Embarrassing? He’s on his knees, begging God. What’s he supposed to be? Cool?
November 4, 2013 § Leave a comment
Early 21st century: from “SELF” + “IE,” says the Oxford Dictionary Online, and since my generation still remembers Internet Explorer (I.E., see), I want to smile. Then I want to paint, whiten, and Willow-filter my smile on Instagram, except I can’t without making a statement: The selfie is self-exploration. It’s self-ex_ploit_ation. It is harmless, fun. It’s narcissism gone wild. No, it’s female narcissism, which didn’t you know is redundant, unless it’s “feminist narcissism” by which we mean self-love so please go fuck yourself. Or it is neither feminist nor female but rather the male gaze internalized and viral, in which case it is nothing but harm, and also is making us stupid. But what if it’s self-portraiture? Then who’s stupid? You, who cannot draw a simple line from the nose of Picasso to Miley’s tongue.
My problem with this last, ultimate defense of the selfie is the assumption it needs defending at all. We have been depicting cool animals since the #LOLMAMMOTHS of the Chauvet Caves, yet pseudo-historians are not lining up around Greenpoint to place the cats of Instagram in a lustrous tradition of art. Likewise, I have not read twenty-eight minor essays defending Thanksgiving dinner pics as new Dutch-masterly still lifes. The face alone has launched a thousand think pieces. So now the question is not one of basic selfie-justification, but rather, why must a photo of my face be justified when a photo of my bookshelf is not? read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Elizabeth Moran
What stranger could suppose that a literature one thousand years old,—a literature full of curious and delicate beauty,—exists upon the subject of these short-lived insect-pets?
November 1, 2013 § Leave a comment
Have I mentioned how I kill book clubs like I kill plants? My second attempt was going swimmingly (our first pick from another member of the group: The Waves by V. Woolf—oh man, it was the best) and then I picked I Love Dick and we haven’t met again since our last meeting in February. No one finished it but me, which is a damn shame because it’s the best book I’ve read this year. I loved it. Can I recommend it to you, internet? Would you read it? It’s about love and obsession and books and women and art and academia and relationships and theory all rolled up into one epistolary affair. It’s the best. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: [unattributed]
He’s whittling on a piece of wood. I got a feeling that when he stops whittling something’s gonna happen
October 31, 2013 § Leave a comment
At the church of San Cerbone in Piombino, Italy, archaeologists have discovered over 200 burials that date back to the late 13th to early 14th centuries. The majority of the individuals seem to have been farmers or fisherman, as the site was located near the Sea of Baratti. Some of them were buried in stone sarcophagi or stone-lined pits, others perhaps in wooden caskets or buried directly in the ground.
Two of the burials, though, were distinct and quite anomalous, so they’re making news this week. One was the burial of a female, with which archaeologists found a bag of 17 dice. It was prohibited for women to play dice in the Medieval era, so Fabio Redi and Andrea Camilli have suggested she may have been a prostitute, buried with a symbol of immorality.
The other burial, they suggest, may have been that of a witch. Her skeleton revealed that she was about 25-30 years old at the time of her death. She was likely buried directly in the ground without any casket, but additional details reveal a rather aggressive burial treatment for this woman. Seven curved nails, each about 4cm long, were found in her mouth. In addition, 13 more nails were found in an outline around her body, which the archaeologists suggest reflect her being nailed to the ground by her clothing. Alfonso Forgione, an archaeologist on the project, uses the term “revenant” to describe what the community may have been trying to prevent in their burial of this woman. read more
FILM: Dave Althouse
the real Eldorado is still further on
October 30, 2013 § Leave a comment
The first thing I did after I heard about the highly classified NSA PRISM program two years ago was set up a proxy server in Peshawar to email me passages from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A literary flight of fancy. I started sending back excerpts from Gerard Manley Hopkins poems.
The cantankerous Seymour Hersh was my inspiration. He had told me about the program in a clipped expletive-filled summary in the summer of 2011: “They’re scooping fucking everything, man! Phones, Internet, the whole works.”
I didn’t exactly believe him. He had also told me in 2008 that the Bush administration was close to authorizing airstrikes on Iran. So I treated his new pronouncement as a possibility, a sign from a questionable but often accurate oracle. I had wanted to rebel. The idea of esoteric poetry and prose in the NSA’s vaults appealed to me. “Yes,” I said to myself. “Yes I will.” And so I set out to tell Joyce’s story of a Chapelizod family, in a new way.
I acknowledge now, of course, that the venture was not the wisest idea. Certainly after I was indicted I regretted the hoax. My wife has had her regrets, too. Signing over your house to a law firm is a humbling experience, and for my wife, a clarifying one.
I will not acknowledge, however, that my actions were illegal. I admit only that the idea was pretentious. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Pavlina Tcherneva
Marx said that quantitative differences become qualitative ones, but a dialogue in Paris in the 1920s sums it up even more clearly: FITZGERALD: The rich are different from us. HEMINGWAY: Yes, they have more money
October 29, 2013 § Leave a comment
The most heavily reported unauthorized release of Japan’s defense information in recent years concerns a video recording of a Chinese fishing boat ramming a Japan Coast Guard vessel near the Senkaku (Chinese: Diaoyu) islands in September 2010. But the video itself was not classified as a “defense secret,” so its release cannot be considered a breach of the Self-Defense Forces Law (“SDF Law”). The leaker, who was identified as a member of the Japan Coast Guard, was not prosecuted for any crime. However, the 2010 incident incited demands for stronger secrecy protection laws and led to the appointment of a new government committee to study the issue.
The rarity of high profile leaks of confidential Japanese government information is a sharp contrast to the United States, where federal prosecutors have brought as many as eight cases against accused leakers since President Obama took office in 2009. Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are known all over the world for releasing masses of secret data for publication in mainstream news media and online publishers like Wikileaks.
For open government advocates, one of the most fundamental questions concerns the life cycle of defense secrets. Secrecy designations are ordinarily limited to fixed periods of time. The proposed Designated Secrets Protection Law would set a maximum term of five years. At the expiration of this term, officials could either decide that information remains sensitive and therefore extend the secrecy term or that it is no longer sensitive and the information can be declassified and released to the public or transferred to a public archive for easy access.
When NHK reporters recently asked Defense Ministry officials to describe the life cycle of defense secrets under the 2001 Law, they received a detailed response. During the five-year period from 2006 through 2011, approximately 55,000 records were designated “defense secrets” under the SDF Law. What is the current status of these 55,000 records? According to Defense Ministry officials, 34,000 were destroyed once they reached the end of their fixed secrecy period. When asked how many of the records were de-classified for potential release to the public, the officials delivered a very precise response: one. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Li Hui
I often like working with a hangover because my mind is crackling with energy and I can think very clearly
October 28, 2013 § Leave a comment
Universal Automation is a Chrome browser extension that automatically searches and applies for jobs on Universal Jobmatch, the government-run job search website which benefit claimants are forced to use. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Evelyn Hofer
‘Now before I quit Calais,’ a travel-writer would say, ‘it would not be amiss to give some account of it.’–Now I think it very much amiss–that a man cannot go quietly through a town, and let it alone, when it does not meddle with him, but that he must be turning about and drawing his pen at every kennel he crosses over
October 25, 2013 § Leave a comment
In the seventeenth century, childbirth rituals were usually female, overseen by the midwife and various female friends, relatives and servants. In the eighteenth century, however, male surgeons took over the bulk of the practice. This shift was not without controversy. Female midwives like Elizabeth Nihell lobbed vitriolic attacks at male midwives—and on the birthing machine’s creator—for releasing “swarms” of male midwives into practice at the “expense of humanity” and decency. Already an experienced practitioner, Smellie studied the methods of French instructor Gregoire the Younger, but disappointment led him to develop new and better instruments (like augmented forceps) and a better way to practice their use: the Labour Device, or mechanical woman. Smellie wanted to use a device that would render the internal machinery of the female body distinct, while allowing his pupils to get a feel for delivery without endangering the living subject. The machine became the patient in the medical theater, one of the most unusual of the eighteenth century’s collection of mechanical automations.
An apparent ‘mechanical genius,’ Smellie contrived devices that earned him the awe of his students and even of his detractors. One of Smellie’s pupils writes:
[Dr. Smellie was] An uncommon Genius in all sorts of mechanicks, which after having shewed itself in many other Improvements he manifested in the machines which he has contrived for teaching the Art of Midwifery. Machines which Dr. Desaguliers, who frequently visited him, allowed to be infinitely preferable to all that he had ever seen of the same kind, and which I (from having seen those that are used at Paris) will aver to be by far the best that were ever invented.
This “apparatus” allowed Smellie to “perform and demonstrate all the different kinds of Delivery with more Deliberation, Perspicuity and Fulness than can be expected on real Subjects.” It differed from other mechanical obstetrical devices, which were “no other than a piece of basket-work, containing a real pelvis covered with black leather, upon which he could not clearly explain the difficulties that occur in turning children.” Being “little satisfied” with this method of instruction, Smellie resolved to create “machines which should so exactly imitate real women and children as to exhibit to the learner all the difficulties that happen in midwifery,” and he refers to his creative trials as his “labours”—a strange birth story in itself.
From this benign and even laudatory presentation of the “ingenious piece of machinery,” Nihell proceeds to question its functionality. She asks if students can really learn an appreciation of the tender parts of a woman from a doll that does not feel, does not speak. What disturbs Elizabeth Nihell is not the mechanics, but the fact that it approximates the body so nearly, yet without sensation. Smellie’s greatest critics seem most appalled by the machine’s incredible approximation to the true body in labor. It is—to put it another way—too much like the real thing. read more
I moved relentlessly over the evening, back and forth, straining to remember exact words, telling inflections, any subtle insults or kindnesses I might’ve missed, and my mind – quite willingly – supplied various distortions
October 23, 2013 § Leave a comment
Mattis: What did Lenin think of it?
Theremin: I brought my apparatus and set it up in his large office in the Kremlin. He was not yet there because he was in a meeting. I waited with Fotiva, his secretary, who was a good pianist, a graduate of the conservatory. She said that a little piano would be brought into the office, and that she would accompany me on the music that I would play. So we prepared, and about an hour and a half later Vladimir Il’yich Lenin came with those people with whom he had been in conference in the Kremlin. He was very gracious; I was very pleased to meet him, and then I showed him the signaling system of my instrument, which I played by moving my hands in the air, and which was called at that time the thereminvox. I played a piece [of music]. After I played the piece they applauded, including Vladimir Il’yich [Lenin], who had been watching very attentively during my playing. I played Glinka’s “Skylark”, which he loved very much, and Vladimir Il’yich said, after all this applause, that I should show him, and he would try himself to play it. He stood up, moved to the instrument, stretched his hands out, left and right: right to the pitch and left to the volume. I took his hands from behind and helped him. read more
FILM: Nino Oxilia
Even a small-time gang of hoodlums has its own melodramatic ideology and pathological romanticism
October 22, 2013 § Leave a comment
… if one wants to photograph another person, isn’t that all about that other person? About, possibly, that person’s essence, personality, or whatever else? It isn’t. Ignoring the fact that photographs are unable to reveal a person’s personality in ways that go beyond what, well, cartoons show, what makes portraiture – and especially looking at its very best practitioners – so exciting, is to see how someone shaped a picture out of another person, using nothing more than a camera. The other day, I met a person I thought I knew from one of my student’s portraits, and I didn’t recognize him at first. How could this be? How can this possibly function, given there’s a camera, a technical device that we think of as faithfully representing what is in front of it? read more
CHART: Lindsay Wilson
They both wanted to exchange bodies, exchange faces. There was in both of them the dark strain of wanting to become the other, to deny what they were, to transcend their actual selves
October 21, 2013 § Leave a comment
Because people hate to think they are receiving welfare handouts, we’ve all decided to pretend that Social Security is some kind of savings program. That way it can really be about you paying in and getting out. Hooray personal responsibility and individualism! But in reality, Social Security is really just a straightforward welfare handout. You tax the currently-working and then take the revenue and give it to the currently-old. It is a transfer program or, if you’d like, a “redistribution” program.
This aspect of old-age security programs is completely unavoidable. As I wrote earlier this year, if you can get currency out of your head for a moment, you should be able to see that — in real resource and real production terms — all retired people live off the production of the currently-working. This is vacuously and stupidly true. Retired people don’t produce anything. So where is the stuff they are consuming coming from? That’s right: the currently-working.
In non-money terms, our ability to support retired people is a function of how much stuff the currently-working are producing. It has nothing to do with how much money is in the Social Security Trust Fund. It has nothing to do with how much payroll tax the people who are moving into retirement paid over the last few decades. That’s all meaningless outside of the world of accounting.
For instance, suppose we had jacked payroll taxes 30 years ago such that the Social Security Trust Fund was much bigger at the present moment than it actually is. Would that change anything outside of the accounting world? No. Recall once again: the iron rule here is that the currently-retired are necessarily living solely off the production of the currently-working. Piling up a bunch of cash and then disgorging doesn’t change the mechanics of what is going on. The currently-retired would still be snatching up the exact same fraction of the currently-working’s production for their consumption. The real outcome would be exactly the same in this more “fiscally responsible” scenario. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Margaret Durow
my nerves are bad to-night 