Progress
At about Bowery & Broome.
A Look Into NFL Pre-game Flybys
NFL Films takes an in-depth look at the tradition of pre-game flybys, including some insight into exactly how precise the pilot crews must be to get the timing right and avoid land-based obstacles. Just amazing to watch.
(via GF)
Tao Lin: reading
Picked up from his blog.
[Removed.]
Thank you for your thoughts about Bruce. We have lost an amazing artist . . . . Bruce was firmly opposed to display of his films on-line, and on his behalf as an attorney I made numerous requests for removal. Now that Bruce has died, all copyrights are now held by Jean Conner (Bruce’s wife), and she has explicitly directed that I request and otherwise take action to have all on-line postings of Bruce Conner movies removed immediately.
Quite a number of links to Bruce Conner films were removed from Movie City Indie, and much as I respect honoring artistic integrity, I am sorry that those of you who do not know his oeuvre cannot whet your appetites online.
But take a look at this from Dennis Cooper.
Update. For now, at any rate, you can whet your appetities online.
Godard’s Band of Outsiders
One of my favorites.
Bruce Conner (1933-2008)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Bruce Conner’s “Sound of Two Hand Angel,” 1974.
Bruce Conner died Monday (July 7, 2008). This from a [Smithsonian] Archives of American Art interview, April 16, 1973:
BRUCE CONNER: Well, when I was in high school I was very interested in paleontology and archeology. I had a geology class which I had no real interest in because they were always scratching rocks for the first two-thirds of the semester before it got into paleontology. My instructor in high school, Dr. Barnard, made a claim that there were no trilobites in the Permian strata in Kansas. Nobody had ever found any. Michael and Dave knew of a limestone quarry where there were lots of fossils.
Lish’s The Quarterly
We talked about this a few months ago, but can someone scan the table of contents of some of the issues? Or, rather, which are the best issues to purchase? I’d love to read the issues with Cooper and Daryl. And of course Diane Williams, etc. Thanks.
Imaginary Madonna Video: “Scroggins To The Oldies”
Free Speech Online
A quick overview of the differences between free speech on and off the web.
Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.’s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.
Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that — far from promoting smoking — the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later.
“I never thought of it as a photo of a smoking kid,” Dors said. “It was just of a kid in Romania and how his life is. You can never make a serious documentary if you always have to think about what Flickr will delete.”
The Hidden Half
This is so difficult to comprehend.
Self-immolation has long been the preferred method of suicide in Afghanistan, but “the trend is upward,” says Ancil Adrian-Paul of the women’s nonprofit Medica Mondiale. Girls as young as nine set themselves ablaze, typically with cooking oil. In Herat Province, where last year 90 women lit themselves on fire, Zahra spent 93 days in the burn unit. Her husband beat her regularly, told her she was worthless and should just light a match. So she did. She is, by some accounts, lucky: More than 70 percent of victims of self-immolation do not survive.
and yet… Read more
cultural evolution
Paul Ehrlich at Seed magazine discusses the ways that cultural shifts both mimic and challenge our understanding of genetic evolution.
We do not understand how cultures evolve nearly so well. The majority of human evolution does not involve changes in our DNA, but rather alterations in the gigantic library of nongenetic information, the culture, that our species possesses. This library is orders of magnitude larger than that of our genetic information, and the elements on its diverse shelves usually have meaning only in connection with other elements. Indeed, there has been a long, bitter debate about whether it is sensible even to use the term evolution to describe changes in culture. After all, culture is composed of overlapping phenomena from languages, religions, institutions, and socially transmitted power relationships to the information embodied in artifacts ranging from potsherds to jumbo jets. The study of cultural change encompasses not only the disciplines of biology and the social sciences, but areas of the humanities as well.
reverse graffiti
via Neatorama
Dear clusterflock
Who gets to be famous?
BS-free business
How instead of this, we agree to this:
This spot only gets better as it ages.
(via swissmiss)
Usher’s “Yeah!” - A Cappella
Great rendention by Divisi, the female A Cappella group from the University of Oregon.
(thanks Will)
Want to Know How I Know the World as We Know It Is Ending?
(via GF)
foxhunt - taking a bit of heat off the squirrels
Coal: Cheap, Abundant, Clean
I present the following video to you in memoriam of a conversation I recently had with a person who did not realize electricity comes from coal. And no, I am not making this up. Sometimes the depth of American ignorance and entitlement is more remarkable than I’m comfortable facing.
This video is done by the Free Love Forum, a sketch comedy troupe whose endeavors have covered TV, radio, animation and theater. I discovered them (and this video clip) via And I Am Not Lying, and have followed them ever since.
This is obviously satirical, and it represents the perfect intersection of ignorance and the current, trendy alternative-energy meme.
Coal: Cheap, Abundant, Clean (Video)
Of cloned sheep and genre painting
Pieter Aertsen. Butcher’s Stall with the Flight into Egypt. Oil on wood panel.
1551. 123.3 x 150 cm (48.5 x 59″). University Art Collections, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Oh, I won’t even try to abstract the Pruned post from which Alexander Trevi links to the image above. Just go and read it.
Pruned is among my favorite blogs. And I don’t even know the guy.
Distracting Miss Daisy
And so I came to reflect on the mundane details of traffic-control policies in Great Britain and the United States. And I began to think that the American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific rules tailored to every bend in the road, has had the unintended consequence of causing more accidents than it prevents. Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite deadly.
This is who we are
Thanks for posting the link to this, Kathy.
Blue Zones
What do Sardinian sheepherders, Japanese grandmothers, and Seventh-Day Adventists in Los Angeles have in common? They are among the most long-lived people in the world. Dan Buettner spent five years visiting areas where people tend to live longer and wrote a book about them called The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest.
One of the most striking people he met during his travels was 104-year-old Giovanni Sannai of Sardinia. “He was out chopping wood at 9 in the morning,” Buettner tells guest host Audie Cornish. “He started his day with a glass of wine and there was a steady parade of people coming by to ask his advice. That’s one of the characteristics of the Sardinian Blue Zone — the older you get, the more celebrated you are.”
I Am Going to Buy This Book
This has potential to be amazing.
With that simple question and an enormous white suggestion box, the New York City based collaborative Illegal Art canvassed the five boroughs, collecting suggestions from passersby of every stripe the young, the old, the filthy rich, the homeless, the mouthy, and the shy. “Love each other or perish.” “Take breath mints when offered.” “Give me a break!” In true New York style, the suggestions are by turns hilarious, nonsensical, angering, and heartwarming. Some people held the suggestion box prisoner while they wrote suggestion after suggestion; others ignored the box, but then came scrambling back with a sudden idea. One woman scribbled as she walked down Wall Street: “More time in the day.” One man in Harlem, when asked if he would like to make a suggestion, said, “Isn’t it obvious? World peace.” Or at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, a woman sadly wrote her misspelled suggestion and then held it up for all to read: “Never brake up with someone on a bridge.” With over 350 entries and 50 photos of the suggestion box in action, Suggestion is authentic, honest, and totally appealing a testiment to the the public’s innermost desire, whether it’s free beer, free daycare, or free pumpkin pie every Thursday.
(thx Leo)
all we are saying is stop stealing my fucking glasses
Four retirees have guarded the wire-rimmed glasses on the John Lennon statue in Havana Cuba for the last eight years.
“You have to be here every day because the day you aren’t, there the glasses go,” said watchman Juan Gonzalez, an 89-year-old retired filing clerk who smokes up to seven cigars a day guarding the bronze statue from a nearby bench.
In fact, the guards are so worried about another theft that they hold onto the glasses in shirt pockets or rags, restoring them to Lennon’s face only when tourists want to take pictures.
My Guitar Hero
An amazing video of the hardest song on the hardest level, 100% perfect. My hands hurt watching it.
via Kotaku