Tag Archives: culture

The Narcissus Society

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“…Thrown together for two weeks at Brooklyn Supreme Court with 22 other jurors, I was struck by how rare it is now in American life to be gathered, physically, with an array of other folk of different ages, backgrounds, skin colors, beliefs, faiths, tastes, education levels and political convictions and be obliged to work out your differences in order to get the job done.

…

America could use more of that kind of experience. As it is, everyone’s shrieking their lonesome anger, burrowing deeper into stress, gazing at their own images — and generating paralysis.” — Roger Cohen (New York Times op-ed)

The Surreal World of Chatroulette

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Una webcam

Image via Wikipedia

“Nothing can really prepare you for the latest online phenomenon, Chatroulette. The social Web site, created just three months ago by a 17-year-old Russian named Andrey Ternovskiy, drops you into an unnerving world where you are connected through webcams to a random, fathomless succession of strangers from across the globe. You see them, they see you. You talk to them, they talk to you. Or not. The site, which is gaining thousands of users a day and lately some news coverage, has a faddish feel, but those who study online vagaries see a glimpse into a surreal future, a turn in the direction of the Internet.” (New York Times )

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America’s Food Revolution

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Burger with Foie Gras and Onion

“Just try having a dinner party today. You’ll have to contend with perfervid vegans, virtuous vegetarians, persistent pescatarians, lamb-phobics, tongue-phobics, veal-rights advocates, the gluten-intolerant, the lactose-intolerant, the shellfish-intolerant, the peanut-intolerant, the spicy-intolerant, and on and on in an ever-fragmenting array. For God’s sake, don’t serve foie gras; a guest might show up wearing a suicide vest and blow the whole party to kingdom come. All this has a lot to do with the decline of traditional manners and the rise of personal assertiveness and the yuppie belief that we can engineer our own immortality. Food matters so much now that it can make tyrants of our dearest friends and neighbors.” (City Journal)

Neuroculture – Home Page

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“Increasingly, ideas, images and concepts of the neurosciences are being assimilated into global culture and becoming part of our daily discourses and practices.

Visual and digital technologies of the brain, the widespread dissemination of psychotropic drugs, expanding programs in consciousness studies and other neurotechnologies are having a significant impact on individuals and society.

These ongoing transformations in science and society are deeply pervading popular culture and are appearing in a profusion of media and artistic expanse- from the visual arts to film, theatre, novels and advertisements.

With this website, we explore and document past and current manifestations of this phenomenon and introduce an online platform for the analysis and exchange of cultural projects intersecting neuroscience, the arts and the humanities.”

The Null Device

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Margaret Thatcher, 1983

Every so often I remember to check in on The Null Device, and I am usually rewarded with a rich harvest of stimulation and idiosyncracy. For instance, right now, you’ll find:

  • a meditation on the reformation of Spandau Ballet and its relationship to Thatcherism;
  • a review of the state of the art in neo-Nazi haute couture;
  • a piece on anti-teenage lighting, the latest in Britain’s war on out-of-control youth;
  • a summary of Lord Whimsy’s essay on bizarre and grotesque fashions throughout history;
  • the revelation of the world’s most alienating airport;
  • how to tell how credit-worthy a person is by looking at their face;

and much more.

The High Priests of Snark

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The Hunting of the Snark

David Denby: “A strain of nasty, knowing abuse is spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation—a tone of snarking insult provoked and encouraged by the new hybrid world of print, television, radio and the Internet. This is about style and also, I suppose, grace. Anyone who speaks of grace—so spiritual a word—in connection with our raucous culture risks sounding like a genteel idiot, so I had better say right away that I’m all in favor of nasty comedy, incessant profanity, trash talk, any kind of satire, and certain kinds of invective. It’s the bad kind of invective—low, teasing, snide, condescending, knowing; in brief, snark—that I hate…

via The Daily Beast.

You Are Free To Leave…

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Pedestrians head ...

Interactive graphic shows the percentage of the population issued passports in each of the fifty states. I am not surprised at the regional discrepancies, which sort with so many other measures of sophistication state-by-state. I am surprised by how low the percentages are across the board. Overall, less than five percent of the American public hold passports. If that doesn’t speak to our insularity… Update: As a reader points out (see the comments), it is likely that the statistic represents the percentage of Americans who were issued passports in just one year. A Google search on “percentage of Americans who have passports” comes up with a figure more like 20-30% instead.

via Good.

‘I Liked Their Early Stuff the Best’

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The burning man, from the Burning Man Festival

Heather Havrilesky is writing here about Battlestar Galactica, about which I do not share the fascination, but her introductory remarks may be worth pondering regardless:

‘I hate hearing, “I liked their early stuff the best.” Even if it’s true, there’s something about that sentiment that’s just so overused and predictable. “Of course you liked early R.E.M. best,” I want to say. “You were 17 years old and drunk on tequila and in love with a girl who didn’t know you existed, and ‘Harbor Coat’ summed up your melancholy mood like it was written just for you.”

The truth is, we all loved early U2 and early Genesis and early “SNL” and early “Sopranos” and early reality TV and the first season of “Lost” and early Modest Mouse and some of the first webzines and the first days of Burning Man (before it got so popular) and John McEnroe (before he was everywhere) and the Dead (before the frat boys caught on) and weed (when it was cheap, remember the dime bag?) and early David Foster Wallace and early Dan Clowes and early This American Life and early Spy magazine and early, early, early, early to the party, not late! Not like everyone else, the herds, the masses! I knew about it all first, I was there, goddamn it, I was right there, discovering it. Just me, me, me!

But you weren’t alone, sugar plum. We were all there. We all liked the same crap, and then we didn’t like the stuff that came after that. And then we got fat and our hair started falling out and our backs started to hurt and we didn’t like anything at all anymore.’

…and, if you’re not there yet, take it to heart because you will be.

By the way, I beg to differ. I didn’t like the same crap, Heather. It is even more hip not to turn your nose up at things you and your crowd used to like but not to care for them in the first place. Things I never ever liked, even in their early days, include: Genesis, SNL, and especially reality TV and This American Life (and how could you forget Dave Eggers?) … And should I boast that I haven’t even heard of Dan Clowes. (You’re right about the Dead, though; I was as fanatic as they came, and I can’t listen to nearly anything past ’78.)

This is only peripherally related, I suspect, but writers on creativity have distinguished immature and mature varieties; immature creativity being brash and bold, energetic and iconoclastic, while mature creativity is more sober, reflective, integrative and synthetic. Psychologists have studied what makes some creative geniuses peak early and others continue to age constructively. As a culture, we increasingly favor the former and ignore, if not spurn, the latter (as our society does with the wisdom of age in general). I suspect the crowd-pleasers are largely of the brash variety. (It is sort of like drinking some Gallo to get smashed out of your mind as contrasted to appreciating a fine Medoc, isn’t it?)

via I Like to Watch, Salon Arts & Entertainment.

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America’s Anthropological President

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Barack Obama and Maya Soetoro w...Barack Obama and Maya Soetoro with their
mother Ann Dunham and grandfather Stanley Dunham
in Hawaii (early 1970s).

‘Ruth Behar, a filmmaker, poet, and anthropologist based at the University of Michigan, offers an interesting take on the fact of Obama’s anthropological matrilineage — and uses that fact to make a policy plea:

“The fact that Barack Obama’s mother was a cultural anthropologist has been noted with curiosity and amusement. A few commentators dismiss her anthropology credentials by describing her as part of a radical American fringe, while others represent her favorably, but as ‘unconventional’, ‘free-spirited’, or ‘bohemian’. That reputation is based on her two brief (and interracial) marriages and her wanderings through Javanese villages in an era when the stay-at-home mom was the public model of the American mother. Many now find it difficult to comprehend her passion for her adopted culture and her desire to live for years among the subjects of her research and advocacy work, though what she did was nothing out of the ordinary within anthropology.

“As a cultural anthropologist, I think Obama’s family background is something to celebrate. But even more important, I think the time is ripe for cultural anthropology to become a fundamental part of American education and public culture. Anthropology needs to be taught alongside math, science, language arts, and history as early as elementary school and definitely throughout the high-school years. Its insights about the perils of ethnocentrism, racialization, and exoticized stereotypes need to become part of our everyday vocabulary.” ‘

via Chronicle of Higher Education

Did his mother’s anthropological roots contribute to Barack Obama’s thoughtfulness and genuinely multiracial embrace? Arguably; and I agree with the implication that anthropology, often dissed as the stepchild social science because of its jargon, politicization and general self-indulgence, should be a core part of education, given its potential to impart cultural sensitivity and an appreciation of relativism. My undergraduate degree was in social anthropology (as I have written here before I was lucky enough to live in several indigenous cultures doing ethnographic fieldwork for my undergraduate thesis) and I think it has shaped my thinking in a pivotal way, informing my cosmology, spirituality, epistemology, and politics as well as my practice of psychiatry (which in some ways I approach as a cross-cultural exercise).

Christians AGAINST Cartoons!

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A clay animation scene from a Finnish TV comme...A friend (thanks, julia), who herself happens to be a cartoonist, forwarded a link to this site to me and also mentioned she knows the writer of Pharyngula and had sent it his way. (Coincidentally, Pharyngula is on my reading list and I had already seen the blink to the CAC site there.) With Pharyngula having a much larger readership than FmH (or at least a more vocal readership), there have been in excess of a hundred comments to the post over there. Like my take on it, opinion is running in favor of its being a parody. Especially telling is that one reader tracked down the registered owner of the CAC domain and reports that it belongs to an animation studio! In any case, I learned a new, very useful, concept from the comments — Poe’s Law.