macguffin

Not to diminish the acclaim or original nature of Black Mirror, which makes us confront our relations to technology and convenience in the same way shows like the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits made us question our tenuous hold on reality and moral uprightness, I think I’d like to preview this adaptation inspired by Roald Dahl’s collection of short stories, thrillers for adults. Despite running for eleven seasons, I have no recollection of Tales of the Unexpected—the plot summaries of the episodes do sound archetypal, not formulaic, and leave the view challenged and draw his or her own conclusions.

phreaking

Lately the term “dog-whistle” has taken on a purely figurative meaning for veiled code words that a signals a political response to those in the know, however, apparently marketers are adopting a very literal feature outside of the human range of hearing to gather and spread demographic information about potential consumers without their knowledge—with potential for much more invasive acts.
Though the method is comparatively an indirect one, it made me think of the subliminal messages embedded in movies to make people salivate and seek refreshment—and then perhaps as a closer parallel was the earlier experimental techniques of phreakers, playing a sequence of tones into headsets to commandeer telephone networks and make free long-distance calls. There’s surely nothing savoury in ultrasonic hacking and while the big telecoms may have seen nothing redeeming in “toll fraud” that undercut their profits, the founders of Apple and other industry luminaries got their start in this community.

reprise or i know what my people are thinking tonight

The doggedly diligent campaign reporters of Nation Public Radio’s Politics Podcast have been working virtually non-stop during this entire physically and emotional taxing election cycle in America, serving up a refreshingly thoughtful and reflective reporting on the election despite the usual common discourse and the pace of change. Now they’re working even harder with daily broadcasts, but recently to bridge the weekend presented a really interesting episode from this summer that I’d missed before—before all these dread realities began to coalesce and was not a regular listener. Encore examines the role of music—specifically musical theatre in the shaping of campaigns and presidencies.
I knew that FDR with “Happy Days are Here Again” (Chasing Rainbows, 1930) and Truman with “I’m just Wild about Harry” (Shuffle Along, 1921—for addressing social justice questions) had capitalized on popular, feel-good songs of their day—just like other rallying standards, but I didn’t realise that the Kennedy White House did not become characterised as Camelot organically but rather became known as such because the Lerner and Loewe Broadway production about to be adapted to film was so popular. Musical numbers might not have the same purchase on cultural currency as they did in decades past—at least not one that’s immediately recognisable—having been replaced by other power-ballads, but it’s interesting how the discussion touches on one candidate’s invoking of songs from The Phantom of the Opera as part of his regular playlist (plus some number with those damn dancing cats, whereas perhaps “Tomorrow belongs to Me” from Cabaret may work better) because of his connection to New York and the Great White Way, and the other who backed away from her rather accidental though intended as flattering comparison to Eva Perón.

it's the great pumpkin, charlie brown

PfRC wishes you and yours a very happy Hallowe’en, an abundance of tricks and treats and thanks for visiting.

5x5

the pet collective: omnibus of video clips of humans supportive of animals behaving oddly

bird’s eye: a collection of stunning satellite photographs of diverse, manmade landscapes

colour guard: Richard Nixon though the Secret Service ought to have fancy uniforms, like the palace details of other countries

unterirdisch überleben: a tour of Lucerne’s still operational, massive fall-out shelter

althing: tiny Iceland has no fewer than seven viable political parties and will now have a governing coalition that includes the Pirate Party 

hauntology

As a ghost story of sorts for the season, we take a look at the interesting if not inattentive trials of one parapsychologist in the 1960s who tried to induce psychical experiences by dressing up as a moaning, menacing apparition in various locations, including a cemetery and the (captive) audience of an adult film cinema.
Of the dozens the passed by or saw the spirit manifest itself in the theatre, disappointingly hardly any registered his presence, with just one or two recalling something that didn’t quite fit—an errant polar bear or an error with the projector perhaps—and one individual purposefully avoiding a man in a sheet. I always found it rather incredulous that not everyone screening the same clip noticed the walk on role of the gorilla (on a unicycle, with pom-poms or what have you) as cited, but never thought seeing that and not calling it out was anywhere near household pets detecting ghosts or the pre-tremors of an earthquake (given I owe that I miss a lot of other obvious, glaring things), and I’m sure that going without acknowledgement after all that effort must have been frustrating. Perhaps that’s why the scary clowns of today have gotten so aggressively hammy. The conclusions of this study held that an experimental, simulated haunting could not elicit the psychic contagion of a genuine one, which sounds pretty reasonable to me.

geomancy

A very clever artist and architect in Tokyo is being honoured the country’s most prestigious design award for his world map—which, through some geometric transformations, finally corrects to a great extent for the distortions of Mercator-projection on a flat surface, the so called polar flair that makes Greenland look bigger than Africa. Find out more about the Authagraph map at the link up top.