Hands on a Hard Body
How a very simple idea can be completely gripping. Who can keep their hand on a pickup truck for the longest amount of time.
via: Kottke
A History of Texas (intro to “True Stories”)
The last real post on Your Daily Awesome:
“When I posted the clip from True Stories of David Byrne deadpanning his way through the history of Texas, I didn’t realize that it would be YDA’s last real post. But if pressed to choose a closing statement, I’d be hard-pressed to select something more appropriate to this blog’s sensibilities.”
Foie Gras
As the ban is lifted on Foie Gras, a piece in the New York Times points to two videos: tabloid enfant-terrible light, Anthony Bourdain (is it just me, or are celebrity chefs this decade’s equivalent of the equally vacuous, contrived fame of the Super Models of the previous one), who claims mock disbelief that “fanatical stealth vegan extremists believe that the force feeding of ducks to plump their livers is actually cruel”. vs a fake promotional ad for French foie gras produced by an animal welfare group. I’ll post them alongside each other, so you can hit play at the same time, on both.
Ruby Ridge
A film about conspiracy theorists rather than a conspiracy theory film. Ruby Ridge is about the infamous anti-government family that holed themselves up at Ruby Ridge in a stand off with the Feds. What I like about this film is how it shows a particular overlap of societal influences that create a particularly American flavor of politics that doesn’t fit categories found elsewhere, having facets of both the liberal counter-culture and right wing conservatism.
Interviewed now, the Ruby Ridge family look like rural American conservatives, the father is interviewed in a diner full of Stetsons and cigarette smoke and the sweet natured, feminine looking, daughter speaks to us from a field, while firing off rounds from a twelve bore. This is Doris Day’s Calamity Jane rather than Jane Fonda.
In America, conspiracy theorists tend to be pro-gun, anti-government and anti-socialism. Rejection of government is ironically coupled by embracing certain cultural traits which are a result of the history of the American government, such as enshrined justification of armed protection of personal territory and fear of communism. In Europe the situation is the opposite, the rejection of the ruling class due to the exploitation of ordinary people as cannon fodder in WWI and the evils of extreme right wing government in WWII mean that people tend to view a socialist welfare state as sacrosanct, and weapons with suspicion.
In the 1930s, large scale economic chaos created the environment for the paranoia of the few to spread into the mainstream, in places like Germany. If America were ever in danger of suffering the same fate, its inner demons could be the same as those that are currently manifested in a tiny minority of paranoid people. In fact, the natural amplification of primal instinct on the web, means that conspiracy theorist nonsense has a worryingly large audience. The film Zeitgeist, has a larger audience than 60 minutes, it is the equivalent of Mein Kampf for the YouTube generation. Since rejection of society is amplified by the size of the country and the distance from people making decisions about their lives (creating a demonization of Federal over State taxes, for example), any kind of mass hysteria in the US is likely to take the form of libertarianism. .
There is a lot to learn about the people from Ruby Ridge, they are people who represent what can happen when the intrinsic, inner psychological fears of a society are amplified.
Jamie Oliver Gasses Chicks
I’m of the view that if you are going to eat meat, you should be prepared to kill it. At the very least you should be aware of what you are eating. In this clip, UK chef, Jamie Oliver presents one of those cushy awards style shows where people sit around round dinner tables sipping wine. He asks the guests to select the paler of a bunch of cute baby chicks and put them in a box (these are the males). He then gasses them, something that is done to all male chicks by egg producers around the world, organic or regular. Male baby chicks are disposable, non-financially viable assets. The guests are predictably and presumably hypocritically (if they eat eggs) upset.
Air Guitar Nation
This could so easily have been nothing more than a five second joke based on the title. Instead its absolutely mesmerising.
The Curse of Oil
There are seemingly hundreds of awful documentaries about oil, so its refreshing to see a large budget 3 part, 3 hour long (1st part here), produced by people who are not nutcases, for the UK’s Channel 4.
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Gyaru – extreme Japanese fashionistas
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.
Luc Tuyman vs Joshua Bell Bakeoff
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 War on Drugs (The Prison Industrial Complex)
April 24th, 2008 Comments Off on The War on Drugs (The Prison Industrial Complex) | # link to | posted by david
This film sounds like a shoddy conspiracy piece, but it is actually very pertinent (the first couple of minutes are in Dutch, the rest in English). I am posting it since it shows the origins of the situation covered in this excellent piece in yesterday’s New York Times.
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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