viz.

 Video Credit: youtube.com

Percy Smith’s The Acrobatic Fly (1910) offers a time capsule into a genre of nature documentary that may seem unfamiliar to many of us today. In contemporary media, bugs are often mobilized for their visceral shock value. In the early-twentieth century, Smith’s singular flies compelled sentimental and conceptual interest. Upon the initial release of his film, The Strength and Agility of Insects (1911), audiences were repelled by its seeming cruelty toward the blue bottle fly. Thankfully, Smith only secured his protagonist with a thread of silk, and no animals were harmed in the making of his film. Audiences were also struck by the uncanny anthropomorphism of Smith’s portrayal of insects’ performances with wood-chips, lint-balls, and dumbbells. His anthropomorphic irony is even more striking in his Romance in a Pond (1932), a nature film tracing the aristocratic courtships and unhappy marriages of “gentlemen newts.” What is so interesting about Smith’s creatures is that they conform to an older natural history in which curious and exemplary specimens played a role in social thought.

Image Credit: Lady Gaga at the VMAs, Designer Franc Fernandez

I realize that I may be a bit behind the times to be addressing (ha!) Lady Gaga's fashion stunt of last fall, but meat's been on my mind this week as I'm about to embark on 30 days of eating vegetarian - largely as a result of the text we're teaching in our introductory rhetoric classes here at UT: Colin Beavan's No Impact Man. But that's another story.  Gaga's appearance at the Mtv Video Music Awards sparked controversy that dissipated rather quickly, and though this may have been due to the singer's own inability to adequately (or logically) explain the reasons behind her wardrobe choice, the images left behind offer a really interesting opportunity for varying and disparate interpretations.  

Screen shot of narrated slide show, Shelter for the Scarred

 featured on Washington Post website

Photographer: Carol Guzy

This past week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments considering the constitutionality of U.S. v. Stevens, a case that makes it a federal crime to make and sell visual images of animal cruelty.  Although originally created by Congress to curb the market for "crush videos"--images of people in high heel shoes stomping on small animals for the purposes of titillating the viewer--the statute contains language so vague that it led the justices to propose a slew of bizarre hypotheticals ranging from the artistic value of images of force-feeding fowl for foie gras to the possibility of a pay-per-view human sacrifice channel.  Now I have to admit that I am slightly shaky on all of the legal issues at stake here, but this transcript of the oral arguments certainly made for some interesting reading.  Moreover, and not surprisingly, many of the questions raised within the oral arguments align with issues we often consider with respect to documentary studies and visual culture.

Earlier this month, a Texas Tech fraternity found themselves victims of their school's solicitation section of the code of conduct. One of the students in the fraternity was selling t-shirts to raise school spirits for the A&M game. The shirts echoed the (strange) A&M motto "Gig 'Em!" with the more timely "Vick 'Em!" The back of the shirt had a football player wearing the number 7 (Vick's number) hanging the Aggie mascot Reveille by a rope:
Texas Tech halted the sale of the t-shirts; citing the code of conduct, the school said it doesn't allow the sale of material that is "derogatory, inflammatory, insensitive, or in such bad taste." The student in question argued that he planned to donate part of the profits a local animal defense league because of "Animal Rights, stuff like that." I guess when it comes to obscenity, like Justice Stewart, those administers "know it when they see it."