This is your brain on politics

Forget all that debate on whether there are "grandmother neurons" in your brain that house your representations and memories of her. Some are saying there are Hilary Clinton areas, and that John Edwards evokes disgust. A NY Times article came out last week which reports an fMRI study where scientists showed images and video of presidential candidates to swing voters to evaluate the neural responses to images of those candidates before and after watching videos of their speeches. Since then, cognitive neuroscientists, especially those who do imaging studies, have moaned and groaned about the interpretations the authors drew of those blobs of activity, and of the increasing tide of over-simplified imaging studies in pop science. Martha Farah, a neuroscience professor at Penn and poster child for neuroethics, wrote a pretty tactful blog response to the article that is also well worth reading.

Slicker older Eric and kick-ass film unite

Tonight I saw an awesome movie (for free!) with my buddy Jay, called "El Orfanato" (The Orphanage), a Spanish film directed by Juan Antonio Bayona. This is probably the best horror movie I've seen in a long time, and I don't usually like horror movies. I'll get the negatives out first: I thought a lot of its scary moments were kind of cliche and anticipated, replete with crescendos of creepy music just to build suspense, and people jumping out of dark places. Also, the ending was a bit too happy for my taste.

Other than that, and the audience being way too vocal, this movie rocked. It had some AWESOME scary scenes that were completely unexpected and really made me jump, and a feeling of overall creepiness and intrigue that made it go beyond just a horror flick. It's the story of a mother and her adopted son, who doesn't know he's adopted and has received indications that he's not long for this world. However, as a cool bonus to a pending death, he can see and play with the spirits of other dead children, who his parents pass off as imaginary friends. When these friends then proceed to steal him away and force his mother to play a game of treasure hunt to find him again, she undergoes some psychological breakdown which leads to great movie suspense.

This movie makes you want to scream and cry and nervously titter when you aren't doing the other two. Definitely definitely see it.

What made it even better for me was that at this particular screening, the director and screenwriter were present and hosted a Q&A session after the film in heavily accented and curse-laden English. They came up with some great and amusing answers to really lame questions, and the audience was impressed with such accomplishment from two young-lookin' guys. Actually aging in at 37 and 32, they were older than they looked, but the best part of both of them was that the director (at least from my 5th-row-from-the-back seat) looked like an older, directiorially established Eric Barkin! Check him out in the center of this pic, and imagine him with the goatee he had on this evening.


Y'all may disagree, but I think this could be the future of the Barkin. Not Eric as we know him now, but an experienced, less "would you rather" and more "I've already done both" Eric. Seeing this guy in the front of a crowd quietly answering questions about his beloved baby made me wish Eric were doing it instead, and solidified my vision of Eric as a filmmaker later in life. Do it buddy! Live my dream!

That's all I got for now. See the movie.

I saw "American Gangster" last night. It was kinda meh, boiling down to too much of an archetypal cops & robbers gunfest for my liking. Russel Crowe's detective character was hackneyed, the trophy wife figure completely unnecessary, Denzel did that stern/grumpy face and beat his chest after barking an emotional line like every other Denzel movie... I could go on but that's not what I'm posting about.

The movie was based on a New York Magazine article from a few years ago about Frank Lucas, a 70's Harlem heroin kingpin, played perhaps too nicely by Denzel Washington in the flick.

The article is a fantastic read; this guy is a very bad man.

***

"'Then the motherfucker broke for me. But he was too late. I shot him. Four times, right through here: bam, bam, bam, bam.

'Yeah, it was right there,' says Frank Lucas, 35 years after the shooting, pointing out the car window. 'The boy didn't have no head. The whole shit blowed out back there . . . That was my real initiation fee into taking over completely down here. Because I killed the baddest motherfucker. Not just in Harlem but in the world.'

Then Frank laughs.

Ha ha ha, siss siss siss. For how many luckless fools like Tango was this the last sound they heard on this earth?"