THE PHILOSOPHY GIRLS EXPLAIN CATO

Hello, Theory Cornerites! My name's Dandelion Fortesque, and I'm a Philosophy Girl. As you probably know, each Philosophy Girl specializes in a particular niche in the history of philosophy. Mine is the Roman Stoics...you know: Marcus Aurelius, Seneca...people like that. 

Today I'll be talking about Cato the Younger, the great Roman Stoic and Senator who disemboweled himself when Julius Caesar took power. Cato wasn't the type to commit suicide. He did it because he knew that Caesar would have him killed anyway, and he wanted to die in a manner that would inspire people to unseat the tyrant and restore The Republic. 

 It's worth asking, "Why did Cato believe that his death would motivate anybody to do anything?" After all, his adversary Caesar was popular and had convinced a lot of people that what the nation needed was a benevolent dictatorship.

  

The answer to that question is an interesting one. Most of the higher-ups in Rome were 

associated with the interests of the various ruling families or political factions. In the Senate only Cato and a small number of others had real moral authority. When he took a stand and backed it up with his life, people listened. 

That's because Cato had a reputation for objectivity and for thinking things through for himself. It was well known that he wanted to do what was best for Rome, regardless of his own biases, and regardless of what special interests thought. Every Senator claimed to do the same thing, but it only a small number actually did. How did Cato manage to convince a bunch of cynical aristocrats that he was the real deal?

Well, he lived the way that he spoke. He wore a simple black toga when all his peers wore lavish purple. He lived in a modest house and walked to work. He ate what the common people ate. When he was a general, he disdained a horse and walked along with the soldiers. He ate what his soldiers ate, and slept in the same gear. When sick, he never complained.

People are impressed by self-discipline. 

Cato's often cited by people who believe in the importance of character. He wasn't the richest or the highest born Roman, or the most successful general, and yet he was as influential as any of them. You could say that his character was worth an entire legion. 

That's really all I have to say, but I can't resist adding a footnote. Here's how Plutarch described Cato's death. Don't read it if you're squeamish...it's pretty grizzly:

Cato did not immediately die of the wound; but struggling, fell off the bed, and throwing down a little mathematical table that stood by, made such a noise that the servants, hearing it, cried out. And immediately his son and all his friends came into the chamber, where, seeing him lie weltering in his own blood, great part of his bowels out of his body, but himself still alive and able to look at them, they all stood in horror. The physician went to him, and would have put in his bowels, which were not pierced, and sewed up the wound; but Cato, recovering himself, and understanding the intention, thrust away the physician, plucked out his own bowels, and tearing open the wound, immediately expired.

I warned 'ya! See you next time!

GROUND AND POUND

Did you see Ultimate Fighting on Saturday night? If you didn't....TOO BAD! You missed one of the great fights in mixed martial arts! It was welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre (above, right) vs interim champion, Carlos "Natural Born Killer" Condit (above, left). WHAT----A----FIGHT!!!!!!

Condit's a super talented bully-type who became obsessed with the thought of wrecking St. Pierre's handsome face. He trained hard for 9 months specifically to fight GSP. He turned down other fights, he watched recordings of GSP's matches, he studied with specialists and with his adversary's trainers and sparring partners, and he trained nearly to death, as only the most obsessed fighters can. Imagine how creepy it must have been for GSP to fight somebody who knew more about himself than he did. 

 Not only that but St. Pierre was out of the fight game for a year and a half, recuperating from a serious knee injury. Fans wondered if he'd have "ring rust." When he entered the Octagon he looked, for the first time in his career, worried. He knew that Condit was serious competition.

Condit's a truly great fighter. For one thing, he's one of the best back fighters in mixed martial arts. He doesn't just lie there while the guy on top pounds him, he fights aggressively from the bottom. When you're on top of Condit you've got a tiger by the tail. No doubt a lot of opponents wished they hadn't taken him to the ground at all.

St. Pierre took him down repeatedly, and paid the price with a face that looked horribly torn and raw. GSP had to work hard to avoid punches, submission holds, moves to wiggle out, and to deliver the ground and pound that could win the fight. There were zillions of expert moves and counter moves, executed so fast that they were almost a blur. I half thought GSP would die from an overworked heart that only just barely managed to stay in his chest.

Eventually Georges won by unanimous decision. I imagine most fans would find it hard to bring themselves to say that that the dedicated and resourceful Condit "lost"...he just didn't win. In the best fights you admire both fighters almost equally. Georges got the belt he deserved and entered the history books as one of the greatest UFC fighters ever.

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By the way, the top two pictures are of Condit and St. Pierre, but the animated gif is of two other fighters.

LUNCH AT LIDO'S

EXT., LIDO'S PIZZERIA:

EDDIE (VO): "Okay, while we're waiting for the pizza, how about a few pictures? You're a Dickens fan. How 'bout posing out something of his?"

KENT: "Sure! How 'bout this one....Mr. Pickwick from 'Pickwick Papers!' "

EDDIE (VO): "Wow! Great!"

KENT: "Or this one....David's mentally handicapped uncle from "David Copperfield."

EDDIE: "Brilliant! More! More!"

KENT: "Okay, one more....Micawber from 'David Copperfield' again.

'Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19 pounds, result...happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 21 pounds, result...misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene.' "

EDDIE: "Haw! Very nice! You should be an actor! Wait, let me take one more picture.........Uh oh. It made you look evil. I swear, this camera could make Mother Theresa look evil. Here, take a look.""

KENT: "Oh, yeah. I see what you mean."

EDDIE (VO): "Don't worry, I'll delete it."

KENT: "No need to delete it. It's fine. Use whatever you want."

EDDIE (VO): "Whatever I....? Really!? You don't mind???? BLESS YOU, KENT!! You're a photographer's dream! Everyone else I know thinks I make them look bad, and they run the other way when I take out a camera."

KENT: "That's silly. They should let you take whatever you feel like."

EDDIE (VO): "Those are golden words by a great man. I'm humbled."

EDDIE (VO): "Wait! Here comes the pizza!"

KENT: "Aaaah, stringy Mozzarella. Nobody does it better than Lido's."

TIME PASSES. KENT FINISHES THE LAST MORSELS OF PIZZA:

KENT: "Aaaahh, that last, satisfying bite!"

EDDIE (VO): "Yes, truly, Lido's does not disappoint."

KENT: "Okay, let's pay this bill! Let's see...you got the linguine...but you had a coupon for 6% off. You let me use it, but the waiter said I'd only get 3%. That means I get a refund, but I owe you two bucks from last time, but then again, you owe me 4 bucks from August. If we split the tax, and reckon in the...wait a minute...okay, we have the right amount. We're good."

EDDIE (VO): "Any picture I want...any picture I want..."

A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY

I'll begin this history with a picture of Coney Island (above) circa 1948. I've posted this before, but it was small and unworthy of its subject. Here's it's bigger and clearer. When this version is published I expect it'll sweep past the sidebar, right past the limit of Blogger's template, and right out into the digital ether where only griffins and centaurs live. This is a BIG picture.

Anyway, Coney didn't start out as congested as the top photo suggests. The beach (above) used to be narrow and less crowded. It was a place for "refined" people to bathe. Click to enlarge.

The problem was, too many refined people bathed there. You couldn't find a place to sit in all that refinement. Click to enlarge.

Under pressure from the public, the city fathers enlarged the beach (above), and oooh what a change that made! The public descended on the place like a tsunami. Amusement piers and cheap public transportation added to the chaos.

But the problem wasn't limited to Coney Island. Before long all of New York City became as crowded as Coney.

New York shops are famous the world over, but even shopping became a chore. There were just too many people.

You could try to relieve the stress with a quiet stroll (above), but at any time of the day or night millions of other New Yorkers were relieving stress with a stroll of their own. Yikes! Something had to give.

It was bound to happen. Nature, sensing that the city had exceeded all rational limits, moved to restore the natural balance.

Hideous monsters emerged from The Hudson River.

Excess New Yorkers (above) were eaten. A harsh corrective, to be sure, but Nature has its own ways and its own rules.

Today New York is a model of ecological harmony. The few thousand people who live there look forward to each new day with renewed enthusiasm.

Call New York...a success story.

IF I MADE A 3D ANIMATED FILM (PART 1)

I'm a comedy guy, and for that I'd want nice, sharp, funny backgrounds like the ones in the old Viewmaster reels.

 I wouldn't have much use for deliberately hazy backgrounds (above). Sure they make the foreground characters pop, but so what? They lose the context, the whole sense of the world the characters inhabit. 

I'll come back to this in a minute. 

Especially in comedy, the backgrounds and props are almost as important as the foreground figures.  Comedy is about stupid people, and the stupid world they inhabit. You have to make a world like the one in the Viewmaster above, one that's fit for ignorant characters to live in.

Of course I'm not being fair to the Kung-Fu Panda people. They were trying to do a humorous adventure film, not a pure comedy, and some of their backgrounds weren't all that blurry. The public liked what they did, so maybe they know something I don't. What I do know is that this type of background wouldn't work in comedy. It's too real.

In the world of ignorance (above) mountains don't know how to look like mountains. The Sun doesn't know how to light people in a natural way...but it still looks beautiful and our characters are still delighted to live there. 

Lighting is just as important as design. There's nothing natural about the light on these George Pal characters (above), but look how good they look. In 3D animated comedy you have to light for ignorance and what looks funny. You need a funny lighting man.

WHAT CLOTHES MEAN

WARNING: Contains Nudity

Thanks to a commenter I discovered an art and photography site that had a lot of draped and undraped figures to study.  I blogged about it at the time but failed to make a note of the website name and address, and now I can't remember it.  Anyway, I still have a few samples which I didn't have room for last time, and which you might be interested in seeing now. 

Why people wear the clothes they wear is a fascinating subject. It's pretty obvious that we all dress to hide our defects and display our assets. We also want to mark our identification with a desired group or class. What's less apparent is that we dress to project messages that we're only dimly aware of ourselves.

When I was growing up women (above) used to dress in a way that emphasized their role as mothers.



Modern women (above) don't want to be mothers, and the clothes show it. When naked, women still look like mothers, but when clothed -- they're transformed into something else. Women want you to know that babies are definitely not on the agenda. 

It's weird. You can walk down the street (above) and tell who would raise a family and who wouldn't. 

This (above) is a terrific picture, because it brings up the area where maternity and sex intersect. The girl above is sexy in both pictures, but most in the naked picture. When naked, the sex cues are even sexier. Women sort of look like babies.



Here's a girl (above) who may want children, whether she knows it or not. For one thing she wears a conservative dress, for another the dress has a symbolic, white, mother's busom at the top. 

It's off-topic but I can't help commnting on the backshot. This girl looks great from the back and her haircut sets it off perfectly.

MORE SID CAESAR

I'm afraid I'm way too sleepy to put up a decent post, but I have a few more Sid Caesar grabs. They don't make the same acting points as last time, but they're interesting for what they reveal about Caesar's preferences in story. I'll put them up and see what happens.

In the situation above Sid and his girlfriend, who used to be poor and half starving, are a now a wildly popular dance act in Vaudeville. For the first time Sid has money to eat whatever he wants and it goes to his head. He can't stop eating...he eats even while dancing... and he's getting too fat to perform. Here his wife begs him to stop, but he pays no attention.

She clutches him passionately. He just stands there, rigid and impassive.

Finally he pushes her away in disgust.

She's crushed an egg salad sandwich that he'd hidden in his jacket pocket.

Fortunately he still has a banana in his other pocket.

I like this for a couple of reasons. I always like scenes where one character has a passion to communicate, and the other couldn't care less. I also like the jump cut that occurs in the final two pictures (above). They tell you to avoid jump cuts in film school but the truth is they work just fine when used correctly. Using them is a signal that something interesting is about to happen. In comedy they prime the audience to laugh.

Poor Sid doesn't realize how fat he's gotten til one day during a performance....

...the audience breaks out in cat calls like "Fat, fat, the water rat! 50 bullets in your hat"

He stops in mid dance, and addresses the audience...tells them they should be ashamed of themselves...but the truth is undeniable now. His career on the stage is over, or at least it seems that way.

Well, the story goes on. It's a parody of vintage movies like "A Star is Born." Caesar was best at doing "shtick," which is what the cocktail party sketch in the previous post was, but he also liked to do parodies. The two together fit what Caesar was good at. A lot of fans don't know that before he hit it big on TV he was a dramatic actor as well as a comedian.

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Yikes! I thought I'd seen this actress (above) before. She's the very same woman who starred in my favorite horror film, "Burn Witch, Burn!"