Small Pleasures #2 - Ice Cream

I couldn’t resist posting this image :)

Happiness isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be…….Viva Melancholia!

Edgar Degas’ Melancholy (1874)

Ask a person what they most want in life and most will automatically reply “happiness”. It’s more than a fair answer and happiness in life is a worthy goal but is it the alpha and omega of our being? One must feel sadness and loss to understand the absence of happiness and to magnify its benefits. It’s these range of emotions that make us all the more human.

In our technologically driven world, many seek happiness by canceling out sadness through medication. Prozac is one of the more popular medications on the market and like other anti-depressants it has been criticized for making people “less human” since it limits the range of their emotions. Soma was used in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” for much the same reason (amongst other reasons).

Americans are notorious pill-poppers, especially those that can result in some form of “happiness”. After all, it fits into their country’s mission statement: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” all too well. But is happiness everything? Eric G. Wilson says it isn’t and that by eliminating feelings of melancholy Americans are missing out on an essential part of life. Read his excellent article: In Praise of Melancholy. Here’s a short excerpt:

I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

Why the Internet Makes Identity Theft So Easy

Identity theft is much easier than you might imagine

We humans being the most social of animals leads us to constantly talk about ourselves (some more than others, some much, much more) no matter how mundane or trivial the actual subject can be. New technology such as the internet has only facilitated this urge to speak about ourselves even more in the form of social networking sites.

In a previous post here at vodka/soda we discussed some of the dangers of social networking sites on the internet. One of the most costly dangers is identity theft, a theft made much easier by the amount of personal information available about ourselves and made available by ourselves (and websites) on the web.

Herbert H. Thompson, a professor of computer science and a software developer, shows us how easy it is to steal a person’s identity just by mining data on the internet in: How I Stole Someone’s Identity. Here’s a quote from the article:

I asked some of my acquaintances, people I know only casually, if with their permission and under their supervision I could break into their online banking accounts. After a few uncomfortable pauses, some agreed. The goal was simple: get into their online banking account by using information about them, their hobbies, their families and their lives freely available online. To be clear, this isn’t hacking or exploiting vulnerabilities, instead it’s mining the Internet for nuggets of personal data.

Mark Rothko, Untitled (1960)

Mark Rothko, Untitled (1960)

As readers of this site are already familiar with my favourite piece of art it should come as no surprise to you that I really appreciate the Rothko work shown above. Rothko refused to explain his work leaving us with one of art’s great mysteries. The UK Times is asking us what we think of this piece and what we think it represents. While you ponder those questions, have a look at some quotes by Mark Rothko:

“I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and color. The only thing I care about is the expression of man’s basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny.”

“The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time. “

“Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative.”

Why Gordon Gekko Got it Wrong: Michael Shermer and Evolutionary Economics

“Greed is Good” - Michael Douglas as the corporate vulture Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street”

The scene is certainly an unforgettable one. Gordon Gekko, the notorious Wall Street corporate vulture, stands in front of a shareholder meeting playing Robin Hood to the unsuspecting people in attendance as he confronts the executives of the company and pulls off a hostile takeover by appealing to peoples’ baser instincts when explaining that “greed is good”.

Although Gekko was meant to represent the cutthroat corporate culture of America in the high-flying 80s, many took his philosophy to heart. The argument went that man’s selfishness is what has propelled human invention and evolution. But is that the case?

Michael Shermer, writer, historian, and founder of The Skeptics Society tells us that this argument is in fact completely wrong. Read the interview with Michael Shermer here. Here’s a sample:

Why, if capitalism is so great, did the Enron scandal occur? Some have suggested that it was a few bad apples in the corporation.

The “bad apples” theory doesn’t explain what really happened at Enron, and it doesn’t explain the nature of corporate evil. Jeff Skilling, the CEO of Enron, set up what he thought was a Darwinian marketing environment. Skilling was a fan of Richard Dawkins’s important book The Selfish Gene, which Skilling misread. He took it to mean that evolution is driven by cutthroat competition and self-centered egotism. He liked the notion of the “survival of the fittest.” Skilling set up a Peer Review Committee, which became known as “rank and yank.” Everybody was ranked on a scale of one to five, and 20 percent of all fives had to be fired. The reviews were posted on a company website with a picture of the employee, increasing the potential for personal humiliation. Good luck being able to go out and have some fun with your teammates. Teammates! These are people who may be taking my job. Once you set up an environment like that, people begin violating rules. Skilling’s evaluation system led to a lot of behind-the-scenes wheeling and back-door dealing between department heads and managers, swapping review evaluation points. In addition to his belief in an outdated and untenable doctrine of social Darwinism, Skilling was a high-risk taker — short on dopamine, we might conjecture. What causes corporate corruption is an environment of evil established by the founders, corporate executives, and managers — a corporate psychology — that creates situations that encourage our hearts of darkness to beat faster.

The Globalisation of Hip

“Hip” now moves faster and has more “sameness” thanks to globalisation

We can trot out cliches about globalisation like “the world is a global village” all day long, but in my opinion this current trend can be described as the “great leveler”. Globalisation has seen money move to places where the quickest profits can be made only to see it abandon those places once they found a more profitable location elsewhere. In the meantime, the world is becoming more similar from location to location as people consume the same products, are wearing the same clothes, and are exposed to the same culture.

Globalisation is also affecting Hipster culture as trends now move more quickly and with more force than they once did. Previously what was cool in New York wasn’t necessarily cool in Helsinki….but now what’s cool in Paris can be what’s cool in Buenos Aires in a matter of weeks. Tim Walker explores the globalisation of hip in: Meet the Global Scenster. Here’s an excerpt:

“Trends aren’t transmitted hierarchically, as they used to be,” explains Martin Raymond, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, a trend forecasting company. “They’re now transmitted laterally and collaboratively via the internet. You once had a series of gatekeepers in the adoption of a trend: the innovator, the early adopter, the late adopter, the early mainstream, the late mainstream, and finally the conservative. But now it goes straight from the innovator to the mainstream.”

The global scenester stays on top of what’s cool worldwide by reading such urban culture despatches as The Cool Hunter, a blog begun in Sydney four years ago by Bill Tikos, which reports on the hippest fashion, furniture, and design culture. The Cool Hunter has more than 600,000 unique visitors per month, who pore over the contents of its licensed offshoots in the US, UK, Turkey, Italy, China, and Japan. Its global audience allows Tikos to homogenise cool worldwide.

Seeing Berlin by Rooftops

Berlin’s The Weekend Club

In North America Berlin seems to get a bad rap (Europeans know better). When listing off the best European capitals to visit, people will usually start off by naming the holy trinity of European travel destinations: London, Paris and Rome. Beyond that you’ll usually hear Prague and Budapest and maybe Vienna and Copenhagen shortly thereafter.

It’s really quite too bad since Berlin has to be Europe’s most underrated city for tourism. A tectonic fault line worthy of San Andreas during the Cold War, the city manages to balance the old (Unter den Linden) with the new, tradition with technology, art with finance. The city has long been a centre of the arts and especially a nucleus for architecture and design.

The Philosophy of Woody Allen

Nebbish, fatalistic, existentialist, etc….

I was lucky enough to be exposed to Woody Allen’s work at a young age. I vividly recall watching Bananas with my father on television some time in the early 1980s and I remember not only finding the slapstick humour hilarious (which my father is quite fond of) but also noting that there were a lot of “smart jokes” in the film, most of which I was too young to understand. Nevertheless, I filed away the name “Woody Allen” in my mind for future use.

When Arts & Entertainment Television was launched (back in the days when you’d actually get to see some real art on television), the station would play a lot of his films. It was then that I was introduced to his other classics such as Sleeper, Love and Death, Annie Hall, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and my personal favourite to this day, Manhattan. At this point I in my life I was able to catch not just his jokes, but also the philosophical dilemmas in his films that were so self-referencing and personal. His neuroses, his paranoia, his existentialist defeatism, all were on display in all their glory for us to watch, to sympathize with, and often to share. Rather than discuss the merits of Woody Allen’s films, I think it best to simply state that they’ve been both smart and funny: a combination that seems simple yet so foreign in a time when smart and funny rarely intersect. A time in which we now live where smart is often associated with irony and funny is now in the realm of pubescent toilet humour.

Emperor Hadrian’s Favourite Galatian City Throwing Up Archaeological Treasures

Sagalassos, the first city of the Roman province of Galatia (present-day southwestern Turkey)

The archaeological dig at Sagalassos in present-day southwestern Turkey is uncovering some real treasures.

Last year, a massive statue of Emperor Hadrian was uncovered. This week a colossal marble head of Faustina the Elder was found by archaeologists.

Tarantino To Give WW2 the Resevoir Dogs Treatment

Acclaimed director Quentin Tarantino is remaking “Inglorious Bastards”

Reports are surfacing that the script for Quentin Tarantino’s newest project, a remake of the WW2 flick “Inglorious Bastards”, has been leaked online. Here’s a description:

But the film project by the US director of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, which is a remake of a 70s war film by Enzo Castellaris, has already created a furious response from German critics. One said the effects of the “collision” between pulp fiction and Nazi barbarity were “completely unpredictable”.

The film depicts scalpings, disembowelment and swastikas being engraved in foreheads as a group of American Jewish soldiers are airdropped into Nazi-occupied Europe to wreak revenge on the Germans.

and more:

“This is pop culture meets Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with an unprecedented force,” wrote the film critic of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Tobias Kniebe, in an attempt to sum up the explosive effect the film is likely to have in Germany.

The trouble is that little distinction is made between Nazi and German, ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers or SS officers, to the extent that if the script is anything to go by, there is no such thing as a good German and all of them have to die.

It’s quite obvious that Tarantino will be putting forward a manichean look at WW2 in which Germans represent dark forces without any individuality nor saving graces and need to be exterminated without prejudice while the Americans represent the forces of light. Naturally such a clear distinction will upset Germans who reject the notion that all Germans were responsible for the actions of the Nazis, a position put forward most notably by Jonah Goldhagen. And being Tarantino, the sadism in the movie will be gory and preposterous, in keeping with the style he first displayed in Resevoir Dogs.

The key here will be to see what kind of character development will be allowed for the Germans in this film. Will they be allowed to have a bit of flair attached to the sadism? Or will they be robotic automatons thus rendering the movie a simple comic book?

The Brain - Tool, Weapon, and Battlefield

The brain can be hostile occupied territory

The evolution of the human species from our primate ancestors has been one in which our brain capacity has grown larger allowing us to focus on tasks previously impossible and allowing us to invent and learn, thus propelling ourselves into civilization and beyond.

The brain as ground zero in evolution isn’t restricted to humans, much less mammals. British scientists have developed a robot with a biological brain. The intent of this project is to see “how memories manifest themselves in the brain, and how a brain stores specific pieces of data”. Robots with biological brains bring up images of cyborgs and tinkering with nature. Suspicions will abound.

But don’t count out the importance of the human brain just yet! Neuroscientists are telling us that the brain is the battlefield of the future:

Rapid advances in neuroscience could have a dramatic impact on national security and the way in which future wars are fought, US intelligence officials have been told.

…..

On the battlefield, bullets may be replaced with “pharmacological land mines” that release drugs to incapacitate soldiers on contact, while scanners and other electronic devices could be developed to identify suspects from their brain activity and even disrupt their ability to tell lies when questioned, the report says.

“The concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects,” the report states.

Is Japan Today the Future of the West?

Tokyo Night 8 - Frank Peter Lohoff (2007)

While the West struggles with its absence of meaningful culture and asks whether hipsters represent the end of western civilization, Japan may already be ahead of the curve in the realm of stagnation and decay.

Feelings of alienation and pessimism abound in Japan in spite of the “cool” cachet the Japanese have in the West thanks to the Harajuku Girls and films like Lost in Translation. The new youth see little hope for a better future and little meaning in the present. As hipsters of the west find irony to be an almost bankrupt currency after two decades of use, the Japanese have already graduated to retreating to virtual reality and suicide pacts.

Roland Kelts takes a deeper look at Japan and its cultural crisis in We Grew Up Too Comfortable to Take Risks:

The combined effect of this assault on the global consciousness is a vision of a contemporary Japan exploding with energy, inventiveness, color and light – qualities we generally ascribe to youthfulness: actually being young, or perpetually feeling that way. Many foreigners see in today’s Japan the face of the future.

But inside the country, specters of darker hues shadow the horizon: an aging population and a declining or stagnant birthrate; an expanding class of young, part-time workers (freeters) with checkered resumes and scant skills; and so-called NEETs (“Not in Employment, Education or Training”), with their CVs and skill sets suspended in mid-youth. Stories of pathological young shut-ins (hikikomori), who withdraw into their bedrooms and virtual worlds to avoid the real one, and internet suicide pacts, through which young loners meet one another online in order to kill themselves in the bricks-and-mortar world, have begun haunting headlines at home and abroad.

“There doesn’t seem to be much optimism,” says literary translator, author and University of Tokyo professor Motoyuki Shibata. Shibata’s current classes are made up of what he calls “the first generation in modern Japan to grow up without the sense that things would get better.”

“We’re the risk-averse generation,” a 20-year-old female student at the University of Tokyo explained to me. “We grew up too comfortable to take risks.”

Read the rest of the article at this link.

What Our Faces Say About Us

Our faces say a lot more about us then we may think

We’ve all heard the expression that the eyes are the windows of the soul and we’ve also heard that it takes more muscles to frown than to smile. Both of these oft-used expressions indicate something bigger when added: that the human face is quite a unique construction and one that is filled with signs not only about ourselves but about what is in our environment that surrounds us.

British gerontologist Raymond Tallis tackles the subject of the human face in his new book The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head. The book centres around our complex relationship with our heads and how they are and aren’t connected to our sense of identity and consciousness. Robert Fulford of the National Post reviews Talli’s work:

Consider the way a human face speaks with silent eloquence. In the view of Raymond Tallis, an eminent British doctor and a talented writer, the face of a man or woman constitutes “the most sign-packed surface in the universe.” Nothing else we see carries more meaning. Every face displays a pattern of dense emotional responses in the present and an archive of its owner’s experience in the past. And each one is both unique and mysterious.

He continues:

Faces, as Tallis sees them, are like texts, crammed with information. A friend of mine used to quote an old literary cliche, “Her face was a study.” In recent times, however, faces have changed, making them harder to read. We are developing a face for our era. Botox is one reason.

Read the rest of the review at this link.

Are the Cities of Northern England Doomed?

A UK conservative think-tank suggests that cities in the North of England are declining without a chance of recovery

The conservative UK think-tank Policy Exchange has sent a shockwave through English politics by suggesting that England’s northern cities are declining without hope of recovery. Furthermore, they propose that residents of cities such as Liverpool and Sunderland move to the more prosperous Southeast of England and that government help this internal migration by building three million new homes to house these people.

The outrage is compounded by the fact that Policy Exchange is tied to UK Tory leader David Cameron and will no doubt have an affect on Tory support (what little that they do have) in these post-industrial cities.

As for these northern cities, Nigel Morris reports:

In its report, the think-tank said: “We need to accept above all that we cannot guarantee to regenerate every town and every city in Britain that has fallen behind. Just as we can’t buck the market, so we can’t buck economic geography either.”

Policy Exchange said many large coastal cities had lost their raison d’etre with the decline of shipping and raised the alarm over the future of Liverpool, Sunderland, Hull, Scunthorpe and Blackpool. It said it was unrealistic to expect the prosperous cities of Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle to regenerate less well-off neighbours such as Liverpool, Rochdale, Bradford and Sunderland. It said such places were not “doomed” and could not be abandoned, but people had to face up to the fact that they had “little prospect of offering their residents the standard of living to which they aspire”. The think-tank said all three million new homes earmarked for England by 2020 should be built in the South-east, making it easier for people in less well-off areas to move. It also called for massive building in Oxford and Cambridge, taking advantage of their high skills base and favourable location.

Small Pleasures #1 - Chico Marx playing piano

The wonderful Chico Marx playing “All I Do is Dream of You” in the 1935 Marx Brothers movie “A Night at the Opera”.