I was just trying to add more sites to the list of sites off to the right, when I happened upon Chick Comics (thanks, Judd): Naturally, I figured that God's opinion ("Somebody Angry?")would be pretty crucial to understanding the situation in the Middle East. Little did I realize that it would also be crucial to my understanding of Hurricane Katrina (as well as Hurricane Andrew, widespread flooding, 9/11, 88 "out-of-season tornadoes", and also other tornadoes, hurricanes, flood, and drought). I always viewed Chick Comics as fervent-but-harmless, because they mostly just keep things personal, but blaming 9/11 on a middle east peace plan and Katrina on the U.S. "pressuring" Israel to evacuate Gaza, is going too far for a comic book.
Another word on Detroit. I've been working on a film that involves lots and lots of archival film footage, and I came across this in my wanderings. It was made in the early 60's as a pitch to host the Summer Olympics in Detroit. One could argue about what a disaster it would have been to have the Olympics a year after the riots, but remember that Mexico City was no picnic, either.
I am curious as to whether the city officials and filmmakers were being hopeful or naive when making this film. Regardless, Jamison Handy's filmmaking skills in general are undeniable; its a bit lamentable that his efforet went almost entirely into producing industrial films. Handy on Handy:
Ah, the mythical $100 home. We hear about these low-priced “opportunities” in down-on-their-luck cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland, but we never meet anyone who has taken the plunge. Understandable really, for if they were actually worth anything then they would cost real money, right? Who would do such a preposterous thing?..... .... But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends. In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline. The good news is that, almost magically, dreamers are already showing up. Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive. Mitch thinks he knows just the spot for it.
[Masks worn during experiments with Plague. Philippines, probably around 1912]
Mike Rhode, the head archivist at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. is beginning to make a huge archive of military medical imagery available online (through flickr). The archive consists of over 500,000 images (that have thus far been scanned) of medical images from the Civil War to Vietnam. They are slowly but surely getting them online for the rest of us, on their own time [from Wired]:
"The Army does not appreciate people using Army resources for sites that they don't consider to be related to your job," Rhode said. Flickr, like many social media sites, is blocked by the Army.
Still, Rhode is continuing to push to get the photos, a precious resource, into the light of the internet.
"We have pictures from all types of military conflicts and all different types of medicine and issues in medicine," Rhode said. "We love the stuff that we're able to play with and want to bring it to everyone else in the world."
The Library of Congress also has vast archives (though again, only a fraction of their materials are online) and has started placing things on flickr as well. [Though you can find even more in the archives on their own site]
[Christy Mathewson, warming up before pitching in the World Series, 1911]
So just a word on this AIG-bonus business: What I really want to know is, why does every article only refer to "AIG executives" but not to any actual individuals with names? I mean, just through cultural osmosis we all know the names Kenneth Lay, Bernie Madoff, John Thain, etc. but does anyone have any idea who any of these executives are? Let 'em keep their money for all I care, but at least make 'em famous.
After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about 3 months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don't know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.
I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited. The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine. Since then I still lose control of my urine when under stress.
I was then placed again in the tall box. While I was inside the box loud music was played again and somebody kept banging repeatedly on the box from the outside. I tried to sit down on the floor, but because of the small space the bucket with urine tipped over and spilt over me.... I was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before.
I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.
As always, thanks to Andrew Sullivan for helping to keep this issue out there. My fear is that this will all get buried and forgotten eventually, and that nobody will face the consequences of their actions. The greater danger, ultimately, I think, is that if none of this comes to light and stays in the light, the public at large will not be forced to reckon with these things that have been going on supposedly to protect us. People must be made to realize that these things happened, are probably still happening, and will happen again and we can't pretend otherwise anymore.
So you are probably saying to yourself, "hey, I drink a lot of coffee, but am I really getting all of the caffeine that I need?" Well, here's some information from The Atlantic's new Food Section that may be of use to you:
In a couple of studies testing 90 different Arabica cultivars, the caffeine content varied between 0.42 and 2.9%. My morning cup would then vary between 84 and 580 milligrams, depending on which of these varieties was in my cup.
If your morning cup came from a commercial roaster who included Robusta in the blend, we have another level of complexity. Caffeine content in these coffees, in one study, varied between 1.16 and 4.0%. A straight 12 oz. cup, using 20 grams of the 4% coffee, probably wouldn't taste very good, but would definitely provide more buzz: 800 milligrams of caffeine.
As with most things, the more one learns, the more complex a topic becomes and, in a sense, the less one knows. To attempt accurate generalization:
• Arabica averages about half the caffeine as Robusta. • The cultivar determines the caffeine content. • Degree of roast has no meaningful effect on caffeine. • An espresso made from 100% Arabica, on average, has about 70 milligrams of caffeine per shot; a 12 oz. cup of drip coffee made my way in a press pot, using two scoops of coffee per 12-ounce cup -- would have 200 milligrams.
Beware of taking this information very far, because individual responses to caffeine differ widely. Caffeine is metabolized faster by men and slowest by pregnant women. Body weight and eating will affect caffeine absorption.
We, as humans, have just taken a huge step towards the utopia that the Jetsons live in*: vending machines that make fresh pizza. I know its not a foodarackacycle (i'm appalled that I can't find a picture of this to link to) but we're getting there. From the NY Times:
Over the last decade, Mr. Torghele, 56, an entrepreneur in this northern Italian city who first made money selling pasta in California, has developed a vending machine that cooks pizza. The machine does not just slip a frozen pizza into a microwave. It actually whips up flour, water, tomato sauce and fresh ingredients to produce a piping hot pizza in about three minutes.
The machine, which Mr. Torghele calls Let’s Pizza, is only the spearhead of a trend. Restaurants reminiscent of the old Horn & Hardart chain in the United States, which are fully automatic, are also showing up around the Continent.
Unlike the old automats (the last Horn & Hardart closed in 1991), which were staffed with workers who refilled the machines with creamed spinach and baked beans as fast as customers pulled them out, these restaurants consist entirely of vending machines.
While Horn & Hardart may have closed down, there are still automats to be had, and right here in New York, at Bamn! at St. Mark's Place - though be warned, human hands still make the food before shoving it into the little warm food-cubbyholes. Also, if you find yourself in Amsterdam, you can always hit up Febo (its grosser than the commercial lets on):
*claims of utopia are debatable, but will be saved for a future post, as The Jetsons are to me what Hamlet is to Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses
After Super-Villains, some of my favorite people are bank robbers/jewelry/art thieves.
In the latest issue of Wired Magazine, super-villain (not really) Leonardo Notarbartolo relates his tale of relieving the Antwerp Diamond Center of at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils in 2003. True to form, his cronies have nicknames: Speedy, The Genius, The Monster, and the King of Keys.
So yes, they rob this safe and make off with the loot. Its not a spoiler to tell you that they got caught, because Notarbartolo is telling the story from prison, but I'm still amazed by HOW they were caught. (I guess Super-Villains always get caught. Still, you plan a job like this and THAT'S how you get caught?)
The Door 1. Combination dial (0-99) 2. Keyed lock 3. Seismic sensor (built-in) 4. Locked steel grate 5. Magnetic sensor 6. External security camera
The Vault 7. Keypad for disarming sensors 8. Light sensor 9. Internal security camera 10. Heat/motion sensor (approximate location)
I am always a big fan of supervillains, and an even bigger fan of supervillain parodies. I once went to a 'Superhero Party' dressed as a supervillain (mad scientist-type), but only after having sent a threatening videotape demanding a ransom for the other guests to watch before I arrived.
This is great. You can see the front page of any newspaper in the country (catch 'em while you can!) It can also be used to watch the demise of the newspaper industry in real-time (or almost-real-time).
Andrew Sullivan, who's blog was one of the first that I began reading on a regular basis (not only for his insights, but for his ability to gather lots and lots of interesting things from all over the internet), has put up a little reflection on the things conflicting him right now. Think what you may of him (I know that his post-9/11 and pre-Iraq writings rub a lot of people, myself included, the wrong way; and I know he now rubs a lot of conservatives the wrong way) but he is one of the more open and honest operators out there, always serious about the positions he holds, and willing to be persuaded, whether by argument or by the unfolding of events.
I just wanted to note that I found his discourse below to be inspiring: its nice to see people openly confronting themselves and their beliefs, and addressing their lives and surroundings and beliefs critically.
Maybe this is adulthood finally arriving a little late: the knowledge that everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it. But a church perpetrating the rape and abuse of children through the power of its moral authority is not a flaw; it's a self-refutation. A movement betraying its core principles in office and then parading as a parody of purists is a form of anti-conservatism as I understand it. And a democratic country using torture to procure intelligence it can use to justify more torture, and prosecuting a war that never ends against an enemy that can never surrender: this, whatever else it is, is not America as its founders saw it. Again, it is a kind of self-refutation.
Where to go? What to do? You read me flounder every day; and you can find many less conflicted bloggers to read. Maybe I should take a break and live a less examined life for a while. Or maybe I should do what I am still doing: trying to make sense of where I belong, stay praying in a church that has sealed itself off from modernity, cling to a conservatism that begins to feel like a form of solipsism, hang on in the hope that America can reform itself and repair the world a little. I think, in fact, that this is obviously the right and only serious choice. Life is always a temporary and losing battle, an engagement with the deadliness of doing. It just feels deadlier than usual in these past few years of brutally unsentimental education.
Or maybe I should laugh more.
Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.
For any and all haters out there, I present a rebuttal from Stanley Burrell (MC Hammer) himself; he's got nothing to be ashamed of:
"I'm not the least bit self-conscious," says Hammer, now 46, his tone steeled with defiance before the show. "I'm the guy who went to the Tokyo Dome and sold out five nights. Who's the other rapper who sold out five nights at the Tokyo Dome? Oh, that's right, there isn't one. You don't have to add anything to my résumé, just read it like it is."
Vanilla Ice saved his choice lines for the audience:
After a few songs, he starts speaking their language: "How about I take it back to the old school?" The crowd goes nuts. "Ice Ice Baby" brings down the house. He follows with "Play That Funky Music," and even plays "Ninja Rap," the song he penned for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze."
Ninja Rap! (plus some awesome interview clips with Vanilla: "ice ice baby's in full effect - yep, yep")
Apparently Cold Emphasis has been noticed by the outside world (because I sent it a link to the coffee posting (also known as Judd-bait)). A reader wanted to post this back (I guess there is some problem with the comments section- that may explain the dearth of comments to this point):
Narasimharao Kondamudi, Susanta Mohapatra and Manoranjan Misra of the University of Nevada at Reno have been doing research into whether used coffee grounds can be used to create diesel fuel.
If you look closely at your cup of fresh coffee, you may notice a thin film of oil on the top. Looks like there's more where that came from.
Dr Misra says that a litre of biodiesel requires 5-7kg of coffee grounds, depending on the oil content of the coffee in question. In their laboratory his team has set up a one-gallon-a-day production facility, which uses between 19kg and 26kg of coffee grounds. The biofuel should cost about $1 per gallon to make in a medium-sized installation, the researchers estimate.
Commercial production could be carried out by a company that collected coffee grounds from big coffee-chains and cafeterias. There is plenty available: according to a report by the United States Department of Agriculture, more than 7m tonnes of coffee are consumed every year, which the researchers estimate could produce some 340m gallons of biodiesel.
Victoire has just released a short EP-style album,A Door Into the Dark, made up of live recordings (spruced up beautifully by the studio-wizard, Lawson White) to hold us over until their full album comes out at the end of the year.
Its an eMusic exclusive, so I think its only available for download for subscribers, but you can also hear the music on Missy's website.
eMusic has a really nice review, too:
Missy Mazzoli, the young composer who writes the music for the all-female modern classical ensemble Victoire, seems to have a private line on mute anxiety, on quietly nagging uncertainty, and on the four short pieces that comprise the Door Into the Dark EP, she taps it with effortlessness bordering on the uncanny. Her urgent, enigmatic songs feel like 3AM dispatches garbled by a bad connection, with only the occasional loaded phrase puncturing the static. The band's combination of chittering electronics, found sound and repetitive string and woodwind lines eloquently conjures how it feels to helplessly grope for words that don't exist to describe disquiet we can't place, how it feels to be left alone with only the colors of our own thoughts for company. Victoire live in the up-close dots of a Seurat painting, the point where a seemingly clear picture dissolves into incomprehensibility. You can squint and focus, but the harder you train your gaze, the further everything breaks apart.
...
...it urges you to lean forward, to decode the message just out of earshot. But there is no secret, nothing that needs unlocking, just four gorgeous and inscrutable pieces of music worth puzzling over.
Plus, for the burgeoning groupie-base, they also post an interview with the band:
Do you ever think about where your music "fits"?
Missy: I think about it a lot. I always have the same thought pattern, and it's like a circle. It starts when I'm trying to figure out where we're going to play a gig, or trying to figure out who's going to release our album. Even the next song, or piece, or whatever you want to call it, that I'm going to write, where to start from. I always have this question: "It would be a lot easier if we had this specific genre." But then my next thought is: Wait, that would defeat the very purpose of writing music that exists in this crack, in this imagined world. It's kind of like our very mission is to not be defined in one or two words. It's fun being enigmatic. It's fun not really being able to be pinned down.
There are so many bands like that, though! Whenever I get angsty about categories, I think about bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor! or the Dirty Projectors. It sounds like they just don't give a shit, like they are totally free from having to stuff themselves in a genre.
Via Boing Boing, It seems that NRK, the Norwegian Public Broadcaster, is beginning to implement its own BitTorrent system to distribute its content to viewers.
According to NRK:
"Experience from our early tests show that if we're the best provider of our own content we also gain control of it."
I got to thinking that Detroit may be the most science fictional city in the world -- if sf is about the way that technology changes society (and vice-versa), then Detroit, the first New World, world-class city built around a high-tech industry that collapsed, is about as science fictional as it gets.
When I think about it, the premise makes sense: it is places like this that become quickly interesting and unpredictable as the 'old order' of social structures breaks down and there is neither an entity big enough or effective enough (government, corporation, civic society, etc.) to impose a new order, nor a large enough population base to maintain its social influence over such a large city.
Maybe big new things will be coming out of places like detroit in the future; nothing like what came out of them in the past, of course, but these things may well be even bigger and certainly stranger.
On Saturday night, the Orange County (Florida) Sheriff's department raided a pirate radio station called "Street Heat". Apparently it was an illegal, vulgar gang-promoting radio station. This is an intriguing story; i'm hoping that a little audio will eventually emerge from the station itself so we can get a little perspective on this.
It does raise some interesting issues about what media is for and what limits are placed on it for the public good.
According to the police: "There are no sentences in this stuff that they're putting out that didn't have vulgar language, didn't have some demeaning language towards women, towards people," said Sgt. Mike Gibson.
Gibson said the radio show covered "where to buy drugs, where to buy prostitutes and what gang to be a member of."
...
"They're promoting violence," Gibson said. "When you promote violence, the robberies go up, the homicides go up, people become victims of crimes."
Some things that I saw, heard, felt, went to, or did recently (and maybe you should check out, too)
Victoire has put out an EP (A Door Into the Dark) over at eMusic. You can only get it at eMusic for now. Their review: The band's combination of chittering electronics, found sound and repetitive string and woodwind lines eloquently conjures how it feels to helplessly grope for words that don't exist to describe disquiet we can't place, how it feels to be left alone with only the colors of our own thoughts for company. ......................................................... Gomorrah, a new film (in the U.S. at least) by Matteo Garrone. This is playing at the IFC Center in New York. I think its been a hit there, so it may play in other cities. As well it should.
It is worth watching the film just to see some of the settings (like the ruined concrete ziggurat-like housing projects) and puzzle over them (there were so many times when I was pleasantly at a loss to grasp what was happening in the background of some scenes).
Go and see it if you can. If you need more prodding, here is the review that tipped me off to the film in the first place.
......................................................... David Byrne at Radio City Music Hall. I thought it was great: he's still got it, and Radio City is an incredible space (I am a sucker for red velvet walls and gold trim, and I don't like using "restrooms" - I prefer "Lounges").
Naturally, I figured that God's opinion ("Somebody Angry?")would be pretty crucial to understanding the situation in the Middle East. Little did I realize that it would also be crucial to my understanding of Hurricane Katrina (as well as Hurricane Andrew, widespread flooding, 9/11, 88 "out-of-season tornadoes", and also other tornadoes, hurricanes, flood, and drought).
I always viewed Chick Comics as fervent-but-harmless, because they mostly just keep things personal, but blaming 9/11 on a middle east peace plan and Katrina on the U.S. "pressuring" Israel to evacuate Gaza, is going too far for a comic book.
