Senses working overtime #158

1 Fake Fake Fake

By Catalan painter Étienne Terrus?

Oh dear! A museum in Southern France has discovered more than half its collection of paintings thought to be by a celebrated local artist are counterfeit. Here's what happened.

2 Learning

Even though I'm an educator, I don't often add that kind of content to JFTT too often. I'll make an exception for this Edutopia article (I love Edutopia!!). Just feast your eyes on these creative designs. Excitingly, we are increasingly moving this way in my current school and this article gave us some great ideas.

3 Fush and chups

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Big in my diet already, maybe it should be big in yours too, according to this. Don't forget the mushy peas!

4 The return of poetry corner

In Defense of Nothing

I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do.
I guess that crooked eucalyptus tree also.
I guess this highway will have to do and the cars
     and the people in them on their way.
The present is always coming up to us, surrounding us.
It's hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine
     hydrogen & oxygen binding, it'll have to do.
This sky with its macular clouds also
     and that electric tower to the left, one line broken free.

Peter Gizzi (2014)

5 Avengers

With Infinity War busting box office records right now, here is a great wrap up of how we got to this point in the Marvel Universe. 

I know, there is a lot of stuff out there but this piece is excellent - just marvel (sorry) at its attention to detail. And it's really well written, which is nice.

Overtime: Hooray for Warren Ellis

Here is the great man on Avengers: Infinity War -

So.  INFINITY WAR, then.  No spoilers.

It is perhaps best understood as an unprecedented brand power move.  It is not "a film" as that term is commonly understood.  It is a sequence of connections.  It's a statement from a bizarre place of popular-culture ownership.  It's a statement that they have done ten years of film storytelling, often with very conventional story templates, so that everyone in the world will show up for what is often an extraordinarily unconventional story-like event with one extremely unexpected tonal shift.

It, by design, makes no sense unless you've watched most if not all of the other Marvel films. There cannot be a casual viewer of this emanation.  Only a committed one.  It is likely to be the largest worldwide opening of all time, as I write this, even though it's not opening in China or Russia this weekend.

The production values are near-perfect.  The days of the slightly janky AVENGERS special effects are long gone, and every pixel is painted with jewelled, exquisite skill. As a visual experience, it is peak Marvel.  The mocap on Josh Brolin makes Thanos a far more effective "CGI villain" than the waste of Ciaran Hinds on JUSTICE LEAGUE, which had all the performance nuance of a level boss in DOOM II.

Per the trailer, I think it was a brave choice to have the evil spaceship apparently designed by James Dyson.

The writers and the directors worked very, very hard to make something that did not feel beholden to rules.  They'll stop the thing dead for sixty seconds to do a gag. There are a lot of gags. I mean, no possible joke goes unjoked. Nothing I say here should be taken to denigrate the work of those people. They have achieved a remarkable thing.

(Special nod to whoever designed the sonics for the next-to-final scene.)

It is not a movie. It is a brand manifestation that wants to have prolonged, eager and reasonably skilled cultural sex with you. It wants your experience with its content™ to be satisfying and it hopes you are pleased enough to return for further interaction with the Brand.  This is a very 21C thing.  I like it for that alone, to be honest.

AVENGERS 4 happens next year, of course, and I will be interested to see how they stick the landing. But, in terms of cultural power plays, this one is the pinnacle.