Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
I recently bought a used copy of a photo book, Nowhere In Particular, by a medical doctor/TV and theatre director/photographer named Jonathan Miller. It features photos of rooftops, corrugated sheet metal, bits of canvas, and (mostly) palimpsests of weathered posters and torn advertising.
The production of ever-higher resolution cameras may be understood as a commercial answer to late modernism’s disaffection with the limitations of reality and its desire for the “really real”.
Do photographs have a grammar?
Although I have no empirical data to support the assertion, I sense that most people regard photography as a universally accessible medium. We believe it’s possible to understand the power of an image across cultures and across languages.
Yes, you read that rightly. The famous French philosopher, Michel Foucault, had his introduction to leather SM in Toronto. He discovered bathhouses here too.
While flying across Canada, I read Roland Barthes’ best-known book, Mythologies. As I waited in Toronto at Pearson International Airport, I read the translator’s note, the two prefaces, and his essay on wrestling. Somewhere over Lake Superior, I read about Roman haircuts in movies from the ’50’s.
Here is a story which Thich Nhat Hanh recounts in his book, The Art of Power:
How do we answer those who apply doubt to sway public opinion in favour of irrational views? How do we respond to the well-orchestrated media campaign that encourages people to doubt the credibility of evolutionary biology in favour of supernatural fiat?
How do we know that what we see is real? This question is old hat for your average philosopher. In early modernity, Descartes posed it in different ways, but one way in particular seems to have captured the Western imagination and has reared its ugly philosophical head in countless sci fi flicks.
The August 2005 issue of Popular Science, the wonderful rag that celebrates good old-fashioned American know-how, has, as its cover story, a survey of 6 proposals to counteract global warming.
For my wife’s birthday, I bought her tickets to Wicked, which we saw on Saturday. It uses the Wizard of Oz as its point of departure and tells the story of life before Dorothy — the relationship of Glinda the Good Witch and Elphaba (who became the Wicked Witch of the West) — and also the story of how the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion came to be.