Thom Andersen analyzing Hollywood’s puzzling penchant for equating Los Angeles’ glorious Modernist architecture with villainy.
Tags: Thom Andersen
From Jonah Lehrer’s smart new Wired interview with fellow neuroscientist Eric Kandel, a passage about the diffuse influence of 19th-century pathologist Carl von Rokitansky;
“Lehrer: One of the heroes in The Age of Insight is Carl von Rokitansky, the founder of the Second Vienna School of Medicine. You argue that he inspired, at least in part, the work of modernist artists such as Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. How did he exert this influence?
Kandel: Rokitansky is the founder of what is now considered the second Vienna School of Medicine, which began around 1846. He was the head pathologist of the Vienna General Hospital, called the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, and then became Dean of the Medical School at the University of Vienna. Rokitansky contributed importantly – I would say, seminally – to the development of modern scientific medicine. He realized that when one examines the patient, one essentially relies on two pieces of information: the patient’s history, and an examination of the patient – listening to the heart and the chest with a stethoscope. But in the 1840s, one did not have any deep insight into what the sounds of the heart meant, for example. No one knew what we now know to be the difference between the sound of a normal valve opening and closing, and the sound of a diseased valve opening and closing. So what Rokitansky realized was that one needed to correlate what one sees of the patient at the bedside, with the examination of the patient’s body at autopsy. Fortunately, Vienna was an absolutely ideal place to do this.
The Vienna General Hospital had two rules that were unique in Europe. One is – every patient who died was autopsied, and two – all the autopsies were done by one person: Rokitansky, the head of Pathology. In other hospitals in Europe, the autopsy was done by whichever physician was is in charge of the patient. So Rokitansky had a huge amount of clinical material to work with. He collaborated with an outstanding clinician, Josef Skoda, who took very careful notes both of what the patient told him, and of what he found on physical examination, and he correlated that with Rokitansky’s autopsy. This allowed Skoda and Rokistansky to define what various heart sounds meant in normal physiology and in diseases of the valve. It also led Rokitansky to enunciate a major principle that had a huge influence – not only on medicine – but also on the cultural community at large, because Rokitansky was not simply a pathologist and Dean of the School of Medicine; he was elected to Parliament, became a spokesman of science, and had an enormous influence on popular culture. He said, ‘The truth is often hidden below the surface. One has to go deep below the skin to find it.’ This Rokitanskian principle had an enormous impact on Freud and on Schnitzler, who were students at the Vienna School of Medicine. In fact, Freud was a student in the last several years of Rokitansky’s Deanship. Rokitansky attended the first two scientific talks that Freud gave, and Freud attended Rokitansky’s funeral. He clearly had a significant impact on Freud’s thinking.” (Thanks Browser.)
I’m in favor of regulated gun ownership in America, because it’s never a good idea to create a black market that’s far worse than the open market. But Japan getting rid of its firearms is a jaw-dropping course reversal. The fable-ish opening of Neil Postman’s 1992 Technos essay, “Deus Machina“:
“Once upon a time, in a land far away, disorder and fear plagued the people. Guns and cannons were everywhere, warring parties slaughtered each other by the thousands, and no soldier would venture into battle unless equipped with the most modern firearms. The gun makers of the land were powerful, skillful, and prosperous, for they not only made guns for their own people but sold them to foreigners as well. You could hardly travel anywhere in the cities or country without seeing a gun or hearing one, which is why the children slept fitfully, with fear in their hearts.
For almost one hundred years, this was the situation in that forlorn land. Then, gradually, the people began to wonder if they would not be better off without their guns. It is hard to know why this thought arose. But they were an intelligent people with strong and ancient traditions and a well-developed sense of civilized behavior. Perhaps that is why the soldiers announced that they did not really like guns, for there was little skill and no honor in killing a man with a gun. The politicians were forced to admit that guns were not necessary to protect the land from foreign invasion since their armies were large and loyal and had never forgotten how to use swords. Besides, no one had seriously tried to invade their land for as far back as anyone could remember. Then, too, everyone agreed that guns were ugly, hardly comparable to the elegant beauty of a well-made sword. And because the sword was so beautiful, it had a value far beyond its use as a weapon. It was a symbol of honor, piety, and courage. And everyone knew that there once was a time when swords were given as gifts to men of great character.”
Tags: Neil Postman
Boids playing ping-pong, via B.F. Skinner.
Tags: B.F. Skinner
I wanted to drive to California to stay at a solarium that existed in the past, when such buildings first opened.
When was that?
But I was asked instead to travel to the sun. Who could deny such a request?
I felt like a gunshot.
As I neared the star, it resembled an eyeball.
The mission was completed, but I was barely protected from the sun.
I returned home, but not without consequences.
I was afforded the best of care.
During my treatment, I noticed that the Earth was becoming too hot.
In the days that followed, the temperatures only increased.
Soon almost no one had a face.
Did they not notice?
Did they not care?
The few who still had faces had no bodies.
They could not walk.
The old legends would not save us.
The technologists were of no help.
Officials still discussed options, but the calls were brief and perfunctory.
What would we become, I wondered.
But at least I had been to the sun.
"Around the pupils of the eyes are the twenty-six letters of the alphabet."
Total bullshit delivered with conviction in the May 24, 1892 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Fort Worth, Tex.–A freak of nature has come to light in the county jail. His name is Jesse Lee, aged 18 years. Turn the boy’s face so that a string of light may shine into his eyes and a phenomenon is seen. Around the pupils of the eyes, in the iris, are the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, arranged symmetrically. There are letters in each eye, those up to M being in the left eye and the remaining ones in the right. Lee says his father and four brothers are similarly affected.”
Tags: Jesse Lee
Calculator and computer legend Jack Tramiel just passed away. His name isn’t as well known as Jobs or Gates, but it should be recalled that his Commodore 64, which came to the market in 1982, was the Model T of home computing, introducing zeros and ones into home addresses. In this 1977 video, a host presents the Commodore PET, a gorgeous machine that was ahead of its time.
Commodore’s Mini-Slide Rule, 1973:
Tags: Jack Tramiel
I need ducks (Yorktown)
I have six ducks, four of them are males (drakes) and I need to get some more females. If you have any that you need to get rid of, please let me know? Thank you for your help.
“The machine cannot lie,” said Leland Stanford, but racer Jackie Stewart knew that humans certainly could–especially to themselves–as he discusses his elaborate preparations for Monaco in 1972 with his good friend, yes, Roman Polanski.
From a 1993 Technos article by that late Luddite Neil Postman, who worried over technology but knew its dominion would only increase:
“Let me begin, then, to make my case by telling you about a conversation I had with an automobile salesman who was trying to get me to buy a new Honda Accord. He pointed out that the car was equipped with cruise control, for which there was an additional charge. As is my custom in thinking about the value of technology, I asked him, ‘What is the problem to which cruise control is the answer?’ The question startled him, but he recovered enough to say, ‘It is the problem of keeping your foot on the gas.’ I told him I had been driving for 35 years and had never found that to be a problem. He then told me about the electric windows. ‘What is the problem,’ I asked, ‘to which electric windows are the answer?’ He was ready for me this time. With a confident smile, he said, ‘You don’t have to wind the windows up and down with your arm.’ I told him that this, too, had never been a problem, and that, in fact, I rather valued the exercise it gave me.
I bought the car anyway, because, as it turns out, you cannot get a Honda Accord without cruise control and electric windows—which brings up the first point I should like to mention. It is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, new technologies do not, by and large, increase people’s options but do just the opposite.”
Tags: Neil Postman
Speaking of space-age undergarments, an excerpt from Rosten Woo’s Los Angeles Review of Books essay, “The Right Fit,” about Nicholas de Monchaux’s history of the Apollo spacesuit, which was a more low-tech creation than you might imagine:
“The narrative heart of Spacesuit is the story of Playtex, the women’s undergarment manufacturer. The company, known at the time as the International Latex Corporation, triumphed over the more politically connected, engineering-driven Hamilton-Standard to win the Apollo lunar space-suit contract. It plays out like an after-school special: ILC’s team, a motley group of seamstresses and engineers, led by a car mechanic and a former television repairman, manages to convince NASA to let them enter their ‘test suit’ in a closed, invitation-only competitive bid at their own expense. They spend six weeks working around the clock — at times breaking into their own offices to work 24-hour shifts — to arrive at a suit solution that starkly outperforms the two invited competitors. In open, direct competition with larger, more moneyed companies, ILC manages to produce a superior space suit by drawing on the craft-culture handiwork and expertise of seamstresses, rather than on the hard-line culture of engineering.
The ILC workshop was a hybrid endeavor: Producing new forms required new skills and habits. Space suit contract in hand, ILC now had to adapt to NASA’s engineering culture. Though ILC seamstresses were hand-making each suit to order based on the astronauts’ measurements, the rigorous specifications of the space suit took the craft to an extreme unknown even to couture: ‘Tolerances allowed for sewing — less than a sixty-fourth of an inch in only one direction from the seam — meant that yard after yard was sewn to an accuracy smaller than the sewing needle’s eye.’ Modified treadles allowed the workers to punch a single stitch with each footfall. To curb the use of pins (just one of these misplaced in a suit’s lining could render an entire suit useless), numbered pin-sets had to be checked out at the beginning of each day and returned each evening as a complete set. Once each part of the suit was produced it also had to be described — made intelligible and traceable by NASA, whose bureaucracy was ill-equipped, to put it mildly, to comprehend or regulate an object like a garment. Because each suit and each component of each suit was designed for a specific astronaut, mountains of paperwork followed. Every alteration to the suit required NASA to register the garment as a new object, a complication worthy of a Borges story.
Yet the suits, de Monchaux says, were never actually constructed according to engineering drawings. The drawings were always descriptive, not prescriptive: produced after the fact. To fit into NASA’s engineering system, ILC had to essentially reverse-engineer construction documents of each space suit after they had already been produced. This seemingly small detail points to the vast blind spots across different cultures of making and knowing, and de Monchaux happily points out the appealing irony: The very image of NASA’s technical triumph, the most iconic image of the space race, is in fact a ‘throwback’ — more craftwork than Kraftwerk.”
Tags: Nicholas de Monchaux, Rosten Woo
Charlotte Moorman models Nam June Paik’s “TV-Bra for Living Sculpture,” 1969.
Tags: Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik
Life takes so much from us, sometimes a great deal all at once but usually through a series of small, excruciating thefts. Eventually, everything’s gone. Some people–they would be heroes if they were making decisions rather than acting compulsively–resist. An excerpt from an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit, in which someone who assists hoarders accepts questions:
“IaMa home assistant for compulsive hoarders AMA (self.IAmA)
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Your computer and phone can be hacked, but what about your heart? If coders can get inside our equipment and more equipment is inside our bodies and brains, why can’t we be invaded on a more personal level? We can. And what about when self-driving cars and the Internet of Things reach critical mass? Could terrorists–or bored teenagers–program us all to turn left when there is no left turn to be made? Can they make our tools become weapons? Of course. From Medical Daily:
“An increasing number of patients are being fitted with medical implants like pacemakers and insulin pumps that are vulnerable to cyber-attacks, according to security researchers.
Expert Barnaby Jack, a researcher at security firm McAfee, discovered that the wireless links used in heart-regulating pacemakers, insulin-delivering pumps and cardiac rhythm-monitoring defibrillators that are used for interrogating and updating these devices left them opening exposed to hackers looking to gain remote control.
Jack told BBC that in just two weeks he found a way to scan for and compromise insulin pumps that communicate wirelessly. After overriding the pump’s safeguard, a hacker can threaten the lives of patients on the device by either turning off the device or by commanding wireless implants to deliver a hazardous dose of medicine to the patient.
‘We can influence any pump within a 300ft range,’ Jack told the BBC. ‘We can make that pump dispense its entire 300 unit reservoir of insulin and we can do that without requiring its ID number.'”
Tags: Barnaby Jack
A 1980 news report introducing the computerized synthesizer, the Fairlight CMI, which was used righteously by those experimenters Herbie Hancock and Peter Gabriel, among others. Not just going electric, but going digital.
"An able-bodied boa constrictor does not smell like peaches."
Cornering the snake market isn’t as easy as it looks. But one bold visionary sought to do just that, according to an article in the May 28, 1900 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which was reprinted from the Philadelphia Bulletin. An excerpt:
“Jacobus Hope of 29 North Ninth Street is the president, vice president, secretary and treasurer of the snake trust. Mr. Hope has cornered the market. Snakes labeled ‘Jacobus Hope, Philadelphia, Pa.,’ are coming this way from all quarters of the globe by rail, by steamer, on horseback and on foot. Like Joe Leiter of Chicago, who cornered the wheat market. Mr. Hope means to have the snakes actually in his possession. The snake hunters of India have been snaking day and night to fill the orders of Jacobus Hope, Philadelphia.
‘Send every python you can lay your hand on,’ were the cabled instructions of Mr. Hope, and as a result India’s supply of pythons and anacondas is well nigh exhausted.
India, it is reported, had a cold spell, which gave the snake crop a setback from which it will take a year to recover. Several hundred yards of snakes are expected from India any day now. All snakes sell by the yard. The regular price of a python up to ten feet is $2.50. Beyond that length the price grows abruptly steeper. A twenty-foot python is worth about $300.
"All snakes sell by the yard."
Boa constrictors from South America are headed this way. They come in boxes that look like giants’ coffins. The baggage man will be in doubt as to the nature of his baggage, as an able-bodied boa constrictor does not smell like peaches.
Thousands of dollars’ worth of the boa constrictors will soon be in the city. Texas is rushing east hog snakes, whip snakes and thunder snakes. A few barrels of blue racers, chicken snakes, bull snakes and milk snakes are coming from New Mexico, while Arizona will be able to spare several crates of ribbon snakes, black snakes and adders, not to mention a Gila monster or so.
In answer to Mr. Hope’s cry for snakes and scorpions, Philadelphia promises to be the greatest snake center of the world, herself having a supply of snakes, big and little, that has never been equaled. As soon as the weather moderates, the busy little Jerseyite, with his stout canvas bag, will go snaking. Pine snakes are the Jerseyite’s specialities. These snakes sell at retail at so much a foot. They grow to a length of five feet.
"Philadelphia promises to be the greatest snake center of the world."
‘Never,’ said Mr. Hope, ‘has there been such a demand for snakes. I have orders from Maine to California, and never, it seems to me, have they been so scarce. The zoological gardens and museums are wanting new snakes. The small tent shows, of which there are more than 250 in the United States, are getting ready to start out. Each of these shows carries from ten to twenty snakes, and the proprietors all want their orders filled immediately. I am rushing the snakes on as fast as possible, but,’ concluded Mr. Hope pathetically, ‘I can’t make snakes.’
Any man who has snakes can now dispose of them at famine prices.”
Tags: Jacobus Hope
"Very stained." (Image by andaluztapatio.)
free stained couch (flatbush)
3 seater pullout couch, free, very stained with dogs period blood, gross i know but its free and with a little DIY spirit it can surely be revived yet again.
6th floor elevator.
peace.
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.
Tags: Evel Knievel
"Radicalism should abandon the mode of activism, and adopt a passive mode." (Image by Mary Ellen Mark.)
There may be a system better than regulated capitalism, but what is it? The marketplace can be a beast, but how else can we share wealth, both of information and materially? The system is corrupting and we must resist it to some extent even as we participate in it, but other alternatives are far worse. From Malcolm Harris’s writings on The State about anti-capitalist scholar Franco Berardi, who advocates the dubious strategy of resistance through lethargy:
“Of the anti-capitalist scholars and intellectuals who prescribe a political program, Franco Berardi might have the most counter-intuitive ideas. In his many articles, books, and lectures, Berardi pushes a curious line against a mind-warping market culture. During the current period of youth-led urban unrest, Berardi has consistently preached a resistance strategy that emulates the process of aging. While capital says go faster, make more, consume more, his call for ‘senilization’ says slow down, work less, consume less. Berardi wants a detox from capitalism’s psyche-damaging relations, and it’s not just a metaphor. Put down the Adderall, roll a joint. Relax.
In a new formulation he calls ‘post-futurism,’ Berardi poses the Futurist fetishization of muscular youth against ‘the force of exhaustion, of facing the inevitable with grace, discovering the sensuous slowness of those who do not expect any more from life than wisdom.’ We have enough things, he writes; what we really want is more time in which to flourish. In his heterodoxy, Berardi has broken one of the cardinal rules of Marxism: revolution as the necessary mode of social transformation. ‘Radicalism,’ he writes, ‘should abandon the mode of activism, and adopt a passive mode.’ Fewer marches, more mahjong.”
Tags: Franco Berardi, Malcolm Harris
Difficult to believe that it’s only since 1978 that NYC dog owners have been legally required to clean up after their pets. Before then, canines were free to crap all over the sidewalk and street. Poop everywhere. We were seriously that unsophisticated and unhygenic that recently. What disgusting things are we brainlessly doing now that should really stop?
In 1972, so-called Pooper-Scooper Law lady Fran Lee took to the airwaves to point out that we were huge slobs. She was a little batty, but she was right. Good on her. Gil Noble, the pioneering African-American TV journalist who recently passed away, held on for dear life while conducting the interview.
Fran Lee died in 2010 at age 99. From her New York Times obituary: “Though Ms. Lee was best known for her work on dog effluence (in 1972, The New York Times called her ‘New York’s foremost fighter against dog dirt’), she had been a crackling presence on city and national airwaves long before then.
On a string of programs and under a series of names – Mrs. Fix-It, Mrs. Consumer, Granny Franny – Ms. Lee advised radio and television audiences on household and consumer issues from the late 1940s until well into the ’90s. Her purview ranged from cyclamates to asbestos to how to make a candle from a sausage. (Add a wick and light; the pervasive fat does the rest.)
In the late 1960s and early ’70s Ms. Lee was seen regularly on two New York stations, Channel 5 (then WNEW) and Channel 11 (WPIX). She was also a frequent guest on many national programs, including The Tonight Show, The Mike Douglas Show and The Steve Allen Show, where she once taught Mr. Allen to transform a worn-out sweater into a bikini.”
It is no longer Chinatown, Jake, so you needn’t forget it. But still you often do.
There was a time in America of Manchurian Candidates, Warren Commissions and Parallax Views, when the facts were tantalizingly, frustratingly beyond our reach. What schemes were being hatched beneath the surface, what cabal was making secret plans? These people had more information than we did, access we could only dream of. They always seemed one step ahead. Even if we learned what deal was, that knowledge would soon retreat into a welter of confusion. The innocence would end and then begin again. The status quo would be restored.
But technology changed all that. Or was supposed to. Now there’s a diffuse media and data trails. Things have never been clearer.
And, yet. What if everything is transparent, what if it is all laid out for us to see and little changes? It doesn’t matter if we have access to the facts if we refuse the facts, if we choose to live inside a narrative. It doesn’t matter if we have unlimited channels if we only accept the ones that congratulate our prejudices. What if knowing isn’t enough? What if the problem all along hasn’t been a lack of information but a lack of some other kind?•
Our every effort today is, in fact, recorded, collated and analyzed. Optimized, in some ways. But the process started long ago, with those attentive algorithms. Our cards were being punched but so were our tickets.
The Remington-Rand Univac at your service, 1952:
The good news: You can get a lot of bang for your buck these days, really wonderful amenities you could never have afforded in the past. The bad news: It would be really helpful if you were dead. In Raymond Carver terms: Can you please be dead, please? From Greg Beato’s new Reason article, “Better Off Dead: The Cheap, Exciting Afterlife Of Modern Mortal Remains“:
“But if the intervening 50 years have taught us anything, it’s that 1963’s corpses were woefully underserved. Sure, the ‘1 percent’ of that era could afford stunning crypts and mausoleums that were far more lavish and better appointed than the homes most of us spend our lives in. For everyone else, however, death was a homogenizing force more ruthless than any communist regime. Everyone who died got an overpriced casket, an awful post-mortem makeover, and a bland grave marker immortalizing them in the same conventionally abstract fashion as everyone else who had died that century.
Now, we’ve got caskets that look like beer cans, headstones shaped like teddy bears, companies that will provision your loved ones with white doves to release graveside. Major League Baseball teams, many colleges, and the rock band KISS, among others, license their logos for use on caskets.
As the number of afterlife options expands, prices are dropping. For years only licensed funeral directors could sell caskets, a practice that kept prices artificially high. According to a 1988 FTC study, the average price of a casket in 1981 was $1,010, or $2,513 in 2011 dollars. In 1984, however, Congress passed the Funeral Rule, which in part requires that funeral homes accept a casket purchased from a third-party provider without charging any additional fees.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Greg Beato
Mike Wallace was as good a TV interviewer as there ever was, though some of his work was done for shock value. His passive-aggressive 1979 takedown of Ayatollah Khomeini was one for the ages, but the To Catch a Predator-level of network trash that sprang from his ambush journalism is also part of his legacy. To his credit, Wallace knew he had crossed a line with the candid camera tricks and retreated into what he did best, which was looking into the eyes of other human beings, some of whom had titanic egos, and asking that question.
A legendary non-60 Minutes interview was his exchange with Ray Bradbury the night men landed on the moon:
One of Wallace’s failures was his sanctimonius dismissal of David Frost in 1977, just before the broadcast of the latter’s damning Nixon interviews, an example of checkbook journalism that paid off handsomely:
Tags: David Frost, Mike Wallace, Ray Bradbury
Photographer and locomotion pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, who miraculously made still photographs dance and gallop, was born on April 9th 182 years ago. He’s celebrated by a Google Doodle.
From Thom Andersen’s 1975 documentary, Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer:
In 1874, Muybridge shot and killed his wife’s lover, Harry Larkyns, in a crime of passion. He was acquitted and his wife succumbed to a stroke soon thereafter. The baby born of the extramarital affair was raised in an orphanage. From Stanford Magazine: “THE OPERATIC EPISODE began on October 17, 1874, when Muybridge discovered his wife’s adultery. In 1872, he had married a 21-year-old divorcée named Flora Stone. When she bore a son in the spring of 1874, Muybridge believed that the child, Floredo Helios Muybridge, was his own–until he came across letters exchanged between Flora and a drama critic named Harry Larkyns. The most damning evidence was a photo of Floredo enclosed with one of the letters: Flora had captioned it ‘Little Harry.’
Convinced he’d been cuckolded, Muybridge collapsed, wept and wailed, according to a nurse who was present. That night, he tracked Larkyns to a house near Calistoga and shot him through the heart.
At his murder trial in 1875, the jury rejected an insanity plea but accepted the defense of justifiable homicide, finding Muybridge not guilty of murder. After the acquittal, Muybridge sailed for Central America and spent the next year in ‘working exile.’“