A voyage of discovery to see where America’s food comes from. This seems like a good topic, since where America’s food comes from has changed more in the last 20 years than the previous 100, replacing the bucolic ideal of the American cowboy rancher with giant agribusinesses and Yale graduate presidents in Stetsons.
(I like the idea of these extended clips for PBS documentaries)
The first in a 2 part series that takes the theme of conquering cold, as the premise for human progress.
Perhaps the trashy magazine aspect of the show about Japan where this clip was taken is the best format for the subject matter. In any case, expect to be deluged with stuff from it on SmashingTelly.
I love this clip about weird Japanese women’s fashion tribes, Gyaru, including the evolution of styles up to the exceptionally weird, reverse Geisha: Ganguro.
Here, the late, great, Maynard Smith talks about what it means to say something is living. Like many virtuosos, he makes something difficult seem simple, with utterly clear explanations – the lecture is a small masterpiece.
He considers that what some biologists (such as Stuart Kauffman) define as life i.e. self reproducing things that metabolize, does not differentiate between life and something like a flame and that we must always add heredity (of infinite possible variety) to account for what we consider to be truly alive.
This leads to life as seen from an information perspective i.e how we transmit information between generations, and he outlines 9 milestones in the evolution of life from this vantage point, from replicating molecules to electronic information communication.
One of the world’s most successful painters, Luc Tuyman, recently exhibited on a wall in a side street ( via Boingboing ). This is reminiscent of when one of the world’s premier violinists, Joshua Bell, played in the DC Metro.
Both Luc Tuyman and Joshua Bell are good sports. They both ventured outside of their natural habitat to display their feathers in ordinary situations to see if people noticed. I put this up as a contrast to the previous post about Gregor Schneider, since neither of these people are Fartists (Feeble artists).
The article asks why is it that in 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville could write “In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States” and yet now the country with a twentieth of the world’s population has a quarter of the world’s prisoners, incarcerated at ten times the rate of other Western countries with no actual difference in crime reduction beyond what has happened in Canada.
Some of the conclusions aren’t that surprising: a Protestant dominated, puritan influenced culture, combined with gung-ho libertarianism and an ongoing race paranoia, but one is startling – Democracy. Unlike most of the world, American judges are elected and often on a ticket of tough justice, which leads to the mob rule flavor of democracy, when combined with the previous factors.
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This Gregor Schneider ‘piece’ is the first post in a new category about Fartists – Feeble artists (a complement to our FEBL media category).
Here is how it is described in copycat white-wall gallery speak:
“Gregor Schneider’s art expresses the concerns and anxieties of today’s world. Bondi Beach, his latest work, brings into question the values that we associate with the sun, surf and sand image of the Australian beach and asks us to consider the fundamental openness of Australian society and the freedoms and liberties we enjoy as citizens.”
What this means is that he has taken the idea that Australian’s are prisoners of the fashion of sun bathing – and built a sunbathing prison. A brazenly literal interpretation of an already waning fashion, a cliched metaphor so hilariously unimaginative that it makes pretty good satire – except its serious.
Schneider’s latest planned piece is to recruit a dying person and have him or her die in an art gallery. The idea is, of course, couched in dignified reverence, but it sells itself all the more on its potential shock value.
If you are going to do something this dramatic there should be depth and subtlety, something that this lacks – on the scale of a wet curry fart in an elevator. When Duchamp put a piss pot in a gallery, I am sure he though he had closed the door on this, instead it has only encouraged people like Schneider – who are ultimately so old-fashioned and Bourgeois, that they still miss the point after nearly a century.
Schneider does Duchamp in the way that Musak do Beethoven. Trying to be a rebel without breaking free of the traditions and places where people buy and sell paintings isn’t being much of a rebel – the artist equivalent of being into Death Metal in an Ohio suburb. Talented creative people these days work elsewhere and the traditional gallery no longer remains supreme rather like the most prestigious art form of ancient Greece – Lyre playing.
Who plays the Lyre these days?
Stephen Fry is a supreme technophile with the aura of a bookish technophobe. There is nobody better to present a documentary about early printing technology and how it changed the world. Great stuff – this is the first of six chunks.
via Kottke
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People have been saying some very nice things about Smashingtelly recently, so thank you to:
Fimoculous, who chose us as number 4 in their respected list of the best blogs of 2007.
Elle Magazine, who said that Smashingtelly was “the future of Television” in their March issue.
Will Not Be Televised, who also chose us in their top list for 2007.
Treehugger founder, Graham Hill, who chose Smashingtelly as one of his top 5 websites that provide him with inspiration at the PSFK conference.
A touching documentary about Ian Shaw, whose daughter died on the Swiss Air flight 111 from New York to Geneva in 1998. Shaw, a very successful Geneva business man, moved on his own to the site of the crash in Novia Scotia, where he bought a diner.
My wife, who is from near Geneva, had a friend who died on this flight, on his way home after a year traveling.