May 18, 2011
The Golden Age of Porn or porno chic refers to a period in the history of pornography, approximately from the late-1960s to the early-to-mid-1980s that is idealized as a time where difficult to treat STDs had not achieved wide public notice. This freedom was ostensibly reflected in the pornography industry, with adult movies and adult magazines approaching the mainstream and becoming increasingly visible.
The golden age was also typified by interactions with the contemporaneous second wave of feminism. These were radical and cultural feminists which, along with the Christian right, attacked pornography, while other feminists were more concerned with ideas of sexual liberation and freedom from government intrusion into the growing industry.
read more »
Posted in Art, Money, Sex |
Leave a Comment »
May 18, 2011
Deep Throat is a 1972 American pornographic starring Linda Lovelace (Linda Susan Boreman). One of the first pornographic films to feature a plot, character development and relatively high production standards, Deep Throat earned mainstream attention and launched the ‘porn chic’ trend despite the film being banned in some regions and the subject of obscenity trials.
The 61-minute movie is intended to be humorous, with highly tongue-in-cheek dialogue and songs; fireworks going off and bells ringing during Lovelace’s orgasms. The film’s popularity helped launch a brief period of upper-middle class interest in explicit pornography referred to by Ralph Blumenthal of The New York Times as ‘porno chic.’ Several mainstream celebrities admitted to having seen Deep Throat, including Martin Scorsese, Truman Capote, Jack Nicholson and Johnny Carson.
read more »
Posted in Money, Politics, Sex |
Leave a Comment »
May 18, 2011
In economics, regulatory capture occurs when a state regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure, as it can act as an encouragement for large firms to produce negative externalities (a cost or benefit incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit). The agencies are called ‘captured agencies.’
In the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), which had had regulatory responsibility for offshore oil drilling, was widely cited as an example of regulatory capture. The MMS is now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE).
Posted in Money, Politics |
Leave a Comment »
May 18, 2011
Tartanry [tahr-tn-ree] is a word used to describe the kitsch elements of Scottish culture that have been overemphasized or superimposed on the country first by the emergent Scottish tourist industry in the 18th and 19th centuries, and later by an American film industry. The earliest use of the word ‘tartanry’ itself is said to have been in 1976.
It refers to often misrepresented or invented aspects of Scotland such as clan tartans, kilts, bagpipes, Scottish Gaelic and Highland culture more generally.
Posted in Language, Money, World |
Leave a Comment »
May 16, 2011
Beautiful Angle is a guerrilla arts poster project in Tacoma, Washington. Approximately once per month, graphic designer Lance Kagey and writer Tom Llewellyn create hand-crafted, letterpress posters and then distribute them around the city’s downtown core via wheat paste and staples.
The first poster, Swirl, was distributed on May 23, 2010. Beautiful Angle has a ‘strange, contradictory relationship with the city’; even though the posters are posted perhaps illegally, the group has won a Chamber of Commerce award of merit.
Posted in Art, Money, Politics |
2 Comments »
May 16, 2011
FAILE is a Brooklyn-based artistic collaboration between Patrick McNeil (b. 1975) and Patrick Miller (b. 1976). Since its inception in 1999, FAILE has been recognized for their pioneering use of wheatpasting and stenciling in the increasingly established arena of street art, and for their explorations of duality through a fragmented style of appropriation and collage.
During this time, FAILE adapted its signature mass culture-driven iconography to a wide array of media, from wooden boxes and window pallets to more traditional canvas, prints, sculptures, stencils, multimedia installation, and prayer wheels. While FAILE’s work is constructed from found visual imagery, and blurs the line between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, recent exhibitions demonstrate an emphasis on audience participation, a critique of consumerism, and the incorporation of religious media and architecture into their work.
Posted in Art, Money, Politics |
Leave a Comment »
May 16, 2011
Flyposting is the act of placing advertising posters or flyers in illegal places. In the U.S., these posters are known as bandit signs, snipe signs, or street spam. In most areas, it is illegal to place such posters on private property without the consent of the property owner, or to post on public property without a sign permit from the local government. Some areas, however, have public bulletin boards where notices may be posted. It is an advertising tactic mostly used by small businesses promoting concerts and political activist groups, but there have been occasions where international companies subcontracted local advertising agencies for flyposting jobs as a form of guerrilla marketing.
Flyposting is commonly seen as a nuisance due to issues with property rights, visual appearance and littering and is a misdemeanor in many countries. A particularly noteworthy incident of this type occurred in Boston, Massachusetts. In the case of the 2007 Boston Mooninite Scare, advertisers had placed electronic signboards without notifying local authorities, prompting a costly reaction by the Boston Police Bomb Squad when the signs were mistaken for bombs.
Posted in Art, Money, Politics |
Leave a Comment »
May 16, 2011
Wheatpaste (also known as Marxist glue) is a liquid adhesive made from vegetable starch and water. It has been used since ancient times for various arts and crafts such as bookbinding and papier mache. It is also made for the purpose of adhering paper posters to walls and other surfaces (often in graffiti). Closely resembling wallpaper paste, it is often made by mixing roughly equal portions of flour and water and heating it until it thickens, or by smearing cooked rice into a paste.
The words paste, pasta, and pastry have a common heritage, deriving from the Late Latin pasta (dough or pastry cake), itself deriving from the ancient Greek pasta, meaning ‘barley porridge.’ In English, paste is used as would be ‘dough’ in the 12th century, or ‘glue’ in the 15th century.
read more »
Posted in Art, Language, Money |
Leave a Comment »
May 16, 2011
‘What Makes Sammy Run?‘ is a 1941 novel by Budd Schulberg. It is a rags to riches story chronicling the rise and fall of Sammy Glick, a Jewish boy born in New York’s Lower East Side who very early in his life makes up his mind to escape the ghetto and climb the ladder of success.
Reputedly, film mogul Samuel Goldwyn offered Schulberg money to not have the novel published, because Goldwyn felt that the author was perpetuating an anti-Semitic stereotype by making Glick so venal. It was later made into a long-running Broadway musical.
read more »
Posted in Art, Money |
Leave a Comment »
May 9, 2011
An executive toy is a novelty item that is usually a small mechanical gadget placed on the desk of a corporate executive or other office workers. They have no work-related function but are usually interesting to look at and entertaining. The first executive toy may have been a gadget designed by the great mathematician and engineer Philo of Byzantium (c.280 BCE), an octagon-shaped ink pot with openings on each side. One could turn the pot so that any face is on top and dip the pen in the opening, but the ink never ran out through the holes on other sides. The inkwell was suspended in the center on a series of gimbals and remained stationary in spite of any rotation.
Examples of executive toys include: EcoSphere (closed Aquarium), Etch A Sketch, Hoberman sphere (a folding and opening geodesic dome), oil and water liquid motion toys, Drinking bird, Magic 8-Ball, mechanical puzzles, music boxes, Nanoblocks (plastic building blocks similar to Lego but about half the linear dimensions), Newton’s cradle (where a set of metal balls are suspended from above, one is pulled from the rest and kicks them, transferring the kinetic energy to the last one), Perpetual pendulum (which doesn’t stop due to an electric magnet in the base of the toy), Pin Art (a box with thousands of small pins of equal length inserted into a board, that can be pressed from one side with any object so that the other ends of the pins form a three-dimensional image of the object on the other side of the board), Rubik’s Cubes, Tops, Yo-yos, Snow globes, Lava lamps, magnet toys, and stress balls.
Posted in Games, Money |
Leave a Comment »
May 9, 2011
Drop City was an artists’ community that formed in southern Colorado in 1965. Abandoned by the early 1970s, it became known as the first rural ‘hippie commune.’
In 1965, the four original founders, art students and filmmakers from the University of Kansas and University of Colorado, bought a 7-acre tract of land in south eastern Colorado. Their intention was to create a live-in work of what they called ‘Drop Art’ (sometimes called ‘droppings’), which was informed by the ‘happenings’ of Allan Kaprow and the impromptu performances, a few years earlier, of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Buckminster Fuller, at Black Mountain College.
read more »
Posted in Art, Money, Philosophy |
Leave a Comment »
May 3, 2011
Anton Stankowski (1906 – 1998) was a German graphic designer, photographer and painter. Typical Stankowski designs attempt to illustrate processes or behaviors rather than objects. Such experiments resulted in the use of fractal-like structures long before their popularization by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975. Despite producing many unique examples of concrete art and photographics, Stankowski is best known for designing the simple trademark of the Deutsche Bank.
His work is noted for straddling the camps of fine and applied arts by synthesising information and creative impulse. He was inspired by the abstract paintings of Mondrian, van Doesburg, and Kandinsky. Stankowski advocated graphic design as a field of pictorial creation that requires collaboration with free artists and scientists.
Posted in Art, Money, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
The Daily Omnivore 