A painting of me
  • Raiders of the Lost Ark, as a silent B&W film. 

    Steven Soderbergh has posted a version of Raiders of the Lost Ark online for people interested in film to study.

    I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not saying I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just saying this is what I do when I try to learn about staging, and this filmmaker forgot more about staging by the time he made his first feature than I know to this day (for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are—that’s high level visual math shit).

    I just clicked around to see what random scenes would look like, and Soderbergh is right, this film is staged perfectly. Everyone seems to be in just the right place, all the time. Also, this film looks gorgeous in black and white.

    (via kottke) #
  • Bronx Obama. 

    I am thanked in the credits. (Because I backed this a couple years ago on Kickstarter.)

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  • Inside David Soknacki’s Last Day on the Campaign. 

    We’ve lost a thoughtful candidate for mayor, and are left with two that aren’t trying very hard and a crack head. This is very disappointing.

    “Ultimately, the reason Ford got elected is that voters were very superficial,” says Kelcey, noting his awareness that these comments may come back to haunt him. “I believe that the reason voters were willing to vote for Ford in 2010 in such numbers was because they were being superficial about municipal issues. That they wanted change, but they bought into the idea that the solutions could were simple and could be expressed in meaningless slogans without a plan to back them up… The challenge is that we’re still facing superficial voters, and the voters who are being anti-Ford may be being as superficial as the voters who were being pro-Ford in 2010, by not demanding more of the other candidates.”

    I suspect we’ll see an upturn in vote for Chow. She needs to do something interesting if she hopes to win. Her campaign has been lacklustre thus far. How is she trailing Tory? Apparently you can get pretty far running a “I’m just like Rob Ford only I don’t do drugs” campaign.

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  • How municipalities in St. Louis County Missouri profit from poverty. 

    I don’t even know where to start with this story. Everything about it is terrible.

    Voss recalls one incident in which after successfully negotiating with a prosecutor to reduce his clients’ fines, the prosecutor replied, “You’re taking money right out of my pocket, here.”

    This story could have been turned into a 6th season of the Wire. The lack of a proper means to generate revenue for these tiny little municipalities means they rely heavily on fines to pay for their expenses. People are incentivized to keep the poor and predominantly black down.

    Bel-Ridge has about 2,700 people, 83 percent of whom are black, and 42 percent of whom live below the poverty line. In 2013 the town’s municipal court handled 7,706 traffic citations and issued 1,723 arrest warrants. As the ArchCity Defenders report in their white paper, the town estimates that in 2014, “it will collect $450,000 in fine revenue–or, an average of about $450 per Bel-Ridge household — making municipal court fines the largest single source of revenue in the budget.”

    …

    Sales taxes are the primary source of revenue in most St. Louis County municipalities. Wealthier areas naturally see more retail sales, so the more affluent towns tend to be less reliant on municipal courts to generate revenue. In recent years a state pool was established to distribute sales taxes more evenly, but existing towns were permitted to opt out. Most did, of course. Perversely, this means that the collection of poorer towns stacked up along the east-west byways are far more reliant on municipal court revenues. That means they face much stronger incentives to squeeze their residents with fines, despite the fact that the residents of these towns are the people who are least likely to have the money to pay those fines, the least likely to have an attorney to fight the fines on their behalf, and for whom the consequences of failing to pay the fines can be the most damaging.

    Those incentives then get passed on to the judges and prosecutors the towns appoint for their municipal courts, and the police officers they pay to enforce the ordinances. “I was representing a client in a poorer town and was negotiating with a prosecutor who was also the municipal prosecutor in a wealthier town,” Voss says. “He actually told me that if we were in the wealthier town he could cut my client a deal. But he couldn’t do it in the poorer town, because there was more pressure on him to generate revenue.”

    This article is a must read. I feel like throwing a brick at something, but i’m not sure what.

    (via rc3) #
  • I just freed an innocent man from death row. And I’m still furious. 

    Some people expect me to feel satisfied, or even happy. The truth is: I am angry. I am angry that we live in a world where two disabled boys can have their lives stolen from them, where cops can lie and intimidate with impunity, where innocent people can be condemned to die and where injustice is so difficult to bring to light. As I lie awake at night, mulling over the maddening details of this case, I wonder: How many more Henry McCollums are still imprisoned, waiting for help that will never come?

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