Temple Grandin Goes to Hollywood

Asperger’s Syndrome, a disorder in the autism spectrum first identified in 1944 by an Austrian pediatrician, Hans Asperger, has become a popular dramatic plot device in television shows such as House, Bones, Law & Order and Degrassi: The Next Generation. It defined the fascinating profile of the literary protagonists in Mark Haddon’s 2003 award-winning novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and in Stieg Larsson’s 2008 posthumous work, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Now Claire Danes is pegged to play the role of Temple Grandin, in an HBO movie to be released in 2010.

Some people might think if I could snap my fingers I’d choose to be ‘normal. But, I wouldn’t want to give up my ability to see in beautiful, precise pictures.
~~ Temple Grandin

Grandin overcame the limitations imposed by the disorder to become a top scientist in the field of humane livestock handling.

High school was especially harsh for Grandin, who was called “tape recorder” by other kids because she repeated things over and over, and she was hypersensitive to many forms of sensory stimulation. She eventually graduated with degrees from several universities, going on to write influential essays on animal welfare and designing humane slaughterhouses. She appears regularly on the news talk show circuit and was the subject of a BBC documentary, The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow, and Errol Morris’ First Person: Stairway to Heaven.

In part, the fascination with Asperger’s is due to the growing social acceptance of neuro-diversity – a buzzword that aims to promote an awareness that not all brains are similarly wired. Many of the books about the disorder have been written since the 1990s, and along with that interest has come a revisionist diagnosis of many creative and scientific geniuses.

The ascendancy of Asperger’s as a popular fictional device or “It Disability,” as some have called it, is partly due to the fact that patients often present as “normal,” except for their social awkwardness and obsessive interests.

Hollywood likes to portray them as tragically misunderstood and endearingly eccentric.

“Any kind of awareness in the mainstream culture is good, I suppose. But it’s a double-edged sword. You have to ensure that it doesn’t negate the severity of the problem,” says Margot Nelles, founder of the Aspergers Society of Ontario.

Aspergers: Separating Reality from Hollywood.

Hachiko Meets Richard Gere

Earlier we recounted the tale of Hachiko, the Japanese akita, revered for his fierce loyalty to his master, Professor Ueno. A Japanese Greyfriars Bobby… The children’s book, written by Lesléa Newman and illustrated by Machiyo Kodaira, won the ASPCA Children’s Book Honor in 2004.

A joyously tearful 1987 Japanese movie, Hachiko Monogatari, followed.

Hachiko’s legend is also featured in David Wroblewski’s , first book, The Sawtelle Dogs.

Now, Hachiko: A Dog’s Tale, is being released in American theatres on December 18, 2009. It stars Richard Gere as the professor, Forest as Hachiko, and a couple of shiba inu puppies as the young Hachiko. It is set in Bristol, Rhode Island, and everyone speaks American.

According to one of the movie’s producers: “Something about this dog’s simple act of unwavering loyalty, of waiting, is so profoundly moving…People seem to identify with Hachiko. He symbolizes so many different things to different people. Hachiko represents innocence, fear, hope, joy, loss and loneliness.”

In May 1994, Japan’s Culture Broadcasting Network played a recording of Hachiko barking which had been made from a broken record repaired with laser surgery. Millions of people tuned in to listen to Hachiko barking, 59 years after his death. Each April, tens of thousands visit the dog’s statue at the Shibuya train station, during a festival in which food offerings are left at the base of the dog’s statue, in hopes that his loyal spirit will visit all humans.

Go see the movie, and take lots of Kleenex. But please don’t hit the pet shop after and buy an akita or shiba inu. As Harry Haller noted, these steppenwolves are magic theatre and not for everyone…

For more on the akita and its recovery from near-extinction during World War II, read The Man Who Saved Akitas.

Image: Hachiko, stuffed, at the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo.

Escarpment Blues

Escarpment Blues is the Juno-winning documentary that tells the story of a current land-use conflict in Southern Ontario on the Niagara Escarpment. A 600-acre quarry mine operated by the Nelson Aggregate Company is being expanded by 200 acres, thereby engulfing the natural area around Mt. Nemo, the plateau near where Canada’s own singer/songwriter Sarah Harmer grew up. The site has been designated as a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve and parts of the proposed quarry areas have been designated as provincially significant wetlands by the Ministry of Natural Resources.

“I grew up on the escarpment on the farm where my family still lives, within a long green ridge corridor that is prized for its freshwater resources, its wetlands and forests, its endangered species habitats, and its prime agricultural soils. This Biosphere Reserve is under serious threat from the aggregate (sand, gravel, shale) industry. Large multinational aggregate companies continually apply to change “tough” environmental land zoning to open new quarries on top of the Niagara Escarpment. Extracting the rock (mostly to be crushed for gravel) below the water table results in headwater depletion and contamination and destroys the most biologically diverse ecosystems in all of Ontario.”

In June 2005, Harmer, along with her band, launched the I Love The Escarpment tour across southern Ontario in order to raise donations for PERL (Protecting Escarpment Rural Land), a conservation group she co-founded. The bandmates walk through the area, playing small venues along the way. Escarpment Blues documents Harmer’s fight to protect the remaining fresh water supply, save species such as the Jefferson Salamander and butternut tree, and preserve the ecological balance.

Watch the TVO video.

Source: TV Ontario: The View From Here.

Raging Against the Machine

In 1984, the cognoscenti saw Big Brother as IBM, which dominated the PC market at the time. But the future of the computer industry didn’t belong to IBM’s machines, it belonged to the “disk-operating system” IBM had franchised to run its machines. That was a program called DOS, created by a little-known firm called Microsoft. Apple never saw it coming, but Bill Gates would become the Big Brother of modern computing. Before the end of the decade, he would, shall we say, “borrow” the Macintosh graphical interface, call it Windows, and capture the industry.

Nothing did more to ruin the high hopes represented by Apple’s hammer-tossing woman than the dominance of Microsoft, soon to become the most ruthless monopoly since Standard Oil. The result has been inferior technology cleverly contrived to keep the public buying one mediocre and buggy program after another.

Given the commercial opportunism with which Microsoft has contaminated the industry, it’s difficult now to recapture the ebullience that originally greeted the personal computer. This was not simply a machine, it was a dream, a cause, an ideal. The hackers who tinkered the first computers into existence were driven by high social expectations. They were bringing humankind the great gift of information — endless amounts of free information.

Even when the Internet was nothing more than a restricted military messaging system, enthusiasts envisioned a day when politically restive millions would network their aspirations and talents via computer. All they had were funky little CPUs that scrolled sickly green letters and numbers at a snail’s pace across a 6-inch screen, but that was enough, they said, to build the New Jerusalem.

The PC was considered a people’s technology, a guerrilla technology, one of the last gasps of countercultural rebellion. In a larger sense, Big Brother in Apple’s “1984″ TV spot was not just IBM but the elephantine military-industrial complex. It was everything big and domineering and slick, the whole corporate world of men in suits.

Apple’s idealism was marvelous, but how sadly misplaced. Perhaps we can see that now in the wake of the dot-com bust. We have watched high tech become the next wave in big-bucks global industrialism, the property of the crass and the cunning, who are no more interested in empowering the people than General Motors was.

The computer has brought us convenience and amusement, but, like all technology, it’s a mixed blessing. Far from smashing Big Brother, computers have given him more control over our lives. They have been a blessing for snoops, con artists and market manipulators. They have turned global communications into glitchy, virus-plagued networks. Along with some highly valuable resources, the World Wide Web has brought a time-wasting flood of trivia, trash, pornography and spam. We have burdened our children with the distractions of becoming computer literate before they are just plain old literate.

Some would say that it’s the sign of a mature technology to generate as many problems as it solves. But in the case of the computer, there has been one peculiarly pernicious result. We have equated a machine with the mind. We believe computers are “smart,” so smart that we cast ourselves as “dummies” in their presence. Thanks to the computer, we have begun to believe that the mind, the defining feature of human nature, is a somewhat inferior information-processing machine.

And, of course, the computer-makers agree. Microsoft is now peddling “E-house” systems that will run our homes better than we can. No doubt there will soon be books to help us out: “E-house Living for Dummies.” Will we ever again be able to see information for what it really is? Minor, sometimes useful pieces of mental furniture beyond which lie the higher, never-to-be-computerized powers of the mind: imagination, revelation, insight, intuition, wisdom?

Sound judgment, good citizenship, being “smart” in the best sense of the word has never had anything to do with information. The real irony in Apple’s charmingly defiant “1984″ commercial is that it failed to understand that the Macintosh too represented Big Brother. Deifying the computer and downgrading the human mind are the first steps toward enslaving ourselves to our own technology.

There will never be a computer program that can effectively respond to the command, “Tell me everything I need to know that is true, wise and relevant.” When we search for that, we will always have to fall back on our own hard-won ability to make graceful use of ideas we inherit from those who needed no machines to think with, but only the resources of their own naked minds, a quiet place to gather their thoughts — and perhaps a stick with which to scratch those thoughts in the sand.

~ Theodore Roszak, “Raging Against the Machine”, Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2004

Séraphine

Art history has proven that madness and genius may be inexorably linked, that the more tortured the creator, the more emotionally resonant their work becomes.

Martin Provost’s haunting film, Séraphine, which chronicles the troubled life of spinster painter Séraphine Louis in post-WW I France, exemplifies this theory. The picture, which swept the Cesar’s (France’s equivalent to Oscar), is slow, meditative and spare in its time-spanning storytelling. It’s also an utterly spellbinding work of serious cinema – elegant, unpretentious, poetic and unforgettable.

Yoland Moreau stars as the titular working class artist, who spends the first half of her life humbly cleaning the dirty floors of moneyed snobs who look down on her station and her eccentric ways.

When famous German art dealer Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur) arrives at the country hotel where Séraphine’s works are on display, it’s only a matter of time before he takes notice of this strange, naive woman’s stunning yet somewhat frightening paintings. But as interest in Seraphine’s work increases, and her financial situation changes for the better, her quirks slowly evolve into full-blown psychosis.

Sequences of the frumpy Séraphine weaving her way through a landscape of wind-whipped trees, flowing rivers and natural beauty juxtaposed with the dimly-lit misery of her working life are lyrical and hypnotic, as impressionistic as the demented floral explosions she captures on canvas.

And that seems to be Provost’s aesthetic – to create a film that captures in tone and mood the soul of Séraphine’s imagery.

The Matrix Redux: Food, Inc.

Earlier we blogged about the state of our food system as prophesied in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. We described Vandana Shiva’s grassroots efforts in India to battle corporate greed, monocultures and genetic engineering. Is it already too late for North America?

That is why Food, Inc., just released, is so important.

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on America’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from consumers with the consent of government regulatory agencies.

The US (and Canadian) food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of e. coli. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

What happened to nutrient-dense food that leaves us satisfied, healthy and safe?

Featuring Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farm’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals shocking truths — about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become and where we are going from here.*

Animal Takeover

What would happen if the world were suddenly without people – if humans vanished off the face of the earth? How would nature react – and how swiftly?

Earlier we blogged about a National Geographic documentary, Life After Humans, which aired last year.

This Sunday, the Canadian Broadcasting Company presents Animal Takeover. It will be shown at 8 p.m. Eastern time on CBC Newsworld.

Watch the promo on Wild Docs.

On the edge of Europe, the deserted village of Chernobyl reveals the surprising answer after an unplanned experiment.

Chernobyl was abandoned by people after the worst nuclear disaster in history (April 26, 1986). A level 7 meltdown resulted in a severe release of radioactivity following a massive explosion that destroyed the reactor. More than 20 years later, Chernobyl has been taken over by a remarkable collection of wildlife and descendents of pets that were left in the city when its residents fled the nuclear fallout. Unexpectedly in the aftermath of this disaster, Chernobyl has become a sanctuary for plants, birds, and animals, including some species thought to be on the brink of extinction.

The adventures of a likeable cast of non-human characters give viewers a rare glimpse into a world where wild animals face challenges in an environment totally outside their experience, and once-domesticated pets have learned how to fend for themselves.

Directed by Peter Hayden, Off the Fence and Blue Paw Artists for Bayerischer Rundfunk, Arte, Animal Planet International and Discovery HD Theatre.

Image: Chernobyl cloud.

101 Dalmatians or Faux Fur?

Pongo and Missis Pongo are a pair of Dalmatians. They live with the newly married Mr and Mrs Dearly (their “pets”).

Missis gives birth to a litter of 15 puppies. The Dearlys are concerned that Missis will not be able to feed them all and Mrs Dearly looks for another dog to act as a wet nurse. By chance, she finds an abandoned Dalmatian mother in the middle of the road in the pouring rain. She has the dog treated by a vet and gives her the name Perdita, from the Latin for “lost”. Later Perdita tells Pongo about her own lost Dalmatian love and the circumstances that led to her being abandoned in the middle of the road.

Mr and Mrs Dearly are invited to a dinner party hosted by Cruella de Vil, an intimidating and very wealthy woman with one side of her hair coloured white and the other side coloured black. They meet her furrier husband and her abused cat, and discover her  fixation with furs.

Shortly after the dinner party the puppies disappear. The humans fail to trace them but through the Twilight Barking, a form of communication by which dogs can relay messages to each other across the country, the dogs manage to track them down to Hell Hall, in Suffolk.

We keep 7.5 million cats and 6.1 million dogs as pets but do we know where that fake-looking fur trim comes from? Today in China over two million cats and dogs are killed each year for their fur and for their skins. Among other things, these furs are used as linings in boots and gloves, jackets and coats, blankets and rugs.

Pongo and Missis try to explain to the Dearlys where the puppies are but fail. The dogs decide to run away and find them.

After a journey cross country, they are met by Lieutenant Pussy Willow, a tabby cat and the Colonel, an Old English Sheepdog who shows them Hell Hall, the ancestral home of the de Vil family. He tells them to rest overnight and that they will see their puppies the next day. They then discover there are 97 puppies including their own 15 and many others who later turn out to have been legally bought. They also discover that the puppies are being kept in Hell Hall by Saul and Jasper Baddun, two crooks who work for Cruella de Vil as caretakers of Hell Hall.

According to government estimates, 500,000 garments sold in the United States every year are trimmed with bobcat, fox, rabbit, or other animal fur, potentially with nothing on the label to indicate there is any fur on the garment. With the labeling loophole in place, consumers are left in the dark; they have no idea that their new clothes may contain fur from animals—even dogs and cats—whose treatment can include being skinned alive, anally electrocuted, or held struggling underwater to drown.

Cruella de Vil appears in the middle of the night and tells the Baddun Brothers that the dogs must be slaughtered and skinned as soon as possible because of the publicity surrounding the theft of the Dearlys’ pups. Pongo and Missis devise an escape plan and agree that they must take all the puppies with them, not just their own 15. They escape on that same night, the day before Christmas Eve.

Pongo says that they need a miracle and find one when they are offered a lift in a removal van. The Dalmatians have rolled in soot to disguise their white hair, and they are able to hide in the darkness of the removal van with the help of a Staffordshire terrier whose pets are the movers.

The fur trade does not deny that it deals in dog and cat skins and it is quite legal for products made from this fur to be sold in Britain and Europe. Fur products do not have to be labeled by species. One cat fur coat alone requires the killing of up to 24 cats. 12 to 15 adult dogs are killed to manufacture each coat made from dog fur – and a horrific 40 or more if puppies or kittens are used.

Arriving back in London, they go to Cruella’s empty house. Her cat is still there and invites them in to destroy Cruella’s collection of animal skins, fur coats and mink bedsheets.

When the Dalmatians return to the Dearlys’ house where they are not recognized because of the soot. Once they are cleaned up, Mr Dearly sends out for steaks to feed them.

Presently, China is the second biggest commercial partner of Canada. According to Industry Canada, the Canadian fur and retail industry imported $5 million in animal pelts and $28 million in fur trimmed apparel from China in 2004. Despite the distinct possibility that many of these imported furs are from dogs and cats, the government has indicated that it has no intention of prohibiting these imports. By the year 2010, the Canadian government hopes to double commercial trade with China.

Later, the cat drops by to tell them Cruella has fled. The shock of discovering her furs have been destroyed has turned the black side of her hair white and the white side green. The Baddun Brothers have also been arrested. Hell Hall has been put up for sale and Mr Dearly buys it with a sum of money he has been given by the government for sorting out a tax problem. He renames it to Hill Hall and intends to use it to start a “dynasty of Dalmatians” (and a “dynasty of Dearlys” to take care of them). They adopt the cat, and promise her a white persian husband.

The import, export and sale of dog and cat fur was banned in the United States in 2000. Effective January 1, 2009, the European Union joined the ban. In Canada, buying and selling dog and cat fur is still legal.

Finally, Perdita’s lost love, Prince (the one hundred and first Dalmatian) shows up. His “pets” can clearly see that the two wish to be together and allow him to stay with the Dearlys.

101 Dalmations was originally written in 1956 by Dodie Smith, and illustrated by Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone.

Bill Peet and 101 Dalmatians

Bill Peet storyboards for 101 Dalmatians.

Ecological Fur

Faux fur or not?

Helvetica

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type. The film had its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2007.

Helvetica encompasses the worlds of design, advertising, psychology, and communication, and invites us to take a second look at the thousands of words we see every day.

Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger with Edüard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. In the late 1950s, the European design world saw a revival of older sans-serif typefaces such as the German face Akzidenz Grotesk. Haas’ director Hoffmann commissioned Miedinger, a former employee and freelance designer, to draw an updated sans-serif typeface to add to their line. The result was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but its name was later changed to Helvetica, derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland, when Haas’ German parent companies Stempel and Linotype began marketing the font internationally in 1961.

Introduced amidst a wave of popularity of Swiss design, and fueled by advertising agencies selling this new design style to their clients, Helvetica quickly appeared in corporate logos, signage for transportation systems, fine art prints, and myriad other uses worldwide. Inclusion of the font in home computer systems such as the Apple Macintosh in 1984 only further cemented its ubiquity.

More about the film.

What font are you? Take the quiz!

This blogger is Courier. Like a type-writer font on a computer, Courier goes proudly against the grain.

Stupeur et Tremblements

Japan beckons, alluring and elusive; foreigners pay court, but their attentions often remain unrequited. The relationship between Japan and the foreign suitor — a dance of seduction, misunderstanding and rejection — has inspired its own literary subgenre.

In Amélie Nothomb’s Stupeur et Tremblements (Fear and Trembling), the protagonist is excluded because she are foreign and typecast because she is a woman. The novel offers a grim, sometimes mordantly funny, vision of a Japan that seems determined to keep outsiders outside — where they belong.

When well-meaning but all too often obtuse Westerners bump up against Japanese standards, the comedy in this novel — and its underlying sadness — emerges. Stupeur et Tremblements takes place at the headquarters of a Japanese corporation in Tokyo.

Elegantly written (as translated from the French by Adriana Hunter) and now — elegantly filmed —  it is a chronicle of the startlingly rapid fall of a young Belgian who tries to find a place in a Japanese company. Amélie, the heroine, is a child of foreign diplomats who spent her early years in Japan and so is fluent in Japanese. But it is soon clear that she is hapless when it comes to translating what isn’t said.

She fails her first test: understanding a lesson in humility that her boss tries to teach her by repeatedly tearing up an assignment without telling her what she’s done wrong. Amélie stumbles again when she takes the initiative by performing a task that hasn’t been assigned to her. Yet her fatal error is more deeply personal: failing to understand the psychology of the beautiful, brilliant and underappreciated Fubuki Mori, the woman who is her immediate superior. Amélie senses Fubuki’s desperate wish to be married — achieving a status that would free her from the tyranny of the company but confine her in a different sphere.

Amélie doesn’t see that her own success may be a threat to a woman who has labored for years to attain what little status she has in a country where women are often denied opportunities for promotion. And then she makes the classic Western mistake of attempting to talk over a problem with Fubuki rather than finding unspoken ways to make amends. Matters become even more complicated after she clumsily tries to offer sympathy when Fubuki is rebuked by her own boss. By witnessing Fubuki’s humiliation, Amélie has shamed her, and Fubuki proceeds to exact her revenge.

Nothomb (herself the daughter of Belgian diplomats who served in Japan) demonstrates a shrewd understanding of the intricate ways Japanese relationships are made and spoiled. And she has the classic Japanese corporation dead to rights, sketching out the often mindless and capricious hierarchy, the dangers of spontaneity and the condescending superiority with which many Japanese regard Westerners. While at times the level of cruelty in her novel approaches caricature, Nothomb also has compassion for those Japanese who are imprisoned in this system.

At times, Stupeur et Tremblements may seem unduly bleak, and they offer only glimpses of the kindness and decency of those Japanese who do open their hearts to foreigners. Yet each book captures a truth that the foreign suitor might use to find some degree of peace: loving without blinders means accepting the inevitability of distance.

Excerpted from: Susan Chira, Lost in Translation, New York Times, March 25, 2001.