The Errant Æsthete

A great little film on the history of the CBS eye, created on its 50th anniversary in 2001. [via link]

VIDEO

A profile in courage out of the New Yorker:

“Ten months ago, Grant Achatz, a chef, was given a diagnosis of tongue cancer. He was informed that if he did not start treatment immediately he would die. “You have Stage IV cancer,” he remembers being told by a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center. “There is no Stage V.

Doctors removed lymph nodes from his neck; a pink scar now extends from an inch below Achatz’s left earlobe to an inch above the collarbone. He was also given twelve weeks of chemotherapy treatment, which made his hair fall out, and six weeks of radiation, which nearly swelled his throat shut, and caused the skin inside his mouth and on his face to peel. “They burned me so bad I had to wear a burn mask,” he recalls. The therapy also destroyed his sense of taste. Although it is slowly returning—the process can take a year or more—he is in the precarious position of having to create and serve food that he cannot really taste.”

Bill Henson’s photos of people at the opera, including a short interview with the photographer.

What I was interested in terms of Paris Opera series was that whole strange business of finding oneself with a whole lot of other people gathered in a darkened space, such as the opera, awaiting some special event. There is something quite magical about it. I’ve always found that people sitting in the dark just waiting for something is the most haunting sort of experience. It seemed to me it was a common experience, a universal thing that everyone feels, really, at some point or another.

More of Henson’s opera photos here[via link].

This may test your credulity, but, nevertheless… If you check out the U.S. Census Bureau’s website, you can fully access a truly awesome book: the Census Atlas of the United States. Hard to believe .gov gets anything right, but in the world of possibility, there’s always the exception.[via VSL]

Abu Dhabi aims to build the first carbon-neutral city. That’s either irony or thinking ahead — probably a little of both. Don’t miss the video version featuring an animated fly-through.

“In Abu Dhabi, there’s an area of nothing but wind-swept desert. But 10 years from now, if all goes according to plan, a city of 6 square kilometers housing 50,000 people will rise in the United Arab Emirates — and it will be carbon neutral.

The project, called Masdar City, will burn no gas or oil, so its contribution to greenhouse gases will be minimal. Masdar is the centerpiece of emirate Abu Dhabi’s plans to get into the renewable energy market, a hedge against the day its oil wells run dry.”

Boatyard at Sunset, Yscloskey, Louisiana, 2001

A mauve sunset blankets a boatyard in Yscloskey, Louisiana, in 2001. This and nearly all the other fishing hamlets in the marshlands of St. Bernard Parish southeast of New Orleans were flattened in the summer of 2005 by Hurricane Katrina’s 20-foot (6-meter) storm surge. Years later, the region’s fisheries and oil and gas industries are still rebuilding.

(Photo shot on assignment by Medford Taylor for National Geographic magazine, July 2001.)

Photoshop at its extreme. With a title like “Manbabies” need you know more? [via link]

Granted, there are some big problems inherent in using a consumer spending index as a yardstick of national health. However, an interactive consumer spending infographic can be elucidating. Kudos to the New York Times. [via link]

When I started reading a story about a guy who joined the NSA after working at Disney’s Imagineering, my curiosity was peaked. What could a guy with that dossier look like? Exactly like Eric Haseltine, with the most perfect crossover face you can imagine. As a neuroscientist and ‘psycho-ecologist,’ Eric not only overuses phrases like “bad guys” and “war on terror”, but you can readily imagine him tracking villains both real and make believe.

In Haseltine’s estimation, something called Intellipedia is the biggest advance in the intelligence community since 9/11. Intellipedia is basically an internal Wikipedia for people who work for one of the 16 US intelligence agencies. Its goal is to break down some of the barriers between these agencies in terms of information sharing and colloboration.

Right at the end of the session, interviewer Jane Mayer asked Haseltine if perhaps the Bush administration is overreacting to terrorism…if the mindset that danger lurks everywhere is appropriate and realistic. He replied that since he got involved in the intelligence community, he doesn’t sleep well at night. “I know too much.” [via link]

One of the most fantastic things about building a suite of tools around a community, instead of the other way around, is that users are always willing to pitch in and help out others with tutorials and forum assistance. It’s A.viary’s plan to build their applications with a very deep set of community tools, built around forums, wiki-documentation, chat, sharable workspaces and user-made tutorials like this one for Chocolatizing a Statue.

A list of the 50 greatest commerclal parodies of all time in side-splitting video. [via link]

If this year’s never-ending primary season has made you wonder about the virtues of the electoral process, just remember: It could always be worse. {And I would be willing to venture most of us remember exactly when it was — in the Fall of 2000} Fortunately, it’s been documented through HBO’s upcoming made-for-TV movie “Recount” (premiering 5/25), which revisits the chaos in Florida following the 2000 presidential election. It’s being called a “surprisingly suspenseful and darkly comic tale in an event whose outcome is never in doubt.”

Told primarily from the perspective of Al Gore’s chief of staff, Ron Klain (played by Kevin Spacey), Recount illustrates how both Democratic and Republican operatives tried to use tactics legal and otherwise to their advantage in the aftermath of the all-but-tied Florida vote. Brilliant performances abound, particularly Laura Dern’s devilish send-up of the memorably self-involved Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state, and Tom Wilkinson’s dead-on portrayal of James Baker, the Bush family’s relentless consigliere. But you don’t have to be a politics wonk to appreciate the excruciatingly accurate scenes that remind you, again and again, how history very nearly could have gone in a completely different direction. {After watching the trailer, I have one comment: “Wow”} [via VSL]

TRAILER

Out of the pages of Salon, an eye opening read on a new kind of luxury community in the heart of the American West. Different from the typical recreation-based developments, utopian in concept, the Ameya Preserve would be a place of unsurpassed beauty, where bright and uncommonly well-heeled people could, however briefly, take their ease in a community implementing the kind of cutting-edge technology that could one day save the planet. Only problem was when the locals cried green-wash, the elite developer cried class envy. Welcome to Paradise Valley.

40 years ago next month, the streets of the French capital saw workers and students protesting against the increasing levels of unemployment and poverty that were all too apparent under Charles de Gaulle’s conservative government. As a reminder of the power of self-initiated protest, May 68: Street Posters from the Paris Rebellion, launches this Thursday at the Hayward Project Space in London and brings together a range of handmade posters that were used to convey the protestors’ grievances during the uprisings. Before the show opens, we talked to the exhibition’s organiser and curator, Johan Kugelberg, about how this vibrant and uncompromising graphic art came about and what it means today… [MORE]

ABOVE: An anonymous poster from the Paris student uprisings of May, 1968

Isabella Rossini’s “Green Porn” series is now live on the Sundance Channel’s website. No introduction can possibly prepare you for this Zoobooks-meets-Hustler experience. [via link]

Commencement advice from P.J. O’Rourke that you’re unlikely to hear anywhere else. One not unsurprising point of note:

“Politics won’t allow for the truth.”

Tom Hanks has a preferred candidate, but what makes his endorsement interesting is not the person he chooses, but how he frames that choice. This video, which appeared on the actor’s MySpace page, seems as much a comment on the celebrity endorsement as it is an endorsement by a celebrity. [via truthdig]

VIEW

The wondrous art of the pixel.

Kirby’s Cupcake. A painting in the pixel-art-style. Created by Ashley Anderson.

Communication City. Pixorama one more time. iPods seem to be pretty happy. The six birds too.

Darth Vader. José Eduardo Contreras Moral designs Darth Vader.

The new fashion accessory {that might be a stretch since it resembles a leftover from “Bubble Boy”} being heralded as the “ultimate tool for the modern rained-upon.” The Nubrella. Just like it sounds, this hands-free umbrella keeps your Burberry and Blackberry conspicuously dry. Comes with its own tutorial: http://www.nubrella.com. Worth a look {would you really want to be seen in this?} and like the writer suggests, someone will undoubtedly try going over Niagara Falls in it.

Another eye opening read out of truthdig that targets the media’s consensus on the war in Iraq: Sunday’s New York Times had a series of articles marking the fifth anniversary of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” victory speech on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. The title of the collection, “How to See This Mission Accomplished,” seems fit more for a motivational-speaking seminar than a critical intervention in the discourse of war. It gestures to the inadequacies that riddle the mainstream media’s analysis of the war in Iraq.

And then you begin to read the articles.

The Times asked nine “experts” on military affairs to each write a short blurb on the “significant challenges facing the American and Iraqi leadership today and to propose one specific step to help overcome that challenge.”

Of the nine:

Three currently hold positions with the deliriously hawkish American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Seven supported and/or participated in the war from its infancy.

Four currently support the U.S. occupation of Iraq without any mention of a troop reduction.

Continue reading ‘How to See This Mission Accomplished’

The Digital Scriptorium is an image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.