Sex Recording (Audio) Wanted for Art
For the sake of an art project, send an audio recording of you and your other having sex. Submissions are anonymous and benefit the improvement of art and culture.
Of the handful of new titles coming this May from the revived line of Pelican Books, the one I’m most excited about is The Domesticated Brain by the experimental psychologist Bruce Hood. The beloved publisher of inexpensive, high-minded titles for the masses is the subject of a Guardian piece by Paul Laity. An excerpt:
“It was the beginning of an illustrious era. Nearly 3,000 Pelicans took flight during the following five decades, covering a huge range of subjects: many were specially commissioned, most were paperback versions of already published titles. They were crisply and brilliantly designed and fitted in a back pocket. And they sold, in total, an astonishing 250m copies. Editions of 50,000, even for not obvious bestsellers, were standard: a 1952 study of the Hittites – the ancient Anatolian people – quickly sold out and continued in print for many years. (These days a publisher would be delighted if such a book made it to 2,000.) The Greeks by HDF Kitto sold 1.3m copies; Facts from Figures, ‘a layman’s introduction to statistics,’ sold 600,000. Many got to the few hundred thousand mark.
‘The Pelican books bid fair,’ Lane wrote in 1938, ‘to become the true everyman’s library of the 20th century … bringing the finest products of modern thought and art to the people.] They pretty much succeeded. Some were, as their publisher admitted, ‘heavy going’ and a few were rather esoteric (Hydroponics, anyone?). But in their heyday Pelicans hugely influenced the nation’s intellectual culture: they comprised a kind of home university for an army of autodidacts, aspirant culture-vultures and social radicals.
In retrospect, the whole venture seems linked to a perception of social improvement and political possibility. Pelicans helped bring Labour to power in 1945, cornered the market in the new cultural studies, introduced millions to the ideas of anthropology and sociology, and provided much of the reading matter for the sexual and political upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s.
The film writer David Thomson, who worked as an editor at Penguin in the 60s, has recalled that as an employee ‘you could honestly believe you were doing the work of God … we were bringing education to the nation; we were the cool colours on the shelves of a generation.’ It was all to do ‘with that excited sense that the country might be changing.”
Tags: Bruce Hood
From Joshua Green’s Businessweek profile of Boston Red Sox savior John Henry, a thumbnail sketch of the owner who initially married a Moneyball mentality to a big-market budget and has since overseen the franchise as its remade itself as a relatively austere and even more analytical organization:
“For so prominent a figure, Henry is a bit of a mystery. He limits contact with the press and, when he does communicate, prefers e-mail. In person, he’s so reserved that it often appears as if he’s working out a difficult algebraic formula in his head. Which is what he may, in fact, be doing. ‘He’s the most mathematically talented person I’ve ever met,’ says Lucchino, the team’s co-owner and chief executive officer. ‘I think that element of the game very much appeals to him. And he’s a competitive guy. He wants to win. He wants to measure his success. When you put it all together, he’s got more dimensions than most baseball owners.’
As different as he may seem, Henry captures baseball’s current era. A mathematical whiz who made a fortune as a pioneering trader of commodities futures, he’s part of a wave of owners from the financial world that’s sweeping professional sports. In baseball, this includes Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg, a former Goldman Sachs partner, and Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio, founder of the investment firm Crescent Capital Group. All are keenly attuned to the statistical revolution that has upended the game and compete as vigorously against each other as anyone on Wall Street. Last year, Henry shut down his commodities trading firm to concentrate on his many other endeavors. In addition to the Globe (where I’m a contributor), he and his partners own the English Premier League soccer team Liverpool and a stake in Nascar’s Roush Fenway Racing team. But just as his trading algorithms did, baseball has furnished him with the most spectacular payoffs.
Henry provides an especially good lens into how the game is changing and why the Red Sox appear poised for further success. It isn’t just that financial types are applying their smarts to baseball, it’s that baseball success has come to hinge less on signing expensive stars, as George Steinbrenner’s Yankees once did, and much more on making smarter bets than the competition on which young players will emerge as the next stars. Winning in baseball is becoming a lot like winning in futures trading.”
Tags: John Henry, Joshua Green
British Pathé has just dropped a huge trove of classic newsreels onto Youtube. One video is of American military veteran and Bronx native Christine Jorgensen (née George Jorgensen), who became, in 1952, world famous for having changed genders with the use of hormone-replacement therapy. Thankfully, she was a quick-witted, confident person who could survive the attention. The Pathé video and a couple others from later in her “second” life.
1953:
1966:
1980s:
While I have plenty of concerns about technology, I don’t understand those who equate it with evil and biology with good. I’m not sure that biology doesn’t have a programmed endgame in mind for us that technology might, perhaps, counter. From E.O. Wilson’s 2005 Cosmos article, “Is Humanity Suicidal?“:
“Unlike any creature that lived before, humans have become a geophysical force, swiftly changing the atmosphere and climate as well as the composition of the world’s fauna and flora.
Now in the midst of a population explosion, this species has doubled in number to more than 6 billion during the past 50 years. It is scheduled to double again in the next 50 years. No other single species in evolutionary history has even remotely approached the sheer mass in protoplasm generated by humanity.
Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth. It was a misfortune for the living world in particular, many of our scientists believe, that a carnivorous primate and not some more benign form of animal made the breakthrough.
Our species retains hereditary traits that add greatly to our destructive impact. We are tribal and aggressively territorial, intent on private space beyond minimal requirements and oriented by selfish sexual and reproductive drives. Cooperation beyond the family and tribal levels comes hard. Worse, our liking for meat causes us to use the Sun’s energy at low efficiency.”
_________________________
“It’s doomsday”:
Evel Knievel was introduced to America in 1967, and six years later he was schmoozing with Johnny Carson as one of the most famous athletes in the world, provided you liberally define “athlete.” The ultimate alchemist, he turned trash into gold. Like a latter-day Houdini–but with nothing up his sleeve–the motorcycle jumper sold the masses on the possibility of death, just as many reality stars and celebrities do today with dysfunction and drugs.
Tags: Evel Knievel, Johnny Carson
From the July 21, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“New Castle, Pa.–David E. Lewis Jr., of this city left yesterday for Sedgewick County, Missouri, to claim Miss Mary Spright for his bride. Some time ago Lewis found the girl’s name and address written on an egg. A correspondence started and the romance is the result.”
Kim Jong-un, a dipshit throwback to last-century tyrants, is probably most interesting for his propaganda and media control. In time, he will get his, but until then his every word is recorded by a cadre of men with antiquated tools (pens and notepads), who are assigned the task of recording his every word. They’re not journalists but players upon a world stage. Like umbrella holders for a movie star, these minions are as much form as function, meant to establish the despot’s importance. From Kathryn Westcott’s BBC explanation of this spectacle:
“In the photographs – from the country’s official Central News Agency (KCNA) – Kim Jong-un observes a unit of women conducting a multiple-rocket launching drill. He strides around a fishery station. He gives a pilot on flight training a pep talk. He enjoys the facilities at a renovated youth camp.
But who are those men meticulously taking notes? They’re not journalists, but soldiers, party members or government officials, says Prof James Grayson, Korea expert at the University of Sheffield. What is happening is a demonstration of the leader’s supposed power, knowledge, wisdom and concern, says Grayson. It’s ‘on-the-spot guidance,’ something instigated by his grandfather Kim Il-sung in the 1950s. ‘It’s part of the image of the great leader offering benevolent guidance,’ says Grayson.”
Tags: James Grayson, Kathryn Westcott, Kim Jong-un
From “Robocopulation” an Economist article about scientists trying to figure out polymorphism with the aid of rodent robots:
“‘How do robots have sex?’ sounds like the set-up line for a bad joke. Yet for Stefan Elfwing, a researcher in the Neural Computation Unit of Japan’s Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), it is at the heart of discovering how and why multiple (or polymorphic) mating strategies evolve within the same population of a species. Because observing any species over hundreds of generations is impractical, Dr Elfwing and other scientists are increasingly using a combination of robots and computer simulation to model evolution. And the answer to that opening question? By swapping software ‘genotypes’ via infrared communications, ideally when facing each other 30cm apart. Not exactly a salty punchline.
Charles Darwin was intrigued by polymorphism in general and it still fascinates evolutionary biologists. The idea that more than one mating strategy can coexist in the same population of a species seems to contradict natural selection. This predicts that the optimum phenotype (any trait caused by a mix of genetic and environmental factors) will cause less successful phenotypes to become extinct.
Yet in nature there are many examples of polymorphic mating strategies within single populations of the same species, resulting in phenomena such as persistent colour and size variation within that population. Male tree lizards, for instance, use three different mating strategies correlated with throat colour and body size, and devotees of each manage to procreate.
Simulations alone can unintentionally overlook constraints found in the physical world, such as how far a critter looking for a mate can see. So the OIST team based their simulations on the actual behaviour of small, custom-made ‘cyber-rodent’ robots. This established their physical limitations, such as how they must align with each other to mate and the extent of their limited field of view.”
Tags: Charles Darwin, Stefan Elfwing
- Lessons Learned From A Year Without Showering
- First ‘Female Penis’ Ever Observed Has Scientists Buzzing
- A Game-Changing Trick To Making Bacon
- Country Collecting Cow Farts
- Watch A Woman Give Birth To A Painting (NSFW)
- Jon Hamm Asks That You Please Stop Talking About His Penis
- The Chocolate Chip Cookie Grilled Cheese: Good Or Gross?
- All This Because A Goat Sneezed?
- Man With Reconstructed Penis Fathers Baby
- To The Troll Who Called My Son Ugly
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
- does donald trump smell bad?
- who was the youngest pimp ever?
- michael pollan writing about geoengineering
- did rocky marciano fight a computer?
- barbara walters interviewing claus von bulow
- rich children with private zoos
- billy carter interview
- vanity fair story about bob guccione
- the science of facial attractiveness
- we have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years and bring increasing prosperity for quite literally billions of people on the planet
This week, Fox News was actually right about something.
Rancher Cliven Bundy is reminiscent of our forefathers in one way.
We owned lots of slaves.
- Old Print Articles: One Collyer brother found dead, the other still missing (1947) + Thomas Edison’s talking pictures prove a (temporary) success + Heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey has part of his ear surgically attached to his nose (1924).
- Featured Videos: Great bull session between Marshall McLuhan and typographer Harley Parker (1967) + Honda introduces its third iteration of the Asimo robot + Novelist Jacqueline Susann is baited during an interview (1960s) + Professor Irwin Corey accepts Thomas Pynchon’s National Book Award (1973) + Evel Knievel makes his debut on Wide World of Sports (1967).
- Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: Thanks to de Blasio’s liberal policies, NYC is a murder capital again + A career fallback option + Maybe check with Mick and Keith first + Girlfriend said “no” to the three-way.
- Vile ventriloquist act Otto and George has been laid to rest.
- Las Vegas lawns may eventually kill Sin City.
- Perhaps animals, like humans, should have legal recourse.
- A worm may soon live entirely inside a computer.
- Tyler Cowen is awed, yet disappointed, by Thomas Piketty’s bestseller.
- Michael Rockefeller’s mysterious disappearance still fascinates.
- Delivery robots might need different regulations than driverless cars.
- Jack Shafer believes no whistleblowers is more dangerous than whistleblowers.
- Life often lingers beneath the surface when humans are in a vegetative state.
- NPR Shanghai correspondent Frank Langfitt did an AMA about China.
- Nudging people’s behavior likely produces more good than bad.
- Cory Arcangel has uncovered a trove of Warhol computer art.
- Software that decides which inmates should be paroled.
- David J. Cord, analyst of Nokia’s collapse, did an AMA about all things mobile.
- There still may be a future for atomic-powered spacecraft.
- An argument that Alexis de Tocqueville was actually tech-savvy.
- Fixating on the apocalypse may be a way to avoid making hard decisions.
- Silicon Valley wants drones to spread the Internet to remote places.
- Perhaps we’ve finally figured out how to make it rain.
- A brief note from 1885 about a zoologist’s appetite.
- A brief note from 1925 about ugliness.
- A brief note from 1913 about a reunion.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
MONKEY MONKEY MONKEY – $20
I seriously need to get rid of this monkey, it doesn’t get along with my girlfriend. (No, I cant get rid of the girlfriend.) If you want a monkey call today after 6pm.
I put up a post just a couple of weeks ago about Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and since then it’s quickly become an unlikely blockbuster, sold out in brick-and-mortar stores and ranked #1 on Amazon, the latest green shoot in the Occupy mindset which blossomed in these scary financial times. At Foreign Affairs, economist Tyler Cowen provides a well-written review of the work, which he finds impressive but (unsurprisingly) disagrees with in fundamental ways. The opening:
“Every now and then, the field of economics produces an important book; this is one of them. Thomas Piketty’s tome will put capitalist wealth back at the center of public debate, resurrect interest in the subject of wealth distribution, and revolutionize how people view the history of income inequality. On top of that, although the book’s prose (translated from the original French) might not qualify as scintillating, any educated person will be able to understand it — which sets the book apart from the vast majority of works by high-level economic theorists.
Piketty is best known for his collaborations during the past decade with his fellow French economist Emmanuel Saez, in which they used historical census data and archival tax records to demonstrate that present levels of income inequality in the United States resemble those of the era before World War II. Their revelations concerning the wealth concentrated among the richest one percent of Americans — and, perhaps even more striking, among the richest 0.1 percent — have provided statistical and intellectual ammunition to the left in recent years, especially during the debates sparked by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests and the 2012 U.S. presidential election.
In this book, Piketty keeps his focus on inequality but attempts something grander than a mere diagnosis of capitalism’s ill effects. The book presents a general theory of capitalism intended to answer a basic but profoundly important question. As Piketty puts it:
‘Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century? Or do the balancing forces of growth, competition, and technological progress lead in later stages of development to reduced inequality and greater harmony among the classes, as Simon Kuznets thought in the twentieth century?’
Although he stops short of embracing Marx’s baleful vision, Piketty ultimately lands on the pessimistic end of the spectrum. He believes that in capitalist systems, powerful forces can push at various times toward either equality or inequality and that, therefore, ‘one should be wary of any economic determinism.’ But in the end, he concludes that, contrary to the arguments of Kuznets and other mainstream thinkers, ‘there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.’ To forestall such an outcome, Piketty proposes, among other things, a far-fetched plan for the global taxation of wealth — a call to radically redistribute the fruits of capitalism to ensure the system’s survival. This is an unsatisfying conclusion to a groundbreaking work of analysis that is frequently brilliant — but flawed, as well.”
Tags: Thomas Piketty, Tyler Cowen
Andy Warhol, that cyborg, was the messenger who got shot. He lived long enough, however, to participate in the early moments of the computer explosion, commissioned by Amiga to create a digital portrait of Debbie Harry. The fascinating visual artist Cory Arcangel has recovered some of Warhol’s other Amiga art. From Jonathan Jones at the Guardian:
“Thanks to the curiosity of Cory Arcangel – one of today’s most important artists working with digital technologies – a forgotten hoard of Warhol artworks has been rescued from old Amiga disks by students who ingeniously hacked into the defunct software.
The works Warhol created to commission in 1985 to help launch the Amiga 1000 computer are not earth-shattering in themselves. He essentially recreated some of his paintings as digital images.
But the meeting of Andy Warhol and a computer at the dawn of the digital age is hugely suggestive. Warhol, after all, is the man who flirted with being a machine. He wore a metallic silver wig and made paintings on a production line, with assistants silkscreening found photographs onto canvas.
This computer-like style was eerie. Yet it was not the real him. In reality, Andy Warhol was a talented draughtsman, a secret Catholic and a compassionate historian of his times. He pretended to be a machine because that was the best way he found to capture the way the world was changing. From canned soup to instant pictures, Warhol took the pulse of the age as America became a society of consumers and celebrity watchers. He portrayed reality so truly he seemed to invent it – as if one artist could create the celebrity age.
Warhol was a reporter who simply told the truth.”
Tags: Andy Warhol, Cory Arcangel, Jonathan Jones
George Dvorsky’s io9 post “This Could Be the First Animal to Live Entirely Inside A Computer” examines neuroscientist Stephen Larson’s attempts to create a virtual worm, which has massive implications for the future of medicine and so much else. An excerpt:
“To be fair, scientists , namely the exceptionally small free-living bacteria known as Mycoplasma genitalia. It’s an amazing accomplishment, but the pathogen — with its 525 genes — is one of the world’s simplest organisms. Contrast that with E. coli, which has 4,288 genes, and humans, who have anywhere from 35,000 to 57,000 genes.
Scientists have also created synthetic DNA that can self-replicate and an artificial chromosome from scratch. Breakthroughs like these suggest it won’t be much longer before we start creating synthetic animals for the real world. Such endeavors could result in designer organisms to help in the manufacturing of vaccines, medicines, sustainable fuels, and with toxic clean-ups.
There’s a very good chance that many of these organisms, including drugs, will be designed and tested in computers first. Eventually, our machines will be powerful enough and our understanding of biology deep enough to allow us to start simulating some of the most complex biological functions — from entire microbes right through to the human mind itself (what will be known as whole brain emulations).
Needless to say we’re not going to get there in one day. We’ll have to start small and work our way up. Which is why Larson and his team have started to work on their simulated nematode worm.”
Tags: George Dvorsky, Stephen Larson
Heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey was one of the biggest things going in America in the Roaring Twenties, in an age when boxing was the king of sports. He was as big a star as Babe Ruth or Charlie Chaplin or Harry Houdini. Like all public figures of those days, Dempsey had a brand new audience to please: filmgoers, who could see his every imperfection in newsreels projected on larger-than-life screens. The boxer had added reason to be concerned about his punched-up mug: He wanted to make Hollywood movies. So during a three-year sabbatical from the ring, during which time he made more than ten silent shorts and starred in Manhattan Madness, Dempsey decided to get his nose fixed. From the August 10, 1924 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Los Angeles–Whoever opposes Jack Dempsey in the next battle for the heavyweight ring championship will have an opportunity to test his marksmanship on a nice new nose.
The world’s champion has gone into retirement with a bandaged face after bowing to the filmdom fad of having one’s nose rebuilt to suit the cameraman.
Since Dempsey had been publicly connected with the motion picture industry all summer, there was no way out of it, and accordingly the plastic surgeon was given permission to cut away a piece of the boxer’s left ear and put it where it would make his nose look like Valentino’s.
It will be a week, the doctor said, before the new nose can be unveiled.”
Tags: Jack Dempsey
Stunt cyclist Evel Knievel, destined for amazing fame but just an opening act at this point, makes his debut on Wide World of Sports in 1967.
“He’s Not a Bird, He’s Not a Plane” is a fun profile of the late, great motorcycle daredevil from the February 5, 1968 issue of Sports Illustrated. The piece was penned by Gilbert Rogin, a novelist who was also SI‘s managing editor.
The article relays what a sensation Knievel was in the ’60s and ’70s. He dressed like Elvis and escaped death like Houdini, although the dark side of his appeal was the sick fascination of watching what would happen if he couldn’t avert disaster, as he jumped his motorcycle over rows of cars, hotel fountains and actual rivers.
Knievel had none of the sociopolitical significance of Muhammad Ali, but he shared the boxer’s keen understanding of Hollywood, hoopla and the hard sell. He went through a lot of money, broken bones, personal problems, a rock opera and a late-life religious conversion before his death in 2007. In Rogin’s piece, Knievel touted his desire to jump across the Grand Canyon (which never happened). A brief excerpt about his not-so-successful jump over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace on the last day of 1967:
“On New Year’s Eve, Knievel jumped the ornamental fountains in front of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which are billed as the World’s Largest Privately Owned Fountains. Several weeks earlier he had said, ‘I know I can jump these babies, but what I don’t know is whether I can hold on to the motorcycle when it lands. Oh, boy, I hope I don’t fall off.’
Knievel’s fears were justified. Shortly after the motorcycle hit the landing ramp, he fell and rolled 165 feet across an asphalt parking lot. Knievel is now in Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital, recovering from compound fractures of the hip and pelvis. ‘Everything seemed to come apart,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t hang on to the motorcycle. I kept smashing over and over and over and over and over, and I kept saying to myself, ‘Stay conscious, stay conscious.’ But, hey, I made the fountains!’”
Considering the appalling way we treat animals apart from a couple of cute ones we are very protective of, it’s worth pondering if non-human creatures should have legal recourse. Historically, animals have taken part in court systems, though as defendants, not plaintiffs. From Charles Siebert’s New York Times Magazine article, “Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner?“:
“Animals are hardly strangers to our courts, only to the brand of justice meted out there. In the opening chapters of [Steven] Wise’s first book, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals, published in 2000, he cites the curious and now largely forgotten history, dating at least back to the Middle Ages, of humans putting animals on trial for their perceived offenses, everything from murderous pigs, to grain-filching rats and insects, to flocks of sparrows disrupting church services with their chirping. Such proceedings — often elaborate, drawn-out courtroom dramas in which the defendants were ostensibly accorded the same legal rights as humans, right down to being appointed the best available lawyers — were essentially allegorical rituals, a means of expunging evil and restoring some sense of order to a random and disorderly world.
Among the most common nonhuman defendants cited by the British historian E. P. Evans in his 1906 book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, were pigs. Allowed to freely roam the narrow, winding streets of medieval villages, pigs and sows sometimes maimed and killed infants and young children. The ‘guilty’ party would regularly be brought before a magistrate to be tried and sentenced and then publicly tortured and executed in the town square, often while being hung upside down, because, as Wise explains it in Rattling the Cage, ‘a beast . . . who killed a human reversed the ordained hierarchy. . . . Inversion set the world right again.’
The practice of enlisting animals as unwitting courtroom actors in order to reinforce our own sense of justice is not as outmoded as you might think. As recently as 1906, the year Evans’s book appeared, a father-son criminal team and the attack dog they trained to be their accomplice were prosecuted in Switzerland for robbery and murder. In a trial reported in L’Écho de Paris and The New York Herald, the two men were found guilty and received life in prison. The dog — without whom, the court determined, the crime couldn’t have been committed — was condemned to death.
It has been only in the last 30 years or so that a distinct field of animal law — that is laws and legal theory expressly for and about nonhuman animals — has emerged.”
Tags: Charles Siebert
Corporations don’t just nudge–they push hard. Trying to get us to consume products that are often injurious to us, they attack with constant messages to trigger our behavior. That’s considered freedom. But it’s stickier when governments try to influence us with sin taxes, default agreements and helpful reminders. That’s called a nanny state. Sometimes I like such initiatives (cigarette taxes) and sometimes I don’t, but they influence us less and to healthier ends than corporations do. From Cass Sunstein’s new Guardian article about nudging:
“The beauty of nudges is that when they are well chosen, they make people’s lives better while maintaining freedom of choice. Moreover, they usually don’t cost a lot, and they tend to have big effects. In an economically challenging time, it is no wonder that governments all over the world, including in the US and UK, have been showing a keen interest in nudging.
Inevitably, we have been seeing a backlash. Some people object that nudges are a form of unacceptable paternalism. This is an objection that has intuitive appeal, but there is a real problem with it: nudging is essentially inevitable, and so it is pointless to object to nudging as such.
The private sector nudges all the time. Whenever a government has websites, communicates with its citizens, operates cafeterias, or maintains offices that people will visit, it nudges, whether or not it intends to. Nudges might not be readily visible, but they are inevitably there. If we are sceptical about official nudging, we might limit how often it occurs, but we cannot possibly eliminate it.
Other sceptics come from the opposite direction, contending that in light of what we know about human errors, we should be focusing on mandates and bans. They ask: when we know people make bad decisions, why should we insist on preserving freedom of choice?“
Tags: Cass Sunstein
Americans have always viewed technology (and anti-technology) in romantic terms. In a New Atlantis piece, Benjamin Storey argues that Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t give tech in the U.S. the short shrift but instead viewed it as a poetic impulse as much as an economic one. An excerpt:
“For Tocqueville, technology is not a set of morally neutral means employed by human beings to control our natural environment. Technology is an existential disposition intrinsically connected to the social conditions of modern democratic peoples in general and Americans in particular. On this view, to be an American democrat is to be a technological romantic. Nothing is so radical or difficult to moderate as a romantic passion, and the Americans Tocqueville observed accepted only frail and minimal restraints on their technophilia. We have long since broken many of those restraints in our quest to live up to our poetic self-image. Understanding the sources of our fascination with the technological dream, and the distance between that dream and technological reality, can help revitalize the sources of self-restraint that remain to us.
That Tocqueville presents much of his commentary on technology in the chapter of Democracy in America entitled ‘Of Some Sources of Poetry among Democratic Nations‘ already indicates why his analysis of technology has been less well received than his analysis of town government or the tyranny of the majority. What, after all, does technology have to do with poetry? Wouldn’t Tocqueville have done better to offer a systematic analysis of ‘the material bases of American life,’ in the manner of an economic or industrial historian, as Garry Wills suggests?
To see what exactly poetry has to do with technological progress, we must first seek to understand Tocqueville’s account of the nature of poetry and the human need for it. We must then turn to his account of the appeal of the poetry of technology to the psychic passions of democratic man. Finally, we must consider his analysis of why democratic peoples would take an argument about the hard facts of economics or industry more seriously as a mode of understanding the question of technology than his own reflections on poetry. By doing so, we can understand something about our typical mode of self-understanding and the distinctive kind of blindness to ourselves to which we are most prone.”
From Robert Andrew Powell’s Grantland article about El Paso betting heavily on minor league baseball and a new (seemingly needless) downtown stadium, a beautifully written passage about how Vietnam vet Jim Paul purchased a struggling Double A franchise for $1000 in 1974 and drew up the Veeck-ian blueprint for the wry, family-friendly entertainment success that the bush leagues have become:
“On the blackboard, Paul mapped out Kazoo Night. Ten-Cent Beer Night. Country Days, of course, and also an appearance by a then-obscure touring mascot called the San Diego Chicken. At one game, Paul tried to set a record for the most soap bubbles blown at one time. He placed a 120-foot-long banana split in the outfield, handed plastic spoons to every kid in attendance, and invited them to race out and eat as much ice cream as they could. When creditors repossessed the stadium’s organ — money was always tight — Paul bought a tape recorder at Radio Shack and began playing the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin over the loudspeakers. After Diablos home runs, fans placed dollar bills in the batter’s helmet, in gratitude. The ballpark was renamed the Dudley Dome even though it remained roofless. The PA announcer relayed statistics — “No team scores more runs with two outs than the Diablos!” — that he simply made up.
The Diablos, a Double-A team, began drawing overflow crowds even while the team trudged along in last place. The Texas League named Paul its executive of the year. Twelve months later, he won executive of the year for all of the minor leagues. A winter marketing seminar he launched in El Paso grew exponentially as his methods proved successful. The athletic directors of schools such as Notre Dame and LSU began showing up, joining executives from baseball clubs as big as the Houston Astros.”
Tags: Jim Paul, Robert Andrew Powell'
From the July 3, 1925 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“After his clever work as a plastic surgeon was completed, Dr. W.A. Pratt married his model, his patient and the ideal of his own recreating. Dr. and Mrs. Pratt have just returned to New York on the S.S. Columbus and are ‘married and very happy,’ as the culmination of a romance that began with the surgeon’s knife.
Dr. Pratt, who recently predicted ‘a perfect-featured nation’ when the skill of the plastic surgeon becomes more widely known and in demand, had been remoulding foreheads, chins, cheeks and noses for some time before he met the woman whose beauty was to make him forget his profession long enough to take a honeymoon.
‘A woman is only as charming as she is beautiful,’ he says. ‘It is only a question of time when ugly features will have disappeared from the human race.’
His story of falling in love with his model shows that his interest increased as the face under his skillful fingers became more and more lovely. ‘When the work was completed, I was wholly in love,’ he explained.”
Tags: Dr. W.A. Pratt, Mrs. Pratt
Bass Player for the Rolling Stones – 55 (Norwalk)
I have just been told that I am to be someday the bass player for the Rolling Stones, life does not get better than that! Happy (fucking) Easter!
Billy
As President Nixon was drowning in the cesspool of Watergate, Professor Irwin Corey accepted the National Book Award in 1973 at Carnegie Hall on behalf of reclusive Gravity’s Rainbow author Thomas Pynchon.
The opening of Gravity’s Rainbow rivals that of A Tale of Two Cities and Anna Karenina:
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No lights anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall–soon–it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light only great invisible crashing.”