Joel's humanistic blog

When C4SS Media made this video , they obviously forgot to include this background image:

"Most intellectuals are attracted to power, but none with less ambivalence than Arthur Schlesinger Jr."   Posted with Blogsy

Sorry to not have a more substantial post, but I thought I'd check in with the blogosphere on the 17th anniversary of Carl Sagan's passing.  It's been a long seven years since the 10th anniversary blogathon (yet Sagan would have only just turned 79!), and the Internet is a very different place, but I am thinking about how to revive something like the blogathon on an ongoing basis.

Must-see film screening of the YEAR : Dario Argento's horror classic Suspiria at the Museum of the Moving Image tomorrow . Yes, it gets shown all the time at revival theaters.  But there is no movie that more demands to be experienced in the very best possible visual and sound quality, deservedly celebrated for both its gorgeous cinematography and stunning soundtrack.  I've even been to a screening where the theater had the truly unenviable dilemma of putting the film either on a screen with sound-system problems, or one with better sound but markedly worse visual quality.  And this is almost the Platonic ideal of a presentation: in the Museum's gigantic main theater with the most impeccable revival screening environment in New York, in not only a 35mm print in an era when that is becoming increasingly rare, but an "imported 35mm print of uncut UK version"!

"In 1975, two leftists, one of whom had been a top GOP insider, anarcho-capitalist, and a founder of the American libertarian movement, collaborated on a book published by a leading Washington, D.C. left-wing think tank and the Unitarian Universalist Association advocating decentralization of political and economic power from the federal, state and city levels to local neighborhoods — hopefully facilitated by the passage of a Republican senator's bill to divert 75% of income tax revenue to them."

Little-known fact: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians received a positive review in The New York Times praising Pia Zadora's "appealing" performance. No, really. Posted with Blogsy

At one point, this was how the Chrome browser's built-in automatic translation handled the header of mutualismo.org :

A day I have been awaiting for almost a decade has arrived: the classic, yet extremely rare collection of anarchist and freethought essays and poetry Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre has been posted as a Project Gutenberg eBook . It was in the summer of 2004 that I both read Selected Works and started proofreading for Project Gutenberg ; the book immediately struck me as the perfect fit for Project Gutenberg's mission of making freely available accessible editions of public domain books, particularly as Selected Works had always been overlooked by print publishers of such public domain material.  (Incidentally, the other classic turn-of-the-20th-century anarchist volume I read that summer, Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread , made it to Project Gutenberg in 2007 ).  And how fitting that the eBook be posted on the Fourth of July weekend, since de Cleyre's American-as-apple-pie anarchism is the perfect bookend to the Declaration of Independence being deliberately chos...

As mentioned by dorkbot's founder, NYC meeting organizer and sexy geek douglas irving repetto earlier today, he has just replaced the static dorkbot logo on the dorkbot home page with my animated GIF version assembling the several alternate-color-schemed logos douglas had previously created. Though I've contributed in various small ways to dorkbot over the years, this is a true honor! And I think it's the perfect encapsulation of the dorkbot spirit that an animated GIF, whose frames are images created by douglas with an old-school analog pen plotter, joins a BLINK tag on a webpage that's remained in plain-vanilla HTML all these years while waiting for the world to catch up with it. Posted with Blogsy

Here's the perfect opportunity for aspiring  libertarian op-ed writers  to follow  Murray Rothbard's lead  in getting into the opinion section of The New York Times : send in a response to the newspaper's weekly "Invitation to a Dialogue" feature.  I've floated the general idea of having libertarians coordinate on responding with letters to the editor  before , but this feature is particularly suitable for unconventional contributors due to being specifically aimed at soliciting contrasting responses from across the political spectrum to each week's piece (which makes it even more of a letdown when a promising topic gets a weak response).  And while the usual contributions make it clear that New York Times  regular columnists have no monopoly on  banal authoritarianism , this week's opening letter  Invitation to a Dialogue: Skipping 12th Grade  is a surprisingly Paul Goodman-esque  "practical proposal"  "to break the rigi...

From this morning's David Brooks column : Likewise, many teachers have an intuitive sense that different students have different learning styles: some are verbal and some are visual; some are linear, some are holistic. Teachers imagine they will improve outcomes if they tailor their presentations to each student. But there’s no evidence to support this either.

Les Misérables : everything Americans know about French revolutions. The Big Lebowski : everything Americans know about the New Left. Monty Python and the Holy Grail : everything Americans know about anarcho-syndicalism. Monty Python's Life of Brian : everything Americans know about leftist sectarianism. Posted with Blogsy

At 92YTribeca. It's been a while since the ultimate fan project has been shown in the NYC area, so this is a rare opportunity for Indiana Jones buffs!   Posted with Blogsy

FDR was closer than the Koch brothers to being a real-life Duke brother. Posted with Blogsy

As part of a fresh start for the new year, I decided to finally try out Tumblr (as a supplement to, not a replacement for, "regular" blogging on this blog and elsewhere). My currently-very-work-in-progress Tumblr is here .

New Girl:  This week is the second week of its second season. dorkbot:  This week is the second meeting of its 0x0cth season . New Girl: Adorkable. dorkbot: Adorkable. New Girl: Has a theme song written by Jess. dorkbot:  Has many theme songs written by dorkbots . New Girl: Rocks a lot of polka dots. dorkbot:  Rocks a lot of  pen plots . New Girl: Stars the pinup of williamsburg . dorkbot:  Created by a top 10 sexy geek . New Girl: Has inspired many animated GIFs. dorkbot:  Has a BLINK tag on the front page .

This Saturday, the Friends of the Modern School is having its 40th annual reunion  at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey to commemorate a unique anarchist educational experiment and utopian community.  This event may be of interest to those in the New Jersey/New York State area interested in alternative education, anarchist history, utopian intentional communities, and/or freethought. I've written more on the general background of the Modern School here and all of the coverage of the Modern School on this blog is here .

After a long stretch of tapering posting quantity followed by inactivity, I'm finally returning to regular blogging. For now, I'll be posting at this location, though I am considering a move, but I intend to post on a regular basis. It's a very different online world from when I started this blog in 2005, less blog-centric but much larger, and it's a good time to start afresh.

This weekend, NYC's IFC Center is showing John Carpenter's cult favorite Big Trouble in Little China at midnight on Friday and Saturday as part of a series of Carpenter midnight screenings.  And an item on the screenings is currently running as the top front page news item at the Big Trouble in Little China fansite The Wing Kong Exchange as a result of "BTLC fan Joel" sending it in!

Something I'm pretty sure I didn't expect to see when I flipped through today's New York Times op-ed page: a detailed plot summary of an op-ed writer 's "favorite children's book" by Frank Tashlin, who has a strong cult following among both fans of his live-action movies and animation buffs who know him for his relatively brief but influential period working on the Looney Tunes (and the book in question was later adapted into a cartoon at MGM, not Warner Bros., but made by Termite Terrace alumni Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble): The situation reminded me of my favorite children's book — "The Bear That Wasn’t," by Frank Tashlin — in which a factory is built around a bear while he is hibernating. When the bear wakes up, no one believes that he is a bear; everyone is certain that he is a malingering factory worker "who needs a shave and wears a fur coat." The bear keeps protesting, "But I am a bear." Ultimately, his confidence...