2
via DT at Facebook—tnx! … Continue reading
Tag Archives: economics
In the sidebar of his blog ↑Dialogic blogger Thivai Abhor maintains a nice list of documentary films which are available online. After having skimmed through a bit, my personal interests were most matched by the three shortly described below. But Dialogic also points to ↑Top Documentary Films, a blog reviewing, commenting, and linking to 1800+ documentary films, all available online, and ↑sorted into categories. ‘↑All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace‘ (Curtis 2011) A series of films about how humans have been colonized by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realize it, the way we see everything … Continue reading
The first anthology of essays by ↑William Gibson is out: ‘↑Distrust that particular flavor.’ GIBSON, WILLIAM FORD. 2012. Distrust that particular flavor. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. via ↑entry at ↑boingboing … Continue reading
↑David Graeber‘s book ‘↑Debt: The First 5,000 years‘ (2011) just arrived on my desk. Unfortunately at the moment I don’t have the time to sit down and read it in peace. Nevertheless I skimmed through it, read a bit here and there, and then couldn’t help but beginning to read it from the front cover on. It won’t be long and Graeber will owe me hours :-) There are books with which I do maintain a love-hate relationship. While reading those I constantly do have the impression that there really is something more than worthwhile, original, … Continue reading
Since 2011 the minifigures the LEGO group sells on magnetic bricks (so you can place them on your refrigerator door) are firmly fixed onto their magnetic pedestals. As it seems this has economic and copyright reasons, and the licence holders of franchises like ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ demanded the fixation—just if minifigs had no rights. Last year I bought some magnetic sets in Berlin’s LEGO flagship store. The minifigs were simply connected to the magnetic bricks in the usual LEGO way. Some of the sets I bought this year are fixed ones, which is a big annoyance. … Continue reading
In the navigation menu above ↵cyberpunk has appeared as a new element. Here is what the new element and its dropdown menu are all about: On the pages assembled in this menu I am collecting ↵motion pictures, ↵literature, ↵comics, and ↵computer games which can be called cyberpunk or cyberpunkish. A cultural artefact out of this categories qualifies, and is added to the respective list, if it comprises a sufficiently critical mass composed of peculiar core themes, æsthetics, settings, and protagonists. At the thematic core there are the reciprocal effects between state-of-the-art technology and culture, society, the … Continue reading
Finally—↑Alan Moore himself speaks out about ↑Anonymous and ↑Occupy Wall Street using Guy-Fawkes masks. Tom Lamont has done a telephone interview with Moore, and made it into a fine ↑article in The Guardian. Here are some snippets: I suppose I’ve gotten used to the fact,” says the 58-year-old, “that some of my fictions percolate out into the material world.” […] “I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle … Continue reading
Some weeks ago we went swimming at the ‘↑Müllersches Volksbad,’ Munich’s gorgeous Art Nouveau indoor pool facility. After having swum some lanes I took a respite in the shallow part of the pool. I hadn’t been swimming for months and may have overdone it a bit on the first lanes. Feeling a slight dragging pain in my right shoulder, I hovered in the water, admiring the architecture, and rubbed said shoulder cautiously. Submerged to his knees an elderly gentleman smiled fatherly at me from the stone steps leading into the pool. ‘Got one, too?’ he asked … Continue reading
At one level, then, the commodification of the body is a new discourse, linked to the incredible expansion of possibilities through recent advances in biomedicine, transplant surgery, experimental genetic medicine, biotechnology and the science of genomics in tandem with the spread of global capitalism and the consequent speed at which patients, technologies, capital, bodies and organs can now move across the globe. But on another level the commodification of bodies is continuous with earlier discourses on the desire, need and scarcity of human bodies and body parts for religious edification, healing, dissection, recreation and sports, and for medical experimentation and … Continue reading
With ↑this year’s EthnoFilmFest in Munich close (16 through 20 November 2011) I remembered some old associations. The above screenshot is taken from the 46 seconds short film “↑Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory,” the first of a series of ten short films presented at the ↑very first commercial screening of movies—on 28th December 1895 in Paris, at the Salon Indien du Grand Café. The short piece is a documentary film, or an ethnographic film—if you take ethnographic in the strict sense of the term. 41 years later Chaplin brought “Modern Times” (1936) on the silver screen, … Continue reading