Posts Tagged ‘Dylan’
Wednesday Night!
* Kinsey gaffe from the Times re: CUNY: Mr. Milliken, 56, the president of the University of Nebraska since 2004, will take over a school system that has undergone a spate of recent expansion but is still troubled by large pockets of impoverished and academically lagging students, the overwhelming majority of whom come from the city’s public schools. Still troubled by existence of the students the school was established to serve. Must be a real nightmare over there.
* Women Destroy Science Fiction!
* First as tragedy… Žižek’s Jokes contains every joke cited, paraphrased, or narrated in Žižek’s work in English (including some in unpublished manuscripts), including different versions of the same joke that make different points in different contexts.
* Oliva Pope fixes Chris Christie.
* Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love.
* Disband West Virginia. I’m From West Virginia and I’ve Got Something to Say About the Chemical Spill. Why So Many West Virginians Relied on Water from the Elk River: Industry Already Polluted the Others.
* Do You Really Want to Use a Commercial Learning-Management System?
* The colonization counterfactual. “What if Africa had never been colonized but was still re-formed into the kinds of political bodies which colonialism sought to create.”
* The university is dead. The question to ask now is not, how do we bring it back. That’s impossible and quite undesirable. The question is what new forms of genuinely democratic self-organization might rise from its ashes? To even begin to ask this question we must first of all get rid of the police.
* Cultural Preservation: Preserving Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital. This is where Dylan hitchhiked to see Woody Guthrie, right at the border of my hometown.
* BREAKING: Fox Only Talks About Climate Change When It’s Cold.
* RT @wewatchwatchers: In whiteness news: Man found with pipe bomb at Edmonton airport allowed to fly.
* Bruce v. Christie: I’ll allow it.
* Schweitzer tacks against Obama: The inside story of how Obamacare became an insurance-industry bailout.
* NLRB finds that Wal-Mart illegally intimidated and retaliated against organizers. I assume that means the corporation is dissolved and becomes a worker’s collective.
* Studies Confirm: Kids Ruin Your Life. Now they tell me?
* And three years ago it cost me $1000 to sequence one gene. Now that’s what it costs to sequence an entire genome.
A Few Friday Night Links
* Tarheel Summer? Roughly 600 people gathered outside the Legislative Building in Raleigh on Monday as part of a growing wave of protests called Moral Mondays, which have now led to 153 arrests over four weeks.
* DIA’s art collection could face sell-off to satisfy Detroit’s creditors.
* Harvard Professors Call for Greater Oversight of MOOCs.
* Immigration-related offenses are now the leading type of federal prosecution, constituting more than 40% of cases compared with 22% for drug crimes, according to federal crime data.
* Study: Anxiety Resolved By Thinking About It Real Hard.
* And for his 72nd birthday, a map of every street, town, and city Dylan has ever sung about.
Tuesday Night MOOCs and More
* 20 Things the Matter with MOOCs.
* Also from Richard: What do asteroids, MOOCs, and medical records have in common? All are examples, currently in the news, of the way in which public policy in the US is driven not by the common good or professionals or expert knowledge, but by the generation of mediashock in the service of the entrepeneurial desire of cybercapitalism to monetize data.
All of us that use the internet are already practicing Drone Ethnography. Look at the features of drone technology: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Surveillance, Sousveillance. Networks of collected information, over land and in the sky. Now consider the “consumer” side of tech: mapping programs, location-aware pocket tech, public-sourced media databases, and the apps and algorithms by which we navigate these tools. We already study the world the way a drone sees it: from above, with a dozen unblinking eyes, recording everything with the cold indecision of algorithmic commands honed over time, affecting nothing—except, perhaps, a single, momentary touch, the momentary awareness and synchronicity of a piece of information discovered at precisely the right time. An arc connecting two points like the kiss from an air-to-surface missile. Our technological capacity for watching, recording, collecting, and archiving has never been wider, and has never been more automated. The way we look at the world—our basic ethnographic approach—is mimicking the technology of the drone.
* The ACLU on what Rand Paul achieved.
* Six-Month-Old Baby Dies From Gunshot Wounds In Chicago.
* “Defense attorneys believe the girl, who lived across the river in Weirton, W.Va., made a decision to excessively drink and — against her friends’ wishes — to leave with the boys. They assert that she consented to sex,” reports the Cleveland Plain-Dealer’s Rachel Dissell. Richmond’s attorney, Walter Madison, is getting specific, citing “an abundance of evidence here that she was making decisions, cognitive choices … She didn’t affirmatively say no.” She was unconscious at the time.
* I think it’s possible Natalia is the reckoning of Girls.
* The Herbalife war: Hedge-fund titan Bill Ackman has vowed to bring down Herbalife, the 33-year-old nutritional-supplement company, which he views as a pyramid scheme. With his massive shorting of Herbalife stock, the price plummeted, prompting two fellow billionaires—Ackman’s former friend Dan Loeb and activist investor Carl Icahn—to take the opposing bet on Herbalife. As the public brawl rivets Wall Street, William D. Cohan learns why, this time, it’s personal.
* The most influential songwriter of his time has become the first rock star voted into the elite, century-old American Academy of Arts and Letters, where artists range from Philip Roth to Jasper Johns and categories include music, literature and visual arts.
* Exhumation of Pablo Neruda’s remains set for 8 April.
* The Law Graduate Debt Disaster Goes Critical.
* Ezra Klein gets it very wrong.
* The US Senate: Where Democracy Goes to Die.
* Here comes the asteroid mining.
* The insane plan to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena by submarine.
* 14 Great Sci-Fi Stories by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.
Saturday Morning Links
* Foreman Says These Jobs Are Going Boys, and They Ain’t Coming Back: Bob Dylan Lays Off 2,000 Workers From Songwriting Factory.
“This is a rapidly evolving industry, and frankly, there’s no way we can compete by relying on equipment and a manufacturing process that haven’t changed much since the 1970s,” said Valentine, noting that Watchtower’s board of directors had already broken ground on piano and Hammond organ facilities in Taiwan. “Despite our best efforts to continue assembling songs the old-fashioned way, we can’t overlook the increased efficiencies offered by fully automated symbolism generators and the use of mass-produced chorus components.”
* Toxic lies about culture are afoot in Silicon Valley. But I suspect other industries will recognize themselves in this discourse too.
We make sure to hire people who are a cultural fit
What your culture might actually be saying is… We have implemented a loosely coordinated social policy to ensure homogeneity in our workforce. We are able to reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that they “aren’t a culture fit” while not having to examine what that means – and it might mean that we’re all white, mostly male, mostly college-educated, mostly young/unmarried, mostly binge drinkers, mostly from a similar work background. We tend to hire within our employees’ friend and social groups. Because everyone we work with is a great culture fit, which is code for “able to fit in without friction,” we are all friends and have an unhealthy blur between social and work life. Because everyone is a “great culture fit,” we don’t have to acknowledge employee alienation and friction between individuals or groups. The desire to continue being a “culture fit” means it is harder for employees to raise meaningful critique and criticism of the culture itself.
* Michelle Obama and the evolution of Mom dancing.
* A brief history of marketing, from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
* Star Wars we can believe in: LucasArts rumored to be developing a Knights of the Old Republic film.
* And a Montana Bill Would Give Corporations The Right To Vote. Not an Onion link! Not an imaginary story!
Wednesday Links
* Two sites keeping track of Occupy Wall Street news: Greg Mitchell at The Nation and the 99 Percent Movement tag at Think Progress. Meanwhile the movement continues to go national (and international), and is apparently leading to walkouts on college campuses as well, including here in NC.
* In class Jameson often notes that for decades the word “capitalism” was a shibboleth of the left; people on the right just didn’t say it. It’s happening just a bit faster with this 1%ers meme.
* He can’t help it if he’s lucky: A late gamble on Bob Dylan has sent the singer-songwriter soaring up the odds to become the fourth favourite to win the Nobel prize for literature on Thursday.
* Whatever happened to the hypertext novel?
* This July, beginning with the Secure Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison in Northern California, as many as 6,600 inmates at thirteen prisons underwent a three-week hunger strike to protest the state’s use of “supermax” facilities designed for long-term solitary confinement. The strike ended on July 20 when inmates received as concessions winter beanies, wall calendars and the promise of “some educational opportunities.” But their larger, more basic demands—more humane living conditions and a feasible exit strategy from solitary besides “parole, snitch or die”—went unmet. As a result, on the morning of September 26, the hunger strike resumed at Pelican Bay.
* And submitted for your approval: the most gerrymandered district in history.
Prussian Blue, Five Years Later
The twins’ mother, April Gaede, who has been a prominent member of racist fringe groups like the National Alliance and the National Vanguard, brought up her daughters with the ethos of white nationalism — a mix of racial pride, anti-immigrant hostility, Holocaust denial and resistance to the encroachment of “muds,” i.e., Jews and nonwhites.
But after enrolling in public school and moving to Montana — a predominantly white state, albeit one with a decidedly hippie-ish vibe — Lamb and Lynx decided they simply no longer believed what they’d been taught.
Their transformation first became evident to Prussian Blue’s fans during the band’s 2006 European tour, a double bill with the Swedish white-power warbler Saga. Along with their familiar repertoire of Skrewdriver covers, racist folktunes glorifying Rudolf Hess and other Aryan “heroes,” and perky bubble-gum ballads about boys and middle school, the girls threw the audience a curve ball — a rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
“Mama, put my guns in the ground,” they sang to a smattering of boos from the crowd of Scandinavian skinheads and other far-right music aficionados. “I can’t use them anymore.”
They knew it was an unorthodox choice. “Oh, our mom warned us,” Lamb recalled. “She said, ‘You know, some people aren’t going to like this — Bob Dylan was a Jew.’”
Tuesday!
* Boogie Woogie Flu has 70 bootlegs and covers in honor of Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday.
* My father sends along this 3-dimensional tour of Detroit’s crumbling Michigan Station.
* Duke is officially off coal.
* White people officially have no idea what racism is.
* The Rapture has been officially rescheduled.
* Eric Cantor is officially a monster.
* And speaking of monsters: Climate scientists still can’t get their calls returned in Washington. History will not be kind.
The Fiends! – 2
At a time when many other American performers have been banned from China, Bob Dylan was allowed to play Wednesday night in Beijing, but with a program that omitted Dylan’s most famous ballads of dissent.
Conspicuously absent from the program at the Workers’ Gymnasium were “The Times They Are A-Changin'” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Dylan’s set list had to be sanctioned beforehand by the Ministry of Culture, which in its formal invitation decreed that he would have to “conduct the performance strictly according to the approved program.”
Sunday Night in Brussels
* We’re in Brussels tonight, which as I mentioned on Twitter is my kind of town: obsessed with french fries, chocolate, and comic books. We’ve really been enjoying the comics murals walking tours and I’m hoping to snag all 38 by the time we leave. We should have time, because unbeknownst to the person who planned our trip the entire country of Belgium shuts down on Mondays. Somebody really Belgiumed this thing up big time.
* Stay in the same expensive hotels. Don’t live close to the people. Produce lots of stories and make money. Pull up in your rented SUV to a camp of people who lost their homes, still living under the wind and rain. Step out into the mud with your waterproof boots. Fresh notepad in hand. That ragged-looking woman is yelling at you that she needs help, not another foreigner taking her photo. Her 3-year-old boy is standing there, clinging to her leg. Her arms are raised, mouth agape, and you can’t understand her because you don’t speak Haitian Creole. How to write about Haiti, via MetaFilter.
* It’s rare to see Malthusian arithmetic drawn out so explicitly. How many of the world’s poor do we need, really?
* Somebody finally let the New York Times know that the Roberts court is ultraconservative. Via OpenLeft.
* Ph.D. Comics is visiting Comic-Con (1, 2). Part 3 will be posted tomorrow, I think.
* And thirty-forty-five years ago today, Bob Dylan betrayed us all. See also. Via Neil.
Friday Night!
Friday night! Let’s linkdump.
* If you sent a letter to Whole Foods about the John Mackey Wall Street Journal editorial, you probably got a response tonight. I’d post what I received, but the small print at the bottom instructs me I cannot:
This email contains proprietary and confidential material for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review, use, distribution or disclosure by others without the permission of the sender is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient (or authorized to receive for the recipient), please contact the sender by reply email and delete all copies of the message.
I certainly appreciate their crafting a non-apology apology for my sole use. I don’t know how Daily Kos got a hold of it.
* NJ-GOV blogging: TPM, TPM, FiveThirtyEight.com.
* Also in Jersey news: Bob Dylan hassled by local NJ cop.
* NC-SEN blogging: Everyone hates Richard Burr.
* Airlock Alpha speaks the truth: it’s obviously too early for another Battlestar Galactica reboot.
* ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’: Huxley vs. Orwell.
* From Betsy to Rush to Sarah Palin to Chuck Grassley to your own old relatives forwarding you crazy shit.
* Joe Siegel’s heirs have won rights to a few more early Superman stories.
* Whitney Phillips at Confessions of an Aca/Fan tracks down the provenance of the recent Obama/Joker/SOCIALISM graffiti. Of course, it was 4chan.
* Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J. Blige won’t sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?
Blackwater v. Fred Chappell
Two book reviews from my household in the Indy this week: my review of Master of War: Blackwater USA’s Erik Prince and the Business of War and Jaimee’s review of Fred Chappell’s latest book of poems, Shadow Box.
In a related sidebar, Lisa Sorg asks: “What’s the difference between Daniel Boyd and Blackwater’s Erik Prince?”
Watchmen
Could the Watchmen movie actually be good? A long interview with Zack Synder at io9 gives some reason to hope. Here’s a sneak peak at the title sequence, which sounds promising:
Cut to the opening credits playing the way too obvious and too long “The Times They Are A-Changin'” by Bob Dylan. But besides the extra-long song the viewer is treated to a montage pictures and video showing the creation of the Minutemen superhero team. If you need a historical point of reference, Watchmen’s opening credits has 1,000 of them. Ranging from Silhouette replacing the sailor in the infamous nurse-kissing V-Day black and white still, to Ozymandias standing outside of Studio 54.
Finally we got to see the creation of Dr. Manhattan and listen to the inner monologue of the “god” himself. Watching him turn from Dr. Jonathan Osterman to blue beast was amazing. The detail that they went into ripping out each little organ was shocking. The appearing-reappearing floating circulatory system that floats about days later is forever burned in my eyes. I really see why this character is Snyder’s favorite.
Overall there was a lot of stuff that was a little “I get it — the Watchmen are a part of history”. But besides that and a few scoring changes it was gorgeous, the characters were so lovely that even their teeth were sparkling in the Snyder film. Dr. Manhattan’s back story alone (just the simple day-to-day life of a 1950s) man was strikingly detail oriented.
My first reaction was “‘The Things They Are A-Changing’? Why not ‘Desolation Row’?” but I see now that that will be playing over the end credits.
I’m officially upgrading my expectations on Watchmen to “cautiously optimistic.”
Gerry Canavan 