“We want you to be you, not someone else,” Air New Zealand tells its flight attendants — before giving them hundreds of pages of directions about grooming, clothing, speech, sleep and behaviour.
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We all have evil within us. Even small children are evil towards each other. ¶ Even my daughter could end up ruling Denmark with an iron fist. The possibility is still there. You never know.
Nina Maria Kleivan photographs her infant daughter dressed as dictators. [via]
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Nowra on Greer, page 42:
I realised then that none of the working-class women who worked with [Nowra's aunt] would ever read The Female Eunuch; it would remain always inaccessible to them with its many quotes from Nietzsche, Blake and Shakespeare.
But by page 46:
Greer’s real talent is as a polemicist. … [H]er ability to popularise complex elements of the Zeitgeist, especially in The Female Eunuch and The Change, is astonishing.
If you’re going to do a hatchet job, at least try to stick to your story.
Paul La Farge contemplates black:
The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, following Aristotle, remarks that the fact that we see darkness means that our eyes have not only the potential to see, but also the potential not to see. (If we had only the potential to see, we would never have the experience of not-seeing.) This twofold potential, to do and not to do, is not only a feature of our sight, Agamben argues; it is the essence of our humanity: “The greatness—and also the abyss—of human potentiality is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential for darkness.” Because we are capable of inaction, we know that we have the ability to act, and also the choice of whether to act or not. Black, the color of not seeing, not doing, is in that sense the color of freedom. [...] ¶ The space of refusal is also the space of imagination. You can sit in the darkness for as long as you like, staring blindly at nothing, and see what you will.
¶ Here’s the first issue of Melbourne Black, “a place where the anarchist community can reflect upon the political climate, generate new ideas for action, and share news of current struggles.”
MoMA’s Eleonore Hugendubel tells the story of the museum’s walls:
In the 1930s, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA’s founding director, tirelessly scoured the front and back spaces of commercial galleries, artists’ studios, and museums, … keenly observing display and installation methods. … Barr had MoMA’s walls lined with plain beige monk’s cloth, a cotton fabric that, according to Philip Johnson, who founded the Department of Architecture and Design in 1930, was “the most neutral thing he could get.” … The cloth soon gave way to white wall paint, although in Johnson’s opinion “the beige color was far better for painting than white.”
Decades later, a similar debate occurred at another iconic New York gallery; Frank Lloyd Wright was furious at the proposed colour for the Guggenheim’s walls:
S.O.S.! … A picture-hanger (named Sweeney) is authorized … to barge in on the architect of the museum and paint the interior dead-white – thus tearing the inside from the outer walls of the organic building. … ¶ A pity to have a masterpiece (it is) daubed to death at the end to gratify a metempsychosis for the white-sepulchre for a museum.
Watching paint dry is not so dull after all.
Owen Hatherley explores an elseworld Britain in which skyscrapers were embraced; a daring and imaginative skyline that was dreamed but never built:
Yet more precocious was the proposal for a pyramidal skyscraper which would, fittingly enough for the Victorian metropolis, be a tower as necropolis, its 50 or so storeys housing the bodies of as many as 5 million Londoners, slotted into a fittingly protomodernist cellular structure. It was presented before parliament, and passed over for the somewhat less demented Kensal Green cemetery.
Language is enriched when it incorporates slang, neologisms, immigrant inventions and street talk that say things that were never needed to be said before, or that we were never willing or able to say to each other. Language is corrupted when it is made bland, vague, superficial, flabby or meaningless.
Frustrated by the phrase “world class”, Renny Pritikin makes a neat point about language. This is something I want to keep in mind whenever I write. [via]
I just found out the Avett Brothers are coming to Melbourne — I am giddy with anticipation.
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Crikey‘s Bernard Keane reminds us that the Opposition’s (and the media’s) purported concern for endangered workers is a recent phenomenon:
[The Howard Government] severely limit[ed] the circumstances in which union officials could act on safety issues, or in which construction workers could take industrial action over safety issues. ¶ The only problem was that safety was not merely a pretext for union activity. Construction is up with road transport and mining as one of the most dangerous occupations in the country. And following the imposition of Andrews’ legislation and the extension of the building industry code, deaths in the constructions industry increased massively, from 3.14 deaths per 100,000 workers in 2004 to 3.86 in 2005, 5.6 in 2006, 4.48 in 2007 and 4.27 in 2008. [...] ¶ Despite clear warnings to the Minister that the changes would endanger safety, there was no media outrage or claims of a debacle. Indeed, in mid-2007 The Australian was lauding the Government’s reforms. The only mention of safety by The Oz was to note that fewer days had been lost due to “abuse of occupational health and safety issues”. More dead workers didn’t get a mention.
Dangerous industries need strong unions — not WorkChoices II. [prev]
The latest OK Go video clip features far and away the most impressive Rube Goldberg machine I’ve ever seen. ¶ Previously, Cadbury.
I don’t really know how to adequately describe The Maria Bamford Show, but it is hilarious. [via]
01 — 02 — 03 — 04 — 05 — 06 — 07 — 08 — 09 — 10
11 — 12 — 13 — 14 — 15 — 16 — 17 — 18 — 19 — 20
(And don’t miss her One-Hour Homemade Christmas Special.)
Colorbind is a join-the-dots puzzle game for iPhone — simple, elegant, beautiful. It feels like Upon a Fold and Eliss had a baby. [via]
“Do spies and assassins really wear fake beards? Absolutely.”
Fake beards have played supporting roles in several notable international incidents. When Australia’s Nugan Hand Bank collapsed in 1980, amid accusations of having trafficked drugs to support American intelligence operations, one of the institution’s founders was allegedly smuggled out of the country in a fake beard. Antonio Mendez, the former chief of disguise for the CIA, used fake facial hair extensively in Cold War Russia. He often put false mustaches on agents going to pick up Russian nuclear secrets from a double-agent called Trinity, so they would blend in with the other comrades. The CIA is so keenly aware of the importance of facial hair that it twice concocted schemes to remove Fidel Castro’s beard, hoping that his nude face would seem less authoritative to the Cuban people.
For some jobs you want a realistic beard, for others you want something “zany” so that witnesses can’t remember anything else about you. Fascinating.
Mercurius sums up the insulation debacle:
So instead of the comically slow, instransigent, late-arriving government servicepersons of 20th century legend, the ALP unleashed a lean, efficient, 21st century employment market that could put young men in harm’s way with unparalleled efficiency and speed. ¶ But even so, four young people didn’t die directly because of a brave new world policy in Canberra. They died because of coalface issues: inadequate supervision, inadequate training, inadequate OH&S. All because a de-unionised workforce of contractors was let loose in a Wild West cash-grab, and the cowboys moved in.
After the release of new ABS crime statistics, Possum Comitatus put together the Crime Paranoia Index, “to see which state has the greatest gap between the expectations [and] perceptions of crime and the actual level of reported crime”. The result surprised me.
The CodeOrgan analyses the “body” content of any web page and translates that content into music. The CodeOrgan uses a complex algorithm to define the key, synth style and drum pattern most appropriate to the page content.
Turns out my blog is in the key of A minor. Or rather, it was in A minor — changing the content changes the key. With every new post, it sings a different song. [via]
When jazzers improvise, “they go into what [scientists] call a ‘dissociated frontal activity state.’” Interestingly, “[w]hile this brain pattern is unusual, it resembles the pattern seen in people when they are dreaming.” ¶ Jazz porn.
The sad story of Philip K Dick’s mental illness, as revealed by his FBI file:
Undoubtedly, one of the prime reasons why Dick attracted attention from the FBI was a series of bizarre letters he penned to the Bureau in the early 1970s, in which he described his personal knowledge of an alleged underground Nazi cabal that was attempting to covertly manipulate science fiction writers to further advance its hidden cause. ¶ And the nature of that cause was even more bizarre: to initiate a Third World War by infecting the American population with syphilis.
[via]