Collective photo agency Magnum Photos has an excellent website featuring slideshows, profiles of their prominent cadre of photographers and thousands upon thousands of excellent photos. I came to their site via a photo essay compiled of shots that Wayne Miller took of Chicago’s African-American community from 1946-1948, but there are plenty of other wonders to explore.
Archive for May, 2008
A World Of Photos
Thursday, May 29th, 2008Zachary Locklin Poetry in Freefall
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008FLYMF Contributor Zachary Locklin has had a poem published in the literary magazine Freefall. As he explains:
The new issue of the little mag Freefall is out now, featuring a brief poem by me…if you’re interested, you can order copies by sending a check for $7.50 (payable to Marc Maurus) to
freefall
c/o Marc Maurus
15735 Kerstyn St.
Taylor, MI 48180Freefall is a very nice little magazine, well worth looking into if you’re interested in contemporary poetry. My poem, also, is in the exact center of the magazine, so it’s easy to flip to if you’re less interested in contemporary poetry.
I’m sending away for my copy now!
Video Game Therapy
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008The New Yorker has an article, “Virtual Iraq,” exploring how immersive virtual-reality simulations are being used to help Iraq war veterans recover from post-traumatic stress disorder. By enabling the soldiers to realistically re-live the events that trigger their trauma—all the way down to sights, sounds and even smells—the technology can dissociate the trauma from the triggers. (At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Anecdotal evidence in the article supports the practice, but it doesn’t sound like any wide-ranging studies have been conducted.)
To make Virtual Iraq, Rizzo started with two basic scenarios: the market-town street scene and a Humvee moving along an Iraqi highway, where all the exit signs are in Arabic and the road cuts through sand dunes. Then he gave therapists a menu of ways—visual, aural, tactile, even olfactory—to customize them. At the click of a mouse, the therapist can put the patient in the driver’s seat of the Humvee, in the passenger’s seat, or in the turret behind a machine gun, and the vehicle moves at a speed determined by the patient. Maybe the gunner in the turret is wearing night-vision goggles—the landscape goes grainy and green. A sandstorm could be raging (the driver can turn on the windshield wipers and beat it back); a dog could be barking; the inside of the vehicle could be rank. Rizzo’s idea is that giving the therapist so many options—dusk, midday; with snipers, without snipers; driving fast, creeping along; the sound of a single mortar, the sound of multiple mortars; the sound of people yelling in English or in Arabic—increases the likelihood of evoking the patient’s actual experience, while engaging the patient on so many sensory levels that the immersion in the environment is nearly absolute.
As technology develops, it will be interesting to see the expansion of video games as educational or therapeutic tools. Already, people with physical and behavioral disabilities have embraced the virtual freedom provided by virtual environments such as Second Life. Realistic, but controllable, virtual environments will play an increasing role in enabling people to learn real-world tasks or become adept at coping with real-world fears.
College Material?
Friday, May 23rd, 2008The Atlantic has a moving piece in its most-recent issue exploring the pitfalls of adult education. Written by an anonymous adjunct professor, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” explores the experience of overscheduled adult students taking classes they don’t have the time, money or aptitude for, all in the interest of an upward mobility that may be illusory.
The author explains:
But my students and I are of a piece. I could not be aloof, even if I wanted to be. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any of us wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity of my own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by which I mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the contents of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our trash daintily atop filled garbage cans.
I taught Freshman Composition when I was in graduate school, and the toughest experience I had was trying to help students that simply didn’t have the tools to write at a college level. Many were non-native English speakers; they worked hard and wanted to learn, but they were often stunned to discover they were deficient in an area where they’d assumed they were fine. Most ended up passing, but future pitfalls loomed down the road. If they’d been adults, I think the process would have been much tougher for all involved.
Free-range grammarians
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008The Chicago Tribune has a funny article on Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, two guys who have spent the past three months roaming the country and righting wrongs, a la Kung Fu. Instead of blazing fists of fury, however, their main weapons are Sharpies and Wite-Out, which they use to correct the grammatical errors they come across on signs and menus during their voyage.
The project sounds like a ploy for a book deal, but the article is a fun read anyway, especially for those among us who bristle at the misapplied apostrophes in our lives.
Dana Weiser’s Explorations of Identity
Friday, May 16th, 2008Friend and artist Dana Weiser has launched a new website showcasing her work. She uses the medium of sculpture—particularly porcelain—to explore the complexities of immigration, assimilation and adoption in the United States.
Her artist statement says:
“I have experimented with different ways of approaching social integration of identity issues. I have explored issues of lost identity, double identity and racial identity. I have looked at the history of stereotypes of Asian Americans to have an understanding of the stereotypes of today; I have created curious abstractions to reflect issues of ethnicity.”
The results are thought provoking and well crafted; they are certainly well worth a look.
Putting Out The Unwelcome Mat
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008Blanche DuBois would have a tough time (well, an even tougher time) in modern America, as kindness to strangers doesn’t seem to be much of a motivating factor for anyone anymore. As the New York Times reports, an Italian man coming to the United States to visit his girlfriend received the common Customs response of being treated like a criminal for no reason:
But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.
Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.
Not Quite Invincible, But Good Enough
Monday, May 5th, 2008The success of Iron Man is due less to the titular man in the metal suit than to his plainclothes alter ego, Tony Stark. Sure, there are plenty of action scenes to set the superhero mood: high g-force jet fights, raucous explosions and a multiple-villain takedown straight out of Terminator 2. The computer-generated effects even have an admirable heft to them, giving weight and presence to the laser blasts and aerial displays that can feel cartoonish in bad hands.
But where the movie really succeeds is in the acting of Robert Downey Jr., who exudes the insouciance and charmful arrogance that should be demanded of any millionaire playboy. His Tony Stark “works hard and plays hard,” to use a cliché. The head of a weapons-manufacturing firm, he’s consistently late and chronically soused. All-day immersions into genius engineering give way to all-night sessions of lovemaking. His private jet has a stripper pole; it’s probably also the fastest thing on the planet.
Downey’s performance reflects a man of gifts and privilege with a non-stop need for stimulation. Tony Stark seems to be living up to a thirteen-year-old’s image of a billionaire’s lifestyle, but a tinge of self awareness and a consistent sense of humor keep the whole thing grounded. Excellent supporting performances from Terrence Howard (college buddy/military man James Rhodes), Gwyneth Paltrow (right-hand assistant Pepper Potts) and Jeff Bridges (menacing mentor Obidiah Stane) lend the film a human feel that balances its high-flying action.
The movie even takes steps toward engaging the genre’s inherent contradiction—people pummeling others in the name of stopping violence—as Stark becomes disenchanted with his business after seeing arms he’s manufactured used by the wrong people. True, it doesn’t go very far in exploring the inherent limitations of Iron Man’s forceful approach (nor does it engage the difficulty of determining “the wrong people”), but hey, that’s what a sequel is for.
Amazing Articles
Thursday, May 1st, 2008A trio of great stories made their way into my mailbox lately. Perhaps the most interesting is an analysis of tribal vengeance by Jared Diamond, author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel. (I almost typed that as Guns, Germans and Steel, which would be an interesting book in its own right.)
The article, “Vengeance is Ours,” in the April 21 issue of the New Yorker, explores the dynamics of revenge in tribal societies, focusing on Papua New Guinea. The politics of the situation are fascinating, even as the mechanics of the feuds consistently unnerving in their disregard for human life. As Diamond explains: