Sophianotloren

Liberia occupies a gloomy place in the Western imagination. Ask the average American what they picture when they think of the country, and they might say child soldiers, the murderous dictator Charles Taylor, or Ebola.

While working in the capital Monrovia for several months during 2014, photographer François Beaurain saw something else entirely. Children were playing. Adults were working. People were making music, going to school, and generally just trying to live good lives. In hopes of getting to know the strangers she saw in the streets, Beaurain started creating GIFs of daily life. “The more I was shooting, the more people I met, and the more I understood about Liberia and Liberians,” she told Hyperallergic.

The GIFS that resulted are charmingly playful, colorful, and hypnotic. But they’re also more than just eye candy, breaking past the never-tired tropes of silly cats and models stumbling on the runway to describe life in a real community. In Monrovia Animated, Beaurain has produced an unusual form of GIF-as-documentary photo, one that brings to life a far-off locale and makes us consider it in a way we’ve rarely been asked to before.

It’s a Friday so I get to lead with a story about a blind baby seal.

The important take-away here is that the Eiffel Tower once had a penthouse apartment in it.

I guess chickens are smarter than we thought too (everything is smarter than we thought).

Let’s all take a walk through a secret soviet nuke stashing bunker.

Reconsidering the rat.

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Jonathan Chait’s attack against “Political Correctness” is the talk of the interwebs.

He mixes a few examples of genuinely bad, but also rare and unrepresentative, anti-speech efforts (MacKinnon in 1992 (!), a student whose anti-feminist article led to his apartment getting egged, a professor who stole a pro-life display) with a laundry list of people – well, progressives – using their free speech to protest or criticize:

You may remember when 6,000 people at the University of California–Berkeley signed a petition last year to stop a commencement address by Bill Maher, who has criticized Islam (along with nearly all the other major world religions). Or when protesters at Smith College demanded the cancellation of a commencement address by Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, blaming the organization for “imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” Also last year, Rutgers protesters scared away Condoleezza Rice; others at Brandeis blocked Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a women’s-rights champion who is also a staunch critic of Islam; and those at Haverford successfully protested ­former Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who was disqualified by an episode in which the school’s police used force against Occupy protesters.[…]

Stanford recently canceled a performance of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson after protests by Native American students. UCLA students staged a sit-in to protest microaggressions such as when a professor corrected a student’s decision to spell the word indigenous with an uppercase I — one example of many “perceived grammatical choices that in actuality reflect ideologies.” A theater group at Mount Holyoke College recently announced it would no longer put on The Vagina Monologues in part because the material excludes women without vaginas. These sorts of episodes now hardly even qualify as exceptional.

Ken White once called this argument “The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker“:

The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker holds that when Person A speaks, listeners B, C, and D should refrain from their full range of constitutionally protected expression to preserve the ability of Person A to speak without fear of non-governmental consequences that Person A doesn’t like. The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker applies different levels of scrutiny and judgment to the first person who speaks and the second person who reacts to them; it asks “why was it necessary for you to say that” or “what was your motive in saying that” or “did you consider how that would impact someone” to the second person and not the first. It’s ultimately incoherent as a theory of freedom of expression.

There are responses to speech that I think are genuinely anti-speech – harassment (Anita Sarkeesian recently posted the harassing comments she gets on Twitter in a single week – extreme trigger warning on that link), threats, attempts to get people fired.¹ But Chait’s examples of unreasonable speech are… well, just unreasonable. More often than not, Chait objects to people using their free speech to criticize what others have said. It’s hard to make what he’s saying into anything principled or even coherent.

Chait sometimes attacks the kinds of political arguments we should value the most. For instance, Chait puts on his laundry list “Stanford recently canceled a performance of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson after protests by Native American students.”

The real event was much more complex. For one thing, no protests took place; for another, it was voluntarily cancelled by the student thespians themselves, not cancelled by Stanford.² Instead, Native American students met with the theater students and had a series of long discussions in which the groups tried to resolve their differences.

“[‘Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson’] more or less uses Native Americans as a prop to tell the story of Andrew Jackson and his controversial presidency,” Brown said. “It uses Native people as a foil, or a backdrop to tell his story, which we felt took away from the legitimacy and historical narrative that is very real and exists for a lot of Native students on this campus.”

Stern and her team proposed a variety of potential solutions to ensure that a positive dialogue came out of the show, including cutting certain songs and making small script changes, or finding a show written by a Native American author to be funded by ATF and put on in conjunction with “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.”

After a month of meetings, which included Stern, the co-producers, SAIO, ATF and various faculty moderators, it became clear that the problems of representation in “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” could not be fixed.

This process – in which two groups that disagreed sat down for in-depth discussions – is exactly the kind of free speech that we should admire. When they walked away from the table, the two groups still didn’t fully agree with each other – but they both praised the other sides’ good intentions and willingness to talk.

When a local newspaper, The Fountain Hopper, published an article making a Jonathan-Chait-like article about freedom of speech under threat, one of the theater students objected:

Knarr expressed equal frustration with the article.

“No one from the Fountain Hopper contacted anyone from our team,” she said. “I think the whole process does bring up questions about, ‘When is it okay to say that something artistic should not be put up?’ but I did not come away from this process feeling like my freedom of speech had been restricted.”

I’m not saying what went on at Stanford was perfect in every way. But it was good enough so we should consider it an example of conflict and speech to strive for – and Chait should explain why this is the sort of speech he wants less of.

Angus Johnson makes a similar point:

When someone protests a campus speaker, they’re engaging in an act of speech. When they complain about microagressions, they’re engaging in an act of speech. When they challenge their professors, or trend a hashtag on Twitter, or write trigger warnings into their syllabi, or accuse each other of racism, or criticize our country’s conception of free speech, they’re engaging in acts of speech.

Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do? Isn’t that what [Chait’s] looking for?

---

A quote from Chait:

Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing.

What I find interesting about this quote is that it remains perfectly true even if the first three words are deleted.

---

Some good blog responses to Chait I’ve read, in arbitrary order:

1. Chait Speech I’d call this a “steelmanning” of Chait’s position; that is, it restates Chait’s argument in a way that is stronger. (And much shorter.)
2. What exactly do you want, Jonathan Chait?
3. Jonathan Chait and the New PC | The Nation
4. All politics is identity politics – Vox
5. ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES: The Language Police Is Coming To Get You
6. The truth about “political correctness” is that it doesn’t actually exist – Vox
7. Some Thoughts on White Anti-Racists and Angry Black People |
8. Amanda Marcotte: P.C. Policeman Jonathan Chait Can Dish It Out, But He Can’t Take It
9. But Wait…There’s More! — Crooked Timber

1. Scott Alexander discusses this in more detail.
2. To be fair, if the production had gone ahead, there would probably have been protests.

So…a toast to Erik, everybody!!!

fluffmugger:

sapphysapph:

For the uninitiated, this is what Magpies are like during “swooping season” here in Australia.

• Fun fact: people have been known to walk around with empty ice cream containers on their heads to protect themselves in lieu of helmets.

Things to remember:

1) This is an Australian magpie. it is not like European magpies.It’s not a flappy bappy chirpy little shitbag you can bat away with your palm. This is a fucking crow in cow makeup

2) Cats and dogs will not try and take them on because cats and dogs know they will lose

3) They live for 25 years and yes, they will remember your face.  Although I will confess that my 36 years of life I have never seen a dead one. Under tumblr logic this means they are immortal

4) They are insane. Cold stone bug-fuck insane.  And they give zero fucks.I’ve seen them attack cyclists, moving cars, trucks, even a goddamn train.

So imagine, if you will, you are walking merrily down a street one spring and suddenly this train-assaulting, cow-cosplaying ball of immortal feathers and batshit insanity comes screaming out of nowhere and tries to embed itself in the back of your skull, beak clacking like the pump of a shotgun as it tears out chunks of your hair.

This is Australia.

rstevens:

Tonight’s comic ain’t afraid of 51% of ghosts.

We've previously discussed how having money can make you feel less pain. So it probably makes you happy too, right? Well, not so fast. This study used census data to test whether higher income is associated with happiness or sadness. Interestingly, they found that although people with money are not happier on a daily basis, they are less sad. Sound paradoxical? According to the authors, "happiness and sadness are distinct emotional states, rather than diametric opposites" -- that is, just be

PARIS — I have never particularly admired French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s overly familiar and obvious Nanas (French slang for “broads”) — the gaudy, plump, joyous everywoman figures that made the artist’s case for female affirmation. Nor am I a huge fan of the Stravinsky Fountain at the Centre Pompidou, her collaboration with her husband, the artist Jean Tinguely. So I was somewhat reluctant to hit the Grand Palais to see her retrospective. But I was very satisfied that I did, as I was casually bowled over with the intensity of her total oeuvre, discovering her full spectrum as an artist. For me, she is more powerful than her mighty, dancing, archetypal female figures, even though they were developed in relation to the position of women in society half a century ago. Indeed, her solo retrospective, and the concurrent Sonia Delaunay exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne, mark a fairly strong season for woman artists in Paris, albeit women who have already died.

Born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle, child of an American mother (Jeanne Jacqueline Harper) and the Count André-Marie Fal de Saint Phalle (a ruined banker), de Saint Phalle grew up in America and began her rather saucy life there. In the show, de Saint Phalle is introduced first as a very pretty and slender professional fashion model, appearing in the late 1940s on the covers of Life magazine and French Vogue. At 18, she elopes with the wonderful writer Harry Mathews, soon to be know for his association with Oulipo and the Locus Solus journal (so named after the novel Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel). They move to Paris in the mid-’50s, where de Saint Phalle pursues a painting career and has her first solo exhibition in 1956. I was particularly taken with this early work, such as “Pink Nude in Landscape” (1956-58), with its cheeky Pollock-meets-Dubuffet painting style, full of both visual noise and charm.

In the early ’60s she is attracted to assemblage after discovering the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Larry Rivers, and incorporates found objects into her pieces, such as “Saint Sébastien (Portrait of My Lover/Portrait of My Beloved/Martyr nécessaire)” (1961). It was at this point in the exhibition that I began to concentrate on the theoretical qualities of her multiplicitious lyricism.

This work was followed by the radical, breakout, creative-destructive series of Shoot pieces of the early ’60s — which incorporate elements of performance, sculpture, and painting — such as “Tir” (“Firing”) (1961) and “King Kong” (1963). With this vanguard  work she joins the Nouveau réalisme movement along with Tinguely, Yves Klein, Raymond Hains, and César.

The sexually and religiously charged Shoot pieces, full of psychic destruction, were made by embedding polythene bags of paint into bas relief sculptures of human forms and assemblaged toys that are covered in several layers of white plaster and painted stark white. She thus creates a surface that she herself will pierce with the shots from a .22 rifle, releasing flows and bursts of colors from the bags of paint, and completing the painting. This period is amply illustrated with many films and interviews shown side-by-side with the works. I was fascinated to see her murder paintings, make them bleed colors, and come back to a better life.

This work led to a series of romantic freestanding assemblage sculptures, such as “Cheval et la Mariée” (1964), where my conflicting ideas and intellectual positions about marriage were mitigated by amusement. In 1966, de Saint Phalle collaborated with Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt on a large-scale, vagina-themed sculpture called “hon-en katedral” (“she-a cathedral”) for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, a giant, reclining Nana whose internal environment was entered from between her legs. This piece elicited massive press coverage worldwide. The provocative feminist and psychological interpretations are too tempting to be avoided and I admit that watching a film on it tickled the clownish Duchampian in me. This work became the model for her highly complex and detailed “Tarot Garden” (1998), a huge sculpture park in Tuscany on which she worked for nearly two decades. Her lovely idealism is fully realized in these works, which often give form to an alogical visual approach based in the theoretical constructs of the feminine.

I was even more impressed with de Saint Phalle’s keen satirical eye for patriarchal bluster, which she tied to an intense alertness and a heightened capacity to sympathize with the downtrodden. She made this clear in her political activism around resistance to France’s war in Algeria, segregation in the US, the war in Vietnam, and the AIDS crisis. Undeniably, I was moved by her immersive chamber titled “Skull (Meditation Room)” (1990), an AIDS-related piece of baffling trepidation, lamentation, and mourning. It is an artwork of tragic cries and private perturbations.

All told, I was seduced by the rebellious grace of de Saint Phalle’s interdisciplinary works. What is particularly interesting about her art today is how it ties empowerment to inventive myth. It is based neither in reductive purism nor fragmentary isolation. Her pleasantly nudging work contains a poetic, passionate, and political meaning that does not rely on a logic or language of appropriation.

Niki de Saint Phalle continues at the Grand Palais (3 avenue du Général Eisenhower, Paris) through February 2. It will run February 27–June 11 at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

asylum-art:

Historic Glass-Plate Photos From Romania Restored And Turned Into Colorful Art

 PhotoMerchant | Jane Long | Facebook

The recoloring of old black-and-white photos is an excellent way for modern audiences to re-visit, understand and associate with history. Jane Long, a photographer based in Australia, has taken a collection of old glass-plate images by Romanian photographer Costica Acsinte (or Axinte, depending on who you ask) and updating them by adding color and a bit of Photoshop magic.

Acsinte, who died in 1984, was a Romanian war photographer during WWI who also took photos professionally and personally after the war. In 2013, what was left of his damaged vintage glass-plate photos was digitized by the Costica Acsinte Archive to preserve it, and it is this collection that Long drew on to create her wonderful photo series.

Via boredpanda

felineofavenueb:

My dash wanted to finish the poem.

helloyoucreatives:

Some amazing GIFs explaining 9 Principles of Responsive Design 

nevver:

Edible light, Radu Zaciu

At The Week, I have some reflections on Michael Strain’s “sure, if we destroy the ACA plenty of people will die, your point being?” op-ed:

But the fact that the costs of the ACA might theoretically exceed the benefits doesn’t get us very far. What benefits, exactly, would accrue if millions of people were denied medical coverage because the ACA is seriously damaged or destroyed? It’s here that Strain’s argument falls apart.

One potential line against the ACA is the radical libertarian one, holding that any effort by the government to provide health care to the non-affluent represents an unacceptable level of state coercion. The problem here is that the “freedom” to die of preventable illnesses and injuries is not one the vast majority of people value very highly. A Republican Party committed to these principles would be transformed into an electoral coalition that would make Barry Goldwater’s 52 electoral votes in 1964 look robust.

Since the people responsible for the anti-ACA effort know this perfectly well, the constitutional arguments against the ACA have the advantage of not logically requiring the Supreme Court to rule the entire modern regulatory state unconstitutional. The disadvantage is that they ask the court to deny many millions of people health coverage based on liberty interests that are ludicrously trivial.

The litigants challenging the constitutionality of the ACA do not contend that the federal government cannot regulate national health care markets. Rather, their constitutional argument boils down to an assertion that the government has the authority to assess a tax to compel people to purchase health insurance, but not a penalty. It’s pretty hard to argue that the fate of liberty in America hinges on this formal limitation on federal power.

The more successful federalist argument launched against the Affordable Care Act is similarly unattractive. Chief Justice John Roberts’ inept re-writing of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion allowed states to opt out. Republican-controlled states have eagerly rejected the large amounts of federal money on offer to insure more poor residents, something that is likely to result in the unnecessary deaths of more than 5,000 people a year.

I don’t think this particular protection of state autonomy is worth that many lives (or, indeed, a single life). But here’s the kicker: The Supreme Court’s decision does not even meaningfully protect state sovereignty. Under the court’s theory, Congress could have enacted the ACA’s Medicaid expansion by repealing the pre-existing Medicaid entirely. This, apparently, would be completely constitutional. There may be things worth 5,000 lives a year; an incoherent legal argument that doesn’t even really protect states’ rights isn’t one of them.

More at the link for those of you who are into that kind of thing. Read Beutler as well. Hiltzik is excellent too.

We’ve already established that for today’s Republicans the minimization of deaths is not a virtue, at least where something as important as arbitrary formal limitations on federal power are at stake. It’s important, therefore, that children get to share in this sweet, sweet freedom from tax credits Congress granted them:

King v. Burwell, the latest Supreme Court case attacking the Affordable Care Act, is largely perceived as a threat to people who purchased insurance through the law’s health exchanges. Should the plaintiffs succeed, at least 8 million people with plans purchased through such an exchange are projected to become uninsured — many of whom have life-threatening conditions. In reality, however, King presents an even bigger threat to American lives. Should the Supreme Court embrace the plaintiffs’ theory in King, up to 5 million children who had insurance long before Obamacare became law would also lose their insurance.

That’s 13 million newly uninsured people, many of them children.

However, it must be noted that Jon Adler has a letter* in which 11 House Democrats are clear that they intended to keep the liberty-destroying boot of health insurance off as many children as possible. Surely the will of Congress must be honored.

*Note: characterization of letter’s contents may not be accurate.

What Yglesias says here, responding to Jon Chait’s definition of “identity politics” as “shorthand for articles principally about race or gender bias” is very true and very necessary:

This is, I think, the problem with idea of “identity politics” as a shorthand for talking about feminism or anti-racism. The world of navel-gazing journalism is currently enmeshed in a couple of partially overlapping conversations, about “PC culture,” diversity, social justice, technological change, and shifting business models. One thread of this is the (accurate) observation that social media distribution creates new incentives for publications to be attuned to feminist and minority rights perspectives in a way that was not necessarily the case in the past. But where some see a cynical play for readership, I see an extraordinarily useful shock to a media ecosystem that’s too long been myopic in its range of concerns.

The implication of this usage (which is widespread, and by no means limited to people who agree with Chait) is that somehow an identity is something only women or African-Americans or perhaps LGBT people have. White men just have ideas about politics that spring from a realm of pure reason, with concerns that are by definition universal.

You see something similar in Noam Scheiber’s argument that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio went astray by emphasizing an “identity group agenda” of police reform at the expense of a (presumably identity-free) agenda of populist economics. For starters, it is actually inevitable that a New York City mayor would end up spending more time on his police department management agenda (something that is actually under the mayor’s control) than on tax policy, which is set by the State Legislature in Albany.

But beyond that, not addressing a racially discriminatory status quo in policing is itself a choice. Indeed, it’s a kind of identity group appeal — to white people, whose preferred means of striking the balance between liberty and security, in many contexts, is that security should be achieved by depriving other people of their civil liberties.

As I mentioned recently, Christopher Caldwell’s assertion that Obama only getting 40% of the white vote suggested that he was racially divisive (something he wouldn’t say about Romney getting less than 10% of the African-American vote or less than 30% of the Hispanic or Asian-American vote) is another classic example. Opposition to “identity politics” generally provides particularly strong illustrations of what it’s decrying.

This is the hubris that is leading to the downfall of America’s police forces and the public’s erosion of trust in them.

A plainclothes detective in San Francisco had the temerity to arrest a public defender who represented the individual he was seeking to question and photograph. When she fulfilled her Constitutional Duty to tell him to go fuck off (in entirely more polite terms than I would have; I’d have laughed in his face), he threatened her with arrest for, get this, resisting arrest.

After his cronies escorted her from the scene, he continued to question the represented individual about his criminal activity.

During the time Tillotson was not present, Stanbury photographed and questioned her client and another man who did not have an attorney present, acccording to Adachi.

Do you think you’d feel free to refuse the officer’s questions at that point? Go ahead, make his day.

It’s one things for officers to get their way by removing civilians from the scene who object to their searches and seizures, but it takes quite another level of totalitarianism and disregard for the law to arrest and make absent an officer of the court.

But police said the five officers, led by a plainclothes sergeant who was accused of racially profiling a fellow officer in a 2013 traffic stop, were merely investigating a burglary case in which her client and his co-defendant were persons of interest.

Tillotson was cited for misdemeanor resisting or delaying arrest because she obstructed a police investigation, police officials said.

As I wrote just yesterday, there seems to be a growing idea among police officers that people must comply with their orders, regardless of the legality of their actions and anyone who gets in the way, questions or refuses those orders is automatically guilty of resisting or hindering.

Now imagine what these cops would have done if they weren’t in a courthouse, on camera. How many convictions have been obtained on the basis of their representations of confessions by bullied and threatened citizens on the streets.

It might be time for some civil disobedience.

Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, California)

Here's how I generally, theoretically, approach lighting in my games and game worlds. Part 1 is about the general concept of lighting design.

Mood is the most important end result of your lighting. The "functional school" of game lighting, which maintains that lighting exists primarily to make a space readable so that the player can navigate it and shoot people -- can be useful in my eyes but only so far as that gameplay is tactical violence, and when that violence can support evoking a mood. The rest of the time, some designers often seem content to light their spaces like a furniture catalog, or even leave it as a total after-thought. Lights can do more than show-off your normal maps and show where to walk to trigger the next cutscene, okay?

So let's begin: lighting design is a discipline that has existed since the beginning of sunlight.

"Urban Lantern" (Fort Worth, Texas), photo by Jeff Stvan

... A window is a light fixture.

So are candles, torches, braziers, lanterns, stained glass windows, tree-shaded gardens, the first electric light, gas lights, welding torches, car headlights, televisions, LEDs... not only is this an old discipline, it is also a robust discipline. Technology cannot render any of these lighting tools completely obsolete the way tech has, for example, more or less erased the payphone or fax machine or beeper from society.

Instead, the light bulb just changed what we use candles for: instead of being your primary work light source as in Shakespeare's days, the loyal candle is now a romantic fixture that is pleasantly dim and pleasantly flickers. Plenty of people still make and buy and use candles, and now candles are mostly a luxury you give as a gift to that one aunt you don't know very well. Candles have not disappeared from the world, they just now signify something different in a modern context.

Meanwhile, a ceiling-mounted flickering fluorescent light strip is not romantic at all, it's more appropriate for a desolate strip mall or a horror movie hospital. This smokeless efficient bright fixture did not replace the candle, it simply created new functions and contexts for other fixtures.

from "Architecture of Authority" by Richard Ross

So why is that hospital fluorescent flicker so different from the flicker of a candle?

It's in the light intensity, the light falloff, the color temperature, the sound it makes, the shape of the fixture, the cost, the cultural connotations, the implied maintenance program. Much like anything else in art, lights are more than just their visual properties, they also express values and politics.

In New York City at least, one main difference between a high-end cocktail bar, a warehouse dance party rave, a million dollar condo, and a dilapidated squat, is the lighting. A lot of torches would evoke... I don't know, an angry mob? A lot of bright electrical light will evoke a large institution. And these days, a lot of dim light sources with old Edison bulbs would imply expense from acquiring and maintaining all these antique fixtures.


My lighting design teacher told us about the early history of electric light: the first domestic fixtures placed the light source on a table at the center of the room, because there was something so beautiful about this new type of glowing filament. (It was barely as bright as a few candles, by our standards, but by their standards it was absolutely fantastic.) Why would you want to hide this beautiful glowing orb with a lampshade, or why would you mount it out of sight on the wall or ceiling?

I often feel a similar way when learning a particular 3D framework or toolset for the first time: I place lights in all these positions and arrangements, flashing neon purple, because I'm just enjoying this sensation of looking at a light and getting a sense of how this engine simulates light. Some lighting designers might call this "glitter" -- glare is usually an unpleasant thing, but in this case, tea candles, holiday lights, and fireworks are forms of glare that are pleasing to look at.

These days, it's very fashionable to mask the light source. Even though I think he's super overrated, part of the basic wonder of James Turrell's light installations is that you're not really sure where the light sources are, which totally distorts your perception of the space. This type of subtle design reads as futuristic, bold, sophisticated. Too much light, or too obvious of a light source, now feels cheap or industrial in a way that early viewers of artificial lighting could hardly imagine. ("What's the point if you can't see the bulb?")


My teacher's point was that, as designers, you have to think beyond the science of light. All those sensory phenomena ultimately get framed by our cultural ideas about light and what light means, and these ideas have changed over time.

Part of unpacking all this meaning in lighting involves expanding your definition of a "lighting fixture" -- a streetlamp outside your window, a mirror reflecting it onto the ceiling, where it splashes onto a spinning disco ball -- and the illuminated red exit sign, reflected by a puddle, by the glow of cigarettes in an alley -- these all belong to one unified system called light, and these all become light fixtures given the right circumstances.

And there's just something about sunlight or moonlight, you know?

NEXT TIME: part 2, a formal approach to lighting, and light as depth.

The Pew Research Center tells us Americans like science and think our scientists are great, but we disagree with them on things like science.

“Present fears are less than horrible imaginings,” Macbeth famously mused. Centuries later, this tenet is borne out in countless horror movies, where campy monsters emerge from the veil of mystery to anticlimactic effect. Rarely does our fear — and our exhilaration — survive the grand revelation and the strained explanation that immediately follows it.

But the eponymous monster in The Babadook, a stunningly adept debut film from Australian director Jennifer Kent, is both a present fear and a horrible imagining. Clad in an ominous black cloak and outfitted with long, claw-like fingers, the Babadook poses an immediate threat to widowed Amelia (Essie Davis) and her six-year-old son Sam (Noah Wiseman) — but it also presents us with a possibility far more terrifying than any of the usual monsters. A creature straight out of a disturbed child’s imagination, the Babadook is as absurd as it is dangerous, suggesting that the fears we dismiss as outlandish or irrational may not be so silly after all.

Set in Australia, The Babadook follows Amelia and Sam’s efforts to cope with the death of Sam’s father, who was killed in a car crash while driving Amelia to the hospital to give birth. Six years later, Amelia is still grieving — and Sam is troubled, obsessed with a seemingly fictive monster he calls “the Babadook.” Amelia and Sam’s relationship becomes increasingly strained as Sam’s fixation escalates into full-on misbehavior: the child sneaks homemade weapons into class, pushes his cousin out of a tree house, and refuses to sleep, keeping his mother awake for days. At first, the situation seems unambiguous: Sam is disturbed, and the Babadook is the stuff of his overactive imagination — even the word “Babadook” sounds like childish murmuring.

But when a morbid pop-up book titled “The Babadook” mysteriously appears on Amelia’s shelf, we begin to question our original take. “If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook,” the book begins. It goes on to narrate the macabre tale of a monster who dogs unhappy houses with relentless fervor. Indeed, the Babadook’s defining feature is his persistence in the face of disbelief: “the more you deny, the stronger I get,” the book warns. And as Amelia’s denials grow increasingly adamant, the Babadook’s displays of defiance grow increasingly dramatic: it calls and breaths ominously into the phone, slams doors, turns lights on without touching them, and slithers across the ceiling over Amelia’s bed. Unsurprisingly, Amelia’s attempts to burn the malevolent book are unsuccessful. It reappears on her doorstop, this time with more sinister content still.

Unlike so many horror movies, The Babadook eschews easy and reductive resolutions: we can’t dismiss the Babadook as a figment of Amelia and Sam’s vivid imaginations and waking dreams, nor does the matter resolve itself via exorcism — one presided over by a kindly, moralizing priest. (Spoiler alert.) Only when Amelia confronts the monster head-on, affirming its existence and its power, can she overcome it. In the end, she doesn’t expel it, but instead relegates it to the basement, where she visits it each day to bring it some snacks. Better to get comfortable with one’s emotional demons, it seems, than try to will them away.

The Badabook is playing in New York at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) through January 31.

exeggcute:

the joke is on you I love being rickrolled and I love 80s one-hit wonders

penamerican:

Fraternities do not have a monopoly on rapists: not at UVA, not at any frat, not even the deep Southern ones where upwards of 100 guys live in the house. (The plumbing; one shudders.) But: what the fraternity system does collect together is a group of male teenagers who enter their organization through rites of interpersonal physical violence, and who, military-style, reproduce this violence onto each other’s bodies. “Thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, [they] cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1785, about the male children of Virginian slave-owners. The sentiment there is still viable. Fraternities are worth examining as groups of rich, young, mostly white boys who were either born or bred into a tradition of getting away with things they should not.

Jia Tolentino, features editor at Jezebel, went to UVA to look at the culture of sexual assault on campus in the wake of the infamous Rolling Stone article.

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• The Rumpus Saturday Essay: Stain
• Good Victims
• Rolling Stone: A Rumpus Roundup
• The Rise and Fall of Alt Lit
• Mint

mydrunkkitchen:

tastefullyoffensive:

A Short History of the Modern World by Robin Edds/Reddit

Previously: The Adventures of George Washington

History of Denmark

BRUSSELS — 7 Square Metres (2014) didn’t set out to explore the subject of failure. Belgian artist Karl Philips’s first documentary film was supposed to record the complex implementation of a site-specific action at a 2011 summer music festival.

“Sometimes I think music is an alibi for companies to do festivals,” Philips says in the opening scene of the film. “It’s shifted from an alternative culture to an exclusive culture. If the music festival were a state, it would be a dictatorship.”

For 7 Square Metres, he began with the question, “Is an underground still possible?” Rather than attempt a political action, he planned to mount a project he considered a “test case” — an experiment designed to find answers rather than prove a point. The laboratory was the festival Pukkelpop in the Belgian town of Hasselt. Founded in 1985 as a grassroots event, it has since grown to become a gargantuan, corporately funded monolith, prioritizing rules and conformity over rebellion and community. Early shots in the film show tie-dyed youth breaking through barbed-wire fence, only to be tackled by security guards — a scene Philips compares to the conditions of transnational migration.

Philips and his team set out to “hack” the festival by occupying a piece of land (7 square meters, to be exact), a tiny ”we are here” kind of gesture. They purchased a foldable camping trailer, which they buried during a covert overnight operation in the field where the festival would be held four months later. The process involved a crew of more than 30 people, including multiple engineers and a lawyer, as well as several months of training and practice digs.

The plan was to resurrect the trailer on the festival’s second day (just before Eminem’s set). But that never happened. On the scheduled date a freak thunderstorm hit, killing five and injuring 140 others. The festival was cancelled and Philips’s project scrapped. A month later the team returned, patterning their original overnight process, digging up the camper, and replacing the earth they had removed. The experiment had failed.

Excerpt from Karl Philips, ‘7 Square Metres’ (2014)

With spontaneous interventions, flash mobs, and creative protests, the art lies less in the action produced than in the conversation it stimulates. An intervention like Philips’s is designed to jolt people out of their realities (or perhaps back into reality) and ask them to observe themselves, their surroundings, and think more critically and honestly about both.

In Philips’s case, the goal was two fold: to point to the co-optation of alternative cultures for profit by the capitalist system and to suggest that participants in those cultures can actively resist the system, not necessarily by flat-out rejecting it but by embracing and subverting it. This second point is evidenced by the administrative organization of Philips’s project. The team formed a limited liability corporation and had a lawyer present through the entire action. In effect, they were using the same system that protects corporate bullies from prosecution to shield themselves in their attempted subversion.

On a more symbolic level, the notion of undoing capitalism from within is suggested by hiding the work inside the festival. As opposed to setting up a counter-festival, another event outside the official zone as an act of protest, the team literally placed its work inside, without the festival knowing it was there. The aim was to stimulate a series of conversations, both during and after the event, about alternatives, co-optation, and capitalism. But because of the storm, none of that ever happened.

While the original project makes for a provocative proposal, the film doesn’t always succeed. It takes the defeat of this specific work as its subject but resists commenting on the status or value of failure in art making, simply presenting it as a topic for contemplation. Failure can be one of the most illuminating moments in creative practice, and the team’s choice to ignore exploring it on deeper, more theoretical terms feels somewhat empty. More problematic is the film’s efficacy in storytelling. When accompanied by sufficient explanation, the narrative becomes clear, but I’m not sure whether it can stand on its own. This is largely because the most important plot point — the storm — barely makes an entry; in the credits, Philips says discussion of it was minimized out of respect for the victims’ families. The storm was a major event in Europe, so it seems fair to assume viewers there will have the necessary context to understand. But could 7 Square Metres play successfully in other parts of the world where the disaster was a minor news item at best? I have my doubts.

By downplaying this element, the film also misses the most ominous part of the whole saga: it was extreme weather — a product of global climate change, ultimately the most destructive result of the systems Philips is trying to subvert — that prevented the attempted subversion. This feels almost like capitalism fighting back and prevailing. While the film shies away from any conclusion, the viewer may be left with the lingering question: what if resistance really is futile?

7 Square Metres screens at the Image Generator festival (Eikelstraat 31, Antwerp, Belgium) through February 2, and is on view in the No Walls Expo (Fenixloods 1, Rotterdam, Netherlands) through February 17.

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