Tuesday, July 01, 2008
You can dress your kid like a fundamentalist Mormon
fldsDress.com
Friday, June 13, 2008
Dolphin mass suicide
Dolphins are one of the animals believed to be most similar to humans emotionally. They exhibit complex communication strategies with each other and with humans, and are able to negotiate situations that require a good deal of higher order thinking.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this idea of dolphins committing suicide en masse, especially in such a brutal way.
Apparently it's popular in Texas...
and that makes me appreciate it even more.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Charles Babbage's 8,000 parts
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Libraries are sexi...
And then I happened upon this post from The Nonist.
Libraries are hot. Prepare yourself for some hot hot smut...
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Medical Marijuana may finally get the feds off its ass.
It's this kind of rationalism that brings me small sprigs of hope. Now, the fact that the simple use of logic has become noteworthy...well that's a different issue.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
(Warning: this post occurred before coffee) The Brits are bringing sexy back...
I'm pleased with the choice. The designer of these new coins is Matthew Dent, a 26 year old Welsh man, proving once again that it's the young who seem best equipped to bring the sexy, especially to the Royal Mint, of all unsexy places. (There is, of course, a cut-off for this age statement. Below 20 or 21 one starts to encounter frighteningly unsexy things in the land of adolescent tastes.)
Hooray for the UK and its hot new coinage. Now, the issue of these coins still being in Pounds and not Euros is a whole other issue...
Monday, April 14, 2008
Upside: no lions
"Everyone took photos of us, not the soldiers and horses. We are looking at one culture, and everyone is looking at us."
Friday, April 11, 2008
In looking for the whites of their eyes...
At M.I.T. they're visualizing viruses. It's interesting to consider the question "What does the trojan fucking up my computer actually look like?" The fact that this work is being commissioned by internet security professionals as a way of showing the customer what they're up against also speaks to the ever-increasing visual nature of our culture.
Icons are what we know best.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
TextMap
Arbeit macht frei...
I am generally rather suspicious of French President, Nicolas Sarkozy. To me he is a slippery character with a little too much hunger for status and wealth. Not to mention that he's pissing off his own people by messing with their laissez-faire pleasure-is-a-humanRight culture. BUT this being said, I think he's making an interesting move on the China v. Tibet front (the French do love their Buddhists.)
BBC reports that France's human rights minister, Rama Yade said:
"'Three conditions are indispensable for him to go,' she said.
'An end to violence against the population and the release of political prisoners, investigation of the events in Tibet and the opening of dialogue with the Dalai Lama.
'These discussions should be about the recognition of Tibetan autonomy and the spiritual, religious and cultural identity of Tibetans.'"
Bold; I like it. I wonder if they'll really follow through. Personally, I hope a full boycott happens. It's economically terrifying, but the fact that we're nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century and situations like what is currently happening in Tibet are happening all the time as the world sits by and stares at their feet...it's atrocious.
They're targeting monks for heaven's sake. These are people who have dedicated their lives to the practice of nonviolence and loving compassion. They have taken a vow to return to this hamster wheel of existence until all living beings are liberated from the toils of reincarnation and can reach Nirvana. I'm almost embarassed for the Chinese government.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Metacommentary: revisting the I
Friday, March 21, 2008
Sidenote: Whitney Biennial
Fantastic!
metacommentary: the I
But, where does the border region exist? I come from a writing tradition that engages heavily with the author's subjectivity, both through playing with personal languages and through utter negation of an author's presence. The I is comfortably present within many blogs, but it's a very formal and detached journalistic I.
I have to admit that there is also, for me, the presence of a subtle self-consciousness that arises from the fact that I am a woman. Self-reflection & non-linear insertion as opposed to a more distant self-reflexivity occurring in the serving of facts, are elements often associated with "feminine writing." And historically this is a way of engaging with language that is less valued in male-dominated circles.
Point:
It's interesting to navigate these terrains. Fresh topographies can bring out the most generative (internal)discourses.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Everything's better in French
The French government is working hard to single out English words that have seeped into French culture (le mail, le spam, le cowboy) and then replace them with truly French words. The post linked below offers a nice little discussion of this initiative, the French language, and the realities intersecting it past and present. Personally, I got a nice little chuckle at the part describing how tact is originally from French.
It's a long post, but really worth the investment:
Charles Bremner on the eve of International Day of the French-speaking World.
Monday, March 17, 2008
The total blunder that is our presence in Iraq
Fateful choice on Iraq Army Bypassed Debate
Dubai's "The World"
"The World" off the coast of Dubai is a real estate development of an amazing magnitude; it's made up of 300 artificial islands that together form the shape of the world map. The developers have taken open water, piled a bunch of rock and sand on top of each other until land stands above the water, and then they reinforce the perimeters. The rhetorical games Nakheel, the project's developer, is playing on the topic of environmental impact are almost funny, claiming that they are in fact helping the marine life of the area. More space for coral reefs to develop? What is going to happen to all these new reefs when the islands and all their waterfront propery are populated by the world's richest people? An article in The Economist poses a great questions:
And focusing on what goes on under the water risks ignor[ing] a bigger question:
where is all the fresh water for this paradise coming from? Dubai is famous for a number of things; not among them is a plentiful supply of water. So where do they get water for the swimming pools, spas, gardens, dishwashers and hotel laundries? Most of it comes from desalination plants, which expend a lot of energy and release plenty of carbon dioxide.
Brilliant. It's wonderful that there are now more people choosing the bike over the car, and buying their food more consciously. But, severe ecological negligence like The World project must stop. Nakheel (and those who benefit from them) is like an ostrich with its head in the sand. With government/scientific reports popping up everyday warning of impending global water shortages, building another island oasis off the coast of the Arabian Desert is the last thing we need to be doing.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Quick! Prepare the hemlock...
First, the director of the Leo Baeck Jewish Day school in Toronto was found to have graphic poems on his personal website (oh no!), and the parents of these k-8 students want him sacked. The more enlightened of the bunch say it's not about the existence of the pieces, it's that he chose to put them out into the public sphere.
Second, the naughty poems article built on the precedent of drama going down at Ryerson University where a freshman moderated (but did not originally start) a Facebook study group for his chemistry class. Specific homework tips passed about the group by its various members, according to the university, counts as cheating so they want to expel the group's moderator. The focus on the group, in practice, was not giving others final solutions to problems, but to brainstorm approaches to the problems. Which brings me to today's analogy du jour...
social networking sites : my generation(and on) : :
rock 'n roll : the BabyBoomers
Their rules are shifty, they challenge many social norms...and they lead to sex&drugs? They're an opportunity for dark characters to get their hands on our virginal youth. They're obviously the devil's playground.
The issue of the educator and his poems is a tricky one. I understand it could be disturbing to be the parent of a 6 year old and then see poems about sex and murder written by the person in charge of your kid's education, but it's completely unreasonable to expect someone to censor their creative work because they also work at a school. The argument that he should have known better than to put them out in public raises issues of ownership of private spaces. Do these parents own who this Prashker guy is outside of school? Do they own the personas he portrays in the metaverse? Why does visceral expression mean you're automatically unfit to deal with kids? All of these things also seem to be dependent on the assumption that a human being is a stable and coherent self. It's hard to accept that maybe the really nice and genuine guy who waves at you when you come to pick up your progeny is also the guy who wrote misogynistic murder scenes, and that those two elements really can live together in a single person in a totally healthy and organic way.
These are questions that often pass through my mind as someone who wants to teach and as someone who also writes "challenging" work. It's actions like those of these parents that keeps a lot of artists relegated to some kind of fringe status in the "productive world." If you engage with certain ideas/discourses on a regular basis and dare to not shamefully hide it away, you pose a threat to the very stability of society(?) You're unsuitable to be around the young? For some, simply unsuitable.
Trapped in the ring.
Everyone froze in silence; I didn't finish the line. (really the messed up part of this story is that there were only two people in a room of 15 who vaguely got the reference. The Rings are straight up canonical; what kind of writers are these people?)
The point?
The point is that the infiltration of media into the meta regions of my un/conscious mind is something that never ceases to amaze me. That my brain will trigger mouth muscles and chest muscles, will pair symbols with semantic content to expel a series of sounds that somehow compliment another set of sounds...all done absent of conscious will, it's a little disconcerting.
Our interactions with the world (whatever that is) are increasingly mediated by devices. But, direct interfacing seems less culturally dangerous than all the things announcing little soundbytes into the air, flashing messages at us as we pass by. It is the repeated passive consumption of letting Fellowship of the Ring play in the background while working/cleaning/sewing that allowed my brain to spit out the corresponding part simply at the mention of "one ring," with essentially no conscious thought or choice around it. We are biological creatures (mostly), and it's amazing just how mutable that makes us.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Monday, January 14, 2008
Getting your download on: more questions than answers
Every few weeks the Uncle and I start talking about the strike and it inevitably leads to a throw down on whether illegal downloading will eventually be wiped out forever. He says surely it will, I say ehhh not so much. He is one of these people (and I love many of them) who thinks that Free Market Capitalism will always eventually correct itself and remain the best economic option we have. (this statement is pretty loaded, but i'm leaving it there for now all on its own.)
Should the experience of art be limited by your financial resources? As the supposed land of milk and honey, is it right for us to say you can only be enriched by certain arts if you have the disposable income for it? Is this the best way to cultivate art and ideas within our culture? Does this simply contain certain discourses within particular groups/realms of power?
I personally feel one should not have to choose between good music and going to the doctor. But, I also think artists should be compensated for their work. It seems to me that a big part of the problem is the structure of the system that exists between me and that artist.
In an imperfect world, what is the best balance between these factors?
Sunday, January 13, 2008
A Beginning Point
FasterNewerShinierSmootherSmaller.PrettierPackaging.
No need to leave your car. No need to speak to the neighbors.
Multiple things, all at once, always.