more for the sonosphere...

one of the most inexcusable things chicago public radio's ever done is cancel gretchen helfrich's odyssey program. charitably, the station has kept it in their budget to continue hosting the show's 7 year archive. so now in my repetitive hours i can catch up on the history of Sino-Japanese Relations and Imagining the Hillbilly. The Film Forum Fridays were always a must-hear and it's fitting that the show goes out on this note: films to see before you die... added a few to the netflix queue.

one interesting bit, talking about films about contract killers, that they derive from benjamin's idea that we are drawn to narrative out of our desire to know the end of something, a way of dealing with our own inability to know our own ending, and these killers being in a way the fulfillment of that since they possess total control of someone's end, have calculated every possible variable.

and.. something said about missed endings i've often thought, that i love the first 10 minutes of every movie i've ever seen because that's when everything is possible.

and. listened to another program, this one about american mania and tracing the history of explaining mental illness in cultural terms to the 19th century when doctors reduced the modern american epidemic of nervous disorders, or neurosthenia, to 5 causes: steam power, the telegraph, the periodical press, the sciences, and the mental activity of women.