Random Specific is a Meena Kadri’s delightful blog on visual culture and design, now focused on Mumbai, India. I especially liked the post on Dabbawallas or lunch delivery services which reminded me of packets in TCP/IP.
via The Browser.
The terrorist attack that did work.
The NYT on last week’s suicide bombing by a double agent:
The attack at the C.I.A. base dealt a devastating blow to the spy agency’s operations against militants in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, eliminating an elite team using an informant with strong jihadi credentials. The attack further delayed hope of penetrating Al Qaeda’s upper ranks, and also seemed potent evidence of militants’ ability to strike back against their American pursuers.
On seeing the new Titanic a second time.
I’ve read and heard bits and pieces of arguments that claim Avatar is an old, racist narrative: the white man who comes to rescue the dark natives.
Yes and no. Yes, that is what appears to be happening for much of the movie. But, no, that’s not the end of the story.
The only way to drive a stake through the heart of a narrative is to rehearse and then change it. That’s what happens in Avatar.
At the very end of the movie, the bad guy, a white man, confronts the hero, a white man, and says: How does it feel to betray your race?
Apparently, it feels fucking fantastic. Something like getting to start life over again as a skinnier, taller, more muscular, more finely featured you. Also, it means you can talk to every form of life. And you can fly.
All of which must look pretty attractive to the hero of the movie: a vet in a wheelchair who can’t afford to pay for the surgery that would bring his legs back and whose only mentioned family, his twin brother, was shot dead in a robbery before the movie begins.
It might also look attractive to anyone who has ever wanted to start over again. Or fly.
The promise of flight is a constant in history. Sometimes, flight can only be achieved at great cost. In this movie, a story for children as much as adults, the price for flight is environmentalism.
Specifically, a vague post-industrial environmentalism which, voiced by the famous Alien-killer Sigourney Weaver, is interesting if not compelling: there’s more wealth in a planet that is exploited holistically and incrementally than one that is stripped apart, all at once, according to a plan that can’t – or won’t – see beyond a single financial quarter.
I’ll take a few cliches and the badly written prayer scenes any day in exchange for that fairy tale.
postscript
At some point during my second viewing, my eyes drifted off the expensive visuals and I focused on an all-too-familiar musical score for a supposedly brave new world. It was then that the lyrics from another cheesy musical score came to my mind: “We Don’t Need Another Hero” from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
I find Avatar’s take at environmentalist science fiction, corny missteps and all, more satisfying than that 1980’s dystopia. In the dried out, anarchic world of Thunderdome, it’s too late to hope for a green planet. In the violent yet balanced world of Avatar, a very green and vibrant planet can still be saved.
Even if that world is a Pandora’s box, it’s filled with plenty of signs of hope. (Many of which are modeled after creatures in our own oceans.)
Danielle Steele vs THC
Ben of Ben and Alice:
Here’s my try: the damage of addiction, irrespective of the narcotic, is that it replaces real life. Potheads, including some friends of mine, generally believe that marijuana is not an addictive drug. But if you check out from the real world every day, you are missing out on real life.
Of course, there is no consensus on what real life consists of. If watching four hours of TV makes you a couch potato, doesn’t reading a novel do the same thing? Most people consider reading novels a worthwhile use of time, but of course it depends on the novel; I’d advise putting down the Danielle Steele and smoking a joint instead.
Drag in Iran.
From a lively recap of the liberal revolution (youth movement) in Iran and what Western states can do to help it:
See for example how an attempt by the regime to smear an opposition figure by showing him in women’s clothes has backfired – the symbols used by the regime are swiftly being annexed by protesters themselves and used to hit back in fierce post-modern irony.
How did we get so mean?
This “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition…is…the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” Those are not my words. They were written by Adam Smith, who regarded the likelihood that we would come to admire wealth and despise poverty, admire success and scorn failure, as the greatest risk facing us in the commercial society whose advent he predicted. It is now upon us.
A small sampling of an incredible lecture by Tony Judt who is also the author of one of the most moving essays I’ve read in some time.
via MeFi.
If you’re wearing a Snuggie, you might need to weatherize your home.
I’ve worn all sorts of ridiculous outfits to stay warm at home. For example:
But wearing a blanket as clothing strikes me as more than just an indulgence. Are Snuggies another sign that too few Americans live in energy efficient homes?
Nerds rule the world: Iranian Revolution edition.
I found this to be refreshingly counterintuitive:
Everyone knows I am a defender of theocratic government, although not in the current form. The difference lies in the fact that I intended for the people to choose the jurist and supervise his work… I now feel ashamed of the tyranny conducted under this banner. What we see now is the government of a military guardianship, not the guardian of Islamic scholars.
The late Grand Ayatullah Hossein Ali Montazeri.
You assigned what ringtone to me?
Seinfeld famously explored the social meaning of speed dial. Who has explored the mores of the ringtone? (The “secret lovers” ad for T-Mobile notwithstanding.)
Add the browser to your rss reader and enjoy.
the browser is one of the most useful sites I have found in the last year.
Italy is dreaming of a white Christmas.
Italy, you never cease to dismay me: Operation White Christmas.
Telling time with corn.
My mother-in-law remembers as a child her mother setting aside a few kernels of corn in early November and placing them in water so that they would germinate by Christmas and could thus be used as decorations for a nativity scene.
We are surprised by how quickly time passes. “Is it really Christmas again, already?” But if we relied on more natural processes, our sense of time would change. Perhaps, it would even slow down.
Do you respect wood?
Corruption in Russia – norms in China + clueless European and US consumers = massive illegal logging.
“President Roosevelt had no legs to stand on, but he sure had spine.”
An entertaining and spirited critique of President Obama by Drew Westen.
Tapping the unconscious for a few extra dollars a plate.
The NYT on the psychology of restaurant menus:
Tabla is just one of the many restaurants around the country that are feverishly revising their menus. Pounded by the recession, they are hoping that some magic combination of prices, adjectives, fonts, type sizes, ink colors and placement on the page can coax diners into spending a little more money.
via MeFi.
Like a great New Yorker cartoon, only, better.
The excellent every day is the same dream has been making the rounds online this week.
It’s a very modest experiment but one yields has rich results; yet more proof that the future of narrative is interactive.
With movies and television, the actors are the hook that brings the viewer along. With “games,” the hook is the possibility for change, which turns the viewer into an actor. If plays are a way to explore moral possibilities, they will be all the more transformative when experienced in the first person.
Imagine the bildungsroman as simulation.
via Waxy.org/links
What’s thrilling is that, as far as our brains are concerned, it’s all virtual reality.
Reading a mostly lame set of predictions for the future, I came across this: “Virtual reality – Glasses which show you a world that isn’t there.”
That’s exactly wrong. The drive to realize “Virtual Reality” is not to escape into a world that doesn’t exist but to hone in on the one that does; it’s a selective vision.
As Alice in Wonderland illustrates, virtual reality is a dive into the borders of reality, into the dense, unseen background that we push out of sight, out of of mind in order to focus on and execute our daily routines.
That’s why “augmented reality”, both the term and the experiences it describes, has caught on where “virtual reality” never did.