Green to Blue: A Modest View of a Serious Problem

Green to Blue is an animated short, which was named to the Top-Ten Shortlist of Friends of the Earth’s 2008 one-minute film competition. Green to Blue is a stop-motion animation that was made to promote global warming awareness. Elizabeth Klein, the film’s creator, explained that, “I made this stop motion to promote global warming awareness. Sometimes the simplest messages are the most powerful, so I’ve tried to present a child-like view of a serious problem.”

Green to Blue: A Modest View of a Serious Problem

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AIG Greed Redux: John Law and the Mississippi Bubble

A national outcry of public outrage has forced the Obama administration to take action on the large bonuses that AIG has given to a group of its executives. The bonuses that AIG has distributed went to the very group of employees whose risky trades brought the company to the brink of collapse. “It’s hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay,” Obama said at the outset of an appearance to announce help for small businesses hurt by the deep recession. “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat,” the president said.

The whole debacle of the greed displayed by AIG, as well as by some large banks that recently received large sums of bailout money from the government, is reminiscent of the simultaneous collapse of both the French trading arm and royal bank in the early 1700s. That collapse has been described as “John Law and the Mississippi Bubble.” John Law was a Scottish economist who believed that money was only a means of exchange that did not constitute wealth in itself and that national wealth depended on trade. During the reign of Louis XIV, John Law set up France’s Banque Générale Privée (“General Private Bank”), which developed the use of paper money. Many have considered Law to be little more than a colorful con man, responsible for the Mississippi Bubble and the chaotic economic collapse in France.

Richard Condie’s 1978 animated short film, John Law and the Mississippi Bubble, offers up a history lesson about that sensational get-rich-quick scheme, which took place in France over 200 years ago. The film won the Best Film Award at the 1980 International Short Film Festival in Tampere, Finland. With economist John Law at the helm, the plan was to open a national French bank and exchange bank notes for gold at wildly inflated share prices to mask the fact that the country’s gold had been depleted in the building of Louis XIV’s palace. In the film, when the inevitable rush to cash in the notes takes place, poor John Law is left broke and broken-hearted.

It was one of the most sensational get-rich-quick schemes heard of in a long time, but it eventually burst over the head of its originator, John Law. This “rags to riches to rags” story, in which the plan was to open a bank and exchange banknotes (paper!) for gold at wildly inflated share prices, ends when John Law, having been cleaned out as a result of a rush to cash in the notes, is left broke and broken-hearted.

John Law and the Mississippi Bubble

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Pure Detroit: When Old Things Get Broken

Pure Detroit is a short film by Ivan George with gorgeous cinematography, but also one which confronts the viewer with dramatic images of the effects that rapid economic and social change can have upon urban life. The impact of the film has been described as somewhere between heaven, hell and quiet meditation. While Pure Detroit is a beautiful visual mood piece, it’s also incredibly sad. The film reveals so much about the rapid changes we’re encountering in our world right now, how the old things gets broken much faster than new things are put in their place. Pure Detroit serves as a powerful reminder of what the old things breaking down can be like for so many of us.

Pure Detroit: When Old Things Get Broken

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Disappearing Storefronts: The Edifice Complex and the City’s Changing Face

New York’s neighborhood storefronts have long had the city’s history carved into their unusual, distinct facades. Each of these little stores is as unique as the neighborhood residents that they serve and are run by shopkeepers committed to providing a special service. Many of these shops have long served as essential parts of their communities, vital to the residents who depend on them for a multitude of everyday needs. But the storefront shops are quickly disappearing, as their neighborhoods are transformed by both rapid gentrification and quickly escalating rents in the real estate market.

The dwindling number of these commercial relics in the city’s rapidly changing streets range from tiny, humble “mom and pop” neighborhood stores tucked away on narrow side streets to well-known institutions on historic streets. The photographs of the city’s disappearing storefronts shown here provide a view of the rapid social and economic changes that are threatening the life of unique enterprises that have long made the city’s neighborhoods distinctive.

From photographs and text by James and Karla Murray.

Disappearing Storefronts: The Edifice Complex and the City’s Changing Face

(Please Click on the Image Above to View Photo-Gallery)

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Picture du Jour: Springtime for Limbaugh

Cartoon by: Steve Brodner

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Krazy Cupcake Dayze: Everything from Epicurean Blather to Fancy Cupcake Explowgions

Krazy Cupcake Dayze: Epicurean Blather, Cake Waltzing and Cupcake Explowgions

Nowadays, writers have been talking about cupcake-lovers as a foodie-cult, about how some kind of cupcake-craze has swept across most parts of the nation. In The Atlantic, Corby Kummer has written that even in the too-too au courant New York City, cloyingly cute little cupcake shops may seem like they’re passé, but they still continue to thrive there. Moreover, new ones seem to be opening across the land by the month, even though they’re often disappointing and downright silly. Nevertheless, according to Corby Kummer, the craze is worth keeping, if only, like the opera audiences at La Scala, to keep applauding until the performers finally do better.

In keeping with these Crazy Cupcake Dayze, I’ve put together this little article composed of three takes showing different viewpoints about this “fairycake” fad: the first is about faux haute-cuisine blather; the next is a frivolous illustration of silly cupcake capers; and finally, the morbid voice of cupcake-doom, which visually pronounces that the cupcake “plague” is a downright horrible, stinking calamity. The three different takes on our krazy cupcake dayze are entitled, respectively: Frosting on the Cake; Silly Kultured Kupcakes: Doing a Ditzy Dancing Waltz Thingee; and Demise of The Very Fancy Cupcake Kids: Huge Explowgions!

In The Frosting on the Cupcake, Atlantic Magazine’s Corby Kummer holds forth at length on the cupcake craze and demonstrates how one should properly perform a gastronomically correct cupcake taste test. Silly Kultured Kupcakes: Doing a Ditzy Dancing Waltz Thingee is a stop-motion animation created by a fellow who ruined a batch of cupcakes. Rather than throwing them out, he made the dilapidated cupcakes repent by doing a bit of dancing (waltzing, to be specific). Now, most of us would sigh and just toss the ruined batch of forlorn cupcakes out, but these little cupcakes got a second chance, even if only just long enough to perform their schmaltzy-waltz for this short-animation. No doubt, someone out there is asking, “What’s next, krumping cupcakes?“

The last piece is the voice of cupcake-doomsday, Demise of The Very Fancy Cupcake Kids: Huge Explowgions! Specifically, it’s the visually macabre account of a legend about how some fancy, luscious cupcake kids were living the carefree good life, famously enjoying their little tasty selves in what was left of a still dangerous part of earth, most of which already had been destroyed by years of awful war. But, according to legend, a big worrisome question still remained about these fancy little treats: Would they be able to survive? Or have cupcakes always just been too delicately fancy and sshhtuupid?

Epicurean Blather: The Frosting on the Cupcake

Silly Kultured Kupcakes: Doing a Ditzy Dancing Waltz Thingee

Demise of The Very Fancy Cupcake Kids: Huge Explowgions!

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Drux and Flux: The Flow of Progress into Tragic Social Decay

“It is only for the sake of those without hope
that hope is given to us.”

Walter Benjamin

Drux and Flux: Visual Comments on Today’s Deepening Economic Crisis

Drux and Flux won the Canadian Film Institute’s 2008 Award for Best Canadian Animation, as well as an Honorable Mention for Best Experimental/Abstract Animation at the 2008 International Animation Festival in Otowa, Canada. Director Theodore Ushev’s Drux and Flux presents an oppressive and miserable vision of how both the contemporary commitment to an over-arching belief in progress and to the ever-expanding industrialism in society have effected modern life. The five-minute short film opens with shots of a printing press, which are used to present the film’s opening titles. That scene then switches away and shifts, through rapidly choreographed cuts, to an elevated train, a dimly-lit manufacturing city-scape, the interior of a factory, then to the manufacturing building’s inner workings. The cuts are rapid, and the fast pace is maintained throughout the film.

The quickly cut scenes track the rise and fall of industry and are accompanied by increasingly discordant sounds on its background music track. Scenes from Soviet propaganda posters and the clashing of gears and girders are juxtaposed, along with almost subliminal flashes of the words “1932” (the year of Hitler’s first election-run for Chancellor of Germany) and “Juggernaut” (a possible reference to perceptions of WWII Germany as an “unstoppable force”). The latter disturbing associations between ever-increasing industrialization, exponential technological advance and the rise of totalitarian political regimes can be quite unsettling. Drux and Flux culminates with clip-art style images of a human skeleton that is reinforced with building materials, yet it’s still unable to support itself. The overall result for the viewer of this film is a vision of the potential horrors of modern-day industrialization, which has been summoned like a nightmare brought about by watching too many hours of late-night horror films while listening to a constantly-looping off-speed recording of Verdi’s Il Travatore Anvil Chorus.

Ushev drew his inspiration for Drux and Flux from a variety of sources. Sociologist-philosopher-political radical Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) is cited as his starting point, a work that presents a wide-ranging critique of both advanced capitalist and communist societies. This book theorized about the inevitable decline of revolutionary potential in capitalist societies and about the development of new and potent forms of social control, especially over the common working person. Marcuse argued that “advanced industrial society” created false needs which fused individuals into homogenized particles that comprised the existing system of production and consumption. Advertising, industrial management, politicians and the mass-media cooperated to brainwash members of the working class, eliminating their potential for effective expressions of negativity, critique, and opposition. The result, according to Marcuse, was a “one-dimensional” universe of thought and behavior, in which the very aptitude and ability for critical thinking and for developing either opposing or alternative social positions was withering away.

As Drux and Flux travels through its series of dismal industrial scenes, one is left with a deeply sad mood about the frightening impressions of the enormous slabs of metal and rust, the smells of rotting death. By the end of this short five-minute journey, the viewer is left to wonder whether this is what things actually might be like when our industrial world finally reaches its end.

Drux and Flux: The Flow of Progress into Tragic Social Decay

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