Hoop Dreams
A seminal moment here – the excellent, Hulu.com allows us to post one of the all time great documentaries: Hoop Dreams. (US Only)
Emily
The London Times’ technology section ran this piece showing the current state of the art in 3d animation. Normally this stuff is not that interesting and just a bit naff. But, having used 3d animation software fairly intensively in the past, this does seem genuinely impressive.
Richard Dawkins – The Genius of Darwin: 2
In this second part of the series Dawkins progresses from the origin of species to the descent of man and what we know today about its implications.
He points out that as a program for living Darwinism is usually abhorrent, but that from Social Darwinists to Libertarians, kin selection and the resultant emergence of altruism as a natural outcome, has been ignored.
His point about Enron is especially pertinent: by periodically culling the people who they believed were the bottom 15% of performers, they encouraged individual ruthlessness rather than team players who would benefit the company as a whole, at the expense of their individual performance. Enron’s selection methods were unnatural rather than natural, and open to error of judgment. Unnatural selection was well known to animal breeders, centuries before Darwinism, but Natural Selection is different, there is no purpose and therefore no possible ideological attachment.
(This is the first of 5 parts of the second program in the series)
James Bond Creator Ian Flemming and the Other Ian Flemming – a fat man on the toilet, hurling expletives
Ian Flemming, holding his trademark cigarette holder, describes how he chose the name James Bond, to be deliberately ordinary, despite the glamorous nature of the character.
Flemming himself, of course, is similarly exotic, despite his relatively commonplace name. Which is why the video of another Ian Flemming, I just found on Youtube – a fat man sitting on the toilet, hurling expletives – is so particularly hilarious.
Stevie Wonder on Sesame Street
David France pointed out another musical gem from Sesame Street. Stevie Wonder performing Superstition, live, for the show.
Phillip Glass for Sesame Street
In 1979 Phillip Glass composed a series of pieces for Sesame Street called the geometry of circles. Well they say kids like repetition. Again.
New Romantics
Given the current predilection for hanging fringes in Indie bands, perhaps this tribal profile should be called ‘Old New Romantics’.
BMW Art Cars – Roy Lichtenstein
This is in German, Lishtenshtein und BMW cars, so it sounds right, and is really just a prelude so that I can rant about the artist, or rather, his fans.
I once saw an interview with one of the impoverished comic book artists whose drawings Lichtenstein had blown up, back projected and traced. It was quite sad to see him timidly suggest that his composition was slightly better and that Lichtenstein had missed something. Lichtenstein was less of an artist, than a curator, but he realized that to make the, so called, intelligentsia comprehend how iconic American comic book art was, required dumbing it down by making it bigger, brasher and bite sized. How ironic, and post modern, indeed.
David Barsalou has been sourcing the original art that Lichtenstein copied, here and here.
My only real objection with Lichtenstein is that some people who wax lyrical about his work don’t realize what he did. I think it is quite possible to take the seemingly moronic, minimally creative task of identifying things and turn that into a popular art form. That, after all, is the idea behind this and the other Curations sites.
Who Gets to Call it Art – Trailer
A trailer for a movie, I must get, about the New York art scene in the 60s.
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After the Revolution – Georgia
Worth linking to, even if there is no embed, a 20 minute, bleak, prescient, profile of Georgia from 2004.
“After the dramatic ‘Rose Revolution’ that saw him to power, will Saakashvili be able to unify his country?
The hardest tasks still lie ahead. Vast swathes of the country are outside his control. Having claimed independence, they answer to no one. Everywhere you turn in South Ossetia are signs of Russian influence. The police and soldiers wear Russian uniforms, cars have Russian numberplates and the region even runs on Russian time. But technically South Ossetia is part of Georgia. Saakashvili is doing his best to win back their support but any invasion would surely be bloody.”
I seems like the Russian invasion of Georgia is the inevitable result of 2 variables: natural resources and union.
Russia feeling it needs to be aggressive against splinter states to prevent fragmentation of other self identifying enclaves; and protecting access to oil routes. From the US Civil War to Iraq this is a feature of most conflict.
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