This scant black and white masterpiece photo book, like another black and white photobook Wisconsin Death Trip, is composed of entirely found negatives, culled from historical, industrial and governmental archives (the defense industry is well in evidence). Evidence, made of some of the greatest late 20th century images of American photography, is precisely how future anthropologists will asses our near past. Specifically it will be an introductory map to our various archives of visual data which will acompany the factual data, in a time/era without very much filming/taping ability. Each image the tip of an iceberg of thousands upon thousands of negatives. Services might even rebuild motion events from a series or even a single still of an experiment, and discover what really went wrong. Documentary movies will probably be made from stills in the future, tracking algorithms can spot each speed of a street in motion's objects, render them for seven seconds. The blur has micro blurs in the negative. Evidence will come to life. First published in 1977 (the equally great Wisconsin Death Trip was published 1974). Reprinted recently.



Unlike Karl Mannheim, who saw ideology through a generalized lens, Bruehl viewed ideoloy as a window into archetypes, neurosis and personality; in effect, she saw the breaking down of racism/sexism/ethnicism as a struggle for psychonanlysis to bear. More 20th century front-loading, but still an involving read. There are fairy-tale abstractions in Bruehl's approach to psychonanlysis.
The Museum of the Moving Image melds a Halloween weekend with a festival of large-scale visions of western cinema. From Tati's OCD self-destruction in 70MM Playtime to Altman's intimate, widescreen semi-improv Nashville, in between are Close Encounters, Fantasia, The Shining, Alien; the long-scale series has an eyeful. Begins Oct 28.
"One of the cleverest things in Lawrence, I'm not sure whose idea it was - probably John Box's (production designer), concerned the Arab robes. Lawrence is given these robes fairly early on, when he's accepted by the Arabs, and then the rot sets in, and he is seized by a certain power mania. What the costume people did was to gradually change the texture of the material from which his Arab clothes were made, and they made it thinner and thinner until it was just muslin, and at the end he looked almost ghost-like. Nobody ever spots it." David Lean |







An Anthro-Bio-Chemist, Ott has botanically observed hundreds, perhaps thousands of plants that yield varying amounts of altered states, from a library and research lab in Mexico, recently damaged by arson. For proof of his studies, check out Pharmacotheon. He analyzes many chemical forms, shows inferior paths, and discusses policy and history. Footnotes tell the real story, and are half the size of each chapter. Continuing Gordon Wasson's unusual and maybe ground-breaking constructions of ancient ceremonies utilizing medicinal tools that altered users, Ott writes the only ethnopharmacogosy of entheogenic drugs. A chemical zoom lens into the brain. Volume 2 is delayed, but Volume 1 is a must have.

Zenon Pylyshyn, Cognitive Scientist, who's discovered rotational aspects of memory.
Why is this important? It may be a key to building the first conscious language, which may in-turn unlock the brain's full capabilities.
See: Seeing and Visualizing, It's Not What You Think. Winner, Best ABA Scholarly Book, 2006
Below: Gobors have dual rotational lines, column a are snapshots every 250ms. They illustrate human objectification in motion and space.
Some think 300ms is the human 'shutter' rate.


Google was introduced through books like The Search by Battelle and Googled by Ken Auletta and now James Gleick analyzes four new books, the essay is a must-read:
"The logical conclusion of our relationship to computers: expectantly to type 'what is the meaning of my life' into Google.
You can do this, of course. Type “what is th” and faster than you can find the e Google is sending choices back at you: what is the cloud? what is the mean? what is the american dream? what is the illuminati? Google is trying to read your mind. Only it’s not your mind. It’s the World Brain. And whatever that is, we know that a twelve-year-old company based in Mountain View, California, is wired into it like no one else."
-James Gleick's How Google Dominates Us NYRB
"Drugs widely prescribed to treat severe post-traumatic stress symptoms for veterans are no more effective than placebos and come with serious side effects, including weight gain and fatigue, researchers reported on Tuesday"
-http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/health/research/03psych.html?hp
"Both the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatry profession have strong financial interests in convincing the public that drug treatment is safe and the most effective treatment for mental illnesses, and they also have an interest in expanding the definitions of mental illness. Even Dr. Carlat, whose excellent book I reviewed, admitted that he and other psychiatrists make nearly twice as much money prescribing drugs as providing talk therapy. In his letter, which seems somewhat inconsistent, he states that the “unequivocal, if perplexing truth about psychiatric drugs” is that “they work” (his italics), and that all the major psychoactive drugs “are robustly more effective than placebos in double-blind controlled trials.” (In fact, the trials yield varying outcomes, many of which fall far short of robustness.) But elsewhere in the letter, he says, “There is no question that among the medical professions, psychiatry is the most scientifically primitive,” and in his book, although he claims anti- depressants work, he comes close to Kirsch in concluding that “much of this response is undoubtedly due to the placebo effect.” - Marcia Angell
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/illusions-psychiatry-exchange/

Above: Spatial organization of retinal neurons. Spiral left and funnel right.
Article Multi-State-Theory.
| Ray Jackendoff is the heir to Chomsky and the evolution of his theories of universal grammar. By structuring grammar, syntax, semantic and morphology he claims he has a window into the neural structure "of language." It's a bit like saying we know the bones of the body by studying the planet's outerwear. Do the external tools expose the inner structure? My guess is logically no, there is a relationship but the outer doesn't decode the inner; but don't let that stop you from reading his seminal work. It has its riveting moments. Here in the west we seem to be primarily driven by our awareness of syntax, which is why our semantic use of language is distorted. Just listen to politicians bend words for deceptive purposes. Perhaps there is a better tangent to explore, like Piaget's take, the teaching of language as opposed to the learning (or acquisition). Crucially, the diagram below exposes a central flaw in Jackendoff's argument (the spatial nuances of languages are explored poorly much later in the book), the sentence explored below is one of highly abstract spatial systems and in his illustration, he uses a Penrose five-pointed star as a stand-in for what must be a highly abstract holographic neural shape. Can a corrosive tool like English be used to map the brain's symphony? |
