viz.

Last night while watching Barack Obama give his speech after the Pennsylvania primary, I got all excited about posting something on viz. for general amusement. But then when I read some other blogs, I realized I was not the only person to see what I saw. I forgot that in this Golden Age of the Internets, Original Ideas do not stay that way for long. But behold, anyway:Notice the three dudes in Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirts right behind the Senator. Supposedly the campaigns choose the people in those seats pretty carefully; one has to wonder, if in fact that's true, what was going through the head of the person who made this decision. Not that there's anything wrong with Abercrombie (well, Jezebel says it's "the epitome of everything about the America that is not 'ready' for" a President Obama), but still, it seems like a weird choice, no?

By reproducing it, I'm probably playing right into the hands of the creator of this image, but, I thought it deserved to be commented on here:

The copy reads, "Terrorism-related deaths since 2001: 11,337 • Tobacco-related deaths since 2001: 30,000,000."

See this earlier discussion of iconographic photography on the campaign trail.

First spotted at Wonkette

Many of you may have seen the story in the New York Times yesterday about a comic that has been introduced in Germany to teach students about the Holocaust. (A brief portion from an English translation appears below.) This week, 25 Feb. through 2 Mar., is actually Holocaust Awareness Week, so some attention is being paid to issues surrounding the teaching of the Holocaust in this and other countries. More examples, after the jump.

Continuing with the recent trend of discussing the fallacies of photography, as well as pictures with guns in them:

This post is not about a certain viral video that will remain nameless, even though most people probably know what I'm talking about, and even if they haven't seen it they may have heard about the controversy surrounding it. Instead, this post is about the response to this viral video, a phenomenon documented in a recent slideshow presented on slate.com (created by Michael Agger). The slideshow presents a series of youtube videos in which people film their reactions to the video in question. So, a strong disclaimer: if you watch this slideshow, you will NOT see the video in question, but you will be shown a series of videos in which people react to it. Additionally, the videos are accompanied by a written commentary on what they signify; this commentary does, albeit somewhat obliquely, hint at the contents of the video.

The slideshow is prefaced by a brief discussion of the study of disgust, an argument that is related to some of my earlier posts about the representation of the unrepresentable:

Disgust, it seems, is hard to investigate without being mocked or without becoming disgusting yourself. With those caveats in mind, let's turn to the phenomenon of [redacted]. Immediately we run into trouble: [redacted] is a video that's too disgusting to write about. In order to discuss (and perhaps learn from) [redacted], then, we must study the faces of those who have seen it.

My (long, inscrutable) reaction to this reaction to the reactions after the jump!

Behold, the generic and intimidating Lego "Bad Guy" for their new Indiana Jones series:

Image: www.lego.com

As you may realize, Lego is engaging in a bit of revisionism: in the original films (at least in the first and third films), the "Bad Guys" were Nazis. Yet notice here that something is conspicuously absent from this little guy (in Lego lingo, a "minifig")...

Photo by Marcio Madeira for men.style.com; first spotted at Boing Boing

So I'm not surprised to see that this particular aesthetic has made its way onto the runways and into the designs of John Galliano; I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner (maybe it has? anyone?). What's interesting to me is the particular form these designs take, with their unmistakably medieval inflection: these designs are as much about the Inquisition as they are about Guantanamo. Is this trenchant (or maybe obvious) political critique, drawing a connection between the draconian measures of the Bush administration (so barbaric! so medieval!)? Or does it go too far, making light of serious infractions by implicitly connecting Lynndie England with court jesters and clowns?

This poster is a political advertisement for the SVP (in English, the "Swiss People's Party"), a far-right political party in Switzerland that has made anti-immigration policies a centerpiece of its campaign in an upcoming election. The posters have been controversial: the tagline reads "to create security," and the image depicts three white sheep booting the black sheep from the swiss flag, presumably symbolic of Swiss territory.

Manohla Dargis just published her NYT review of Lake of Fire, a new documentary directed by Tony Kaye about the "abortion wars" in the U.S. (Kaye is probably most famous as the director of American History X.) Apparently, Kaye has been making this film for over sixteen years, and the duration of his effort may show in the length of the film, which clocks in at 152 minutes.