Excerpts

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“Even In Zuccotti Park, His Name Isn’t Widely Known”

December 19, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a recent Drake Bennett Businessweek article about David Graeber, the anarchist anthropologist who is one of the more intriguing anti-leaders of the OWS movement:

“Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist—among the brightest, some argue, of his generation—who made his name with innovative theories on exchange and value, exploring phenomena such as Iroquois wampum and the Kwakiutl potlatch. An American, he teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. He’s also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade: Quebec City and Genoa, the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia and New York, the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, the London tuition protests earlier this year. This summer, Graeber was a key member of a small band of activists who quietly planned, then noisily carried out, the occupation of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, providing the focal point for what has grown into an amorphous global movement known as Occupy Wall Street.

It would be wrong to call Graeber a leader of the protesters, since their insistently nonhierarchical philosophy makes such a concept heretical. Nor is he a spokesman, since they have refused thus far to outline specific demands. Even in Zuccotti Park, his name isn’t widely known. But he has been one of the group’s most articulate voices, able to frame the movement’s welter of hopes and grievances within a deeper critique of the historical moment. ‘We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt,’ Graeber wrote in a Sept. 25 editorial published online by the Guardian. ‘Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?'”

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Graeber in conversation with that avuncular capitalist, Charlie Rose;

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“Despite Kim’s Creative Influence On The Industry…North Korean Movies Continued To Stink”

December 19, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kim Jong-Il, a diminutive despot who refused to go away, much like Mike Bloomberg, just died–too young, too young–but he sadly lived a full life. When he wasn’t busy dictating, Kim always kept his iron hand in the country’s movie industry. From an insane Mental Floss story by Jessica Royer Ocken about how the Dear Leader “recruited” a star director:

“Long before his father’s death in 1994, Kim Jong Il played supervisor to the North Korean movie industry. As such, he made sure each production served double duty as both art form and propaganda-dispersion vehicle. Per his instructions, the nation’s cinematic output consisted of films illuminating themes such as North Korea’s fantastic military strength and what horrible people the Japanese are. It was the perfect job for a cinephile like Kim, whose personal movie collection reportedly features thousands of titles, including favorites Friday the 13th, Rambo, and anything starring Elizabeth Taylor or Sean Connery.

Despite Kim’s creative influence on the industry during the 1970s (when he served with the country’s Art and Culture Ministries) and the fact that he literally wrote the book on communist filmmaking (1973’s On the Art of the Cinema), North Korean movies continued to stink. Frustrated, Kim sought help by forcing 11 Japanese ‘cultural consultants’ into servitude during the late 1970s and early 1980s, only to have several die inconveniently on the job (some by their own hands). But coerced consulting can only get a film industry so far, and North Korea was still in search of its Orson Welles. Then, in 1978, respected South Korean director Shin Sang Ok suddenly found himself out of work after he angered his own country’s military dictator in a spat over censorship, and Kim Jong Il saw his chance to harness Shin’s artistry.

Kim promptly lured Shin’s ex-wife and close friend, actress Choi Eun Hee, to Hong Kong to ‘discuss a potential role.’ Instead, she was kidnapped.

A distraught Shin searched for Choi, but found himself similarly ambushed by Kim’s minions. After some ‘convincing’—by way of some chloroform and a rag—he was whisked away to North Korea. Choi lived in one of Kim’s palaces, and Shin—having been captured after an attempted escape only months after arriving—lived for four years in a prison for political dissidents, where he subsisted on grass, rice, and communist propaganda.”

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“She Was Prone To Spontaneous ‘Performance,’ Often In The Nude”

December 19, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The first paragraph of Brian Kim Stefans’ L.A. Review of Books article about Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, one of Dada’s leading ladies:

“The typical thumbnail portrait of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven usually goes like this. She was the Queen of New York Dada from 1913 to 1923, the first to wear clothes made of discarded clothes and rubbish (including a brassiere made of tin cans). She constructed assemblage-style art in the manner of Marcel Duchamp, and her scatological proclivities may have inspired his seminal Fountain. She was prone to spontaneous ‘performance,’ often in the nude, and was sexually aggressive in a decidedly ‘masculine’ way. She courted Duchamp actively and mocked him in poems (dubbing him ‘M’ars’ — my arse), and chased right to his front lawn in Rutherford, New Jersey the relatively prudish doctor-poet William Carlos Williams, who, legend has it, learned how to box in order to deck her in self-defense.”

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“He Had Met An Australian Journalist Who Asked Why Americans Made The Interior Of Their Planes Look Like Nurseries”

December 19, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

May you live in interesting times, goes the sly, old Chinese curse. Some eras are more interesting than others, but they’re all fascinating in one scary way or another, not just these desperate times we’re facing now. From “The Evil in the Room,” Norman Mailer’s 1972 Republican National Convention coverage from Miami, which he filed for Life:

“There were ghosts on the convention. And the sense of having grown old enough to be passing through life a second time. Flying to San Francisco in 1964 to write up the convention which nominated Barry Goklwater, he had met an Australian journalist who asked why Americans made the interior of their planes look like nurseries, and he had answered, in effect that the dread was loose in American life. Was it still loose, that sense of oncoming catastrophe going to fall on the nation like the first bolt from God? Such dread had taken many a turn–from fear of Communism to fear of walking the streets at night, which was a greater fear if one thought about it (since the streets were nearer). It was a fear when all was said which suggested that the nation, in whatever collection of its consciousness, was like a person who wakes up often in the middle of the night with the intolerable conviction that something is loose in the system, and the body is on a long slide from which there will be no remission unless a solution is found; the body does not even know where the disease is at. Nor will the doctors, is what the body knows in the dark.”

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Occupying the GOP Convention, 1972: “Don’t hurt the car, don’t hurt the car!”

“It’s a very plastic, packaged thing”:

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“We Realize The Value In Copying”

December 18, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"As we're more and more connected to each other, there's more and more to copy." (Image by Warren H. Chaney.)

I would guess there are as many if not more innovators than ever, though our interconnected world and the proliferation of information has made copying remarkably easy. Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel meditates on this dynamic at Edge. An excerpt:

“The interesting thing with Facebook is that, with 500 to 800 million of us connected around the world, it sort of devalues information and devalues knowledge. And this isn’t the comment of some reactionary who doesn’t like Facebook, but it’s rather the comment of someone who realizes that knowledge and new ideas are extraordinarily hard to come by. And as we’re more and more connected to each other, there’s more and more to copy. We realize the value in copying, and so that’s what we do.

And we seek out that information in cheaper and cheaper ways. We go up on Google, we go up on Facebook, see who’s doing what to whom. We go up on Google and find out the answers to things. And what that’s telling us is that knowledge and new ideas are cheap. And it’s playing into a set of predispositions that we have been selected to have anyway, to be copiers and to be followers. But at no time in history has it been easier to do that than now. And Facebook is encouraging that.”

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“Taxpayers Have Funded The Entry Fee Into This High-Priced Fantasy League”

December 18, 2011 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Despite what team owners pretending empty pockets say, new sports arenas benefit only them, not local economies, as study after study has shown. Yet taxpayers keep getting hustled and giving welfare to the wealthy. An excerpt from Patrick Hruby’s seething, spot-on Yahoo! Sports piece about the use of public funds to build a new stadium for the Miami Marlins and their wealthy art-dealer owner Jeffrey Loria:

“Following the financial meltdown of 2008, President Bush diagnosed the deus ex machina of the Great Recession like this: ‘Wall Street got drunk.’ He was wrong. Wall Street did not get drunk. Wall Street got over. Wall Street made billions underwriting crappy mortgagees, repackaging them as Triple-A investments and peddling them to naïve investors (read: your 401(k), state pension plans); made billions more placing side bets on and against the preceding criminal, but not technically criminal practice; made billions on top of that when the whole unsustainable shell game went belly up, thanks to a massive, unprecedented influx of taxpayer cash — again: your money — via TARP and the Federal Reserve’s money-for-nothing “discount window,” which in turn allowed financial houses to keep handing out the kind of outsized salaries and bonuses that had the encamped residents of Zuccotti Park so peeved.

Over in the sports world, the Marlins are running the same basic con.

‘They’re finally spending money? That’s a misnomer,’ says Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director for the League of Fans, a Washington, D.C.-based fan advocacy group affiliated with consumer advocate Ralph Nader. ‘To me, it’s more like taxpayers have funded the entry fee into this high-priced fantasy league, and the Marlins are going off and buying players with our money. I think this will go down as the ultimate case of corporate sports welfare gone bad.’

Sick of corporate bailouts? Occupy the Marlins.”

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“Are you in?”:

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“He Employed Actors To Push Carts Through His Aisles”

December 18, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A brief passage about the history of the shopping cart, from a New York Times Magazine piece by Hilary Greenbaum and Dana Rubinstein:

“One night in 1936, [Sylvan] Goldman had an epiphany. ‘As he worked late in his office, his attention was drawn to two ordinary folding chairs,’ wrote Terry P. Wilson in The Cart That Changed the World, the seminal Goldman biography, published in 1978. What if, he wondered, one chair was placed on top of another? What if a basket was placed on top of each seat? What if it had wheels? The modern shopping cart was born.

Widely considered the inventor of the shopping cart, Goldman was no slouch as a promoter either. He ran ads in local newspapers that read, in part, ‘Can you imagine wending your way through a spacious food market without having to carry a cumbersome shopping basket on your arm?’ He stationed what he described as ‘an attractive girl’ near his store entrance to hype the new device. When it became clear that only the elderly were interested, he employed actors to push carts through his aisles.”

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In addition to customers, actors sometimes portray fictional, folksy CEOs. If things had broken differently, these people could have been cast as horse trainers or secret agents or bank robbers. It’s just a costume.

Colonel Harlan Sanders:

Bartles & Jaymes :

Betty Crocker:

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“Police Rushed In And Made The First Known Arrests Of U.S. Citizens With Help From A Predator”

December 16, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Warfare changed dramatically over the past decade with the development and deployment of Predator drones. With the wars abroad drawing down, drones will soon transform domestic policing in the U.S., whether we like it or not, even for cow poachers. From the Los Angeles Times:

“Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.

As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.”

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Cow, perturbed by surveillance:

“Good Bosom Men Were Considered Experts And Got Lots Of Work”

December 16, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Bruce Weber’s New York Times obituary of Joe Simon, the comic-book legend who not only co-created Captain America but also made Hitler a villain in his panels right before America entered WWII:

“He took to drawing at an early age, creating comic strips and cartoons for his high school newspaper and yearbook. After graduating, he worked in the art department at newspapers in Rochester and Syracuse, learning how to retouch photographs and lay out pages. He created cartoons and illustrations for the papers’ sports sections — ‘Drawing athletes prepared me for drawing superheroes,’ he said in his autobiography — and began to write as well, covering boxing matches and other sports events.

He eventually moved to New York, where his first job was for Paramount Pictures, retouching still photographs of movie stars. ‘I retouched some of the most famous bosoms in motion pictures — Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard and Dorothy Lamour,’ he wrote. ‘Good bosom men were considered experts and got lots of work. I could hold up a sagging bust line with the best of them.'”

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“She Spent Her Life Opposing The Only Known Cure For Poverty”

December 16, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

mother-teresa-india

Christopher Hitchens, that godless heathen (I mean that as a compliment as well as a statement of fact), just passed away from esophageal cancer. From “Mommie Dearest,” his enthusiastic flogging of Mother Teresa published on Slate in 2003:

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for “the poorest of the poor.” People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the ‘Missionaries of Charity,’ but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell’s admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.•

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“I’m Having An Awkward Conversation With A Robot”

December 15, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

GQ writer Jon Ronson converses with our AI brethren in his excellent March 2011 article, “Robots Say the Damndest Things.” The opening:

“I’m having an awkward conversation with a robot. His name is Zeno. I clear my throat. ‘Do you enjoy being a robot?’ I ask him, sounding like the Queen of England when she addresses a child.

‘I really couldn’t say for sure,’ he replies, whirring, glassy-eyed. ‘I am feeling a bit confused. Do you ever get that way?’

Zeno has a kind face, which moves as expressively as a human’s. His skin, made of something called Frubber, looks and feels startlingly lifelike, right down to his chest, but there’s nothing below that, only a table. He’s been designed by some of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists, but talking to him is, so far, like talking to a man suffering from Alzheimer’s. He drifts off, forgets himself, misunderstands.

‘Are you happy?’ I ask him.

‘Sorry,’ says Zeno. ‘I think my current is a bit off today.’ He averts his gaze, as if embarrassed.

I’ve been hearing that there are a handful of humanoid robots scattered across North America who have learned how to have eloquent conversations with humans. They listen attentively and answer thoughtfully. One or two have even attained a degree of consciousness, say some AI aficionados, and are on the cusp of bursting into life. If true, this would be humanity’s greatest achievement ever, so I’ve approached the robots for interviews. Conversations with robots! I’ve no doubt the experience is going to be off the scale in terms of profundity.

‘Are you happy?’ I ask Zeno again.

‘I prefer not to use dangerous things,’ he replies.”

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“Will you knock that stuff off?”:

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“This Sandwich Is Spectacularly Resilient To Threats”

December 15, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I remember reading some years back that Hershey made a special chocolate bar crammed with thousands of calories for the U.S. Army so that soldiers could stave off starvation. Now the American military has come up with a BBQ chicken sandwich that doesn’t spoil for two years. From NPR:

“For the U.S. military around the world, the enemy can be hard to pinpoint and even harder to defeat. But back at home, the Army has a tiny and vexing foe in its sights: the bacteria that cause food to rot.

In this bacterial battle, though, it’s clearer who’s winning, and the evidence is a humble pocket sandwich, which looks from the outside no different than your average hot pocket in the frozen foods aisle.

But this sandwich is spectacularly resilient to threats (or hurdles, in Army speak) that would turn it into a dry, moldy mess if they could. Unlike probably any other sandwich out there, this one keeps the microbial forces of nature at bay for up to two years.”

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“Not even a Hot Pocket?”:

“Jobs Initially Called The Script ‘Shit'”

December 15, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Steve Jobs has posthumously received much credit for the “Think Different” advertising campaign that relaunched the Apple brand in 1997. Rob Siltanen, former creative director of TBWA/Chiat/Day, sets the record straight for Forbes. An excerpt:

“While I’ve seen a few inaccurate articles and comments floating around the Internet about how the legendary ‘Think Different’ campaign was conceived, what prompted me to share this inside account was Walter Isaacson’s recent, best-selling biography on Steve Jobs. In his book, Isaacson incorrectly suggests Jobs created and wrote much of the ‘To the crazy ones’ launch commercial. To me, this is a case of revisionist history.

Steve was highly involved with the advertising and every facet of Apple’s business. But he was far from the mastermind behind the renowned launch spot. In fact, he was blatantly harsh on the commercial that would eventually play a pivotal role in helping Apple achieve one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in business history. As you’ll learn later in my account, the soul of the original ‘The crazy ones’ script I presented to Jobs, as well as the original beginning and ending of the celebrated script, all ultimately stayed in place, even though Jobs initially called the script ‘shit.’ I’ve also read a few less than correct accounts on how the ‘Think Different’ campaign was originally conceived. While several people played prominent parts in making it happen, the famous ‘Think Different’ line and the brilliant concept of putting the line together with black and white photographs of time-honored visionaries was invented by an exceptionally creative person, and dear friend, by the name of Craig Tanimoto, a TBWA/Chiat/Day art director at the time.

I have read many wonderful things about Steve Jobs and how warm and loving he was to his wife, children and sister. His Stanford commencement address is one of the most touching and inspiring speeches I have ever heard. Steve was an amazing visionary, and I believe the comparisons of him to some of the world’s greatest achievers are totally deserved. But I have also read many critical statements about Steve, and I must say I saw and experienced his tongue lashings and ballistic temper firsthand—directed to several others and squarely at me. It wasn’t pretty. While I greatly respected Steve for his remarkable accomplishments and extraordinary passion, I didn’t have much patience for his often abrasive and condescending personality. It is here, in my opinion, that Lee Clow deserves a great deal of credit. Lee is more than a creative genius. In working with Jobs he had the patience of a saint.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“The Concept Seems To Border On Science Fiction”

December 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Paul Allen is willing to invest $200 million of his Microsoft billions to create a mega-aircraft with wingspans wider than football fields, which are capable of launching truck-sized satellites into space. From today’s Wall Street Journal:

“The concept seems to border on science fiction. It envisions a behemoth mother ship with twin, narrow fuselages, featuring six Boeing Co. 747 engines attached to a record 385-foot wingspan, plus a smaller rocket pod nestled underneath. Expected to weigh roughly 1.2 million pounds, the combination would roughly match the maximum takeoff weight of the largest, fully loaded Airbus A380 superjumbo plane, but the wings would be more than 120 feet longer than those of the Airbus A380.

Flying at roughly 30,000 feet, the craft would climb sharply just as it released the rocket, which would use a cluster of four or five engines to boost itself into orbit.

The sheer size of the endeavor presents severe engineering and production challenges. While scientists have long studied the principles of air-launched rockets—Mr. Rutan recalls beginning preliminary work on such a project as long ago as 1991—Stratolaunch Systems Inc., as the new venture is called, still hasn’t firmed up critical design details.”

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A clip from Paul Allen’s 2011 talk with male impersonator Rosie Charles:

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“Automation Was The Only Way Out”

December 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Mail delivered by the United States Postal Service increased every year for 200 years until 2007, when the digital revolution jumpstarted the USPS’s   obsolescence. Technology has doomed the former linchpin of American communications, but technology actually rescued it in the 1960s. An excerpt from an Alexis Madrigal piece in the Atlantic:

“Despite these successes, there have been some hard times for the Postal Service. The biggest crisis USPS faced probably came in the mid-1960s. During that time, which was before Richard Nixon signed a bill that made the service ‘self-funding,’ the Post Office could not get enough funds from Congress to buy the machines they needed to keep up with the post-War explosion in the mail. In October of 1966 the situation came to a head, when, as the museum exhibit put it, ‘a flood of holiday advertisements and election mailings choked the system.’ The Chicago Post Office, the largest in the country, ‘stopped delivering mail for three weeks.’

Automation was the only way out. Zip codes, which were only introduced in 1963, became the lynchpin in the automated postal system. Imagine life without them: a single person can’t sort more than a letter a second, which is at best, 3,600 letters an hour. With the help of machines, postal workers could gain almost an order of magnitude of speed, sorting 30,000 letters an hour.”

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“An army of men in wool pants running through the neighborhood handing out pottery catalogs door to door”:

See also:

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“We Live In A Violent Era, Perhaps The Most Violent Man Has Known”

December 13, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A brief excerpt of Ian Fleming discussing 007’s propensity for violence, in a 1964 Playboy Interview:

“Playboy: You’ve been criticized for being ‘obsessed’ with violence in your books. Do you feel the charge is justified?

Fleming: The simple fact is that, like all fictional heroes who find a tremendous popular acceptance, Bond must reflect his own time. We live in a violent era, perhaps the most violent man has known. In our last War, 30 million people were killed. Of these, some six million were simply slaughtered, and most brutally. I hear it said that I invent fiendish cruelties and tortures to which Bond is subjected. But no one who knows, as I know, the things that were done to captured secret agents in the last War says this. No one says it who knows what went on in Algeria.”

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“I wanted a really flat, quiet name”:

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“About The Size Of A Beer Keg, The Rock Weighed 1,430 Pounds”

December 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The opening of Ben Paynter’s “The Meteor Farmer,” a 2007 Wired article about a Midwestern man hunting for the remains of rock that had fallen to Kansas from heavens:

“For two weeks, Steve Arnold trudged through the dusty farmland of Kiowa County, Kansas, a 6-foot rope trailing over his shoulder. Tied to the end of the rope was a metal detector cobbled together from PVC pipe and duct tape. Back and forth Arnold paced, pulling the jury-rigged device across the dirt, hunting for meteorites. He had already found a few, but nothing bigger than 100 pounds or so. Mostly, he found horseshoes. And beer cans. Soon the farmers would want him off their land; planting season was coming. To speed things up, Arnold attached his contraption to a tractor. He was sure there was a bigger rock out there, just a few feet beneath the turf.

On a Thursday afternoon, his rig yelped, a shrill beep sounding through his headphones. He drove forward, tires pulling in the fine soil, and the detector crescendoed to an electric wail. Arnold saved the coordinates on his GPS receiver, marked the spot with a pile of dirt, and pulled out his cell phone.

Three days later, Arnold and his partner and investor – an oil and gas attorney from San Antonio named Philip Mani – were attacking the site with a backhoe. After digging down about 5 feet, Arnold scrabbled into the hole with a shovel and started clearing. Finally, the blade clanged against something metallic. The more dirt he moved, the more meteorite he exposed. They lowered the backhoe scoop and strapped the rock to it. Grinding and whining, the machine pulled free the biggest meteorite Arnold had ever seen.

Its shell was mottled, stippled like ground beef. That’s a pattern typical of pallasites, the rarest type of meteorite on Earth. One side was rounded and streamlined by passage through the atmosphere. ‘It’s oriented, Steve!’ Mani shouted. ‘It’s oriented!’

About the size of a beer keg, the rock weighed 1,430 pounds, the largest pallasite ever found in the US. By Arnold’s reckoning, it was worth more than $1 million.” (Thanks Longform.)

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“A modern-day treasure hunter was searching for something out of this world–literally”:

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“As Putin Spoke, And As The National Audience Watched, Many In The Crowd Started To Jeer And Whistle”

December 12, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

David Remnick can write about any topic brilliantly, but it’s always special when he focuses on American politics, boxing or Russia. He has a new New Yorker article on the latter topic, focusing on Vladimir Putin at a time when the once and perhaps future president of the Russian Federation is facing vociferous dissent from his people for the first time. The opening:

“On the night of November 20th, two weeks before elections for the State Duma, Vladimir Putin set aside the cares of the Kremlin and went to the Olympic SportComplex for an ultimate-fighting match—a ‘no rules’ heavyweight bout between a Cyclopean Russian named Feodor (the Last Emperor) Yemelianenko and a self-described anarchist from Olympia, Washington, named Jeff (the Snowman) Monson. The bout was broadcast nationally on Rossiya-2, one of the main state television channels. Putin, wearing a blue suit and no tie, was at ringside. He has always been eager to project the macho posture of a muzhik, a real man. He has had himself photographed riding horses bare-chested, tracking tigers, shooting a whale with a crossbow, piloting a firefighting jet, swimming a Siberian river, steering a Formula One race car, befriending Jean-Claude Van Damme, and riding with a motorcycle gang. Once, on national television, he tried to bend a frying pan with his bare hands. He did not quite succeed, but the effort was appreciated. And now ultimate fighting: the beery crowd of twenty thousand—some prosperous, some less so—were his own, Putin’s people.

Yemelianenko and Monson were of a rough equivalence: heads shaved, two enormous sacks of rocks, though the Russian was distinguished by his unstained skin; Monson had tattoos from ankle to neck, including two in crowd-friendly Cyrillic—svoboda and solidarnost’. The gesture got him nowhere. Almost from the start, the Russian dominated the fight. Yemelianenko, with a deft and powerful kick, snapped a bone in Monson’s leg, causing the American to limp pitifully. But, even as Yemelianenko took command, steadily reducing Monson to a swollen, bloody pulp—a source of pleasure to the crowd—it was hard to tell if Putin was enjoying himself. The camera flashed to him now and then. He barely betrayed a smile. His face, now smoothed with Botox and filler (it is said), is more enigmatic than ever. What was more, he had larger concerns. He knew that, no matter how hard his operatives tried to get out the vote in the provinces and massage the results, the Kremlin party, United Russia, was going to lose ground.

At the end of the bout—a unanimous decision for Yemelianenko—the Prime Minister climbed through the ropes to pay tribute to the loser and to congratulate his countryman. By this time, the American handlers were tenderly helping their warrior to the dressing room. Monson could no longer walk. His lips were as fat as bicycle tires.

Putin had a kind word for Monson (‘a real man’) and paid Yemelianenko the ultimate compliment of Russian masculinity, calling him a ‘nastoyashii Russki bogatyr‘—a genuine Russian hero. As Putin spoke, and as the national audience watched, many in the crowd started to jeer and whistle. This had never happened to Putin before, not once in two four-year terms as President, not in three-plus years as Prime Minister. And yet now, having announced his intention to reassume the Presidency in March, possibly for another twelve years, he was experiencing an unmistakable tide of derision.”

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Bending frying pans:

Emelianenko crushes Monson:

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“Colonial Authorities Described For Him The Enormous Search Already Under Way”

December 12, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

“They had moved extra patrol boats in, chartered air search planes from as far away as Australia and sent policeman sloshing through coastal swamps to look for Mike.” (Image by Harvard.)

Michael Rockefeller may not have been devoured by crocodiles or cannibals but he was most definitely swallowed whole by the rugged expanses of New Guinea in 1961. The wealthy young scion of Governor Nelson Rockefeller was in that country studying the culture and art of the Asmat people when he and his associate found themselves stranded in a canoe. Rockefeller decided to try to swim 12 miles to shore. He was never seen again, his body never recovered, and sensational theories about his disappearance began to emerge. From a 1961 Life article by Richard B. Stolley about the fruitless rescue mission:

“The full horror of this primitive country where his son was lost struck Governor Nelson Rockefeller only after he had seen it himself. En route from New York with his daughter, Mary Strawbridge, he was cheered by news that his son’s companion, Dutch Anthropologist Rene Wassing, had been saved. When the governor’s chartered jetliner landed at Biak, on the north side of the island, colonial authorities described for him the enormous search already under way. They had moved extra patrol boats in, chartered air search planes from as far away as Australia and sent policeman sloshing through coastal swamps to look for Mike and to urge the friendly Asmat natives to do the same.

A Dutch admiral told Rockefeller that the Navy had put a seaman into Flamingo Bay, where Mike disappeared, with two metal gasoline cans like those Mike had used. By holding the cans in front of him, the sailor could swim quite rapidly, and the experiment proved that young Rockefeller might easily have reached shore. Everywhere in New Guinea, compassionate Dutch officials treated Rockefeller not so much with deference due a man who is one of the most powerful leaders in the U.S. but with the sympathy deserved by a father who has lost a son.”

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The subject of an In Search Of… episode:

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“Noyce Knew That He Had Discovered The Road To El Dorado”

December 12, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Noyce had figured out a solution. But fabricating it was another matter." (Image by David Carron.)

The late Dr. Robert Noyce, father of the silicon microchip, would have turned 84 today. From Tom’s Wolfe’s 1983 Esquire article “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” a passage about the race to create the first (and best) integrated circuit: 

“Even for a machine as simple as a radio the individual transistors had to be wired together, by hand, until you ended up with a little panel that looked like a road map of West Virginia. As for a computer, the wires inside a computer were sheer spaghetti.

Noyce had figured out a solution. But fabricating it was another matter. There was something primitive about cutting individual transistors out of sheets of silicon and then wiring them back together in various series. Why not put them all on a single piece of silicon without wires? The problem was that you would also have to carve, etch, coat, and otherwise fabricate the silicon to perform all the accompanying electrical functions as well, the functions ordinarily performed by insulators, rectifiers, resistors, and capacitors. You would have to create an entire electrical system, an entire circuit, on a little wafer or chip.

Noyce realized that he was not the only engineer thinking along these lines, but he had never even heard of Jack Kilby. Kilby was a thirty-six-year-old engineer working for Texas lnstruments in Dallas. In January, 1959 Noyce made his first detailed notes about a complete solid-state circuit. A month later Texas Instruments announced that Jack Kilby had invented one. Kilby’s integrated circuit, as the invention was called, was made of germanium. Six months later Noyce created a similar integrated circuit made of silicon and using a novel insulating process developed by Jean Hoerni. Noyce’s silicon device turned out to be more efficient and more practical to produce than Kilby’s and set the standard for the industry. So Noyce became known as the co-inventor of the integrated circuit. Nevertheless, Kilby had unquestionably been first. There was an ironic echo of Shockley here. Strictly speaking, Bardeen and Brattain, not Shockley, had invented the transistor, but Shockley wasn’t bashful about being known as the co-inventor. And, now eleven years later, Noyce wasn’t turning bashful either.

Noyce knew exactly what he possessed in this integrated circuit, or microchip, as the press would call it. Noyce knew that he had discovered the road to El Dorado.”

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Noyce predicts the future of technology, 1981:

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Joseph Stalin, In Relatively Jovial Mood (1941)

December 9, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Legendary Life photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White explained how she snapped the above picture of Joseph Stalin smiling–well, smiling  by his somber standards–in quotes that ran in her 1971 New York Times obituary, I actually don’t know if she did the world a favor by locating a softer-looking Stalin, but here’s an excerpt:

“For her meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin in 1941, which was arranged by Harry Hopkins, Miss Bourke-White employed a stratagem to catch him off guard. Recalling the incident, she wrote:

‘I made up my mind that I wouldn’t leave without getting a picture of Stalin smiling. When I met him, his face looked as though it were carved out of stone, he wouldn’t show any emotion at all. I went virtually beserk trying to make that great stone face come alive.

‘I got down on my hands and knees on the floor and tried out all kinds of crazy postures searching for a good camera angle. Stalin looke down at the way I was aquirming and writhing and for the space of a lightning flash he smiled-and I got my picture. Probably, he had never seen a girl photographer before and my weird contortions amused him.’

Miss Bourke-White maintained that ‘a woman shoudn’t trade on the fact that she is a woman.’ Nonetheless, several of her male colleagues were certain that her fetching looks–she was tall, slim, dark-haired and possessed of a beautiful face–were often employed to her advantage.

‘Generals rushed to tote her cameras,’ Mr. [Alfred] Eisenstadt recalled, ‘and even Stalin insisted on carrying her bags.'”

Margaret Bourke-White, 1964.

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“The Uselessness Of Art Makes Any Spending On It Especially Potent”

December 8, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"Crowds lining up to see a portrait by Gustav Klimt in the private Neue Galerie in New York weren’t there out of any fondness for the artist."

Eye-popping prices for artworks are a puzzlement for people outside of that world–and for many people on the inside. In Newsweek, Blake Gopnik attempts to explain why this market is impervious even to worldwide financial collapse. An excerpt:

“‘If I can’t sell something, I just double the price.’ That’s what Ernst Beyeler, the great Swiss dealer who helped found Art Basel, reportedly said. Some people actually prefer to pay more than makes sense. Zelizer explains that, in all walks of life, we treat the biggest sums -differently, with special respect or even awe, than more-everyday money. ‘I think very often the price paid for a work is the trophy itself,’ says Glimcher, the dealer.

In 2006, the crowds lining up to see a portrait by Gustav Klimt in the private Neue Galerie in New York weren’t there out of any fondness for the artist. They were there because they’d heard that the museum’s founder, cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, had paid a record $135 million for it.

The sociologist Mitch Abolafia, who has made a study of Wall Street financiers, says that sometimes money speaks for itself. ‘A trader said to me one day, with glee in his eyes, ‘You can’t see it, but money is everywhere in this room. Money is flying around—millions and millions of dollars.’ It was a generalized excitement about money. Even I felt it.’ That’s the excitement we all get from expensive art. One collector, who believes deeply that art should be bought for art’s sake, acknowledges basking in the ‘robust glow of prosperity’ that his purchases give off once their value has soared.

The people who are spending record amounts on art buy more than just that glow. (And much more than the pleasure of contemplating pictures, which they could get for $20 at any museum.) They’ve purchased boasting rights. ‘It’s, ‘You bought the $100 million Picasso?!,’’ says Glimcher. Abolafia explains that his financiers were ‘shameless’ in declaring the price of their toys, because in their world, what you buy is less about the object than the cash you threw at it. The uselessness of art makes any spending on it especially potent: buying a yacht is a tiny bit like buying a rowboat, and so retains a taint of practicality, but buying a great Picasso is like no other spending. Olav Velthuis, a Dutch sociologist who wrote Talking Prices, the best study of what art spending means, compares the top of the art market to the potlatches performed by the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, where the goal was to ostentatiously give away, even destroy, as much of your wealth as possible—to show that you could. In the art-market equivalent, he says, prices keep mounting as collectors compete for this ‘super-status effect.'”

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Carson Daly visits Mr. Brainwash’s Warholian vomitorium:

“Best Of All, However, I Relished Women’s Brains In Vinaigrette”

December 8, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s Diego Rivera’s 125th birthday today. In  his 1960 autobiography, My Art, My Life, the famed Mexican muralist claimed to have spent part of his youth dining on human flesh. It sounds like complete bullshit. The brief chapter called, “An Experiment in Cannibalism”:

“In 1904, wishing to extend my knowledge of human anatomy, a basic requisite for my painting, I took a course in that subject in the Medical School in Mexico City. At that time, I read of an experiment which greatly interested me.

A French fur dealer in a Paris suburb tried to improve the pelts of animals by the use of a peculiar diet. He fed his animals, which happened to be cats, the meat of cats. On that diet, the cats grew bigger, and their fur became firmer and glossier. Soon he was able to outsell his competitors, and he profited additionally from the fact that he was using the flesh of the animals he skinned.

His competitors, however, had their revenge. They took advantage of the circumstance that his premises were adjacent to a lunatic asylum. One night, several of them unlocked his cages and let loose his oversize cats, now numbering thousands. When the cats swarmed out, a panic ensued in the asylum. Not only the inmates but their keepers and doctors ‘saw cats’ wherever they turned. The police had a hard time restoring order, and to prevent a recurrence of such an incident, an ordinance was passed outlawing ‘caticulture.’

At first the story of the enterprising furrier merely amused me, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I discussed the experiment with my fellow students in the anatomy class, and we decided to repeat it and see if we got the same results. We did — and this encouraged us to extend the experiment and see if it involved a general principle for other animals, specifically human beings, by ourselves living on a diet of human meat.

Those of us who undertook the experiment pooled our money to purchase cadavers from the city morgue, choosing the bodies of persons who had died of violence — who had been freshly killed and were not diseased or senile. We lived on this cannibal diet for two months, and everyone’s health improved.

During the time of our experiment, I discovered that I liked to eat the legs and breasts of women, for as in other animals, these parts are delicacies. I also savored young women’s breaded ribs. Best of all, however, I relished women’s brains in vinaigrette.

I have never returned to the eating of human flesh, not out of a squeamishness, but because of the hostility with which society looks upon the practice. Yet is this hostility entirely rational? We know it is not.

Cannibalism does not necessarily involve murder. And human flesh is probably the most assimilable food available to man. Psychologically, its consumption might do much to liberate him from deep-rooted complexes — complexes which can explode with the first accidental spark.

I believe that when man evolves a civilization higher than the mechanized but still primitive one he has now, the eating of human flesh will be sanctioned. For then man will have thrown off all of his superstitions and irrational taboos.”

 

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“Very Occasionally, They Offer A Vision Of The Future”

December 7, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

An uncommonly prophetic 1969 Australian concept car is born again, as the Holden Hurricane is restored. From the Daily Mail:

‘Concept cars’ are unveiled by car makers to show off new technologies. Sometimes they evolve into production vehicles, sometimes they don’t – but very occasionally, they offer a vision of the future.

Holden’s Hurricane – unveiled 42 years ago in Melbourne – was packed with decades-worth of technologies that have become standard in cars. The Hurricane not only had digital displays, it also had a primitive magnetic GPS system, a rear-view CCTV camera, and a hydraulic entry system that would have made the Dukes of Hazzard jealous – the entire roof lifted off on hydraulic plates.

Now the concept car has been brought back to life at a motor show in Melbourne.”

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“It shows amazing foresight into future automotive technologies’;

“It’s Hard To Think Of A Company Whose Onetime Dominance Of A Market Has Been So Thoroughly Obliterated By New Technology”

December 7, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From Michael Hiltzik’s L.A. Times piece on former blue chipper Kodak, laid low by the digital revolution and creative destruction:

“Kodak Brownie and Instamatic cameras were once staples of family vacations and holidays — remember the ‘open me first’ Christmas ad campaigns? But it may not be long before a generation of Americans grows up without ever having laid hands on a Kodak product. That’s a huge comedown for a brand that was once as globally familiar as Coca-Cola.

It’s hard to think of a company whose onetime dominance of a market has been so thoroughly obliterated by new technology. Family snapshots? They’re almost exclusively digital now, and only a tiny fraction ever get printed on paper.

Eastman Kodak engineers invented the digital camera in 1975; but now that you can point and click with a cheap cellphone, even the stand-alone digital camera is becoming an endangered species on the consumer electronics veld. The last spool of yellow-boxed Kodachrome rolled out the door of a Mexican factory in 2009. Paul Simon composed his hymn to Kodachrome in 1973, but his camera of choice, according to the lyrics, was a Nikon.

It’s not uncommon for great companies to be humbled by what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called the forces of ‘creative destruction.’ Technology, especially digital technology, has been the most potent whirlwind sweeping away old markets and old strategies for many decades.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“These poor mortals are getting rather clever”:

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