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Image From: The Advocate 

Almost two months following the fatal shooting of the unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, which occured on February 26th, 2012 in a gated community in Florida, the circumstances surrounding his death have been refracted through a variety of lenses: local and national protests have claimed solidarity with the fallen teen; gun control advocates and gun ownership advocates have debated the efficacy of "Stand your Ground" laws; and conflicted media reports have coursed through the charnal houses of cable and network news, presenting and altering evidence along the way. The whole thing started with George Zimmerman, his alleged killer, looking at the young man in a hoodie; and the response to this dimension of the event will be my subject today.

Delivered in  twenty-three minutes, David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College had an audience of a few hundred. However, in the years which followed, the transcription of Wallace's speech became an internet phenomenon, coursing through millions of email boxes and introducing the writer to people unfamiliar with his complex fiction.  "Thanks to the enthusiasm" of people who knew nothing about Wallace's work, and the "magic of the cut-and-paste function," Tom Bissell remarks that the address likely ranks "high among the most widely read things Wallace ever wrote." But perhaps the most significant testament to the speech's popularity is that the short speech would eventually become a book in its own right. In the year after Wallace's passing, the "Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address" became This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009). And yet, even as Little, Brown's publication of the lecture gave the speech permanence and stability, it also aroused significant debate about whether the form of this publication worked with or against the speech's message. In examining the remediation of Wallace's speech, I suggest that the debate refracts core concerns that Wallace addresses.

Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center Photo by Anthony Maddaloni

Near the sorth-eastern quadrant of the Harry Ransom Center is a series of images of a jockey throttling a racehorse: Eadweard Muybridge's "Horse in Motion." While these images may seem inconspicuous juxtaposed to Dorothea Lange's eminently recognizable photographs, their ability to bear witness to a horse's motion was both evidence of an event and a monumental event in itself. The product of two men's obsessions, "Horse in Motion" is both a fascinating example of a visual argument and a foundational episode in the history of motion pictures.

Lawrence, no. 1: ("In the Beginning--All was Void") Image From: Bill Hdoges Gallery

Replete with bright flashes of color, the "Genesis" series of Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), currently on display on the back wall of the Harry Ransom Center's King James Bible exhibition, pulled me in like a tractor beam from across the room. It is perhaps only appropriate, then, that the subject of this series is an enthralling spectacle of storytelling and creation.Though Lawrence is perhaps best known for his "Migration Series," a sixty-panel retelling of the African-Americans' migration across the United States, Lawrence's comparatively short (8 panel) portrayal of the narration of Genesis deserves attention for its ability to express a powerful sense of motion in a single place. 

Image Credit: Magic Motorways

Following up on my previous post about Norman Bel Geddes's ambitious application of hydro/aerodynamics to develop concept vehicles which imparted a strong sense of motion, I would like to follow up on the legacy of Bel Geddes's aesthetics of transportation in contemporary popular culture, taking a journey from his famous World's Fair exhibit, Futurama (pictured above), to Matt Groening's contemporary television show, Futurama. Bel Geddes's futuristic view of a world of connectivity involved literal as well as aesthetic transport. By looking at aspects of his work that have been translated into modern title sequences, I suggest we can get a better sense of his ability to capture a feeling  of crossing threshholds and ushering us into  strange, exciting, and entertaining worlds.

  Image Credit: Stanford

Perhaps everyone born in the last century has grown up fantasizing about the possibility of driving a flying car. At the age of ten, Norman Bel Geddes would have heard the news of the Wright brothers' first flight. And by the time he was twenty one, Henry Ford's advances in mass-production were able to produce cheap automobiles at a rapid pace. It was perhaps only natural that he would attempt to combine these innovations into a single machine. After all, as I discuss below, his vision for the ground automobile was powerfully shaped by innovations in industrial design that came from developments in the realm of aviation.

Image Credit: PR Daily

Some of you may know that the U.K.'s Sun newspaper-tabloid--said to be the tenth largest in the world, in terms of circulation--has suffered some serious blows at the hands of the British authorties lately. This, of course, is not the first time that the Sun's owner--News Corp--chaired by the mega-mogul Rupert Murdoch--has faced such travails. In fact, the current shake-up at the Sun appears to be the next domino to fall in a series of of blows precipitated by last year's phone hacking scandal--a scandal which led to the fall of the lesser tabloid News of The World (explained in another useful infographic here). But just how big is News corp? Would they be permanently damaged by the fall of the Sun, or would it just be a minor burn? Today, I've included some infographics that can help us visualize the size and global reach of this mecia conglomerate. 

Lucas Cranach's Melancholia Image Credit: Art Tattler

Last week, I examined how painters of the nineteenth century revised the image of Phillipe Pinel, the famous mental health physician, to contribute to an evolving national mythology and edify the physician's archetypal (as well as vocational) role in fostering mental health. While the representation (as well as the specific job description) of the mental health practitioner has changed drastically over the past five centuries, one cannot help but notice that there are striking continuities to be found in representations of people said to be afflicted with maladies of the mind. Today, we will take a look at some remarkable consistencies to be found linking 16th and 21st century visual representations of one of Western society's most frequently visualized maladies: melancholia.  

                                                                                   Image Credit: Archives of General Pyschiatry

When historians seek gathering metaphors to describe the French Revolution--with its violent upheavals, experiments in re-arranging calendar time, and, of course, the demands for liberty and equality that underwrote these events--they rarely describe the atmosphere or environment of the period as particularly stable or "sane." And yet the work of Philippe Pinel--a progressive French physician who helped lay the groundwork for a major shift in mental health treatment--has been nonetheless remembered as a figurative crystallization of the Revolution's lofty, humanist goals--goals which in turn influenced the trajectory of ninenteenth century psychiatry. Today, I seek to briefly explore how 19th century visual re-enactments of Pinel's participation in a highly mythicized (and mostly apocryphyl) event--a ritualized "unchaining" of the captive patients-- were used to remind French citizens of the virtues of republican government during times of national upheaval.