viz.

Image Credit: Halloweenorwilliamsburg.com

Halloween season put me in mind of the hipster-bashing tumblr Halloween or Williamsburg that emerged around this time last year.  The microblog features crowd-sourced photos of people in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, whose over-the-top fashion choices cause daily confusion about whether or not it is Halloween.  The website’s wittily-captioned parade of fools is relentlessly funny, though it inevitably delivers a slightly skewed version of reality. (I've never been to Williamsburg, but I imagine not every resident reaches for the costume box when they get dressed every morning.) But that’s partly why the site offers such a satisfying experience. Scrolling through its photo logs is like going people watching and seeing only the “gems.” It’s like a walk down Telegraph Avenue sans the drab-looking Cal students. 

Image Credit: Harper’s Bazaar 

This blog post started as a conversation in the break room here at the DWRL.  After a discussion of the subversive, alternative female artists of the 90s—not only in band formulation like Riot Grrl or Bikini Kill but especially the singer/songwriters who dominated top 40 radio: Alanis Morissette, Melissa Etheridge, Fiona Apple—someone mused, “Where have all the angry girls gone?”

I can’t say I like the answer.  The angry girls have been billed as terrorists (MIA) or criminals (Fiona Apple).  Some girls perform anger in a way that only weakly resonates with the general public (Miley Cyrus).  But the angry girl has also been rebranded. The inevitable subsumption of alternative culture by the mainstream has cloaked our angry girl in airy dresses with flowing tresses and the voice of an angel to deliver the proverbial “fuck you.”  I am, of course, referring to the girl who’s on the cover of every magazine this week as she promotes her new album Red.  So hey girl hey, Taylor Swift—this week’s post goes out to you as I explore the paradoxical relationship between the underground and the mainstream, which emerge and subsume and emerge again in a cycle as endless as the couple on the verge of reconciliation (really! I think so!) in “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”

(Image credit: The New York Times)

I noticed during the other night’s debate that President Obama is wearing a pink bracelet in support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. This is a welcomed embrace of a worthy cause, no doubt. But after Romney’s “binders full of women” in the last debate and both candidates’ rather transparent desire for female votes, I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not President Obama is actually this interested in this particular disease. The alternative would be that his wearing of the bracelet is a cynical gesture designed to cobble up some more votes. Moreover, if this were a cynical gesture on Obama’s part, what might this confirm about the ongoing political conversation in the United States? After a term in which Obama frequently supported women’s health concerns, his wearing of a bracelet is really what it takes to attract female voters? With these questions in mind, I did a little Wikipediaing a was instantly reminded that Obama’s mother died of ovarian and uterine cancer – facts I then recalled from my reading of his two books. I now felt like a jerk for my own cynicism. It was soon clear to me how much my own cynical reasoning was a product of the media-dominated culture in which I live. But what’s the alternative? Wouldn’t seeing the bracelet and not thinking twice be like watching all those negative TV ads and accepting them at face value?

Image of Ron Mueck's In Bed (2005); Image Credit: Brooklyn Museum

Ron Mueck is an Australian sculptor of the "hyperrealist" school. He got his start working for Jim Henson and on Labyrinth (1986). Mueck became known to the art world for his 1996 Dead Dad, a two-thirds life-size sculpture of the artist's father moments after passing away. Mueck's sculpture attempts to reproduce human beings in all of their external reality. That is to say, while there are no organs on the inside, so far as what everyone but surgeons can see of a person, Mueck depicts, down to the last follicle. 

Image Credit: Sophie Blackall via Flavorwire.com

Some "missed connections" ads have a life beyond Craigslist. Though only a small fraction may lead to actual rendezvous, dozens have found their way into the imagination of book illustrator Sophie Blackall, who published a collection of watercolor interpretations of these ads called Missed Connections: Love, Lost and Found (2011). Blackall's paintings imaginatively visualize the encounters that inspire people to write these heartfelt epistles on missed connection pages (the Internet's version of the proverbial bathroom wall). Her designs have been called "heartbreaking" and "comical" , "wonderful" and "whimsical" , and her book was featured on Oprah's website--a testament to its popular appeal. Presumably, Blackall's illustrations made a splash because they incorporate a delightful mix of the real and the ideal, yoking artifacts of modern life to images of pure fantasy in a style reminiscent of Blackall's artwork for children. 

Image Credit: UNOCHA

How can you quickly communicate concrete concepts to an audience that includes speakers of many languages and those who can't read? The Noun Project sees an answer in symbols, and it offers a platform for people to submit icon designs that others can download and use. On its "About" page, the Noun Project describes itself as:

a platform empowering the community to build a global visual language that everyone can understand. Visual communication is incredibly powerful. Symbols have the ability to transcend cultural and language barriers and deliver concise information effortlessly and instantaneously. For the first time, this image-based system of communication is being combined with technology to create a social language that unites the world.

But do symbols "have the ability to transcend cultural and language barriers" as they suggest? In looking at the symbols on the site, I wonder whether these icons rely just as much on enculturation for understanding as any written language does. The benefits of speed of comprehension and intelligibility across languages and cultures seem to depend on a similar learning process to that any literate person goes through if, perhaps, abbreviated.

(Image credit: SB Nation)

I can’t help but write about baseball today. My apologies, my apologies. If you don’t feel like reading anymore, by all means, you’re more than welcome to click over and read more pundits’ spin about last night’s debate. What I have to say below deals with the San Francisco Giants, and even if you don’t continue reading, their rabid internet fan base is sure to increase our blog’s trafficking statistics. So do as you will, no offense taken. But I know you’ve already read your fair share about last night’s Presidential debate, and that any more emotional reactions might be dizzying to the point of a certain paralysis, so let us think about baseball for a moment. Was Matt Holliday’s slide into Giant’s second baseman Marco Scutaro during Monday night’s Game 2 of the National League Championship Series a dirty play? There’s no way.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

With Halloween on the horizon, I thought I'd take a break from the horror show of the campaign to consider some more visceral scares, and photographer Joshua Hoffine provides viscera aplenty in his works. The image above is one of Hoffine's tamer outings, though it is still disturbing. A small child stands outside before a clothes line hung with drying laundry. The sun shines behind a large white sheet, casting the shadow of a clown holding a bunch of balloons in one hand and displaying a set of menacing claws on the other. Hoffine uses children in many of his photos, contrasting the innocence and helplessness of childhood with the savage agency of monsters human and supernatural. Before we look at other photos, I suggest readers consider the images below the fold not safe for work or for those who prefer to avoid depictions of bodily violence and mutilation, death and decomposition, children in life threatening scenes, or children posed near their dead, violently murdered, parent's corpses.

Image credit: Art Resource, N.Y.

I, too, have caught the debate season fever. I humbly submit to you another viz. post on the Romney-Obama debate from last week.  I couldn't help sharing the strange firing of synapses that led me from Colbert's recap of the October 3rd debate to the head pieces of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.  Follow along, if you dare!

 Image Source: Entertainment Weekly

I’m afraid I dare divert our attention away from the current Vice-Presidential debate this evening (as tempted as I am to address Paul Ryan’s recently released photos from a year-old Time shoot) and address the original celebrity VP with the limited rhetorical perspective that four years can give us.  With the release of the HBO television movie Game Change in March of this year, the premiere of her daughter’s and grandson’s reality show Life’s a Tripp on Lifetime in June, and Bristol Palin’s return to the All-Star season of Dancing with the Stars just weeks ago, Sarah Palin has managed to pop up quite frequently in celebrity media even four years after her failed bid for the vice-presidency.  Just this week in LA, a paparazzi photo of a much-thinner Palin made the internet rounds, prompting an investigation from People. (Surprise: in an exclusive interview, Palin translates her new, slimmer physique into an endorsement for a forthcoming fitness book that directly opposes Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, which Palin openly criticized in 2010.)  How can we explain this resurgence in public interest in Palin, especially in an election year? What can the public’s interest in Sarah Palin’s post-political life, as well as the eagerness of the media to portray it, tell us about political celebrity in 2012?