August 22, 2008

  • ART WARS continued –

    Tentative movie title:
    Blockheads

    Kohs Block Design Test

    The Kohs Block Design
    Intelligence Test

    Samuel Calmin Kohs, the designer (but not the originator) of the above intelligence test, would likely disapprove of the “Aryan Youth types” mentioned in passing by a film reviewer in today’s New York Times. (See below.) The Aryan Youth would also likely disapprove of Dr. Kohs.

    Related material from
    Notes on Finite Geometry:

    Kohs Block Design figure illustrating the four-color decomposition theorem

    Other related material:

    1.  Wechsler Cubes (intelligence testing cubes derived from the Kohs cubes shown above). See…

    Harvard psychiatry and…
    The Montessori Method;
    The Crimson Passion;
    The Lottery Covenant.

    2.  Wechsler Cubes of a different sort (Log24, May 25, 2008)

    3.  Manohla Dargis in today’s New York Times:

    “… ‘Momma’s Man‘ is a touchingly true film, part weepie, part comedy, about the agonies
    of navigating that slippery slope called adulthood. It was written and
    directed by Azazel Jacobs, a native New Yorker who has set his modestly
    scaled movie with a heart the size of the Ritz in the same downtown
    warren where he was raised. Being a child of the avant-garde as well as
    an A student, he cast his parents, the filmmaker Ken Jacobs and the
    artist Flo Jacobs, as the puzzled progenitors of his centerpiece, a
    wayward son of bohemia….

    In American movies, growing up tends to be a job for either Aryan Youth types or the oddballs and outsiders….”

    4.  The bohemian who named his son Azazel:
    “… I think that the deeper opportunity,
    the greater opportunity film can offer us is as an exercise of the
    mind. But an exercise, I hate to use the word, I won’t say ‘soul,’ I
    won’t say ‘soul’ and I won’t say ‘spirit,’ but that it can really put
    our deepest psychological existence through stuff. It can be a powerful
    exercise. It can make us think, but I don’t mean think about this and
    think about that. The very, very process of powerful thinking, in a way
    that it can afford, is I think very, very valuable. I basically think
    that the mind is not complete yet, that we are working on creating the
    mind. Okay. And that the higher function of art for me is its
    contribution to the making of mind.”

    Interview with Ken Jacobs, UC Berkeley, October 1999

    5.  For Dargis’s “Aryan Youth types”–

    From a Manohla Dargis
    New York Times film review
    of April 4, 2007
       (Spy Wednesday) –

    Scene from Paul Verhoeven's film 'Black Book'

    See also, from August 1, 2008
    (anniversary of Hitler’s
    opening the 1936 Olympics) –

    For Sarah Silverman

    and the 9/9/03 entry 

    Olympic Style.

    Doonesbury,
    August 21-22, 2008:

    http://www.log24.com/log/pix08A/080821-22-db16color.gif

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