I’ve touched on some problems of social construct theory before, more than once, and noted that its implications could appeal to unsavoury motives: 

If a person’s tastes and disposition are primarily socially constructed, that person can also, presumably, be remade to suit society and its representatives. Such high-minded Agents of Society might even become “engineers of the human soul,” to borrow Stalin’s phrase.

With the above in mind, let’s turn our attention to the feminist commentator Amanda Marcotte, whose book cover mishap entertained us so. In a recent outpouring, Ms Marcotte offered this: 

The theory that women have a natural urge to have babies is one that’s got a long and ignoble sexist history, […] None of that is to say that the urge to have children that some (but far from all) women experience isn’t real, and that’s my other giant problem with the ongoing preoccupation with [evolutionary psychology] theories to explain things that are cultural constructs… 

Note that Ms Marcotte is quite insistent on this point. The inclination to reproduce simply is a cultural construct, and a dubious one at that. Why humans should apparently be unique in this regard, untouched by biology, isn’t entirely clear. Presumably, human beings – specifically human men – have constructed elaborate patterns of behaviour to mimic almost exactly biological inclinations that are felt as real, by men and women, but which don’t in fact exist.

Some film-related items.

Attack of the remakes. Does the world really want a live-action Akira or another Logan’s Run? Can The Thing be improved upon? Flash Gordon without Brian Blessed? Er, Romancing the Stone?

A gallery of bewildering foreign film posters. Guess which films are being advertised below. And wait ‘til you see Bullitt.

And in one of Watchmen’s more disquieting scenes, Dr Manhattan turns his hand to crime-fighting. Disintegrations ensue.

One for camera enthusiasts. A Nikon D3 very neatly cut in half. 

(h/t, Dr Westerhaus)

Baby, toys and time-lapse. // A year in photographs: 1, 2, 3. // Age your photos. // Zoom into this 1,474 megapixel image. (h/t, TDK) // Leap between buildings on Google Earth. // It’s a rainbow, or a cloud with a tractor beam. // Your very own Louis Vuitton caviar case. // How bacon is made. // Unfeasible teapot. // Fun with centrifuges. // Red square, a game. (h/t, Tim) // The perils of electrocution. (h/t, Things) // The scourge of cello scrotum. (h/t, Ephemeral Zed) // The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. (1962) // The eyeballing game. // Jazzmutant. More. (h/t, Coudal) // TV science fiction from the Seventies. // Asian film posters. // Alan Moore, avert your eyes. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Henry Mancini. 

Readers with an interest in visual culture should visit the blog of Eye magazine. While you’re there, you could even take a minute or two to read my post on the art world’s rhetorical flummery:

Take artist Aliza Shvarts, for example, who rose to fleeting prominence last year with a work that purported to involve “repeated, self-induced miscarriages”. She described her efforts thus: “This piece – in its textual and sculptural forms – is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a [sic] independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse… It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership.”

It isn’t clear how form or function can ‘converge’ on the body, not least because the human body is already a form with numerous functions. Can function, strictly speaking, ‘converge’ on anything at all? Can ambiguity be a ‘focus’ and ‘isolate’ something else – something that is terribly important but unclear and at no point explained? Despite such mysteries, one thing is unambiguous. Ms Shvarts believes that the extract above is itself a work of art: “The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above…”

The rest.