Making New Infrastructure …

The market dictates you wait till bridges fall down.

There’s some awesome Rafael Correa quote about how he invested gov’t money in stuff like, I dunno, job programs and education and silly shit like that, and their economy is booming. Or I could be wrong. Too tired to try to find it. And Snowden can’t go there.

TJ/ What do you guys think about this Snowden guy? Like, the guy. In a way, the media is kinda pulling a Bradley Manning on him and investigating their personal lives almost as much as what they did. They seem to be trying to create a connection between motivation and private matters that might not hit the germanity level of the Texas Senate. ;-)

I dunno. I was pissed when PBS did that hit piece on Manning. Snowden is coming off like a jerk and is losing whistleblower cred. Sure, he sounds like a jerk, but is what he did important? Is it important that he’s a doucher?

Yes, it’s important that Assange is a doucher rapist.

Cool explosion, but I was hoping to hear more of die schöne deutsche Sprache. Speaking of which, the Goethe Institut here had an event last night in honor of the 50th anniversary of JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech (which fell on Wednesday, to be precise). The highlight was a screening of Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three. Even having seen it before I was struck by the presence of numerous scenes in German with no subtitles. Granted, more Americans spoke it then (my maternal grandparents, both chemistry Ph.Ds, even had to study it, because the leading textbook at the time had not yet been translated from German into English), but, more broadly, it seems to speak to a faith in the audience’s intelligence and ability to discern meaning from a scene’s physicality that is, sadly, absent from most contemporary Hollywood movies.

@mellbell: That sounds like a lot of fun.
Do you watch German movies on Netflix? I saw Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, which was fairly disturbing, as expected. (Aside: Do German comedies even exist?). Netflix has a pretty great selection of Spanish and Japanese films as well.

P.S. Were jelly donuts on the menu?

P.S.S. I’m So Excited, the new Pedro Almodóvar film, opens today. Yay!

/sick, sad, wrong & hilarious/

Exploding Actresses

Your favorite films–now with exploding heads. Reminds me of the time that I couldn’t stop hysterically laughing after Mr. Big left Carrie at the alter in the first SATC movie (which unfortunately did not feature any exploding heads).

@¡Andrew!: That’s very funny.

There certainly are German comedies. and, of course, operettas. I saw a musical comedy a couple of years back that featured a bunch of dancing sailors, a great deal of Swarofski crystal, and three couples heading for New York on a liner because they thought of it as the most magical and exciting place on earth and wanted to get married there. One of the couples were men. The last number with the ship steaming into New York harbor was actually quite touching.

@mellbell: Have you read Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities? I read it years ago and was very impressed. It’s about why we love one person and not another.

Speaking of which, the gays are marrying in CA right now.

It’s NINE PM! Someone TURN OFF THE SUN! damn

@¡Andrew!: I saw the Meinhof Conspiracy. Sophie Scholl is awesome. I loved The Counterfeiters.

@mellbell: Also, Billy was from there.

@¡Andrew!: Some German comedies I like are Good Bye Lenin!, Was tun wenn’s brennt?, 7 Zwerge, Alles auf Zucker!, Im Juli, and Soul Kitchen. The last two are by Fatih Akin, whose dramas (Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite) are incredible (but bleak). And, while not strictly a comedy, Mein liebster Feind, Werner Herzog’s documentary about his insane relationship with Klaus Kinski, is nevertheless hilarious.

@JNOV: Snowden should have stayed in the states and stood his ground here. NSA and the DoD have had leakers before, like Ellsberg. There have also been media running stories with classified data like Knoll at the Progressive. They mostly won their cases by building a constituency at home and telling the story of the crimes over and over again to keep the discussion from drifting into trivia like what difficult people they are, etc. His closest analogue in this cohort, Ellsberg, expected to go to jail but was shrewder in building a crowd around his activism, enlisting Ed Kennedy’s staff to help him make copies of the Pentagon Papers. He had the sense to organize a very well-focused and broad info dump to the leading papers of the time and make league with a number of key senators of the day. Snowden gave stuff to just one US paper and split. Now the story is about him going walkabout. He’s a lightweight and has no idea how to enlist institutions to defend his story – and himself.