Part-time Author and Artist. Full-time Educator, Visual Culture and Art History Lecturer, House Hubby and Breadmaker.
Utah
Joined October 2019
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J. Whitebread retweeted
Imagine studying music and being taught that Beethoven's greatest achievement was revealing the class structures of nineteenth-century Europe.
That's essentially what happens in far too many English departments.
This, but academia.
Glenna did an unusual thing that people typically don't do: she checked a citation in a law review article to see whether the citation said what the authors claimed it did.
She found that the citation said the opposite of what the authors claimed it did.
She then asked the editor of the law review for a correction.
The editor did not reply to the request.
She then asked the authors for comment on the incorrect citation.
The authors acknowledged that the citation was erroneous and regretted the error.
The authors then insisted that the citation did not matter to their actual argument because nothing in their argument depended on the citation being right.
Glenna then wrote a post explaining why the erroneous citation was in fact important to their actual argument, and why the erroneous citation also exposed a wider ignorance of the subject on which the authors were writing. (She claims, convincingly, that it's important to know what sex is in order to understand what sex discrimination is, and that being able to define what sex is is an inextricable aspect of knowing what sex is.)
I consulted with some lawyer friends in a chat group who helpfully explained to me that no one ever reads footnotes, no one checks the underlying references, and no one cares if they are correct or not because law review articles like the one Murray and Shaw published are merely political advocacy masquerading as legal scholarship that no one reads, and therefore not to expect the Supreme Court Review to issue a correction for a citation that the authors are on the record admitting was erroneous.
Do I have all that right, @williambaude?
This is a rip off of a Shen comic, but then he wrote that comic about being happy someone stole his bike, so I guess he's okay with people stealing his stuff.
J. Whitebread retweeted
I can tell this will become an annual lament for me: the “trunk and treat” is a degraded, uncivilized, atomized replacement for actually going around to your neighbors’ houses and interacting with them on Halloween. Horrible development in American life.
J. Whitebread retweeted
Halloween is definitely a Christian or at least a Christianized holiday. For many centuries its core point has been to confront ourselves with the *strangeness* of death, the fact that it seems not only sad but also somehow wrong, uncanny, weird, and unnatural.
There’s something essentially misshapen about decay and decomposition. They strike us as interlopers in the natural order, not just as a matter of local evolutionary preference but as a firm-stuck reality of the world as a whole. Life is not supposed to dissipate and break down like this, we feel, and the crawling of the skin at Halloween gives us a visceral encounter with that feeling.
The ritual goes like this: we confront the weirdness of death, and then we make light of it. That’s the two-part Christian gesture. It’s informed by the confidence that death really is wrong, awkward, gross, and—finally—impotent. It is an awkward, unwelcome, doomed visitor in our saved world.
For what it’s worth, I think the second part of that conviction is what we’re losing. We remember that death is ugly. We no longer believe it is weak. Take away the Christian faith in the afterlife and Halloween stops being jolly, spooky fun. It turns into something genuinely sinister and menacing. If you remember the first part of the story—that death is a horror—but forget the second—that it is conquered—then what used to be a jolly romp of defiance turns into a miserable wail of defeat.
I can’t prove this, but I feel that the *spirit* of Halloween decorations has shaded over lately into this darker mood. They seem now to assert, not humanity’s triumphant ability to make light with death, but death’s hideous dominion over humanity. There is less whimsy—less cackling and skeleton-dancing—and more real gore, more ugliness in earnest. You see the same thing in a lot of recent horror movies, where it seems like demons are real but God isn’t.
Currently I’m seeing a lot of people come out “against Halloween” as “anti-Christian,” or whatever, which seems imprecise. But I think underneath that they’re reacting to a real fact, which is that the Christian promise has bled out of the Halloween idea, turning it from something pleasantly chilling to something existentially horrifying. That’s my sense anyway.
I know it's the passing of the old guard for another franchise, but this will always been my favorite Koenig role.
Annotated bibliographies used to be one of the best ways to force students to find and actually get them to read or at lease peruse sources. In the age of AI, they are next to worthless. Every day I have to rethink how I teach and make assignments. It's an endless arms race.
What was mostly a local and family affair in a few communities in Oaxaca, Guanajuato and Michocan just 40 years ago has now become a massive commercialized holiday. Just like Halloween. I wonder if anyone in Mexico misses the celebrations like I miss Halloween before holiday got taken over by adults and the sleazy adult costumes. I hardly see Trick-or-Treaters anymore.
J. Whitebread retweeted
¿Quién era Mictlantecuhtli?
Conoce más de esta figura y su representación en la Zona Arqueológica del Zapotal en Veracruz en nuestro YouTube.
#Arqueologia #Historia #CultivamosMemorias #ArqueoVisual
J. Whitebread retweeted
En 1972, los arqueólogos notaron un cambio de color en la tierra de un montículo en Veracruz. Pensaron que era un mascarón de serpiente. Era el señor del Mictlán, sedente en su trono de barro y esta es su historia en un. nuevo #ArqueoVisual. Sólo aquí en Libreta Negra Mx.
Mañana gran estreno en YouTube.
#CultivamosMemorias
"Soon you won’t be able to tell if the voice on the phone, the face on a Zoom call, or the footage on the news is real."
So as it happens, we were teaching about the invention of photography in class this week and talked about this image. The photo below is called Fading Away by Henry Peach Robinson and was made in 1858.
Everything in this photo is fake, and I don't just mean that it was staged by actors. It is a composite of at least 5 different negatives that have been carefully cut and fitted together to look like one photo. Can you see the seams? I can, but I've been told what to look for.
This was made in 1858, nearly 170 years ago, before AI, before Photoshop, before even airbrushing, and was made less than 30 years after the earliest experiments with photography.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. You don't even have to go to this level to deceive with a photo. Matthew Brady, the Civil War photographer used to pose the bodies of the dead on Civil War battlefields for more dramatic shots. And there's the famous Falling Soldier from the Spanish Civil War that was completely staged.
You don't even need to lie, exactly. The famous shot of the girl running naked from a napalm attack in Vietnam captured reality, but the way it was hyped and misrepresented made the image a lie in the end.
I suppose I should also add that in a painting, you can't see the seams at all because they were never there to begin with, but they are all equally "fake." Everything before the advent of photography, film and the phonograph was fake.
The truth is we aren't losing anything but our illusions. If we have been operating under the assumption that photos are "real" and represent "truth" that was only because of our naievty. And trust me, judging by my freshmen, the current generation is pretty dang cynical. They start out assuming everything is AI.
It may be that in the future historians will look back on the 200 year period after the advent of photography, as a mere blip of undeserved credulity, when people assumed that images were true because of the mechanical means of their production, but that's our fault.
An era where we intrinsically understand images are not real, but a construct of the creator that may or may not reveal truth, and whose motives can be questioned, is probably, if anything, a return to baseline.
The artist Gerome famously said that with photography, "Truth has come out of her well." But she hasn't. She's still there at the bottom of the well and we can only see her dimly and with much effort.
J. Whitebread retweeted
I’m not being hyperbolic here when I say that “Wildwood” is one of the biggest artistic & technical achievements in cinema & animation history.
The fact that in the age of AI all of this was crafted by hand is incomprehensibly astonishing.
And none of it overshadows just how incredible amazing the story is; filled with love, & loss, and the horrifying things we’re capable of doing to one another when we’re afraid of losing someone.
I promise you, when you leave the theater after watching this film, you’ll be filled with a ravenous hope & will to do good in the world.
Go see Travis Knight's "Wildwood." Go see it alone, with family, with kinds, with friends. Just go see it. It's phenomenal. It's the modern fairy tale we needed to see magic & love again.
It's the most ambitious stop-motion animated film ever made. It has heart, it has grit, it has courage. It's one of those rare films that comes along and upends the medium by its pure honesty about what it's portraying.
Everyone knows how time-consuming stop-motion animation is, so the only think I'm going to say about it, is that sometimes there are dozens of characters on screen and all of them move, all of them have that magical realism about them. The amount of work that went into the flow of this film is magnificent.
It's a film that is beautifully shot. Cinematography: awesome. Score: awesome. Sound design, OMG, the sound design, it's so immersive. The story is wonderful, and as I've noted full of heart, its raw soul expression of imagination, of creativity, of that which makes us human. It will make you feel things, and rage against rage itself, against grief, against all those unfair horrors of life that make good people turn evil.
The symbolism in this film is simply perfect. From the manipulative Alexandra, who is pure grief embodied & might be one of the best portrayals of a witch in art since The White Witch of Narnia, to the bureaucratic Roger Swindon, who is just the sort of administrative evil we all despise, villainy is real, it's true, and it's not expressed with some weird form of manipulative sympathy.
That scene about couples being unable to have children but still having love that they must express unto the world. The toll it take, becuse it does take a toll on the future. Pure poetic brilliance.
Prue McKeel, Curtis Mehlberg & the McKeel parents are all very well realized and humanly relatable. All the side characters are brilliant, and have their moment to shine. Who would have guessed I'd feel so much for a rat. Oh, Septima! One of the greatest secondary characters in the media. The cast's voice acting is brilliant.
And that final battle. I can't tress to you how impressive it is. It's violent, it's bloody, it's cruel, it's so very very melancholy. And yet you watch it and reflect on the current state of our world and see that the metaphor it presents has been lost to storytellers today. I won't spoil the ending, but its pure love, pure hate, pure humanity fighting against itself.
Nothing in the film is forced, not emotion, not ideology, not politics, not family, the setting is reflective of the story it's telling. Portland, Oregon is presented just as it is, from its ideology to it's flaws, to its intimate beauty. The narrative nuance of this film is deep, I can see books being written about it.
I can't praise this film enough.
Go see "Wildwood." People need to support genuine & honest art like this. I hope it makes all the money, & I hope Studio Laika gets all the awards for it, because frankly they simply deserve it. "Wildwood" is 10/10 for me, & worthy of all the praise it's gonna get.
J. Whitebread retweeted
"A simple syringe mark is easy enough to heal or vanish. A direct injection of air or water to the right place can kill as easily as an AK. An icepick in the ear? Almost instant death if you do it right. Clean it all with Scourgify, most Purebloods will be confused as to why their friend is dead, and why they have a puncture in the brain. They'll assume it was some Brain Puncturing Curse. After all, what kind of wizard would use a Muggle tool to kill someone?"
"What kind of wizard, indeed."
