Manejo Contenido Web USC 2010

A few days ago I watched again Inglourious Basterds.

What a masterpiece of mashup cinema! Only Tarantino is so able of mixing pieces of film history and rearranging them to form a unique tale. That’s it: unique story telling. Through a compelling art and master craft Tarantino builds a very well told story, which is what cinema is almost all about. And he does so with bits and pieces of the films he likes.

So, I was again surprised and amazed at the beauty of the scene in which Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) kills Frederick, her hopeless pursuer and lead actor of the nazi-propaganda film they are showing at her cinema theatre in Paris. Shosanna, the woman who once, when she was a girl, had escaped from the nazi killings at the beginning of the film, now shoots Frederick. Then there’s this climaxing scene with such rethorical but beautiful music. Like in a Western, a bit slow-motioned Shosanna reaches out -almost to repentantly take care of the man, who then shoots her back in a flashing surprise. No second thoughts are admitted in Tarantino’s cynical world. It’s like this, no objection taken. The rethorics of music superimposed on the rethorics of the war-hero movie being shown, superimposed on the rethorics of Shosanna’s feelings, noble but in a way so predictable, so built-in in the woman, she cannot do anything but fall. Still, she manages to win in the end.

It’s sublime Tarantino!

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Related articles by Zemanta

• Mélanie Laurent: the real star of Inglourious Basterds (guardian.co.uk)
• Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds – Liquid Modernity and Alternate History (blogcritics.org)

Another nice surprise from Barcelona: Sclipo: the Social Learning Revolution!

Sclipo is a web application to teach, learn and share with your students and fellow teachers. This video tutorial shows you the following tools:

• COURSES: Publish, manage and teach face2face and online courses!
• LIVE TEACHING: Hold live online classes, webinars and meetings with 100 people or more!
• LIBRARY: Share content in any format (videos, documents, audio & more)!

EVENTS:…

Let’s give it a try! BTW, Sclipo is @goSclipo on Twitter.

I’m going to use a sentence from a person I admire and follow, whose work I am fond of. Thus I am not disclosing the name. Still there are too many new-age-like thoughts that need to be uncovered and an inference apparently sound becomes untrue. You may say I am lacking poetic sense. But this sentence was not taken from a poem: the issue here is that the author stated the sentence as a teaching moment. And that terrifies me. It’s a beautiful, suggestive sentence. We have heard or read it already.

If the sky is infinite, it has no boundaries, it’s everywhere. You are one part of it: the sky is within you. [Thus] you are within everyone and everything.

Let us assume for the moment that the assumption is true: the sky [the universe] is infinite. Has it got no boundaries? First false inference: the universe may be infinite but bound in one direction. For instance, it may have a west boundary, and still be infinite. The line starting at point zero and going forever to infinity has certainly the zero boundary. So an infinite sky [assuming the sly is infinite] may be bound. However, by definition, the universe **must** contain everything, so it must be true in some sense that it “is everywhere.” But not because it is boundless or infinite.

If it is everywhere, then certainly you and I are part of it. Is the sky part of me? Well, in a poetic sense, yes. But it’s really myself who am within the universe. This little inference is wrong. If I am part of something, then it’s not true (though I’d love it to be!) that “that something” (even if it’s infinite”) is part of me!! Example: “I am part of the Internet” certainly doesn’t mean the Internet is within me! The “spirit” of the Internet is, but that’s BS! Ok, up to now, that’s a lot of BS in just one sentence!!!!

Again, one may say that I lack poetic sense, and I love poetry! Or that I want to spli a hair in four and miss the poetic points of the sentence. Which brings me to asking: what is exactly the point of that sentence? Who does it help? Or is it uttering some syntactic sugar so to help us feel well for a second?

Thus, for the sake of poetry, I am including a brief parenthesis with a nice little (nonsense) poem.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!”

Now this is poetry!

Let’s go on. For all I said before, the conclusion is another great piece of BS. “I am within everything and everyone”. I will accept though that this conclusion may actually have some truth, notwithstanding the faulty inferences that yield it. It’s true in a sense that part of me (99% of my DNA for instance) is within everyone, but not really everything. Thus I am certainly connected to all other human (and to a lesser extent to all living beings), but not to rocks or diamonds! Come on, of course I am connected to rocks, you may say, since we both come out of the same big bang, or because Peter is the rock upon which I found my church, or whatever, but… that’s stretching it!

Now, let’s go back to the first assumption, which we thought initially as true. But is it really true that the sky is infinite?

Well, no, no way. At least, we don’t know. If I don’t know something, I must stay with known evidence, though it may be hard to accept. In fact, for our humble mind, it’s a lot easier to accept the universe is infinite (after all, the universe is greater that all of us, and it’s unthinkable…), that that it may be finite. As soon as we think the universe is finite, our mind jumps to ask: “Then, what is there **beyond** the universe?” Which is an unfair question to ask. Because Out Of The Universe There Ought To Be Nothing. That’s it. The universe is everything there is, by definition. Thus, there’s no “outside it” even if it’s finite, and even if I cannot understand it. It’s our mind who wants to believe it is infinite! It may be, but we think it is not, since we have absolutely no evidence.

Now, I showed a faulty reasoning together with many false assumptions as they are commonly used in the media and by people. Only reason can defend us from such BS. This doesn’t mean of course we should only use reason. Sometimes, the heart without any reason is quite good! Still, beware of false science and worst, of fake reason!

Packrati.us = Twitter + Delicious

Packrati.us follows your Twitter feed, and whenever a status you tweet or re-tweet contains URLs, we add them to your delicious.com bookmarks.

La Universidad del Sagrado Corazón y el proyecto STEMmED organizan el

Simposio

La nueva Web y la transformación de la educación superior

3 de septiembre de 2010 ~ 8AM-12:30PM ~ Sala de Facultad, Universidad del Sagrado Corazón

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Conferencias de Dolors Reig, Jim Groom, Mario Núñez, quienes dialogarán sobre los máximos sistemas del mundo de la educación.

Programa, Registro etc. -> http://simposio.stemmed.sagrado.edu

Twitter hashtag: #nwstm

The bird with the Crystal Plumage is a complicated title in English,

but wonderfully cryptic in Italian. It happens to be Dario Argento’s first title.

A classic thriller, one of the first to develop many of the classic ideas of the serial killer franchise. A murder and a witness who remembers there’s one thing which doesn’t add up in the murder scene he saw. Then, a little particular which gets to be discovered late in the movie, betrays the murderer. Plus, a nice twist on the plot’s logic. Nice movie, an early Argento with many of his beloved themes, like the scene where the killer whispers to a likely victim: “You’re not going to come out of this room alive“, and the director builds up the suspense with this cat-and-mouse-in-a-cage scene.

Here’s the trailer.

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I will never forget The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971!) and its Vincent Price performance. I love Vincent Price, period. And this movie is probably precursor to lots of horror cliches, along with the baroque theme of what variation of the-murdering-scheme-we’re-using-today, recently taken to unprecedented “depths” by the Saw series.

So today I was pretty amused and fascinated when an English professor showed everybody, during a session to build an online course,  a video of Vincent Price’s declaiming Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven. Beautiful, but that’s not what I am giving you. I’m resurrecting one of Price’s most unbelievable movies, precisely The Abominable Dr. Phibes. First, enjoy the classical opening (the famous organ playing), then you’ll find a Tribute to Vincent from Monster Madness review (2009).

From Wikipedia: A doctor, scientist, organist, and biblical scholar, Dr. Anton Phibes, seeks revenge on the nine doctors he considers responsible for his wife’s death.

His wife’s name: Vulnavia. Which resonates with other terrenal, womanly words. And, of course, with horror trash movies.

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Image via Wikipedia

Philip French, film critic of The Guardian, reminds that it is now 50 year since Godard’s masterpiece of A bout de souffle (Breathless) opened (Breathless continues to shock and surprise 50 years on).

What French writes is fascinating history of cinema. Read his story of Chabrol, Truffaut and Godard working together in the film:

Claude Chabrol, who served as supervising producer on Breathless, famously warned that great subjects rarely make great films. And Godard, the master of the gnomic epigram and perceptive paradox, once said: “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.” This was the basis of the brief scenario that Truffaut, a fellow admirer of film noir and série noire pulp fiction, provided for Breathless. Its antihero, the swaggering, misogynistic petty criminal Michel (Belmondo), steals a car in the south of France and kills a policeman on the road to Paris, where he takes up with an old girlfriend, the well-heeled American, Patricia (Seberg). They talk of life and literature (in particular Faulkner’s The Wild Palms) in a seedy hotel, make love and visit the movies while he tries to get money owed him by criminal associates. The police close in, Patricia betrays him. Hardboiled B-feature stuff. But the style is everything, a calculated destruction and remaking of traditional film grammar, and Godard formulated his much-quoted idea that “a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order“.

Breathless’s Jean Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg are unforgettable masters in this film, and they greatly portray two characters of rebellion and anti-conformism. Dialogue, Citroens and Deux Cheveux populate Paris’ streets, while Belmondo’s smile always shows a cigarette between his teeth, just like Humphrey Bogart’s poster.

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I saw Breathless first in its American remake (by Jim McBride, 1983) with Richard Gere and Valérie Kaprisky and though Gere is no Belmondo (no offense!) it inspired me and took my breath away, but it’s a completely different movie. Only later did I view Godard’s.

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Now Godard’s provocations have given us another film: Film Socialisme, a movie resumed within its two-minute trailer.

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Related articles by Zemanta

• 50 years of Breathless (guardian.co.uk)
• Admiring Godard’s Latest and Greatest (nytimes.com)
• The Timeless Appeal of ‘Breathless’ (online.wsj.com)

A little gem of a scene from Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room (La stanza del figlio), Palme d’Or at Cannes. The film will be all about the reality of a sudden death, of its pain. And of a missing son. The song being sung in the car is titled something like “I’ll stay with you no more“, and I especially love the realism of all the family, one at a time, singing the song. Still, in the song scene, there’s the future death pronouncing these words in the son’s mouth. The scene is so unbelieavably simple and done so that everybody will recognize himself (son or father) in it -this is why the scene is so powerful and likable. Yet, Moretti dares to put in it the phantom of things to come, of the future, of doom, of death.

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Must be the age. I’d have never admitted I like this song when I was young(er). Still, it’s a classic to sing under the shower or while driving. It has a perfect melody. The lyrics though (by nonetheless than master Mogol -Lucio Battisti’s lyricist), were pretty kitsch at the time, and still are.

Anyhow, I found this version by Malika Ayane, simply splendid, to be enjoyed. It seems it was done for a film, surely enough a sugary buttery nothing. It’s “The first beautiful thing”, La prima cosa bella.

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