Month: March 2012

Photographer Dominic Bracco tells the story of a couple murdered in Juarez:

These people were killed by one single bullet. The woman is far into her pregnancy. The hit man came in from the left-hand side of the car and fired a bullet into the man’s head when they were embracing and killed both of them.

The violence is really hard to show in a way that is humane. It is almost impossible to give any kind of dignity to the people that have died, because of how horribly they have been maimed. Taking pictures of those things, you feel like you are supporting what the narcos are doing because you are spreading out their message of horror. So I really became obsessed with making a picture that was intimate – while still showing violence – and encompassed humanity and dignity. I wanted to give these people a story.

More on Bracco's project here.

Today's genre movies have to wink at audiences in order to survive:

As much as it is straightforward entertainment, "21 Jump Street" is a buddy cop movie about buddy cop movies, a film in which a significant part of the humor — Ice Cube mugging as an angry police captain while his cop-baiting "Straight Outta Compton" verse plays on the soundtrack, say — depends on viewer savvy and facts that can’t be located within the script. … Viewers raised on a steady diet of 15-tab Internet browsing and "Family Guy" are fundamentally more clever than they used to be; when the new "21 Jump Street" mocks its own premise by including a line about how the creators of the revived "Jump Street" program were "out of ideas," no one in the audience is likely to miss the joke.

Flavorwire hosts a forum on what subculture will follow hipsters. Robert Sloane's take:

Predicting what comes after the hipster is almost as impossible as predicting the hippies would have been in 1959, or predicting the punks in 1967 (unless you knew that the Velvet Underground’s mostly-unheard debut album would give rise to a whole scene of like-minded folks a decade later). Subcultures usually form in response to some sort of perceived cultural conformity or hegemony. For me, today, that’s technology and the Internet, and in a way, some of today’s hipsters participate in some activities that try to eschew modernity (craft food and spirits, knitting, canning, etc.). However, I can’t see a youth subculture forming to react against modern technology, since it has become so intertwined with modern life.

William Deresiewicz wonders if politics will replace consumerism:

The best bet for the next thing would be for something to emerge from the Occupy movement: less concerned about music and clothing, more concerned about politics; less concerned about differentiating yourself from the people around you, more concerned about working with them; less concerned about status, more concerned about social change; less ironic, more earnest; less polished, more grungy.

Touching on many of the ideas above, Aaron Lake Smith revisits Richard Linklater’s 1991 film Slacker:

The same question can be asked about subcultures that Jared Diamond asks about civilizations in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: why do some survive and others perish? A college in town ensures a continuous flow of warm young bodies to the scene—idealism on tap. It takes successive generations of people sticking around, suffering and dying off like the first Pilgrims, to finally cement down the freak flag. And then just as quickly as a culture rises, it can return to dust. Places like Williamsburg, Austin, Portland, Oregon, and Athens, Georgia rose to prominence fueled by their lively, yeasty subcultures. Today these places, like Britain after the Empire, live on in an afterglow, preceded by their own loud cultural legacy. They become museum-like, historical Meccas of hipsterdom. That mysterious youth alchemy that once drove them slowly atrophies and becomes parody.

A new study led by Debby Herbenick put reports of exercise-induced orgasms to the test:

The "orgasm" group mostly said during the experiences they weren't having a sexual fantasy or thinking about someone they were attracted to. Of the women who had orgasms during exercise, about 45 percent said their first experience was linked to abdominal exercises; 19 percent linked to biking/spinning; 9.3 percent linked to climbing poles or ropes; 7 percent reported a connection with weight lifting; 7 percent running;  the rest of the first-time experiences included various exercises, such as yoga, swimming, elliptical machines, aerobics and others.

One possible anatomical explanation:

The internal part of the clitoris extends into the pelvis, and exercise increases bloodflow and flexes muscles in the area. Sorry, we can’t tell you any more because the science of female orgasms is still poorly developed and even anatomy textbooks are getting it wrong (pdf). The authors of this paper are careful not to call these exercise-induced orgasms "coregasms," a word coined by the Internet literature, because there’s no evidence core muscles are actually involved. 

Lindy West is confused about the study:

Only 69% (yes, proceed with your giggling IF YOU MUST) of clandestine gymnasium-pleasure-havers are heterosexual? Does that seem weirdly low to anyone else? That means, if we go with the rough standard that 10% of the population is non-heterosexual, that lesbian and bisexual women are four times likelier to experience exercise-induced sexual pleasure. … Either lesbians (and bis — I do not forget you, bis) are just really into online questionnaires, or acoustic jock-jamz are the best aphrodisiac ever.

Herbenick answered questions about the study this week on her blog, including reports that men experience them as well. 

Owosso, Michigan, 5.59 pm

They have become big business in Britain:

Home Office figures show that Muslim men bring almost 12,000 women to Britain as spouses from the Middle East and the subcontinent every year. One reason for this is the perception that women with careers tend to be "a bit lippy" and don't make good wives, according to Parag Bhargava, a moustachioed natty dresser in blue shirt and sleeveless navy cardigan, whose more personalised and discreet introduction service in Southall, Middlesex – the Suman Marriage Bureau (established 1972) – claims to be the first and largest of its kind in Europe. The importing of foreign brides has led to a numbers problem, making it harder still for British Asian women to find husbands.

Skip to the 1:30 mark for an impressive take on lighting up the dance floor:

Robin Sloan highlights the meta-novelty:

It’s ostensibly TRON-themed, but that’s irrelevant to its coolness. What makes it so great is the way that it puts the techniques of video editing—freeze frames, jump cuts, motion trails—back up on stage, live. … To me, popping and locking and the stuttering, slow-mo dance moves on display (e.g.) here are basically inconceivable without video. We need to see human bodies moving this way on screens before we can imagine moving them that way out on the street.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

The New York Public Library is planning a renovation, called the Central Library Plan (CLP), that would move about 3 million books to New Jersey to make room for more computers. Caleb Crain decries the move despite its popularity among members:

Libraries should offer computer access, but it would be risky to stake too much of the library's identity on providing a particular technological service. Technologies change, and lately they've been changing quickly: witness all the now-little-used Ethernet ports in the tables of the third-floor reading room. What if the mayor's office were to decide a decade from now to provide city-wide wireless internet access? What if a decade from now, almost everyone has a smartphone and almost no one uses a laptop let alone a desktop computer? Then what would the purpose of the new CLP library be?

Crain also argues that the shift will especially hurt scholars who depend on the great research center.

The argument can be made: