Why Humans Are Obsessed with Cats

in Biology, History, K-12, Life, Nature, Science | December 4th, 2020

A house cat is not real­ly a fur baby, but it is some­thing rather more remark­able: a tiny con­quis­ta­dor with the whole plan­et at its feet —Abi­gail Tuck­er

As part of its Annals of Obses­sion video series, The New York­er invit­ed sci­ence jour­nal­ist Abi­gail Tuck­er, author of The Lion in the Liv­ing Room, to reflect on “how felines took over the Inter­net, our homes, and our lives.”

It goes with­out say­ing that cats and humans have co-exist­ed for a very long time.

Most of us are acquaint­ed with the high regard in which Ancient Egyp­tians held Felis catus.

And we may know some­thing of their sea­far­ing his­to­ry, begin­ning with the Vikings and con­tin­u­ing on through Unsink­able Sam and oth­er cel­e­brat­ed ship’s cats.

An over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of us have spent the last decade or so glued to online exam­ples of their antics—rid­ing robot vac­u­ums, react­ing with ter­ror to cucum­bers, and pounc­ing on humans, some of whom have had the temer­i­ty to write and record voiceovers that sug­gest they have insight as to what goes on inside a cat’s hat. (As if!)

It’s grat­i­fy­ing to hear Tuck­er echo what cat lovers have long sus­pect­ed (and embla­zoned on t‑shirts, cof­fee mugs, and dec­o­ra­tive pillows)—the cats, not the own­ers, are the ones run­ning the show.

For­give us. Dogs have own­ers. Cats have staff.

Cats took a com­men­sal path to domes­ti­ca­tion, moti­vat­ed, then as now, by the food they knew to be stored in our set­tle­ments.

Tuck­er describes it as a series of cat con­trolled takeovers—a process of arti­fi­cial selec­tion, under­tak­en on the cats’ own ini­tia­tive:

House cats are supreme­ly adapt­able. They can live any­where and, while they must have plen­ty of pro­tein, they eat prac­ti­cal­ly any­thing that moves, from pel­i­cans to crick­ets, and many things that don’t, like hot dogs. (Some of their imper­iled feline rel­a­tives, by con­trast, are adapt­ed to hunt only a rare species of chin­chilla.) House cats can tweak their sleep­ing sched­ules and social lives. They can breed like crazy.

In cer­tain ways the house cat’s rise is trag­ic, for the same forces that favor them have destroyed many oth­er crea­tures. House cats are car­pet­bag­gers, arriv­istes, and they’re among the most trans­for­ma­tive invaders the world has ever seen—except for Homo sapi­ens, of course. It’s no coin­ci­dence that when they show up in ecosys­tems, lions and oth­er megafau­na are usu­al­ly on their way out.

Aloof as many of their num­ber may be, cats have engi­neered things in such a way as to be phys­i­cal­ly irre­sistible to most humans:

Their big heads and big eyes are so cute!

Their fur is so soft!

We can car­ry them around!

Dress them in doll clothes (some­times)!

Their cries mim­ic the cries of hun­gry human babies, and elic­it a sim­i­lar response from their human care­givers.

We may not love lit­ter box duty, but with 1 in 3 humans infect­ed by Tox­o­plas­ma gondii, we’ll like­ly be teth­ered to them for all eter­ni­ty.

For bet­ter or worse, we love them. And so do dog lovers. They just don’t know it yet.

But do not ever imag­ine that the feel­ing is rec­i­p­ro­cal.

They’re arch­car­ni­vores who can­not open their own cans. As Tuck­er wry­ly observes:

I think it’s fair to say that we are obsessed and they are not.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

GPS Track­ing Reveals the Secret Lives of Out­door Cats

In 1183, a Chi­nese Poet Describes Being Domes­ti­cat­ed by His Own Cats

How Humans Domes­ti­cat­ed Cats (Twice)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She loves cats, but most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Japanese Art Installation Lets People Play Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” As They Walk on Socially-Distanced Notes on the Floor

in Art, Life, Music | December 2nd, 2020

The glob­al pan­dem­ic has revealed the depths of sys­tem­at­ic cru­el­ty in cer­tain places in the world that have refused to com­mit resources to pro­tect­ing peo­ple from the virus or refused to even acknowl­edge its exis­tence. Oth­er respons­es show a dif­fer­ent way for­ward, one in which every­one con­tributes mean­ing­ful­ly through the prin­ci­pled actions of wear­ing masks and social dis­tanc­ing or the prin­ci­pled non-action of stay­ing home to slow the spread.

Then there’s the crit­i­cal role of art, design, and music in our sur­vival. As we have seen—from spon­ta­neous bal­cony ser­e­nades in Italy to poignant ani­mat­ed video poet­ry—the arts are no less cru­cial to our sur­vival than pub­lic health. Human beings need delight, won­der, humor, mourn­ing, and cel­e­bra­tion, and we need to come togeth­er to expe­ri­ence these things, whether online or in real, if dis­tant, life. Ide­al­ly, pub­lic health and art can work togeth­er.

Japan­ese design­er Eisuke Tachikawa has put his skills to work doing exact­ly that. When cas­es began spik­ing in his coun­try in April, Tachikawa and his design firm Nosign­er made some beau­ti­ful­ly designed, and very fun­ny, posters to encour­age social dis­tanc­ing as part of an ini­tia­tive called Pandaid. Then they cre­at­ed Super Mario Broth­ers coin stick­ers to place six feet (or two meters, or one tuna) apart. In its Eng­lish trans­la­tion, at least, the text on Nosigner’s site is direct about their inten­tions: “As this con­tin­ues we want­ed to val­ue-trans­late the social con­straints of social dis­tanc­ing into some­thing pos­i­tive and enjoy­able.”

Tachikawa and Nosign­er have “devel­oped a brand,” they announced recent­ly, called SOCIAL HARMONY “in order to spread the cul­ture of social dis­tanc­ing in a humor­ous way.” Their lat­est instal­la­tion, how­ev­er, does not incor­po­rate jokes or Nin­ten­do ref­er­ences. Rather it draws on one of the most pop­u­lar and beloved pieces of min­i­mal­ist clas­si­cal music, Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” (pro­claimed by Clas­sic FM as “the most flat-out relax­ing piece of piano music ever writ­ten”). “Peo­ple stand on a large music sheet on the floor and notes are played the moment you step on them. By respect­ing social dis­tances and going one note at a time, the pub­lic is able to play” Satie’s piece.

Even for such a suc­cinct com­po­si­tion, this must require a rig­or­ous amount of coor­di­na­tion. But it is nec­es­sary to play the notes in order: “Since the melody changes with every stop, one can cre­ate one’s own Gymnopédie No. 1, since the played melody changes with every step.” The piece was installed at the entrance hall to the Yoko­hama Minatomi­rai Hall for DESIGNART TOKYO 2020, where it will remain until the end of the year. Sure­ly there will be oth­er forms of “social har­mo­ny” to come from the Japan­ese design­ers. Like the prac­tice of social dis­tanc­ing itself, we can only hope such projects catch on and go glob­al, until the wide­spread vac­ci­na­tion and an end to the pan­dem­ic can bring us clos­er again.

via Spoon & Tam­a­go 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A New Dig­i­tal Archive Pre­serves Black Lives Mat­ter & COVID-19 Street Art

Watch How to Be at Home, a Beau­ti­ful Short Ani­ma­tion on the Real­i­ties of Social Iso­la­tion in 2020

2020: An Iso­la­tion Odyssey–A Short Film Reen­acts the Finale of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a COVID-19 Twist

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Eden Project Built a Rainforest Ecosystem Inside Buckminster Fuller-Inspired Geodesic Domes

in Creativity, Design, Environment, Life, Technology | November 24th, 2020

Buck­min­ster Fuller had a dif­fi­cult time as an inven­tor in his ear­ly years. “Hav­ing been expelled from Har­vard for irre­spon­si­ble con­duct,” notes The Guardian, “he strug­gled to find a job and pro­vide a liv­ing for his young fam­i­ly in his ear­ly 30s.” Despite lat­er suc­cess­es, and a lat­er rep­u­ta­tion as leg­endary as Niko­la Tesla’s, he was often, like Tes­la, seen by crit­ics as a utopi­an vision­ary, whose visions were too imprac­ti­cal to real­ly change the world.

But his body of work remains a tes­ta­ment to an imag­i­na­tion that ris­es above the trends of indus­tri­al design and engi­neer­ing. After a peri­od of decline, for exam­ple, Fuller’s geo­des­ic domes expe­ri­enced a revival in the ear­ly 2000’s when “aging baby-boomers across Amer­i­ca” began “build­ing dream homes in the shape of geo­des­ic domes.” Mean­while in Corn­wall, Eng­land, a few years ahead of the curve, Dutch-born busi­ness­man and archae­ol­o­gist-turned-suc­cess­ful-music-pro­duc­er Sir Tim­o­thy Smit broke ground on what would become a far more British use of Ful­lerist prin­ci­ples.

In the late 90s, Smit start­ed work on an enor­mous com­plex of geo­des­ic bio­mes called the Eden Project, a facil­i­ty “akin to a quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Vic­to­ri­an cre­ation: the Eng­lish green­house,” which reached its apex in the famed “Crys­tal Palace” built for the Great Exhi­bi­tion in Hyde Park in 1851. These were build­ings “born out of a play­ful, deca­dent imagination—yet in their archi­tec­ture and design they often opened new path­ways for the future.” So too do Fuller’s designs, in an appli­ca­tion meld­ing Vic­to­ri­an and Ful­lerist ideas about cura­tor­ship and sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Look­ing like “clus­ters of soap bub­bles” the Eden Project slow­ly rose above an exhaust­ed clay pit and opened in 2001 (see a short time-lapse film of the con­struc­tion above). Each of the two huge cen­tral domes recre­ates an ecosys­tem. The Rain­for­est Bio­me allows vis­i­tors to get lost in near­ly 4 acres of trop­i­cal for­est and includes banana, cof­fee, and rub­ber plants. The Mediter­ranean Bio­me hous­es an acre and a half of olives and grape vines. Small­er adjoin­ing domes house thou­sands of addi­tion­al plant species. There is a per­for­mance space and a year­ly music fes­ti­val; sculp­tures and art exhi­bi­tions in both the indoor and out­door gar­dens. The facil­i­ty has host­ed well over a mil­lion vis­i­tors each year.

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 2016, the Eden Project began plant­i­ng red­woods, intro­duc­ing a for­est of the North Amer­i­can trees to Europe for the first time. Next year, it will begin drilling for a geot­her­mal ener­gy project to turn heat from the gran­ite under­ground into pow­er, an under­tak­ing that, unlike frack­ing, will not release con­t­a­m­i­nants into the water sup­ply or addi­tion­al fos­sil fuels into the air and could pow­er and heat the facil­i­ty and 5000 addi­tion­al homes. In 2018, the project began con­struc­tion on Eden Project North, in More­cambe, Lan­cashire, with build­ings designed to look like giant mus­sels and a focus on marine envi­ron­ments.

Eden Project Inter­na­tion­al aims to build unique facil­i­ties all around the world, “to cre­ate new attrac­tions with a mes­sage of envi­ron­men­tal, social and eco­nom­ic regen­er­a­tion” and “to pro­tect and reju­ve­nate nat­ur­al land­scapes.” None of these ambi­tious expan­sions use the geo­des­ic domes of the orig­i­nal Eden Project, but that is not a reflec­tion on the domes’ struc­tur­al sound­ness. Many oth­er trans­par­ent uses of Fuller’s design have encoun­tered dif­fi­cul­ties with water tight­ness and heat flow. The Eden Project’s domes use inno­v­a­tive inflat­able, tri­an­gu­lar pan­els instead of glass to solve those prob­lems. Fuller sure­ly would have approved.

The project also rep­re­sents a poignant per­son­al vin­di­ca­tion for the Fuller fam­i­ly. Fuller “vowed to ded­i­cate his life to improv­ing stan­dards of liv­ing through good design,” The Guardian writes, after his daugh­ter Alexan­dra died in 1922. In 2009, his only sur­viv­ing child, Alle­gra Fuller Sny­der, then 82 and Chair­woman of the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute, vis­it­ed the Eden Project. “Of all the projects relat­ed to my father’s work,” she remarked after­ward, “I would say that this is the one I am most aware of as being a pow­er­ful, com­pre­hen­sive project…. My father would have been just thrilled. He would feel that it is a mar­vel­lous appli­ca­tion of his think­ing.”

Learn more about the Eden Project, which reopens Decem­ber 3, here. And learn how to “cre­ate Eden wher­ev­er you are” with the project’s free resources for gar­den­ers at home.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Buck­min­ster Fuller Rails Against the “Non­sense of Earn­ing a Liv­ing”: Why Work Use­less Jobs When Tech­nol­o­gy & Automa­tion Can Let Us Live More Mean­ing­ful Lives

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch How to Be at Home, a Beautiful Short Animation on the Realities of Social Isolation in 2020

in Animation, Books, Film, Life, Poetry | November 23rd, 2020

I think, as social pri­mates, we want to feel a strong sense of belong­ing either in a rela­tion­ship or to a community—or both. But also intrin­sic to our human­i­ty is a feel­ing that we are tru­ly alone.

—Film­mak­er Andrea Dorf­man, 2010

When they first became friends, poet Tanya Davis and film­mak­er Andrea Dorf­man talked a lot about the plea­sures and hard­ships of being alone. Davis had just gone through a break up, and Dorf­man was just embark­ing on a rela­tion­ship after four years of fly­ing solo.

These con­ver­sa­tions led to a col­lab­o­ra­tion, 2010’s How to Be At Alone (see below), a whim­si­cal videopo­em that com­bines live action and ani­ma­tion to con­sid­er some of soli­tude’s sweet­er aspects, like sit­ting on a bench as sig­nal to the uni­verse that one is avail­able for impromp­tu con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger.

That bench reap­pears in their 2020 fol­low up, How to Be At Home, above. Now it is cor­doned off with black and yel­low cau­tion tape, a famil­iar pub­lic health mea­sure in 2020.

As with the ear­li­er project, a large part of Davis’ pur­pose was to reflect and reas­sure, both her­self, and by exten­sion, oth­ers.

Although she has become a poster child for the joys of soli­tude, she also rel­ish­es human con­tact, and found her­self miss­ing it ter­ri­bly while shel­ter­ing alone in the ear­ly days of the pan­dem­ic. Writ­ing the new poem gave her “an anchor” and a place to put her anx­i­ety.

Dorf­man notes that the project, which was com­mis­sioned by the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da as part of a short film col­lec­tion about Cana­di­ans nav­i­gat­ing life dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, was “essen­tial­ly cat­alyzed by COVID.”

As she embarked on the project, she won­dered if the pan­dem­ic would be over by the time it was com­plete. As she told the CBC’s Tom Pow­er:

There was this feel­ing that this could go away in a month, so this bet­ter be fin­ished soon, so it’s still rel­e­vant. So as an artist, as a film­mak­er, I thought, “I have to crank this out” but there’s no fast and easy way to do ani­ma­tion. It just takes so long and as I got into it and real­ized that this was going to be a marathon, not a sprint, the images just kept com­ing to me and I real­ly just made it up as I went along. I’d go into my stu­dio every day not know­ing what lay ahead and I’d think, “Okay, so, what do we have up next? What’s the next line? And I’d spend maybe a week on a line of the poem, ani­mat­ing it. 

It appears to have been an effec­tive approach.

Dorfman’s paint­ed images rip­ple across the fast turn­ing pages of an old book. The titles change from time to time, and the choic­es seem delib­er­ate—The Lone Star Ranger, Le Secret du Manoir Han­té, a chap­ter in The Bro­ken Halo—“Rose­mary for Remem­brance.”

“It’s almost as though the way the poem is writ­ten there are many chap­ters in the book. (Davis) moves from one sub­ject to anoth­er so com­plete­ly,” Dorf­man told the Uni­ver­si­ty of King’s Col­lege stu­dent paper, The Sig­nal.

In the new work, the absence of oth­er peo­ple proves a much heav­ier bur­den than it does in How To Be Alone.

Davis flirts with many of the first poem’s set­tings, places where a lone indi­vid­ual might have gone to put them­selves in prox­im­i­ty to oth­er humans as recent­ly as Feb­ru­ary 2020:

Pub­lic trans­porta­tion

The gym

A dance club

A descrip­tion from 2010:

The lunch counter, where you will be sur­round­ed by chow-down­ers, employ­ees who only have an hour and their spous­es work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

In 2020, she strug­gles to recre­ate that expe­ri­ence at home, her phone serv­ing as her most vital link to the out­side world, as she scrolls past images of a Black Lives Mat­ter protests and a masked essen­tial work­er:

I miss lunch coun­ters so much I’ve been eat­ing [pick­les and] toast­ed sand­wich­es while hang­ing unabashed­ly with my phone.

See How to Be at Home and the 29 oth­er films that com­prise The Curve, the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da series about life in the era of COVID-19 here.

How to be at Home

By Tanya Davis

If you are, at first, real­ly fuck­ing anx­ious, just wait. It’ll get worse, and then you’ll get the hang of it. Maybe. 

Start with the rea­son­able feel­ings – dis­com­fort, lack of focus, the sad­ness of alone

you can try to do yoga

you can shut off the radio when it gets to you

you can mes­sage your fam­i­ly or your friends or your col­leagues, you’re not sup­posed to leave your home any­way, so it’s safe for you

There’s also the gym

you can’t go there but you could pre­tend to

you could bendy by your­self in your bed­room

And there’s pub­lic trans­porta­tion

prob­a­bly best to avoid it

but there’s prayer and med­i­ta­tion, yes always

employ it

if you have pains in your chest ‘cause your anx­i­ety won’t rest

take a moment, take a breath

Start sim­ple

things you can han­dle based on your inter­ests

your issues and your trig­gers

and your inner logis­tics 

I miss lunch coun­ters so much I’ve been eat­ing [pick­les and] toast­ed sand­wich­es while hang­ing unabashed­ly with my phone

When you are tired, again of still being alone

make your­self a din­ner

but don’t invite any­body over

put some­thing green in it, or maybe orange

chips are fine some­times but they won’t keep you charged 

feed your heart

if peo­ple are your nour­ish­ment, I get you

feel the feel­ings that undo you while you have to keep apart

Watch a movie, in the dark

and pre­tend some­one is with you 

watch all of the cred­its

because you have time, and not much else to do

or watch all of the cred­its to remem­ber 

how many peo­ple come togeth­er

just to tell a sto­ry

just to make a pic­ture move

And then, set your­self up danc­ing

like it’s a club where every­one knows you

and they’re all gonna hold you

all night long

they’re gonna dance around you and with you and on their own

it’s your favourite song 

with the hard­est bass and the cathar­tic drums

your heart pumps along/hard, you belong

you put your hands up to feel it

With the come down comes the weep­ing

those down­cast eyes and feel­ings

the truth is you can’t go danc­ing, not right now

not at any club or par­ty in any town

The heart­break of this astounds you

it joins old aches way down in you

you can vis­it them, but please don’t stay there

Go out­side if you’re able, breathe the air

there are trees for hug­ging

don’t be embar­rassed

it’s your friend, it’s your moth­er, it’s your new crush

lay your cheek against the bark, it’s a liv­ing thing to touch

Sad­ly, leave all bench­es emp­ty

appre­ci­ate the kind­ness in the dis­tance of strangers

as you pine for com­pa­ny and wave at your neigh­bours

savour the depths of your con­ver­sa­tions

the lay­ers uncov­ered

in this strange space and time

Soci­ety is afraid of change

and no one wants to die

not now, from a tiny virus

not lat­er from the world on fire

But death is a truth we all hate to know

we all get to live, and then we all have to go

In the mean­time, we’re sur­round­ed, we’re alone

each a thread woven in the fab­ric, unrav­el­ling in moments though

each a solo enti­ty spin­ning on its axis, for­get­ting that the galaxy includes us all

Here­in our fall

from grace from each oth­er from god what­ev­er, doesn’t mat­ter

the dis­as­ter is that we believe we’re sep­a­rate 

we’re not

As evi­denced by virus­es tak­ing down soci­eties

as proven by the lone­li­ness inher­ent in no gath­er­ings

as pal­pa­ble as the vacan­cy in the space of one per­son hug­ging

If this dis­rup­tion undoes you

if the absence of peo­ple unrav­els you

if touch was the teth­er that held you togeth­er

and now that it’s sev­ered you’re frag­ile too 

lean into lone­li­ness and know you’re not alone in it 

lean into lone­li­ness like it is hold­ing you

like it is a gen­er­ous rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a glar­ing truth

oh, we are con­nect­ed

we for­get this, yet we always knew.

How to Be at Home will be added to the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch 66 Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed-and-Award-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Shorts Online, Cour­tesy of the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Watch “Ryan,” Win­ner of an Oscar and 60 Oth­er Awards

2020: An Iso­la­tion Odyssey–A Short Film Reen­acts the Finale of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a COVID-19 Twist

 

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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David Lynch Explains How Simple Daily Habits Enhance His Creativity

in Creativity, Film, Life | November 20th, 2020

At first glance, Madame Bovary and Blue Vel­vet would seem to have lit­tle in com­mon, as would their cre­ators. But the artis­tic life Gus­tave Flaubert led and the one David Lynch now leads share a basic pre­cept: “Be reg­u­lar and order­ly in your life,” as the for­mer once put it, “so that you may be vio­lent and orig­i­nal in your work.” Lynch has spo­ken about his ways as an artis­tic crea­ture of habit many times over the years, as demon­strat­ed by the inter­view clip com­pi­la­tion above. “Some peo­ple have heard the sto­ry that I went to Bob’s Big Boy for sev­en years every day at 2:30 and had the same thing,” he told Jay Leno in 1992. “That was my longest habit pat­tern, I think.”

Lynch’s reg­u­lar­i­ty at that Los Ange­les burg­er joint is just one of the rou­tines that has struc­tured his exis­tence. “I like habit­u­al behav­ior because it’s a known fac­tor,” he says, “and then your mind is free to think about oth­er things.” When life has an order, he lat­er told Char­lie Rose, “then you’re free to men­tal­ly go off any place. You’ve got a safe sort of foun­da­tion, and a place to spring off from.”

More recent­ly, on a phone Q&A for the David Lynch Foun­da­tion, the auteur described his rou­tine thus: “I wake up and I brush my teeth and I use the bath­room. Then I have a cap­puc­ci­no and some cig­a­rettes. Then I medi­ate, and then I have either some amrit nec­tar or a small smooth­ie with pro­tein pow­der and blue­ber­ries and peach­es. And then I go to work.”

How­ev­er con­tra­dic­to­ry they may seem, Lynch’s long-stand­ing twin loves of smok­ing and med­i­ta­tion both express them­selves as rou­tine actions. And if the back­grounds of his Youtube videos — includ­ing his lit­tle-vary­ing dai­ly Los Ange­les weath­er reports — are any­thing to go by, he per­forms them in the kind of unclut­tered phys­i­cal space he’s long pre­ferred: “The pur­er the envi­ron­ment,” as he puts it, “the more fan­tas­tic the inte­ri­or world can be.” His 1980s and 90s com­ic strip The Angri­est Dog in the World took place in such an envi­ron­ment, its near­ly unchang­ing visu­als and increas­ing­ly bizarre text an artis­tic cor­rel­a­tive to his ideas about dai­ly life and the imag­i­na­tion. But what­ev­er their inter­est in his meth­ods, Lynch’s fans want to know one thing above all: what the imag­i­na­tion of this least angry of all artists will bring forth next.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Lynch Got Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion? By Drink­ing a Milk­shake at Bob’s Big Boy, Every Sin­gle Day, for Sev­en Straight Years

An Ani­mat­ed David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Boosts Our Cre­ativ­i­ty (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Med­i­tat­ing)

David Lynch Cre­ates Dai­ly Weath­er Reports for Los Ange­les: How the Film­mak­er Pass­es Time in Quar­an­tine

The Dai­ly Rou­tines of Famous Cre­ative Peo­ple, Pre­sent­ed in an Inter­ac­tive Info­graph­ic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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What Happens When You Spend Weeks, Months, or Years in Solitary Confinement

in Life, Science | November 17th, 2020

The lone­li­ness and iso­la­tion of quar­an­tine is noth­ing to laugh about, though we might have heard grim jokes about soli­tary con­fine­ment in the last few months. We’ve also seen over­wrought com­par­isons of social dis­tanc­ing to prison. These are, I think, release valves for real pain. One hopes the har­row­ing expe­ri­ence of the pan­dem­ic will give Amer­i­cans some com­pas­sion for the lives of pris­on­ers, a shock­ing num­ber of whom spend years, even decades, in soli­tary, most­ly deprived of nat­ur­al light, human con­tact, enter­tain­ment, edu­ca­tion, or a change of scenery. It seems, inar­guably, like a form of tor­ture.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, soli­tary con­fine­ment does real harm to the body and brain. Even inmates placed in soli­tary for a few days expe­ri­ence symp­toms of acute anx­i­ety and depres­sion. “Iso­lat­ed inmates often report symp­toms sim­i­lar to those of hyper­ten­sion, such as chron­ic headaches, trem­bling sweaty palms, extreme dizzi­ness and heart pal­pi­ta­tions,” Mary Mur­phy Cor­co­ran writes at NYU’s Applied Psy­chol­o­gy Opus. “Inmates in iso­la­tion may also have dif­fi­cul­ty sleep­ing, and some may expe­ri­ence insom­nia…. Con­se­quent­ly, inmates report feel­ings of chron­ic lethar­gy.” Over the years, this stress exacts its long-term toll.

In the Slate video at the top, for­mer inmate Five Mual­imm-Ak describes the five years he spent in soli­tary dur­ing a 12-year prison sen­tence. His account and those of oth­ers were recent­ly col­lect­ed in a book with the grim­ly evoca­tive title Hell is a Very Small Place. For­mer soli­tary inmate Ter­rence Slater describes a kind of fur­ther soli­tary of the mind: how impor­tant it is to lim­it the amount of time one thinks about loved ones dur­ing a 23-hour day alone in a cell, or “you’re going to lose your mind in there.” It’s esti­mat­ed that rough­ly 80,000 inmates in the U.S. are placed in such con­di­tions every year.

Giv­en enough time, one may lit­er­al­ly lose one’s mind, as Robert King dis­cov­ered. King was “con­fined in a 6x9-foot cell for almost 30 years,” Elana Blan­co-Suarez writes at Psy­chol­o­gy Today. “King knew that soli­tary con­fine­ment was chang­ing the way his brain worked. When he final­ly left his cell, he real­ized he had trou­ble rec­og­niz­ing faces and had to retrain his eyes to learn what a face was like.” He could no longer fol­low sim­ple direc­tions. “It was as if his brain had erased all those capa­bil­i­ties that were no longer nec­es­sary for sur­vival in a cell no big­ger than the back of a pick-up truck.”

Pro­longed peri­ods of sen­so­ry depri­va­tion can be espe­cial­ly inju­ri­ous for pris­on­ers who go into soli­tary with pre-exist­ing men­tal health issues, and “men­tal­ly impaired pris­on­ers are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly rep­re­sent­ed in soli­tary con­fine­ment,” Kirsten Weir notes at the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion. One 2005 study found that the “preva­lence of men­tal ill­ness in admin­is­tra­tive seg­re­ga­tion” in Col­orado “was greater than 35 per­cent, com­pared with a men­tal ill­ness rate of less than 25 per­cent among the gen­er­al prison pop­u­la­tion.”

Clin­i­cal pro­fes­sor of psy­chi­a­try at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado Jef­frey Met­zn­er argues that the “cor­rec­tion­al sys­tem has become our men­tal health care sys­tem for too many peo­ple,” using abu­sive, bar­bar­ic prac­tices that haven’t exist­ed in men­tal health wards for decades. The effects of soli­tary con­fine­ment sug­gest that “it doesn’t make facil­i­ties safer, doesn’t make our com­mu­ni­ties safer, and that peo­ple are devel­op­ing men­tal and phys­i­cal ail­ments because of this prac­tice.”

So says James Burns, a for­mer­ly incar­cer­at­ed film­mak­er who vol­un­tar­i­ly entered soli­tary con­fine­ment for 30 days in 2016 and livestreamed the whole expe­ri­ence. See his last four hours above and read at Vice about his rea­sons for sub­mit­ting him­self to hell—not a “dark dun­geon,” he writes, but “a very ster­ile, bright hell” which is, “more than any­thing… a mind fuck.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Pris­ons Around the U.S. Are Ban­ning and Restrict­ing Access to Books

Inmates in New York Prison Defeat Harvard’s Debate Team: A Look Inside the Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive

Art Class Instead Of Jail: New Pro­gram Lets Young Offend­ers Take Free Art Class­es Rather Than Spend Time in the Crim­i­nal Sys­tem

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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The Gruesome Dollhouse Death Scenes That Reinvented Murder Investigations

in Art, Education, Life, Psychology, Science | October 30th, 2020

Who can resist minia­tures?

Wee food, painstak­ing­ly ren­dered in felt­ed wool…

Match­book-sized books you can actu­al­ly read…

Clas­sic record albums shrunk down for mice…

The late Frances Gless­ner Lee (1878–1962) def­i­nite­ly loved minia­tures, and excelled at their cre­ation, knit­ting socks on pins, hand rolling real tobac­co into tiny cig­a­rettes, and mak­ing sure the vic­tims in her real­is­tic mur­der scene dio­ra­mas exhib­it­ed the prop­er degree of rig­or mor­tis and livid­i­ty.

Lee began work on her Nut­shell Stud­ies of Unex­plained Death at the age of 65, as part of a life­long inter­est in homi­cide inves­ti­ga­tion.

Her pre­oc­cu­pa­tion began with the Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries she read as a girl.

In the 1930s, the wealthy divorcee used part of a siz­able inher­i­tance to endow Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty with enough mon­ey for the cre­ation of its Depart­ment of Legal Med­i­cine.

Its first chair­man was her friend, George Burgess Magrath, a med­ical exam­in­er who had shared his dis­tress that crim­i­nals were lit­er­al­ly get­ting away with mur­der because coro­ners and police inves­ti­ga­tors lacked appro­pri­ate train­ing for foren­sic analy­sis.

The library to which Lee donat­ed a thou­sand books on the top­ic was named in his hon­or.

The home­made dio­ra­mas offered a more vivid expe­ri­ence than could be found in any book.

Each Nut­shell Study required almost half a year’s work, and cost about the same as a house would have at the time. ($6000 in the 1940s.)

“Luck­i­ly, I was born with a sil­ver spoon in my mouth,” Lee remarked. “It gives me the time and mon­ey to fol­low my hob­by of sci­en­tif­ic crime detec­tion.”

Although Lee had been brought up in a lux­u­ri­ous 13 bed­room home (8 were for ser­vants’ use), the domes­tic set­tings of the Nut­shell Stud­ies are more mod­est, reflec­tive of the vic­tims’ cir­cum­stances.

She drew inspi­ra­tion from actu­al crimes, but had no inter­est in repli­cat­ing their actu­al scenes. The crimes she authored for her lit­tle rooms were com­pos­ites of the ones she had stud­ied, with invent­ed vic­tims and in rooms dec­o­rat­ed accord­ing to her imag­i­na­tion.

Her intent was to pro­vide inves­ti­ga­tors with vir­gin crime scenes to metic­u­lous­ly exam­ine, culling indi­rect evi­dence from the painstak­ing­ly detailed props she was a stick­ler for get­ting right.

Stu­dents were pro­vid­ed with a flash­light, a mag­ni­fy­ing glass, and wit­ness state­ments. Her atten­tion to detail ensured that they would use the full nine­ty min­utes they had been allot­ted ana­lyz­ing the scene. Their goal was not to crack the case but to care­ful­ly doc­u­ment obser­va­tions on which a case could be built.

The flaw­less­ness of her 1:12 scale ren­der­ings also speaks to her deter­mi­na­tion to be tak­en seri­ous­ly in what was then an exclu­sive­ly male world. (Women now dom­i­nate the field of foren­sic sci­ence.)

Noth­ing was over­looked.

As she wrote to Dr. Alan Moritz, the Depart­ment of Legal Medicine’s sec­ond chair, in a let­ter review­ing pro­posed changes to some ear­ly scenes:

I found myself con­stant­ly tempt­ed to add more clues and details and am afraid I may get them “gad­gety” in the process. I hope you will watch over this and stop me when I go too far. Since you and I have per­pe­trat­ed these crimes our­selves we are in the unique posi­tion of being able to give com­plete descrip­tions of them even if there were no witnesses—very much in the man­ner of the nov­el­ist who is able to tell the inmost thoughts of his char­ac­ters.

It’s no acci­dent that many of the Nut­shell Stud­ies’ lit­tle corpses are female.

Lee did not want offi­cers to treat vic­tims dis­mis­sive­ly because of gen­der-relat­ed assump­tions, whether the sce­nario involved a pros­ti­tute whose throat has been cut, or a house­wife dead on the floor of her kitchen, the burn­ers of her stove all switched to the on posi­tion.

Would you like to test your pow­ers of obser­va­tion?

Above are the remains of Mag­gie Wil­son, dis­cov­ered in the Dark Bath­room’s tub by a fel­low board­er, Lizzie Miller, who gave the fol­low­ing state­ment:

I roomed in the same house as Mag­gie Wil­son, but knew her only from we met in the hall. I think she had ‘fits’ [seizures]. A cou­ple of male friends came to see her fair­ly reg­u­lar­ly. On Sun­day night, the men were there and there was a lot of drink­ing going on. Some time after the men left, I heard the water run­ning in the bath­room. I opened the door and found her as you see her.

Grim, eh?

Not near­ly as grim as what you’ll find in the Par­son­age or the Three-Room Dwelling belong­ing to shoe fac­to­ry fore­man Robert Jud­son, his wife, Kate, and their baby, Lin­da Mae.

The peri­od-accu­rate mini fur­nish­ings and fash­ions may cre­ate a false impres­sion that the Moth­er of Foren­sic Sci­ence’s Nut­shell Stud­ies should be rel­e­gat­ed to a muse­um.

In truth, their abun­dance of detail remains so effec­tive that the Office of the Chief Med­ical Exam­in­er in Bal­ti­more con­tin­ues to use 18 of them in train­ing sem­i­nars to help homi­cide inves­ti­ga­tors “con­vict the guilty, clear the inno­cent, and find the truth in a nut­shell.”

Explore 5 Nut­shell Studies—Woodman’s Shack, Attic, Liv­ing Room, Garage, and Par­son­age Parlor—in 360º com­pli­ments of The Smith­son­ian Amer­i­can Art Muse­um Ren­wick Gallery’s exhib­it Mur­der Is Her Hob­by: Frances Gless­ner Lee and The Nut­shell Stud­ies of Unex­plained Death.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Record Store Designed for Mice in Swe­den, Fea­tur­ing Albums by Mouse Davis, Destiny’s Cheese, Dol­ly Pars­ley & More

“20 Rules For Writ­ing Detec­tive Sto­ries” By S.S. Van Dine, One of T.S. Eliot’s Favorite Genre Authors (1928)

Lucy Law­less Joins Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #5 on True Crime

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Japanese Traditions of Sashiko & Boro: The Centuries-Old Craft That Mends Clothes in a Sustainable, Artistic Way

in Art, Fashion, History, How to Learn for Free, Life, Philosophy | October 26th, 2020

The state of our trou­bled plan­et dic­tates that dis­pos­ables are out.

Reusables are in.

And any­one who’s taught them­selves how to mend and main­tain their stuff has earned the right to flaunt it!

A quick scroll through Insta­gram reveals loads of vis­i­ble mend­ing projects that high­light rather than dis­guise the area of repair, draw­ing the eye to con­trast­ing threads rein­forc­ing a thread­bare knee, frayed cuff, ragged rip, or moth hole.

While some prac­ti­tion­ers take a freeform approach, the most pleas­ing stitch­es tend to be in the sashiko tra­di­tion.

Sashiko—fre­quent­ly trans­lat­ed as “lit­tle stabs”—was born in Edo peri­od Japan (1603–1868), when rur­al women attempt­ed to pro­long the life of their fam­i­lies’ tat­tered gar­ments and bed­ding, giv­ing rise to a hum­ble form of white-on-indi­go patch­work known as boro.

While sashiko can at times be seen serv­ing a pure­ly dec­o­ra­tive func­tion, such as on a very well pre­served Mei­ji peri­od jack­et in the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art’s col­lec­tion, its pri­ma­ry use was always one born of neces­si­ty.

As Austin Bryant notes on Hed­dels, a news and edu­ca­tion web­site ded­i­cat­ed to sus­tain­able goods:

Over gen­er­a­tions of fam­i­lies, these tex­tiles would acquire more and more patch­es, almost to the point of the com­mon observ­er being unable to rec­og­nize where the orig­i­nal fab­ric began. As they recov­ered after the end of World War II, to some the boro tex­tiles remind­ed the Japan­ese of their impov­er­ished rur­al past.

Keiko & Atsushi Futat­suya are a moth­er-and-son arti­san team whose posts on sashiko and boro go beyond straight­for­ward how-tos to delve into cul­tur­al his­to­ry.

Accord­ing to them, the goal of sashiko should not be aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing rows of uni­form stitch­es, but rather “enjoy­ing the dia­logue” with the fab­ric.

As Atsushi explains in an Insta­gram post, view­ers see­ing their work with a West­ern per­spec­tive may respond dif­fer­ent­ly than those who have grown up with the ele­ments in play:

This is a pho­to of a “Boro-to-be Jack­et” in the process. This is the back (hid­ing) side of the jack­et and many non-Japan­ese would say this should be the front and should show to the pub­lic. The Japan­ese would under­stand why it is a back­side nat­u­ral­ly, but I would need to “explain” to the non-Japan­ese who do not share the same val­ue (why we) pur­pose­ful­ly make this side as “hid­ing” side. That’s why, I keep shar­ing in words. One pic­ture may be worth a thou­sand words, but the thou­sand words may be com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent based on their (free) inter­pre­ta­tion. In shar­ing the cul­ture, some “actu­al words” would be also very impor­tant.

To try your hand at sashiko, you will need a long nee­dle, such as a cot­ton darn­ing nee­dle, white embroi­dery thread, and—for boro—an aging tex­tile in need of some atten­tion.

Should you find your­self slid­ing into a full blown obses­sion, you may want to order sashiko nee­dles and thread, and a palm thim­ble to help you push through sev­er­al weights of fab­ric simul­ta­ne­ous­ly.

You’ll find many pat­terns, tips, and tuto­ri­als on the Futat­suya family’s Sashi.co YouTube chan­nel.

via Vox

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

20 Mes­mer­iz­ing Videos of Japan­ese Arti­sans Cre­at­ing Tra­di­tion­al Hand­i­crafts

See How Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Can Build a Whole Build­ing Using No Nails or Screws

Explore the Beau­ti­ful Pages of the 1902 Japan­ese Design Mag­a­zine Shin-Bijut­sukai: Euro­pean Mod­ernism Meets Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Design

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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