Y a-t-il un sentiment que tu aies eu qui soit disparu ? Non, tout reste, n’est-ce pas ? Tout. Les momies que l’on a dans le coeur ne tombent jamais en poussière et, quand on penche la tête par le soupirail, on les voit en bas, qui vous regardent avec leurs yeux ouverts, immobiles.
{ Gustave Flaubert, Lettre à Louise Colet, 16 janvier 1852 | Continue reading }
Desmond Morris, a curator of mammals at the London Zoo, suggested that permanently enlarged breasts in human females resulted from hominid bipedalism. (…)
The link between bipedalism and permanent breast enlargement, according to Morris, has to do with the erotic nature of breasts. He argues that as early humans (hominids) began walking upright, face-to-face encounters between the sexes became the norm, affecting the position used in sexual intercourse: males would no longer mount females from behind as they do among non-human primates. In the non-human primate position, presentation of the female buttocks to the male is an erotic display that stimulates male interest and excitement. with the advent of bipedalism, Morris argues, if females were to be successful in shifting male interest around to the front, evolution would have to do something to make the female frontal region more stimulating to males. This was accomplished, Morris says, through self-mimicry in which female breasts came to look like rounded buttocks: female breasts became mimics of “the ancient genital display of the hemispherical buttocks.”
Szalay and Costello (1991) have continued this line of thinking, but argue that permanently enlarged breasts sexually arouse males not because they look like buttocks, but because they mimic the appearance of female genitalia.
{ Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Sarah Lawrence College, Why Women Have Breasts, 2002 | Continue reading }
photo { Reka Ebergenyi photographed by Eric Fischer }
In the 55 years since Albert Einstein’s death, many scientists have tried to figure out what made him so smart.
But no one tried harder than a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who lost his job and his reputation in a quest to unlock the secrets of Einstein’s genius. Harvey never found the answer. But through an unlikely sequence of events, his search helped transform our understanding of how the brain works.
How that happened is a bizarre story that involves a dead genius, a stolen brain, a rogue scientist and a crazy idea that turned out not to be so crazy.The genius, Einstein, died April 18, 1955, at Princeton Hospital in Princeton, N.J. Within hours, the quiet town was swarming with reporters and scientific luminaries, and people who simply wanted to be near the great man one last time, says Michael Paterniti, a writer who did a lot of research on the events of that day.
“It was like the death of the prophet,” Paterniti says. “And so it got a little bit crazy.”
Things got especially crazy for Thomas Harvey, who performed the autopsy on Einstein. During the procedure, he removed the brain to examine it, which is routine.
But instead of placing the brain back in the skull, Harvey put it in a jar of formaldehyde, Paterniti says.
“And out of that complete, sort of melee of the moment, he made off with the brain, and it was under somewhat dubious circumstances,” Paterniti says.
Harvey later said Einstein’s older son Hans Albert had given him permission to take the brain. But the Einstein family denied this.
In any event, Harvey lost his job and was denounced by many colleagues. But he kept the brain. His justification, Paterniti says, was a sense of duty to science. (…)
Along the way, Harvey told Paterniti how he had tried to fulfill his duty to science by periodically sending bits of Einstein’s brain to various neuroscientists. (…) One scientist who’d asked for samples was Marian Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley. She wanted pieces from four areas in Einstein’s brain. (…)
At the time, the 1980s, most scientists still believed all the important work in the brain was done by neurons. And researchers had already learned from other samples of Einstein’s brain that he didn’t have a lot of extra neurons.
But Diamond was fascinated by another type of brain cell, called a glial cell. Glia means glue. And the assumption back then was that glial cells were just glue holding a brain together.
Diamond wanted to see if there were more of the glial cells known as astrocytes and oligodendrocytes in Einstein’s brain. So she counted them and found that there were, especially in the tissue from an area involved in imagery and complex thinking. (…)
Discoveries about the role of glia in the brain have caused a revolution of sorts in the world of neuroscience during the past couple of decades.
“Now we can see scores of ways in which astrocytes could be involved in many cognitive processes,” Fields says. “And now it’s not so crazy to find that there were abnormally high numbers of astrocytes in the parts of Einstein’s brain involved in imagery and mathematical ability and that sort of thing.”
Until the Mexican-American War, it was not clear whether the dominant power in North America would have its capital in Washington or Mexico City. Mexico was the older society with a substantially larger military. The United States, having been founded east of the Appalachian Mountains, had been a weak and vulnerable country. At its founding, it lacked strategic depth and adequate north-south transportation routes. The ability of one colony to support another in the event of war was limited. More important, the United States had the most vulnerable of economies: It was heavily dependent on maritime exports and lacked a navy able to protect its sea-lanes against more powerful European powers like England and Spain. The War of 1812 showed the deep weakness of the United States. By contrast, Mexico had greater strategic depth and less dependence on exports.
The American solution to this strategic weakness was to expand the United States west of the Appalachians, first into the Northwest Territory ceded to the United States by the United Kingdom and then into the Louisiana Purchase, which Thomas Jefferson ordered bought from France. These two territories gave the United States both strategic depth and a new economic foundation. The regions could support agriculture that produced more than the farmers could consume. Using the Ohio-Missouri-Mississippi river system, products could be shipped south to New Orleans. New Orleans was the farthest point south to which flat-bottomed barges from the north could go, and the farthest inland that oceangoing ships could travel. New Orleans became the single most strategic point in North America. Whoever controlled it controlled the agricultural system developing between the Appalachians and the Rockies. During the War of 1812, the British tried to seize New Orleans, but forces led by Andrew Jackson defeated them in a battle fought after the war itself was completed.
Jackson understood the importance of New Orleans to the United States. He also understood that the main threat to New Orleans came from Mexico. The U.S.-Mexican border then stood on the Sabine River, which divides today’s Texas from Louisiana. It was about 200 miles from that border to New Orleans and, at its narrowest point, a little more than 100 miles from the Sabine to the Mississippi.
Mexico therefore represented a fundamental threat to the United States. In response, Jackson authorized a covert operation under Sam Houston to foment an uprising among American settlers in the Mexican department of Texas with the aim of pushing Mexico farther west. With its larger army, a Mexican thrust to the Mississippi was not impossible — nor something the Mexicans would necessarily avoid, as the rising United States threatened Mexican national security.
Mexico’s strategic problem was the geography south of the Rio Grande (known in Mexico as the Rio Bravo). This territory consisted of desert and mountains. Settling this area with large populations was impossible. Moving through it was difficult. As a result, Texas was very lightly settled with Mexicans, prompting Mexico initially to encourage Americans to settle there. Once a rising was fomented among the Americans, it took time and enormous effort to send a Mexican army into Texas. When it arrived, it was weary from the journey and short of supplies. The insurgents were defeated at the Alamo and Goliad, but as the Mexicans pushed their line east toward the Mississippi, they were defeated at San Jacinto, near present-day Houston.
The creation of an independent Texas served American interests, relieving the threat to New Orleans and weakening Mexico.
{ George Friedman, Arizona, Borderlands and U.S.-Mexican Relations | Continue reading }
photo { Gosia Wieruszewska }
…being green really is tough, so tough that the color itself fails dismally. The cruel truth is that most forms of the color green, the most powerful symbol of sustainable design, aren’t ecologically responsible, and can be damaging to the environment.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” said Michael Braungart, the German chemist who co-wrote “Cradle to Cradle,” the best-selling sustainable design book, and co-founded the U.S. design consultancy McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. “The color green can never be green, because of the way it is made. It’s impossible to dye plastic green or to print green ink on paper without contaminating them.”
This means that green-colored plastic and paper cannot be recycled or composted safely, because they could contaminate everything else. The crux of the problem is that green is such a difficult color to manufacture that toxic substances are often used to stabilize it.
Take Pigment Green 7, the commonest shade of green used in plastics and paper. It is an organic pigment but contains chlorine, some forms of which can cause cancer and birth defects. Another popular shade, Pigment Green 36, includes potentially hazardous bromide atoms as well as chlorine; while inorganic Pigment Green 50 is a noxious cocktail of cobalt, titanium, nickel and zinc oxide.
If you look at the history of green, it has always been troublesome. Revered in Islamic culture for evoking the greenery of paradise, it has played an accident-prone role in Western art history. From the Italian Renaissance to 18th-century Romanticism, artists struggled over the centuries to mix precise shades of green paint, and to reproduce them accurately. (…)
Green even has a toxic history. Some early green paints were so corrosive that they burnt into canvas, paper and wood. Many popular 18th- and 19th-century green wallpapers and paints were made with arsenic, sometimes with fatal consequences. One of those paints, Scheele’s Green, invented in Sweden in the 1770s, is thought by some historians to have killed Napoleon Bonaparte in 1821, when lethal arsenic fumes were released from the rotting green and gold wallpaper in his damp cell on the island of Saint Helena.
images { Erwin Redl, Matrix II, 2000 | light-emitting diode installation }
{ Vance, a trapper boy, 15 years old. Has trapped for several years in a West Virginia coal mine at 75 cents a day for 10 hours work. All he does is to open and shut this door: most of the time he sits here idle, waiting for the cars to come. | BBC | more }
{ Prehistoric siltstone phallus, the world’s oldest sex toy, was also used as tool to ignite fires. | NY Daily News | full story }
in the beginning there was imp, and imp had a groove. and from this groove came the grooves of all grooves. and while one day viciously throwing down on her box, imp boldly declared, let there be house! and house music was born. i am, you see, i am the creator, and this is my house, and in my house there is only house music. but i am not so selfish, because once you’re into my house it then becomes our house and our house music. and you see, no one man owns house, because house music is a universal language spoken and understood by all. in every house, you understand, there is a keeper and in this house the keeper is imp. now, some of you might wonder, who is imp and what is it that imp does? imp is the one who gives you the power to imp your body. imp is the one who gives you the power to do the snake. imp is the one who gives you the key to the power disco. imp is the one that can bring nations and nations of all impers together under one house. you may be black, you may be white, you may be jew, or gentile. it doesn’t make a difference in our house.
{ Chuck Roberts, My House, 1987, edited by Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC }
The French invented the suit designations we use today. Each supposedly indicates one of the principal divisions of medieval society: the heart, coeur, the clergy; the club, trefle, the peasants; the diamond, carreau, merchants and tradesman; and the sword, pique, the nobility.
Espada, the Spanish equivalent of the French pique, has become our present day spade.
The symbolic significance of the nobleman’s sword is obvious enough, but some of the other associations are a little obscure.
Clubs can be interpreted into two ways: as walking-sticks or cudgels, the characteristics weapons of the lower class, who were frequently forbidden to own swords; or as cloverleaves, indicating agriculture.
Hearts symbolize courage and virtue, which presumably would pertain to the clergy, the highest level of society.
The diamond apparently was originally a paving tile, indicating the artisan-tradesman group, purveyors of material goods. Alternatively, there is the obvious connection between diamonds and money.
{ Spring/Summer 1999, Mcqueen ended his show w/ model Shalom Harlow standin’ in a white dress on a rotatin’ platform, bein’ spray painted by robotic arms. }
In the Talmud, he is called “ish gam zu” (the man of “gam zu”); and this name is explained as referring to Nahum’s motto.
It is said that on every occasion, no matter how unpleasant the circumstance, he exclaimed “Gam zu letovah” (This, too, will be for the best). (…)
It is related that in later years Nahum’s hands and feet became paralyzed, and he was afflicted with other bodily ailments. He bore his troubles patiently, however, and even rejoiced over them.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
Amor fati is a Latin phrase coined by Nietzsche loosely translating to “love of fate” or “love of one’s fate.” It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good. That is, one feels that everything that happens is destiny’s way of reaching its ultimate purpose, and so should be considered good. Moreover, it is characterized by an acceptance of the events or situations that occur in one’s life. It is almost identical to the Jewish concept of “Gam zu letovah” (this, too, is for the best).
Critics tend to declare that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, entitled “Fountain”, is the most important artwork of the 20th century. Yet its standing as a collectable object has always lagged behind its value as an idea. The work questioned notions of authenticity when Duchamp first purchased the mass-produced plumbing fixture and signed it “R. Mutt” in 1917. Now, over 40 years after the artist’s death, the problem of legitimacy remains relevant as unauthorised urinals have been discovered circulating in Italy. The art world loves paradoxical conceptual gestures, but it seems that someone might be taking the piss.
“Fountain” was the first ready-made that Duchamp engineered for scandal. The artist was a member of the board of the Society of Independent Artists, whose exhibition had no jury and was set to be the largest in America. He knew that most people would perceive the work as a prank, particularly if submitted by an unknown Richard Mutt from Philadelphia. When the board duly voted against it, Duchamp and his chief patron, Walter Arensberg, resigned in protest—a story that was swiftly leaked to the New York papers.
The ready-made had its public debut a few weeks later in an art magazine called the Blind Man. A photo of the urinal by Alfred Stieglitz was published alongside the founding manifesto of conceptual art, which included the words: “Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it.” The urinal then went the way of many of Duchamp’s early ready-mades; it was smashed or trashed. So insignificant was the porcelain pissoir at the time that no one can remember exactly what happened to it.
“Fountain” was not a coveted art object until well after the second world war, when Duchamp became a cult figure among Pop artists. In response to the art world’s desire to see his legendary lavatory, Duchamp authorised curators to purchase urinals in his name in 1950, 1953 and 1963. (The first is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the second is lost and the third sits in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.) Then in 1964, in association with Arturo Schwarz, a Milan art dealer, historian and collector, the artist made the momentous decision to issue 12 replicas (an edition of eight with four proofs) of his most important ready-mades, including the urinal. Mr Schwarz, now 86, went on to write the artist’s catalogue raisonné—a scholarly book meant to document the complete works of Duchamp.
photo { Stephen Shore, New York City, New York, September-October, 1972 }
{ stereohell, 2008 }
Ruby Mazur, creator of the Rolling Stones’ lips-and-tongue logo, received a call most artists only dream about.
A native New Yorker and a Las Vegas resident since 2000, Mazur has been invited by the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to show a retrospective exhibition of his entire collection of paintings.
“That’s heavy, man,” Mazur said Thursday. The Whitney is considered among the worlds’ top contemporary museums.
Las Vegans might get first peek at the exhibition. Mazur not only has a one-man exhibition at Art de Vignettes at the Fashion Show Mall on July 22, but the Whitney might launch the exhibition here, Mazur said.
His Stones’ logo was selected in 1971 after Mick Jagger asked Mazur to create it. It made an immediate splash.
“I did it over a weekend and when I took it to his house on Mullholland Drive (in Hollywood), I gave it to him outside by his pool. He got so excited he pushed me, and I fell back into the pool, fully dressed.”
The logo remains the Stones’ emblem.
“It made me,” Mazur said.
He’s done more than 3,000 album covers, including childhood pal Billy Joel ’s “Cold Spring Harbor,” Elton John ’s “Friends,” and the soundtrack album cover and artwork for the advertising campaign for “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”
{ Las Vegas Review Journal, 2000 | Rubymazurgallery.com }
photo { Tim Barber }
Founded in 1974 and based in Los Angeles, the Z Channel was the nation’s first pay-cable station, preceding HBO or Showtime. At its pinnacle in the early 1980s, it served only 100,000 viewers, but nonetheless inspired and influenced the movie industry with its eclectic fare, securing a unique place in film history.
{ Netflix }
The Z Channel was known for its devotion to the art of cinema due to the eclectic choice of films by the programming chief, Jerry Harvey. It also popularized the use of letterboxing on television, as well as showing ‘director’s cut’ versions of films (which is a term popularized after Z Channel’s showing of Heaven’s Gate). Z Channel’s devotion to cinema and choice of rare and important films had an important influence on such directors as Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, and Jim Jarmusch. In 1989, Z Channel faded to black and was replaced by SportsChannel Los Angeles.
photo { Otto Obrien }
{ Leda and the Swan, copy after a lost painting by Michelangelo, c. 1530 }
{ François Boucher, Leda and the Swan, 1741-1742 | Read more }
{ François Boucher, Leda and the Swan, c. 1740 }
{ Leda and the Swan, Scindia museum, Gwalior }
{ Leda and the Swan by Norman Parkinson, 1980s }
Leda and the Swan is a motif from Greek mythology, in which Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan.
The subject undoubtedly owed its sixteenth-century popularity to the paradox that it was considered more acceptable to depict a woman in the act of copulation with a swan than with a man.
Leonardo da Vinci began making studies in 1504 for a painting, apparently never executed, of Leda seated on the ground with her children. In 1508 he painted a different composition of the subject, with a nude standing Leda cuddling the Swan, with the two sets of infant twins, and their huge broken egg-shells.
After something of a hiatus in the 18th and early 19th centuries (apart from a very sensuous Boucher), Leda and the Swan became again a popular motif in the later 19th and 20th centuries, with many Symbolist and Expressionist treatments.
Cy Twombly executed an abstract version of Leda and the Swan in 1962.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Bonus: Doggie style by Fred Inaudi }
How to rate the sportsmen and women of the day against the stars of yesteryear.
There’s no easy way to make meaningful comparisons when sports change so dramatically over the years. Even in endeavours like baseball where player stats have been meticulously kept for almost a hundred years, comparisons across the decades can be odious. Is it really fair to compare players from the 1920s against those of the last 20 years when so many external factors have changed such as the use of new equipment, better training methods and, of course, performance enhancing drugs?
In 1914, the National League Most Valuable Player was Johnny Evers with a batting average of 0.279, 1 Home Run and 40 Runs Batted In. That was impressive then but these stats would embarrass even a second rate player in today’s game.
But what if there were a way to remove the systematic differences to reveal intrinsic talent? Today, Alexander Petersen at Boston University and a few pals explain just such a method that “detrends” the data leaving an objective measure of a player’s raw ability.
{ What O.J. Simpson wore when he was acquitted in 1995 of murdering his ex-wife and her friend was the suit seen around the world during one of the most watched televised moments in history. But the Smithsonian Institution, America’s repository of historical artifacts, rejected it Tuesday as inappropriate for their collection. | Washington Post | Continue reading | Flashback: The O. J. Simpson murder case | Wikipedia | Related: Robert L. Stone, a former top executive at the Hertz corporation who had hired O.J. Simpson in the 1970s as a famous pitchman for the car rental giant, has died. | Related: The Los Angeles Police Department has apologized to the family of the late Robert F. Kennedy and removed items from a homicide exhibit in Las Vegas that included the dress shirt worn by the senator when he was assassinated in 1968. | LA Times | Continue reading }
