Jockohomo

“The comedian has been outspoken about his battle with depression. But many men struggle to talk due to childhood messages to toughen up. Last week Stephen Fry spoke movingly, not for the first time, about his experience of bipolar disorder and suicidal impulses. When the interview aroused the usual smattering of ill-informed comments, Alastair Campbell tweeted rather brilliantly: ‘To those asking what @stephenfry has to be depressed about, would you ask what someone has to be cancerous, diabetic or asthmatic about?’

Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.

If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, after the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder at the unfailing stars.

Out of confusion, as the way is,
And the wonder, that man knows,
Out of the chaos would come bliss.

That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.

Being but men, we walked into the trees.

-“Being But Men” by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas,1939

Of the four artists known by history as the NEA Four, Karen Finley is the one whose full name many people remember, even if they know little else about the situation that led to the artists’ lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)…One week before her work Sext Me If You Can opened at the New Museum, I [Alexis Clements at Hyperallergic] chatted with her by phone to learn about the new piece, and also to reflect back on her career more broadly as part of my ongoing series of interviews with the NEA Four artists during their residency at the New Museum.

“For the past year, a Philadelphia-based startup called Curalate has been stalking Pinterest, amassing a database of millions of images shared on the picture-collection hub, plus information on how often those images were shared, liked, or commented upon. The Curalate team, including a computer vision PhD and a dedicated in-house data scientist, recently did some intensive number crunching on that database, sampling 500,000 images and distilling from them half a dozen or so characteristics that seem to distinguish popular Pinterest images. Then, at our request, they identified one ideal picture that best combines these characteristics…” It is a photograph of Paula Deen’s recipe for cucumber, tomato, and onion salad.

“Archive is a documentary focused on the future of long-term digital storage, the history of the Internet and attempts to preserve its contents on a massive scale. Part one features Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and his colleagues Robert Miller, director of books, and Alexis Rossi, director of web collections. On a mission to create universal access to all knowledge, the Internet Archive’s staff have built the world’s largest online library, offering 10 petabytes of archived websites, books, movies, music, and television broadcasts.”

Can anything as internationally sourced as a smartphone ever be fair trade, ethical and environmentally friendly? For instance, Tin and tantalum from DR Congo that support great performance, not warfare. Is this possible?