Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

It’s a beautiful spring day. Lex10 has won a small victory over Blogger and the Glyphblog is back with another great bit of moving image + music. I’m glad, I’m glad, I’m glad.

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Lex10’s Youtube channel is here, his workup of the Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn is here. I reiterate: I’m so glad.

I’ve been getting a lot of hits on searches for Gabrielle Drake - something I find myself taking a perverse pleasure in. I thought I’d use the google and see what was coming up; before I got anywhere near DoaMNH, I encountered this essay, Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon, on the Ballardian. Yes, Ms. Drake appeared in a 1971 short titled Crash!, opposite some guy named J.G. Ballard. Click through and read the essay - meanwhile, I’ll just continue to shake my head in amazement.

Indeed, the egocentric popular culture of today, the all-invasive media landscape in which the private becomes public — the Myspace glossolalia of intimate, private space projected onto a global screen — can perhaps be understood in these terms, a result of what Ballard sees as ‘the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape’.

Mild warning - the film is titled Crash! after all…

I’m far more likely to have one of these actually hanging in my house (actually, I do) - however, I find the computational art here irresistible.

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It’s tinfoil to my magpie beetle elytra to my Vogelkop Bowerbird.

Via Make:.

Win! Hooray for serendipity. I started at Bruce Sterling’s and followed his link to a post on Amazon’s new Kindle (wisdom of crowds says, “Fail!” - also, read this). Speedbird - the blog with the Kindling post - looked interesting; I read a bit. Down a ways mention is made of a new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen title - The Black Dossier. Great news - and news it is. Though I love me some graphic novels, I’m out of the loop - there is much in the comic book world that I’m not particularly interested in, and I haven’t figured out where to find my kind of stuff (I read FLOG, but that’s just one - great - publisher). The only decent comic book store in the area having gone out of business and Million Year Picnic being too far to drive for one book (although I do want to get down to Cambridge soon - visit friends and the HMNH), off I go - virtually - to Amazon.

For those of you who know the League only via the movie - as is often the case - the books are far superior. I need to rent V for Vendetta and make that comparo sometime soon…

A couple bits of linky goodness…

Via comments on the always great BibliOdyssey, George Goodall’s Facetation blog. Per peacay, Mr. Goodall is “writing up his PhD thesis on technology and machine manuals of the Renaissance”. Recent post title: The Lure of Antiquity, the Cult of the Machine, and the Kunstkammer. Yes, please.

Via the Danger Room, helmet designs of WWI.

When the U.S. jumped into World War I, they brought Bashford Dean on to work on new helmet designs. Dean was the curator of the arms and armament department at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. So it’s probably no surprise that many of his 16 experimental models looks like they’re straight out of the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance. *

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I heard this story on the radio while driving to work today. Estaba la Madre, an opera set in Argentina during the Dirty War, certainly has all the ingredients of a riveting, gut wrenching piece - the mothers of los desaperecidos, the military and the Catholic Church (yet another of it’s not-finest-hours). There are no new stories under the sun - women suffering while their children are tortured and killed by the state? Archetypal - yet every single occurrence is a separate tragedy that scars those that survive.

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Estela Carlotto, whose own daughter disappeared and was later executed, says clergymen demanded money when she sought their help. Carlotto was instrumental in bringing Estaba La Madre to Argentina, an opera that captures experiences like hers. Carlotto recalls the night police summoned her to retrieve her daughter’s disfigured body.

“My husband identified her. He didn’t want me [to] see her. Her face had been totally destroyed,” Carlotto says. “I wanted an autopsy, but no doctor would perform one out of fear. That injustice and that pain transformed me into a fighting woman.”

And we in the US have an Attorney General who can’t bring himself to say that waterboarding is torture. I hope there’s a young genius out there who will make art to help us confront what we’ve done (and at this point, are doing).

• Book - peacay at Bibliodyssey recently announced The BibliOdyssey Book. I think I’m going to request one through my local bookstore - they’ll often order an extra for the shelves.
• Radio - I heard a song for the first time the other day - The Smith’s Girlfriend in a Coma. Bwaaa-haa-haa-haa! I was never much of a Smith’s fan - it always seemed to me a bit unseemly to be that whiny self-pitying introspective without at least a half gallon of brown liquor in your belly. Girlfriend in a coma?!? Case closed.
• DVD - 29 years worth of National Lampoon? I’m in. I’ll spare everyone the fogeyniscences - suffice it to say, I remember very clearly the moment I first clapped eyes on a NatLamp.
• Paper - papercraft Japanese trout. Remember, “If the trout are lost, smash the state!” (Tom McGuane?) Aside - coming up on smash the state time anyhoo, methinks. Your tax dollars at work (the Higazy case).
• Later - Newspaper illo - Dan Zettwock - amazingly good:

In response to my Ranchero post below, Steve sends along this picture of a ‘61 taken 300 feet away from his house:

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Cue Homer Simpson slobbering noises from yrs truly.

Let me also put in a shameless plug for A Certain Design Student’s MoMA Flickr set. Well worth a peek. The shot below is not from his museum set, but I post it because I love panoramas (as usual, click to embiggen).

1. Get enough food to eat,
and eat it.

2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
and sleep there.

3. Reduce intellectual activity and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
and listen to it.

4.

- Richard Brautigan *

The Jules Rupalley Album on BibliOdyssey.