Commercial/music video director Wiland Pinsdorf’s SAMPARKOUR is “a short that reveals the city of São Paulo (Brazil) under the look of Parkour. Where people see obstacles, Zico Corrêa visualizes new possibilities.”
Shot in HD with a 35mm lens adapter, the short is simultaneously dizzying and becalming, presenting Corrêa’s death-defying feats in a breathtaking rush of carefully framed shots and well-paced edits. Today –perhaps more than most days– it is deeply satisfying to witness a collaboration (between filmmaker and athlete, city and gravity) so vital, immediate, and perfectly alive.
This is a little known documentary based on the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. This documentary came out in 1972 and features Orson Welles as the narrator. [...]
As far as I can tell, this documentary is in the public domain. I took the liberty of uploading my videotape transfer to YouTube. It is in 5 parts, and you can view them below.
Turns out there’s already another Dangerous Minds episode. This one features Douglas Rushkoff and covers some familiar terroritory for readers of Rushkoff’s columns (which I link to frequently).
I agree with quite a lot of what Rushkoff has to say, and I respect him a lot. But there are a few important things he gets wrong or doesn’t account for.
There’s a contradiction in his assertion that the government/corporate complex will be too broke to enforce monopolies - but he also mentions, when questioned about US foreign debt, that we still have the strongest military. And that’s the thing. Entrenched powers aren’t going to roll over and die as long as they’ve got the bomb and the gun.
Alternative currencies are great. But governments tend squash them as soon as they start disrupting the status quo. See The New Currency War and George Monbiot’s history of alternative currency. There’s a really question of how much the “powers that be” will let “us” get away with - in terms of growing our own food, creating our own currency, and anything else that reduces their power over us.
Much of Rushkoff’s optimism stems from romanticizing a future where Americans break free from our cubicles and start actually “doing stuff.” I’ve noticed a tendency for a lot of people to think that jobs need to be more like what they think their ideal job should be like. Some people say “people need to be out doors” or “people need to work with their hands” or “people need more creative jobs.” They miss the fact that a lot of people genuinely like working with numbers, or programing computers, or doing detailing oriented office work.
Anyway, the millions of people who work in (or have recently worked in) the health care, education, restaurant, hotel, farming, gardening, manufacturing, trucking, rail road, utility, and construction industries may be surprised to hear that all the economy needs is for Americans just need to get off their fat cubicle dwelling asses and “do something.” What percentage of the population is actually employed in just pushing numbers around and managing outsourced labor?
I’m fairly confused on this point because Rushkoff also talks about how the financial industry is essentially extracting value from the rest of us. So are we producing value or not?
Rushkoff is correct in tracing the modern collusion of government and corporations back to the very beginnings of corporations, but he falls into a certain trap that libertarians tend to fall into: the idea that getting rid of the government influence would solve the problem of megacorporations (or other large institutions) would stop their meddling in the market and lead to a laissez faire utopia.
The problem is that the government is not the only way large institutions (be they for-profit corporations, religious institutions, unions, professional organizations, or non-profit organizations) manipulate the market. We could try splitting up megacorproations - but that requires government intervention and gets sticky quick (for all the reasons that libertarians warn against government intervention).
The typical libertarian assumption, as I understand it, is that without government intervention the market would quickly self-correct - all those decades of entrenched power and influence would cease to matter as real competition came to the fold. Needless to say, I don’t share this belief. And actually, I rather doubt Rushkoff does either.
I look forward to Rushkoff’s book. I suspect many of my points will at least be addressed.
Since I’ve been a little soft of socialism lately, here are some thoughts on this episode: they talk a lot about the problems with capitalism and the need for more welfare to support the large numbers of people who will be unemployed long term as the economy continues to change.
However, they do not propose any real solutions (granted, this is just a short interview). The Welfare State needs a tax base to fund its social programs. Metzger mentions that he doesn’t see the market proposing any solutions to our problems. “The market” (a dubious term in its own right - what we should actual say is “private industry”) is perhaps the only thing proposing solutions - alternative energy, biotechnology, and other initiatives to increase actual, non-fictitious capital. Even solutions like permaculture, co-ops, credit unions, and alternative currency are “market” solutions, in that they are they are the private undertakings.
The bad news of course, we’re all familiar with: heavy debt both as a nation and as individuals, lack of individual savings, a serious trade deficit, etc. Some of these problems may have some governmental solutions. But redistribution of wealth require wealth to redistribute, and tariffs and trade regulation require commerce to regulate (whatever the advantages and disadvantages may be). This is what “the market” is good for.
The body of the tower was made by a new technique called “ferrofluid sculpture” that enables artists to create dynamic sculptures with fluid materials. This technique uses one electromagnet, and its iron core is extended and sculpted. The ferrofluid covers the sculpted surface of a three-dimensional iron shape that was made on an electronic NC lathe. The movement of the spikes in the fluid is controlled dynamically on the surface by adjusting the power of the electromagnet. The shape of the iron body is designed as helical so that the fluid can move to the top of the helical tower when the magnetic field is strong enough.
MAKE has a round-up of dead media tech, including a bit by Trevor Blake about mechanical television:
Television achieves the illusion of motion in a similar but unique fashion. Rather than refresh the entire image at once, as film does with each cell that passes in front of the projector’s light, television refreshes an image one line at a time in a scanning process. Within the cathode ray tube, an electron gun scans a single line of an image from one side to the other, then scans the line underneath it, until it has scanned an entire image.
The Nipkow disk is an earlier, mechanical means of achieving the same side-to-side, top-to-bottom scan process. It consists of a disk that rotates on its axis. A series of evenly spaced, uniformly sized holes are cut into the disk, spiraling in toward the center. The disk is housed in a box with a small viewing window: the outermost hole of the disk will form the outermost scan line visible in the viewing window, and each additional hole will form additional scan lines.
Wired has an update on the Sex Life of Robots movie and interview with sculptor and animator Michael Sullivan. The Museum of Sex has a new exhibition by Sullivan.
A Video and sound piece composed for Terra:Extremitas by FoolishPeople focusing on remote interfacing with the locale immediate to their performance. This was achieved through a combination of psionic video, witness samples, and circuit bent equipment translating sound to video distortion while utilizing radionic tones scaled to audible octaves.
“In a bold move, Monty Python announces their partnership with YouTube, creating the first official Monty Python Video Channel on the internet. To all the fans who’ve for some unknown reason have sat, progressively losing their eyesight, squinting at their computer screens, watching The Dead Parrot Sketch, or missing the climax of The Fish Slapping Dance all because you’re too damned cheap to buy the shiny new DVD Box Set, you who have gawped at grainy bootlegged Python snippets only to be left unfulfilled by the ripped-off rubbish posted on YouTube… Well loyal Python fan, strain no longer! Now you can save your eyesight and join the Monty Python YouTube Channel, where you can enjoy high quality Python lounging in your knickers. Yes, that’s right, you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your laptop to join the Flying Circus.”
Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun’s finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies.
Alejandro Jodorowsky talks about his fascination with the Tarot and how he helped recreate what the Tarot of Marseilles looked like 1400 years ago. He also goes into what the different Tarot cards mean. This video is an extra from the 2007 restored DVD of The Holy Mountain (1973 film).
The 1987 documentary on the life of Robert Crumb, underground comics pioneer, 60s icon, and the quintessential Dirty Old Man. Written by the man himself, it lacks the distance from its subject that made Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb more of a revelatory study in neuroses and emotional trauma and instead puts you squarely in the middle of Crumb’s gonzo world of misogyny and self-loathing and in that sense it is a much better illustration of Crumb the Artist as opposed to Crumb the Man.
