Virtual Touch
It's eerie and expensive, but it works: Toy creators are using haptic tools to "sculpt" on the screen, with tactile feedback that makes them feel like they're handling real material. Wired.com's Alexander Gelfond reports.
Dynamist Blog
High vs. Low, or Good vs. Bad
LAT art critic Christopher Knight recently published an excellent piece on the false dichotomy between "high art" and "kitsch," first posited by Clement Greenberg. I'm not a huge fan of Knight, but this piece is worth reading in its entirety to get the historical context. Here's an excerpt:
The only distinction that truly matters is the one between good art and bad art, accounting for all the shades of gray in between. Jackson Pollock's paintings are better than Robert Motherwell's. "The Ernie Kovacs Show" is better television than "The Adventures of Superman." Arguing the reasons sharpens perception.
By contrast, ranking a painting against a TV show is just dumb--not to mention undemocratic. The measure of moral and intellectual status does not derive from hereditary social station, as if painting is for princes and television is for scullery maids. I'd as soon look at a "Six Feet Under" episode as a Lucian Freud painting any day.
Speaking of Clark Kent, Pop art in the 1960s turned out to be Greenberg's Kryptonite. Edward Ruscha and Andy Warhol, Depression-era babies from Omaha and Pittsburgh, brought their hardscrabble pasts with them when they high-tailed it to opposite coasts as young men. Both knew something crucial: In American art's democratic lexicon, every avant-garde idea could be represented in kitsch terms of popular entertainment.
In a famous 1943 letter to the New York Times, budding Abstract Expressionist painters Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb wrote "only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless." For Greenberg's avant-garde, the tragic and the timeless meant abstract painting. In Warhol's hands it would mean the numinous mystery of Marilyn Monroe's shocking suicide and the national trauma of Jackie Kennedy's widowhood, chronicled in the tabloids.
When Divas Have Hissy Fits
Ron Bailey breaks the polite silence to provide eyewitness account of what really happened at the Liberty Fund conference that Ann Althouse has been making such hay about lately. Hysterical tears are involved. (I didn't know any of this back story when I made my original post here and comments on Althouse's blog. Like everyone else, I assumed her account reflected reality.)
UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg, who went very easy on Althouse in a recent Blogginheads.tv appearance has second thoughts: "I should say that while Ron and I have many serious ideological differences, my faith in Ron's honesty and good faith is unshakable. All I will add for now is that I had no idea about the events around the dinner table--when Althouse accused fellow conferees of racism--when I participated in my bloggingheads conversation with her or when I called her original blog post 'odd.' I would have used a different adjective." Like Jonah, I have heard privately from multiple sources confirming Ron's account. Althouse was clearly out of her intellectual depth during the discussions and vented her frustration by lashing out at fellow conferees in person--she even called one female participant who dared to disagree with her an "intellectual lightweight" and an embarrassment to women everywhere--and by using her blog to recast what happened with herself as the martyred star. Now that's a diva. Diana Ross would be jealous.
UPDATE III: After she mentioned this post, I attempted to post the following comment on Ann Althouse's blog. I hadn't planned to say more on this topic, but she's managed to push my buttons:
Since I made my views clear in a previous comment, which Ann Althouse quoted in another post, I can only assume that her question of what my views are is another dramatic pose. Sorry, Ann, you got yourself into this mess not only by blowing up in a hysterical way but by constantly harping on the subject when everyone else would have happily let it drop, with no embarrassment to you. You consistently misrepresented people's views and personalities and the nature of a Liberty Fund conversation. It's a Grande Diva pose, but has nothing to do with civil rights law or libertarian thought. As you know, your entire dinnertime meltdown started after you asked about the previous night's discussion and were told it involved Ron Bailey's vigorous defense of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (He also noted in his blog posting that no one in the discussion around the table agreed with Meyer's position on civil rights laws.) Stop pretending you were an innocent little martyr surrounded by racist ideologues. It's b.s., albeit great for generating attention and blog hits. And, for the record, since you seem to care more about righteous preening than argument, my family was defending civil rights in the South--including Little Rock in 1957--long before it was popular. (I was just a little kid doing my part by attending integrated--25% black--public schools.)
And, yes, like Jonah I've known Ron (who, contrary to Althouse's description, is not my colleague) for years and found him to be a person of enormous integrity and good will--and a vehement supporter of civil rights. So between the diva and the rational reporter, I'll choose to believe the reporter.
While I appreciate the good intent of the folks at GayPatriot.net, I don't aspire to be a diva. It's not all about me.
How Do I Sound at 6 O'Clock in the Morning?
To find out, you can listen to me discussing the evolution of shopping centers on Wisconsin Public Radio (8 CT, 6 PT). The LAT article I'm discussing is here. (A shorter version ran in the Christian Science Monitor, which is why the host mentions it.)
Glamour in Long Beach...Vanishing Soon
Photographer George Hurrell created the iconic style of Golden Age Hollywood glamour portraits. (For more on Hurrell, see my Slate slideshow here.) Since July, an amazing exhibition of more than 100 of his photos from the 1930s to the 1980s has been on display the Queen Mary in Long Beach. The exhibit's last day is January 1. Admission is included in several Queen Mary tour packages, or you can just go to the exhibit for $10. From now until the close of the exhibit, you also get a free copy of the beautiful catalog, with an essay by yours truly.
How to Build Blog Traffic
WindyPundit has it figured out:
I should blog more about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and adoption, Janice Dickinson and car accidents, Tawny Kitaen and cocaine, whether Naomi Campbell beats her assistants, Nancy O'Dell (whoever she is), Pamela Anderson's breakup with Kid Rock, Paris Hilton and/or Lindsey Lohan (for whatever it is this time), Star Jones Reynolds' career, Tom Cruise (not that there's anything wrong with that), and because she's still getting press, Princess Diana.
Check out his update for further ideas.
UPDATE: And then there's this from Eugene Volokh:
Sex (or SexLaw) Sells -- Surprise!
Our unique visitor count Monday was 35697, and Tuesday was 38423 -- both near our historic highs. (The norm for a typical weekday is in the low 20000s.) My sense is that most of the extra visits were to the initial Ten Years in Prison for 17-Year-Old Who Had Consensual Oral Sex with 15-Year-Old post.
No, we won't be upping our blogging on SexLaw as a result. (We'd blog about it independently of visitor interest.) But it's interesting, though of course completely unsurprising, that this is indeed what many people want to read.
To get the full story, click through to Eugene's post.
Culture Maven
Grant McCracken is back to blogging after a few weeks off.
Just Like Jihadis
Grande Conservative Blogress Diva frontrunner Ann Althouse attends a Liberty Fund conference and decides libertarian and conservative intellectuals are scarily like the 9/11 hijackers. (My response to her specifics is in the comments.) It does seem rather divalike...
Even Strip Centers Can Be Sociable Places
The WaPost's Nick Miroff reports on how Latin American immigrants are recreating the central plazas of their hometowns in the strip malls of suburban Virginia. It's a nice complement to my recent LAT piece on the evolution of shopping malls.
Seasonal Promotion
I'm afraid I don't have a capital-intensive hobby that can generate lots of holiday-season Amazon buying suggestions. But I do buy a lot of books with pictures, which cost a lot (and take up a lot of space). So here are a few suggestions, concentrating on works where the text is as valuable as the photos.
Woman in the Mirror: 1945-2004
I read Richard Neutra: And The Search for Modern Architecture by Thomas S. Hines
Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies by James Sanders
Professor Postrel waited two decades for me to finally read Watchmen, the brilliant graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I finally did, as research for my Atlantic column on superhero glamour, and it lived up to the hype. It appeals most to people who've read superhero comics and can fully appreciate how it upends genre conventions, but anyone who is interested in literary genres, the temptations of power, dramatic irony, or a host of other English-major topics ought to read it. For truly impressive gift giving, the oversized the "Absolute Edition" of Watchmen
Also on the superhero-glamour beat, Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross
It has nothing to do with any of the above, and isn't even a book, but I have to put in a plug for the DVDs to Battlestar Galactica: season one
For those who prefer their DVDs glamorous, Garbo - The Signature Collection
Finally, the best book I've read recently is Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, by Oliver Sacks