Log24

"A 1991 PBS documentary called Dancing Outlaw  introduced the world to the life and times of gas-huffing, vengeance-seeking, tap-dancin’ Jesco White. White Lightnin’ , which premiered recently at Sundance, is British director Dominic Murphy’s reportedly more surreal take on this fabled Appalachian anti-hero. While not locked in reform school, work camps, or the psych ward, the young Jesco White learned his special breed of clog dancing from his father, who was eventually killed in a random act of hillbilly violence. In White Lightnin'  Jesco picks up his daddy’s tap shoes and hits the road, where he comes to grips with the art, addiction, and madness that have plagued his violent life story. And somewhere along the way he meets his wife, played by none other than Carrie Fisher. While David D’Arcy speaks almost fondly of White Lightnin' s redneck-exploitation (he was probably stretching for other ways to describe this “hillbilly slasher saga”), Dennis Harvey was less enchanted by the film’s 'pretentious glimpse of hillbilly hell.' Most early reviews are apprehensive about the film’s distribution chances unless its grotesque lyricism finds a niche market. But I can't imagine this, being the first film written by the co-founders of Vice Magazine , not generating more distribution steam in the near future. If anyone knows how to generate buzz it is those guys."

— MLeary review, January 28, 2009, 12:58 AM

Leo P. Kadanoff, a physicist who provided critical insights into the transformations of matter from one state to another, died last Monday in Chicago. He was 78.

The cause was respiratory failure, said the University of Chicago, where he was a professor from 1978 until his retirement in 2003.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he received the National Medal of Science in 1999.

“He won basically every prize except the Nobel Prize, and many people thought he should have won the Nobel,” said Emil Martinec, a physics professor at the University of Chicago who directs the university’s Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics.

Dr. Kadanoff’s biggest scientific contribution came in the 1960s as scientists were trying to understand phase transitions, when matter changes from one form to another.

A Cornell chemist, Benjamin Widom, had come up with mathematical relationships that described behavior associated with second-order phase transitions, which include the boiling of water to steam at a particular temperature and pressure. But Dr. Widom did not have an underlying physical explanation for why these relationships existed.

Willis Carto, a reclusive behind-the-scenes wizard of the far-right fringe of American politics who used lobbying and publishing to denigrate Jews and other minorities and galvanize the movement to deny the Holocaust, died last Monday at his home in Virginia. He was 89.

His death was announced by The American Free Press, a newspaper he helped found.

Mr. Carto raised funds to finance a right-wing military dictatorship in the United States, campaigned to persuade blacks to voluntarily return to Africa and, most influentially, started newsletters, a journal and conferences of academics and others to deny the scale, and even the existence, of the Holocaust.

The Anti-Defamation League called him “one of the most influential American anti-Semitic propagandists” and “the mastermind of the hate network.”

His associates included neo-Nazis, Christian vigilantes, John Birch Society members and Ku Klux Klansmen, and his extreme views alienated mainstream conservatives. After William F. Buckley sued Mr. Carto for libel and won in 1985, Mr. Buckley said Mr. Carto epitomized “the fever swamps of the crazed right.’’