April 18, 2015
I'm a man in a dress, and I'm not afraid to show that
Beautiful by Night is a short documentary by James Hosking about veteran drag queens in San Francisco. [more inside]
This time, we are the aliens.
Over a mere 22 episodes between 1994 and 1995, a rag tag group of adventurers, thrown together by a shadowy government conspiracy explored a strange new world, ruled by an underground government and populated with strange new creatures. [more inside]
The golden ratio has spawned a beautiful new curve: the Harriss spiral
40 years ago, two men married for immigration benefits in the US
40 years ago, a clerk in Boulder, Colorado let 6 same sex couples get married. One of them was a couple with an Australian national facing deportation. This is their story. Imagine falling in love and then being told that no, your relationship isn't good enough to qualify to keep your partner with you. Now imagine that this takes place 40 years ago and you're a gay man. This actually happened, and the decision from immigration was effectively 'f***ots can't have a real marriage.'
This is a wound I shall bear forever.
"I am in the depths of despair." Jonathan Crombie, the raven-haired actor best known to a generation of literature lovers as Gilbert Blythe in the classic Anne of Green Gables miniseries(es), has died at age 48 of an apparent brain hemorrhage.
Bridge scene (ending) in Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel [more inside]
Bridge scene (ending) in Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel [more inside]
Director, Special Projects for the State of Eternity
The one work of art by James Hampton was the The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly. He built it when not working as a janitor for the General Services Administration.
What does it mean? Good question. Everything Hampton ever wrote about it is in a single manuscript, St James: The Book of the 7 Dispensation... and it is in code.
Lord of the Shadows
An Iraqi (intelligence) officer planned Islamic State's takeover in Syria and SPIEGEL has been given exclusive access to his papers. (by Christoph Reuter)
[more inside]
Who pays for the legal battle over same-sex marriage?
As a historic constitutional showdown over gay marriage looms this month at the U.S. Supreme Court, attorneys are fighting over another bitterly disputed issue: their fees. In some cases, the fee requests run well into seven figures and are submitted on behalf of powerful law firms that a Reuters examination found have outsized access to the Supreme Court. Individuals and advocacy groups that file lawsuits aimed at the high court sometimes retain big-firm lawyers who specialize in arguing in that forum and boast remarkable success rates in getting their cases heard.
“One person’s putrid is another person’s pleasant...”
Would You Want to Smell BBQ All the Time? [New York Times]
"Over the years attempts by states and municipalities to regulate odor have led to a patchwork of legal guidelines subjectively enforced by inspectors who sniff the air and determine whether to make a stink about a stink. In the past the offenders were typically livestock operations and wastewater treatment plants, but more recently odor inspectors are getting calls about smells emanating from ethnic restaurants, coffee roasters and candle and bath shops."
Jawbreaker Broken
What happens when you put a red hot ball of nickel on a huge novelty jawbreaker (Red hot nickel ball previously)
South African Hip Hop
Dear Brothers in SA Hip Hop: a letter by Ntsiki Mazwai/Women In South African Hip-Hop: 6 Leading Female Rappers
John Denver, America's unofficial musical diplomat
As John Denver's US prominence waned into the 1980s, opposite the rise of new wave and harder rock, he kept touring internationally for some notable firsts. In 1979, Denver was one of the performers to welcome Chinese Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping to the US, and six years later, Denver was the first western artist to tour in the USSR, where he performed alongside Kermit the Frog. In 1992, he had another first for a western peformer, when Denver toured mainland China, to find that many of his audiences already knew his songs. Two years later, he was the first US act in Vietnam since the Vietnam War. [more inside]
“Freedom Under God”
For much of the 1930s, organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) had been searching in vain for ways to rehabilitate a public image that had been destroyed in the Great Depression and defamed by the New Deal. In 1934, a new generation of conservative industrialists took over NAM with a promise to “serve the purposes of business salvation.” How Corporate America invented Christian America.
What could go wrong?
The family shows up at Hank’s house unaware that they’ll be sharing it with assorted wildlife whose collective attitude toward humans ranges from playful to scarily aggressive. Oh, and all the animals are real, and largely untrained, and when they paw and pounce on their human costars, you can see real terror in the actors’ eyes — like actual Oh shit please God no terror.The making of Roar, possibly the Most Dangerous Movie of All Time.
"...the best song Jagger and Richards have written in twenty years"
YoutTube: The story of Bitter Sweet Symphony | Andrew Oldham Orchestra - The Last Time (1965) | Original video | 2010 studio performance for Radio 1 Presents | 2008 concert performance | Live at Glastonbury 2008 | Glastonbury 2011 | potted history of The Verve at BBC News
Brought to you by the Wikipedia "random article" button
Czech competitive firefighting (known as požární sport) involves such events as the obstacle course and the tower climb, but none is more prestigious (nor thrilling) than the famous hose race.
I can testify that this applies to art history seminars as well as TV.
The Four Worst Types of TV Critics In all four cases—the Theorists, the Activists, the Purists, and the Partisans—we’re treating the inherently subjective fields of art and art criticism as things we can be objectively right about. We’re taking work that’s complex and capable of conveying multiple contradictory meanings and reducing it to a simple either/or, yes/no proposition.
In other words, we’re fucking up.
Movies are *bleep*in' great and being alive is so awesome
The Sandhogs
Eighty years ago, New York City needed another tunnel under the Hudson River. The Holland Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge could no longer handle the mounting traffic between New Jersey and Manhattan. Thus began construction of the Lincoln Tunnel.
But this is not a story about the Lincoln Tunnel. This is about the men who made it. The Sandhogs.
The Full Stack Employee
Full stack employees have an insatiable appetite for new ideas, best practices, and ways to be more productive and happy. They’re curious about the world, what makes it work, and how to make their mark on it. It’s this aspect above others that defines and separates the full stack employee from previous generations. Full stack employees can’t put blinders on once they land a job; instead they must stay up on developments in their industry and others, because they know that innovation is found at the boundaries between disciplines, not by narrowly focusing in one sphere.Is the Full Stack Employee the future of workers, the glorification of privileged generalists or maybe just another expression of anxiety in the New Economy (tm)?
Anthropology, already read
Déjà Lu republishes locally-selected scholarly articles from journals connected to regional anthropological associations around the world. The result is a PDF-heavy but fascinating collection of long reads on obscure topics. Via. [more inside]
Not-So-Stupid Vine Tricks
If 4-year-old Ava is the Queen of Vine (previously), then 23-year-old Zach is the King. That's his name, Zach King, and he has gotten 2.9 million followers with his skillful use of practical and digital effects to cheerfully do the impossible in 6 seconds. Here's a five-minute compilation of his most popular Vine bits, and here, as part of a Red Bull promotion is "How He Makes a Vine", a Rube Goldberg process with several impossible transitions. [more inside]
And not just for expressing your feels about Supernatural
And this is significant: not just because it enables a deeper, more thorough analysis of visual media, but because it makes that analysis both overt and accessible in a way it wasn’t before. A well-constructed gifset is a thing of tremendous beauty, and the more of them I see, the more I’m convinced that we’re in the midst of an academic paradigm shift. It’s not just that gifsets let us contrast the dialogue, cinematography, composition and acting of various visual narratives side-by-side in unprecedented ways, or even the fact that anyone, potentially, can make one; it’s the that this tremendously useful ability is online-only at a time when the vast majority of academic writing, even when digitally accessible, is stuck in static, access-restricted, locked-in formats, despite the fact that most everyone else is using free blogging platforms.Foz Meadows: how gifs are changing critical analysis.
She's the minister for men
The Minister for Men: a web series by Gretel Killeen. As background, it probably helps to know that Tony Abbott, Australian Prime Minister, appointed himself the Minister for Women. But the series is entertaining even without a background knowledge of Australian politics. [more inside]
Hire a typist
Robert Eaglestone reviews the first English translation of Umberto Eco's How To Write A Thesis:
Into this bleak picture comes the first English translation of Eco’s How to Write a Thesis, continuously in print in Italy since 1977. That was a long time ago in academia, and, at first sight, lots of this book looks just useless, rooted in its historic and specific Italian context. Who uses index cards any more? (I mean, I used to, but I wrote my PhD on a computer with no hard drive, using 5¼-inch diskettes, when the internet was still for swapping equations at Cern or firing nukes at Russia.) Who has typists copy up their thesis? The sections on using libraries and research sources sound like an account of a lost, antediluvian culture. But.[more inside]
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