Perhaps you’ve read about the Indonesia Obama impersonator Ilham Anas. Reading about him reminded me of a post on Sociological Images pointing out our president’s strong resemblance to his white grandfather: “I tried a little experiment in class. I put up a photo of adult Obama and I had my students make a list of what characteristics made him identifiably Black, in their view. Every one of them put on their list his nose, lips, and hair, and several made comments about his ears or just that ‘the combination of all his facial features’ was ‘clearly’ Black.
Then I brought up the photo of Dunham next to the photo of Obama. It led to a really interesting discussion. Because my students think of Obama as Black, they saw all his features through that racial lens. It was obvious to them that he had ‘Black’ facial features. After viewing the photos next to one another, they talked about how the two men look very similar, but their facial features seem ‘clearly’ Black on one person and ‘clearly’ White on the other.” It’s an interesting discussion. I’m rooting for Radhika Desai on Top Chef because she’s my sister’s doppleganger and I once met a Chinese woman who had uncanny resemblance to my mother. Do you have a cross-racial lookalike?
Cell Phone Cameras Forever
It seems like everyone had the same thought I had watching President Obama’s speech at the Inaugural Youth Ball last night. Cell phone cameras!!! Whether or not it’s appropriate, (I see nothing wrong with wanting to document “history”) I found myself wondering if any technology might replace the camera now that it is more essential today than television — and constantly with us. I just can’t imagine a world without cameras, no sci-fi scenario where they are replaced with something else now that they are cheap and omnipresent.
We like to remember people and events as static images, framed in our minds. And we want to remember images from precisely the vantage point where we stood at that place that night. Even knowing a million other people captured the same thing and we can search for it on Flickr, on Tweetpic, on anything really — it’s not the same if we didn’t snap it.
What was distressing was no one put the cameras down. It wasn’t a sneaky thing…take one snapshot and it’s back in the bag. No, most of the people there seemed to be observing it all through their viewfinder, which is, oh my god, the most cliched of cliches in modern life.
But what kind of things don’t we photograph? You don’t take a photo of the bride when the priest is about to pronounce you married. You probably didn’t take a photo (you forgot to, didn’t think of it) during nearly all of your happiest memories. Why would you want to interrupt a blissful moment? Distancing yourself from the action taking place and denying yourself the opportunity to experience it with your full attention?
Image from VentureBeat via Ekstasis, who points out cameras are what lighters used to be. Clayton Cubbitt quotes A Clockwork Orange, “It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.”
It made me think of an Aldous Huxley essay:
The saddest sight I ever saw was in a Montmartre boite at about 5 o’clock of an autumn morning. At a table in the corner of a hall sat three young American girls, quite unattended, adverturously seeing life for themselves. In front of them, on the table, stood the regulation bottle of champagne; but for preference – perhaps on principle – they were sipping lemonade. The jazz band played on monotonously; the tired drummer nodded on his drums; the saxaphonist yawned into his saxaphone. In couples, in staggering groups, the guests departed. But grimly, indominably, in spite of their fatigue, in spite of the boredom which so clearly expressed itself on their charming and ingenous faces, the three young girls sat on. They were still there when I left at sunrise. What stories I reflected, they would tell when they got home again! And how envious they would make their untravelled friends. “Paris is just wonderful…”
Cameras remind us to feel something, when perhaps we aren’t as much as we would like to be.
“I don’t know if I would’ve supported Obama as much as I did if I realized his favorite art work was a Pre-Raphaelite painting” – Hrag Vartanian
Just when you thought you couldn’t love the President Elect more, you read he’s got a collection of Conan and Spiderman comics. He’s read all the Harry Potter books with Malia and Sasha dressed up as the Corpse Bride for Halloween. He joked about a belt buckle Michelle Obama wore, “The lithium crystals! Beam me up, Scotty!” (Metafilter is convinced he actually said the correct “dilithium crystals,” and the reporter heard it wrong.) Last month, he greeted Leonard Nimoy with the Vulcan hand signal. Henry Jenkins points out James T. Kirk was consciously modeled after JFK and the series was really the first to show a harmonious multiracial community, things a young Obama probably picked up on. There are rumors on this post at Tor about him attending Comic Con! Maybe he’ll host a Whitehouse Battlestar Galactica marathon. Still, our most science fiction president remains Ronald Reagan for his great contribution to preemptive measures against alien invasion.
National Review thinks Obama should reach across the aisle and appoint John McCain as Secretary of Defense. How’s that for a new America! I still think he’d make a great Secretary of Veterans Affairs, but better Max Cleland for that post.
It’s a little annoying how many journalists and bloggers gave up their tv critic/oceanography/etc beats to be armchair political strategists (meanwhile, guilty!) Which is why it might be a little quiet here for the next two days as I struggle not to add too much to the din. I’m also going to try not to do what Jack Shafer predicted will happen on Wednesday: “Giving a reporter (or a pundit) too much time to think about a historic event such as VE Day, the moon landing, the fall of Communism, or the release of Nelson Mandela is like entering him into a grandiosity competition to see who can squeeze the most poetry out of his keyboard. Suddenly, everybody with a notepad and a word processor thinks he’s Norman Mailer.” I’ll save the Obama, blah, blah, Obama, blah, blah historic, change me, me, me essay for my journal. In the meantime: this is the cutest photo of a politician ever!
“How many of us are seduced by the notion that in a room full of people supporting Barack, maybe we’ll meet guys who are at least a bit like Barack himself. Thoughtful, charming, a bit gangly, yet possessing the grace of a gazelle (a gazelle you want to text message with late into the night). I imagine the straight guys out there who are attending phone bank parties are really hoping to meet their Michelles. Sure, they want to call long lists of swing state-based agoraphobics, but isn’t the perk the possibility that they might meet beautiful, fiercely intelligent women with super-adorable underbites while doing so?” – Jessi Klein. Related: this image.
The photograph of Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan’s grave. It comes from a New Yorker slideshow. More about his life.
Why was the debate last night instantly forgettable? Why did neither candidate stray far from his respective stump speech? Because both candidates gain from a format designed to minimize gaffes and specifics. More from Lindsay Beyerstein: “If the debates are to add value, they must push the candidates out of their comfort zones and force them to engage answer questions that their handlers won’t let them tackle on the campaign trail. The best way to do that is to have debates on relatively narrow topics…This time around, we should have had debates exclusively devoted to energy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the economic crisis.”
I have nothing new to say about the debate last night (if you haven’t read it, Nate Silver has the best analysis,) but how about that dress Michelle Obama wore? It was a pattern one might normally associate with a “plastic covered couch”, with a strange black bow to the side, but she pulled it off. Then again, I guess opinions on her dress — like the debate itself — depend on your opinion of her husband. Ta-Nehisis Coates says, “It’s like she was dreamed up in ‘Black First Lady’ factory.” The White House/Black Market dress Michelle O wore on The View flew off the racks last spring, so I wouldn’t be surprised if an H+M knockoff (unless it was H+M?) finds its way in stores soon. Cindy McCain also looked great, but she’s so Dynasty. She should go back to the Rachel Maddow haircut and toughen up her look with some leather jackets and tall boots.
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