04w29:1 June 16th Posted July 11th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 29 number 1 (June 16th) ——————————————————————— Super Theory Woman | Jerry Saltz http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/jsaltz/saltz7-8-04.asp ” On the night of June 16, 2004, I was a guest on the MSNBC talk show featuring the strangely likable, peculiarly white-under-the-eyes Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida and rabid right-winger […] The first ten-minute segment is a blur to me and seemed to last two seconds. All I remember is Scarborough coming on and asking, “Where’s the outrage?†Then I think he talked about Fraser being a prostitute and breaking the law and asked me, “If I snuck up from behind you and smashed you over the head with a brick and then poured salt in the open wound, would you call that art?†All I could think to answer was “That would be bad art, Joe.†I did pointedly ask if either of them had actually seen Fraser’s videotape. Unsurprisingly, neither had, to which I said something like, “Oh, so you’re like those people who ban books without reading them.†[…] whether you like it or not, Fraser should be commended for doing something brave, and in the middle of a minefield. Outside the art world she will be labeled a slut and a nut. The art world will likely call her a narcissistic showoff. But the art world is a place that says that you should be free.” Joyce’s long-lost, lustful letter smashes auction record | CBC http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2004/07/09/Arts/sexyjoyce040709.html “The famously erotic missive, initiated by an equally explicit first letter from Barnacle, includes Joyce’s recollection of past sexual encounters with Barnacle describing the time she had opened his trousers and ‘made a man of him’ – and shares his ‘ungovernable lust’ for her. Calling Barnacle ‘my darling little blackguard’ and ‘my strange-eyed whore,’ the letter is signed ‘heaven forgive my madness, Jim.’ Joyce and Barnacle met in Dublin on June 16, 1904 – the day he later immortalized in his masterwork Ulysses. Later that year, they left Dublin and never returned together to Ireland. They married in 1931, about a decade before the author’s death. “ Abracadabra , The Magic of Theory | Timothy Comeau http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/commentary/2004/06/abracadabra-magic-of-theory.html “Here’s the thing. I’m an artist, so I think I can say I know how the creative process works. I think I’ve had enough dealings with other artists to know that this is usually how it works for most of us. And my feeling is that she thought this guy was hot and wanted to do him; further, she had the wherewithal to frame it within the context of her practice and using a magic spell of theory was able to get her sextape on the wall. She didn’t even give it a title, which is really revealing. Unlike Paris Hilton, who was famous for her green-light blowjobs before her ignorance of Wal-Mart, this from the get-go was meant to be shown off, but it was also an excuse for Fraser to get laid. All well and good and I congratulate her on her cleverness and the originality of her seduction. But the work does not ‘raise ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships’. It’s a simple porn. It might raise these issues if you were an alien. Let’s ignore for a second how typically pathetic that press release is and just assume that all art galleries are currently engaged in the same bullshit, thinking this is what we – an audience of intelligent people – want and expect. And that I think that’s what I finally understand – the art-world orients itself to non-humans. The texts that accompany art works are meant to explain them to dolphins, squid, elephants and ravens, or whatever intelligent non-human life is in outer space. To entertain the ‘questions raised’ is to enter a state where we deny our common humanity for the cheap thrill of speaking of a sex video in terms of the sociological, something most likely done with others in a social situation to begin with, and something that has been done to death already to no apparent end.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Sunday 11 July 2004 @ 6:30 PM
04w22:1 Followups Posted May 23rd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 22 number 1 (followups) ——————————————————————— Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection | Indiana University http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/cushman/index.jsp “Charles Weever Cushman, amateur photographer and Indiana University alumnus, bequeathed approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slides to his alma mater. The photographs in this collection bridge a thirty-two year span from 1938 to 1969, during which time he extensively documented the United States as well as other countries.” Followup to the posting (04w20:2) on pre-1945 colour photography. Virtual Worlds | Edward Castronova http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=294828 “In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world called ‘Norrath’, populated by an exotic but industrious people. About 12,000 people call this place their permanent home, although some 60,000 are present there at any given time. The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath’s currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many. The population is growing rapidly, swollen each each day by hundreds of emigres from various places around the globe, but especially the United States. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new world is its location. Norrath is a virtual world that exists entirely on 40 computers in San Diego. Unlike many internet ventures, virtual worlds are making money — with annual revenues expected to top USD 1.5 billion by 2004 — and if network effects are as powerful here as they have been with other internet innovations, virtual worlds may soon become the primary venue for all online activity.” Followup on the Walrus Article by Clive Thompson (04w21:1) on the economics of internet gaming. (The paper that started it all). Sticking up for painting | Franklin Einspruch http://www.artblog.net/?name=2004-05-19-16-38-painting “I could go on, but my point is that even someone as pro-painting as I am recognizes that art is not a zero-sum game between painting and all other media. Maybe this Gopnik article is a reaction to David Hockney’s recent statements about the superiority of painting, but Gopnik’s thesis is flawed for the same reasons that Hockney’s is. Every medium has particular strengths and weaknesses – otherwise artists wouldn’t prefer one over the other – and all media can be used well or used badly. Gopnik’s attitude is as conservative as Hughes’s, just the other way around. To praise art for being unlike painting is as ridiculous as criticizing it for being unlike painting, and the Post article full of ridiculousness […] Gopnik has an additional problem here that makes him sound desperate while Hughes sounds authoritative – Hughes is writing about a committed painter, Gopnik is not.” Followup to the last posting loosely related to painting. —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Sunday 23 May 2004 @ 2:23 PM
04w20:2 The Colourful Past Posted May 10th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 20 number 2 (the colourful past) This selection constitutes a “good see” over a good read. Two examples from the past of colour photography over the usual black and white. The first is from a recently published book of photographs from the late 1930s and early 1940s. The second selection is of Russia in 1910. I’ve sent two links for that one since the first details the process the photographer used at the time and the efforts made to produce the images, and the second offers thumbnails for quick browsing. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Poverty’s Palette | New York Times Magazine http://tinyurl.com/36cuq “In our mind’s eye, much of the past exists in black and white. This is particularly true of Depression-era America, in large part because of the unforgettable monochrome images created by the New Deal-sponsored photographers who traversed the country in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, chronicling the lives of its citizens. About 160,000 of their pictures are collected in the archives of the Library of Congress. Less well known are the roughly 1,600 of these photographs that were shot in color — most notably by the photographers Russell Lee and Jack Delano — using Kodachrome film, which Kodak introduced in 1936. This month, the Library of Congress and Harry N. Abrams are making a substantial collection of these images available for the first time in a book called Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43.” NOTE: The New York Times requires registration; but if you’ve looked at NYT content before and haven’t deleted your cookies, that may not be necessary. However if prompted, use the following username:goodreader100 and password: goodreads (courtesy of goodreads.ca). The Empire That Was Russia | The Library of Congress http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/f?prok:0:./temp/~pp_urXc: and http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/ “In the early 1900s Prokudin-Gorskii formulated an ambitious plan for a photographic survey of the Russian Empire that won the support of Tsar Nicholas II. Between 1909-1912, and again in 1915, he completed surveys of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car provided by the Ministry of Transportation. […] This exhibition features a sampling of Prokudin-Gorskii’s historic images produced through the new process; the digital technology that makes these superior color prints possible; and celebrates the fact that for the first time many of these wonderful images are available to the public. ” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Monday 10 May 2004 @ 1:56 PM
04w13:2 Nipples Posted March 25th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 13 number 2 (nipples) ——————————————————————— Lennon art trial secrets revealed | BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3561607.stm “The newly-released papers show the initial warrant was issued under the Obscene Publications Act. And a letter from prosecuting counsel Kenneth Horn suggests a prosecution under this act would have a good chance of success. […] But the file also preserves a letter from artist PFC Fuller of Maidstone, Kent, warning of the potential impact of a guilty verdict. […] The artist even warns that the monarch could end up being prosecuted if such a precedent was set: ‘I understand that HM the Queen has some highly erotic work by Fragonard.’ ” Transatlantic cleavage | The Economist http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2405081 “This seems odd to Britons, whose smaller broadcast channels keep themselves afloat on a sea of smut. Not only tabloid newspapers, but also the Times and even the Daily Telegraph (average age of reader 55) showed the star’s spangled nipple, waving joyfully in the wind. Why the difference? Maybe because secular Britons are no longer shockable, while Americans have clung to their religion and associated puritanism. But the difference does not seem to be one of demand. Miss Jackson’s breast topped internet search subjects after the incident was reported. The structure of the media market seems a likelier explanation. Britain has ten competing national newspapers. Sensationalism jostles with pornography in the pages of the tabloids; softer versions of both infect the broadsheets. America’s papers, which tend to be local near-monopolies, can afford a loftier attitude. Newspapers set the tone for television, and the regulators’ attitudes. ” Verrocchio in Washington | Charles T. Downey http://ionarts.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_ionarts_archive.html#107990382323128583 “A fourth famous statue of David, by Andrea di Michele Cione (known by the nickname Verrocchio, c. 1435 – 1488), was cast in bronze around 1466. About 47-1/4 inches tall, this statue is now in the collection of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, in Florence, but for the past several months it has made an unusual tour outside of Italy, for the first time since a trip to the United States in 1939 and 1940. It was on exhibit at the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, Georgia, from November 18, 2003, to February 8, 2004 (their Web feature on the sculpture is remarkably well done and very informative: if it is kept online, I will assign it to my Humanities students next year); […] On a completely different note, could the attire of Verrocchio’s David (see detail at right) have been the inspiration for Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl?” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Thursday 25 March 2004 @ 1:11 AM
04w10:2 History Posted March 3rd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 10 number 2 (history) ——————————————————————— The Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory | Pierre Nora http://www.iwm.at/t-22txt3.htm “It is of crucial importance, for it has shattered the unity of historical time, that fine, straightforward linearity which traditionally bound the present and the future to the past. In effect, it was the way in which a society, nation, group or family envisaged its future that traditionally determined what it needed to remember of the past to prepare that future; and this in turn gave meaning to the present, which was merely a link between the two. Broadly speaking, the future could be interpreted in one of three ways, which themselves determined the image people had of the past. It could be envisaged as a form of restoration of the past, a form of progress or a form of revolution. Today, we have discarded these three ways of interpreting the past, which made it possible to organize a ‘history’. We are utterly uncertain as to what form the future will take. And because of this uncertainty, the present-which, for this very reason no doubt, now has a battery of technical means at its disposal for preserving the past- puts us under an obligation to remember. We do not know what our descendants will need to know about ourselves in order to understand their own lives. And this inability to anticipate the future puts us under an obligation to stockpile, as it were, in a pious and somewhat indiscriminate fashion, any visible trace or material sign that might eventually testify to what we are or what we will have become. ” Artifact: Visionary Art | Charles Paul Freund http://www.reason.com/0402/artifact.shtml “These spectacles, auctioned in the fall by Sotheby’s, are said to have belonged to J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), the British painter whose wholly original treatment of luminosity late in his career inspired the Impressionists and revolutionized art. But British eye surgeon James McGill, a student of Turner’s work, believes the glasses are evidence that Turner’s late style was actually a result of his deteriorating vision. Turner ‘was painting exactly what he saw,’ McGill told Britain’s Guardian. ” Artifact: Webcam in the Round | Charles Paul Freund http://www.reason.com/0401/artifact.shtml “Behold the Tholos, where the webcam meets the circular, painted panorama of the 19th century. The device, which features a 23-foot wrap-around screen some 10 feet high, works in pairs: People gathered at one Tholos can see real-time, life-size HDTV images of people around a distant partner device, with microphones enabling users to converse.” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 03 March 2004 @ 2:09 PM
04w08:1 Nazi Porn Posted February 17th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 8 number 1 (Nazi Porn) ——————————————————————— High-definition porn has arrived. That’s bad news for HDTV. | Brendan I. Koerner http://slate.msn.com/id/2094788 “The HDTV microscope could kill the fantasy that the adult industry peddles. Hollywood is already learning this lesson the hard way: HDTV has revealed that some glamorous stars look a lot more pedestrian than we’ve been led to believe. And the makeup tricks that protect the aging and less-than-perfect are easy to spot in HDTV. When technology pundit Phillip Swann first saw the Charlie’s Angels movie in HDTV, he was taken aback by Cameron Diaz’s appearance. ‘Diaz looks like a different person,’ he marveled in the pages of Television Week, noting that her face has been ravaged by acne over the years. ‘She’s still very pretty. But to be very frank, I doubt that she would make People’s ‘Most Beautiful’ list.’ ” The Eloquence of Pornography | Laura Kipnis http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/porn/special/eloquence.html “Pornography should interest us, because it’s intensely and relentlessly about us. It involves the roots of our culture and the deepest corners of the self. It’s not just friction and naked bodies: pornography has eloquence. It has meaning, it has ideas. It even has redeeming ideas. So why all the distress? […] Despite knowing this, it’s difficult to envision contemporary pornography as a form of culture or as a mode of politics. There’s virtually no discussion of pornography as an expressive medium in the positive sense — the only expressing it’s presumed to do is of misogyny or social decay. That it might have more complicated social agendas, or that future historians of the genre might produce interesting insights about pornography’s relation to this particular historical and social moment — these are radically unthought thoughts.” Porn und Drang | Luke Harding http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1146258,00.html “Before submitting his manuscript to his publisher last summer, Kunkel had researched long and hard into one of the most subterranean aspects of the Nazi era – a series of erotic home movies known as the Sachsenwald films, shot secretly in 1941. Officially, pornography was forbidden under the Nazis; in reality, however, the films were not only screened privately for the amusement of senior Nazi figures, but were also traded in north Africa for insect repellent and other commodities” The death pit | Janina Struk http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1131825,00.html “Finally, whether the scene was photographed at Sniatyn, Bochnia, Sniadowo, Lodz or Drohobycz – towns hundreds of miles apart, or in Latvia or the Soviet Union or somewhere else, and whether it was taken in 1939, 1941, 1943 or 1944, we do not know. So what does it tell us? In a sense, it says everything. That the Germans and their collaborators took photographs of their crimes to keep as mementoes and trophies. That brave resisters smuggled such images out of their occupied countries to provide evidence of Nazi atrocities. That the Holocaust has at times been promoted, at other times suppressed, as a central story of the second world war. That the death pit image has been made to serve the propaganda purposes variously of the Nazis, the resistance and the Warsaw pact. That curators, documentary makers and publishers have been remarkably promiscuous and cavalier in their appropriation of it as evidence for whatever story they intend. But in another sense, it tells us nothing. We have no certain knowledge of the perpetrators and the victims. Of the lives of the old man with the shoe and the young boy with the hat whose last moments we presume to witness, we will never know anything ” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 17 February 2004 @ 1:30 PM
0406:3 Space Shuttle Posted February 2nd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 6 number 3 (space shuttle) This selection commemorates the Shuttle Disaster of a year ago. Last Sunday on NBC News’ Meet the Press, Howard Dean criticized Bush’s economics by saying, “He’s promising a trillion-dollar tax cut and a trip to Mars,” and I had to do a double-take because it was a literal as opposed to rhetorical statement. It can be argued that the new drive to go to Mars is partially due to the gross waste of expenditure and resources that the shuttle represented, and these year old articles articulate a view that NASA is a test-pilot boys club, fulfilling the baby-boomer tendency to squander potential for a yahoo good time. The third article is from last August and discuses the bureaucratic culture which allowed the disaster to happen. At least now it can said that NASA has a legitimate goal, and future generations will not consider the cost frivolous, anymore than we consider the Moon images we grew up with as a waste of money. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Was the space shuttle useful? Not really | David Owen http://slate.msn.com/id/2078104 “The scientific investigations undertaken during Columbia’s final voyage were similar to those conducted during Glenn’s mission five years earlier; indeed, they were similar to the experiments conducted on nearly every manned American space voyage that has ever taken place. For example, eight Australian spiders aboard Columbia added to our understanding of weightless web-weaving, a subject NASA first studied aboard Skylab in 1973.” (Article date: 4 Feb 2003) Astronauts – Why they shouldn’t be heroes | Chris Suellentrop http://slate.msn.com/id/2078230 “Before this past weekend, many Americans viewed the ‘Space Age’ as a kitschy thing of the past, like AstroTurf or I Dream of Jeannie. The great scientific challenge of the day, the one the president dared the nation to aspire to, was the creation of hydrogen-powered cars. Space? Been there, done that. As astronauts boldly went where many men had gone before, we forgot how bold they were. ‘It’s a job that doesn’t have anything to do with exploring space,’ NASA’s first flight director sniffed to USA Today in 2001. The Right Stuff flyboys had been replaced with nerdy tinkerers and scientists, seemingly as carefully selected for race and gender as a Benetton ad. […]In 1981, the buzz over the Columbia’s first flight was that space travel was about to lose its glamour. And the shuttle did exactly what it set out to do. We briefly achieved the dream of yawning as rockets hurtle men and women into outer space.” (Article date: 6 Feb 2003) A harsh critique of NASA’s culture | Peter N. Spotts http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0827/p01s02-usgn.html “Until now, Mr. Chase adds, ‘NASA hasn’t been allowed to look higher than low-earth orbit for human space flight.’ The shuttle and ISS programs often appear to be ends in themselves, when they could well serve as stepping-stones to human missions to Mars or back to the moon. Such efforts also could boost broader public interest in human space exploration, analysts say, noting that while polls indicate support for the program overall, the public appears to show little enthusiasm for space trucks moving back and forth between Earth and the space station.” (Article date: 27 Aug 2003) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Monday 02 February 2004 @ 2:57 AM
