Christopher Lee Hodge

I'm Moved!

2010-05-20T11:59:00.000-04:00

I'm Moved!

http://chodge.tumblr.com/

-Chris

May Hiatus

2010-04-29T09:09:00.000-04:00

I'm moving, so I'm going to be putting this blog on hiatus until I get settled into my new apartment, hopefully by early June. We'll see...

-Chris

Selections from Jack Corn's Documerica (1974)

2010-04-23T17:45:00.000-04:00

Robert Johnson, 18, and Lanny Green, 21, Outside a Beer Joint in Clothier, West Virginia, near Madison. They Had Been Drinking Beer and Visiting with Friends Inside. Johnson Has Passed a Job Physical and Is Waiting to Go to Work in the Mines. Green Has Not Worked in the Mines and Isn't Interested, But Has Not Located a Job. He Would Like to Work for the Railroad 04/1974.

Four Young Men Gather in a Beer Joint in Clothier, West Virginia, near Madison. They Are Left to Right--Michael Doss, 18; Lanny Green, 21; Junior Jeffory, 20; and Robert Johnson, 18. All Their Parents Work Or Have Worked in the Mine. Jeffory Is a Mining Foreman after Two Years, But Does Not Like It and Wants to Join the Navy. Green Can't Find a Job But Would Like to Work for the Railroad Doss Isn't Working, But Is Waiting for a Job in the Mines 04/1974.

Robert Johnson, 18, Sits on a Pool Table in a Beer Joint in Clothier, West Virginia, near Madison. He Has Passed a Job Physical and Is Waiting to Go to Work in the Mines. Many of the Young Men Like to Get Together in the Taverns and Drink Beer and Talk. There Is Little Else to Do in the Small Mining Towns 04/1974.

The DOCUMERICA Project (1971-1977) was the Environmental Protection Agency's program to document subjects of environmental concern. These included everything from National Parks, Junkyards, and Coal Mines. To document this, the EPA hired over 70 well renowned freelance photographers, including Jack Corn.

For his DOCUMERICA assignment, Jack Corn focused his camera on the American Coal Miner. These photographs allow us to see the Coal Miner fully formed, from the young man waiting his chance to go down into the mines to the families touched by mining. These photographs stand in drastic contrast to the helpless caricatures others had focused on.

It's interesting to note that these photographs were taken just two short years after the disastrous Buffalo Creek Flood.

Cultural Effects of The Year Without a Summer

2010-04-21T08:59:00.002-04:00

High levels of ash in the atmosphere led to unusually spectacular sunsets during this period, a feature celebrated in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner. It has been theorised that it was this that gave rise to the yellow tinge that is predominant in his paintings such as Chichester Canal circa 1828. A similar phenomenon was observed after the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, and on the West Coast of the United States following the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.
The lack of oats to feed horses may have inspired the German inventor Karl Drais Draisine or velocipede. This was the ancestor of the modern bicycle and a step towards mechanized personal transport.^[16] to research new ways of horseless transportation, which led to the invention of the
The crop failures of the “Year without Summer” forced the family of Joseph Smith^[17], precipitating a series of events culminating in the publication of the Book of Mormon and the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.^[18] to move from Sharon, Vermont to Palmyra, New York
In July 1816 "incessant rainfall" during that "wet, ungenial summer" forced Mary Shelley, John William Polidori and their friends to stay indoors for much of their Swiss holiday. They decided to have a contest, seeing who could write the scariest story, leading Shelley to write Frankenstein, or The Modern PrometheusThe Vampyre.^[19] and Polidori to write
The Year without a Summer also inspired Lord Byron to write his 1816 poem Darkness.
The chemist Justus von Liebig, who had experienced the famine as a child in Darmstadt, later studied the nutrition of plants and introduced mineral fertilizers.

via en.wikipedia.org

Posted via web from some interesting wikipedia articles...

Flyer for GARAJE SÓNICO by Marina Molares (2008)

2010-04-16T08:06:00.000-04:00

Flyer for GARAJE SÓNICO by Marina Molares,

originally uploaded by jueves sónicos via flickr.

Starting this week, every Friday I'm going to post interesting photos and art I've discovered via Flickr. You can view the gallery here.

John Holstrom

2010-04-15T23:11:00.000-04:00

John Holstrom, Cartoon from Punk Magazine #7 (1977)

"I found that most humor comes from degrading people, humiliating them. Most of it is based on pain. The funniest cartoons I do are the ones where I inflict the most pain on my characters. That's just what life is about. I base my cartoons on my life. Whatever horrible things happen to me, I turn into a cartoon."
- John Holmstrom

Visit John Holmstrom's blog here.

Ship of Theseus

2010-04-14T07:02:00.002-04:00

The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus' paradox, or various variants, notably grandfather's axe (US) and Trigger's Broom (UK) is a paradox that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object.

According to Greek legend as reported by Plutarch,
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
—Plutarch, Theseus^[1]
Plutarch thus questions whether the ship would remain the same if it were entirely replaced, piece by piece. Centuries later, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes^[2] introduced a further puzzle, wondering: what would happen if the original planks were gathered up after they were replaced, and used to build a second ship. Which ship, if either, is the original Ship of Theseus?

via en.wikipedia.org

Posted via web from some interesting wikipedia articles...

John & Yoko - Jamaica Dyer (2010)

2010-04-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

John & Yoko by Jamaica Dyer (2010).

I'll been following Jamaica Dyer's surreal webcomic Weird Fishes for a-while now. It's a story about growing up that bends and breaks the lines between imagination and hallucination and I enthusiastically suggest it to any fans of Nate Powell's Swallow Me Whole.

The above image is from her online journal / sketchbook. Here's a quote about it:

I recently saw the interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the Dick Cavett Show and I loved it so much, the way they both looked and the way they interacted that I realized I had to do a painting. So here’s my little painting from a youtube still. This makes me want to do more re-interpretations of low-quality internet stills and camera photos as paintings.

And a page from her sketchbook:

Weird Fishes was recently published by Slave Labor Graphics and you can get it (for $9.95!) here or here. Or you could read it online here.

Side Thought: How perfect would it be if Diablo Cody was contracted to write a script for Weird Fishes? Can you imagine it? DAMN! Talk about a perfect fit. Also, if this ever was adapted into a moive that Diablo Cody wrote I would hope that whoever picks the music would be heads up enough to pick Radiohead's Weird Fishes / Apreggi in the trailer / closing credits.

Neophile

2010-04-07T18:04:00.002-04:00

Neophile or Neophiliac is a term used by counterculture cult writer Robert Anton Wilson to describe a particular type of personality. A neophile or neophiliac can be defined as a personality type characterized by a strong affinity for novelty. Neophiles/Neophiliacs have the following basic characteristics:
The ability to adapt rapidly to extreme change
A distaste or downright loathing of tradition, repetition, and routine
A tendency to become bored quickly with old things
A desire, bordering on obsession in some cases, to experience novelty
A corresponding and related desire to create novelty by creating or achieving something and/or by stirring social or other forms of unrest.
A neophile/neophiliac is distinct from a revolutionary in that anyone might become a revolutionary if pushed far enough by the reigning authorities or social norms, whereas neophiles/neophiliacs are revolutionaries by nature. Their intellectual abhorrence of tradition and repetition usually bemoans a deeper emotional need for constant novelty and change. The meaning of neophile/neophiliac approaches and is not mutually exclusive to the term visionary, but differs in that a neophile actively seeks first-hand experience of novelty rather than merely pontificating about it.

via en.wikipedia.org

Posted via web from some interesting wikipedia articles...

Malvina Reynolds - No Hole in My Head (1967)

2010-04-05T20:39:00.000-04:00

From: Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest, 1967.

The Birth of Altermodern - Micah White (2010)

2010-04-02T08:54:00.000-04:00

I received a crash course in postmodern thought during my first semester at Swarthmore College. In a lesson that was to be repeated throughout my undergraduate education, the professor opened the class by admonishing us to reject binary thinking. As the class was staring at her dumbfounded, she divided the chalkboard in two with a thick vertical line and asked us to name the dualisms that structure our world. After she provided a few examples to get us started – male/female, white/black – we jumped into the game, calling out binaries one after another: rich/poor, smart/stupid, human/animal, cool/lame, skinny/fat … The game went on until the board was full and the air saturated with chalk dust. Pausing a moment, our comparative literature professor asked us if we noticed anything odd about the list we had constructed.

(Read More via MicahMWhite.com)

Harriet Taylor Mill

2010-04-01T10:05:00.001-04:00

(Harriet Mill, Artist and Date Unknown)

A haunting, uncredited painting of Harriet Taylor Mill (October 8 1807 – November 1858). Harriet was a philosopher, early suffragist, and an influence on her second husband John Stuart Mill.

You can read her essay, The Enfranchisement of Women (1851) here.

Glass Delusion

2010-03-31T08:14:00.001-04:00

The glass delusion was an external manifestation of a psychiatric disorder recorded in Europe in the late Middle Ages (15th to 17th centuries). People feared that they were made of glass "and therefore likely to shatter into pieces". One famous early sufferer was King Charles VI of France who refused to allow people to touch him, and wore reinforced clothing to protect himself from accidental "shattering".

via en.wikipedia.org

Posted via web from some interesting wikipedia articles...

Nate Harrison - Can I Get An Amen? (2004)

2010-03-29T11:52:00.000-04:00

Nate Harrison

Can I Get An Amen? (2004)
Recording on Acetate, Turntable, PA System, Paper Documents
Dimensions Variable
Total Run Time 17 minutes, 46 seconds

Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60's soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a 'B' side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that 'information wants to be free'- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

Listen to: Can I Get An Amen?

Youtube mirror: Here.

Christian Communism & Acts 4:32-35

2010-03-26T15:45:00.004-04:00

In Christian Communism, the hammer is (ironically?) replaced by the cross.

Christian communism is a form of religious communism based on Christianity. It is a theological and political theory based upon the view that the teachings of Jesus Christ compel Christians to support communism as the ideal social system. Although there is no universal agreement on the exact date when Christian communism was founded, many Christian communists assert that evidence from the Bible suggests that the first Christians, including the Apostles, created their own small communist society in the years following Jesus' death and resurrection. As such, many advocates of Christian communism argue that it was taught by Jesus and practiced by the Apostles themselves.

via en.wikipedia.org

And here's probably the most pertinent and often quoted passages from the New Testament concerning Christian Communism:

The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. ³³With great power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great favor was accorded them all. ³⁴There was no needy person among them, for those who owned property or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds of the sale, ³⁵and put them at the feet of the apostles, and they were distributed to each according to need. - Acts 4:32-35, New American Bible.

What made me think of this: Glenn Beck's recent tirade against Social Justice, where he urged his listeners/viewers to leave their churches if they preached/participated in Social Justice. He's just ridiculous. Here's a quote:

"If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish," he said. "Go alert your bishop and tell them, 'Excuse me, are you down with this whole social justice thing?' If it's my church, I'm alerting the church authorities: 'Excuse me, what's this social justice thing?' And if they say, 'Yeah, we're all in on this social justice thing,' I am in the wrong place." - Glenn Beck, via ABC News.

I'm not a biblical scholar or anything like that, but I've always considered Christianity, and certain portions of the New Testament as key foundations of socialism. I mean, if your church doesn't preach social justice, then you need to GTFO!

Hikikomori

2010-03-24T08:57:00.001-04:00

Hikikomori (ひきこもり or 引き籠もり, Hikikomori^?, literally "pulling away, being confined", i.e., "acute social withdrawal") is a Japanese term to refer to the phenomenon of reclusive people who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various personal and social factors in their lives. The term hikikomori refers to both the sociological phenomenon in general as well as to people belonging to this societal group.

via en.wikipedia.org

Posted via web from some interesting wikipedia articles...

UPDATE: Alexa Meade - Natura Morta (2009)

2010-03-23T11:42:00.005-04:00

Natura Mora

Live installation: Acrylic paint on found objects, walls, and flesh.
Alexa Meade, 2009.

(Natura Morta, Alexa Meade, 2009)

Alexa Meade is a 23-year-old mixed media artist based in the Washington, DC area. She is a graduate of Vassar College and her next upcoming show is on Friday, April 2nd 2010, from 6 to 8pm at the Postmasters Gallery in New York City. You can view her latest work on her flickr page or visit her portfolio.

UPDATE: The Washington Post did a write up on Alexa. Check it out here.

Destination Earth (1956)

2010-03-22T15:00:00.001-04:00

(From: Destination Earth, a 1956 American Petroleum Institute Propaganda Film)

"On a distant planet, in a land controlled by an evil totalitarian despot, a lone astronaut is sent to an alien world to acquire valuable technology, but instead discovers the mechanism for toppling a totalitarian regime and bringing revolution to his people. His name is Colonel Cosmic."

I would watch that. And I could easily imagine it as some late 70's early 80's b-movie sci-fi kitsch that is perfect (and probably available) to watch instantly on Netflix.

But it's not.

Instead, this is my loosely translated plot-line of an interesting pro-capitalist / pro-oil propaganda cartoon commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute in 1956 called Destination Earth. I don't know the history of the major players (animators, directors, music, etc) but the animation is that cute futurism tinged Hanna-Barbera-esque style that I've always loved since I use to watch Cartoon Network back when it literally was nothing but old Hanna-Barbera-esque cartoons. @ archive.org

Download / View: Destination Earth (1956) via The Prelinger Archives @ archive.org

Ever Dream This Man? (2009)

2010-03-18T10:53:00.001-04:00

Have you ever dreamed of this man?

"In January 2006 in New York, the patient of a well-known psychiatrist draws the face of a man that has been repeatedly appearing in her dreams. In more than one occasion that man has given her advice on her private life. The woman swears she has never met the man in her life.

That portrait lies forgotten on the psychiatrist's desk for a few days until one day another patient recognizes that face and says that the man has often visited him in his dreams. He also claims he has never seen that man in his waking life.

The psychiatrist decides to send the portrait to some of his colleagues that have patients with recurrent dreams. Within a few months, four patients recognize the man as a frequent presence in their own dreams. All the patients refer to him as THIS MAN."

This would make a great story. And I wish I would have thought of it.

But I didn't.

And calling it a hoax is too strong of a word, and also a disservice. Instead, I like to imagine THIS MAN as viral-mythology, where story-telling and story-tellers are open source, and everyone can be part of this modern Homeric Odyssey with a few keystrokes.

The website itself offers some interesting theories.

Visit: http://www.thisman.org for more information.

Acoustic Kitty

2010-03-17T08:24:00.003-04:00

Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project launched by the Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1960s attempting to use cats in spy missions. A battery and a microphone were implanted into a cat and an antenna into its tail. Due to problems with distraction, the cat's sense of hunger had to be addressed in another operation. Surgical and training expenses are thought to have amounted to over $20 million.

The first cat mission was eavesdropping on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and killed by a taxi almost immediately. Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss.

via en.wikipedia.org

Posted via web from some interesting wikipedia articles...

Starting this week, the random / interesting wikipedia entries that I irregularly post are gonna be posted every Wednesday, part of what I'm calling: "Wikipedia Wednesday".

These Wikipedia entries are also mirrored on their own blog which you can visit at: http://wikipedia.posterous.com.

Also, feel free to email me interesting wikipedias. I will be sure to credit you.

Carol - So Low (1981)

2010-03-16T10:20:00.007-04:00

Download: Carol - So Low (1981) via Mediafire (128kps)

This is one of those incredibly sad, but in a way uplifting songs that I can't help but love. I like to imagine it as an update to Petula Clark's Downtown, except instead of New York, it takes place in Suburban Virginia circa the Regan Eighties and instead of the city lifting your spirits, it's the suburbs tearing your heart out.

Just imagine a wealthy 17 year old girl with a bowl cut smoking her mother's cigarettes at a tennis court in February. Yeah. It's kinda like that.

Ryō Hanmura - Cardboard Box (1974)

2010-03-15T11:46:00.003-04:00

“Contemplated in allegory is the fate of ordinary working people.”

A box is for putting things in. It is in having things put into them that boxes find pleasure in life. When things are packed in lightly, a box's body can shiver with insurmountable gratification.

Yet people make boxes just to put tangerines in, and once that duty is finished, even if a box can still be used, they abandon it without a care.

I really really dug this story. And it was so good, I didn't read any of the other stories in this collection for fear that they might even be better than Cardboard Box. I don't know why, I just sometimes do stuff like that.

Read / Download: Ryō Hanmura - Cardboard Box (1974) from The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories (1989?)

UPDATE: Walt Whitman and Anachronistic Homosexuality

2010-03-14T11:24:00.009-04:00

"To find satisfactory language with which to discuss Whitman's love poetry is difficult: one would like to avoid both the squeamishness of euphemisms and the inaccuracy of anachronism. In "Whitman's 'Live Oak with Moss'" (an essay reproduced on this site) Alan Helms talks about Whitman as a man who had "come out as America's first self-identified 'homosexual.'" He then suggests that we ought to "at last begin where Whitman himself began," implying that he will be sensitive to Whitman's historical context. Although Helms puts the term homosexual in quotation marks, suggesting that he uses the word advisedly, he doesn't explicitly talk about the paradox (not to say anachronistic impossibility) of Whitman becoming a "self-identified 'homosexual'" a decade before the word homosexual was coined by the German-Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny in a letter written to the sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. (The earliest known usage of homosexual in a U.S. text was in the Chicago Medical Recorder, May 1892). Nor does Helms comment on the problems of thinking of "coming out" as a transhistorical phenomenon and not as something that is very much culturally and temporally conditioned. In many ways Whitman's culture was not like that of the modern day U.S. His culture was far more accepting of open displays of same-sex affection. Moreover, male-male love, though not encouraged, had not been pathologized as it would be later in the nineteenth century."

From the Introduction to: Sex, Politics and "Live Oak, With Moss" by Kenneth M Price, Ph.D (2001?)

Edit: I forgot to add that I really want to read this book. And that earlier when I linked to Parachronism, I had this topic in mind, because although the term Homosexual and Homosexuality are indeed anachronisms when dealing with Walt Whitman's Calamus and Live Oak Moss and most likely Whitman himself, I believe this is only the case in word alone. In actuality, homosexuality, or rather the acceptable and/or tolerated relationships between men in the 19th century are actually Parachronisms that concurrently vanished with the rise of Freud and the rise of the ego and the boxing in and sectioning off of gender and sexuality. I can't help but think that this is no coincidence. It seems that (although I haven't done research) discrimination based on sexuality is sadly the result neologisms. :(

Pogrom

2010-03-12T09:08:00.001-05:00

A pogrom is a form of riot directed against a particular group, whether ethnic, religious, or other, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes, businesses, and religious centers. The term was originally used to denote extensive violence against Jews – either spontaneous or premeditated – but in English it is also applied to similar incidents against other minority groups.

via en.wikipedia.org

Posted via web from some interesting wikipedia articles...

Warp Speed Will Kill You by Jeremy Hsu (2010)

2010-03-11T09:08:00.001-05:00

Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner)

(Originally Posted on Space.com)

Captain Kirk might want to avoid taking the starship Enterprise to warp speed, unless he's ready to shrug off interstellar hydrogen atoms that would deliver a lethal radiation blast to both ship and crew.

There are just two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on average in space, which poses no threat to spaceships traveling at low speeds. But those same lone atoms would transform into deadly galactic space mines for a spaceship that runs into them at near-light speed, according to calculations based on Einstein's special theory of relativity.

The original crew of "Star Trek" featured as unfortunate examples at a presentation by William Edelstein, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, at the American Physical Society conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 13. The physicist showed a video clip of Kirk telling engineer Scotty to go to warp speed.

"Well, they're all dead," Edelstein recalled saying. His words caused a stir among the audience.

Edelstein's personal interest in this thought experiment began 20 years ago, when his son Arthur asked him if there was friction in space. The father responded that yes, there would be hydrogen bumping off a spaceship. But he soon realized that the stray atoms of hydrogen gas would actually go right through the ship traveling close to light speed, and irradiate both crew and electronics in the process.

More recently, the physicist and his now-grown son calculated the scenario of a spaceship trying to travel halfway across our Milky Way galaxy in just 10 years. That's doable in theory, because special relativity states that time slows down and distances shrink for travelers approaching light speed.

Edelstein's work showed that a starship traveling at just 99 percent of the speed of light would get a radiation dose from hydrogen of 61 sieverts per second, when just one tenth of that number of sieverts would deliver a fatal dose for humans. And that's not even the 99.999998 percent of light-speed necessary to make the journey to the center of the Milky Way in 10 years

At the higher speed, the human crew of a starship would experience something like getting struck by the high-energy proton beam from the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. On top of killing the crew, such powerful levels of energy would also likely destroy the starship electronics.

"I'm not claiming this is a brilliant new discovery or anything," Edelstein told SPACE.com. "I'm just saying that it's interesting."

Some audience members at the American Physical Society event protested that Kirk, Spock and the "Star Trek" crew would all still live because of the starship Enterprise having shields. But Edelstein noted some of the existing difficulties with creating an electromagnetic shield with any resemblance to "Star Trek" technology.

Solid shields seem even more hopeless. A starship might need anywhere from a 4.4 -meter to 4,400-meter thickness of lead shielding to deflect the hydrogen radiation — added mass that would make travel at near-light speed even more impractical.

The physicist concluded by suggesting that extraterrestrials might not have visited Earth because of all the problems in traveling at near-light speeds, including how to deal with deadly hydrogen space mines. But for the record, he does believe that alien life exists.

"Getting between stars is a huge problem unless we think of something really, really different," Edelstein said. "I'm not saying that we know everything and that it's impossible. I'm saying it's kind of impossible based on what we know right now."

from: Ward Speed Will Kill You (March 2010) by Jeremy Hsu via Space.com.