The Groundhog is Dead! Long Live the Groundhog!
Though killed last year by then-newly elected NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, the reincarnated Staten Island Chuck has predicted an early end to this winter, which ran surprisingly mild through the end of last year but turned tough in the middle of last month.
The original Staten Island Chuck (full name: Charles G. Hogg, Sr.) began forecasting in 1981, courtesy of the Staten Island Zoo, where he and all his descendants have resided. When he retired, his son — then Charles G. Hogg, Jr., now simply Charles G. Hogg since his father has passed — took over.
Amicable for decades, relations between NYC mayors and marmot meteorologists have exhibited dramatic signs of strain in recent years. In 2009 the original Chuck’s scion bit the finger of then-Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. As a result, the zoo benched him, substituting his sister, Charlotte. However, in what some took as mayoral retaliation for the nip her brother gave Hizzoner Bloomberg, a year ago de Blasio dropped Charlotte, who died one week later of internal injuries. (This week Jimmy, the official groundhog in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, bit the mayor’s ear during a Groundhog Day event. I hope this isn’t turning into some nationwide groundhogs-vs.-mayors feud. That will not end well.)
Unsure whether Charlotte’s brother, this month back again in the role of Staten Island Chuck, stands prepared to forgive de Blasio or NYC mayors generally for his sister’s untimely fate, the Staten Island Zoo has wisely decided to eschew mayoral handling of the forecaster. Instead, the rodent prophet now makes his or her appearance protected by a plexiglas box — something like the Popemobile, if you will. No one seems concerned that this enclosure might affect the prediction.
In any case, Chuck has promised us an early spring for 2015. That puts him at odds with Punxsutawney Phil, who has prognosticated another six weeks of bleak and cold. Aside from rooting for the home team, I wouldn’t mind if the weather pattern cut us a break, so I’m with Chuck on this.
I Am Charlie
Charlie Hebdo cover: “We must make Charlie Hebdo cover its face!”
Speaking of the papacy, I’ve noted with concern Pope Francis’s recent pronunciamento that “Freedom of expression must take into consideration human reality and, therefore, I say it must be prudent,” his making common cause with Islamists by arguing that religious beliefs merit special protection from offense (“You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”), and his assertion that “If [someone] says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch.” So I have this to say in carefully considered response:
Frankie, your mother was notorious for her self-pleasuring delight in imagined threesomes and bouts of bukkake with assorted combinations of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Yahweh, Allah, Zeus, Minerva, Buddha, Shiva, Ogun, Bast, Thor, L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, and other prophets and deities. Should we ever meet (which seems unlikely), I’ll expect that punch. You can count on one in return.
I say that in full awareness that the theocratization of our secular democracy proceeds apace, with this smug pontiff now scheduled to address a joint meeting of Congress on September 24. Invited to do so by House Speaker John Boehner, Ye Infallible One will pontificate to a Congress that is 31 percent Catholic. As bad ideas go, this ranks right up at the top, opening the door for the head man of every one of “the world’s great religions” and the hordes of their true believers to expect and demand equal time. And, after them, the leaders of the second-drawer faiths, etc.
I’m with John Adams: “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.” He, Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, and most of the other founders of this country already spin in their graves.
Walter Benjamin was Wrong
MIT Technology Review has just published an essay of mine titled “Auras: There’s an App for That.” The unfortunate pluralizing of the first word in that title may disguise its purpose, as a meditation on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ambience and energy that accrues to unique, handmade works of art as a consequence of their physical facture and passage through time.
In short, I argue that Benjamin was wrong (about this, at least). Aura isn’t inherent; it’s something we attribute to things. We can attribute it to anything. And, in the digital era, it has become a flavoring, akin to sprinkles on your ice cream cone, that can get added to images at will.
You can read the whole piece at the Tech Review website, which makes the print edition’s complete contents available free of charge. Think of Tech Review as a counterpart to Wired, but without the trendiness. Worth bookmarking for return visits. I’ve written for them in the past; this marks the beginning of what I hope will be a long return engagement.
In conjunction with this article I did a live 15-minute interview on January 31 for Digital Village Radio, “a weekly broadcast about the impact of technology, computers and the Internet on media and popular culture, hosted by Ric Allan and Doran Barons.” The show is broadcast Saturdays at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time on KPFK (90.7fm), Los Angeles. They’ve added this rapid-fire exchange to their archive; you can listen to it here.
WTF?!? Contest Premiere!
As we go into this blog’s sixth calendar year, I’ve decided to initiate the Photocritic International WTF?!? Contest. The rules are simple:
- Prepare your analysis / interpretation / paraphrase of the text below.
- Email it to me.
- I will select winners for first place, second place, third place, and two (2) runners-up, if the volume and quality of entries suffice.
- My decisions will be final.
- Results will get published here.
- Winners will receive, by snail-mail, signed copies of a book of mine.
The text for this first contest, a nugget of “International Art English”:
VENTANA244 presents OYSTERS WITH LEMON, an exhibition in three parts featuring works selected by Andrew Huston and Michael Zahn. Informed by close readings of genre, facture, and style, OYSTERS WITH LEMON regards the poetics of the concrete image while drawing from a source in postwar Lettrist ‘metagraphie’. In turn, the exhibition sets out staged tableaux of form, color, and scale imagined relative to the sequent, the discrete, and the infinitesimal.
Fur Seals and Penguins
In the 1960s the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her friend Robert Lowell, also a poet, “Since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully; who knows what might depend on it? So I am enclosing a clipping about racoons.” The specifics of that clipping may reside in Lowell’s papers, but otherwise must remain imaginary. In that spirit — who knows what might depend on it? — I offer you this link to a story about fur seals and penguins. Plus those below.
Casting as I do a wide net in my efforts to understand visual communication, and the ways in which lens-derived imagery fits into that larger puzzle, and thus the issues that criticism of such imagery must needs address, I find myself pondering all kinds of “floating things.” Forinstance, the perplexing fact that, apparently, men and women see colors differently — which would suggest that women make color photographs differently than men do, and, as viewers, react to them differently than men do.
“The Stinker,” official mascot of the Ig Nobel Prizes.
Sponsored by the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), the Ig Nobel Prizes, as Nature magazine puts it, “reward those research projects that ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think.'” I track them not just because weird science intrigues me in general but because sometimes something relevant to our field pops up.
Cases in point: The 2014 winners include “Seeing Jesus in toast: Neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia,” by Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, relevant to our response to photographers whose images encourage such anthropomorphing (Neuroscience category).
Kenneth Burke, “The Philosophy of Literary Form” (1941), cover
Not to mention “Aesthetic value of paintings affects pain thresholds,” by Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, “measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot [in the hand] by a powerful laser beam” (Art category). This (unintentionally, I’m sure) adds new meaning to literary critic Kenneth Burke’s proposal of a sliding scale between the aesthetic and the anaesthetic/analgesic for the assessment of works of art. (See his 1941 classic, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action.)
Selfie Watch
As readers of this blog know, I gather and weigh data related to the selfie phenomenon. Presently it comes in so thick and fast that I can’t sort it out immediately. At the same time, I don’t want to shelve the most striking of these bits and pieces until reflection sheds light on them. Some of the most promising:
“World of_ Warcraft,” avatar selfie
• From Nathan Grayson at Kotaku (a gaming website), January 26, 2015: “Soon You Will Be Able To Take Selfies In World Of Warcraft.” Yes, this means that your avatar in a FPS (first-person shooter) video game will shortly become enabled to make his/her/its own self-portrait. You can even accessorize the imaginary camera involved, via “a bonus mission … that will reward you with an upgrade kit for the S.E.L.F.I.E. Camera MkII. It’s got filters!”
• From Meghan Keneally and Clayton Sandell at ABC News, February 3, 2015, “Selfies Likely Caused Colorado Plane Crash, NTSB Says.” Yes, the latest reported “death by selfie” — it actually occurred on May 31, 2014 — involved excessive, inappropriate selfie-making by the pilot, using a GoPro camera in the cockpit. “‘Based on the evidence of cell phone use during low-altitude maneuvering, including the flight immediately before the accident flight, it is likely that cell phone use during the accident flight distracted the pilot and contributed to the development of spatial disorientation and subsequent loss of control,’ the NTSB said,” according to ABC News.
• Maybe this explains that. From Darren Orf at Gizmodo, January 11, 2015, “Men Who Post Lots of Selfies Show Signs of Psychopathy, Says Study.” The study itself, “The Dark Triad and trait self-objectification as predictors of men’s use and self-presentation behaviors on social networking sites,” by Jesse Fox and Margaret C. Rooney, has this among its conclusions re men who post lots of unedited selfies:
“This lack of filtering and impulsivity in SNS [social networking sites] posting may benefit some psychopathic men, however. One study found that male users who had SNS posts that alluded to excessive drinking and promiscuous behavior were perceived as more attractive than male users with posts identifying them as ”the life of the party” (Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim, Westerman, & Tong, 2008). Thus, when psychopathic men appear reckless or impulsive on SNSs, it may actually help attract mates.”
(“The Dark Triad,” a term heretofore unknown to me, apparently refers to a lethal cocktail of “narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.” Know anyone like that?)
DAM tweet, February 2, 2015
• From Adam Withnall at The Independent, February 3, 2015, “Palestinian man’s selfie while ‘running away from the Israeli military’ isn’t quite what it seems.” DAM (Da Arabian MCs), self-described as “the first Palestinian hip hop crew and among the first to rap in Arabic, [who] began working together in the late 1990s,” posted to Twitter “A selfie while the Israeli military running after me.” Turns out the group staged the image. “[A] DAM associate told Buzzfeed News they did not want to be quoted on record because ‘they’re enjoying watching the reaction the photo is generating online.'”
• Finally, from Emma Burrows at CNN, February 5, 2015, “Russian lesbians take selfie with anti-gay lawmaker.” Finding themselves sharing an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg with Vitaly Milonov, the notoriously homophobic Russian politician behind the controversial anti-“gay propaganda” law, a pair of lesbian activists took a selfie of themselves kissing with him in the background, and uploaded it to Instagram. You can see him hiding his face with his tablet. Girl power!
SPJ Research Award 2014
Cabin Fever 2015: Bits & Pieces (1)
Though killed last year by then-newly elected NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, the reincarnated Staten Island Chuck has predicted an early end to this winter, which ran surprisingly mild through the end of last year but turned tough in the middle of last month.
The original Staten Island Chuck (full name: Charles G. Hogg, Sr.) began forecasting in 1981, courtesy of the Staten Island Zoo, where he and all his descendants have resided. When he retired, his son — then Charles G. Hogg, Jr., now simply Charles G. Hogg since his father has passed — took over.
Unsure whether Charlotte’s brother, this month back again in the role of Staten Island Chuck, stands prepared to forgive de Blasio or NYC mayors generally for his sister’s untimely fate, the Staten Island Zoo has wisely decided to eschew mayoral handling of the forecaster. Instead, the rodent prophet now makes his or her appearance protected by a plexiglas box — something like the Popemobile, if you will. No one seems concerned that this enclosure might affect the prediction.
In any case, Chuck has promised us an early spring for 2015. That puts him at odds with Punxsutawney Phil, who has prognosticated another six weeks of bleak and cold. Aside from rooting for the home team, I wouldn’t mind if the weather pattern cut us a break, so I’m with Chuck on this.
I Am Charlie
Charlie Hebdo cover: “We must make Charlie Hebdo cover its face!”
Speaking of the papacy, I’ve noted with concern Pope Francis’s recent pronunciamento that “Freedom of expression must take into consideration human reality and, therefore, I say it must be prudent,” his making common cause with Islamists by arguing that religious beliefs merit special protection from offense (“You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”), and his assertion that “If [someone] says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch.” So I have this to say in carefully considered response:
Frankie, your mother was notorious for her self-pleasuring delight in imagined threesomes and bouts of bukkake with assorted combinations of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Yahweh, Allah, Zeus, Minerva, Buddha, Shiva, Ogun, Bast, Thor, L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, and other prophets and deities. Should we ever meet (which seems unlikely), I’ll expect that punch. You can count on one in return.
I say that in full awareness that the theocratization of our secular democracy proceeds apace, with this smug pontiff now scheduled to address a joint meeting of Congress on September 24. Invited to do so by House Speaker John Boehner, Ye Infallible One will pontificate to a Congress that is 31 percent Catholic. As bad ideas go, this ranks right up at the top, opening the door for the head man of every one of “the world’s great religions” and the hordes of their true believers to expect and demand equal time. And, after them, the leaders of the second-drawer faiths, etc.
I’m with John Adams: “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.” He, Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, and most of the other founders of this country already spin in their graves.
Walter Benjamin was Wrong
MIT Technology Review has just published an essay of mine titled “Auras: There’s an App for That.” The unfortunate pluralizing of the first word in that title may disguise its purpose, as a meditation on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ambience and energy that accrues to unique, handmade works of art as a consequence of their physical facture and passage through time.
In short, I argue that Benjamin was wrong (about this, at least). Aura isn’t inherent; it’s something we attribute to things. We can attribute it to anything. And, in the digital era, it has become a flavoring, akin to sprinkles on your ice cream cone, that can get added to images at will.
You can read the whole piece at the Tech Review website, which makes the print edition’s complete contents available free of charge. Think of Tech Review as a counterpart to Wired, but without the trendiness. Worth bookmarking for return visits. I’ve written for them in the past; this marks the beginning of what I hope will be a long return engagement.
In conjunction with this article I did a live 15-minute interview on January 31 for Digital Village Radio, “a weekly broadcast about the impact of technology, computers and the Internet on media and popular culture, hosted by Ric Allan and Doran Barons.” The show is broadcast Saturdays at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time on KPFK (90.7fm), Los Angeles. They’ve added this rapid-fire exchange to their archive; you can listen to it here.
WTF?!? Contest Premiere!
As we go into this blog’s sixth calendar year, I’ve decided to initiate the Photocritic International WTF?!? Contest. The rules are simple:
The text for this first contest, a nugget of “International Art English”:
VENTANA244 presents OYSTERS WITH LEMON, an exhibition in three parts featuring works selected by Andrew Huston and Michael Zahn. Informed by close readings of genre, facture, and style, OYSTERS WITH LEMON regards the poetics of the concrete image while drawing from a source in postwar Lettrist ‘metagraphie’. In turn, the exhibition sets out staged tableaux of form, color, and scale imagined relative to the sequent, the discrete, and the infinitesimal.
Fur Seals and Penguins
In the 1960s the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her friend Robert Lowell, also a poet, “Since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully; who knows what might depend on it? So I am enclosing a clipping about racoons.” The specifics of that clipping may reside in Lowell’s papers, but otherwise must remain imaginary. In that spirit — who knows what might depend on it? — I offer you this link to a story about fur seals and penguins. Plus those below.
Casting as I do a wide net in my efforts to understand visual communication, and the ways in which lens-derived imagery fits into that larger puzzle, and thus the issues that criticism of such imagery must needs address, I find myself pondering all kinds of “floating things.” Forinstance, the perplexing fact that, apparently, men and women see colors differently — which would suggest that women make color photographs differently than men do, and, as viewers, react to them differently than men do.
“The Stinker,” official mascot of the Ig Nobel Prizes.
Sponsored by the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), the Ig Nobel Prizes, as Nature magazine puts it, “reward those research projects that ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think.'” I track them not just because weird science intrigues me in general but because sometimes something relevant to our field pops up.
Cases in point: The 2014 winners include “Seeing Jesus in toast: Neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia,” by Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, relevant to our response to photographers whose images encourage such anthropomorphing (Neuroscience category).
Kenneth Burke, “The Philosophy of Literary Form” (1941), cover
Not to mention “Aesthetic value of paintings affects pain thresholds,” by Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, “measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot [in the hand] by a powerful laser beam” (Art category). This (unintentionally, I’m sure) adds new meaning to literary critic Kenneth Burke’s proposal of a sliding scale between the aesthetic and the anaesthetic/analgesic for the assessment of works of art. (See his 1941 classic, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action.)
Selfie Watch
As readers of this blog know, I gather and weigh data related to the selfie phenomenon. Presently it comes in so thick and fast that I can’t sort it out immediately. At the same time, I don’t want to shelve the most striking of these bits and pieces until reflection sheds light on them. Some of the most promising:
“World of_ Warcraft,” avatar selfie
• From Nathan Grayson at Kotaku (a gaming website), January 26, 2015: “Soon You Will Be Able To Take Selfies In World Of Warcraft.” Yes, this means that your avatar in a FPS (first-person shooter) video game will shortly become enabled to make his/her/its own self-portrait. You can even accessorize the imaginary camera involved, via “a bonus mission … that will reward you with an upgrade kit for the S.E.L.F.I.E. Camera MkII. It’s got filters!”
• From Meghan Keneally and Clayton Sandell at ABC News, February 3, 2015, “Selfies Likely Caused Colorado Plane Crash, NTSB Says.” Yes, the latest reported “death by selfie” — it actually occurred on May 31, 2014 — involved excessive, inappropriate selfie-making by the pilot, using a GoPro camera in the cockpit. “‘Based on the evidence of cell phone use during low-altitude maneuvering, including the flight immediately before the accident flight, it is likely that cell phone use during the accident flight distracted the pilot and contributed to the development of spatial disorientation and subsequent loss of control,’ the NTSB said,” according to ABC News.
• Maybe this explains that. From Darren Orf at Gizmodo, January 11, 2015, “Men Who Post Lots of Selfies Show Signs of Psychopathy, Says Study.” The study itself, “The Dark Triad and trait self-objectification as predictors of men’s use and self-presentation behaviors on social networking sites,” by Jesse Fox and Margaret C. Rooney, has this among its conclusions re men who post lots of unedited selfies:
“This lack of filtering and impulsivity in SNS [social networking sites] posting may benefit some psychopathic men, however. One study found that male users who had SNS posts that alluded to excessive drinking and promiscuous behavior were perceived as more attractive than male users with posts identifying them as ”the life of the party” (Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim, Westerman, & Tong, 2008). Thus, when psychopathic men appear reckless or impulsive on SNSs, it may actually help attract mates.”
(“The Dark Triad,” a term heretofore unknown to me, apparently refers to a lethal cocktail of “narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.” Know anyone like that?)
DAM tweet, February 2, 2015
• From Adam Withnall at The Independent, February 3, 2015, “Palestinian man’s selfie while ‘running away from the Israeli military’ isn’t quite what it seems.” DAM (Da Arabian MCs), self-described as “the first Palestinian hip hop crew and among the first to rap in Arabic, [who] began working together in the late 1990s,” posted to Twitter “A selfie while the Israeli military running after me.” Turns out the group staged the image. “[A] DAM associate told Buzzfeed News they did not want to be quoted on record because ‘they’re enjoying watching the reaction the photo is generating online.'”
• Finally, from Emma Burrows at CNN, February 5, 2015, “Russian lesbians take selfie with anti-gay lawmaker.” Finding themselves sharing an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg with Vitaly Milonov, the notoriously homophobic Russian politician behind the controversial anti-“gay propaganda” law, a pair of lesbian activists took a selfie of themselves kissing with him in the background, and uploaded it to Instagram. You can see him hiding his face with his tablet. Girl power!