Results tagged “death” from Uncivil Society
Every time I see this commercial, I wonder what could have prompted the people to sing and dance with such exuberance. Do they know that once the commercial is over they will disappear forever? No more continuity--they're just gone.
And then today I noticed the leap, like the leap of Butch and Sundance, and I figured, hey, that's they answer. It begins with the question of life--"What next?" They know, and so they sing, embracing the leap into the endless dark. It's Sartre with slot machines.
Y'know, I really need to get out of the apartment today.
If I have a hobby, it's reading lasts--the last issue before a new writer or artist, the end of a series, the final appearance of a character before the reboot. Anger, resentment, satire, release, profound loss--you see the full range of human responses. Below: the end of the cult classic newspaper strip Robin Malone.
Many more photos at Abandoned Russia.
200 trolley victims in 1925--a classic Soviet PSA.
Actually, Elizabeth, you won't, because your creator is killing you on Sunday.
Your doppleganger escapes from the Black Lodge on September 1.
As a youngster I went to see the Clint Eastwood "Every Which Way" films--not because of the plot, of course, but because of co-star Clyde the Orangutan. Here's what I didn't know about them until today:
According to "Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People" by famed primatologist Jane Goodall and Dale Peterson, the original "Clyde" was trained with a can of mace and a pipe wrapped in newspaper. He was viciously beaten the day before filming started to make him more docile. Near the end of filming the sequel "Any Which Way You Can," the orangutan was caught stealing doughnuts on the set, brought back to the training facility and beaten for 20 minutes with a 3 1/2 -foot ax handle. He died soon after of a cerebral hemorrhage.
An application to Speed Racer follows in this Defamer post.
Sigh.
You can't really get more American than this, photographed on display at Salvatore's Italian Gardens in Depew, NY:
And in the spirit of the season, here's a tourist 9/11 meditation from Overheard in New York.
The Mike and Mad Dog radio show was a New York sports talk institution, until a salary dispute led to Mad Dog's sudden departure Thursday night. Yesterday Mike conducted a final show under that name, and the tone was emphatically funereal--people crying, recounting their memories, expressing condolences.
And then, pure whack.
A guy sent in photos of his recently deceased mother--one, on her deathbed, and another, as ashes in the first ever official Major League Baseball Yankees urn. The pics were shown to the camera for the TV simulcast as a way to make her an honorary participant on the last show.
Mike and the Mad Dog is a show that generates 15 mil in ad revenue a year, and the Yankees exponentially more. Yet they are both communal media, extensions of the self for fans who identify with them.
Even if it sometimes seems a bit much.
For some, Renaissance Weekend is a place to meet headline-making world leaders in politics, journalism and social change. For me, it's where I met Michael Silberkleit.
Silberkleit lived Archie Comics. If you ever had a chance to speak with him or to see him lead a panel at a convention, you witnessed a living example of why I resist drawing a distinction between social entrepreneurs and commercial business. Yes, he was running a company that had to make a profit, but he was also passionate about the values it upheld.
In our last conversation we talked about a project of mine whose theme was directly inspired by watching him at work. I'll miss being able to continue that discussion.
The words "profound" and "blog" rarely occur together, but "Russia Abandoned" is a distinct exception to the rule. Empty buildings reveal dimensions of the human experience seldom seen in daily life.
Above: table with clock and a portrait of Vladimir Vysotsky, the legendary bard and actor of the Soviet era. The scene reminds me of this classic song, which, mutatis mutandis, might have an application or two in the U.S.:
In pieces the crown has been scattered,
Without authority, not even a throne.
The life of Russia and of law---
Everything's gone to hell.
As for us, it's like we've been chased into holes,
Trapped, like thieves,
With nothing before us except blood and shame.
The picture above was taken at Frankie & Johnny's, an old New York steakhouse that's scheduled to be replaced with a new condo complex. Forty years ago this was commercial glitz; now it's a fading phantom of a lost authentic city.
I got home from the office today to find news of another Union Square suicide, this time in San Francisco. As you can see from the above SFist comments thread, the connection was quickly noted--indeed, someone commented on my Flickr set they initially thought it was from SF.
In all likelihood the second death was a coincidence, not inspired by its New York counterpart. For one thing, as of the time of the San Francisco suicide, reports of the New York event had not hit the national news.
The reporting of suicide raises complex ethical questions. One issue is perhaps best known through Robert Cialdini's classic Influence: namely, the possibility that suicide is contagious.
It's not an unlikely hypothesis. Mimesis is hard-wired in the mind; it is arguably the key factor in the emergence of humanity. But it also seems to have a dark side. Philosopher Rene Girard has written extensively on the role that mimetic desire plays in social conflict, as imitation among competitors leads to mimetic aggression. Similar, it has been argued that reports of a suicide spark imitative self-destruction, as the report of the act validates suicide as an adaptive behavior.
The possibility that the suicide is mimetic has given rise to at least two competing lines of thought re the ethics of reporting suicide. One approach holds that we need to limit access of information about suicide, so as to reduce the possibility that the act will go viral. Supporting this approach: statistical studies that seem to confirm that suicides tend to occur in clusters.
Others adopt a somewhat revisionist point of view, arguing that a more nuanced analysis of the statistics does not actually support the mimetic hypothesis, at least in every case. Among the proponents of this argument, surprisingly enough, has been the Center for Disease Control, which cites a Texas study observing that news of suicide might actually decrease the risk of suicidal behavior.
How can that be, given our innate mimetic impulse? One key factor may be the way the news is presented. In short, the more it comes across as maladaptive or reductionistic--less than beneficial, less than human--the greater the likelihood that suicide will seem unattractive. In this regard, consider jokes about suicide or, say, driver ed films that associate mangled bodies in car accidents with funny music; rather than being tasteless, they might actually be embedded strategies for survival, neutralizing negative mimetic behavior by making reckless or self-destructive acts seem absurd.
Should I have been arrested for taking this picture?
This is the first of a series of photos I took following a suicide on Union Square, on Broadway just south of the Virgin Records store. It was an incredibly poignant scene--a life reduced to a makeshift memorial that it would itself soon be washed away.
But that's not how a police officer saw it. He ordered me to stop taking pictures, growing so adamant and vociferous that I defused the situation only by calmly inviting him to arrest me.
One of the officer's statements particularly stands out: he said that I had to stop because he--the officer--was going to see his grandchildren later today. Even here, it seems, an appeal to the children seemed to be a powerful argument--and no doubt for the officer it was.
The standoff spoke volumes about our relation to death and personal identity. I started to take these photos for my Blingdom of God and Uncivil Society blogs as a meditation on life, death and memory--this was a truly moving scene, a life of despair marked by detritus and blood on the sidewalk, and then washed away.
The officer's response reflects our all too human desire not to acknowledge the reality of death in daily life. This was a street, a sidewalk, a place where people pass through as they live their daily lives--we should not remember death here; we should not memorialize the willful end of one's own existence; we should not expose our children to all that this scene may imply--not least of all lest they, mimetic as they are, begin to see despair and death as viable options.
Which is more respectful to the memory of the person lost here in so many ways? To remember & reflect or to wash it away?
A brilliant depiction of the meaning of the game:
When I was a tyke, I was fascinated with media theory, particularly the then-ubiquitous paperback ouvre of Marshall McLuhan. One of the things that leapt out from the work of McLuhan and his acolytes was that the photos of people in magazines depict real-world comics characters--the degree to which we manipulate images creates graphic abstractions that are closer, say, to Power Girl than people as they are in real life.
There are any number of ramifications of this that we'll be exploring here, particularly the way that attempts to use visual imagery to rise above nature can reverse into reductionism. For now, since I'm still swamped in end of the semester stuff, a picture and a quick note.
Below: an image ostensibly of Gwyneth Paltrow from a new Vogue Iron Man tie-in. I say ostensibly because if it weren't for the title of the article, I would not have recognized her. The shopped-in Iron Man tech is not the issue; the face has been abstracted to such a degree that it obliterates her distinguishing features. In fact, if you look at it for any length of time, you'll see that her face is essentially bifurcated into a Harvey Dent of idealized beauty--one wider, lighter, larger; the other, shaded, narrow, more compact. The head looks like its been pasted on, and her left arm (from the viewer's perspective, right) has fused into her body to form what looks to be wing-like webbing.
A series of Photoshop disasters? Perhaps, perhaps not. The whole effect is one of mechanized soullessness, which judging from Paltrow's hollow expression would seem to be the point.
A brief meditation on death, technology and personal identity in this post on the historic first edition of Mark Gruenwald's collected Squadron Supreme.
Duke and Carolina basketball fans tend not to unite on positive values--which is the best team, who is the better player--but their game tonight opened with a singular unifying moment. As the announcer declared before the game started, the teams & students were coming together not as two rival teams but as one community, honoring the memory of the UNC's student body president, murdered earlier this week.
Uniting in loss. A moment of silence. Everyone in attendance wearing a ribbon in Carolina blue, not as a mark of loyalty but as a symbol of sympathy (sum + pathos, feeling together) in loss.
Defined not by what they are but what is not.
For real--Steve Gerber, Howard's creator, has died. Gerber was an astute satirist, and if your only exposure to Howard the Duck was the 1980s movie, well, that wasn't Howard the Duck.
Gerber was one of those writers who had a tremendous influence on me over the years but whom I never met. His last work, which he wrote literally on his deathbed, was the latest incarnation of Doctor Fate.
Below: God explains the mystery of life in the last issue of Gerber's 2002 Howard the Duck revival:
Yesterday we featured a Special K's cause marketing partnership with . . . well, if you look carefully, you'll notice that it doesn't name the cause or the charity. The reason: it's breast cancer. Presumably they feel that no one would buy cereal with cancer on the box.
The cartoon above took a much bigger risk. It's today's Funky Winkerbean strip, the culmination of a storyline in which lead character Lisa Moore dies due to breast cancer. This strip also has a significant social enterprise component: the cartoonist, Tom Batiuk, has been working in partnership wiith Cleveland's Ireland Cancer Center to establish and finance Lisa's Legacy Fund for Cancer Research and Education. In fact, the Fund will receive 100% of the proceeds from the book collecting the strips in the storyline.
But not everyone thinks this is a good thing. Check out the heated comments on TheCancerBlog, particularly from one angry grandmother:
I think you are on an ego trip and feeling that you are doing something good. Well it is not good and you need to fix it. Consider your public and remember, children are reading your work. Young mothers with breast cancer are reading your work.You are hurting people who already have more hurt in their lives than you can possibly imagine. As a mother and a grandmother I beg you to stop hurting and begin to give some hope to those who must face each day with the knowledge that hope is all they really have.
Which got me thinking about the family and social responsibility. Should society be obligated to shelter children from the dark side of life? Must public life paint the picture of a Secret world in which every outcome is positive?
Contrast the American criticism of Lisa's death with the popular acclaim afforded the new Doctor Who series in the U.K., in which "everything dies" is the pervasive recurring theme. Doctor Who is unapologetically marketed as a children's program, and even the happy endings have a tragic core.
My own take: death, pain, loss--these are part of life, the ultimate natural law. Without them there is no growth, no change; pretend they don't exist and you risk being unprepared to face them down. In this regard the family can play an invaluable role as a social enterprise, teaching kids how to respond to the negative in ways that make life better for us all.
