Friday Ephemera
Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham. // NASA wants your urine. For the toilets of tomorrow. // Wine in a can. // Toys for cats. // Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes. Part 2, 3, 4, 5. // Stephen Salmieri’s photographs of cadillacs. (h/t, Coudal.) // Build your own giant cardboard Ghandi. // 100 ways to draw manga eyes. // “My boots are all sticky.” // Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along. It’s tough being evil. // The Victim Privilege Checklist. (h/t, Anna.) // Communist Loser: James Kirchick on the delusional Eric Hobsbawm. // Cultural imperialism! // Latte art and assorted cakes. More. // The German Hosiery Museum. // World’s largest subwoofer. (h/t, Chastity Darling.) // Colour flipbook. // 696 book covers. // San Francisco panorama. // Skyscraper earthquake dampening. A 728-ton sphere should do it. // Dismantling old buildings, from the bottom up. // Ship graveyard. (h/t, Tim239.) // Steve Reich: Piano Phase. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Ms Ethel Waters.
I want a giant carboard Ghandi. And a cat tank.
Those Cadillacs. Ooooh….
The link to “Dismantling old buildings” is broken at the moment, here’s one from youtube:
Sorry messed that up, try:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwf9LoS9Xt8
Re: Hobsbawm –
“Lifelong devotion to Communism destroyed him as a thinker or interpreter of events.”
Spot on.
John,
Indeed. Though Hobsbawm’s devotion to that sad, sick religion did more than blunt his faculties and make him wilfully dishonest. It also made him an apologist for evil, repeatedly, and thus a little evil himself. And while ageing Nazis often come belatedly to understand shame, many enthusiasts of Communism remain unrepentant, despite all they know (but often pretend they don’t).
John and David
Too right.
It is astonishing that someone as shabby and inhuman as Hobsbawm should be president of a major academic institution, Birkbeck College. Birckbeck itself seems quite happy with have a supporter of tyranny and murder on its masthead and, far from turning a blind eye to the fact, seems to relish it. See this fawning article on the College’s website:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/about_us/publications/bbk/bbk22/history
The casual tone of this remark:
“While most other left-wing historians had abandoned their Marxist credentials after the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Budapest uprising, Hobsbawm retained his Communist Party membership …”
leaves me speechless.
Horace,
It’s a monstrous delusion that’s excused much too casually, as if it were merely a youthful fashion gaffe, like a taste for dodgy pop music:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2008/05/youthful-indisc.html
In some quarters it’s apparently looked on as some kind of credential or mark of credibility. The morality of which escapes me.
Here’s a clip of the earthquake dampener moving (a little bit):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYSgd1XSZXc
Oliver Kamm on Hobsbawm:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/thunderer/article460555.ece
“Hobsbawm was asked by Michael Ignatieff in a BBC interview in 1994: “What (your view) comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?” He replied: “Yes.””
John,
Thanks for that. Like Seumas Milne, Hobsbawm is an example of how persistent and wilful misreading of events becomes entrenched fantasy and, thus, duplicity and pathology. But apparently it’s a kind of duplicity and pathology that’s to be indulged, even rewarded. And, as Kamm points out, the idea that Lenin was “not merely pragmatically intolerant but congenitally bloodthirsty is too *unsophisticated* a thesis to merit Hobsbawm’s consideration.”
The French have had wine in aluminum bottles (essentially cans with bottle shapes) for years. It is sold in boat stores to yachties who need some vin while at sea.