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Weekly Link Roundup 12.05

This past week link roundup includes an introduction to the “urban datasexual” (a new mode of subjectivation?), a chart showing who’s authorized to fly drones in the United-States, a new gallery of images related to New York’s history, spambots which started to do philosophy (self-awarness will likely be reached in a near future: according to XKCD, there’s nothing to worry about), the increasing popularity of self-tracking, a couple of interesting resources about Klout (online influence tracking), some thoughts about “the cloud”, and more.

• • •

The New Republic: “How ‘The Godfather’ Was Diminished By Its State-of-the-Art Restoration” by David Thomson, April 24, 2012. Excerpt:

The Godfather was, for a moment, the most successful film ever at the box office. And now it is not exactly a film, but something fit for plush seating and Doremi servers. No, I haven’t seen this version, but I have seen enough digital projection in “complete entertainment environments” to be wary of the technical coldness of the show, and an end to that feeling of light falling on skin—photography, where appearance has burned into silver salts.
Big Think: “Meet the Urban Datasexual” by Dominic Basulto, April 16, 2012. Excerpt:

The origin of the datasexual in all likelihood started with the humble infographic, which is a highly stylized and well-designed way to talk about all the data out there on Web. The infographic trend was followed by the data visualization trend, which made it even cooler to display data in innovative new ways. These data visualization tools eventually gave us cultural artifacts like Nicholas Felton’s annual Feltron Reports, which made the obsessive recording of everyday activities seem cool. From there, it was only a small evolutionary step to the whole quantified self (QS) movement, which promises “self knowledge through numbers.” QS proponents obsessively track every single bit of data about themselves throughout the day. The QS movement eventually led us to the embrace of data by consumer-facing companies Nike, who found a way for urban datasexuals to flaunt their obsessive data-grooming to the rest of us in a way that’s stylish and mod.
Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art: “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer” by Kathryn M. Rudy, vol. 2, issue 1-2, 2010 (PDF). Abstract:

Early users of medieval books of hours and prayer books left signs of their reading in the form of fingerprints in the margins. The darkness of their fingerprints correlates to the intensity of their use and handling. A densitometer — a machine that measures the darkness of a reflecting surface — can reveal which texts a reader favored
The Atlantic: “Who Has the Right to Fly a Drone Above Your Head? Finally, There’s a List” by Alexis Madrigal, April 25, 2012.
NYC Department of Records: “The NYC Department of Records announces on-line access to a gallery of over 870,000 images”. Direct access to the gallery here. Depending on your location, servers may be down “due to overwhelming demand”.
Associated Press (via Fox News): “Breivik’s publicity at trial just what he wanted”, April 25, 2012. Excerpt:

As Anders Behring Breivik has given shocking and remorseless accounts to a Norwegian court of how he massacred 77 people, his testimony has revived a debate about how much of a public platform mass-murderers should be given in trials.
Ian Bogost: “My spam readers…might be more interesting than my human ones” April 21, 2012. Excerpt:

(…) this morning I found a new salvo of incredibly persuasive imitations in my blog comments. There’s no doubt that they are spam, but its now clear that the spambots are carefully reading my blog (and other, related blogs)—perhaps more carefully than many human readers.
Rhizome: “A Conversation with Jonathan Lethem” by Joanne McNeil, April 26, 2012. Excerpt:

I’ve always been a very late adopter. I mean even MP3s, I didn’t have them after other people I knew did. Something about me always sort of wants them to become a little more part of the world. It’s like I need to believe in them by seeing people form attachments before I make that move. I’ve got a friend who teases me because he remembers me saying that I would probably never bother with email. I knew a few people who were doing it and it just didn’t seem that appealing to me. Now I’m ten years into an unbelievable promiscuous emailing binge that will never end. So I’ve been a late adopter a lot of times with tech.
Quantified Self: Self knowledge trough numbers.

Quantified Self is a collaboration of users and tool makers who share an interest in self knowledge through self-tracking. We exchange information about our personal projects, the tools we use, tips we’ve gleaned, lessons we’ve learned. We blog, meet face to face, and collaborate online. (About)
Klout:

Our friendships and professional connections have moved online, making influence measurable for the first time in history. When you recommend, share, and create content you impact others. Your Klout Score measures that influence on a scale of 1 to 100.
The New Yorker: “Klout is evil, but it can be saved” by Nicholas Thompson, April 27, 2012.

Klout grades users on a scale of one to a hundred based on some proprietary algorithm that counts how often your comments are retweeted, liked, or shared. If you want your score to go up, tweet more and get influential people to retweet you. Don’t ever go on vacation. If you’re on a social network, Klout gets your score, whether you’ve ever logged into the service or not. Think of a mercenary socialite, holding a calculator and trying to figure out who to invite to a party based on import. Then put whatever number she arrives at on every guest’s lapel. That’s Klout.

See also Klouchbag by Tom Scott (Flash is required, as well as a good sense of humor). [UPDATE–May 18, 2012] See also Randall Munroe’s take on Klout (from his XKCD web comic no. 1057):
Wired: “What Your Klout Score Really Means” by Seth Stevenson, April 24, 2012. Excerpt:

The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”
The Poetry Foundation: “Why I Don’t Trust the Cloud” by Kenneth Goldsmith, April 27, 2012. K. Goldsmith is the founding editor of UbuWeb. Excerpt:

Don’t trust the cloud. Use it, enjoy it, exploit it, but don’t believe in it. Or even the web for that matter. Many people assume that the web —and its riches—will always be there waiting for you. It won’t. Don’t bookmark. Download. Hard drives are cheap. Fill them up with everything you think you might need to consult, watch, read, listen to, or cite in the future.

• By Philippe Theophanidis on April 29, 2012 ― Published in Link-roundup

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Friedrich Kittler’s Protest Sign

AR―You have never expressed an opinion on war, never written an anti-war theory.

FK–At my one and only five-minute meeting with Jürgen Habermas, it was in Amsterdam, he took me aside and reproached me, saying my historical analyses were okay, but I had never showed any commitment to a cause.

AR–In 1968 when the students in Freiburg were demonstrating against Vietnam, you brandished a sign with the Heidegger solution: “Being and Time”. A conscious distancing?

FK–Yes. As a child you cannot imaging how fascinated I was by Napoleon.

☛ Signandsight.com: “We only have ourselves to draw upon”, an interview with German media theorist, Friedrich Kittler, who died on 18 October, by Andreas Rosenfelder. The interview originally appeared in Welt am Sonntag on January 30, 2011.

This anecdote was confirmed to me by Andreas Rosenfelder in a personal email exchange in which he specified:

It was Kittler himself who painted and held the sign.

First found via Enowning.

• By Philippe Theophanidis on June 13, 2012 ― Published in Communication | Tagged: cause, commitment, distance, Heidegger, Kittler, protest, war

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Histories of Violence website

☛ Histories of Violence, founded and directed by Dr. Brad Evans from Leed University, in collaboration with The Guardian and the Guggenheim Museum. © Copyright Leeds 2011

[UPDATE–July 13, 2012] The site was finally updated (or reboot) on July 2012 with a new URL address (the old one is still working, but with the same old content or absence of content it offered back on September 2011). Full lectures (one hour each) are now available to watch. Among others, participants include Steven Graham, Michael Hardt, Brian Massumi, Zygmunt Bauman, Michael Shapiro, Simon Critchley and Noam Chomasky. Clicking any of 16 thumbnails available open a Vimeo player in full screen.

In the light of the forthcoming 10th anniversary of September 11 attacks, most media will offer special coverage of the event itself and how it shapes the years that followed. This coverage will most likely be shaped by a wide range of political allegiances and theoretical frameworks.

The Histories of Violence website is an example of such an effort. It will be officially launched on September 11th as a

multi-media forum dedicated to exploring the theoretical, empirical and aesthetic dimensions to violence. Founded and Directed by Dr. Brad Evans, this trans-disciplinary project provides an open access platform for the specific purposes of academic and public engagement; knowledge transfer; political discussion; philosophical reflection; along with exhibiting works which directly engage the perennial problem afflicting human life.

At the moment, beside the slideshow from which the above image was taken, one can watch a 45 minutes video featuring a presentation by Zygmunt Bauman (for more about him, see The Bauman Institute)

The Histories of Violence works in collaboration with The Guardian: it provides material and analysis for a special series covering the 10th anniversary of September 11: “10 Years of Terror”.

In this video series, prominent scholars explore the legacy of 9/11 and discuss the theoretical, empirical and aesthetic dimensions to violence. Full lectures will be available at Histories of Violence on September 11th (read the full presentation by Brad Evans and Simon Critchley: “New thinking is needed about September 11”)

The Guardian already offers three more short videos featuring analysis by Brian Massumi, Zygmunt Bauman and Noam Chomsky. Below is the intervention by Brian Massumi (posted on September 2, 2011):

See also Žižek’s take on Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”: “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib” (May 21st, 2004)

Previously: “The Half-Life of Disater” by Brian Massumi

• By Philippe Theophanidis on September 4, 2011 ― Published in Communication | Tagged: 9/11, action, actual, affect, Bush, Massumi, potentiality, reality, terror, threat, United-States, violence, war

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Link Roundup 12.16

In this new roundup: sentences for both Jared Lee Loughner and Anders Behring Breivik, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, more on “trading robots”, security and the “clouds”, Internet Archive is on BitTorrent, David Pogue on Hollywood and online piracy, a provocative review of Beast of the Southern Wild (2012), storing data with DNA, intellectual integrity and stardom, Kodak is selling its printed film business while Samsara (2011) was entirely shot in 70mm (but will be shown exclusively in a digital format) and, finally, an excerpt from Burden of Dreams (1982), a making-of documentary about Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo (1982).

• • •

The New York Times: “Life Term for Gunman After Guilty Plea in Tucson Killings” by Fernanda Santos, August 7, 2012.

Jared L. Loughner pleaded guilty on Tuesday to killing six people and wounding 13 others last year during a meet-and-greet event here held by Gabrielle Giffords, then a member of the House of Representatives and the primary target of his rampage. The plea brought a sudden resolution to a case that seemed threatened by the fragility of Mr. Loughner’s mental state.

The shooting occurred on January 8, 2011. With this verdict, the defense avoids the death penalty while prosecutors avoid the risk of having him declared legally insane (and therefor not responsible for his actions). Previously here: “Loughner’s Mental Competence Is Doubted” (The Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2011) and Jared Lee Loughner Not Competent to Stand Trial.
BBC: “Anders Behring Breivik: Norway court finds him sane” August 24, 2012.

Breivik, who admitted killing 77 people when he bombed central Oslo and then opened fire at an island youth camp, told the court he would not appeal. He insisted he was sane and refused to plead guilty, saying last year’s attacks were necessary to stop the “Islamisation” of Norway. Prosecutors had called for him to be considered insane. Breivik was convicted of terrorism and premeditated murder, and given the maximum sentence of 21 years’ imprisonment. However, that can be prolonged at a later date if he is deemed to remain a danger to society.
NASA – Mars Science Laboratory: Images. With NASA’s new rover “Curiosity” safely arrived on Mars, we can all checked on the various updates (news, multimedia, images) at the NASA’s official webpage for the MSL’s mission.
Technology Review: “Watch High-Speed Trading Bots Go Berserk” by Will Knight, August 7, 2012.

The animated .gif above shows the rise of high-frequency trading across several U.S. stock exchanges over the last five years. You’ll notice that there’s relatively little activity in 2007, followed by spikes in activity at the opening and close of the market starting in 2008. And then, sometime around the start of 2010, activity becomes much, much more frenetic and erratic. The image was originally posted by Nanex, a company that provides market data to traders.

Algorithmic trading lets financial firms to spot and exploit market patterns at lightning speeds. This can bring a tidy profit, but it also puts computers in charge of making decisions that can cost a company millions, and that may have an unpredictable effect on the rest of the market.

The ascent of high-frequency trading has long been a concern within the financial industry (see “Trading Shares in Milliseconds”). But criticism reached a fever pitch last week when Knight Capital Group, a well respected and fairly conservative trading firm, suffered catastrophic losses when one of its algorithms went haywire for 30 minutes.
Wired: “How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking” by Matt Honan, August 6, 2012.

And it’s also worth noting that one wouldn’t have to call Amazon to pull this off. Your pizza guy could do the same thing, for example. If you have an AppleID, every time you call Pizza Hut, you’ve giving the 16-year-old on the other end of the line all he needs to take over your entire digital life.

In a follow up video, Honan acknowledged one crucial aspect in this story:

In the video above, Honan assumes partial responsibility for losing irreplaceable family photos in the attack. “Because I wasn’t backing up makes me feel a lot of this stuff I could have prevented, stuff that was my fault,” he says. “I’m a technology journalist — I’ve been a technology journalist since the ’90s — I know better than to not be backing up.”

Anyone using a computer on a regular basis should have a rock solid backup strategy. External hard drives are affordable and the whole backup process can be automated so it doesn’t even have to be a hassle.
Internet Archive Blogs: “Over 1,000,000 Torrents of Downloadable Books, Music, and Movies” August 7, 2012.

The Internet Archive is now offering over 1,000,000 torrents including our live music concerts, the Prelinger movie collection, the librivox audio book collection, feature films, old time radio, lots and lots of books, and all new uploads from our patrons into Community collections (with more to follow). […]

BitTorrent is the now fastest way to download items from the Archive, because the BitTorrent client downloads simultaneously from two different Archive servers located in two different datacenters, and from other Archive users who have downloaded these Torrents already. The distributed nature of BitTorrent swarms and their ability to retrieve Torrents from local peers may be of particular value to patrons with slower access to the Archive, for example those outside the United States or inside institutions with slow connections.
The Verge: “Japanese company will 3D print your fetus for $1,275” by Jeff Blagdon, August 8, 2012.

Called Tenshi no Katachi or “Shape of an Angel,” the product is based on a digital model of the mother’s torso built from CT or MRI scans, reports DigInfo TV. That model then gets 3D printed with two resins simultaneously using a process called Bio-Texture, which Fasotec also uses to create medical models. The result is a scale reproduction of your unborn baby, composed of an opaque white fetus encased in the mother’s clear, colorless abdomen.
Slog: “Yesterday, I Went to the American Idol for Startups. It Made Me Want to Die” by Paul Constant, August 9, 2012.

But, oh, my God, the terrible things these people do to words. It’s like watching some sadist work over a baby lamb with a rusty crowbar and a broken gin bottle. The names of these startups sound like the products of an aggressive brain tumor on the frontal lobe. Crowdegy, Placeling, Kouply, QuoteRobot, Appthwack, Makegood, Onthego, Nickler, Kahal, Tanzio, Taskk. They’re all whimsical and unique in exactly the same way. One of the judges works for Storenvy. The main corporate sponsor for Startup Riot is Mailchimp, along with a flock of smaller sponsors like Uber, Gist, and Twilio. I could staple the mismatched meat of syllables together all afternoon and you wouldn’t be able to tell the legitimate businesses from the illegitimate: Mehole, Kaprah, Yimmy, Blanter, Catzap, Dunzyinonezy, Simplert, Lustaminate.
Salon.com: “Hushpuppy, anarchist antihero?” Kelly Candaele’s review of Beasts of the Southern Wild (IMDb), August 9, 2012.

The feeling of being disciplined and punished by cold and bureaucratic agents of social control seems to resonate with a good portion of moviegoers, not to mention voters. What social and psychological storms threaten us so much that even the technology of flood control can seem a “restrictive” interference with our freedom? Has the “State” truly become a self-perpetuating machine of repression, or are the burdens of modernity so inherently alienating that juvenile rebellion feels like liberty?

In his new book The Age of Fracture, Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers suggests that post-World War II American history has seen a “disaggregation of the social,” where the broad social contract that had brought more and more Americans into the domain of full economic and political citizenship has dramatically shrunk. We are left with smaller and smaller visions of “community,” often being reduced to the level of a single “rights-holding self.“ In a sad way, the characters in the Bathtub are an artistic reflection of this fragmented world.
ExtremeTech: “Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram” by Sebastian Anthony, August 17, 2012.

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.
Scientific American: “How Hollywood Is Encouraging Online Piracy” by David Pogue, August 21, 2012.

And if you don’t make your product available legally, guess what? The people will get it illegally. Traffic to illegal download sites has more than sextupled since 2009, and file downloading is expected to grow about 23 percent annually until 2015. Why? Of the 10 most pirated movies of 2011, guess how many of them are available to rent online, as I write this in midsummer 2012? Zero. That’s right: Hollywood is actually encouraging the very practice they claim to be fighting (with new laws, for example).
Foreign Policy: “Intellectual power and responsibility in an age of superstars” by Daniel W. Drezner, August 23, 2012.

I think there are three interlocking things going on that explain why everyone feels so cranky. The first, as I alluded to in my Zakaria post, is that the economics of superstars has now reached the world of public intellectuals. There’s been a lot of talk about “brands” recently, and it gets at how the rewards for intellectual output have expanded at the upper strata.

See also: “Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Dylan Quotes for His Book” (by Julie Bosman, The New York Times, July 30, 2012), “Malcolm Gladwell Unmasked: A Look Into the Life & Work of America’s Most Successful Propagandist” (by Yasha Levine, S.H.A.M.E., May 31, 2012) and “The Naked and the TED” (by Evgeny Morozov, The New Republic, August 2, 2012). While those are not identical cases, they all can be linked to the general topic regarding the relation between intellectual integrity and stardom.
CNET News: “End of an era: Kodak to sell its film business” by Lance Whitney, August 24, 2012.

Or perhaps the reaction should be: what film business? Regardless, the company is auctioning off what’s left of its print film business and other segments amid its bankruptcy proceedings.
Samsara (official website): “Note from Mark Magidson on 70mm film, digital projection, and Samsara”, August 23, 2012.

All three of the films Ron and I have made have been photographed in 70mm (65mm negative), a process that has become more and more difficult as time has gone by for our kind of filmmaking due to security issues and the need to move film stock in and out of so many locations without it being X-rayed. We have employed this rarely used format because we have no actors or dialogue in our films, image is the main character. 70mm brings an unsurpassed emotional impact to the viewing experience. […]

We have chosen to output SAMSARA to DCP for digital projection rather than creating 70mm film prints this time. There are many reasons for this, but the bottom line is we believe a digital output from the high res scan of our film negative yields the best possible viewing experience. It is a combination of using a 50-year-old camera system and cutting-edge digital technology that works for our kind of filmmaking.

So in all likelihood, if you goo see Samsara in a movie theatre, you’ll get to see it either in 2K or 4K. As always, if you care at all, you should ask what you’re being served.
YouTube: Excerpt from the documentary Burden of Dreams (1982) about the making-of of Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo. If the footage looks and sound familiar, it’s because it was used in the Herzog’s excellent documentary My Best Fiend (1999, IMDb). Visit The Criterion Collection for more information about Burden of Dreams.

• By Philippe Theophanidis on September 2, 2012 ― Published in Link-roundup

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Hannah Arendt as herself: audio and video recordings

A movie that depicts intellectuals isn’t necessarily intellectual. There’s more real cognition at work and on display in Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color” and Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder”—neither of which depict people who make a living from intellectual pursuits—than in this movie, which comes off as a sort of soft-core philosophical porn. “Hannah Arendt” titillates the craving for the so-called intellectual life while actually offering little intellectual substance.

☛ The New Yorker: “‘Hannah Arendt’ and the Glorification of Thinking” by Richard Brody, May 31, 2013.

Richard Brody’s essay on Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt is well worth reading, whether one agrees with it or not. It covers such themes as the use of anecdotes to tell historical events, the cinematic representation of intellectual labour and, more importantly, Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), which was first published in The New Yorker. Brody, who feels Arendt’s philosophical analysis of the trial was too cold, concludes with the following words:

The cumulative effect, then, of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is overwhelming, incommensurable, alien to human experience. As such, the book reflects the absolute darkness of the Holocaust, its unassimilable otherness. From her philosophical, historical, and journalistic failures, Arendt created an accidental literary masterwork despite itself.

Brody’s legitimate concerns echo, to some extent, those expressed by Primo Levi in an appendix he added in 1976 to his 1947 book Se questo è un uomo (If This Is A Man). I have already used this excerpt in an essay I wrote a year ago precisely on the topic of incommensurability (see “On the threshold of knowledge: Pythagoreans, incommensurability and the experience of modernity”). I am not aware of an existing English translation for Primo Levi’s appendix, so I am relying on a French translation instead:

Peut-être que ce qui s’est passé ne peut pas être compris, et même ne doit pas être compris, dans la mesure où comprendre, c’est presque justifier. En effet, «comprendre» la décision ou la conduite de quelqu’un, cela veut dire (et c’est aussi le sens étymologique du mot) les mettre en soi, mettre en soi celui qui en est responsable, se mettre à sa place, s’identifier à lui. Eh bien, aucun homme normal ne pourra jamais s’identifier à Hitler, à Himmler, à Goebbels, à Eichmann, à tant d’autres encore. Cela nous déroute et nous réconforte en même temps, parce qu’il est peut-être souhaitable que ce qu’ils ont dit —et aussi, hélas, ce qu’ils ont fait —ne nous soit plus compréhensible. (Si c’est un homme, tr. by Martine Schruoffeneger, Paris: Pocket, p. 205).

• • •

The five-part series of Arendt’s essay Eichmann in Jerusalem are available for free at The New Yorker archive (see Part I on February 16, 1963; Part II on February 23, Part III on March 2, Part IV on March 9 and Part V on March 16). Although advertisement is understandably what allow the magazine to publish Arendt’s report in the first place, the juxtaposition of her account of Eichmann’s trial alongside consumer products (such as RCA new color television and Zenith new remote control) is somehow awkward (the same remark applies to John Hersey’s essay Hiroshima published later that year).

It is possible to get an “unglorified” idea of who (and how) Hannah Arendt was through audio and video recordings available online. I would recommend the following three.

The Hannah Arendt Collection offers audio excerpts of a lecture on “Power and Violence” Arendt delivered on December 11, 1968 at Bard College. There’s a 20 mins excerpt of the lecture itself, followed by 37 minutes of questions and answers with the audience (to download the mp3 files, right-click and “Save Link As”: Speech, Questions and Answers)
“Hannah Arendt im Gespräch mit Günter Gaus” (“Hannah Arendt in conversation with Günter Gaus”) is a 60 minutes television interview broadcast on October 28, 1964. In this interview, Arendt offers a broader and maybe more intimate introduction to herself and her work. The transcript, in German, is available at RBB Online. The video embedded below has English subtitles.

On October 1973, two years prior to her death, Roger Errera interviewed Arendt in New York. The result is a 50 minutes filmed co-produced by ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française) and INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel) which was first broadcast on July 6, 1974 as part of the series Un Certain Regard. In the recording, Arendt exposes her views on the political specificities of the United States. The questions were asked in French and Arendt answered in English. However, in the broadcast version ―which I believe is the only one available online― Arendt voice is dubbed-over with a French translation. YouTube has different versions: one has added Spanish subtitles and another has added German subtitles. On his official website, Roger Errera provides a complete transcript of Hannah Arendt’s original answers in English (the transcript was produced by U. Ludz in 1995: PDF).

• By Philippe Theophanidis on July 15, 2013 ― Published in Art, Communication, Movies | Tagged: Arendt, Eichmann, ethic, incommensurability, incommunicability, moral, otherness, philosophy

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John Cuneo: “Literary Skin: Great Writers, Naked”

☛ John Cuneo – Personal: “Literary Skin: Great Writers, Naked”, date unknown (© John Cuneo).

From his website:

John Cuneo, humorous illustrator whose work appears in many national publications including Atlantic Monthly and Esquire Magazine.

Cuneo published a book of illustration back in 2007 (Fantagraphics publishers):

Like Emily Dickinson, master illustrator John Cuneo has spent years generating a huge oeuvre of work that has never been published… anywhere. Unlike Ms. Dickinson, however, Cuneo’s consists of stacks and stacks of weird, perverse, erotic, hilarious, and disgusting images delineated in his sketchbooks. But make no mistake — these full-color sketchbook drawings are as lushly finished as his prize-winning illustration work for such magazines as Esquire (where he illustrates the sex column), Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Entertainment Weekly, and The Atlantic. nEuROTIC is a sharply designed little full-color hardcover that collects the very best of Cuneo’s humorous erotica. (read more over at Fantagraphics)

More resources about John Cuneo and his artwork:

He’s got a portofolio over at illoz.com: it’s composed of 19 published drawings along with 6 drawings of people (like Bush and Bukowski).
Cuneo also as a presence online over at Drawger.com (a site regrouping illustrator blogs for and by illustrators).
Line and Colors, a blog about drawing, sketching, painting and more, has a small piece about John Cuneo:

His wonderfully lose, sketch-like pen drawings, enlivened with deft applications of watercolor, are a visual treat.
Finally, Illustration Art (David Apatoff’s blog) offer a lengthier essay about the art of John Cuneo, more specificaly about the way he represents the relation between the artist and the world in his artwork. Worth reading.

• By Philippe Theophanidis on November 11, 2010 ― Published in Art, Illustration, Literature | Tagged: body, humor, John Cuneo, nude, writer

‘Mirror’ by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975

☛ Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975. At appr. 1 hr 12 mins. The quote reads: “A poet must stir the soul, not nurture idolaters.”

The complete film is available to watch on YouTube (at the time of this writing). One can press the “CC” button at the bottom of the viewing window in order to display English captions. The screenshots featured here all come from this YouTube copy: that’s because it features the exact same subtitles as in the 35 mm copy I saw. As of October 2012, the only Blu-ray edition available on the market is a Russian one without English subtitles.

• • •

Tarkovsky’s Mirror is about many things. In his book Sculpting in Time the Russian filmmaker wrote:

Anyone who wants can look at my films as into a mirror, in which he will see himself. When the conception of a film is given forms that are life-like, and the concentration is on its affective function rather than on the intellectual formulae of poetic cinema (where the aim is manifestly to provide a vessel for ideas) then it is possible for the audience to relate to that conception in the light of individual experience. (tr. by Kitty Hunter-Blair, Austin: University of Texas Press, [1986]1987, Second Edition, p. 184)

Two main themes nonetheless seem to dominate the story when I last saw it. First, the scattered memories, which are at times enchanted and at times dreadful. Second, the painful gap that exists between a man and a woman: each time they make an effort to cross it, it seems to grow wider and wider.

Again, in Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky explains how memories work as some sort of artistic reconstruction:

Generally people’s memories arc precious to them. It is no accident that they are coloured by poetry. The most beautiful memories are those of childhood. Of course memory has to be worked upon before it can become the basis of an artistic reconstruction of the past; and here it is important not to lose the particular emotional atmosphere without which a memory evoked in every detail merely gives rise to a bitter feeling of disappointment. There’s an enormous difference, after all, between the way you remember the house in which you were born and which you haven’t seen for years, and the actual sight of the house after a prolonged absence. Usually the poetry of the memory is destroyed by confrontation with its origin. (Ibid., p. 29)

He wrote something quite similar in the original script for the film:

The fragile joy we had felt on returning slowly ebbs from our hearts, like the blood of one mortally wounded; leaving a bitter anguished emptiness […] You should never return to ruins, whether it be a town, the house where you were born, or someone you have separated from. (quoted in Mirror: The Film Companion by Natasha Synessios, London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2001, p. 110)

This idea of memories as constructed representations that do not, however, stand for anything real is at the heart of the melancholic disposition (see previously here: memories as phantasms in relation to Angelopoulos’s film The Beekeeper).

In his book The Poetics of Space (originally La Poétique de l’Espace, 1958) Gaston Bachelard also wrote about the fleeing quality of memories and, consequently, about the difficulty one has to communicate what they are to others. Except maybe through artistic expression:

We can perhaps tell everything about the present, but about the past! The first, the oneirically definitive house, must retain its shadows. For it belongs to the literature of depth, that is, to poetry, and not to the fluent type of literature that, in order to analyze intimacy, needs other people’s stories. All I ought to say about my childhood home is just barely enough to place me, myself, in an oneiric situation, to set me on the threshold of a day-dream in which I shall find repose in the past. Then I may hope that my page will possess a sonority that will ring true―a voice so remote within me, that it will be the voice we all hear when we listen as far back as memory reaches, on the very limits of memory, beyond memory perhaps, in the field of the immemorial. All we communicate to others is an orientation toward what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively. (tr. by Maris Jolas, Beacon Press, 1994, p. 13)

Perhaps this could explain how, although the characters seem to experience some problems with the way they relate to each other, Tarkovsky as an artist is able to “stir the soul” of the viewers.

“You and I could never communicate” in ‘Mirror’ by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975, at 33mins.

In her Film Companion book to Mirror, Natasha Synessios shared a similar view:

It is a paradox that Mirror, a film which confirm the deep and unbreakable ties between people, between generations, between the personal and the political, between ourselves and the world, is essentially a film about people who fail to communicate, who have failed to communicate. All the characters share that plight―they are tongue-tied, they stutter; overwhelmed by emotion they speak in quotes, obliquely; disheartened, they take flight. Yet, through sheer will, talent, faith and the miraculous transformation of art, the film achieve what Tarkovsky always strove for: “In one form or another all my films have made the point that people are not alone and abandonned in an empty universe, but are linked by countless threads with the past and the future; that as each person lives his life he forges a bond with the whole world, indeed with the whole history of mankind.” (Mirror. The Film Companion, p. 110)

• • •

• By Philippe Theophanidis on October 3, 2012 ― Published in Art, Communication, Movies | Tagged: Bachelard, childhood, couple, home, incommunicability, melancholy, memory, past, phantasm, Russia, séparation, Tarkovsky

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“But there’s something in the New York air…” by Simone de Beauvoir, 1948

January 29, 1947 ― Again I slept late. But there’s something in the New York air that makes sleep useless; perhaps it’s because your heart beats more quickly here than elsewhere―people with heart conditions sleep less, and many New Yorkers die of heart problems. In any case, I’m enjoying this windfall: the days seem too short.

Breakfast in the corner drugstore is a celebration. Orange juice, toast, café au lait―an unadulterated pleasure. Sitting on my revolving stool, I participate in a moment of American life. My solitude does not separate me from my neighbors, who are also eating alone. Rather, it’s the pleasure I feel that isolates me from them. They are simply eating; they’re not on vacation.

☛ America Day by Day by Simone de Beauvoir, tr. by Carol Cosman, Berkeley: University of California Press, [1954]1999, p. 18.

L’Amérique au jour le jour was first published in French in 1948. In it, French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir tells the story of the four months trip she took to the United-States at the beginning of the year 1947. Here’s an excerpt from the foreword by Douglas Brinkley included in the English edition:

Beauvoir’s story begins with her “smooth flight” from Paris to Newfoundland to New York’s La Guardia Airport. Embraced upon arrival by the Condé Nast set at a gaggle of cocktail parties, cheered on at Vassar College, where she took part in a symposium called “Women’s Role in Contemporary Society,” gossiped about as the “prettiest existentialist” by Janet Flanner in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” Beauvoir made a significant splash. The New York Times Magazine even commissioned an article from her―“An Existentialist Looks at Americans”―which appeared on May 25, 1947. Although much of her itinerary revolved around her well-arranged lecture schedule, she allowed plenty of free days for aimless explorations and journalistic pulse taking. Beauvoir, like an anxious literary traveler, wanted to pinpoint the intellectual fountainhead of the nation that produced the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos. The first chapters of America Day by Day take place in prosperous postwar Manhattan, where Beauvoir was overwhelmed by the cult of American consumerism, disturbed by our national attraction to luxury cars and Madison Avenue come-ons, and angered at the anticommunist groupthink mentality she encountered wherever she went. She perfectly captures the alienated sensation of being a stranger in Gotham: “Between these houses that have existed without me for years, for centuries, these streets were traveled by thousand of people who were not me, who are not me. But now I am walking here. I go down Broadway; it’s really me. I’m walking in streets not yet traveled by me, streets where my life has not yet been carved, streets without any scent of the past. No one here is concerned with my presence; I’m still a ghost, and I slip through the city without disturbing anything. And yet from now on my life will embrace the contour of these streets, these houses; New York will belong to me; I will belong to it.”(pp. xii-xiii)

I’ve tracked down the small text by Janet Flanner mentionned in Brinkley’s foreword: it was published in The New Yorker on February 22, 1947. Here’s an excerpt:

Last week, we had a talk wityh Simone de Beauvoir, the French novelist, playwright, and No. 2 Existentialist, just before she left town on a coast-to-coast lecture tour. Aware that Mlle. de Beauvoir is regarded in Paris as the female intellectual counterpart of Jean-Paul Sartre, we were all set for a grim half hour. Well, surprise! Mlle. de B. is the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw; also eager, gentle, modest, and as pleased as a Midwesterner with the two weeks she spent in New York. Her English is rickety, se we sought to draw her out in our rickety French. “I’ve walked all around Manhattan and Brooklyn,” she told us. “I flew here on a Saturday. I left my hotel, the Lincoln, the next morning at nine o’clock and walked downtown to the Battery, through an abandoned city with empty canyons. Even the drugstores and cafeterias were closed. Paris never seems so empty on Sundays. Since then, I’ve walked three or four hours every morning the weather has been nice. I’ve walked all over Washington Heights, Greenwich Village, and East Rivers. I think I like Washington Square best. I’ve also admired the city from roofs, since you can’t really see it from the streets. I’ve been to the Blue Angel, Café Society Downtown, and Sammy’s Bowery Follies, which is wonderful. It’s absolutely dissolute [crapuleux]―all those old singers, whom nobody wants, with feathers on their heads. I’ve gone to the cinema, to see your ‘thrillings,’ and I’ve been amused by the children skiing in Central Park. We haven’t enough snow in Paris for this, as a rule, or enough slopes when we do.” (The New Yorker: “The Talk of the Town” by Janet Flanner and Stanley Edgar Hyman, February 22, 1947, p. 19; full access may require a subscription)

Below is a portrait of Simone de Beauvoir photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1945 (retrieved from Magnum Photos):

Simone de Beauvoir by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, France, 1945. © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

• By Philippe Theophanidis on December 15, 2012 ― Published in Art, Communication, Literature | Tagged: America, city, existentialism, New York, Simone de Beauvoir, sleep, travel, woman

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Tim Hetherington (1970-2011)

☛ Restrepo a film by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, 2010

Daily, we surf the web for news, watch documentaries and browse through stunning photographs provided by photojournalists in order get a “bigger picture” of the world we’re living in. We’re able to do so because people, out there, are putting their lives on the line.

Today, we learned the death of photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington who was killed while covering the front lines in the besieged city of Misrata, in Libya.

Misurata, Libya’s third-largest city, has been cut off by land from the rest of the country by military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. It has been the scene of intensive, close-quarters fighting for weeks. Hundreds of Libyans have been confirmed killed.

The photographers had reached the city by sea from Benghazi, the rebel capital. The early reports said they had been working together near the front lines when they were struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. (The New York Times: “‘Restrepo’ Director Is Killed in Libya” by C.J. Chivers, April 20, 2011)

Restrepo won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. It was also nominated for the 2011 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

Tim Hetherington (right) and Sebastian Junger (left) at the Restrepo outpost in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan.

Tim Hetherington (right) and Sebastian Junger (left) and at the Restrepo outpost in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan. Junger and Hetherington jointly directed, filmed and produced the movie 'Restrepo' from June 2007 to January 2010.

Photo via the Time LightBox: “Tim Hetherington in Memoriam”

[Update] The Photography Post put up an exhaustive collection of links and resources about Tim Hetherington’s death and his lifetime’s work.

• By Philippe Theophanidis on April 20, 2011 ― Published in Art, Communication | Tagged: death, documentary, filmmaker, media, obituary, photographer, photojournalism, war

“Viva el 1ro de Mayo” by Ernesto Bazan, 1997

☛ Cuba Bazan by Ernesto Bazan, BazanPhotos Publishing, 2008. © Ernesto Bazan. Large format retrieved from Everyday I Show.

This photo shot in 1997 is part of the self-publish book Cuba Bazan which won the Best Photography Book of the Year Award at the New York Photo Festival in 2009. It shows a cigar factory worker while she begins her shift by rolling a cigar. Behind her, on the wall, one can read the inscription “Viva el 1ro de Mayo” (a celebration of the International Workers’s Day or May Day). The photo is also included in a story on tobacco growing and cigars in Cuba (also by Ernesto Bazan).

From The New York Times’s LENS blog:

Mr. Bazan’s book documents that parallel and heartbreaking reality, devoid of color but rich in gritty black-and-white textures. He captures the stoic pride of the guajiros, farmers with rough hands and strong faces. Inside a store filled with empty shelves, a bored caretaker — how could he be a salesman if there is nothing to sell? — sits at a counter. Penitents in Havana seek divine intercession crawling on their hands to the shrine of St. Lazarus. Or they haul crosses, oblivious to the revolutionary slogans that no longer put food on the table or hope in their hearts. (“Showcase: Sisyphean Days in Cuba” by David Gonzalez, September 30, 2009)

To learn more about Ernesto Bazan, consider the following links:

Everyday I Show has 41 large format photos (both black & white and color).
Enersto Bazan official website bazanphotos.com and as well as the main website for his book Cuba Bazan bazancuba.com The website has a preview of the book as well an introduction by Ernesto Bazan, photos of the making of the book, link to reviews, etc.
NPR: “Ernesto Bazan’s Vision Of Cuba” by Heather Murphy, July 7, 2009.
See also the video interview “Talking with Ernesto Bazan” produced in 2011 by Peruvian photographer Luigi Abanto Varese (it comes with English subtitles). Watch it below:

• By Philippe Theophanidis on May 1, 2013 ― Published in Art, Photography | Tagged: cigar, Cuba, Ernesto Bazan, May Day, tobacco, woman, worker

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