Web Monitor
17:13 UK time, Wednesday, 7 October 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today Web Monitor accommodates the weary film star and anxious yuppies. Share the most interesting bits of the web by sending links via the letters box to the right of this page.
• Jesse Eisenberg may not be a film star on the level of Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt but he is starring in . Just starting out in the industry, he provides an example of how quickly one can become jaded in Hollywood - as shown in :
"I get offered movies on a regular basis, but most of them are terrible because most of the movies that are made are terrible... I was on the plane today with my sister and I just had her read one [script] because I just couldn't stand it. It was just this guy who was trying to have sex with a lot of women. I read like five pages and then my veins hurt."
• There is an increase in Americans burying their dead in their back gardens . that this has caused controversy - not because of the health and safety implications, but because it highlights how public grieving has become too social:
"By planting our dead in public, Americans solved an urban planning problem and created an emotional one. Cemeteries put death in the public realm. But they also hide death by sticking it on a hilltop in the suburbs. One could thus argue that enveloping corpses with copses, decorating them with flowers and bits of marble, is simply an elaborate process of avoidance. That as we attend a jazz concert together over our dead grandmothers, we are distracted from grieving for them."
• What is it about antiquities from across the world that is so alluring? How do gift shops full of trinkets make their money? In that these knick-knacks are for anxious yuppies but no-one is immune to their appeal:
"In this age of ephemeral digital connections and vaporous 24-hour media feeds when most of us spend our days squinting at computer screens, it makes sense that we would be infatuated by the notion of real labor, that we would cling to the concreteness of old stuff that looks like it has a long and storied history... none of us are above seeking the validation afforded by truly special, anointed, original, odd, whimsical things. It's just that most of us can't afford them."
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