Month: March 2011

A performance that brings tears to the eyes. Start the video around the 1.40 mark.

Mo at Neurophilosophy reports on a new study about how humans associate touch with feminine or masculine faces:

The new findings provide further evidence that abstract concepts are grounded in sensory metaphors. Just as holding a heavy object makes us perceive an issue as being more important, and physical warmth makes us perceive an interpersonal relationship as also being warm, so does touching something tough or tender influence our mental representation of social categories such as sex. 

The WSJ tracked down the 1968-style socialist turned Thatcherite, Paul Johnson, for an interview. I was struck by this exchange:

And then there was Ronald Reagan. "Mr. Reagan had thousands of one-liners." Here a grin spreads across Mr. Johnson's face: "That's what made him a great president."

Jokes, he argues, were a vital communication tool for President Reagan "because he could illustrate points with them." Mr. Johnson adopts a remarkable vocal impression of America's 40th president and delivers an example: "You know, he said, 'I'm not too worried about the deficit. It's big enough to take care of itself.'" Recovering from his own laughter, he adds: "Of course, that's an excellent one-liner, but it's also a perfectly valid economic point." Then his expression grows serious again and he concludes: "You don't get that from Obama. He talks in paragraphs."

Really: a "perfectly valid economic point" that vast and growing debt and deficits take care of themselves? One wonders what Johnson thinks of the current Tory government's savage cuts in public spending or his heroine, Margaret Thatcher's brutal spending cuts in the midst of the 1981 recession? Or of the Tea Party's alleged insistence on tackling debt? Oh, wait, he has something to say about the latter:

Pessimists, he points out, have been predicting America's decline "since the 18th century." But whenever things are looking bad, America "suddenly produces these wonderful things—like the tea party movement. That's cheered me up no end."

And he repeated what he regarded as Thatcher's core values in an interview with the far right Newsmax magazine in 2004, equating her values with George W. Bush's:

Thatcher followed three guiding principles: truthfulness, honesty and never borrowing money.

"Never borrowing money." Yes, that sums up Reagan and George W. Bush perfectly, doesn't it? And Obama's failure? He talks in paragraphs. The whole ramble is almost a parody of the cynicism and blind partisanship of what's left of the right.

My Modern Met has posted some incredible pieces of book art:

Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed.

More photos of Dettmer's work and an interview here. On the role of the web:

The internet has been great because it has been self-perpetuating for my own work. After the work, I think the most important thing is to take good images and to allow others to grab them and let them spread. I don't twitter and I'm not on Facebook and I don't really have to promote myself at this point. It's a cliche but things really work from the bottom up now. I have been really fortunate with bloggers and other sites mentioning my work and that leads to magazines, newspapers and other press and more opportunities for my work to be exposed to an audience.

Glenn Beck talks to some cup-cakes.

Ellen Collett salutes the art of the police report:

Every event a cop responds to generates a report. Crime reports are written in neutral diction, and in the dispassionate uni-voice that’s testament to the academy’s ability to standardize writing. They feel generated rather than authored, the work of a single law enforcement consciousness rather than a specific human being.

So how can I identify Martinez from a single sentence? Why do his reports make me feel pity, terror, or despair? Make me want to put a bullet in someone’s brain—preferably a wife beater’s or a pedophile’s, but occasionally my own? How does he use words on paper to hammer at my heart? Like all great cops, Sergeant Martinez is a sneaky fucker. He’s also a master of inflection and narrative voice.

Claire Potter reads Brooks Palmer's Clutter Busting: Letting Go of What’s Holding You Back:

For academics, four shelves of books, double-shelved, that you have never read says:  “I’m worried I’m not smart enough!”  Or, “Maybe if other people see these books, they will recognize that I am smart.”  Meanwhile, the books sit there looking at you, sending another silent message:  “You bought us, now you are stuck with us.  Before you get to your own writing, or any reading that would give you pleasure, you have to make good on the promise to read us."

I had a library cull the other day. I'm an outlier because my hatred of clutter is particularly pathological and publishers send me books for free as part of their marketing – but it was remarkable how many crappy books were still sitting there, glaring at me. With iBooks and iPads, their accumulation is as unnecessary as sitting on piles of CDs. So my goal is to decide which 200 books are worth keeping to read in my dotage. In itself that's an interesting exercize in literary criticism.

But I remember the days when I would think of something I had read that would be apposite for a piece of writing and scour through several possible books to see if I could remember the precise source. I relied on my margin scribblings and indexes, and, of course, I could end up sitting on the floor reading something completely unrelated, while my asthma kicked in with the dust.

Now? Google. The hours saved. The shelves cleared. And the serendipities missed.

Members of the Russian art group Voina kissed policewomen this week after Medvedev changed the name of the force from "militsia" to "politsia." This isn't their first stunt:

Voina's antics have targeted police in the past, with the latest stunt involving turning over police cars in Saint Petersburg, after which two activists were jailed for several months and recently released on bail. Their most famous achievement however was painting a giant penis on one of the rising bridges in Saint Petersburg so that it rose to face the offices of the FSB security service.

English Russia collected stills of the kisses; Molly Finnegan has the video set to the Yiddish song "Down With the Police."

Jonathan Kirshner reviews four books on the economic collapse and looks ahead:

[B]anks emerged from the crisis bigger, more powerful, and more systemically dangerous than ever before. They are playing by most of the old rules and all of the old norms. We are now left with six gargantuan, interconnected, too-big-to-fail financial institutions that are a threat to our economy and our democracy. Johnson and Kwak (and Stiglitz and Roubini and Mihm) believe they need to be broken up. It seems almost certain this will not happen.