Author: Jessie Roberts

by Jessie Roberts

Marvin Heiferman thinks we shouldn’t call photography a “universal language”:

People talk about photography being a universal language but really it’s not; it’s multiple languages. The dialogues you can have with neuroscientists about photographic images are as interesting and as provocative as the dialogues you can have with artists. People have wildly different contexts in which they use photographs — different criteria for assessing them, reasons for taking them, priorities when looking at and evaluating them. It creates incredible possibilities for dialogue when you realize the medium is so flexible and so useful.

How we should think about photography:

Galleries and museums have spent the last 30 or 40 years trying to say this is art. Yes it is, but on a bigger level it’s life. Photography is all about life. You can have a philosophical conversation about a red light photograph that you got a parking ticket for as much as you can over something you see in a museum. We need a broader appreciation of photography as it comes to play a more central role in our lives; it shapes our imagination; it shapes our values; it shapes our activities. We have to understand that better.

(Photo by Flickr user Kelly Hofer)

by Jessie Roberts

“[T]he fact is … he was a godawful writer. He was so bad,” writes Peter Damien of H.P. Lovecraft:

A Lovecraft story isn’t delivered so much as thudded down on the table in front of you like a quivering glob of wet cement. So the writing isn’t great by any stretch of the imagination. And the man himself wasn’t that great either, a fairly unpleasant, incredibly racist guy who had a bit more sympathy for Adolf Hitler than you’d really hope for out of your 20^th Century Icons of Writing list. He wrote a bunch. He wasn’t that successful. He died. The stories lingered. And why? Because the ideas beneath the ugly exterior were astonishing.

The notions of vast and ancient gods, hidden texts and cults, madness, and insanity in the realization that there was a world beyond ours and it was too horrifying to comprehend–all of his ideas were themselves amazing things. It’s just that Lovecraft lacked the capability to do anything useful with them himself. To use a perhaps wobbly metaphor, it’s as if Lovecraft wrote piles and piles of source code, but never thought to compile it into a beautiful and functional piece of software. So instead, the world was greeted with pages of source code, which, the world not being made up solely of programmers, did not read smoothly, did not look pretty, and was not interesting. The remarkable thing is all the people who have later come along and compiled that source code of ideas into amazing works of art.

Previous Dish on Lovecraft’s legacy here.

by Jessie Roberts

Jim Davies describes how superstition arises from circumstance:

In 1948 the Polish born British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski published a book on a study he conducted of the fishermen of the Trobriand Islands. Sometimes they fished in an inner lagoon, where fishing was pretty predictable. Every time they fished there, they got pretty much the same kind of catch. But they also fished in the open ocean, where the fish were bigger and harder to catch. Sometimes people would get great catches, and other times, terrible ones. The lure of the very rare great catch proved too tempting for the Trobrianders, so they ventured into the open ocean despite the odds—and developed a set of superstitions. These included rituals performed during fishing and the casting of magic spells.

The circumstance dictated the explosion of rituals. We might think this is a completely human adaptation. But it turns out that the tendency to resort to ritual in an effort to manage a challenging situation isn’t exclusive to humans. In the same year that Malinowski published his experiment, American psychologist B. F. Skinner found that he could generate superstitious behavior in pigeons. He taught pigeons to press down on a bar in exchange for food. All animals can learn to do this, and this learning process is called reinforcement. But an interesting thing happens if the food is given at random intervals—that is, pressing the bar sometimes does, and sometimes does not, produce a treat, with no discernable pattern. Under these conditions, but not under reliable conditions, the pigeon will start repeating arbitrary, idiosyncratic behaviors before pressing the bar. It might bob its head, or turn around twice. The pigeon becomes superstitious.

by Jessie Roberts

Kyle Vanhemert crafted a photo essay from screenshots of Jeffrey Martin’s 150-gigapixel panorama of Toyko:

[I]n an image this large, where so much physical space is captured in such high resolution, there’s also, inevitably, art. Or at least fragments that are artful. It’s a little bit like a photographic version of the infinite monkeys theorem. Photograph so much life, and some of it’s bound to be evocative, in one way or another. So, on a recent afternoon, I spent three hours immersed in this frozen metropolis, searching not for sordid happenings but for those scattered bits of beauty. …

On a basic level, mine was an exercise in curation. I clicked and dragged this truly massive image across my laptop screen until something interesting wound up inside of its borders. I took screenshots of things that I would have taken photographs of had I been there in person–compositions that piqued my aesthetic interest, for one reason or another. Coming out of my three-hour Tokyo excursion was strange and disorienting–some unique virtual variety of jet lag. But the folder of screenshots I ended up with was even stranger. Did I take these photographs? Did Jeffrey Martin? Are they photographs at all? Are any of them worth a damn?

He concludes by noting that “estimates put the number of pictures being generated everyday above a billion” and that “as that number grows, finding signal amidst all that noise will inevitably become a more viable artistic pursuit.”

(Photo: Jeffrey Martin via Kyle Vanhemert)

by Jessie Roberts

Anthropologists conducted a comparative analysis of six Boston-area coffee shops, including three Starbucks locations:

The anthropologists conducted their observations at Pavement Coffee House in Copley Square, 1369 Coffee House in Central Square, Diesel Café in Davis Square, and in three nearby Starbucks locations. They focused their observations on five categories, derived by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, that describe how urban, social spaces function: how social and welcoming a place is; the arrangement of seating; the activities taking place there (work, socialization, leisure); amenities (like wi-fi and power outlets); and the overall atmosphere, as measured by music volume, volume of chatter, wall color, lighting, and décor.

The biggest surprise was that, on the whole, Starbucks actually provided a more welcoming environment than any of the three local coffee houses. They credited the Central Square Starbucks with having the most vibrant sense of community, and observed that the baristas there knew many patrons by name and could anticipate their orders. The anthropologists also noted that the Starbucks baristas were friendlier to new customers than the bespoke hipsters behind the counter at the local places: “The Starbucks baristas would help customers by explaining the many options available and even offering suggestions. In contrast, the baristas at the independently-owned coffee houses were more aloof and would just wait or sometimes stare at a customer, offering minimal assistance.” The Starbucks friendliness advantage was further accentuated by its greater amenities. In particular, the locally owned coffee shops were more restrictive with their Internet policies, either charging for wi-fi access (Diesel Café and 1369 Coffee House) or setting a cap on daily Internet use (Pavement Coffee House).

(Photo by Flickr user tawalker)

by Jessie Roberts

Mary Ruefle, whose work the Dish recently featured, responds to an interview question about the role of spirituality in her work:

My preoccupation with God—what you call the theological—is not aesthetic—that would be awful! Any art[ist] who encounters the spiritual in their work is driven to do so out of a genuine preoccupation with existence, with being. At least I hope so. I am not religious in the traditional sense of the word—I do not belong to a church, or practice any one of the numbers of ritualistic belief systems. But I am interested in them all, and I find in each something of essence. As for poetry, of course it is a spiritual practice, in so far as it celebrates or laments the human spirit, in so far as it is always deeply curious about something—it could be language, or the natural world, it could be the absurdities of culture, or human beings in general or in specific—how to live, what to do, these are the questions of poetry. Environmental concerns—they are ultimately spiritual ones; if you are interested in how persons will experience the world in the future, well, that’s something you can’t see. What is the point of recycling if you don’t have faith that it is the right thing to be doing? That it impacts something you can’t see and don’t understand.

by Jessie Roberts

Phil Hartman auditions for Saturday Night Live:

Excerpts from a lively oral history of SNL auditions:

JIMMY FALLON: In makeup, they go, “Hey, Jimmy, some advice: Lorne Michaels doesn’t laugh when you audition. So don’t let that throw you.” Then the audio guy, he goes, “Hey, little advice — Lorne doesn’t like to laugh.” I’m like, “O.K.” Then Marci [Klein, a longtime “SNL” producer] comes out: “Jimmy, they’re ready for you. But hey, a little advice for you. If Lorne doesn’t laugh, be cool.” I’m like, what is this guy’s problem? He’s doing a comedy show. Why does he not like to laugh?

CHERI OTERI: I felt good because I heard Lorne laugh a little bit. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, laughing his very subtle, subtle laughter. Almost regal laughter.

RACHEL DRATCH: I didn’t get it that year [of her first audition]. They hired Horatio [Sanz], Jimmy [Fallon] and Chris Parnell, and they said: “We’re not taking any women this year. But maybe next year.” I was at peace with it.

SETH MEYERS: They flew me all the way back to New York to meet with Lorne. I realized later that he was doing a final personality vet. He said, “Do you think you can live in New York?” And I thought, “Does anyone blow it at this stage?” Does anybody get this far in the process, and then is like, “It’s definitely New York? Well, if you guys can’t be flexible on that, I’m not sure if I can be flexible on that.”

WILL FERRELL: [Mr. Michaels] never really has a moment where he says, “So, welcome to the show.” He phrases it, “So, we’re bringing you to New York.” And I thought, God, another audition? And he goes, “Cheri’s going to be there, too.” And that’s when it hit me: Oh, my God. I got the gig. But I didn’t have a celebratory moment with him. Then I got self-conscious, like it came across that I didn’t care about getting the job. So I stood up real quick, and I’m like: “Well, gosh, thank you. I just want to shake your hand.” And he said, “Do whatever you have to do.”

A collection of audition tapes viewable online is here.