Posts Tagged ‘Geisel’
“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us”*…
On the occasion of Banned Books Week– which begins today– a short film from the American Library Association on the Top Ten Challenged Books of 2016:
Read ’em or weep…
* Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
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As we get out our library cards, we might spare a thought for Theodor Seuss Geisel, AKA “Dr. Seuss”; he died on this date in 1991. After a fascinating series of early-career explorations, Geisel settled on a style that created what turned out to be the perfect “gateway drug” to book addiction for generations of young readers.
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
– I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978)
“Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future”*…
From MIT’s Media Lab and it Pantheon Project, an interactive mapping tool that let’s one visualize the history of cultural production.
You were not born with the ability to fly, cure disease or communicate at long distances, but you were born in a society that endows you with these capacities. These capacities are the result of information that has been generated by humans and that humans have been able to embed in tangible and digital objects.
This information is all around you. It is the way in which the atoms in an airplane are arranged or the way in which your cell-phone whispers dance instructions to electromagnetic waves.
Pantheon is a project celebrating the cultural information that endows our species with these fantastic capacities. To celebrate our global cultural heritage we are compiling, analyzing and visualizing datasets that can help us understand the process of global cultural development. Dive in, visualize, and enjoy.
Pantheon allows one to select a time period, then see the results sorted by place of origin (as in the chart above) or by profession, and provides a ranked listing of people.
It’s all fascinating, but the “professional” sort is especially telling, as Kottke observes:
Up until the Renaissance, the most well-known people in the world were mostly politicians and religious figures, with some writers and philosophers thrown in for good measure. Starting with the Renaissance through the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, politicians, writers, painters, and composers become more prominent. For the past 50 years, athletes and entertainers dominate the list, with footballers making up almost a third of the most known. (If you only go back to 1990, actors dominate.)
Politicians rate slightly behind tennis players (but ahead of pornographic actors) and religious figures are not represented in the graph at all.
Visit Pantheon to see for yourself, and find more on the data and methodology used here.
* Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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As we put down the remote control and pick up a book, we might send tasty birthday greetings to the culinary genius behind green eggs and ham, Theodor Seuss Geisel, AKA “Dr. Seuss”; he was born on this date in 1904. After a fascinating series of early-career explorations, Geisel settled on a style that created what turned out to be the perfect “gateway drug” to book addiction for generations of young readers.
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
– I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978)
“I’m so hungry I could eat a sandwich from a gas station”*…
Seoul Food D.C. restaurant, located inside an Exxon gas station
Gas stations have long been synonymous with cold pizza, dried-out doughnuts and mediocre hot dogs rotating on unappetizing roller grills. But in cities like Miami, Kansas City, and even Saxapahaw, N.C., among others, patrons can fuel up on gourmet grub and top off their tanks in one stop…
Gas stations for a long time have been a low-margin business. Owners typically make their real profits not on fuel sales but on the snacks and other items customers purchase when they come inside the station. These latest gas station eats are just taking that business model up a notch or two…
Fill ‘er up at “The Joys of Good Gas Station Food.”
* “Clark Griwold” (Chevy Chase), National Lampoon’s Vacation
###
As we pull in to take out, we might send tasty birthday greetings to the culinary genius behind green eggs and ham, Theodor Seuss Geisel, AKA “Dr. Seuss”; he was born on this date in 1904. After a fascinating series of early-career explorations, Geisel settled on a style that created what turned out to be the perfect “gateway drug” to book addiction for generations of young readers.
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
– I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978)
“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch”*…
Australian photographer T.Q. Lee has thing for food… or at least, for what looks like food…
Waxed Rolled Socks w/ Dirty Hot Shaving Cream Now with ten times the fibre of regular donuts! It took me a few tries to work out how to get these brown, rolled socks to accept the wax treatment without simply absorbing it. In the end, refrigeration was rather aptly, the key ingredient in my wax frosting.
His series, Inedible, composes a wide– and often revolting– variety of ingredients into appetizing photos of “food.”
Telephone Cord in Papier-mâché Sauce w/ a glass of Betadine All of my images for Inedible are lit with natural light in contrast to and to highlight the artifical subjects being photographed. At times the distinction between real and fake became indistinguishable, and so I would add a final element that causes the viewer to question what they are seeing. In this instance, I felt the combination of telephone cord, mashed-up serviettes, soap and green cardboard clippings was too convincing alone. I was also coming down with a cold, so I fortunately had access to plenty of sore throat gargle to complete the dish..
Lee explains…
Part visual pun, part social comment on convenience food, Inedible is a still life photographic series of meals made from unconventional ingredients. Every element in these dishes are considered inedible in insolation. Together, do they whet or surpress your appetite?
Kitchen Cupboard Sushi My first awareness of sushi was from the cult-classic, The Breakfast Club. In the lunch scene, rich-kid Claire (Molly Ringwald) explains that sushi is “raw fish, rice and seaweed” to the disgust of school-criminal, Bender (Judd Nelson) and, supposedly, the audience. How things have changed. Sushi is now a staple lunch for the modern workforce. It was precisely this ordinariness that I wanted to capture in this Inedible work. “Kitchen Cupboard Sushi” is made from ingredients found in a common kitchen cupboard, with just a few additional inedible materials from my craft box. See if you can figure out all of the raw details.
Browse the buffet at Inedible.
* Orson Welles
###
As we wonder what he’d do with green eggs and ham, we might spare a thought for Theodor Seuss Geisel, AKA “Dr. Seuss”; he died on this date in 1991. After a fascinating series of early-career explorations, Geisel settled on a style that created what turned out to be the perfect “gateway drug” to book addiction for generations of nascent young readers.
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
– I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978)
“From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it…”*
If the diagram above makes sense to you, you may have succumbed to one of the most pernicious perils of our time. Check the list of symptoms at “25 Signs You’re Addicted To Books.”
And on that subject, enjoy this lionizing of libraries…
* Groucho Marx
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As we keep up with the jones, we might spare a thought for Theodor Seuss Geisel, AKA “Dr. Seuss”; he died on this date in 1991. After a fascinating series of early-career explorations, Geisel settled on a style that created what turned out to be the perfect “gateway drug” to book addiction for generations of nascent young readers.
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
– I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978)
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