Arashi Media: a blog of Art, Culture, Politics, Travel and Adventure.
Conceived of and written by Arashi Young. Arashi is an artist who works in visual and written media, an addict of cultural expressions and political clashing, and lover of the eccentric, odd-ball, curious, weird, wonderful (and all other synonyms for off-kilter).
Recession Special! by ~Boston Bill~
The New York Times recently asked readers to submit pictures of the recession for their piece, Picturing the Recession. Photographers from all over the world submitted photographs showing how the world wide economic crisis was hitting home. There are pictures of swap meets in Bangladesh, pictures of the stunted housing boom in Australia, pictures of all sorts of businesses closing shop. There are even pictures of 99 cent stores liquidating assets for 69 cents.
The compilation is really quite amazing. I never feel like I can really understand the scale just looking at my town and what businesses are failing here. Seeing the stores fold over and over and over again helps show what is happening in more broad context, regionally, nationally, internationally.
The pictures show more than just desolation. They show cultural shifts, people starting their vegetable gardens, people beginning to raise backyard chickens for eggs, and people baking bread at home with a copy of Michael Pollan’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” hanging out in the background. People who are essentially trying to survive by reclaiming their food from the food industry.
Photographers who feel inspired can still try to submit photos to the NYT here. And of course there is a flickr group gathered to share photos based on the recession, the Economic Clusterf*ck (aka Recession) of 2008-9.
Spring is officially here, and with Spring comes baby chick season. It seems like it was only yesterday when my full grown hens were just tiny little balls of down peeping their fool heads off. What I remember about raising them, from little two day old chicks, was how fast they grew up. The way the feathers would practically shoot out and before I knew it, and suddenly I had three pullets desperate to escape the brooder.
I remember being fascinated, watching all those feathers come in. First on the very tip of the wing and a tiny little tuft on the butt. How cool it would be to document that growth.
The good news is that some people already are. Right now there is a photoblog charting every day of chicken growth called 3 chix a day. It is definitely worth checking out to see this very quick body progression.
The Woodstock Farm and Animal Sanctuary currently has a baby chick webcam operating. Other than providing a stream of chick video, the site hopes to curb classroom hatching projects by providing a safe alternative information source, instead of hatching babies in classrooms when there is no home for the eventual pullets. Their stance on hatching projects can be found here.
And if that is not enough baby chick goodness, well, there is always flickr. Here is one more for the road.
It started out as a joke, and the joke created a demand. Thinkgeek is trying to produce a Tauntaun sleeping bag. I personally hope that they start to offer adult sizes for all us grown up geeks. I could fit in a 60 inch tall bag, but really I would hope for more room than that.
Definitely check out the thinkgeek page here, and you will have to appreciate the lining on the inside of the bag, a delightful little print of intestines, so you could almost approximate that feeling of being cuddled by intestine-y warmth. I suppose asking for life-like feeling goo to lube the intestines would be too gross.
about Burningman is the art projects. I like the ones that are the little art projects like this:
Not amazing in that pretentous way, but wonderful nonetheless. I think I ended up losing my marble somewhere on the playa. But that is to be expected. *smiles* Enjoy it anyway.
Sorry for posting all three videos right here. I could have posted one video which would have been the full episode of the daily show, I chose instead to post the three sections of the unedited videos, care of Comedy Central.
Rarely do any interviews in this modern TV landscape take up the entire length of a show, but in this case the interview was pertinent and timely. Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s entertainment-finance show Mad Money, came on to The Daily Show for an interview about the economy. Like Stewart’s famous appearance on Crossfire, the dialog of the Cramer interview focused on the role of the media as it disseminates information. Or rather, the assumption that television news shows are supposed to be reporting facts instead of just entertaining viewers with hacked together press releases and statistics of dubious origin.
Stewart has been able to press this point in the past as The Daily Show keeps receiving critical acclaim. It is the fake news show that more and more people in mass culture use to get their “actual” news. The Daily Show has even turned into a meta-news show where you can get the news of the day and your criticism of media at large. It is a refreshing idea, to pull the camera back far enough to see the spin doctors at work, but the larger questions loom: Why is this the responsibility of a comedy show? Isn’t critical thinking an important enough idea to support a “serious” media endeavor? There are attempts to tap into this vein of legitimacy, the no spin zone, etc. But most of those shows are a shallow effort to profit from a deeper hope.
Some of the concepts touched on in the interview reminded me of a fictional detective novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by the late Stieg Larsson. The main character Blomkvist is a financial reporter in Sweden. There were a number of passages where he contemplates the nature of the writing about the financial industry. The argument was postulated that Investigative Journalism was at best genre specific, that for example, in politics it is accepted that a political figure would be investigated and exposed publicly, but in business, writing “news” comes down to regurgitating a company’s press releases or annual reports. It seems like only during these times of Ponze schemes and economic meltdown do we see the world of closely guarded business practices smacking up against freedom of information needs.
In both the Stewart interview and Larsson’s book it is asked why business reporting should be treated as different from any other kind of critical thinking investigative reporting. The interview shows Cramer’s complicit behavior as well as the “I am just passing along the info” pundit strategy. This wall ultimately falls apart when Stewart asks him to go back to the basics of investigation rather than blindly believing the “facts” as they have been handed over. Wherever one is on the political perspective, it is hard to argue against basic fact-checking when building an argument.
Teaser Post: The Engineer’s wet dream.
This beauty was the belle of the Playa, weighing in at 16,000 lbs, triggering latent Star Wars and Robotech memories, and thrilling all who managed to see it move, spider-like, across the playa. Rumor had that it was far more heavy than the usual allowances for art-cars, but this one was grandfathered in because the people who made it were non-profit. But then again, those were just the rumors.
When it moved, the whole ground would shake, the massive legs striking down and reverberating. My friend’s camp was across the street and down the block, and they had the privilege to see the maiden voyage. It walked, slowly but intently, down the street toward the Esplanade. The two builders rode it and cheered at their own ingenuity in the flesh.
This lumbering beast of an art car had an achilles heal though, it could only move in a straight line. When it needed to turn, a large turret came down from the center and made contact with the ground. The drivers would then have to get out and turn the whole apparatus in the direction it needed to go. On the maiden voyage, the turret descended, but the ground was uneven and the whole creature began to list and nearly fall over. The legs returned quickly to their former weight bearing places and the mobile returned to its home for a last minute tune up.
Whatever problems it had were quickly solved. I saw the spider-like mechanism all over the playa, so it obviously was able to move. My only regret was not seeing it in action, in all its over-sized and overweighted glory.
Tuesday night, local news channel Koin 6 hosted a debate party at the beautiful McMenamins Bagdad Theatre. This normally low-key theatre was bustling with activity, from floodlights being set up for anchorman Mike Donahue, to the roving cameramen cruising for succulent soundbites, to the laptops being set up for the local political bloggers, to the technical experts who handled projecting the live debate on the large theatre screen. The house was at nearly full capacity, leaving late arrivals searching frantically for seats, while half the empty seats actually “belonged” to he people in the beer line, which stretched all the way from the vestibule to the entrance to the balcony.
Click to continue reading “Debate watching party at the Bagdad Theatre”
When we think of cartoons today, we think of Saturday morning children’s entertainment. We think of images drawn in bright colors, dealing in fanciful concepts, moving at a quick pace. Sometimes they deal with ethical struggles of selfishness. There is a common story arc of the main character indulging him or herself, hurting people around him/her, and ultimately learning a lesson about sharing or togetherness. When people think of cartoons today they don’t think of them as being places to make sweeping statements about race relations, or a place to influence opinion on national enemies, or a place to make jokes about domestic violence.
Click to continue reading “Bad Bugs Bunny: The Dark Side of Warner Brothers Cartoons”
T.R. Reid, veteran foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and current NPR commenter, produced a travelogue documentary for Frontline comparing the national health systems of five capitalistic democracies. In Sick Around the World, he traveled to Britain, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and Taiwan, interviewing top health policy experts asking them to explain their national health care system, the advantages and disadvantages, in the hopes of gaining insight on how to fix the broken American health care system.