Yvi Magazine is a new publication from Holland, whose first edition features my conversation with David Maisel, along with many of his photos, reproduced in stunning quality. I don’t know about availability in various parts of the world - check out their website (or contact them).
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Can you guess what this man invented 25 years ago? Those who are able to read German, can read about it.
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“In 1971, 23 American college students’ lives were changed by the now notorious Stanford Prison Experiment. For the eminent psychologist responsible, Philip Zimbardo, the parallels to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib are palpable. In an exclusive Australian interview, he joins Natasha Mitchell, to reflect on the capacity in all of us to commit evil. It’s a case of good apples put in bad barrels.” - story
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At the risk of sounding like a Kulturpessimist, for every technology/invention there will be someone who will turn it into something that is - at best - just annoying (for example telemarketing) or - at worst - outright harmful (for example nuclear weapons). This interesting article discusses “spam” - don’t we all know it?
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“Ingmar Bergman, the ‘poet with the camera’ who was one of the greatest directors in motion picture history [and who hated to watch his own movies], died Monday at the age of 89, Swedish news media have reported.” (story)
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I always tell people it’s easier to get a doctorate in astrophysics first and then to do something else, but I’ve just been proven wrong: “Brian May is completing his doctorate in astrophysics, more than 30 years after he abandoned his studies to form the rock group Queen.” (story; my emphasis)
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I can’t resist posting this link (scroll down for the real madness!).
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“Franziska Augstein takes a critical look at media muckraking that’s uncovered the Nazi pasts of a new group of leftist intellectuals.” About these most recent “revelations”, an intellectual (one of the few Jewish Holocaust survivors who stayed in Germany after the war) noted that what they really showed was that Germans were still happy to be informers, and it’s hard to see how he doesn’t have a point.
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It was to be expected: The Empire strikes back. Ed Winkleman already commented on it, and because bis repitita non placent I should refrain from commenting.
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“A 27-year-old man described as one of the world’s most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.” (source; my emphasis)
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“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.” (Albert Einstein) In this spirit, here’s The Creation Museum, where, according to the LA Times, “Bamm-Bamm and Dino played together”. Don’t miss to look at these photos.
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“Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University created this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms.”
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“[Vivienne] Westwood can’t help herself. The broad message of her piece is: the philistines are upon us! […] ‘My biggest criticism is how can people be so easily satisfied? Even people with talent.’ She sends up conceptual art as ‘a symphony composed on the remaining three keys of a broken piano, combined with the random throwing of marbles at a urinal’.” - story
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“It has long been predicted that traditional books are about to be replaced by little machines on which you can download any novel you fancy. But the technology has never really been up to the job - until now. Here Andrew Marr, who treasures his smelly, beautiful library of real books, spends a month with one of the new gadgets.” (story)
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“‘Manufacturing Dissent’ will have its premiere on March 10 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. To say it sheds an unflattering light on Moore — whose work includes the hit ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ and the Oscar-winning ‘Bowling for Columbine’ — would be an understatement.” - full story
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When I look at how Paint by Number kits’ selling point was “Every Man a Rembrandt!” I just can’t escape to notice similarities with current claims about photography, involving digital photography and Flickr… And there appears to be even more: Just compare how the craze about older paint-by-numbers is not that dissimilar from the one about, say, found photographs.
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“What is it about Germans and nudity? The Teutonic attitude to getting naked in enough to make the prudish British and Americans blush […] Now even Germany’s universities have caught this fever for disrobing. Over the past few years a new trend has emerged on campus — the naked college calendar, featuring a seemingly endless supply of brazen young people willing to appear in their birthday suit for a variety of good causes.” - story
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“Nearly 30 years ago, an electrician called Mac Robertson working at Francis Bacon’s studio in west London noticed the artist dumping rubbish in a skip. Something of a squirrel, and clearly no fool, he persuaded Bacon to let him keep these few discarded paintings, diaries, photos and bits and bobs. He hung on to the stuff, storing it in a friend’s attic in Surrey. Last night, this collection of Bacon’s trash, now accorded the grandiose title of the Robertson collection, was definitively transformed, from its owner’s perspective, into treasure. Conservatively expected to make 500,000 British Pounds, the 45 lots in fact fetched a total of 965,490 British Pounds, not including 17.5% buyers’ premium.” - story
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Today, I came across a set of Japanese TV commercials for what looks like a pasta sauce (or maybe a pasta with sauce) that I don’t even want to think about (it appears to include cod roe). Why am I telling you this? Well, the commercials are weird on just so many different levels - be warned: if you watch them, you won’t get that theme tune out of your head for a while (my wife is humming it while I’m typing this). But the thing that really struck me was the imagery used - it reminded me of photography that has been quite popular recently. You watch the commercials, and you’ll see. So here are three of them (and I did warn you about that theme tune): 1, 2, 3.
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Being a cosmologist, I can’t help but be endlessly amused by this version of creation (and I especially like the creationist alternative at the end).
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I don’t know whether the story of the cleaning lady removing and thus destroying a pile of fat set up by Joseph Beuys is an urban myth or not (if it is an urban myth then just like almost any other one it’s one that I just wish was true), but this definitely happened: “London transport workers have painted over an iconic mural by ‘guerrilla artist’ Banksy” (story) Notes a spokesperson of “Transport for London”: “Our graffiti removal teams are staffed by professional cleaners not professional art critics”. Which makes me think that if one was to protect Banksy’s art work, then one could hardly call him (if it’s a he) a “guerilla artist” any longer (it’s bad enough Hollywood celebrities are buying his art, and his book is on prominent display at “Urban Outfitters”). But coming back to that spokesperson, according to him (or her) “Transport for London” graffiti has to be removed because it creates “general atmosphere of neglect and social decay which in turn encourages crime. We have no intention of changing this policy as it makes the transport system safer and more pleasant for passengers.” Wow, that’s channeling the nasty spirit of quite a few unpleasant people, with Rudolph Giuliani being the least unappealing amongst those.
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“Photography has always had the potential to democratise images, but it has seldom worked out that way in practice. Digital imaging has made image-making devices ubiquitous. Many more people now possess the means to make images more of the time. At the same time, images are primarily used, in the public image environment, to influence public opinion and encourage the consumption of products and services. What is the relation between these two phenomena: near universal private image-making capability and widespread manipulation through public images?” - story
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Imagine the following situation. Your apartment is filled with toddlers, and there’s a large number of extremely sharp and shiny knives lying on the floor somewhere, which the toddlers can access easily. What do you do? Kind of obvious, isn’t it?
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I know what I’ll be doing whenever I got a free minute today: I’ll be looking at (and editing) the Uncyclopedia, which is kind of like the Wikipedia, except the former admits it’s all just for the laughs.
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I can’t resist linking to this. Have a look at these highlights from Britain’s old fake news show The Day Today, featuring the proto-Stephen Colbert Alan Partridge. Oh, and don’t miss this one.
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I’m a big fan of Godzilla movies. As far as entertainment value goes, they’re hard to beat. So what’s so good about a Godzilla movie?
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Over at Sign and Sight, there’s a whole bunch of interesting articles that go beyond the “some say” diet we’re so familiar with. In The ghosts are leaving the shadows, former East German dissident Wolf Biermann discusses the movie The Life of Others and its implications. The multicultural Issue contains a whole set of articles debating how/whether to engage moderate Islam (remember there are large Islamic minorities in many European countries). Navid Kermani examines Germany: A mindset. And in The radical loser, Hans Magnus Enzensberger tries to understand what converts ordinary people into terrorists.
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“Slaves - Notable by their absence in films about Sparta, even though they were the bedrock of Spartan society. Presumably acknowledgment of Sparta’s large slave population would sit oddly with a portrayal of a heroic society that valued freedom.” - story
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“If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.” (story)
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Thingsmagazine just called the cruise ship Freedom of the Seas “quite possibly the world’s largest and most tasteless object”. Given the ship’s nauseatingly tacky name it’s hard to disagree.
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“Jean Baudrillard’s death did not take place. ‘Dying is pointless,’ he once wrote. ‘You have to know how to disappear.’” (obit) Speaking of pointless, I have to admit I only read one book by Jean Baudrillard (or actually about half of it). But when I read the book, I remembered a scene from one of the deleted scenes of the movie Waiting for Guffman, where Fred Willard, in character, goes into a convoluted recollecting of some baseball game with an ending that is entirely made up, concluding “That’s not true, but it sounds good.” Reading Baudrillard, that struck me as quite adaptable to the book: This is all crap, but it sounds good.
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“The most successful Hitler parody on film is a short in which Adolf moans about a dishonest car salesman. It’s attracted more than half a million hits on YouTube. The two-and-a-half-minute short was made by film student Florian Wittmann […]. It marries footage of Hitler delivering a speech from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will with the sound of a routine by German cabaret performer Gerhard Polt. The result is a film in which the Führer appears to deliver a tirade, replete with all his characteristically hysterical gesturing, about how a car dealer swindled him into a costly leasing agreement for an auto he thought he was buying outright. An enthusiastic German crowd applauds him as he works himself up into a petty bourgeois frenzy.” (source)
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To balance the anti-MAC rant from the other day, here is the report of some sucker who “updated” to Microsoft’s “Vista”.
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“When little green men from Mars eventually descend on our planet and unearth America’s time capsule dating back to the beginning of the year 2007, it could skewer their whole view of our great civilisation.” - story
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I never watch music videos, and I don’t even care much about them. But this is too good to pass it over. It’s not a music video, but the review of one, and a pretty funny one at that. Oh, and don’t miss the archives…
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Seems like psychologists have come up with a term that describes such effects as rude emails, flaming, and virtual shouting matches at online forums: It’s the “online disinhibition effect” at work. “In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming.” (source; my thanks to Jen for pointing this out to me)
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It is a somewhat curious statement to claim that “it is left to high fashion to take up the role that fine art has all but abandoned. While much of fine art has succumbed to the ‘passion for the realÂ’, high fashion remains the last redoubt of Appearance and Fantasy.” But still, this article about a photo spread entitled “State of Emergency” in the Italian edition of Vogue (from some time last year) is quite interesting (even though I don’t necessarily agree with aspects of it; and despite sentences like “The Atrocity Exhibition, like ‘State of EmergencyÂ’, is devoid of any decipherable intent; the oneiric juxtapositions in BallardÂ’s and MeiselÂ’s work seemed to be conceived of as neutral re-presentations of the substitutions and elisions made by the mediatised unconscious.”). It might be enlightening to read this article after or before a recent article in New Yorker magazine about the TV show ‘24’, which, of course, runs on Fox, the network for the reptile brain. I certainly would not have imagined ten years ago to live in times, where large parts of the population in a democratic country believes that there really is nothing wrong with torture.
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Here’s a funny little rant about the British version of Apple’s smug ads, you know the ones with the PC and the MAC guy: “when you see the ads, you think, ‘PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.’ In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.” (full text)
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“From the Holocaust to 9/11, from Berlin to New York, the world is now studded with memorials to human suffering. But does this really mean we care more than we used to? And does our obsession with terrible events make it any less likely that we will repeat them?” - story
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“‘HD [high definition TV] is great because people want to see how people really look,’ Ms. Price [some porn star] said. ‘People just want to see whatÂ’s real.’” (my emphasis, quoted from a New York Times article, which discusses yet another very pressing issue: In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real; and you can just imagine the kind of smirk they must have had at the Times for the oh-so clever first sentence “The XXX industry has gotten too graphic, even for its own tastes.” How witty!)
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I seem to be one of the few people who dislikes the design used my Apple - it might be the German in me who prefer shiny (or better still: brushed) metallic things over cheap looking plastic (so I actually kind of like the design of the second-generation iPod shuffle that I was given this past Christmas). In any case, if you want to find out about the person behind all that design click here.
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In the spirit of my previous Friday posts about the weirdness of reality I give you the story of how the World’s Tallest Man Saves Two Dolphins.
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In the spirit of scraping the bottom of the barrel labeled “culture” every Friday, here is this week’s post: Lindsay Lohan loses it (which boldly assumes that there was something to be lost in the first place).
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“There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain - about one for every 14 people.” - story
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When you email me and then read my response, you’ll find that I sign off with either “Best” or “All the best” (just like, as it turns out, überblogger Jason Kottke, who pointed me to the following). Leave it to the New York Times to publish a lengthy article (where by “lengthy” I mean “disproportionally long given the actual relevance of the topic matter”) about what to use at the end of an email. Regardless of what they say in that article (that will mercifully disappear behind their pay-for-it firewall soon enough) I’ll stick with “Best”, in the spirit of Jason, who notes “So ‘Best’ it is… don’t take it the wrong way.”
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“The main criticism people direct at the media obsession with celebrities is that it clogs up the news with trivia. But it matters more than that today. As serious public and political life has withered, so celebrity culture has expanded to fill the gap, often with the encouragement of political leaders desperate for some celebrity cover. […] Take the fuss over Madonna. Since I criticised her high-profile attempt to adopt a Malawian toddler, irate pundits from around the world have asked how anybody could want to make that boy live in poverty in Africa […]. In fact the argument is not really about Madonna and her new trophy baby. What she is doing embodies the new ‘caring colonialismÂ’ underpinning Western attitudes towards Africa. It is based on the assumption that we know what is best for them, and the West must save Africans from themselves […]. This popular attitude effectively reduces the whole of Africa to a helpless orphan that must be carried on our backs, just as Madonna carried her chosen ‘sonÂ’ for the cameras in a native sling. And it rides roughshod over any notion of African self-determination.” - story
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“Edgar Wallace was a prolific British crime writer, journalist and playwright, who wrote 175 novels, 24 plays, and countless articles in newspapers and journals. Over 160 films have been made of his novels, more than any other author. In the 1920s, one of Wallace’s publishers claimed that a quarter of all books read in England were written by him.” (source, with the usual caveat about the accuracy of the information) For some odd reason, Germans have always loved Edgar Wallace’s pulp fiction, and the paperbacks have been selling like the proverbial hotcakes. Add to that a series of movies in the 1960s, plus - lately - audio “books” (just to give you an idea how popular he is in Germany, while I got 87 hits on Ebay.com today, Ebay.de offered me 1,425 articles) . Since I love buying old paperbacks and since older editions of Edgar Wallace novels were designed quite beautifully, I bought some late 1950s/early 1960s on German Ebay, and I finally managed to get them to the States and scan them. Have a look. Coincidentally, Ralf Zeigermann, another German expat, just scanned his.
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I was wondering how long it would take for someone to sue Sasha Baron Cohen, the guy behind Borat (if you have not seen the movie yet, do not miss it!), and I was wondering who that someone would be. Turns out the first are a bunch of fraternity kids: “The plaintiffs — listed as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 — were allegedly assured the film would not be shown in the U.S. and their identities would not be revealed.” (source) Yeah right! “The plaintiffs claim they suffered ‘humiliation, mental anguish, and emotional and physical distress, loss of reputation, goodwill and standing in the community…’” Hmmm, to avoid future “mental anguish” and “loss of reputation”, maybe just don’t drink like a horse at a watering hole and then explain how minorities are exploiting America and how you want slavery back - I think that should do it.
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While compiling my own personal set of all-time favourite tracks to put on an mp3 player (for my upcoming travels), I came across the soundtrack of the movie Pi, which gotta be one of my favourite movies (its website is a bit old, but I guess that’s what happens to movie websites long after the release dates). It’s not even that I care so much about the idea that the number Pi contains any special meaning, it’s more the way to movie is filmed and done. If you haven’t seen it, it’s shot entirely in black and white. There are basically no grey tones - they used some old film type for it. And the editing, along with the way the music is added, is quite amazing.
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Here’s a little bit of fun for you. Read this article by Kevin Federline (Britney Spears’ husband). Something makes me think that people like Federline (or Paris Hilton) are today’s dadaists (“Like, I could do the work, but I didn’t want to do the work.” - K.F.).
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