davidthompson

Friday Ephemera

There’s something lurking in the sewer. Worms, apparently. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus) // Have you examined your ant lately? // Our insect overlords. // Challenging stairs. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus) // Art made from chewing gum. // Art made from bacon. // Bacon haikus. // Do you see blue and green? // Feats of skill and madness. (h/t, Coudal) // Edit solo. // The 50 greatest film trailers? // Destroying a planet isn’t as easy as you’d think. // Dioramas of Normandy, 1944. // The jellyfish are coming. // Fish sculptures. // Cat Ladies. // The CandyFab 6000. // A castle made of paper. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s the return of Señor Coconut. 

Every Bit as Hobbled

I’ve previously noted the tendency of some academic activists to indulge in wild overstatement, not least those entranced by the Holy Trinity of race, class and gender. As, for instance, when Barbara Barnett, a product of Duke’s infamous English department, claimed that, “20%–25% of college students report that they have experienced a rape or attempted rape.” Barnett’s assertions were subsequently debunked by KC Johnson: 

Barnett… thereby [suggests] that college campuses have a rate of sexual assault around 2.5 times higher than the rate of sexual assault, murder, armed robbery and assault combined in Detroit, the U.S. city with the highest murder rate. For those in the reality-based community, FBI figures provide a counterweight to Barnett’s theories: not 20%-25% but instead around .03% of students are victims of rape while in college. Duke’s 2000-2006 figures, which use a much broader reporting standard than the FBI database, indicate that 0.2% of Duke students “report that they have experienced a rape or attempted rape.”

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Christina Hoff Sommers spies more academic work in which accuracy appears peripheral to a political agenda:

Consider The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World (2008), by the feminist scholar Joni Seager, chair of the Hunter College geography department… One color-coded map illustrates how women are kept “in their place” by restrictions on their mobility, dress, and behavior. Somehow the United States comes out looking as bad in this respect as Somalia, Uganda, Yemen, Niger, and Libya. All are coded with the same shade of green to indicate places where “patriarchal assumptions” operate in “potent combination with fundamentalist religious interpretations.”

Seager’s logic? She notes that in parts of Uganda, a man can claim an unmarried woman as his wife by raping her. The United States gets the same low rating on Seager’s charts because, she notes, “State legislators enacted 301 anti-abortion measures between 1995 and 2001.” Never mind that the Ugandan practice is barbaric, that U.S. abortion law is exceptionally liberal among the nations of the world, and that the activism and controversy surrounding the issue of abortion in the United States is a sign of a vigorous free democracy working out its disagreements.

Among the scholarly lapses discussed is the following nugget, from Nancy K.D. Lemon’s Domestic Violence Law, which includes an historical perspective by Cheryl Ward Smith.

According to Ward:

“The history of women’s abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement... The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man’s right thumb. The law became commonly know as ‘The Rule of Thumb.’ These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe.”

Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology - the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase “rule of thumb” did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors.

Heaven and Hell (in a Lift)

Marco Brambilla’s Civilization is a video mural created for the lifts of New York’s Standard Hotel. Assembled from hundreds of loops of found and original footage, the mural depicts an ascent from hell, via purgatory, to heaven (and a less heartening journey for those going down to the lobby). Think Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Hieronymus Bosch with cameos by Princess Leia, General Zod and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. 

High definition here. Via Coudal. 

Not So Goode

Thanks to TDK, I finally got to see Mike Judge’s new animated series, The Goode Family, which follows an environmentally obsessive PC household and their ostentatious concerns. Here are the first three episodes.

Given Judge’s previous creation, King of the Hill, there are inevitably some good moments. There’s an amusing scene involving carrier bag anxiety, and the local overpriced whole food store has an electronic display informing customers of the latest ethical shopping practices, which change in real time. And there are odd flashes of demented ingenuity, as when a visiting Freegan uses his own tears as seasoning. Unfortunately, these moments are spaced much too far apart. What we get instead are misfires like this scene, in which the Goodes fret about the correct way to refer to their black neighbour. There’s a joke lurking in there somewhere, but nobody managed to find it. And that’s pretty much the default setting for the first few episodes.

King of the Hill quickly grew beyond Texan small town caricature and, however grotesque its protagonists could be, they felt both plausible and deserving of some empathy. Comedy emerged from character and didn’t depend entirely on stereotypes, knowing references or the weekly plot contrivance. Viewers soon came to share the producers’ obvious affection for the Hills, despite – or because of - Hank’s unwavering squareness and preoccupation with propane. And while Hank was often stuffy, unadventurous and emotionally repressed, he remained above all an honourable man – something of an oddity in modern animation. The rooting of comedy in character and culture – as opposed to politics - also made possible a collision of surrealism and genuine poignancy. (Peggy’s need for oversized shoes and her subsequent, unwitting friendship with a transvestite springs to mind, or Bill’s near-constant teetering on the brink of despair.)

In contrast, The Goode Family is laboured and affected, as if built by committee from the outside in, with unlikeable characters and a premise that’s somehow both obvious and thin. There’s no evidence yet that Judge or his writers have any sympathy for the Goodes and their self-inflicted predicament, and it’s not clear whether we’re supposed to see them as victims of their own politics or just unrelenting grotesques. The daughter, Bliss, is presented supposedly as a foil for her dysfunctionally PC mother, but the tension on offer is between preening political concern and preening teenage ennui. Perhaps these are teething troubles and The Goode Family will find its footing and become much funnier and less self-conscious. But if so, it needs to improve a hell of a lot, very quickly. Right now, the protagonists seem more suited as secondary characters in a show about someone else, and the air of contrivance leaves the series feeling almost as fake and unappealing as the pretensions it mocks.

Friday Ephemera

Morphine syrup, asthma cigarettes and cocaine toothache drops. // Red wine powder. // Milky vodka. // Moscow Cat Theatre. (h/t, Coudal) // Search Flickr by colour. // Sixty Symbols. // Geometric sculptures. // The bulbdial clock. // Apocalypse porn. // Mars, seen from orbit. // Robots of yore. // Deco-Gundam fights crime, looks fabulous. // Synaesthesia. // On maths and jellyfish. // Plotline similarities. // The politics of intelligence. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Ms Liz Brady.

Tubing

A Boy and his Tuba is a series of improbable cover versions. As the name suggests, all parts of each song are performed with a tuba, with assorted loops, grunts and distortions manipulated live. Here’s New Order’s Blue Monday. Stay with it, it may surprise you.

Hardware enthusiasts may want to watch this behind-the-scenes clip, which explains the mysteries of envelope filters and the importance of gaffer tape.

Via Coudal. 

Uprising

Poking about in the archives, I unearthed the second episode of Vanessa Engle’s excellent documentary series, Lefties. Titled Angry Wimmin, the film traces the rise of radical feminism in a grim Britain of the 1970s. As a record of social history it’s interesting stuff. The revolutionary politics of shoes, for instance, is quaintly entertaining, and the subsequent, post-revolutionary fear of being caught shaving armpits or wearing lipstick may also amuse. Around 6 minutes in, there’s a section on “political lesbianism,” i.e. lesbianism as an ideological duty, irrespective of desire. One of the figures interviewed is Julie Bindel, a Guardian commentator whose subtleties of mind include a belief that “[get] men off the streets” is “a fabulous slogan” and “all women know that if we have not been raped, we are lucky.” In the first clip below, Ms Bindel airs the following reminiscence:

What I could never understand – and I did resent – was [heterosexual feminists] going home to men at night. It just seemed such a contradiction. And often I would get very angry when I would challenge them about this, and they would say, “Well, that’s just the way I am. I just don’t fancy women.” Having no understanding at all of the fact that sexuality is a social construct and that we all make choices depending on the way we want to live and the world we want to see.

What’s striking is Bindel’s adamance. It’s not even open to debate. This, presumably, is how she still sees the world. Sexuality simply is a social construct - it’s a fact - and all human beings can reconfigure their desires in accord with ideology. Though the basis for this claim remains somewhat mysterious. Former activist Lisa Power recalls her own, rather different, experience of sexuality by decree:

It was a bit of a pain because there were all these women who suddenly wanted to be lesbians, but they didn’t actually terribly want to sleep with women. But they sort of felt they ought to, to pay their dues.

Here’s part 1:

Watch Angry Wimmin Part One in News  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Always Aim for the Head

Further to this post on the alleged political subtexts of zombie films, it seems the debate refuses to die.

In The American Prospect, Paul Waldman argues:

[A]t heart, the genre is a progressive one. It’s true that fighting off the zombie horde requires plentiful firearms, no doubt pleasing Second Amendment advocates. And in a zombie movie, government tends to be either ineffectual or completely absent. On the other hand, when the zombie apocalypse comes, capitalism breaks down, too - people aren’t going to be exchanging money for goods and services; they’re just going to break into the hardware store and grab what they need…

But most important, what ensures survival in a zombie story are the progressive ideals of common cause and collective action. A small group of people from varying backgrounds are thrust together and find that they can transcend their differences of age, race, and gender (the typical band of survivors is a veritable United Nations of cultural diversity). They come to understand that if they're going to get out of this with their brains kept securely housed in their skulls and not travelling down some zombie’s gullet, they’ve got to act as though they’re all in it together. Surviving the tide of zombies requires community and mutual responsibility. What could be more progressive than that?

Over at Ace, Mætenloch takes a different view:

Grand Ambitions

Despite that local spot of bother, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad still finds time to share his thoughts on more elevated matters. Press TV, the state-sponsored purveyor of “24/7 truth,” quotes approvingly:

In the democracy of the West, the exalted values and the people are ignored, [whereas] the aspiration and origins of the Islamic Revolution are different from those of other revolutions. Because, in the Islamic Republic that rose from the revolution, the object is the realization of Divine aspirations and the commands of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and, consequently, the perfection of humanity.

Those with the stomach for it can witness the ongoing perfecting of humanity here, here and here. Apparently, the process is more stick than carrot. 

Get Them While They’re Soft and Yielding

Zomblog has a new series documenting the quaintly leftwing trappings to be found in leafier parts of Berkeley, California. The first instalment highlights a mosaic made by students of Black Pine Circle School, one of the city’s more exclusive private elementary and middle schools. The mosaic, which runs along the front of the school on Seventh Street, is presumably intended to advertise the values being cultivated inside. It’s the handiwork of children aged 13 and 14.

See if you can spot the curious detail and its surprising prominence.

A closer look reveals an ominous prophesy, in red, bottom left.

Friday Ephemera

It’s raining tadpoles in Ishikawa prefecture. // Schoolboy versus meteorite. // Sydney panorama. (h/t, Coudal) // The Rorschach alphabet. // Steampunk watches. // The Barbie store, Shanghai. // Hygienic robot hands. // Brown sugar bacon waffles. // A dress made of meat. (h/t, Mr Eugenides) // Beef jerky underpants. // Tactical corsets. // Goat towers. // More Communist monuments. // 40 years ago, hairless apes did something very clever. // Remember the Uniqlo grid? Here’s the Uniqlo calendar. // The baffling adventures of Unko-san, the lucky faecal fairy. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Señor Coconut. 

Oh, Bea

Caution: rationalisation in progress.

My politics comes from Marxism and feminism; it’s republican, it’s gay and it’s green… The survival of an honours system clothed in royalism and imperialism is a reproach to New Labour’s craven sentiment about pomp and power… That creates a contradiction in moments like this… You ask yourself the question: how can I accept anything from this horrible imperial regime?

Why, it’s former Communist Party member and all-purpose agitated person, Beatrix Campbell. Sorry, Beatrix Campbell, OBE.

Symmetry

More from the Shorpy Photo Archive.   

 

Kay Jewelry Co., 407 Seventh Street N.W, Washington, D.C. Circa 1919. 

A Spot of Bother

  

Michael Totten has links, clips and coverage. See also Breitbart and Azarmehr.

Friday Ephemera

Small actions, repeated often. // Giant crop circle jellyfish. // Enormous actual jellyfish. Up to 200 kg. // Animals of Africa. (h/t, Coudal) // Unfortunate unicorn tattoos. (h/t, Anna) // 10 striking movies. // Take the quake quiz. Are you ready to rumble? // Meat, fish and bugs, all canned for tasty freshness. // Lego candles. // Made with light. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus) // Low altitude pass of lunar surface. // Nebula panorama. // Saddam’s palaces. // In B flat. // Height and happiness. // Tunnel networks of note. // Atlas Obscura. Modern wonders. // The Heinz Beanzawave. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s the ghoulish stylings of Hayseed Dixie. 

Mixtape (6)

A few minutes ago, this site was visited for the millionth time. Blimey. Here’s some music from the ephemera archives.

Henry Hall: Hush, Hush, Hush (Here Comes the Bogey Man). (Circa 1930s)

Keiichi Suzuki: Japanese “It’s Alright” Song. (1991)

Tony Hatch: The Champions. (1968)

Count Basie: Kingston Calypso. (1965) 

Harry “The Hipster” Gibson: Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs Murphy’s Ovaltine? (1944)

The Chordettes: Mr Sandman. (1954)

Doris Day: Sentimental Journey. (1945)

Jeff Beal: Rome. (2005) 

John Barry: You Only Live Twice. (1967)

Frank Sinatra & Bing Crosby: Well, Did You Evah! (1956)

Feel free to add your own. Previous mixtapes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 

Reheated (4)

For newcomers, three more items from the archives:

Spooky Action.

Jim Schnabel’s charmingly bizarre film about Cold War research into extrasensory perception as a tool of espionage. By turns intriguing and hilarious.

Rebellion, Revisited. 

Classroom impropriety and the grooming of young minds.

Even if we set aside the not insignificant issue of whether professors of, say, literary criticism have any business trying to “win over” their students and mould their political outlook, reasonably or otherwise, there is another problem. Is the student-professor relationship sufficiently equal and reciprocal to ensure evidence and reason prevail? Is there no pressure on students to defer, to please? Can we simply assume that improper leverage will never be brought to bear – for instance, in terms of grading or more subtle signs of displeasure? And isn’t there an unavoidable air of… predation?

Infestation.

A Guardian writer asks, Am I Fit to Breed? Other, less hesitant souls long for human extinction.

Explore the greatest hits.

Avert Your Eyes

The Guardian’s George Monbiot is feeling a little dirty, a little compromised. In a typically understated piece, titled Newspapers Must Stop Taking Advertising from Environmental Villains, Mr Monbiot ponders “the extent to which newspapers should restrict the advertisements they carry.”

Readers will doubtless be shocked to hear that newspapers, and their columnists, depend on advertising...

It pays my wages. More precisely, it provides around three-quarters of newspapers’ income. Without it, they would not exist: certainly not in their current form, almost certainly not at all. For all their evident faults, newspapers perform a crucial democratic service: without professional reporting, it is impossible to make informed decisions.

And here’s a small compendium of the Guardian’s “professional reporting,” without which “it is impossible to make informed decisions.”

The problem at hand, at least for Monbiot, is this. Advertising is bad, you see. All of it. Very, very bad.

I believe that advertising is a pox on the planet. It is one of the forces driving us towards destruction, as it creates needs that did not exist before and promotes consumption way beyond sustainable levels. I believe that it is also socially damaging, turning ours into a more grasping, more atomised society, focused on material display rather than solidarity and community action.

Sadly, no evidence is offered to support this tangle of emphatic supposition. Though questions do spring to mind. Exactly how would one go about measuring the alleged “atomising” and “socially damaging” effect of an advert for cheap flights or a car, or for something more mundane - say, a nice pair of shoes? Exactly how much shoe advertising, or shoe consumption, constitutes wickedness? Is there a preferred, morally elevated, level of shoe ownership?

[Adverts] generate behavioural norms, telling us, in effect, that the goods and services which are destroying the biosphere are acceptable, even beneficial. I believe that their presence in the newspapers makes hypocrites of all those of us who write for them. Our editorials urge people to reduce their impacts. Our advertisements urge people to increase them.

Actually, the charge of hypocrisy isn’t dependent on accepting adverts for things readers may want and for which they’re willing to pay. The prodigious hypocrisy of Monbiot’s employer, Alan Rusbridger, has previously been noted, and in Monbiot’s case there are other, more immediate, reasons to mutter “hypocrite.” Not least the amount of air travel the columnist indulged in to promote his book on the unacceptability of air travel, an activity he saw fit to equate with child abuse. 

Friday Ephemera

You’ll want one of these. // Buy your own private island. // An 11-kilo lead balloon. // Spot the Moon. // Dubious demo tapes. // 80s pop goes ragtime. // How to make a nacho hat. (h/t, Coudal) // Bizarrely unlucky people. // Title sequences for Hulk and The Incredible Hulk. // Hyperfins. // Mining sulphur. // Religious structures reclaimed by nature. // Roadside architecture. // The joys of neon signage. // Expialidocious. // A history of beer cans. // School lunches from around the world. (h/t, Ace) // The Apprentice versus Cassetteboy. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus) // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Tony Pastor & The Clooney Sisters.

I Laugh at Gravity

This is the showreel of Damien Walters. I’m not sure what to call what it is he does. But he does it very well.

(h/t, Anna)

Chewing the Scenery

Here’s an all too brief extract from Daniel Martinico’s 15-minute epic, Khaaaaaan! The film features the expressive genius of Mr William Shatner, suitably enhanced, and “the single most dramatic syllable in science fiction history.” Stay with it and watch closely. The suspense is unbearable.

Now wash your eyes. That’s distilled Shatner. Via Metrolander.

Tempted by Sunlight

“I’ve always had this really strong appreciation for… dark.”

I think you’ll like this. Here’s the trailer for Jeanie Finlay’s Goth Cruise, a documentary following 150 Goths on a five day sea journey from New Jersey to Bermuda and back again. With 2,500 “Norms” for company. Brace yourselves for some coloured hair and collective non-conformism.

“I’m really not Goth. I enjoy the aspect of the music… and the dressing up. But when it comes down to it, I don’t think I fit the Goth template.”

If you possess black lipstick and a counter-cultural attitude, you’ll be thrilled to hear this year’s outing takes in Key West and Cozumel, Mexico.

Via Coudal.

Ghost Baskets

Images of an abandoned German colliery. The hanging cages, or Kaue, were individually numbered and used as storage lockers for miners’ belongings.

No Pointing

Further to this, today’s Telegraph has an extract from Hyok Kang’s account of his childhood in 1990s North Korea, This Is Paradise!

I was born on April 20 1986 in a village not far from Onsong, a city of 300,000 inhabitants in the north-east of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, close to the Chinese border and Siberia. The city is divided into ku (districts) and ban (classifications) of 20 families. My parents lived in ban number three, in a semi-rural zone. The house was like dozens of others built on the same model and lined up in rows. There was a door, a single window, and a roof of curved orange tiles. The walls were white, but they had been painted blue to a height that I must have passed about the age of eight or nine. Each time the district officials came to check the hygiene of the houses, as they regularly did, they ordered us to change the colour of this lower part: to green, now blue, now light brown, but all the houses in our ban had to be the same colour; perhaps because dwellings, like everything else in North Korea, are the property of the people. That means that nothing belongs to anyone.

Via sk60, The Vice Guide to North Korea is worth watching. Shane Smith pays a visit to Pyongyang. Surrealism ensues. Part 1 is embedded below.

Parts 2-14 can be viewed here.  

Friday Ephemera

Context is for weaklings. // Transforminators. // Cyborgery. // What’s inside your refrigerator? (h/t, Maggie’s Farm) // Gin and Titonic. // Hellingly Asylum. // Children of the race-class-gender church. // Department of bandsaw skillz. (h/t, Maggie’s Farm) // Skiing and chess, together at last. // How the Ear Functions. (1940) // Assorted medical antiques. // Assorted interchanges. // Chairs from The Incredibles. // Glowing inflatable furniture. // An ugly wooden lamp. // Rooks and hooks. // “All the animations seen in this video were created in camera.” // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr John Morris & Mr Mel Brooks.