Guest blogger Akiba Solomon on watching HBO’s “Girls” and VH1′s “Basketball Wives”

My aunt Yvette “Kinyozi” Smalls passed away on April 16, 2012. To deal with the realness of her transition, I’ve been indulging in lots of television. There was one weekend when I sat around in my bathrobe mainlining episode after episode of “Psych” (Dule Hill, mmm), “Law and Order” and “Say Yes to the Dress: Atlanta.” And then there’s my alarming addiction to VH1’s “Basketball Wives” and HBO’s “Girls.”

On the surface, these shows couldn’t be more different. VH1’s “Basketball Wives” is a reality show centered on working and lower middle class black and brown women who have been in relationships with NBA players. “Girls,” as many critics have noted, is a dazzling display of millennial white privilege.
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Guest Blogger Guy Cunningham on Susan Sontag’s Critical Writing

Susan Sontag is the writer who first taught me that a critical essay could be every bit as valuable as a work of fiction. I admire her judgment; but I admire the way she expresses her views, her writing, even more. Some of that is her adept use of aphorism, her ability to compress an entire point of view into one clean, memorable phrase — “All writing is a species of remembering,” “Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment,” “Disenchantment is the characteristic posture of contemporary American intellectuals, but disenchantment is often the product of laziness,” and so on. But, more importantly, Sontag uses her critical essays as a way of exploring her own personal sensibility.

That sensibility exists between two seemingly irreconcilable poles — a high-culture aestheticism not too far removed from the work of canonical critics like Walter Pater, and a radicalism inspired by the twentieth century European avant-garde. Sontag radiated a devotion to literature and serious art that seemed rooted in another era. Her son, David Rieff, has written, “My mother’s was, I think, a nineteenth-century consciousness.” And the two volumes of her journals currently available, Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963 and the newly published As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks 1964-1980, with their dutiful lists of new books to read and almost Emersonian devotion to self-improvement, both bear that out. At the same time, she made her name calling for an “erotics of art,” and when she died in 2004, The New York Times hailed her as an “evangelist of the new,” pointing to her championing of new writers and the attention she paid to popular culture, especially film.
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“Careful now.
We’re dealing here with a myth.
This city is a point upon a map of fog;
Lemuria in a city unknown.
Like us,
It doesn’t quite exist.”
Ambrose Bierce
San Francisco journalist, poet, & novelist of the early 1900s

“San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.”
William Saroyan
Author

Guest blogger Jesse Tangen-Mills on Jorge Carrera Andrade

I don’t know who should be more insulted: Jorge Carrera Andrade because I’ve waited to get to Ecuador to read him or Ecuador for my number one concern being Jorge Carrera Andrade. Yes, I came to Quito ready to ask, Where do you keep your Jorge Carrera Andrade books? The poet Carrera Andrade had better questions thankfully, which is probably why he became an Ecuadorean ambassador, granting him a nice stable salary, along with the chance to live in places like Japan, where in fact he birthed the tiny book in question: Micrograms.

The most surprising thing about looking for Carrera Andrade in Quito is that you can find him in English easier than you can in Spanish. I went to five different bookstores and only one had a book called Micrograms — it was the English translation. This might have something to do with the fact that, according to Quito Imaginado, books are normally printed in runs of 1,000. There are over 10,000 Americans living in this capital city of 2,000,000. When I did finally find his complete works in Spanish it was in a school library, stiff as a salted fish. But then I guess the same is probably true of so many other poets (what the Ogden Nash?).

If you know the Latin American Modernist type, Jorge Carrera Andrade — his life — doesn’t offer many surprises. “Poet” was like an internship you did to become “ambassador” which lead you to a life as a “man of letters.” Speaking of letters, I found a two volume edition of his memoir in Colombia and got bored about a tenth of the way through. Did they really have to go for the second volume? There of course is a vast literary history from where Carrera Andrade protrudes, betwixt visits from illustrious European writers (Henry Michaux), kinship or maybe competition with Alfredo Gangotena (who ditched Spanish for French a few times), and a flare for being a champagne socialist, which I guess comes with the territory of being a politician and a poet in a country where literacy was a problem. Continue reading →

Viktor Hertz’s Alternative Poster For MARLEY

Viktor explains – “The idea behind the pictogram mosaic portrait, is to show the complexity and all the different things that made the man behind the music.”

If you haven’t yet seen the trailer for MARLEY, here it is (The film will be available in theaters and on demand in the US on 4/20):

From Wooster Collective.

Eudroa Welty once said that reading Anton Chekhov was like having the angels sing to her. Something like happens to me when I read Chekhov. His prose seems sculpted and has an effortless quality, which demonstrates his great gift combined with hard work. I can tell that he loved to tell stories, to go deep into characters in the way he said one must write, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” That is what he did in his stories and in his plays. In “The Duel,” a wonderful and classic novella, he takes us into a small town far away in the Caucasus. A young man of twenty-eight named Laevsky, originally from Moscow, is living a miserable life in this little town. He has brought his lover, a young women who left her husband, with him into his misery. A stench of rotten romanticism hangs over the lives of these two lost lovers. The young man is an emotional mess verging on delusional negativity and by the end of the novella he is forced to come face to face with his deepest fears and harsh realities. This is a story where we see the doctor side of Chekhov. Not only through his memorable physical descriptions, which could also be medical diagnoses, but also at points in the story where another character, an army doctor, prepares the medicines of the day for Laevsky’s lover.

Duels were a 19th century staple in Russia and at one point Chekhov quotes the final lines from Alexander Pushkin’s poem, “Memory”:

“Upon my mind, weighed down with woe,
Crowd thoughts, a heavy multitude:
In silence memory unfolds
Her long, long scroll before my eyes.
Loathing and shuddering I curse
And bitterly lament in vain,
And bitter though the tears I weep
I do not wash those lines away.”

Tragically, Pushkin himself was killed in a duel. But, in Chekhov’s duel, the outcome is not so deadly, but rather tragically absurd.

I strongly recommend this novella. The version I read was published by Melville Books and is part of what they call their hybrid book series, which combines the usual hard copy of the work with online additions.

Max Benavidez

Guest blogger Chris Velazco on Exploring Cosmic History

Sometimes I feel like we of the tech community tend to get bogged down in the little stuff. Hardware specs, OS choices, rumor after endless rumor — it can be nice to just take a step back and stop sweating the small stuff.

For a bit of perspective, why not take a few minutes this fine Friday afternoon and explore the nearly 14 billion year history of the cosmos as we know it? There are plenty of ways to do it — randomly clicking through Wikipedia could get the job done — but why not do it with a little pizzazz?

With ChronoZoom, we can do just that.

ChronoZoom splays out the entirety of cosmic history in a web browser, where users can click into different epochs to learn about about the events that have culminated to to bring us to where we are today — in my case, sitting in an office chair writing about space. Eager to learn about the Stelliferous epoch? Click away, my fellow explorer. Curious about the formation of the earth? Jump into the “Earth and Solar System” section to see historian David Christian talk about the birth of our homeworld.

What’s more, the entire project was constructed with the magic of Azure and HTML5, so it’s simple enough to veg out on a couch with iPad or Android device in hand and delve into the deep, dark, wondrous past.

The ChronoZoom project is the brainchild of Professor Walter Alvarez and a former student of his named Roland Saekow. Alvarez is perhaps best known for working with his father to put forth the theory that dinosaurs were eradicated 65 million years ago because of a massive asteroid strike, but his path crossed with Saekow’s while he was teaching a course called Big History at UC Berkeley.

When I think of history, and especially ancient history, I think of the Egyptians. The Romans. The Tigris and the Euphrates bounding Mesopotamia. Big History, as Alvarez puts it, extends far far beyond that — it seeks to explore the the events that have shaped not just the earth, but the universe. Hence, the tremendous scale displayed in ChronoZoom. What started as a novel idea for a learning tool to present the past ultimately gained significant support from Microsoft Research and a team from Moscow State University, and, well, here we are.

ChronoZoom is still in its beta stages, and while it’s definitely apparent at times (I imagine they’ll fill more information into the thing soon), the whole experience is both surprisingly fluid and terribly cool. If you thought the Sagan’s famous Pale Blue Dot was sobering, try watching all of recorded human history disappear in an instant as you switch to a larger scale view of universal antiquity. How’s that for making Android vs. iOS squabbles look petty?

First appeared in Techcrunch