As always, Vandana Shiva precisely identifies the core paradigm behind the global food system. Here she makes all kinds of linkages that will make your skin crawl, but knowledge is power, right?

You can see the complete talk here.

FYI, for some context, you might be interested in the ad posted below. It’s to market Monsanto’s Satya in India. Creepy.

Heidi Cullen, author of The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet, “duels” with Colbert. He does a good job of lampooning the culture of denial.

It took me a minute to figure out what is happening in this video, but if you look closely, you will see this is indeed the work of Banksy. Hint: what is the dolphin jumping over?

Here’s more from Banksy’s recent work in the Gulf of Mexico:

Image source

Image credit: http://appalachiarising.org/faq/

An interesting item from the Huff Post: Nike has a new uniform designed for West Virginia University intended to “honor” the 29 minors killed at the Upper Big Branch mine, but the ad features a flattened mountaintop in the background. This has pissed off some student groups who feel that it is not appropriate for their university to done an “honorary” uniform which normalizes mountaintop removal as a mining practice (click her to learn more).

This is just stupid and ignorant on Nike’s part. I have seen first hand this horrific practice. I can’t imagine any sane person who thinks blowing up the tops of mountains makes any sense on any level, even if it provides jobs. I visited a guy who lived just below the tree line of one flattened peak. We walked up to the mining site where there were these monstrous bulldozers as big as buildings scraping away the rock and soil. There was dust in the trees and in the creeks and in my eyes. The sound of explosions was terrifying. I prayed that a builder wouldn’t fly out and flatten us, as happens every once in a while. Meanwhile, this particular “beneficiary” of sporadic mining work (jobs come and go depending on supply, demand and global prices) lives in a little shack smaller than his very own monster truck paid for during a boom cycle. Some life!

BTW, this person in my story had “fuck it” tattooed on his lips. Indeed!

Lisa Margonelli connects lots of patterns when speaks on “The political chemistry of oil.” An facsinating observation is that fuel pumps are designed to look like ATM machines. Interesting.

It’s from the TedxOilSpill event earlier this summer. There’s also a cool overview of the event at PBS’s Need to Know Website.

I’ve written previously about my view that Warhol was a zen master (click this link to see my favorite Warhol quotes listed at the end of the post). Now, I know it’s a stretch. I realize that thinking of a Warhol as a bodhisattva contradicts the view that media are the destroyer of all that is good in the universe. Indeed, Warhol celebrated and created many of the most reprehensible and superficial aspects of contemporary media culture, such as the concept of “superstars” and the idea that visibility is worthy enough for celebrityhood. (Even though he said that someday everyone would have 15 minutes of fame, little did he know that it would only take three minutes a la YouTube to do the trick.) Films like Factory Girl, about troubled Warhol protege and starlet Edie Sedgwick, even depict Warhol as a user of humans in the worst way.

All these criticisms are valid. However, as a friend once said, trust the art, not the artist.

From this perspective, I’d like to share with you my enthusiasm and love or Warhol’s most interesting work, his screen tests. Made during the Factory’s 1964-66 heyday, they were short films lasting a reel, with the only instruction being that the talent stare into the camera without moving. Many who came through Warhol’s Factory were asked to participate in such experiments, including uber-celebrities (Bob Dylan), uber-artists (Salvador Dali), quasi-famous actors (Dennis Hooper), resident artists (Lou Reed) and an assortment of characters that will remain historically anonymous (except for their presence in these films and at the Factory).

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I have had profound and deeply moving spiritual encounters with these films. In fact, it is extremely rare that works of art cause me to shiver, but these do. The video I posted here is a compilation of several screen tests set to a soundtrack by Dean & Britta (formally of Luna), who were commissioned by the Warhol Museum to create a series of tracks to accompany a live screening of the films. The DVD (and soundtrack too) is called 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol Screen Tests, and is absolutely wonderful. Dean & Britta do a great job of emulating the Velvet Underground without imitating their sound, thereby replicating the mood of Warhol’s Factory while also sounding contemporary. I can’t imagine a better, more atmospheric tribute to the screen tests than this.

You can get a flavor of the screen tests on YouTube, but it is not nearly as moving as seen projected onto a large screen. One of the subtle manipulations of the films is that Warhol slowed them down very slightly to give them a slight unreality. Though I love the soundtrack Dean & Britta created, the films were originally silent (unless they were projected during live Velvet Underground shows, which is possible, but I cannot verify) and when viewed as such they have an unearthly quality.

Warhol has said that the camera “turns people on.” This could be a double entendre meaning that on the one hand people will light up/perform for the camera, but also it is a turn-on to look at other people without them knowing it. There is some truth to both aspects. I think, though, there is something more revealing and less performative about the screen tests. If you stare into someone’s eyes for four minute you will likely lose your guard and reveal your insecurities. I dare you to try it sometime. In fact, I challenge you to look intently into your own eyes in the mirror for four minutes. Staring at a camera takes the edge off the fear of exposing ourselves, yet you can see in many of these clips that a profound vulnerability, and hence humanity, reveals itself. I don’t think you will find such a deep, penetrating look into people’s souls in any other kind of media. Perhaps that is what I find so wonderful and sublime about viewing the screen tests.

For some YouTube Webcam posts can produce a similar feeling. Michael Wesch’s An anthropological introduction to YouTube culminates in an interesting exploration of the camera eye of the computer that is both highly personal and global. But I think it takes Wesch’s anthropological sensibility to point this out. I don’t have the patience to watch YouTube confessions, but I remain enraptured by Warhol’s screen tests. I hope that you can find a way to watch the DVD with a projector so you can see them larger than life. I can’t guarantee that you will have the same experience of the sublime that I had, but I’m guessing that you will find something eerily remarkable about these films.

The above work is the product of two my star students, Wanda and Sara Gabai. This summer they did an intensive media literacy seminar with me, creating the above video as part of their coursework. I’m impressed by the quality of the script and how they contextualized it with their own mash-up of Web imagery. It was the first video they have ever made or posted to YouTube. If you like it, please to go the video’s YouTube page and post a comment or give it a thumbs up.

I was so eager for my summer holiday that I forgot to post a note that I had gone fishing for a good part of August. In reality I ate other people’s fishing, in particular in Crete– I wonderful place to catch rays and fish. I made a point of taking “non-academic” reading with me, but in my world no such thing exists. Even reading for “pleasure” entails a desire to learn something. For recreational reading I prefer sci-fi, and for many years cyberpunk has done the trick. In fact, I first read Neuromancer in 1985 while visiting my parents in Hawaii (who lived there during those years). It was a strange contrast between the cyberpunk cowboys of Gibson’s cyberspace and the bamboo forests and snorkeling that accompanied the read. Nonetheless, Gibson’s vision of multinational corporations, sprawl and Japanese technology somehow offered an interesting context for viewing the complex global interconnections of Hawaii with its Asian neighbors.

While in Crete I finally dove into the work of Octavia E. Butler, an African American sci-fi writer who I’d heard a lot about, but had not found the space or time to read since I started my PhD work. To get acquainted, I chose a collection of three novellas, Lilith’s Brood (originally published as the Xenogenesis trilogy). The collection proved to be absolutely perfect for both my bonding with the primordial waters of the Mediterranean and my current interests in ecology. I won’t spend too much time summarizing the story (you can get a good one at this wiki page), but I’d like to just to give a flavor for why this is such an important book.

The story begins 250 years after a global war has destroyed most of Earth’s civilization. An alien race of DNA traders, the Oankali, has salvaged surviving humans with the hope of blending with them in order to evolve their species. The Oankali are truly alien to human eyes and sensibilities– they violate most human taboos about race, gender and sexuality. They are also a purely ecologically-driven race whose guiding ethic is “life,” but they lack a morality that respects the rights of other races. That is, they will do anything to blend and mesh with a new race, even if it means destroying it. They do so through a genderless class called the Ooloi, who are masters of DNA manipulation and sexual seduction. The Ooloi are a mix of shaman and midwives who enable mating and propagation to occur. They are gentle but merciless manipulators. They will do anything to make sure the Oankali can ravish Earth, essentially eating and digesting it with their organic, living spaceship entities that are self-contained “planets” and are self-sustaining in outer space.

There are human resisters who refuse to mate with Oankali, but they do so on grounds that reveal how irrational and superstitious people can be. Butler uses the human resisters as a foil to criticize our “hierarchical” flaw that allow males to dominate through violence. Nonetheless, Butler is nuanced in that the Oankali are not depicted as morally pure either. The “constructs,” who are human-Oankali hybrids, seem to possess the middle ground between the ecological sensibilities of the aliens and human heart. This dynamic provides an interesting discussion point for Haraway’s cyborg theory. Butler also achieves something where other science fiction fails: her protagonists are not white males, but multiracial females, “feminist” males and are sometimes genderless. Through the ooloi she is able to show how gender and sexuality are in fact constructed, not normally the province of white, heterosexual sci-fi.

‘Nuff said. I’m wondering if any of you have also read Lilith’s Brood and what you thought about it.

I’m an old fan of Douglas Rushkoff, who is one of our most generous public intellectuals. I appreciate how he keeps the Gen X flame lit. In this nifty little Webcomic from Seth Kushner Rushkoff covers some key points from his current book, Life Inc., and themes from his Frontline documentaries, The Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders. In the above panels he riffs on a few motifs that I’ve been playing with: slowing down, mediating less, doing more with people outside the Internet, and engaging in organic and slow media.

Henry Rollins – The Art of a Bad-Ass from Joseph Vella on Vimeo.

I never realized that Henry Rollins was such a jazz geek. In this sweet little podcast he discusses Miles Davis, and in doing so rips the music industry while savoring one of the great risk-taking bad asses of yore. It’s strange to think of either as “organic” artists, but in relation to what is passed off as jazz or punk these days, we’ve got to tip our hat to both these fine folks for keepin’ culture alive.