Vitajex (A Face in the Crowd)

(video link)

Elia Kazan's 1957 film, A Face in the Crowd explores the arc of media sensation; a trajectory which usually consists of a spike, a (brief) plateau, a descent and a dead drop-- a fall that can pass beyond the zero into the terrain of derision and antipathy. Some manage to jump off the track and find a way to sustain a career of some sort, most seem to burn out, walk away or get booed off the stage.

The cultural references in this film might be lost on some, but the presented themes are eternal and recognizable. One can easily see parallels with the emergence of the media darling, the one-hit wonder and the pop-culture amateurs of Reality Television and the Internet.

Fame, with a capital F, is one of the true enigmas of modern life. Along with the stable of entertainers, public figures and athletes that dominate the halls of Fame, there is an odd branch of the family that consists of a varying assortment of precocious kids, criminals, dead people, hayseed pundits, photogenic victims, average Joes and Joans and outright freaks. These people are the most vulnerable to public opinion. The masses can be merciless and often turn on them, if given proper opportunity. (Even though it's almost certain you will know exactly what I'm saying, this is nothing new, the exact nature of the public and why we act and react the way we do remains at the root of this enigma. Who could have predicted Star Wars Kid?)

Despite director Kazan's capable orchestration of a sprawling ensemble cast, Andy Griffith runs off and shreds his way through the story. He cuts quite a different cast than he did as the sedate and friendly Sheriff Andy Taylor. He almost overshadows the entire film. (I mean that in a good way.)

The production is beautifully supported by the set design, sound and cinematography. It's full of samples, sound-bites and imagery that borders on the surreal, in and out of context. This film is imminently mashable.

It's worth putting in the queue. (Or, you can watch it online via the video link.)

E.O. Hoppé: Photographer

Medicine man with mask and costume, Palm Island, Queensland, 1930

E.O. Hoppé: Photographer, Edwardian Modernist (1878-1972)

image from The Fifth Continent - 1931

hat tip: 鏡

Another take on the Straw-Boys

STRAW-BOYS: An Ancient Custon still Observed in IRELAND, THE GRAFIC, JULY 8, 1911 "From time immemorial a strange wedding custom has been observed in the West of Ireland, young men- known as the Straw-Boys- who have not been invited to the ceremony, and who care to present themselves in the disguise shown in our picture, being allowed to join in the festivities and control all the arrangements for a couple of hours." illustration by E. A. Morrow

Print collection of Maggie Land Blanck - Customs in Ireland:

Straw-boys activity occurred mostly in the west of Ireland. Groups of revelers wearing pointed top hats, masks, and skirts of straw arrived uninvited at wakes and weddings where they sang, danced, played music and games and generally performed acts of buffoonery often of a risque sexual nature. They were welcomed because it was believe that they brought good luck to the families involved. The entertainment value was probably considerable. The masks and outlandish attire was supposed to hide the identity of the individual and allow complete freedom from his inhibitions. However, I would imagine that in the small rural environments where these festivities were most popular everyone would have pretty much known everyone else and this was a case of who was kidding whom.

Ping Pong Politics

Exhibition match between a Moroccan and a Chinese athlete

Thomas H. Hahn Docu-Images » Images from the Cultural Revolution

Professor Thomas H. Hahn of Cornell University has a remarkable collection of photographs on Zenfolio. Photo geeks could get lost in this one for a good while.

via Danwei

stray bullets

Deep in the radioactive bowels of the smashed Chernobyl reactor, a strange new lifeform is blooming Ever since, a 30 km 'exclusion zone' has existed around the contaminated site, accessible to those with special clearance only. It's quite easy, then, to conjure an apocalyptic vision of the area; to imagine an eerily deserted wasteland, utterly devoid of life. But the truth is quite the opposite. The exclusion zone is teeming with wildlife of all shapes and sizes, flourishing unhindered by human interference and seemingly unfazed by the ever-present radiation. Most remarkable, however, is not the life buzzing around the site, but what's blooming inside the perilous depths of the reactor. (via)

Global Trail of an Online Crime Ring As an international ring of thieves plundered the credit card numbers of millions of Americans, investigators struggled to figure out who was orchestrating the crimes in the United States. When prosecutors unveiled indictments last week, they made a stunning admission: the culprit was, they said, their very own informant.

Unabomber objects to cabin display at Newseum Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski wrote a letter to a federal appeals court complaining about a museum exhibit of the tiny cabin where he plotted an 18-year bombing spree. Kaczynski, who is serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole, says the display at the Newseum in Washington runs counter to his victims' wish to limit further publicity about the case. (see the letter) (via)

FBI seeks owners of stolen art after collector dies When New York art collector William Kingsland died in 2006, he left behind hundreds of works of art. But some, including works by Pablo Picasso, turned out to have been stolen.

Is 'gene doping' the next Olympic threat? Could this be the first Olympics in which athletes are discovered altering their own DNA?

In search of Western civilisation's lost classics The unique library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried beneath lava by Vesuvius's eruption in AD79, is slowly revealing its long-held secrets (via)

also:
Photography Bans (what will they do when we have cameras in our heads?)
The Agritopia Project is an effort to design and build a neighborly community around an urban farm. (via)
Old Computers Recycled to Make Construction Material
Watchmen: The Movie Blog - A Mysterious Discovery in New York
Carl Craig Gets an Orchestra
Should You Worry About Digital Drugs?
Is the New Bernie Mac & Samuel L. Vehicle Cursed?
Update from the Samorost world (games)
Public Computer Errors pool (via)
Bugs made from found objects (via)
Cat butt menagerie
Cat Butt Museum (via)

Atomic Wednesday: Project: Upshot Knothole

viddy:
Q-Tip works the turntables
Tommy James and the Shondells - Cellophane Symphony
Robert Anton Wilson - Maybe Logic

Abkhazian Kosak

From the comments on vintagephoto:

One can read about africans from Abkahzia in the book of Fazil Iskander "Sandro from Chegem". Author wrote about africans lived (still live?) in Abkhazia since nobody knows what time... I think local people may clear the situation. But Iskander did not... The local africans according to Iskander lived in the villages and married to local villagers-women etc but their children became africans with local (Abkhazian) mentality...

stray bullets

Everyone should (link)blog The best response I've read. This is quite funny. I'm not going to comment on this again. If you'd like to know my thoughts, look here and here and read the comments, though you're better off just reading the above posts. He says what I wish I had. (big thx)

Identity is That Which is Given On the mutability and transformation of culture, why we're all multi-culturalists, identity and decay, and just what does culture mean these days? A touch on the academic side, but a worthwhile read. (via)

Return of the ivory trade The world trade in ivory, banned 19 years ago to save the African elephant from extinction, is about to take off again, with the emergence of China as a major ivory buyer.... The unleashing of a massive Chinese demand for ivory, in the form of trinkets, name seals, expensive carvings and polished ivory tusks, is likely to give an enormous boost to the illegal trade, which is entirely poaching-based, conservationists say. Tragic and stupid. A real head-shaker. (via)

Copper thieves take down Sainsbury’s This is only going to get worse, everywhere. Some day down the road, there will be paper thieves. (via) see also (via)

History's Weirdest Deaths We are a strange lot. History and legend, mind you. I'm sure you could expand this list a thousand-fold.

How To Work 52 Jobs in One Year: Interview with Sean Aiken Last year, Sean Aiken from Vancouver, Canada, graduated from college with a business degree and wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next. Like a lot of us of all ages, Sean had a good work ethic, but was uncomfortable with being locked into a career that offered little variety. Sean was also a bit of an adventurer, so he decided to do something different for his first year of full-time employment.

also:
In Pictures: Eight Ways To Quit Mousing Around "touchless" tech (via)
Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta Photographs by Ed Kashi (via)
Totoro Forest Project (via)

Futility Closet (a favorite):

Owen Parfitt In June 1768, bedridden tailor Owen Parfitt was put into a chair at the door of his Somerset cottage while his sister made his bed. She emerged after 15 minutes to find only the empty chair. A search continued throughout the rural village through the night and all the following day. No trace of him was ever found.

stray bullets

The U.K. bans product placement on TV, hopefully a trend (via); Wired Science asks, Would You Smoke Genetically Modified Marijuana?; just don't smoke any before you read The Art of Simplexity (via); though if you insist, you can zone out on some European Film Treasures (via); but if you really want to go deep, check out Jahsonic's mind-blowing Art and Popular Culture Wiki, good for you.

stray bullets

There's more than you'd ever want to know about the Pink Floyd pig, (via) (prev) the Fermilab Code was broken even before Bruce Schneier had a chance to blog about it, there's a new Theory for the Formation of Large Agrarian Empires and, um, a government insider says that George Bush authorized the 9-11 attacks. (via)

ลอยโคมยี่เป็ง (Thailand)

bugzila:

Chiang Mai Yipeng Festival

In addition, it is the great festival of Lanna duly succeeded from ancient age. "Yi Peng" or full-moon day of second lunar month of Lanna villagers is corresponding to the full-moon day of 12th month of central region during the end of raining season and beginning of cold season when the climate is very nice and fair. One tradition of Lanna other than Loi Kra Thong on the river is to light up the lantern and float up in the sky based on their belief that to pay worship to Phra Ket Kaew Julamanee in the heaven or to relief one' bad luck for more auspicious life.

via Cynical-C

The new library fad: borrow a person

This tickled me:

The idea, which comes from Scandinavia, is simple: instead of books, readers can come to the library and borrow a person for a 30-minute chat. The human “books” on offer vary from event to event but always include a healthy cross-section of stereotypes.

(...)

First out were Social Worker (“naive”) and Immigrant (“wasting resources”) and then Muslim (“beard”) was borrowed for a quick chat, presumably about bombs and his attitude to women. The rest of us tucked into the sandwiches and pretended that we weren't at all worried about being, almost literally, left on the shelves.

I think it's a great idea, though I would go for something a little bit more free-form and less dependent on stereotypes.

via Gems Sty

Germany and China: The cultural differences

Informative comparisons.

via Laurent Haug's blog

Israel's Stalags

From Beyond the Multiplex:

Taking their name from the Nazi prison camps in which they were set, Stalags were Israeli pornographic paperbacks featuring Nazi themes.

How do you make a movie about a disreputable and totally defunct literary genre? That question never quite gets answered by Ari Libsker's hour-long documentary "Stalags,"

I had no idea.

I did have reservations about posting this, but frankly, I found it too fascinating to pass. Human behavior is always so surprising, unique and varied.

via Gpod

Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle and human evolution

(NSFW Alert: Language. He drops the f-bomb a few times.)

I love Howard. He chews off so much that sometimes I find minor flaws in a few of the details, but overall, the message takes.

In his book, The Lucifer Principle, he posits that evil is a by-product of nature's strategy and what drives us to survive, thrive and do great things is at the root of our potential downfall as a species. In the end he calls for us to transcend this by changing the wiring of our brains, how we interact and how we observe, measure and design our society. Some of this is happening on its own, some needs a little push. Becoming aware and unafraid of our hard-wired tendencies toward evil would, in itself, be a big step.

If you're an opponent of the Killer Ape theory, you won't like the message, but you should read it anyway. Chances are, many people wouldn't like his message. Leave your biases at the door.

From his prologue:

I've attempted to employ the subject of man's inborn "evil" like those who turned to the subject in the past--to offer up a restructuring of the way we see the business of being human. I've taken the conclusions of cutting-edge sciences-- ethology, sociobiology, psychoneuroimmunology and the study of complex adaptive systems, among others--to suggest a new way of looking at culture, civilization, and the mysterious emotions of those who live inside the social beast. The goal is to open the path toward a new sociology, one which escapes the narrow boundaries of Durkheimian, Weberian and Marxist concepts, theories that have proven invaluable to the study of mass human behavior while simultaneously entrapping it in orthodoxy.

As an omnologist and freelance generalist, I resonate with polymaths like R. Buckminster Fuller, Robert Anton Wilson, Ray Kurzweil and Howard Bloom, to name just a few. None of them are perfect, but the gems lie in the overall.

What comes through to me is the need for disciplines that coordinate human knowledge, in whole or in varied inter-related segments, in order to understand and manage the dynamic forces integral to large-scale human interaction and the formation of a global society, all the while providing a sort of 'connective tissue' between various specialized fields to promote better informed and integrated perspectives and strategies.

New problems will present themselves and new systems will need to be adopted in order to cope. The tools and methods of empire, as well as, nationalistic, hemispheric and racially-driven world-views will largely have to be abandoned. Specialized sectors, like information technology, have already moved on. Others are slower to adapt. A field of discipline like omnology, might help provide rudder. At least until someone like Hari Seldon shows up.

Howard Bloom's column

A good complement to The Lucifer Principle:
A Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking. This means that the potentially-integratable-techno- economic advantages accruing to society from the myriad specializations are not comprehended integratively and therefore are not realized, or they are realized only in negative ways, in new weaponry or the industrial support only of war faring.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller - Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Here's the entire interview (24 min., better quality)
Thanks to Disinformation for making this video.

I Heart My Frozen Feces Knife

An excellent interview with Wade Davis, formerly of The Serpent and the Rainbow infamy, now explorer-in-residence for the National Geographic Society.

My favorite Wade Davis story:

During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.

Here's his talk at the 2003 TED Conference: