OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

[Click for a larger, more 1955ish view.]

From Michel Hazanavicius, director of The Artist, OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions [OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies] (2006) is a smart and funny secret-agent spoof, with beautiful and dangerous women, international villains, and brilliant cinematography and special effects. Jean Dujardin seems to be channeling Cary Grant and Sean Connery (out of character, he resembles neither). His OSS 117 is charming, dim, self-satisfied, yet remarkably capable. Bérénice Bejo’s Larmina though is much, much smarter. As with The Artist, cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman shows himself to be an ace at capturing older styles of moviemaking. I love the period-perfect color and cheap projected background in the scene above.

Speaking of Cary Grant, I wonder how many viewers will recognize the Grant–Randolph Scott element in the flashbacks to 117’s relationship with Jack Jefferson (Philippe Lefebvre).

[Jack and 117, hitting a ball back and forth. Click for a larger view.]

Related posts
The Artist (and typography)
EXchange names on screen (Cary Grant and Randolph Scott)
Jean Dujardin Sings (Elaine’s post on 117’s performance of “Bambino”)

xkcd: “Wrong Superhero”

[xkcd, February 3, 2012.]

From the Life Photo Archive

[“534-Stephens College.” Photograph by Nina Leen. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Wikipedia reports that Stephens College is “a women’s college located in Columbia, Missouri.” I have David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest on my mind — thinking about the novel’s many masks (figurative and literal, some worn while engaging in “video telephony”) led me, idly browsing, to this photograph.

The record store as public good

Leon Wieseltier on Amazon and the closing of Washington, D.C.’s Melody Record Shop:

How easy must every little thing be? A record store in your neighborhood is also convenient, and so is a bookstore. There is also a sinister side to the convenience of online shopping: hours once spent in the sensory world, in the diversified satisfaction of material needs and desires, can now be surrendered to work. It appears to be a law of American life that there shall be no respite from screens. And so Amazon’s practices raise the old question of the cultural consequences of market piggishness. For there are businesses that are not only businesses, that also have non-monetary reasons for being, that are public goods. Their devastation in the name of profit may be economically legitimate, but it is culturally calamitous. In a word, wrong.

Going to Melody (The New Republic, found via Music Clip of the Day, where you can read more)

Record stores I have known
Relic Rack, Sam Goody’s, J&R
Record Service

Arteries of New York City

“Buses are slower than the subway, but they offer the pleasure of being able to see store windows and the people of the city as they work and play.” From the Prelinger Archives, it’s Arteries of New York City, a 1941 Encyclopedia Britannica film (found via The Atlantic).

Life in colledge

In the news: “A college student claims he was injured when a fraternity member in a ‘drunken stupor’ decided ‘that it would be a good idea to shoot bottle rockets out of his —

I’m stopping right there. You’ll have to click through to read the rest (found via Boing Boing).

Why colledge? That’s my word for “the vast simulacrum of education that amounts to little more than buying a degree on the installment plan.” Colledge cheapens the experience of students who are in college. Colledge students and college students are often found on the very same campus.

Related reading
All colledge posts (via Pinboard)

Same time, next year (plagiarism)

February 2011: dozens of MBA applicants at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business are found to have submitted plagiarized essays.

February 2012: a dozen MBA applicants at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management are found to have submitted plagiarized essays.

A plagiarized grad-school application essay suggests a long and successful undergrad history of academic misconduct, don’t you think? Professors who discover plagiarism and are thinking about proper penalties should always ask themselves: how likely is it that this is the first time the student has plagiarized?

Related reading
All plagiarism posts

Mysterious apologies

“I take back any false or bad remarks, any rudeness or negative actions.” Mysterious written apologies are baffling the town of Whitstable, Kent.

[My guess: someone in a twelve-step program is making amends.]

Social relations and technology

Dartmouth student Benjamin Schwartz:

When we draw our social experiences, including our most solemn and profound ones, out of the well of personal interaction and cast them into the public domain, they often are swept up in the current of exhibitionism. Genuine connections are made when people can let go of the notion that they might be judged and make self-expression the priority rather than endearment. Facebook crowds out the opportunities for this to happen. Ironically, this can render a tool meant to foster “connections” a profoundly isolating force.

Social Relations and Technology (The Dartmouth)

A related post
Infinite Jest, telephony

From The Waste Books

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was a professor of experimental physics and a keeper of Sudelbücher, “waste books”:

Merchants have a waste-book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch, I think it is in German), in which they enter from day to day everything they have bought and sold, all mixed up together in disorder; from this it is transferred to the journal, in which everything is arranged more systematically, and finally it arrives in the ledger, in double entry after the Italian manner of book-keeping. . . . This deserves to be imitated by the scholar.

Sounds like proto-blogging. One more sample:

It is strange indeed that long syllables are designated with a ˉ and short ones with a ˘, since the former is the shortest way between two points and the latter is a crooked line. The inventor of these things must therefore have been been thinking of something else when he invented them, if he was thinking of anything at all.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review Books, 2000). Originally published as Aphorisms (1990).

[The macron and breve mark long and short syllables (and sometimes stressed and unstressed syllables) in metrical poetry.]