• Vladimir Putin, the benevolent zookeeper | Stephen Cave and Polina Aronson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk 091012
  Vladimir Putin, whatever else one might think of him, has a certain genius for the theatricality of power. Among his many stunts, communing with wild animals has always played a special role. But whereas his previous performances have been displays of manly courage – petting polar bears or tranquilising tigers – on Wednesday seemed to show a gentler side: Putin as good shepherd, albeit to a flock of Siberian white cranes. The message of the underlying symbolism, however, remained the same: that the Russian president is omnipotent and benevolent, sole dispenser of salvation.
  The stunt itself was pure pantomime: Putin in a motorised hang-glider showing the innocent young fledglings the way to freedom. In order to convince the cranes that he was their legitimate leader, the head of the Russian state cunningly disguised himself as one of them in an all-white suit with black gloves (they are white with black wingtips). Thus clad, he assumed his natural role as alpha-crane and took off.
  Despite the president’s efforts, the birds showed little enthusiasm: only one crane followed the hang glider when Putin flew for the first time, while the other birds sceptically observed from the ground. On a second attempt, however, five cranes took off with Putin, which was regarded by his entourage as good enough. The resident crane experts – who had branded the mission “flight of hope” – explained the lack of engagement on the birds’ side by strong wind, reminiscent of the references to “bad weather” made by election campaigners forced to apologise for the low turnout of pro-Putin voters in their districts.
• Creativity Predicts a Longer Life: Scientific American 090912
  Researchers have long been studying the connection between health and the five major personality traits: agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, openness and conscientiousness. A large body of research links neuroticism with poorer health and conscientiousness with superior health. Now openness, which measures cognitive flexibility and the willingness to entertain novel ideas, has emerged as a lifelong protective factor. The linchpin seems to be the creativity associated with the personality trait—creative thinking reduces stress and keeps the brain healthy.
  A study published in the June issue of the Journal of Aging and Health found that higher openness predicted longer life, and other studies this year have linked that trait with lower metabolic risk, higher self-rated health and more appropriate stress response.
• Steampunk Culture, steampunk, fantasy, science fiction, Jules Verne, H. G. Welles, Victorian era England, steam power
  Steampunk is a sub-genre of fantasy and speculative fiction that came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used. Usually the 19th century, and often Victorian era England, but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy.
• Photos, Videos: Tornado Touched Down In Brooklyn And Queens!: Gothamist
  We knew there were going to be some thunderstorms today, but things just got amped up oh so slightly: the National Weather Service warns that a severe thunderstorm passing over parts of Brooklyn right now could turn into a tornado!
  They say the storm is currently near Sheepshead Bay or Flatbush, and it’s moving northeast at 25 MPH. Other locations that the storm might hit include: Canarsie, Crown Heights, Howard Beach, Ozone Park, Forest Hills, Jamaica, Little Neck, Jackson Heights, Flushing and Bayside. In addition, a flash flood warning has been issued for Queens and Brooklyn until 12:45 p.m.
  You can share your photos with Gothamist, by sending them to photos@gothamist.com, tagging them “gothamist” on Flickr or #gothamist on Instagram, or Tweeting them to us @Gothamist.
  Update: According to The National Weather Service, the tornado has touched down on the Flatbush Avenue area of the Belt Parkway (and is moving eastward). Queens and Brooklyn have been put on tornado alert until 11:30 a.m. They recommend that residents immediately go indoors and/or to the lowest floor of your building for shelter, and to stay away from windows.
  According to reports, there is already “a lot of damage in the area,” including cars ontop of other cars.
  Update: Check out a first look at the tornado below, along with some tweets:
• Advocate Fights ‘Ambient Despair’ In Assisted Living : NPR 090612
  Martin Baybe: “The truth is, in the facility I am in, the administration [is] by and large wonderful people — wonderful people — but in many facilities they are not, and they have a top-down management system, which starts obviously with the owners, or stockholders, whichever the case may be, and they try and make you as compliant as possible, as quickly as possible. They don’t need any revolutions. They want to put on a good face for the public. I was driving with someone else about a mile away from where I live and I saw an ad, a large ad, for my facility and there was a couple dancing [in it]. And I said to myself, ‘If I stood outside my room for five years, I would never see a couple dancing in my facility.’ “
• A Room With A Grim View: The ‘Ambient Despair’ That Marks Life In Assisted Living
  Martin Bayne’s article @Health_Affairs: After entering an assisted living facility at age fifty-three because of young-onset Parkinson’s, an observer-advocate contemplates the dire need for long-term care reform.
• The Feathered Flounder

  Martin Bayne: “The Feathered Flounder offers original literary writing by authors who are 60 or older. Each quarterly issue contains short fiction, essays, interviews, and video by writers with original voices. Sometimes serious, silly, irreverent, and wild; sometimes heartbreaking, educative, inspiring—The Feathered Flounder aims to inspire, incite, and surprise.Additionally, it strives to illuminate the universal path of aging … and beyond. Part fish and part bird, The Feathered Flounder is born in the imagination of those with the benefit of having accepted the unexpectedness of aging. This fish with feathers swims to our deepest depths and soars through the…”

]]> http://blindflaneur.com/2012/09/10/internet-flaneur-september-10-2012/feed/ 0 http://blindflaneur.com/2012/09/07/internet-flaneur-september-7-2012/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=internet-flaneur-september-7-2012 http://blindflaneur.com/2012/09/07/internet-flaneur-september-7-2012/#comments Fri, 07 Sep 2012 10:26:09 +0000 Mark Willis http://blindflaneur.com/?p=4991 Continue reading →]]>

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Attention Economy -

• The Confidence-Man – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  “The Confidence-Man uses the Mississippi River as a metaphor for those broader aspects of American and human identity that unify the otherwise disparate characters. Melville also employs the river’s fluidity as a reflection and backdrop of the shifting identities of his “confidence man.” Melville’s choice to set the novel on April Fool’s Day underlines the work’s satirical nature and potentially reflects Melville’s worldview… The work includes several satires of 19th century literary figures: Mark Winsome is based on Ralph Waldo Emerson while his “practical disciple” Egbert is Henry David Thoreau; Charlie Noble is based on Nathaniel Hawthorne; Edgar Allan Poe inspired a beggar in the story.”
• The Confidence-Man Hypertext
  A Hypertext Thesis By Scott Atkins: “This project will involve a number of stages in adapting Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man to hypertext format. The first of these is to digitize, spell-check, and edit the entire text of the first American edition–the 1857 Dix, Edwards, & Co. This phase has already been completed, its emendations checked against those of the five critical editions listed below. From here I will establish a set of annotations, a single file of notes linkable from the passage to which it refers, and available on its own as a feature of a hypertext appendix. The appendix will then include the annotations, along with manuscript fragments, illustrations, reviews, a chronology, and relevant background material, such as excerpts from James Hall’s Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the West, from news accounts of the historical `Confidence Man,’ from Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad.” Both notes and appendix will work to establish a basic historical context for The Confidence-Man, filling interpretive gaps for contemporary readers by explicating what in Melville’s society would not have required elaboration– Biblical allusions, references to historical or political figures and situations, uses of popular literature of the time. Beyond this, I will embed within the text a series of codes that enable the text to be searched thematically. The categories chosen will reflect the interpretive approach set forward in the introduction (described below), and will involve considerations of narrative and metafiction, genre, language, and textuality. This will help extend the critical argument into the text, by inviting the reader to engage more actively its perspective toward the novel.”
• The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville – Project Gutenberg
  Project Gutenberg various formats
• LibriVox » The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, by Herman Melville
  The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was the last major novel by Herman Melville, the American writer and author of Moby-Dick. Published on April 1, 1857 (presumably the exact day of the novel’s setting), The Confidence-Man was Melville’s tenth major work in eleven years. The novel portrays a Canterbury Tales-style group of steamboat passengers whose interlocking stories are told as they travel down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. The novel is written as cultural satire, allegory, and metaphysical treatise, dealing with themes of sincerity, identity, morality, religiosity, economic materialism, irony, and cynicism. Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Melville’s Moby-Dick and “Bartleby the Scrivener” as a precursor to 20th-century literary preoccupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism. (Introduction by Wikipedia)

• Sacre Bleu | Defacing Fine Art Since 2011
  Publisher’s website supporting the novel by Christopher Moore, with images of the paintings enlisted in the story…
• Art, Mystery And Posh Pigments In ‘Sacre Bleu’ : NPR 033112
  Novelist Christopher Moore says he isn’t very good at giving elevator speeches — those quick pitches on your latest project that Hollywood screenwriters are so good at. “[That's] one of the reasons I probably don’t work in Hollywood,” Moore tells NPR’s Scott Simon. But if he had to give a brief rundown of his latest novel, Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d’Art, he says, “I’d talk about it being a book about the color blue, and about solving the murder of Vincent van Gogh and the sort of mystical quality of making art. And it’s funny.” The narrative winds all around late 19th century Paris through artists’ homes, cafes and brothels. But it begins and ends with a meditation on blue.
• Was Van Gogh Murdered? A New Book Says Yes : The Two-Way : NPR 101711
  A new book, written by Pulitzer winners, is raising eyebrows over how it says the great Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh died. Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, posits that Van Gogh did not kill himself as is popularly believed. Instead, the authors argue, Van Gogh was murdered. Here’s how The Telegraph explains their thinking: “The theory contradicts the accepted version of events, which holds that Van Gogh shot himself in a field, staggering more than a mile back to an inn where he was staying. Before dying 30 hours later, he was asked if he meant to commit suicide, and said: “Yes I believe so”.But this does not explain why the easel and brushes that he had taken to the fields with him that day, not to mention a gun, were never found, and nor was a suicide note. The book questions whether the artist, who was known to have spent time in an insane asylum, could have got hold of a gun.” The authors say that 16-year-old Rene Secretan, who bullied Van Gogh, was the one responsible for his death. They talked about this on a long 60 Minutes segment that aired yesterday:

“The life and death of Vincent van Gogh” CBS 60 Minutes (101611)  Part 1 | Part 2

Don Byron is one of the jazz artists I hope to hear this week. He has a gig at Jazz Standard on Thursday-Sunday. For now, here is Hide Me In Thy Bosom and Precious Lord.

x

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art – The Great Sirens
  Identified with the Belgian Surrealist movement, although never an official member, Paul Delvaux was influenced by his contemporary René Magritte, as well as by the Italian Metaphysical and proto-Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. Like Magritte, Delvaux relied on the provocative and incongruous juxtapositioning of precisely rendered objects, persons, or situations to create imaginative dreamscapes. From de Chirico he adopted the use of dramatic settings characterized by receding diagonals and classical architecture. With a sense of theater, he evokes a classical world that, in fact, never existed. Here, the architectural elements are reminiscent of Greek temples-like those on the Acropolis-and secular Roman architecture, but do not represent any known buildings. In assimilating a variety of images, Delvaux’s goal was to produce “poetic shock” by “putting heterogeneous but real things together in an unexpected way.”
• Don Byron New Gospel Quintet feat DK Dyson – Hide Me In Thy Bosom – YouTube
  with Frank Wilkins, Pheeroan AkLaff, Brad Jones
• Don Byron & New Gospel Quintet – Precious Lord – Bridgestone Music Festival 2010 – YouTube

• Into the Void | OntheBoards.tv
  Josef Vascovitz: “As a commissioned work, Catherine Cabeen’s Into the Void is a smart choice for OtB, especially as the theatre season winds down. First it’s a beautiful blend of music and stagecraft, with exquisite (ly performed) dance gracefully stepping through a narrative about art. When art speaks well about art , it finds a way to reexamine even your most steadfast assumptions. Coupled with Catherine and her troop’s remarkable dance movement- at times she seemed to float through the air like Klein’s famous leap- held motionless against gravity.”
• The Arts | Review: Seattle dancer-choreographer Catherine Cabeen explores a dreamlike ‘Void’ | Seattle Times 042011
  Sound can be a trance. Colors can be an embrace. Air can be a shape. Those might seem like vague impressions to take away from “Into the Void,” Seattle choreographer Catherine Cabeen’s first evening-length piece, especially when you’re aware of the research that went into “Void.” […] Yves Klein, the French artist who inspired “Void,” had his eye on the ineffable — and that, in large part, is what has drawn Cabeen to him. Klein created work that sometimes left no trace but a memory. At other times, he suggested that his artistic process was as integral to the appreciation of a piece as any innate qualities in the work itself — for instance, in his “Anthropométries,” created by covering nude models in paint, then having them roll across white paper. Cabeen’s 70-minute work alludes to certain specifics of Klein’s life. But if you want to catch the references she’s making, you’ll have to do some homework first. Far from being a literal illustration of Klein’s life and career, “Void” is a d
• Yveskleinarchives / Pinterest
  Pins from Yveskleinarchives
• Catherine Cabeen and Company: Gender/Drag/Truth and Lies 041111
  Catherine Cabeen: “Klein once said that, “A painter should only paint a single masterpiece, himself, constantly.” His admiration for the daily practice of art making, and the lack of separation between art and life, which that creates, is one aspect of his work that continues to draw me to him. I wonder how this connection between art and life played out for Klein in relation to his gender expression. He was a small man, not physically imposing, but a black belt in judo who was always full of energy. His work is often seen as misogynistic, though his wife and many of the female models he worked with claim that he was full of spiritual integrity, enthusiasm and joy when he created the work in question. While I aim to dismantle the problematic gendered hierarchy in Klein’s performance art through how I reference the 1960 Anthropometries in Into the Void, I hope to do so by complicating the issue and posing new questions, not by solving or underlining the binary nature of male/female…”
• The Girl, the Swing and a Row House in Ruins – New York Times
  Evelyn Nesbit was just 16 years old when she used to kick high into the air from the red velvet swing, aiming her toes at the great Japanese fan that hung from the ceiling of the hideaway built for seduction. The year was 1901, and Nesbit, a model and chorus girl with long black hair, full lips and dark eyes, was there to charm her seducer, Stanford White, one of the most celebrated architects of the Gilded Age. White had designed the swing for his adulterous loft in a four-story brick row house at 22 West 24th Street so that Nesbit and other young women in varying degrees of undress could entertain him. When the building partly collapsed last weekend, after complaints about its precarious state of disrepair, it took down with it the setting of a rich and bizarre turn-of-the-century Manhattan narrative, one that involved beauty, opulence, fame, sex and eventually murder.