04w08:2 Tommy Toomuch Reality Posted February 18th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 8 number 2 (tommy toomuch reality) ——————————————————————— eBay auction of ‘eight-six-seven-five-three-oh-nieeine’ on hold | Ian Demsky http://tinyurl.com/2hl8s “The phone number popularized by 1982’s one-hit wonder Tommy Tutone – Eight-six-seven-five-three-oh-nieeine – rings into a Murfreesboro used-car dealership in area code 615. Tuning in to national attention for the auction of New York’s 212 version of the number on eBay, the dealership put its number on the Internet auction block Monday. […] The bizarre convergence of ’80s pop culture and offbeat Internet auctions made ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday. Before the auction was canceled, New York’s ‘Jenny’ was going for more than $200,000. ” My Big Fat Obnoxious Prank | Joy Press http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0407/tv.php “Somehow we’ve grown accustomed to violation as prime-time entertainment. Violation of privacy – not only do we contend with security cameras in public spaces, the invasive threat of the USA Patriot Act, and cell phone users covertly snapping photos of people, but we also have hidden TV camera crews prowling through once anonymous city streets, looking to catch us at our most vulnerable. And violation of trust -more and more reality shows weave blatant deception into their basic premise, throwing unwitting victims into situations that range from the surreal and embarrassing to the downright traumatic. […]Critics may mock hidden-camera shows as the lowest rung of reality schlock, but the daddy of them all – Allen Funt’s Candid Camera -began with noble intentions. Funt believed that by secretly filming, he could reveal how average people respond to societal pressures and conflicts. ‘The worst thing, and I see it over and over, is how easily people can be led by any kind of authority figure,’ Funt once said. […] As McCarthy points out to me, ‘Networks have standards-and-practices offices to oversee things like swearing and sexuality and violence, but there’s nothing comparable to the institutional review boards that looks at the ethics of these programs.’ It’s left to the shows’ producers to think about where to draw the line – or not. ” Long urls made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 18 February 2004 @ 1:21 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
04w07:3 Text Messaging Posted February 13th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 7 number 3 (text messaging) ——————————————————————— ‘Yo, can u plz help me write English? | Steve Friess http://www.stevefriess.com/archive/usatoday/internetlingo.htm “Carl Sharp knew there was a problem when he spotted his 15-year-old son’s summer job application: ‘i want 2 b a counselor because i love 2 work with kids. ‘That night, the father in Phoenix removed the AOL Instant Messenger program from the family computer and informed both his children they were no longer to chat with friends online. […] Writer David Samson of Beverly Hills, Calif., notices the same problem. Teenage fans of his humor books e-mail him and show little regard for formality. He cites one note: ‘yo mr dave can u plz write me a funny speech about any animal cause i need it for school.’ ‘They seem to avoid every rule I was ever taught about how to get a response from anybody, especially an adult,’ says Samson, 51 … ” MSN Spoken Here | Charles Foran http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=04/01/13/1755252&tid=1 “Two qualities of text messaging make it unique. First, where most street argots are particular to a society, this one is fast becoming universal. Its ‘street,’ so to speak, is a vast one — the World Wide Web. Second, for all its resemblances to oral speech, text messaging isn’t spoken. It is written and, even then, hardly in the traditional sense. It exists solely on the computer or cell-phone screen, and is meant to be as ephemeral as an unrecorded, real-time conversation. ” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Friday 13 February 2004 @ 5:34 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
04w04:1 *POWERPOINTLESS* Posted January 25th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | * POWERPOINTLESS * 2004 week 4 number 1 A recent conversation on the pros and cons of PowerPoint vs. good old fashioned slides promted these selections. On the one hand, PowerPoint is derided for oversimplifying and on the other David Byrne thinks it’s an art form. – Tim ——————————————————————— PowerPoint Makes You Dumb | Clive Thompson http://tinyurl.com/2evbu “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation — where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it.” Power Point is Evil | Edward Tufte http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2_pr.html “In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about eight seconds’ worth of silent reading material. With so little information per slide, many, many slides are needed. Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentially, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships.” Learning to Love Power Point | David Byrne http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1_pr.html “Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent. The pieces became like short films: Some were sweet, some were scary, and some were mysterioso. I discovered that even without text, I could make works that were “about” something, something beyond themselves, and that they could even have emotional resonance. What had I stumbled upon? Surely some techie or computer artist was already using this dumb program as an artistic medium.” Turning Heads with PowerPoint | Xeni Jardin http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,61485,00.html “This is exactly what was intended by the people who developed this program. They hoped that this tool would allow people to bypass the middleman, to communicate without having to work through a gauntlet of graphic designers or AV professionals. Do it yourself. After all, I learned how to do it in only a couple of hours.” The Epistemology of David Byrne | Brian Braiker http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3703506/ “They all make assumptions about what you want to do with them and what kind of use you’re going to put them to, and therefore how you lead you’re life and what’s important to you. And it comes down to really simple things. Like in address books, it has a slot for your parents and your house and your spouse. That makes assumptions about how you live–and most of them are absolutely true–but what I’m talking about is stuff that’s not visible. It’s about how the architecture of the software makes assumptions about how you do things. This is going to sound high-falutin’, but it’s in the same way that Wittgenstein would say that the limits of our thought are the limits of our language. What we can say, what we can verbalize or write, determines what we can think. ” Long urls made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Sunday 25 January 2004 @ 2:54 PM
04w03:3 Posted January 23rd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 3 number 3 ——————————————————————— It’s Time, Once Again, To Kill The Past | Charlie Finch http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/finch/finch9-20-02.asp “In 2002, nobody gives a shit if you were once insulted by Barbara Kruger. She is old hat, and so is the star system of art which arose in the past 40 years of the last millennium. […] What the young artists need is exile: get out of New York, get out of London, get out of Berlin, find your own place […] cream over yourself and your personal circle, without hungering for validation from above…”(Article date: 20 Sept 2002) How an Art Scene Became a Youthscape | Benjamin Genocchio http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/23/arts/design/23DEAL.html?pagewanted=all “Mr. Reich says that for the younger dealers the art business is less about making money than about expressing the values and experiences of his generation. ‘It’s all about being happy about whatever you can be happy about,’ he said. ‘My generation grew up in a time when we didn’t have heroes. You grew up believing you were being hoodwinked and manipulated — and knowing you were, but learning to enjoy it because it came in fun colors or was on MTV. ‘The bottom line,’ he added, ‘was that I really wanted to have a gallery, and sometimes you just have to start doing something with whatever you have at your disposal.'” Note: NYT may require a free one time registration (but then you’ll be able to read whatever you want without going through the hassle again). —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Friday 23 January 2004 @ 3:20 PM
