Immersion: "Knife. Knife."

Photographer Robbie Cooper made this video of kids' faces concentrating while they play video games. It's pretty freaky.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gu0iu0xwls&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

UncategorizedJack DysonComment
Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR radio documentary from 1981 (audio)

Xeni Jardin on BoingBoing put up this chilling post on the Jonestown massacre, thirty years ago this week. There are a few other posts by Xeni on the subject on the main BoingBoing page, all well worth reading.

Thirty years ago this week, nearly a thousand adults and children lost their lives in Jonestown, Guyana. The settlement was also known as "Peoples Temple Agricultural Project", and was formed by followers of the Reverend Jim Jones and Peoples Temple.

Today, some refer to the mass deaths as suicide, others murder. We still don't really know all the facts of what happened, or how, or exactly why. Autopsies were botched, records and forensic evidence were mis-handled, and many of the US government's documents remain classified, out of reach of FOIA requests.

But we do understand that most of the people who died on November 18, 1978 drank fruit-flavored Flavor-Aid laced with a variety of intoxicants and poisons: Valium, chloral hydrate, and cyanide. The victims included hundreds of children. Many of the corpses, including children, bore puncture wounds indicating they received lethal cyanide injections. Adults who resisted were injected with cyanide or killed by gushot.

Jones' followers had moved from their Northern California base to the South American jungle the year before. The promise: they'd build a utopian, agrarian, interracial community in Guyana, which had a Socialist goverment at the time. Jonestown was to be free from racism, sexism, and ageism, and founded on communist principles. Jones told his followers to think of him as a living incarnation of Jesus Christ, and God.

Over the past 30 years, many documentaries, books, and articles have been produced about Jones, Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. I'll be blogging pointers to some of them today.

I want to start with the one I've returned to again and again -- a radio documentary from 1981 that for me, also defines what radio journalism can achieve. "Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown," was co-written by my NPR colleague Noah Adams. Here's a snip from the original introduction on npr.org:

In the months preceding the tragedy, Jim Jones and his People’s Temple followers recorded their tho ughts, their problems and their aspirations. The hundreds of hours of audio tape form the basis of [this] NPR documentary (...) written by James Reston, Jr and Noah Adams, and produced by Deborah Amos. It was based on the tapes Reston acquired under the Freedom of Information Act, and won most major broadcast awards including the Dupont Col umbia Award, the National Headliner Award and the Prix Italia.

Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown recaptures the final months for the People’s Temple cult. After problems arose for the group in San Francisco, they moved to the South American jungle during the 1970's. In 1978, reports of an increasingly hostile and controlling atmosphere by Jones led to a Congressional fact-finding mission into the cult. As the group, led by Rep. Leo J. Ryan (D-Calif.), was preparing to leave they were ambushed. Ryan, three American journalists and a Peoples Temple defector were killed. A dozen other people were injured. The incident was just hours prior to the deaths of the cult members.

Here's the web page for Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown, with audio links. Here is the direct *.ram link for the complete 90 minute program (requires Real Audio). The website for this related NPR feature, produced in 2003, also includes 3 direct audio urls for "Father Cares," broken into 45 minute chunks (requires Real Audio or Windows Media Player). Another powerful, related NPR piece: Noah Adams talks with Deborah Layton, author of Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple.

UncategorizedJack Dyson Comment
Crazy French Seventies watches

Found this terrific photoset on Wired, with the following description:

Unless you're a deeply geeky watch aficionado, a frequent patron of Barney's or a protesting student during the French labor strikes of the mid-1970s, then you've probably never heard of Lip. Time to get educated. Thirty-five years ago the European watch manufacturer pioneered some of the geekiest tech and most innovative design ever found in a timepiece. But all was not to be well for Lip. A volatile political and labor climate in France shattered the 141-year-old company and led to it being closed for nearly 15 years.

After numerous false starts, Lip was jump-started back to existence in the 1990s. Since then the watchmaker has enjoyed a quiet resurgence by returning to its nerdy roots and hiring back many of the original designers of these timepieces. These reissued watches are both technically and physically identical to their DeGaulle-era counterparts.

This above watch was originally conceived in 1973 by Roger Tallon, designer of the TGV high-speed train, the Lip 200 "Dark Master" set the design standard that all Lip watches would follow for the next 30 years.

UncategorizedJack DysonComment
Seventh severed foot found off coast...

...this from the Seattle Times. Yuk.

RICHMOND, British Columbia —
Another human foot has washed up on British Columbia's south coast, the seventh to be found on the province's beaches since August 2007.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constable Annie Linteau confirmed that human remains were inside a New Balance running shoe spotted Tuesday afternoon.

"My first reaction was this was a small size, maybe a woman's shoe," said Ken Johnston, who fished the shoe out of the Fraser River off Richmond after his wife spotted it while walking their dog.

One right-foot New Balance running shoe - the only one belonging to a woman - has been found since the first foot was located on Jedidiah Island in Georgia Strait on Aug. 20, 2007. That shoe turned up May 22 on Kirkland Island in the Fraser River, not far from the site of Tuesday's discovery.

All the other feet were found at several sites on or near Georgia Strait, including remains in a shoe found in August in Pysht, Wash., about 30 miles west of Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula.

Police have determined that two of the shoes - found Feb. 8 on Valdez Island and June 16 off Richmond - are a match.

DNA testing linked one foot to a depressed man who disappeared in 2007 but the other remains have not been identified.

Authorities say it appears that all of the feet separated naturally from bodies as they decomposed in the water.

UncategorizedJack DysonComment
Theo Jansen - kinetic sculptor

That heart (previous post) reminds me of Theo Jansen. I first saw him on YouTube a while ago and have been obsessed ever since. He's quite simply the most amazing artist, engaging on every level. This film is a lecture he gave to TED in March 2007. Wish I'd been there, I'd love to see one of his machines working in real life - best of all, they're all about mechanics, not computer chips.

Here's his bio from the TED website:
Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who builds walking kinetic sculptures that he calls a new form of life. His "Strandbeests" walk the coastline of Holland, feeding on wind and fleeing from water.

Why you should listen to him:

Dutch artist Theo Jansen has been working for 16 years to create sculptures that move on their own in eerily lifelike ways. Each generation of his "Strandbeests" is subject to the forces of evolution, with successful forms moving forward into new designs. Jansen's vision and long-term commitment to his wooden menagerie is as fascinating to observe as the beasts themselves.

His newest creatures walk without assistance on the beaches of Holland, powered by wind, captured by gossamer wings that flap and pump air into old lemonade bottles that in turn power the creatures' many plastic spindly legs. The walking sculptures look alive as they move, each leg articulating in such a way that the body is steady and level. They even incorporate primitive logic gates that are used to reverse the machine’s direction if it senses dangerous water or loose sand where it might get stuck.

-

Jansen's website is well worth a visit. There are other videos and images on it that do a far better job than I could do at explaining the movement of his machines. I have a feeling he has done some sound sculptures in Lancashire too...

UncategorizedJack DysonComment
Ads from comic books

I AM CHARLES ATLAS!
From Boingboing: Here's a gallery of great old ads from comic books. The companies that advertised their shoddy, misrepresented products to gullible children should be commended for teaching the youth of America that there were people out there ready to lie to them in order to get their hard earned, paper route dollars.

The new "Testimonials" section containing "stories of sadness sung by the stung" looks promising. Here's one:

A neighbor and I sent away for the "Monster Ghost".
"Make him obey your commands even when you are secretly hiding as far as 100 feet away"

"A real terror, giant sized---" which, when it arrived, turned out to be...

A white balloon
A white garbage bag
Two glow in the dark circles
A string.

SUPERMARKETING: ADS FROM THE COMIC BOOKS

UncategorizedJack DysonComment
Dad's biog

He's the coolest person I know. I googled my Dad and found this:

John Dyson is a "sea-journeyman" writer whose books and articles have covered a wide range of subjects. Mostly they concern adventure under sail, history, science, technology and lifestyle.

Sailing the high seas and roving the world on assignment, John has made remarkable voyages and journeys. He roamed much of the Pacific in South-Sea trading ketches and cockroach-infested copra cutters. His breadth of experience in both the polar regions is probably unrivalled in journalism. He worked in a British trawler fishing Arctic waters in winter and has voyaged in icebreakers, square-riggers, liners, tramps, tankers and warships. He has a coastal yacht-master's ticket, served as mate (ie, chief officer) in a British sail-training ketch, and now sails his own little ketch in English waters, often single-handed.

As one of Reader's Digest's top investigative writers, John has covered a wide variety of topical stories from genetic engineering and the drug-resistant Tb boiled out of Russian jails to the need for DDT to fight malaria and Uganda's dramatically successful stand against HIV/Aids. His documentary books and sea-adventure novels have been widely reviewed. One book, acclaimed by The New York Times, was an account of the sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand. His last two books about Columbus have together sold more than half a million copies in sixteen countries. His NBC Special, Treasure at the South Pole, won an award for best TV documentary on the environment.

John Dyson is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in London. He has lectured to that Society and also to the Explorers' Club in New York and to a number of U.S. corporations. He and his wife Kate, who runs a successful antique shop in London, have four children aged between 32 and 22. They live in a large old house on the banks of the River Thames. It was once owned by a French spy who, in 1805, was assassinated on the stairs by an agent of Napoleon Bonaparte.

UncategorizedJack DysonComment
Facial Fuzz

Ooh I'm in this too. Hilarious. I'd forgotten about it but then looking for the NHS bit (below) I remembered Jonathan interviewing me for this:

Lewis is in it too, about 4.26 in. His beard is beautiful.

UncategorizedJack DysonComment
Classic Instruction Manuals

When we first started Rubbish I always wanted to have a gents' section in it that would have real Boys Own stuff. Cutaway diagrams, maps, all that. There's an inimitable style to informative and instructional design, and... ah, it's all too easy to pontificate on it. Suffice to say, I love it. Here's a photo essay from Wired US.

UncategorizedJack DysonComment