It’s easy to dismiss science fiction and other genre movies (and books, and games) as mindless entertainment. But the reason for the popularity of Star Wars, Twilight, and Lord of the Rings can’t simply be that our culture craves vapid adventure stories to while away the idle hours. I think we consume these modern epics because, for many of us, traditional institutions don’t cut it anymore. Church, family. and government once handed over fairly rigid instructions on “how to live”: how to be a good citizen, neighbor, spouse, or parent. The cultural revolution of the 1960s and ’70s changed all that. Vietnam, political assassinations, government corruption, and the rise of the corporate state left us suspicious of conventional authority and religion. We got jaded.
Is it no wonder, then, that many now seek moral guidance and spiritual example not in mosques and chapels, but huddled in darkened movie theaters or bathed in the holy glow of our Blu-rays? Our new gods and priests might be writers, movie directors, and actors. When, in The Lord of the Rings, Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf the wise intones to Frodo, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us,” it’s hard not to prick up our hobbity ears and nod our heads in agreement. Yes, that’s damned good advice. And for many of us, it’s guidance much easier to swallow than the kind shouted from the pulpit on a Sunday morning.
the cinema as chapel
and the olympic gold medal for painting goes to…
The dream of uniting sport and art, as they were once paired in the original Greek Olympiads, was in fact central to the mission of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the godfather of the Games. The goal was “to reunite in the bonds of legitimate wedlock a long-divorced couple — Muscle and Mind,” the baron loftily announced to an organizing committee in an early attempt to get the idea off the ground. But while the first athletic competitions got under way in Athens in 1896, it was not until the Stockholm Games in 1912 that medals would be given for architecture, sculpture, painting, music and literature.
What a noble aim. Sadly it proved too difficult to judge such contests objectively (amongst other difficulties explained in the New York Times article) and the marriage of sports and the arts did not last very long. Read more about it at the NYT Website.
More info about art competitions at the Olympic games at wikipedia.
caught in the act of make-believe
Miles Davis. Photo: LIFE
Brian Eno on Miles Davis (and music in general):
When you listen to Miles Davis, how much of what you hear is music, and how much is context? Another way of saying that is, ‘What would you be hearing if you didn’t know you were listening to Miles Davis?’ I think of context as everything that isn’t physically contained in the grooves of the record, and in his case that seems quite a lot. It includes your knowledge, first of all, that everyone else says he’s great: that must modify the way you hear him. But it also includes a host of other strands: that he was a handsome and imposing man, a member of a romantic minority, that he played with Charlie Parker, that he spans generations, that he underwent various addictions, that he married Cicely Tyson, that he dressed well, that Jean-Luc Godard liked him, that he wore shades and was very cool, that he himself said little about his work, and so on. Surely all that affects how you hear him: I mean, could it possibly have felt the same if he’d been an overweight heating engineer from Oslo? When you listen to music, aren’t you also ‘listening’ to all the stuff around it, too? How important is that to the experience you’re having, and is it differently important with different musics, different artists?
Miles was an intelligent man, by all accounts, and must have become increasingly aware of the power of his personal charisma, especially in the later years as he watched his reputation grow over his declining trumpeting skills. Perhaps he said to himself: These people are hearing a lot more context than music, so perhaps I accept that I am now primarily a context maker. My art is not just what comes out of the end of my trumpet or appears on a record, but a larger experience which is intimately connected to who I appear to be, to my life and charisma, to the Miles Davis story. In that scenario, the ‘music’, the sonic bit, could end up being quite a small part of the whole experience. Developing the context – the package, the delivery system, the buzz, the spin, the story – might itself become the art. Like perfume…
(via peter serafinowicz’s twitter page)
solipsistic jerk-off comedy
Harold Ramis:
I don’t want to say that there’s nothing new in comedy, but having seen Andy Kaufman in the mid-70s in clubs in New York, nothing surprises me conceptually. There’s a difference between getting the joke and liking the joke. Popularity isn’t the only measure of success. Sometimes the ‘public’ is an idiot, but obscurity and perversity for it’s own sake can be a solipsistic jerk-off and real waste of time. I have no rules or expectations; I just like comedy that works.
how are tv ratings measured?
This is something I’ve often wondered about. Turns out sample statistics are taken from participating households and this data is then extrapolated to get an estimated total — similarly to how political popularity polls work.
To find out what people are watching, meters installed in the selected sample of homes track when TV sets are on and what channels they are tuned to. A “black box,” which is just a computer and modem, gathers and sends all this information to the company’s central computer every night. Then by monitoring what is on TV at any given time, the company is able to keep track of how many people watch which program.
Small boxes, placed near the TV sets of those in the national sample, measure who is watching by giving each member of the household a button to turn on and off to show when he or she begins and ends viewing. This information is also collected each night.
The national TV ratings largely rely on these meters. To ensure reasonably accurate results, the company uses audits and quality checks and regularly compares the ratings it gets from different samples and measurement methods.
Well I never. (via howstuffworks)
nationalism: just looking, thanks!
Clay Risen on “the search for national identity in a post-national age” in Germany:
Atop a forested hill a few kilometres outside the sleepy west German town of Detmold stands a 19-metre high statue of Hermann, the Germanic chief whose forces annihilated nearly 20,000 Roman legionnaires at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD. Gazing toward the French border, the copper statue, wearing a jaunty winged helmet, holds an upraised sword, whose blade bears the inscription “German Unity is my strength, and my strength is Germany’s power”.
The Hermannsdenkmal, or “Hermann Monument”, was unveiled in 1875, in the aftermath of Germany’s crushing defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent unification of the disparate German states into the Second Reich. At the time it was the world’s largest statue; standing on an 18-metre pedestal, it is visible for nearly 50 kilometres. The monument became a symbol for German militant nationalism and a pilgrimage site for the growing cult that celebrated Hermann as a kind of Ur-German, a movement that reached its fever pitch under the Nazis.
After the Second World War the Germans purged their culture of anything remotely tainted by Nazism, and the monument – and Hermann – fell into anonymity. The battle, once known as the Hermannschlacht, or Hermann Battle, was rechristened the Varusschlacht, after the Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus: it is surely one of the only battles in history named after its loser. German schoolchildren, who once read from the countless Romantic Age poems celebrating Hermann, now learnt what a shame it was that the erstwhile hero had prevented Latin culture from reaching northern Germany.
More at the national (via 3qd).
you can’t download getting your hands dirty.
Guardian interviewer Decca Aitkenhead on novelist/artist Douglas Coupland:
Only the day before we meet, he had been in a branch of Paperchase when a sheet of multi-coloured hexagonal wrapping paper so mesmerised him that, after a while, staff had to approach the spellbound novelist, taking him for some sort of crazed drifter. As he is telling me this, his eyes feast on the colours of the drawing room. “I don’t know if you get this,” he rasps softly, “but I feel like I can just stare at a recently opened bucket of paint for minutes, just . . . yeah.” For the colour or the smell? “Well, when the paint’s wet in the can, it’s just so – it’s optical, but it’s edible as well.” He gazes into space for a moment, looking dreamily blissed out. “You think, ooh, what would it feel like to eat?” It is at this point that I quietly put aside all the questions I’d prepared, and surrender to an entirely different register of conversation.
Coupland comes across as a fascinating and endearing character by the end of the interview. Partly because he is and partly because Decca Aitkenhead is a fabulous writer and interviewer. This is a very enjoyable read.
I’ve also read and enjoyed Aitkenhead’s interviews with David Mitchell of Peep Show, and American writer David Sedaris.
Her cool destruction of Matt Lucas is a joy, as well.
happiness recipe
Laura of what I like blog has written up a dandy little summary of Eric Weiner’s findings from his book “The Geography of Happiness”.
Here are the first two points:
Culture – The unhappiest countries (Moldova, which seems to have been a bit at sea ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, is a deeply depressed place) have a distinct lack of culture. Without culture there’s no sense of identity, no connection to a country. No literature nor art means no sense of self, either at the collective or individual level.
Nature – Despite the general ennui that the Swiss seem to exhibit (from my brief, superficial observations), the country rates very high on the happiness scale. This is largely attributable to the very deep connection that the citizenry has to nature. Iceland, a stunningly happy (if very dark) country, also has this relationship with the outdoors. There’s an appreciation, not a fear, of the land, connecting the people to the most basic thing that humans know
David Byrne in the Wall Street Journal:
There’s an old joke that you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it’s the other way around you’re in hell. In an attempt to conjure up a perfect city, I imagine a place that is a mash-up of the best qualities of a host of cities. The permutations are endless. Maybe I’d take the nightlife of New York in a setting like Sydney’s with bars like those in Barcelona and cuisine from Singapore served in outdoor restaurants like those in Mexico City. Or I could layer the sense of humor in Spain over the civic accommodation and elegance of Kyoto. Of course, it’s not really possible to cherry pick like this—mainly because a city’s qualities cannot thrive out of context. A place’s cuisine and architecture and language are all somehow interwoven. But one can dream.
David proceeds to give a list of factors that make a city “livable” for him. Read what follows at WSJ.
more music than time
The New Yorker website has a short and sweet interview with Jonny Greenwood. He has a few interesting things to say, this nugget being my favourite:
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of the MP3 age?
JG: The downside is that people are encouraged to own far more music than they can ever give their full attention to. People will have MP3s of every Miles Davis’ record but never think of hearing any of them twice in a row—there’s just too much to get through. You’re thinking, “I’ve got ‘Sketches of Spain and ‘Bitches Brew’—let’s zip through those while I’m finishing that e-mail.” That abundance can push any music into background music, furniture music.
“My name is Jonathan, and I am an introvert.”
This article by Jonathan Rausch on Introversion vs. Extroversion in American society is an interesting read (for me at least), although Rausch comes across as a little staid and arrogant. Presumably these are not inherent traits of introverts.
Oh, for years I denied it. After all, I have good social skills. I am not morose or misanthropic. Usually. I am far from shy. I love long conversations that explore intimate thoughts or passionate interests. But at last I have self-identified and come out to my friends and colleagues. In doing so, I have found myself liberated from any number of damaging misconceptions and stereotypes. Now I am here to tell you what you need to know in order to respond sensitively and supportively to your own introverted family members, friends, and colleagues. Remember, someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts. It pays to learn the warning signs.
foie gras production
Here’s a slideshow which details in a series of photos the production of foie gras, the fatty liver of duck or goose… (Yum; No wonder it is cloaked it in French).
This is, the owner of the plant argues, a completely humane process. The reporter seems to sympathize with the producer, adding under each picture pathetically relativist comments to try and play down what is clearly a depraved process.
The animals never see daylight, they’re force-fed with a metal tube, and eventually hung upside down, dipped in an electrified bath and slit across the throat with a knife — but they have wonderfully spacious pens (as big as an office cubicle, it is flatly boasted).
End the University as We Know It
2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.
Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.
A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.
In this Op-Ed in the New York Times Mark C. Taylor proposes a practical model for university education that would replace the arguably obsolete model adumbrated centuries ago by Kant. I like very much the idea of harnessing all these otherwise masturbatory brains for contemporary problem-solving.
antspotting
The New York Times has a very interesting article about social insect behaviour, and a beauuuutiful photo gallery to accompany it.
To understand what is really going on in a colony of ants or bees, Dr. Dornhaus, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, tracks the little creatures individually — hence the paint and the numbers. Individual ants, she said, have “their own brains and legs, as well as complex and flexible behaviors.” She continues, “Each ant’s behavior and the rules under which it operates generate a pattern for the colony, so it’s crucial to discover its individual cognitive skill.”
…
The social insects, she said, are “the most interesting creatures evolution has produced.”
Dr. Dornhaus is breaking new ground in her studies of whether the efficiency of ant society, based on a division of labor among ant specialists, is important to their success. To do that, she said, “I briefly anesthetized 1,200 ants, one by one, and painted them using a single wire-size brush, with model airplane paint — Rally Green, Racing Red, Daytona Yellow.”
After recording their behavior with two video cameras aiming down on an insect-size stage, she analyzed 300 hours of videotape of the ants in action. She discovered behavior more worthy of Aesop’s grasshopper than the proverbial industrious ants.
“The specialists aren’t necessarily good at their jobs,” she said. “And the other ants don’t seem to recognize their lack of ability.”
Dr. Dornhaus found that fast ants took one to five minutes to perform a task — collecting a piece of food, fetching a sand-grain stone to build a wall, transporting a brood item — while slow ants took more than an hour, and sometimes two. And she discovered that about 50 percent of the other ants do not do any work at all. In fact, small colonies may sometimes rely on a single hyperactive overachiever.
Why do some worker ants lean on their shovels and let the rest of the workers do all the work? “It’s like students living together — you’ll always find one will have a lower threshold for doing the washing up and will end up always doing it all,” she said.
Read more: NY Times.
superficiality
How superficial is it to judge a book by its cover anyway? NewScientist explores how we interpret people’s appearances and what that can mean for the person judged.
THE history of science could have been so different. When Charles Darwin applied to be the “energetic young man” that Robert Fitzroy, the Beagle’s captain, sought as his gentleman companion, he was almost let down by a woeful shortcoming that was as plain as the nose on his face. Fitzroy believed in physiognomy – the idea that you can tell a person’s character from their appearance. As Darwin’s daughter Henrietta later recalled, Fitzroy had “made up his mind that no man with such a nose could have energy”. Fortunately, the rest of Darwin’s visage compensated for his sluggardly proboscis: “His brow saved him.”
The idea that a person’s character can be glimpsed in their face dates back to the ancient Greeks. It was most famously popularised in the late 18th century by the Swiss poet Johann Lavater, whose ideas became a talking point in intellectual circles. In Darwin’s day, they were more or less taken as given. It was only after the subject became associated with phrenology, which fell into disrepute in the late 19th century, that physiognomy was written off as pseudoscience.
Now the field is undergoing something of a revival. Researchers around the world are re-evaluating what we see in a face, investigating whether it can give us a glimpse of someone’s personality or even help to shape their destiny. What is emerging is a “new physiognomy” which is more subtle but no less fascinating than its old incarnation.
Read further at NewScientist
photic sneezing
This morning my classmate and I were walking to college and both sneezed at the sight of the sun. There’s an article on NewScientist that explores the possible reasons for this apparently common reaction to the sun’s light.
Mahmood Bhutta offers the hypothesis that it is to do with crossed ‘wires’ in our nervous system. From the article:
All these nerve responses flow to and from regions of the medulla close to where the sneeze centre is located. This suggests that far from being a neat system of discrete responses to individual stimuli, our reflex systems at their base in the medulla are often a tangled web of cross-talking nerve wires. Sometimes when bright sunlight hits our eyes, the parasympathetic system responds appropriately and our pupils constrict. But for certain people whose medullas are wired differently, sunlight triggers a different reflex response, such as a sneeze.
Nervous overkill is no deal breaker in the survival stakes as long as the right reflexes are also stimulated at the right time, so aberrant genes that cause confused reflexes in some individuals would have been conserved by evolution. “It’s a mess,” says Bhutta, “because it’s never had to be anything else.”
Read more at NewScientist
Planet X and the “Wow!” signal
I wish that were the title of a film, but it’s merely a summation of my favourite stories from this NewScientist article: 13 things that do not make sense .
Also interesting was the question raised by homeopathy research (a field the concept of which I didn’t really understand before reading their summary here):
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions – so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule – worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this “mother tincture” in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. “We are,” Ennis says in her paper, “unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.” If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
wes anderson’s style retraced
Movingimagesource has an very well considered video essay detailing Anderson’s influences and making visual comparisons. Very neat! (The video link is on the right hand side).
via kottke
the fat controller
A new discovery is leading geneticists to think that the reason some people never get fat despite a high fat diet is because they have a gene which facilitates the conversion of dietary fat into energy instead of the body habitually storing it under the skin.
The enzyme, MGAT2, determines whether dietary fat is used to generate energy or stored under the skin around the waist. The discovery of its role could be the key to preventing obesity, diabetes and heart disease
Scientists found that mice missing the gene for MGAT2 were able to feast on a high fat diet without becoming flabby or overweight.
Mice lacking MGAT2 were also protected against glucose intolerance – a precursor to diabetes – high cholesterol and a build up of fat in liver cells.
from the telegraph, via neatorama
I ate 2 chocolate bars today (in my defense there was an offer of “5 for €2″ — I HAD to buy 5, and so eating only two of them shows great restraint) and I feel fatter already. I’ve never been so envious of other people’s genes.