Finds: January 23, 2014

David Dale, "Small-town secrets in Mystery Road," at the Sydney Morning Herald:

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/smalltown-secrets-in-mystery-road-20140117-30zn1.html

A nice overview of Aussie film noir. I'm not sure that Jonathan Teplitzky's Gettin' Square (2003) qualifies as noir, since it's more of a comic heist movie. I tire of heist movies sometimes, but what brightens this one is a fresh, original visual scheme based on the sunshine-and-sky look of the Australian coast.
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Ed Fuentes, "Surveying the Link Between Modernist Mexican Painting and Murals" at Writing on the Wall:

http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/columns/writing-on-the-wall/patriarch-painter-to-be-pondered-in-pasadena.html

Compared to Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros, the Mexican Modernist painter Alfredo Ramos Martinez (1871-1946) doesn't come in for much attention. But he definitely seems interesting, and is now the subject of a retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of California Art:

http://pmcaonline.org/exhibits/alfredo-ramos-martinez/index.html
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Jake Hinson, "The Dark Collaborations: Japanese Noir from [writer] Seicho Matsumoto and [director] Yoshitaro Nomura" at CriminalElement.com:

http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2014/01/the-dark-collaborations-japanese-noir-from-seicho-matsumoto-and-yoshitaro-nomura-film-international-crime-jake-hinkson

The dependably sharp Jake Hinson makes these films sound great! I haven't seen much Japanese noir, only the well-known Kurosawa titles: Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, The Bad Sleep Well, and High and Low, all great films (and Scandal, nearly as good, has some noir elements).
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"Exhibit Celebrates Pioneers of St. Louis Modernism" at Dwell:

http://www.dwell.com/post/article/exhibit-celebrates-pioneers-st-louis-suburban-modernism

Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch towers over St. Louis, but the city’s suburban landscape is dotted with midcentury modern monuments of a more modest sort in the form of elegant, low-slung houses with high-vaulted ceilings and ample windows. 

The husband-and-wife architectural team of Ralph and Mary Jane Fournier deserve much of the credit for the St. Louis area’s enduring reputation as a hothouse of midcentury modernism for the masses—but it has tended to elude them, affixing itself instead to the likes of William Bernoudy, Harris Armstrong, and a few others.

For visual documentation, check out these two links. Awesome homes - I'd live in one happily.

http://www.tedwight.com/st_louis_real_estate_blog/ralph-fournier-architect/

http://www.beltstl.com/2014/01/celebrating-st-louis-architect-ralph-fournier/
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Peter Ludlow, "Fifty States of Fear" at the New York Times Opinionator:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/fifty-states-of-fear/

Ludlow makes good points about the manipulative uses of fear in contemporary politics:

One way in which our fears can be manipulated by the government is to lead us to fear the lesser danger. Schneier provides a simple example of this: 9/11 caused people to irrationally fear air travel and led them to the much more dangerous route of traveling in automobiles.

Another such example of this misdirection of fear took place in the case of the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, in which the Boston Police Department effectively imposed martial law and seized control of people’s homes and used them as command posts in their effort to apprehend the perpetrators. The bombings were terrible (three people died and more than 260 were injured), but just two days later another terrible thing happened: a giant explosion in a fertilizer plant in Texas killed at least 14 people and injured more than 160. For a moment we held our collective breath. Could it have been terrorists?

When we learned that it was probably an accident caused by the ignition of stored ammonium nitrate, a collective sigh of relief was heard, and then not another word about the event. But why? And what if the explosion in that factory was part of a larger problem of industrial safety? In fact, according to a report by the United States Congressional Research Service, thousands of industrial facilities across the country risk similar harm to nearby populations.

Meanwhile, 300,000 residents of West Virginia were without safe drinking water last week after 7,500 gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol leaked into the Elk River from an industrial storage tank at a plant owned by a company called Freedom Industries. Few, if any, of the Sunday TV talk shows discussed the matter, but imagine the fear that would have been pedaled on those shows if terrorists had poisoned the water of those 300,000 Americans. Of course the danger is the same whether the cause is terrorism or corporate indifference and malfeasance.

(Underlining mine.) Sure enough, here is a news piece from earlier this week, "Separate plant blasts kill 4 people in Nebraska, Oklahoma":

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/20/22373508-separate-plant-blasts-kill-4-people-in-nebraska-oklahoma

This sort of incident happens all the time, but doesn't get much sustained attention. The media always make decisions as to what to emphasize. Remember that Chilean mine disaster in 2010 in which, happily, all 33 trapped men eventually did survive? Sure you do. How about the New Zealand mine disaster that occurred just one month after the Chile incident ended? In that one, all 29 trapped men died.

No, I didn't think you had heard about that one.