as I nodded my head at it, the book has had its desired effect: it has made me want to take another look at what I remain convinced are the aridly programmatic likes of Prénom Carmen (1983) and King Lear (1987).

As critical achievements go, it mightn’t be up there with spotting the genius of Howard Hawks and Orson Welles. But from where I’m going to be sitting, it still looks like a mighty big deal.

By SAM WANG and SANDRA AAMODT
NY Times Published: June 27, 2008

FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls.

Even if they do not understand the neuroscience behind source amnesia, campaign strategists can exploit it to spread misinformation. They know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked. In repeating a falsehood, someone may back it up with an opening line like “I think I read somewhere” or even with a reference to a specific source.

In one study, a group of Stanford students was exposed repeatedly to an unsubstantiated claim taken from a Web site that Coca-Cola is an effective paint thinner. Students who read the statement five times were nearly one-third more likely than those who read it only twice to attribute it to Consumer Reports (rather than The National Enquirer, their other choice), giving it a gloss of credibility.

Adding to this innate tendency to mold information we recall is the way our brains fit facts into established mental frameworks. We tend to remember news that accords with our worldview, and discount statements that contradict it.

In another Stanford study, 48 students, half of whom said they favored capital punishment and half of whom said they opposed it, were presented with two pieces of evidence, one supporting and one contradicting the claim that capital punishment deters crime. Both groups were more convinced by the evidence that supported their initial position.

Psychologists have suggested that legends propagate by striking an emotional chord. In the same way, ideas can spread by emotional selection, rather than by their factual merits, encouraging the persistence of falsehoods about Coke — or about a presidential candidate.

Journalists and campaign workers may think they are acting to counter misinformation by pointing out that it is not true. But by repeating a false rumor, they may inadvertently make it stronger. In its concerted effort to “stop the smears,” the Obama campaign may want to keep this in mind. Rather than emphasize that Mr. Obama is not a Muslim, for instance, it may be more effective to stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man.

Consumers of news, for their part, are prone to selectively accept and remember statements that reinforce beliefs they already hold. In a replication of the study of students’ impressions of evidence about the death penalty, researchers found that even when subjects were given a specific instruction to be objective, they were still inclined to reject evidence that disagreed with their beliefs.

In the same study, however, when subjects were asked to imagine their reaction if the evidence had pointed to the opposite conclusion, they were more open-minded to information that contradicted their beliefs. Apparently, it pays for consumers of controversial news to take a moment and consider that the opposite interpretation may be true.

In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court wrote that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Holmes erroneously assumed that ideas are more likely to spread if they are honest. Our brains do not naturally obey this admirable dictum, but by better understanding the mechanisms of memory perhaps we can move closer to Holmes’s ideal.

Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, and Sandra Aamodt, a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”

Rehersal for Retirement (detail)
English Lime wood, Poplar, 2008

By David A. Keeps, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 26, 2008
The first in a yearlong series profiling California’s living legends of midcentury design.

AT 94, Otto Heino has no time for false modesty.

With an output of 10,000 pieces a year, Heino might also add “most prolific” to his list of superlatives. For more than six decades, the Ojai artist has been the workhorse of post-World War II ceramics, one of the artisans who transformed California crafts into a national design movement in the 1950s to ’70s. Now that home furnishings are falling in step with a burgeoning green movement, Heino’s work is resonating with a new generation drawn to his earthy, organic expression of midcentury modernism.

“He has understood and manipulated clay as well as — or better than — the handful of ceramists whose work transcends crafts,” says Los Angeles Modern Auctions owner Peter Loughrey, who has seen prices for Heino pieces double in the last few years. “And his experiments with glazing and firing techniques — well, it practically takes a scientist to do what he has done.”

Indeed, Heino and his late wife, Vivika, spent about 15 years developing the formula for a once-lost ancient Asian glaze that produces a velvety, low-sheen yellow on high-temperature stoneware and porcelain. Despite million-dollar-plus offers from companies in China, Japan and Korea, the recipe remains his secret. Instead, he sells his own pottery with the signature finish for as much as $25,000 per piece.

Among collectors, Heino also is known for jade-like celadon, rich blues and turquoises, pale purples and blood reds.

“The surface and color and the iron spots on a lot of the pots make them look natural, unmanipulated, like a rock you’d find somewhere,” Doug Van Sickle, a Sherman Oaks potter who studied with Heino, says of the finishes — some glassy, some satiny, others rough and speckled. “To get that look, you have to make your own clay.”

Despite his age and slight physique, Heino still fires his own pottery at 2,575 degrees inside the nine kilns of his cinder-block home studio. He packs and ships overseas orders himself and sells $150-and-up pieces to visitors in a showroom that the architect Lloyd Wright designed for the property’s original owner, the esteemed potter Beatrice Wood.

And, of course, he still throws at his wheel. During a recent visit to his studio, Heino effortlessly turned 50 pounds of clay into five impressive bowls and vases in well under an hour.

ALONG with Vivika, who taught generations of potters before her passing in 1995, Heino embodied the spirit of the 1950s studio crafts movement. In Southern California, modern ceramists such as the Heinos and Otto and Gertrud Natzler ushered in a new era — “a merger of designer and craftsman, and a unification of form and function,” says Christy Johnson, director of the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona.

In workshops often set up in pastoral communities such as Ojai, these artisans sharpened their skills while earning a living. Demand for their work was driven by the postwar boom for tract-style homes, Johnson says. “The style was modern — lots of glass, open floor plans — and that architecture called for a different type of decorative art.”

Otto and Vivika produced fittingly modern objects that were appreciated for their natural materials. In the back-to-the-earth counterculture of the 1960s, Johnson notes, such studio pottery fit the social and political priorities of the time.

Among artists, the couple were known for being generous with their expertise.

“They were the teachers who taught the teachers who taught us all,” says Van Sickle, 54, who studied with the Heinos in the 1980s. “To this day, I mix my own clay and glazes, just like they did.”

This organic style — something Heino calls “rugged but delicate” — is informed by centuries of craftsmanship. Bulbous vases with narrow necks and other simple, elegant shapes recall traditional Japanese pottery. His nature-inspired decorations reflect the English Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century as well as the indoor-outdoor lifestyle of Southern California.

But most important, Heino’s work ethic and aesthetic are in line with the Bauhaus philosophy of functional design.

It is a modernist sensibility that continues to influence contemporary California artists of note, including Van Sickle, Adam Silverman of Atwater Pottery in Los Angeles, Kevin Nguyen of Xiem Clay Center in Pasadena and James Haggerty, a Santa Barbara ceramist who at 13 was Vivika Heino’s youngest student.

“For those of us who work in creating vessels, as opposed to sculptural ceramics, Otto’s work is a perfect unity of throwing technique and refined forms,” Haggerty says, “a great example of what clay and glaze can do together.”

OTTO HEINO was born Aho Heino, a second generation Finnish-American in East Hampton, Conn., who with 11 siblings weathered the Great Depression raising dairy cows and delivering milk.

In World War II, while serving as a waist gunner aboard a B-17 bomber, Heino says he was shot down twice over Germany and escaped death because of his blond hair, blue eyes and dog tags with the more Teutonic-sounding “Otto Heino.”

During five years of Air Force duty, he briefly worked on engines at a Rolls-Royce factory in England. There he visited the studio of the legendary Bernard Leach, the Hong Kong-born artist who introduced Japanese techniques to British pottery, and the decision was made: “That was what I wanted to do,” Heino recalls.

At the end of the war, he attended the League of New Hampshire Arts and Crafts, where he studied painting and ceramics. He married his pottery instructor, Vivika, who in 1952 was recruited to teach at the University of Southern California.

Heino’s mechanical abilities and knowledge of ceramics led to a job with NASA here crafting nose cones for rockets. Well compensated but artistically unfulfilled, he gave up the position after 13 years to became a full-time potter.

The couple bought Wood’s home in the early 1970s (”paid her $35,000 cash,” Heino recalls) and set up shop in Ojai, signing their works “Vivika and Otto.”

Ask about his process today, and Heino simply responds, “The clay shows me what to do.” He centers the material on his wheel, squeezes it into a cylinder, then presses his thumbs down the center and out to the edges, drawing the clay upward with his fingers to create the walls of a bowl.

After 60 years, it’s an entirely intuitive set of movements. Unlike most potters, Heino uses little water to shape his creations. By not thinning out the clay, he can make sturdy vessels that are more than 2 feet tall or wide.

“You tend to see the same shapes again and again in Otto’s work,” says Gerard O’Brien, owner of Reform, a Los Angeles gallery specializing in California design and decorative arts. “He developed his vocabulary of utilitarian forms early on and added natural elements like leaves and branches impressed into the clay, and colored slip [liquid clay] painted with calligraphy brushes.”

The glazes, however, are Heino’s greatest legacy.

His famous yellow formula sells for $75,000 per 5-gallon bucket, Van Sickle says, “which I doubt costs more than $5 to make.”

When Heino first began selling the yellow pottery overseas, he received six-figure checks and wire transfers that led federal agents to his studio.

“They thought I was selling drugs,” Heino says with a laugh, recalling notations on the payments that said, “for pot.”

TODAY, where pet peacocks once strolled, the lush grounds of the artist’s home are patrolled by the border collie Robbie II.

In the kitchen, a collection of copper pots and pans — wedding gifts to Otto and Vivika — still hang from a shelf that he designed, and Heino still eats from stoneware plates made in the studio a quarter-century ago.

They’re decorated with his late wife’s calligraphic rendering of a blue swallow, a design that also appears on the master bath’s tiles — fitting for the man who won the gold medal at the 1978 Biennale Internationale de Ceramique d’Art in Vallauris, France, for a pot decorated with tiny birds perched on the rim.

A long teak dining table and chairs designed by Danish architect Hans Wegner stretch through the kitchen, leading the eye to an original wrought-iron butterfly chair with leather seat and a gas-powered potbellied stove that sits by a wall covered in handmade Heino tiles.

On the other side of the stove, a Windsor-style chair is testament to Heino’s East Coast roots.

“I like American Colonial and the old New England stuff,” says Heino, who sleeps in an old four-poster bed and hangs wooden pitchforks and cookie molds as art.

The living room is a midcentury modernist collector’s dream: A pair of authentic Papa Bears, Wegner’s jet-age version of a wing chair, straddle a flagstone fireplace.

Danish credenzas and tables are covered in ’50s and ’60s ceramic lamps and bric-a-brac. A long, lean Wegner sofa serves as a backdrop for ethnic and folkloric pillows and textiles. It is in this room that Heino lights a fire in winter or watches the Lakers on TV.

In February, doctors installed a pacemaker that slowed Heino down for a couple of weeks. But he was back to work soon enough.

“Never hurry, never worry,” he says, describing his attitude toward art and life.

“If you’re negative, you’ll never make it.”

marc foxx

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: June 25, 2008

Karl Rove was impressed with Barack Obama when he first met him. But now he sees him as a “coolly arrogant” elitist.

This was Rove’s take on Obama to Republicans at the Capitol Hill Club Monday, according to Christianne Klein of ABC News:

“Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”

Actually, that sounds more like W.

The cheap populism is really rich coming from Karl Rove. When was the last time he kicked back with a corncob pipe to watch professional wrestling?

Rove is trying to spin his myths, as he used to do with such devastating effect, but it won’t work this time. The absurd spectacle of rich white conservatives trying to paint Obama as a watercress sandwich with the crust cut off seems ugly and fake.

Obama can be aloof and dismissive at times, and he’s certainly self-regarding, carrying the aura of the Ivy faculty club. But isn’t that better than the aura of the country clubs that tried to keep out blacks? It’s ironic, and maybe inevitable, that the first African-American nominee comes across as a prince of privilege. He is, as Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic wrote, not the seed but the flower of the civil rights movement.

Unlike W., Obama doesn’t have a chip on his shoulder and he doesn’t make a lot of snarky remarks. He tries to stay on a positive keel and see things from the other person’s point of view.

He’s not Richie Rich, saved time and again by Daddy’s influence and Daddy’s friends, the one who got waved into Yale and Harvard and cushy business deals, who drank too much and snickered at the intellectuals and gave them snide nicknames.

Obama is the outsider who never really knew his dad and who grew up in modest circumstances, the kid who had to work hard to charm whites and build a life with blacks and step up to the smarty-pants set.

He might be smoking, but it would be at a cafe, hunched over a New York Times, an Atlantic magazine, his MacBook and some organic fruit-flavored tea, listening to Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” on his iPod.

Rove was doing a variation on the old William Buckley line: “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book than by the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty.”

Conservatives love playing this little game, acting as if the “elite” Democratic candidates are not in touch with people like themselves, even though the guys doing the attacking — like Rove, Limbaugh, O’Reilly and Hannity — are wealthy and cosseted.

Haven’t we had enough of this hypocritical comedy of people in the elite disowning their social status for political purposes? The Bushes had to move all the way to Texas from Greenwich to make their blue blood appear more red.

Everyone who ever became president was in the elite one way or another, including Andrew Jackson.

Rove and Co. are nervous because they see that Obama, in rejecting public financing, is not going to be a chump, like some past Democratic candidates.

For some of Obama’s critics, it’s a breathtaking bit of fungible principles, as though Gandhi suddenly donned a Dolce & Gabbana, or Dolce & Mahatma, loincloth.

But even as the Republicans limn him as John Kerry, as someone who is too haughty and too “foreign,” Obama is determined not to repeat what Kerry thinks was a big mistake: not having enough money to compete against the Republicans in 2004.

Charlie Black crassly argued in Fortune that a terrorist attack would “be a big advantage” for John McCain. And what’s scary is, Black is the smartest adviser McCain’s got.

It’s hard to believe that if Americans get attacked after all these years of getting strip-searched at the airport, they’re going to be filled with confidence at the performance of the Republicans on national security. And at least Obama wants to catch Osama and doesn’t think he’s getting his directions on war from “a higher Father.”

Rove’s mythmaking about Obama won’t fly. If he means that Obama has brains, what’s wrong with that? If he means that Obama is successful, what’s wrong with that? If he means that Obama has education and intellectual sophistication, what’s wrong with that?

Many of Obama’s traits are the traits that people in the population aspire to.

It looks as if Rove is on the verge of realizing his dream of creating a permanent position for the Republicans.

Unfortunately for him, it’s in the minority.

By CHARLES McGRATH
NY Times Published: June 24, 2008

Stand-up comedy in America is not, for the most part, a long-lived profession. Comics burn out, go stale, lose their edge. Some, like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, almost literally consume themselves. Others, like Steve Martin, prudently retire from the stage at the top of their form and then find other things to do. And a few old-timers, like Don Rickles, have turned themselves into living museums, doing a kind of humor that commemorates its own borscht belt roots.

George Carlin, who died on Sunday at 71, had a remarkably long and productive career of 50-odd years and was far from a museum piece. His last HBO special, “It’s Bad for Ya,” was broadcast in March, and like all the others, was an enormous hit. Mr. Carlin was beloved by the middle-aged, who had practically grown up with him, but also by young people whose parents weren’t even alive when he began appearing on “The Tonight Show” in the 1960s and transforming everyone’s notion of what stand-up could be.

That was still the era of bit comedy, of stories and one-liners. Mr. Carlin did routines that involved full-fledged characters of a sort that had seldom been seen on television before. There was Al Sleet, the hippy-dippy weatherman, for example, whose forecasts had an existential edge: “Dark. Continued dark throughout the evening.”

Mr. Carlin delivered these lines with the eye-rolling and the slightly spaced-out voice that eventually developed into his trademarks, when he abandoned characters for a more free-form kind of humor. He didn’t seem stoned, exactly, but a lot of his humor appeared to come from that part of the brain that lesser people need drugs to activate. He got tremendous mileage just from repeating certain words, dirty ones especially. His most famous routine was “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” You still can’t say them — or print them in most newspapers, for that matter — even after the issue went all the way to the Supreme Court.

In later years Mr. Carlin added three more words to the list, but the comic principle remained the same, and the joke was as fresh as ever. These ostensibly taboo words, which are at the same time an unavoidable part of our daily discourse, used and overheard everywhere except on television and in newspapers, became unaccountably funny when Mr. Carlin intoned them onstage, pausing for dramatic effect and every now and then wriggling with mock horror.

Like all the great comics, Mr. Carlin had a gift for saying — and thinking — things that other people wouldn’t or couldn’t. He wasn’t as threatening as Bruce or Pryor. Especially in his later years, when, mostly bald but with a white beard and just a hint of a ponytail in back, he would bounce onstage in a black sweater, black pants and sneakers, his persona was warmer, cranky rather than angry. He was like your outrageous beatnik uncle.

But his humor was always a little subversive and aimed at puncturing hypocrisy and feel-goodism. He hated religion, self-help movements, corporate and government doublespeak, shopping malls, fast food and trendy child-rearing practices. Though he delivered it with a smile, his forecast was the same as Al Sleet’s: dark and getting darker.

Mr. Carlin was a surprisingly effective physical comedian, prowling the stage with a microphone and delivering his punch lines with body English and facial acrobatics. But the heart of his humor was verbal. One of his favorite bits was an extended riff, a mock tirade, against what he called “soft language — the language that takes the life out of life.” Soft language was the substitution, say, of “bathroom tissue” for “toilet paper”; it was calling the dump the landfill and saying you were experiencing a “negative cash-flow situation” when what you really meant was that you were broke.

Mr. Carlin had dozens of examples, and he could cite them for minutes on end, alternately rueful and disbelieving. But what came through, even as he shook his head and used one or more of the seven forbidden words to say how stupid we were, was his love of language itself and how various and evocative it was. Even the expletives — or perhaps especially the expletives.