I’d guess I’d need to categorise this as one of those things the more one thinks about it, the more manifest it becomes, and I had not given much thought to the thesis beforehand that comics as more than caricature or a stock-epithet is an act of cultural reclamation.
Happily after the absolutely brilliant regular podcast Futility Closet introduced a few weeks back to a large portion of its listening audience the German and Eastern European phenomenon bound up in the works and personality of the imaginative adventure writer Karl May—and re-introduced to others with the glad occasion to reflect and wonder a little bit how this author was no longer remembered in some of the exotic lands where his stories took place, the topic has become for the team and commentators a sustained and very productive one.
Branching off to a series of tales set in the Middle East, rendered all the more amazing since like his stories that took place in the American Old West came across as convincing and more culturally sympathetic than those who’d actually experienced those places first hand, another iconic character, akin to Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, comes on scene, in the faithful guide Hadschi Halef Omar Ben Hadschi Abul Abbas Ibn Hadschi Dawud al Gossarah. Notwithstanding that fictional character was the only naming-convention in the Muslim tradition studied and committed to memory by committed fans from a European background, the stories were a lens on the casbah and the souq, which all things considered was not a bad introduction for the 1890s. The German disco band Dschinghis (Genghis) Khan, EuroVision Song Contest contender probably most famous for their party hit Moscow, Moscow—celebrated this literary figure with a particularly catchy number in 1980 (or try here, depending on your location). I hope all the characters in this particular universe eventually get their own treatment and profiles.
ancient aliens: a look at the three billion year old Klerksdorf Spheres mined in South Africa
∞: floating, figure-eight ferris wheel under construction in Macau casino
word wars: war reporting presented as a Star Wars opening exposition crawl
i am what i play: once in 1979, BBC 1 was turned over to David Bowie
life-long learning: an exploration of how architecture learns and grows after its been built
The nonpareil BLDGBlog offers a fascinating and ponderous contrast between autonomous, driverless cars and one of select pilots qualified to operate planetary rovers who ply and steer in a similar sort of headspace.
While the unmanned automobiles navigate through a virtual recreation of our reality, the ensemble of Martian rovers—with the aim of allowing the little robots to ultimately exercise their own innate sense of curiosity, manoeuvres with a unique but directed compromise between their human engineers (the featured pilot honed her skills first operating tractors in India) of projection and instinct, as the distances between worlds are too great for real-time, defensive-driving. As our vehicles of both exploration and personal transit gain greater self-sufficiency, I wonder if those skeuomorphs, placebo-buttons and other vestiges of feeling in control will be retained even after choice or necessity is taken away and people are just back-seat drivers.
Recommended reading from Kottke comes in the form of this absorbing article from the New Yorker on the science behind the hysteria over the North American Pacific Northwest earthquake that’s by the numbers long overdue.
I have just started essaying the massive tome (the one volume, abridged paperback version) by the influential Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer. This ethnographic undertaking had its first best-selling runs around the turn of the past century and was absolutely devoured by scholastics and the reading public. Modern criticism is mostly directed at what strikes the politically-correct attuned ear as chauvinistic and racist and very much dated, and while contemporaries did wonder that Frazer himself was not as savage (or more so) as the primitives he studied in expounding such a monumental work premised on his own ignorance and confusion (the origins of the cycle of death and rebirth and the metaphoric rituals that have arisen that seem to defy explanation).
In Frazer’s own time, however, his work was most controversial in that Christianity’s customs were not spared from the rigourous analysis of how magical thinking creates totem and taboo and progresses onto religion. Subsequent editions of the Golden Bough, referring to the votive branch that gained รneas entry to the Underworld and reminds me of the later parallel occurrence when Henry II (Henry Plantagenet, the Sprig-Bearer—specifically of a hedge called broom that was cultivated to form the enclosures of landholdings and a nickname that came before this encounter) of England and Normandy met with Philip II of France—under a elm tree near the border town of Gisors, between the kingdoms—and violently fell the innocent tree after their failed embassy (perhaps to negotiate a peace-settlement or as some imaginatively suggest the schism among the Western Christian Military Orders), tended to not subject native religion and customs to the same treatment—although it was clearly superfluous at this point since Frazer had already made his point. As I said, I am just getting started and it is a very dense work but I am already struck by the numerous lucid examples, which I think was a time for privileged witness before war and industry wholly swept away native superstitions, and categorisations of magical thinking and had never before appreciated how homeopathy—whether charms, potions or medicine, is based on the principle—misguided belief that ought to be dispelled, according to Frazer, that like engenders or attracts like. The Golden Bough is pretty dismissive of such recourse, no matter how strongly ingrained but is not an exposition on other merits over mechanisms and relations, and really leaves no room for alibis for practitioners other than medicine men. It’s slow-going, but I am excited to see how the argument progresses and to see whether the self-censorship was a faithful omission.
One of the premiere moments for animation—that is, when it came to the small screen and was widely broadcast in syndication—was infamously introduced in 1959 with a distinct lack of animated sequences with the adventures of Clutch Cargo and friends.
Higher art with greater production value was reserved for the cinema, featurettes like Gerald McBoing-Boing to be shown along with news reels to the audience before the film began, and many great animators honed their talents, debuting on the air-waves later in the following decade, like Chuck Jones and the team of Hanna-Barbera. Utilising a process called Syncro-Vox that superimposed the moving images of the voice-actors’ mouths on to a cartoon visage, a lot of live action and stock footage transitions, the studio could produce episodes at a fraction of the cost, and although this series seems crude and decidedly inanimate compared to the next generation (Jones derided that early stage as “illustrated radio” and it was really rather not much more than a comic strip) but in defense of this flatness, the stories were quite involving and imaginative and offered a chain of cliff-hanger chapters to be resolved Saturday mornings and had quite a cult following.
Before universal audiences were exposed to a reference in passing in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction—the flashback scene when a young Butch (Bruce Willis) is presented his treasured watch nearly left behind as they fled and there’s an cartoon Eskimo with a human mouth on the television set, there was a more garbled and chaotic and perhaps more localised with the 1987 incident called the Max Headroom Signal Interruption in Chicago. An unknown man with at least one accomplice (disguised as the recently created British character Max Headroom and as a French maid, respectively) hijacked two broadcast stations in the city—I guess as a demonstration to show that they could but no one knows as they were never caught and their identities are still a mystery, ranted on air and hummed the theme from Clutch Cargo and made a few references to its final episode—which seemed to resonate with the otherwise bewildered at home audience.
