Continuing in the vein of the profound in the banal, here is a short clip of the photographer, Martin Parr, talking about his work. Parr takes photographs of ordinary people and shows them in a extraordinary light – something that is very difficult to do and which easily demonstrates to the unconvinced the difference between a great photograph and a snap.
(I’m sorry if all the recent posts have been very Brit centric, its not deliberate)
Part 1 embedded, Part 2 here.
Total running time: approx 40 mins
This documentary is an absolute gem, in the tradition of Errol Morris it finds the profound in the utterly banal, without resorting to postmodern sneering. The subject is a sleepy English seaside town, one of those places where uptight, keeping up appearances, Edwardian sensibilities hang by a thread, appropriately enough at the nation’s edge. This is a culture that was satirized in Dad’s army as being obsolete 40 years ago and which Orwell railed against even earlier in Keep the Aspadistra Flying, but it still lives in Frinton on Sea.
This calcified culture that has only recently begun to emerge in America, where middle class people, or to paraphrase Evelyn Waugh, ‘upper lower middle class’ people emulate the veneer of respectability displayed by the public face of the powerful, without enjoying the private debauchery. Its a sick joke that is played by the rich on the modest, the world over, where ordinary people suffer humdrum in exchange for a caricature of dignity.
When people talk about the hypocrisy of suburbia, as if the few people who are secretly sleeping around and snorting coke after church on Sunday are proof of endemic problems, they miss the point. Where I have encountered it, this Janus like culture seems to be the norm in the upper echelons of society, from the Hamptons to Hampshire, whereas in places like Frinton-on-Sea there are many people who actually live the lives that the Victorians pretended to. Its a raw deal.
Here, a BBC team pokes back at the ‘twitching net curtains’ of exburbia, to examine the traumatic impact of the decision to automate the town’s railroad crossing and the resulting local outcry. The result is a small socio-anthropological masterpiece.
Based upon a poll of film makers, organized by Channel 4 in the UK, the 50 best documentaries of all time were chosen. Despite the unpromising screenshot image of Jimmy Saville at the beginning, this is great. Of course, I would differ with the selection, but that’s part of the game.
Total running time: approx 100mins.
We’ve just been through a period of historic excess and debauchery, based on the financial miscalculation that the world had nearly twice as much wealth as it has now, where celebrities where famous for nothing other than fame itself and where the robbers were running the banks (an altogether more systemic societal risk than lunatics running asylums). Nothing like the here and now, after this monstrous, toxic, asset-zit has exploded, cries out for meaning and purpose.
In this existential vacuum, the Daily Herald, ‘Suburban Chicago’s Information Source ‘, prints a reader’s letter by Patricia Grabowicz which complains about money going to Fermilab to spend on mere particles, with what I would argue is a cheap shot saying the money would be better spent on education.
While showering money on places that served no higher purpose than profit, places like Fermilab, which probe the very essence of our existence on this spec of sand in an intergalactic ocean and carry the meaning and purpose that inspire people to educate themselves in the first place, are surely the very things we need to invest in.
But that is not where Grabowitz is wrong. The single, devastating, reader comment by Larry Jankowski at the end of the letter is worth quoting in its entirety:
The Tevatron is being shut down as soon as CERN super-collider goes on-line. No experiments using it for pure science are in the future budget. But the ancillary services provided by the LINAC, and booster rings, like protons and synchrotron light, for treating cancers and materials manufacturing research, is what the budgeted money is for. The search for Higgs is being moved to the EU and CERN.
Fermilab money to save people from dying of otherwise untreatable cancer is not such a bad thing, and a better use of that money than special education classes for a handful of politicians, and keeps scientists and medical researchers here, rather than brain-draining their talent to the EU.
As Fermilab gets ready to pass off to CERN, it is just possible that it may find the particle that gives mass that CERN was built for, the Higgs Boson. This week the scope of where it may exist was further narrowed and a mysterious particle called Y(4140) was discovered. If Fermilab doesn’t find the Higgs, CERN will certainly either find it, or perhaps more excitingly prove that it doesn’t exist, bringing into question the core of our current understanding of reality.
This all sounds abstract, and unfortunately, real things are not always simple, but the challenge of discovery is as thrilling as and more important than the Apollo missions.
CERN have put together a great website for children, where the playlist at the top comes from. Make this your information source, Daily Herald readers.
Ben Goldacre rails against modern day fraudsters such as anti-vaccination extremists. What’s strange about anti-vaccination is that despite it being a provably fraudulent meme that is endangering lives, it is taken to be a viable stance and attacking it is seen as controversial. Even this Goldacre clip has a legal disclaimer at the end from the news anchor presenting it.
Current events help put this in perspective, its like saying Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme and being quoted with the disclaimer that its a matter of personal opinion and not of the news organization.
Weapons dealers’ marketing materials are often a great source of unintentional black comedy, however, there are no words to adequately describe this gem found by the excellent 3 Quarks daily.
Israeli arms company, Rafael, decided to create a Bollywood style promotional video for the Aero India 2009 show in Bangalore. The truly weird result is a lot of singing and dancing around missiles.
What is it with these Kramer people?
This coming week on ST will be accents week.
In their extreme, accents can entirely take over people’s faces as was the case with former British Prime Miniser, Sir Alec Douglas-Home (pronounced ‘Hume’ for some unknown reason – presumably to do with a long line of affected speaking). Home had the quintessential English ‘stiff upper lip’, to the extent that while talking, there was almost no perceptible difference between him and a ventriloquist dummy, his top lip being almost entirely motionless.
Here, Home slides out diphthong after diphthong from the narrow slit where his mouth should be (owf instead of off, caeb instead of cab), and where consonants would be more intelligible, proving that the English upper classes didn’t actually speak very clearly. The overall effect is no less exaggerated than the flailing gesticulations of a grovelling courtier.
Competition: Feel free to post some links to clips of ‘Home-like’ Ventriloquist puppets in the comments.
Like expensive, limited-edition cars, the cinematic quality Red One digital movie camera required a $1000 deposit and a years waiting list to get one.
The results look incredible as this 120fps, dreamlike short of skateboarders (at what looks like the Trocadero in Paris) demonstrates. Although, to be fair, this is not just because of the camera.
Watching this (click through to watch the HD) shows how Vimeo is continuing to set itself apart from Youtube in terms of quality rather than quantity. Increasingly, Vimeo is to Youtube as Flickr is to Imageshack. Perhaps Yahoo should buy Vimeo to ram the comparison home and score a cred point against the Google monster?
Sometimes truth is no stranger to fiction. America’s only serious news comes from a comedy channel.
US network and cable news are an embarrassment, a children’s view of the world based upon geographical and historical ignorance delivered by people who look like Long Island realtors and whose opinions should be deemed equally suspect.
In print form, U.S. newspapers make up for relatively poor coverage of world news with advanced level business news – this is capital C Capital-ism after all. However, the same sophistication does not apply to cable business news, and this is best exemplified by CNBC.
CNBC covers the industry that makes money, the industry that has recently lost 30% of the notional moolah created from everything humans have made, planet-wide, since Tutankhamun. It is watched by Wall street professionals from large screens which hang over trading floors, and during the collapse of Lehman, the employees were looking at CNBC to see what was happening in their own building. In other words, it is not just a consumer product but one used by the billionaire pros who can afford anything. Yet it looks and feels like a cheap toy.
The fact that this financial channel of record looks like a low-rent hybrid of a shopping channel and pro-wrestling match, with ads for gold coin collections and get rich quick books and set designs comprised of embossed metallic, swooshing titles and plasticky red white and blue, certainly does not spell money. And yet I am gripped by it.
For three years I have been going to the gym across the street from the stock exchange and pumped or, more accurately, schlepped iron in front of CNBC. I have nothing to do with manipulating money for a living, I have little of it and don’t understand how it works, but am overwhelmed by a morbid obsession with cable financial news while working out. It fires me up with primeval anger and makes my veins bulge like a steroid addled bodybuilder.
Sadly, I was in London, when the most egregious CNBC moment took place and the one that Jon Stewart takes CNBC to task over: Rick Santelli’s Mercantile Exchange uprising – at the least that was how it was pumped up on Drudge.
The Rick Santelli uprising comprised a televised football coach style rant. Santelli complained that home owners were being bailed out, and this was yelled from the floor of the Chicago Mecantile New York Stock Exchange, where his fellow libertarians, presumably working for financial institutions bailed out by tax payers, rallied round, failing to see the pitiful hypocrisy of it all.
London was a strange place to watch this, because there the libertarianism of ‘don’t let the government bail out the people’ would have been crushed, despite the fact that Britain’s endemic culture of home equity greed outstripped the worst avarice of the financiers. In the UK, the prevailing mood on TV was unanimously, ‘hang the bankers, don’t screw the home owners’.
I put this difference down to culture, but Jon Stewart has proven me wrong by bookending a relentless series of clips of CNBC editorial failure with the Rick Santelli uprising and an interview with the world’s second best conman, the sweaty, pie-faced, cricket playing Texan, Allen Stanford. It is a withering attack on CNBC but possibly more than that.
In fairness to CNBC, three of the clips concern reporting of other people’s mistakes, for example one shows Merril Lynch saying they were adequately capitalized not CNBC, and one shouldn’t shoot the messenger. But in the grand scheme of things both the originator and the messenger were at fault and there is evidence to prove it.
The degree of this financial implosion makes the once epic ambitions of Bonfire of the Vanities seem inadequate, yet to my mind the scale of the tragedy has ironically been best captured, to date, by a ten minute comedy piece.
Watch it in its entirety and see what Stewart has to say about Allen Stanford at the end. A must see.