Ancient animation from Iran

Italian archaeologists found an urn 5,200 years old decorated with images which, when viewed in quick succession, describe the movement of a gazelle towards a tree: the first known animation. Scientists dispute the meaning and intention of the images, falling for or against the animation theory. I hardly find it relevant. They either found a proto-animation or an early comic-book. Amazing in any case.

I wonder if they’ll review other pottery from the period, looking for more evidence of an ancient artistic trend. Of course, the artist/s did not have Quicktime to animate a gif for them. They must have visualized the outcome mentally or had another method for bringing the stills to life. Perhaps they spun round pot slowly in some way while maintaining a fixed perspective, like a clay version of the flip-book? No way to know, unfortunately.

I found it floating in Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

Review: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Despite our collective attempt to remove ourselves from the natural world, what we call “civilization” has ecological limits and a material lifespan. Our end seems assured. The only real unknown is how many other species we’ll take down on our way out. Weisman attempts to answer that question in his book, to the extent possible. Even if he’s wrong, he brings up excellent points I had not considered.

Check out my full review of The World Without Us on Goodreads.

The Politics of the Panty

I stumbled across an older clip from a French fashion documentary released in the eighties. I can’t speak a word of French (well, not in polite company), and so I do not know what the narrator says about women’s fashion relative to the history of France. I do think that fashion offers an exciting visual codex of fluctuating philosophies at play in society.

Fashion defines itself as more than mere clothing by its capacity to reflect current ideological statements and social musings. A survey of the street uncovers an interplay a competing ideas, the general articulated through the individual, and styles worn by women put them on display. I think the close association of fashion with femininity reveals something about the role women are expected to play in culture. Hippy or high street, we model the values of our communities in dress and decorum. Hysteria over hemlines makes sense if we understand that we’re not talking about legs, but challenges to the socio-religious order underpinning sexual modesty. For all its fussings with fabric, women’s fashion exhibits our desires, our repressions, our aspirations in naked detail.

further reading

A History of the Breast by Marilyn Yalom

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, as Freud said, but even he’d admit that a breast is never just a breast. Breasts mean maternity and sexuality, evoke a wholesome naturalness to wanton seduction, and symbolize the weakness of flesh-and-blood women but the fearlessness in statues of ideals (e.g. one exposed breast of Truth or Justice). Yalom goes through centuries of mis/representation of the breast in this thought-provoking academic work. Her discussion includes theory, but also a political history of topics like breast-feeding and lingerie. Yalom also wrote The History of the Wife, another fascinating title; unfortunately, it’s not nearly so good

A Cultural History of Fashion in the Twentieth Century: From the Catwalk and Sidewalk by Bonnie English

I have not read this book, but I want to badly. English chronicles what she calls “the democratization of fashion,” a process spanning from the early years of factory-made clothes, the rise and (arguably) fall of major design houses, and the inception of “street fashion.” If fashion is an art, it must function as all arts– as validation of dominant mores and as protest against them, as intellectual statement and aesthetic rambling. English applies the same critical thinking one would toward artistic or political movements to the history of fashion.

Plus, I have a cousin named Bonnie and I always loved this name.

What’s the word?!

Please somebody: grab the nearest hipster and shake them. Hard.

Harder.

HARDER.

Okay, great. Now look on the sidewalk for loose change in any denomination– music, video, zine, site, whatever. Any cash is my gift to you, darling, but send me tips on what’s cool from the street. Icebound until October, I must turn to my trusted friends and psychological muggings to keep in the loop.

Diggin’ This

I love that true creator of the video (Andrew Filipone Jr.) ascribes authorship to Samuel Beckett to describe a theme and style. This single gesture acknowledges the source of his style and themes, not as a nod to an inspiration but as a unabashed rip-off. Perfect illustration of Picasso’s famous quote: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

The Syllabus of Errors (1864)

The Syllabus now ranks as my #1 Papal Encyclical of all time. First, you gotta dig the title. It just rolls over your tongue and lingers at the tip, poised for ironic re-purposing. I tried to think of some equally genius equivalent, like The Compendium of Blunders. Not bad, but not ironic. And it would take too long to write.

Pius IX: best known for his work on Virgin Birth.

Pope Pius IX wrote the Syllabus in 1864 to denounce the popular heresies of the day as his papal predecessors had done before him, except that Pius IX faced a new devil conjured by science and a burgeoning capitalist class. Previously, the term “heresies” referred the beliefs of competing religious sects, most recently Protestantism, but by Pius IX’s reign that dispute had largely settled itself. The Syllabus addresses a new form of impiety that we would call Modernity, identified by Pius IX as the “Scourge of Liberalism” in the subtitle. From here on out, the Church accepted a truce in overtly religious wars in order to arm itself against rationalism, philosophy, democracy and even more radical political ideologies like communism.

Pius IX found a mere 80 “errors” in the Modern world, actually far fewer than I find. He listed the offenses as expressed by their proponents, rather than turning them into condemnations. Consequently, the Syllabus reads like a bullet-point presentation of contemporary thought and political ideals:

• Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself, and suffices, by its natural force, to secure the welfare of men and of nations. (Error #3}
• Philosophy is to be treated without taking any account of supernatural revelation. (Error #14)
• The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits. (Error #39)
• The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church. (Error #55)
• No other forces are to be recognized except those which reside in matter, and all the rectitude and excellence of morality ought to be placed in the accumulation and increase of riches by every possible means, and the gratification of pleasure. (Error #58)
• It is lawful to refuse obedience to legitimate princes, and even to rebel against them. (Error #63)
• The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization. (Error #80)

That last one had to sting!

Of course, heresy has political causes and consequences in a system where the Church has rights to taxation, land ownership, corporal punishment, tribunals, etc. From the late-18th century on, countries all over the world took those rights from the Church and royals and placed them in the hands of civil governments exclusively. Anti-colonial revolutions succeeded throughout Central and South America, and in Mexico. Rulers met at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to withdraw the map of Europe (literally) in order to stop the spread of liberalism and nationalism, only to be washed away by a wave of revolutions in 1848 (the same year Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto). Additionally, the Holy Roman Empire officially dissolved in 1804 after centuries of slow disintegration and nearly disappeared by the time Pius IX wrote the Syllabus.

Anyone who wants to vie with me for nerd points, check out The Syllabus of Errors for yourself.