milk 6.mil.1100281 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

One of the first scenes in “Milk” is of a pick-up in a New York subway station. It’s 1970, and an insurance executive in a suit and tie catches sight of a beautiful, scruffy younger man — the phrase “angel-headed hipster” comes to mind — and banters with him on the stairs. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan

The mood of the moment, which ends up with the two men eating birthday cake in bed, is casual and sexy, and its flirtatious playfulness is somewhat disarming, given our expectation of a serious and important movie grounded in historical events. “Milk,” directed by Gus Van Sant from a script by Dustin Lance Black, is certainly such a film, but it manages to evade many of the traps and compromises of the period biopic with a grace and tenacity worthy of its title character. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com

That would be Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn), a neighborhood activist elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 and murdered, along with the city’s mayor, George Moscone (Victor Garber), by a former supervisor named Dan White (Josh Brolin) the next year. Notwithstanding the modesty of his office and the tragic foreshortening of his tenure, Milk, among the first openly gay elected officials in the country, had a profound impact on national politics, and his rich afterlife in American culture has affirmed his status as pioneer and martyr. His brief career has inspired an opera by Stewart Wallace, an excellent documentary film (“The Times of Harvey Milk,” by Rob Epstein, from 1984) and now “Milk,” which is the best live-action mainstream American movie that I have seen this year. This is not faint praise, by the way, even though 2008 has been a middling year for Hollywood. “Milk” is accessible and instructive, an astute chronicle of big-city politics and the portrait of a warrior whose passion was equaled by his generosity and good humor. Mr. Penn, an actor of unmatched emotional intensity and physical discipline, outdoes himself here, playing a character different from any he has portrayed before.

This is less a matter of sexuality — there is no longer much novelty in a straight actor’s “playing gay” — than of temperament. Unlike, say, Jimmy Markum, Mr. Penn’s brooding ex-convict in Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” Harvey Milk is an extrovert and an ironist, a man whose expansive, sometimes sloppy self-presentation camouflages an incisive mind and a ferociously stubborn will. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan  All of this Mr. Penn captures effortlessly through voice and gesture, but what is most arresting is the sense he conveys of Milk’s fundamental kindness, a personal virtue that also functions as a political principle.

Which is not to say that “Milk” is an easy, sunny, feel-good movie, or that its hero is a shiny liberal saint. There is righteous anger in this movie, and also an arresting, moody lyricism. Mr. Van Sant has frequently practiced a kind of detached romanticism, letting his stories unfold matter-of-factly while infusing them with touches of melancholy beauty. (He is helped here by Danny Elfman’s elegant score and by the expressive cinematography of Harris Savides, whose touch when it comes to framing and focus could more aptly be called a caress.)

In the years since the earnest and commercial “Finding Forrester” (2000), Mr. Van Sant has devoted himself to smaller-scale projects, some of them (like the Palme d’Or-winning provocation “Elephant”) employing nonprofessional actors, and none of them much concerned with soliciting the approval of the mass audience. “Gerry,” “Elephant,” “Last Days” and “Paranoid Park” are linked by a spirit of formal exploration — elements of Mr. Van Sant’s experimental style include long tracking shots; oblique, fractured narratives; and a way of composing scenes that emphasizes visual and aural texture over conventional dramatic exposition — and also by a preoccupation with death.

Like “Elephant” (suggested by the Columbine High shootings) and “Last Days” (by the suicide of Kurt Cobain), “Milk” is the chronicle of a death foretold. Before that subway station encounter, we have already seen real-life news video of the aftermath of Milk’s assassination, as well as grainy photographs of gay men being rounded up by the police. These images don’t spoil the intimacy between Harvey the buttoned-up businessman and Scott Smith (James Franco), the hippie who becomes his live-in lover and first campaign manager. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan   Rather, the constant risk of harassment, humiliation and violence is the defining context of that intimacy.

And his refusal to accept this as a fact of life, his insistence on being who he is without secrecy or shame, is what turns Milk from a bohemian camera store owner (after his flight from New York and the insurance business) into a political leader.

“My name is Harvey Milk, and I want to recruit you.” That was an opening line that the real Milk often used in his speeches to break the tension with straight audiences, but the film shows him deploying it with mostly gay crowds as well, with a slightly different inflection. He wants to recruit them into the politics of democracy, to persuade them that the stigma and discrimination they are used to enduring quietly and even guiltily can be addressed by voting, by demonstrating, by claiming the share of power that is every citizen’s birthright and responsibility.

The strength of Mr. Black’s script is that it grasps both the radicalism of Milk’s political ambition and the pragmatism of his methods. “Milk” understands that modern politics thrive at the messy, sometimes glorious intersection of grubby interests and noble ideals. Shortly after moving with Scott from New York to the Castro section of San Francisco, Milk begins organizing the gay residents of that neighborhood, seeking out allies among businessmen, labor unions and other groups.

The city’s gay elite, discomfited by his confrontational tactics, keeps Milk at a distance, leaving him to build a movement from the ground up with the help of a young rabble-rouser and ex-hustler named Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch).

For more than two lively, eventful hours, “Milk” conforms to many of the conventions of biographical filmmaking, if not always to the precise details of the hero’s biography.  http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan  Milk’s inexhaustible political commitment takes its toll on his relationships, first with Scott and then with Jack Lira, an impulsive, unstable young man played by Diego Luna with an operatic verve that stops just short of camp.

Meanwhile, local San Francisco issues are overshadowed by a statewide anti-gay-rights referendum and the national crusade, led by the orange-juice spokesmodel Anita Bryant, to repeal municipal antidiscrimination laws. The culture war is unfolding, and Milk is in the middle of it. (And so, 30 years later, in the wake of Proposition 8, is “Milk.”)

“Milk” is a fascinating, multi-layered history lesson. In its scale and visual variety it feels almost like a calmed-down Oliver Stone movie, stripped of hyperbole and Oedipal melodrama. But it is also a film that like Mr. Van Sant’s other recent work — and also, curiously, like David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” another San Francisco-based tale of the 1970s — respects the limits of psychological and sociological explanation.

Dan White, Milk’s erstwhile colleague and eventual assassin, haunts the edges of the movie, representing both the banality and the enigma of evil. Mr. Brolin makes him seem at once pitiable and scary without making him look like a monster or a clown. Motives for White’s crime are suggested in the film, but too neat an accounting of them would distort the awful truth of the story and undermine the power of the movie.

That power lies in its uncanny balancing of nuance and scale, its ability to be about nearly everything — love, death, politics, sex, modernity — without losing sight of the intimate particulars of its story. Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. “Milk” is a marvel. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

hair 33.hai.9090 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Clothes moths will eat more than our wardrobe. Given a chance, they’ll eat us too.

Casemaking clothes moth caterpillars can digest human hair and will feed on corpses. But it’s not all bad news, scientists say.

Hair bits nipped off of corpses by caterpillars of the casemaking clothes moth, Tinea pellionella, can yield enough DNA to identify the deceased, according to entomologist Sibyl Bucheli of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/

Particularly helpful is the caterpillars’ habit of retreating to nearby, out-of-the-way corners when it’s time to stop feeding and metamorphose into small tan moths, Bucheli reported November 16 in Reno, Nev., at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America. The human body they’ve been feeding on may get moved away, but left-behind caterpillar cases containing human hair can still tie the body to the location, she said.

Casemaking clothes moths rank among the two major wardrobe attackers in North America, though the species remains more of a rural dweller than an urban one.

Scientists have discovered clothes moths nibbling on a corpse before, according to Bucheli. And clothes moth larvae in the wild will graze on a dead animal. “They had to eat something before people invented wool sweaters,” she said. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/

What’s new is the human hair in the home of the casemaking clothes moth caterpillar. This species takes its common name from the half-inch long, skinny, fiber-fuzzed cases that young larvae build.

Youngsters create the case with one end open, nestle inside and then crawl around in search of food. They feed by sticking out their front ends partway, like chilly campers refusing to climb all the way out of warm sleeping bags. As the caterpillars grow, they enlarge their cases, incorporating bits of nearby fibers into their portable homes.

Bucheli and her colleagues discovered human hair in caterpillar cases when a forensics team asked for help with an abandoned body discovered in August 2007 in a Galveston County, Texas house. Witnesses who had hung around the house in the past said they hadn’t seen the deceased for more than a year, since the previous summer. Investigators asked Bucheli whether the insects around the body offered any clues to when the person had died.

Investigators presented Bucheli with what she describes as “basically a salad crisper” full of hundreds of insects, dead and alive. Among them were the clothes moth larvae in their cases still feeding on clumps of the deceased’s hair. The parts of the cases made most recently bristled with stubs of human hair.

The hair shafts yielded enough mitochondrial DNA for Bucheli and her lab to sequence a repetitive bit of genetic material commonly used for forensic identification. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/

To determine the timing, Bucheli and her colleagues relied on the insect assemblage, which lacked some of the flies and other species that routinely visit fresh corpses in warm weather. Thus, the person probably had died during cool weather, not in summer as the witnesses had claimed, she concluded. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

hips 882.hip.201 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .  She was short, squat and definitely not built for speed. On the plus side, this adult female Homo erectus, who lived in Africa roughly one million years ago, had hips wide enough to bear babies with brains nearly as big as those of newborn human infants. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan

That’s the evolutionary picture presented by researchers who have unearthed a rare find: a nearly complete female H. erectus pelvis. Pieces of the fossil were found at an Ethiopian site called Gona in 2001 and 2003. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan

H. erectus females evolved a pelvis of a size unprecedented among human ancestors because the females had to squeeze increasingly big-headed babies through their birth canals, concludes a team led by anthropologists Scott Simpson of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Sileshi Semaw of Indiana University in Bloomington.

In the Nov. 14 Science, the researchers say that the new pelvis challenges an earlier proposal that both sexes of H. erectus evolved to grow relatively tall and slender in order to shed body heat efficiently in their tropical homelands. That idea was largely based on measurements of a 6-foot-2-inch H. erectus skeleton found in 1984 that has been attributed to a slim, 10- to 12-year-old boy who lived in eastern Africa 1.5 million years ago.

“It’s now apparent that body size range in H. erectus has been underestimated,” Simpson says. The Gona female lived between 1.4 million and 900,000 years ago and stood no taller than 4 feet, 9 inches. Fossil evidence of other small-bodied H. erectus individuals in Africa and Central Asia has accumulated over the past several years.

Simpson also views the broad, flaring Gona pelvis as a challenge to an earlier proposal that H. erectus individuals possessed narrow hips suitable for endurance running, a capacity that would have aided them in hunting.

The ancient Gona female, known to be an adult based on the development of the pelvis, had wider hips than virtually all women today. Given the size and shape of the new pelvis, H. erectus infants must have been more than 30 percent larger at birth than has usually been assumed, in the scientists’ view. During childhood, H. erectus brains grew at a faster pace than the brains of chimpanzees but at a slower rate than the brains of modern humans, the team estimates. And though the hips in H. erectus were bigger than the hips of H. sapiens, the size of the birth canal may have been similar for the two species. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan

Anatomical similarities link the Gona find to remains of other fossil female pelvises — including one from Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis individual found in eastern Africa, and another from a 2.5-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus individual unearthed in southern Africa.

“I do not see any major problems with either the reconstruction or the interpretation of this new specimen,” comments anthropologist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio.

“This pelvis is a nice addition to the fossil record, but it raises more questions than it answers,” remarks Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman, a proponent of endurance running as characteristic of H. erectus.

In his view, the new specimen might come from a comparably ancient species in the human evolutionary family, Australopithecus boisei. A big, and therefore probably male A. boisei, could have had hips as wide as those of the Gona individual, Lieberman suggests.

A. boisei fossils have not been recovered at or near Gona, Simpson responds. A stone tool recovered along with the new pelvis corresponds to those known to have been used by H. erectus, he adds.

Other researchers say the volumes of fossil brain cases provide reliable estimates that H. erectus females delivered babies with brains about 15 percent smaller than the maximum figure cited in the new study. But Simpson says that his team’s estimated range of possible brain sizes for H. erectus babies overlaps with others’ estimates.

Finally, Lieberman remains skeptical of Simpson and Semaw’s conclusion that H. erectus was characterized by extremely short and wide females and unusually tall and narrow males, as indicated by the boy’s skeleton. “I need to be convinced,” he says.

Intriguingly, Simpson notes, modern human females have evolved relatively short statures and broad hips in cold environments, not in hot ones similar to Gona. Although H. erectus inhabited a variety of environments, females of that species retained a broad pelvis wherever they lived, he hypothesizes. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan

Other H. erectus fossils display traits that would have enabled endurance running, such as attachment spots for large upper-leg muscles and enlarged inner-ear structures for improved balance, Lieberman says. Long-distance running enabled H. erectus to hunt effectively without spearheads and to obtain enough meat to support the evolution of increasingly large brains, he proposes.

Simpson disagrees. The endurance-running hypothesis crucially depends on the H. erectus boy’s reconstructed skeleton, he notes. But, he predicts, a revised reconstruction would show that this youth had a broader, more flared pelvis than has been claimed.

beetle 66.bee.21 Louis J. Sheehan

The largest outbreak of mountain pine beetles on record is turning a forest in British Columbia from part of the solution into part of the problem in the fight against greenhouse gases.

Climate modelers typically count the great boreal forests that stretch across Canada and Russia as friendly assets, helping to take up and store a bit of the excess carbon dioxide that human activity releases into the atmosphere. http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Not so anymore for a section of Canada’s forest in south-central British Columbia, says forest ecologist Werner Kurz of Natural Resources Canada’s Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria. Records plus a computer model show that beetle damage will probably make the region a net source of carbon at least until 2020, he and his colleagues report in the April 24 Nature.

“What is unique and new is that we have been able to improve the model and the data so that we can run the model with, and without, the beetle,” Kurz says. This refinement marks the first time greenhouse-gas bookkeeping has weighed the effects of an insect outbreak, he says.

When infested trees die, the forest takes up less carbon dioxide. Also, the wood starts decaying and the dead trees themselves release the carbon they once stored. Carbon pal becomes carbon problem.

The computer model finds a big carbon footprint from the beetles, comparable to about a quarter of the emissions from Canada’s transportation sector per year. The researchers estimate that the insect infestation may lead to the release of a total of 270 million metric tons of carbon between 2000 and 2020.

Such upsets in forests need attention as scientists try to understand climate change, says forest ecosystem ecologist Tom Gower of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Previous generations of climate models treated a forest as a “closed box with the climate acting on it,” he says. In the real world, though, wildfires blaze through and insects attack, sometimes with enough of a wallop to shift the bottom line of carbon accounting. “Don’t forget disturbance — it’s important,” he says.

Ironically, the beetle disturbance is itself fueled by climate change. The mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae), each about the size of a rice grain, are native North Americans. The beetle larvae spend winters under the bark of mature pines. Every once in a while, beetle populations boom until they “eat themselves out of house and home,” says Kurz. Warming temperatures allowed them to expand their range northward and higher up mountain slopes, and warm winters failed to blast them with larva-killing cold snaps of -40° Celsius. So starting in 2000, the beetle populations began rising explosively in British Columbia. They’ve infested an area about the size of Alabama. “We’ve never seen an outbreak like this before,” says Kurz. http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire