The Plasma Spring Archive

Stuff We Like

The Vice Guide to North Korea

This brilliant and disturbing documentary takes you deep into the shallows of Kim Jong Il’s hermit kingdom. Somehow, Vice Magazine’s Shane Smith (founder of VBS, Vice’s video division and star of their Guide to Travel series) and a clandestine-camera-wielding companion secure passage into North Korea from China -- pretending to be tourists, of course, because journalists go to jail. For an hour Smith explores the thin, saccharine veneer of majesty and might that the dictatorship uses to obscure the truth about the desperately impoverished and broken country. He mingles with eerily upbeat hosts, waitresses and tour guides, all hand-picked to chaperone him 24/7 during his stay (the pretense of which is to view and report on the Arirang Mass Games, a spectacular orgy of propaganda and gymnastics too baffling for words). Complete with a heartbreakingly awkward karaoke rendition of the Sex Pistol’s "Anarchy in the U.K.," this documentary is a must-see: a visceral primer for anyone interested in understanding the uniquely other-worldly yet backwards North Korea. -- Adam Schaefer
The Art of Marco Fusinato

Music, math, the interactive: these are three things that I really like, and Marco Fusinato's art includes them all. Mass Black Implosion is probably my favorite of his projects -- it reimagines musical scores, sometimes by overlaying them with scribbles of varying thickness (maps to some imagined territory), in architecturally-precise lines (an explosion into three dimensions), or as some kind of gloriously strange infographic for the world to come. Aetheric Plexus, in sharp contrast, turns audiovisual detail into interactive assault. It's difficult to get a sense of the scope of some of these works, but it's evident that Fusinato's gallery showings include a vast collaborative and musical component -- I'd love a chance to see some of this stuff live -- and I'm quite taken with his curatorial series You Don't Have to Call it Music, which tasks visual artists to create music. -- Lauren Caldwell
Dianne Wiest's Old Face

Dianne Wiest first struck me as the standout of Hannah and Her Sisters; then as the Law & Order DA who tells Sam Waterston what to do and how to think. She aged between these roles and now is even older, the offbeat beauty of her youth having morphed into a mature visage of both astonishing expressiveness and grandmotherly inscrutability — a crucial element of her facile and felicitous performance as psychotherapist Gina Toll on HBO's In Treatment. Psychotherapy is a delicate, hyper-pressurized encounter in which change rests on an enduringly empathetic therapist (who is also capable of being perceived as such) imbuing contingent actions and words with novel meanings and potentialities. Gina's patient Paul, a former protégé who returns for guidance after a decade of estrangement that began when Gina denied him a promotion, is ever probing Gina's face for nefariousness. A sleepy spider lying in wait, is what Paul calls her: What secret motives lie covertly in the fragile folds of her jowls, in the puffy bags beneath her eyes, etched on her weblike cheeks? Her enigmatic expressions initially offend Paul, whose history with Gina predisposes him to read any ambiguity in her mien as perfunctorily negative. Not sharing this pervading bias, we enjoy the virtuosic, Emmy-winning face of this gorgeous old lady whose allure and gravitas make me want to ask her to run for president. -- Kevin Hilke

From the Vault

Things that died in 2008.

Our president pledged as primary candidate to staunchly defend individual civil liberties and curb the domestic intelligence abuses of the Bush Administration. As the Democratic candidate, he hedged. As president-elect, he made stunning about-faces, notably on immunity for telecommunications companies who cooperated with Bush's illegal requests. Now, as president, he's continued as many of Bush's abuses as he's curtailed. Also, there was a time when John McCain wasn't an unprincipled, dishonorable bigot. He was quite the man, when he was a man. Then came a succubus to hasten his by then inevitable decline.

drink deep

Mar 9, 2010 0

Poor Bill Buckley

Kevin Hilke

Ezra Klein looks at just how insanely stupid (”The Soviet Union [reformed healthcare], and we know how that worked out”! etc.) what passes for intellectual seriousness on the right is today.

Mar 9, 2010 0

Give the Press Handjobs

Kevin Hilke

David Gregory, host of Meet the Press, is more a warmup comedian for pandering partisan blather than any sort of intellectual referee. E.J. Dionne tries to keep his head from exploding.

Mar 8, 2010 0

The Power of the Sun Is 0.3 Hellawatts

Kevin Hilke

The Sacramento Bee reports on Austin Sendek, a UC Davis physics student who has started a petition to establish “hella” as a scientific prefix.

Mar 8, 2010 0

Talking Punts

Kevin Hilke

Sarah Palin, pandering in Calgary, argues against herself: “My first five years of life we spent in Skagway, Alaska, right there by Whitehorse [Yukon Territory, Canada]. Believe it or not—this was in the ‘60s—we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse.” Stephen Harper should appoint her [...]

Mar 7, 2010 0

Gay Tories’ Fancy

Kevin Hilke

Christopher Hitchens will soon reveal that he slept with two men in college who would later work for Margaret Thatcher.

Poor Bill Buckley

Ezra Klein looks at just how insanely stupid ("The Soviet Union [reformed healthcare], and we know how that worked out"! etc.) what passes for intellectual seriousness on the right is today.
Give the Press Handjobs

David Gregory, host of Meet the Press, is more a warmup comedian for pandering partisan blather than any sort of intellectual referee. E.J. Dionne tries to keep his head from exploding.
The Power of the Sun Is 0.3 Hellawatts

The Sacramento Bee reports on Austin Sendek, a UC Davis physics student who has started a petition to establish "hella" as a scientific prefix.
Talking Punts

Sarah Palin, pandering in Calgary, argues against herself: “My first five years of life we spent in Skagway, Alaska, right there by Whitehorse [Yukon Territory, Canada]. Believe it or not—this was in the ‘60s—we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse." Stephen Harper should appoint her to their Senate!
Gay Tories' Fancy

Christopher Hitchens will soon reveal that he slept with two men in college who would later work for Margaret Thatcher.
Does Sarah Love Pickles?

Amelie Gillette explains how Sarah Palin and Jersey Shore's Snookie are basically the same person.
The Ultimate Intimacy

Daniel Mendelsohn on Avatar's complicated relationship with technology and reality. This is the best thing I've read about the movie, and I've read a ton of stuff about it.
Brain Inflammation

Psychiatric Times hosts a debate on whether neurology and psychiatry should (or could) be merged.
I Wonder If Either of the Olsen Twins Ever Tried This

"The woman was sleeping in her lover’s darkened bedroom when a man joined her. The two had sex, but something felt off to her. His body didn’t feel right. She flicked on the bedroom light and realized the man wasn’t her lover but his identical twin."
My Previous Plan Had Been To Become a Poet

Ed Gottlieb really, really doesn't like Jake Silverstein's slapdash, mindless-pomo exemplifying volume Nothing Happened and Then It Did: "As the far-fetched coincidences mount and the picaro proceeds forward in his unflappable way, a kind of supervening blankness enters."
Indians Are Disappearing

Anthropologist and archaeologist Michael Wilcox argues that his field has long had Native Americans all wrong.
Nifty, Useful Visualizations!

From Foreign Policy, Scope, and The Book Haven come simple and stylish visual representations of complex fields of information: China's global investments, the efficacy of nontraditional health supplements, and the motivations and socioeconomic demographics of today's bloggers.
Unzombified

The Nation's Alexander Cockburn on the unlikely integrity of The American Conservative—which we pointed to last year—under publisher Ron Unz.
Veracity, Mendacity, History, and Politics

Essayist and Cavafy critic Daniel Mendelsohn asks what the popularity of memoirs, from Augustine of Hippo to Augusten Burroughs—and our reactions to discovering them as "false"—tells us about ourselves.
The Maple Leaf Looks Little Like the Swastika

Other than being compared to Nazis by a curmudgeon, the Canada of Vancouver 2010 came off damn well to Americans. "Not in my 60 years have I seen Canada shown to Americans in such a positive and sustained light," says former U.S. ambassador to Canada Gordon Giffin. Now that one set of games is over, Canada moves on to another.
I Will Evade Answering

A senior military interrogator reviews Courting Disaster, a literary defense of war criminals by Marc Thiessen, "a speechwriter who's never served in the military or intelligence community acting as an expert" and whose sole, fatuous argument is that abusing prisoners saves lives.