SilverJacket

The Professionals

In researching for an article I assigned recently, I happened across an intimidating tag team of characters moonlighting as the faculty of The Southwest Finland Institute for Art, Craft and Design. Digging up some background info (via reconnaissance, surveillance, downloading of CVs) I've identified the all-stars from the troupe and assembled their profiles below.

THE THUGS

Esa Virko
Esa "Wild Bill" Virko, also known as "The Chair Wrangler of the North," demonstrates his perfected headlock technique on an unruly specimen. He's the reason the department no longer invests in Aerons.

Eero Juntilla
Eero Juntilla (translation: "Euro Giantilla") prepares to make kindling so that he might roast a wild boar to tide him over until the departmental tea.

Anne-Maj Laine
You see that shit she's holding? That's a pegleg. A fucking pirate's leg! Cross her and suffer the same face-cracking and subsequent skull-pegging that Cap'n Jack Rackham suffered from his own appendage before making his generous donation in kind to the school.

THE STRATEGISTS

Seppo Ikävalko
"The Baron," exuding stately pride over all that he surveys, descends from a long, esteemed line of Nordic Appalachians.

Marjatta Nurmikari-Berry
"The Matriarch." Through rigorous exercise, she keeps her spine so straight she will slip it out and harpoon you with it at the drop of a book. That book, incidentally, will not be one of the wisdom-infusing tomes on her head. They are attached.

Keijo Kinnunen
"The Thinker." Do not interupt him! He's busy thinking.

SPECIAL OPS

Kristian von Pfaler
West Side Choppers has nothing on this dude, who hand-crafts the fastest Vespas in Finland out of other Vespas and human teeth. Dare him to turn around and risk being blinded by "badditude" bejeweled onto the ass of his leather slacks.

Esa Kaven
"The Flash." He actually does not run very quickly, but do not try to serve him, for he will throw down  cardboard and windmill your legs out from under you faster than you can say "The Fla." Ghetto Blaster not included.

Paula Mattsson
Avoid messing with, or looking directly at, Paula, whose implanted video screen will enslave your mind ALMOST as fast as her ego-withering glare. (Tweak the right knob, though, and guess what? Endless Tubby Custard!)

Seeing Double

Two magazines, one day's mail.
Two tales of drugs, one vision.

Top:
New York, January 8 2007
pages 24-25
[My Adventures in Psychopharmacology]

Bottom:
Wired, January 2007
pages 130-131
[The Righteous Fury of Dick Pound]

Guts

Last week in New York I went to BODIES...The Exhibition, one of those human cadaver plastination exhibits derived from Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds. Among my favorite stops on the anatomical tour was the last--the body of work comprising glimpses of visitors' psychological anatomies. At a table with chairs sat big binders filled with white pages inviting comment. Rather than add to the compendium, I sat and read. In just that one day, hundreds of people had shared their inner thoughts on the thoughtless innards they'd witnessed.

A few notes on the exhibition: most bodies displayed were male. One room featured fetuses and infants in various stages of development, including one still housed in its mother, revealed by way of cutaway. The bodies all come from China, some donated but most unclaimed.

Some comments raised political or ethical concerns. Should people be displayed after death without consent? Should female bodies have been used to illustrate more than just sexual reproduction (or, in one case, obesity)?

Some comments were emotional. One woman wrote that she had had an abortion and became choked up when she reached the fetus room. She requested that all women considering abortion visit the exhibit.

And, unsurprisingly, many comments were inane. "Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door." "Maiden Rulez." "Chinks are dumb and have small dicks."

But below are four of my favorites.

To many wangs. [Double entendre?]
To many dead baby's.

I should not have seen this.
Sorry.
Dave

Some of it looked like chicken.
mmmmm  lol

It was cool and interesting but it made me sick and dizzy and I almost cried.
Call me.
[phone number redacted]

Robots Are People Too

Another thought on Natalie Angier's exegesis of cuteness. (Recall: "The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby...")

The anthropomorphism of robots is especially revealing of our instincts and cognition. Eight years ago I went to a talk titled  "Emergent, Situated, and Embodied: alternative AI and the aesthetics of behavior." (I got a woody from the title alone. I know, I'm dork.) Here's what I wrote about it afterward:

Open up and say "Derrrrr."

It's not often that the mere title of a piece of art strikes me enough that I jot it down verbatim on the back of the gallery guide for later examination. Perhaps not ever. Until last week. The photograph bearing the striking title struck me as well, viscerally promoting its dark irony. But of course neither struck me as hard as a more tangible object appears to have struck the subject of the portrait in question.

Machines of all Times

Recently Automobile Magazine posted their "highly subjective" list of the 100 Coolest Cars. Necessarily, there's a lot to like and a lot to dislike about the list. I'm finicky about cars and car design, so I could nitpick all day. But I'll keep myself to two brief comments.

Number 10 is the Jaguar E-Type. Sure, it's a cool car, but I would offer SO MUCH MORE props if I saw someone roll through in a an E-Type/hearse splice like the one in "Harold and Maude."

And, secondly, where was the DeLorean?

As a sidenote, I must point out that there's been a DeLorean parked at a house on my block at least since I moved here a year ago. But it's always under cover so I never knew what it was. That is, until my friend Natalie pointed it out. "You know that's a DeLorean, right?" Holy crap.

Ligers, Tigons, and Genomes, Oh My!

Legendary physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson wrote recently in Technology Review about evolution. Based on a 2004 article by microbiologist Carl Woese, he refers to a pre-Darwinian era as the age before species, when organisms traded genes freely. According to Dyson, genetic evolution will soon piggyback on cultural evolution, leading to a post-Darwinian era that will resemble the pre-Darwinian era in one important way: the prominence of horizontal gene transfer. As culture makes the distribution of ideas (in particular those underpinning genetic engineering) more fluid, biology will follow. Species will no longer exist, as ligers and tigons and tomacco-ti-ligers rule the earth and reproduce in orgiastic laboratory love puddles. Kids can even get in on the action (no not that way):