Category: Arts and Culture

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Mutato Visual

Care Bear Speaking of Devo, little-known fact about Mark Mothersbaugh: He’s been creating a mixed media postcard every day, for over 30 years. Originally created as personal diaries, they’ve become an obsession, and now go on tour with him. The postcards combine media and styles freely — painting and illustration, found objects, backing materials. Some gorgeous, some insane, but these seem to have very little scent of the kitsch of late-model Devo. Selections from the 2006 set are displayed online; not sure where to find the rest of the archive.

Music: Jonas Hellborg & Shawn Lane & Jeff Sipe :: Time Is The Enemy
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Facing the Past

OK, the reason for the Time Forward poll: A physorg.com piece on South America’s indigenous Aymara, who visualize the past in front of them and the future behind, indicating that even some of the most primal and seemingly universal metaphors are still human or linguistic constructs.

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time. Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.

The article mentions in passing that roughly half of English speakers will answer the question about a meeting being moved forward two days from Wednesday as “Monday,” the other half “Friday.” My small sampling seems to support that.

The other question is how 2000 daily visits to this site can yield only 21 respondents in two days; maybe I need to do another poll on why people don’t take polls.

Music: Mission of Burma :: OK/No Way

via Weblogsksy

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Rot at the Top

Had the privilege of listening to a Robert Reich lecture last weekend. He maintains that there are four basic themes that run through most great stories and movies, and that “big” news stories can generally be seen through one or more of these lenses (two of them hopeful, two fearful):

  • The Triumphant Individual
  • The Benevolent Community
  • The Mob at the Gate
  • Rot at the Top

Pick up today’s (any day’s) newspaper and see how many of the top stories can be characterized in these terms. Examples from today’s Chronicle:

  • The Triumphant Individual

    • (new appreciation for Gore, Nixon)

  • The Benevolent Community

    • (new breast cancer drug possible)

  • The Mob at the Gate

    • (terrorism, immigration)

  • Rot at the Top

    • (disintegration of Bushco)

His message to journalists: This is just observation of a human tendency toward oversimplification, and the media plays into it. Maybe journalists have a responsibility to achieve better clarity by resisting the impulse to simplify. You have to hear Reich talk to appreciate the power of these metaphors – incredibly eloquent. Kind of a new Joseph Campbell figure.

Music: Nancy Sinatra And Lee Hazlewood :: You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’
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Serious Games

So much more goes on in kids’ heads than meets the eye. Steven Berlin Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good For You) on Serious Games for IT Conversations — relates an anecdote about demonstrating Sim City to his 7-yr-old nephew, giving a fairly superficial tour. “This is the house where the mayor lives, and these are the ports where the boats tie up. These are my factories, but I’m having trouble with them. The workers aren’t happy, and I just can’t seem to make the factories profitable. See how the workers are all covered in soot?”

The nephew, who had until now been listening in silence: “I think you should try lowering your industrial taxes.”

Music: Prince Far I :: Shine Eye Gal
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Play Pump

Historically, villagers in water-starved areas have worked hard to manually pump contaminated water up from shallow water tables for drinking – water they then have to carry in buckets back to their homes. People spending their time as beasts of burden.

Inventor Trevor Field is bringing clean, fresh drinking water from deep underground to villagers across Africa with the Play Pump, which harnesses the limitless energy of kids. In place of the traditional hand-cranked pump, Field’s team installs a merry-go-round connected to a deep well pump on school playgrounds. The kids, who often have virtually no access to playground equipment, love it.

The Play Pump can be installed in a few hours for just $7,000, and can bring drinking water to more than 2,500 people — water that’s cleaner than what came from the hand pumps it replaces, since it comes from deeper underground.

Field then sells ad space on the pump’s reservoir to finance pump maintenance — and reserves one ad panel for AIDS awareness campaigns: “We’ve got to get the message through to them before they become sexually active,” he says. “It seems to be working.”

According to comments on the Frontline story, other companies are using similar solutions to generate electricity.

Music: Robert Wyatt :: Tubab
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Bastard Chairs

Bastard Chair Photographer Michael Wolf chronicles worn out, improvised, screwed up, tricked out, workhorse street chairs from his travels in and around China. Junk but not junk. Something in this work reminds me of what Amy does so well – revealing all of the humanness we leave behind in the inanimate objects with which we spend time.

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World Without Numbers

A pair of stories (reproduced from The Globe and Mail and BBC News) about researchers’ discovery in 2004 that members of the Amazonian Piraha tribe apparently lack capacity for any kind of math whatsoever — not even simple counting. A few relativistic number words – “one-ish” and “two-ish” describe many and few, but that’s it. They are, apparently, alone in the world in their lack of any kind of numerical system.

… the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting. Not only that, but adult Piraha apparently can’t learn to count or understand the concept of numbers or numerals, even when they asked anthropologists to teach them and have been given basic math lessons for months at a time.

So can they not do numbers because their language doesn’t contain the concept, or do they not have number words because their brains don’t contain the concept?

“The question is, is there any case where not having words for something doesn’t allow you to think about it?” Prof. Gordon asked about the Piraha and the Whorfian thesis. “I think this is a case for just that.”

Music: Paul Bley :: Line Down
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Up With Grups

It used to be that people stopped being hip when they became parents, but those days are long gone. Parents today keep their hip selves right on truckin’, kids or no, on into their 40s. New York Metro on the new breed of “Grups:”

This is an obituary for the generation gap. It is a story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent. It’s about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning. It’s about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano.

Music: Blind Lemon Jefferson :: Chock House Blues
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Ask Philosophers

Ever wonder what real, working philosophers think about subjects like medical immortality or whether alcoholics should be allowed to breed? Ask Philosophers has assembled a couple dozen professional philosophers to provide commentary on questions from the general public.

There is a paradox surrounding philosophy that AskPhilosophers seeks to address. On the one hand, everyone confronts philosophical issues throughout his or her life. But on the other, very few have the opportunity to learn about philosophy, a subject that is usually taught only at the college level. (Why? There is no good reason for this and plenty of bad ones.) AskPhilosophers aims to bridge this gap by putting the skills and knowledge of trained philosophers at the service of the general public.

“Is thought possible without language? (re: Helen Keller)” … “What, if anything, distinguishes natural from artistic beauty?” The answers aren’t always 100% satisfying (philosophy never is), but they do a great job of bringing clearer focus to the questions themselves.

“Can Non-Being and Being occupy the same space at the same time?” How many hands do you have? Two? Or do you have three? Your left hand, your right hand, and the non-existent third hand that’s attached to your head? Obviously, that last “hand” shouldn’t count. To say that you don’t have a third hand isn’t to say that you have a hand that possesses the particularly stunting property of non-existence.

Especially amazing is the fact that the site has been so successful in getting real philosophers to engage the public so actively/enthusiastically. A wonderful experiment.

Music: Devendra Banhart :: Michigan State

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The Omnivore’s Dilemma

J-School professor and Birdhouse user Michael Pollan has written a new book, The Ominvore’s Dilema: A Natural History of Four Meals:

In this groundbreaking book, one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating.

The book has recently been reviewed by the SF Chronicle, The Washington Post and Salon. I’ve done a lot of work on Pollan’s site over the past few months.

Pollan will be on NPR twice this week: Tuesday on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and Friday on Science Friday. Check your local listings for times.

Music: James Chance & The Contortions :: Jaded

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