Archives for May 2008
Fruit and Colors
This week the New York Times wrote about miracle fruit, the West Africa berry thats been dazzling foodies by radically altering their taste buds. It’s set to revolutionize dieting (although we’ve heard that one before,) but for now it’s a cool party trick.
After eating a berry, bitter and sour foods taste sweet. Cheeses, Brussels sprouts, mustard, vinegars, pickles, dark beers all tasted chocolate-y or fruity to the “40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night.” Even Tabasco sauce tasted like “doughnut glaze.”
The language “under the influence” is intentional. Many have compared the experience to tripping. But there’s something so darned virginal about it. The hippies had acid, Montmartre had absinthe. Making food taste radically different is awesome, but it isn’t transgressive. No one’s ever going to paint Starry Night or write Naked Lunch after trying it. Plus, there’s no known danger in taking it — it’s a fruit after all.
Jacob Grier, food blogger, magician, and think tanker, has written quite a lot about miracle fruit over the past few years. There’s more at the blog where he contributes, EatFoo. One EatFoo writers says, “If you have the choice, go for the magic mushrooms, but otherwise miracle fruit is one of the weirdest food-induced experiences one can have. It’s like some weird new experiment from Willy Wonka’s factory, only Willy Wonka is some shady horticulturist from Fort Lauderdale known to the world only through his cryptic messages on obscure gardening blogs. But he came through.” (The “shady horticulturist” is Curtis Mozie, who charges $1 per fruit.)
What’s most really amazing about it, is our sense of taste is so influenced by visual stimulus. Most of us have a little bit of synesthesia. John Stosell once had his 20/20 interns take a blind taste test, arranged by Brian Wansink, author of the book Mindless Eating. Wansink, a Cornell food science professor, asked them which of two cups of yoghurt “had more strawberry.” Everyone answered one or the other.
It turns out it was vanilla yoghurt mixed with chocolate syrup of varying concentrations. Nobody noticed it wasn’t “strawberry” at all (well, partly because out unnatural “fruit” flavors are pretty arbitrary.)
Around the same time I was reading the article on miracle fruit, I was reviewing some of my delicio.us bookmarks on color theory. Every stoner has wondered, “is my orange, your blue?” But few people realize the answer — sort of — exists. People have a varying number of color-sensitive cones in the human retina, yet the brain tends to perceive them all the same way. Medical Optics researchers viewed the cones the pick up specific colors and found for the tests individuals, they all asked similarly depending on the color they were given to look at. (Of course, if you’re stoned you can debate whether this is the chicken or the egg for eternity.)
This isn’t a total digression from miracle fruit. Another experiment from the same researchers, involved several several people wearing colored contacts. After a little while adjusting, they reported they were seeing colors normally, as their eyes had adjusted. But researchers found that wasn’t the case. Under scrutiny, “even when not wearing the contacts, they all began to select a pure yellow that was a different wavelength than they had before wearing the contacts.” The researcher explained, “Over time, we were able to shift their natural perception of yellow in one direction, and then the other…This is direct evidence for an internal, automatic calibrator of color perception. These experiments show that color is defined by our experience in the world, and since we all share the same world, we arrive at the same definition of colors.”
So, I wonder if it’s not that the effect of miracle fruit really wears off after an hour, so much as our perception adjusts? I’d love to see a scientific study of it. In any case, I’m really astonished that it exists and works…. and can’t wait to try it myself.
- Christopher Williams, Untitled 2000
- John Baldessari, Six Colorful Inside Jobs
- Jim Dine, The Studio
- Dan Flavin, Untitled 1987
These images are taken from MoMA’s exhibit, Color Chart: Reinventing Color from 1950 to Today. It closed, but you can buy the really beautiful book.
Did the pro-anas moved to Second Life? There’s a creepy Flickr group for “thinspiration” avatars.
Huntington Hartford II died last week at 97 (via.) NYT revisits his life history squandering his family’s A&P supermarket fortune, starting with The Huntington Hartford Museum. The architecture critic called it, “a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops.” (More on the history of that building here. It closed after 5 years, being home to only “unremarkable” art.) Another venture gone pear-shaped: Paradise Island, his makeover of an island in the Bahamas. “Advisers persuaded him to stop short of exotic attractions like chariot races, but, overextended and unable to get a gambling license, he wound up losing an estimated $25 million to $30 million.” Toward the end of his life, he declared bankruptcy — while still the beneficiary of a trust fund yielding more than $500,000 a year. “To most Americans the worst errors are financial, and in that respect I have been Horatio Alger in reverse,” he wrote in Esquire in 1968. Other failed ventures: a handwriting institute, a modeling agency and stage adaptation of ‘Jane Eyre.’ He inherited an estimated $90 million and lost an estimated $80 million of it.” Well, he had one modest accomplishment: Peter Owen, publisher of my favorite mid-century author — did publish his book.
“[The] team created a computer model that uses picture elements such as angles and brightness to predict the neural activity elicited by a novel black-and-white photograph. Then the researchers scanned subjects while showing them new snapshots. Most of the time Kay’s model could single out which image the subject was viewing.” - Scientific American. The researcher believes his algorithm might perform “at least some degree of [image] reconstruction” based on fMRI data.
Here’s a collection of “Machinalia,” Boris Artzybasheff’s anthropomorphic Soviet retro-futurist illustrations.
If you are in NYC, you don’t want to miss Dr. Steven Kurtz at Eyebeam. His charges were dismissed this month. “Strange Culture,” Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film about his life, is on DVD.
Vera Farmiga stars in a new movie about apotemnophilia, “Quid Pro Quo.” (via.) Earlier today I was reading Errol Morris’ Wikipedia. It turns out Vernon, Florida was to be about how some residents practiced a morbid form of insurance fraud where they deliberately amputated a limb in order to collect the insurance. “In the hierarchy of nubbiedom, the supremely rewarding self-sacrifice was the loss of a right leg and a left arm, because… ‘afterward, you could still write your name and still have a foot to press the gas pedal of your Cadillac.’” The film doesn’t even make mention of the towns nickname, “Nub City,” as Morris got death threats from residents fearing they’d be exposed. Hey…wait a second…did Quid Pro Quo scoop Morris’ next project? Nope, it’s just more of that wannabe business, explored before
The President Isn’t Your Boss
[Despite] his doubts about the “intelligence” he had been provided, despite the fact that he spent days “trimming the garbage” from Vice President Cheney’s “evidence” of Iraq’s weapons programs and its ties to Al Qaeda, Powell went ahead and shilled for the liars anyway. Why did he not threaten to expose the whole thing publicly? Because, as he has said, to do so would have betrayed the ethic of the loyal soldier he believed himself to be.
What kind of culture defines “maturity” as the time when young men and women sacrifice principle to prudence, when they pledge allegiance to the boss in the name of self-promotion and “realism”? What kind of culture defines adulthood as the moment when the self goes underground? One answer might be a military one. The problem is that while unthinking loyalty to one’s commanding officer may be necessary in war, it is disastrous outside of it. Why? Because loyalty, by definition, qualifies individualism, discouraging the expression of individual opinion, recasting honesty as a type of betrayal. Because loyalty to power, rather than to what one believes to be true or right, is fatally undemocratic, and can lead to the most horrendous abuses. Powell’s excuse—that he did not want to betray the ethic of the loyal soldier—was precisely the one used by the defendants at Nuremberg, and if you say that the analogy is a reckless one, that Colin Powell is no Rudolf Hess but a generally decent man—an A student, a team player, a loyal employee, a good soldier—I’ll agree, and say only this: God save us from men and women like him, for they will do almost anything in the name of “loyalty.” Something to consider, perhaps, as the nation contemplates electing to the presidency John McCain, a member of our warrior class for whom loyalty constitutes the highest possible virtue.
That’s Mark Slouka in an outstanding essay in this month’s Harper’s, “Democracy and deference.” You can read the whole thing online.
At a White House reception a couple of years ago, President George Bush asked Senator-elect Jim Webb how things were going for his son, a Marine serving in Iraq. “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Webb replied. “I didn’t ask you that,” the president shot back. “I asked you how your boy was doing.”
Webb, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, had not only risked his own life in the service of his country but now had a child in harm’s way, serving in an ill-conceived and criminally mismanaged war sold to the nation under false pretenses by the man standing in front of him. One might expect this second man to be nice. To show a modicum of respect. Should he fall short of this, one could at least take comfort in the certainty that the American people would hold him accountable for his rudeness and presumption.
Which is precisely what many of them did—they held Jim Webb accountable. “I’m surprised and offended by Jim Webb,” declared Stephen Hess, a professor at George Washington University, in a New York Times article entitled “A Breach of Manners Sets a Tough Town Atwitter.” … Letitia Baldrige, the “doyenne of Washington manners,” termed the whole thing “a sad exchange.” Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners, made the point that “even discussions of war and life and death did not justify suspending the rules,” then declined to comment on l’affaire Webb-Bush, saying, “It would be rude of me to declare an individual rude.”
But it was left to Kate Zernike, the author of the Times article, to place the cherry atop this shameful confection in the form of a seemingly offhand parenthetical: “(On criticizing the president in his own house, Ms. Baldrige quotes the French: ça ne se fait pas—‘it is not done.’)”
To which one might reply, in the parlance of my native town: Why the fuck not? Répétez après moi: It ain’t the man’s house. We’re letting him borrow it for a time. And he should behave accordingly—that is, as one cognizant of the honor bestowed upon him—or risk being evicted by the people in favor of a more suitable tenant.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The outrage over the Webb-Bush exchange was not really about decorum. It was about daring to stand up to the boss. Rudeness? Stop. This is America. We’re rude to one another more or less continually. We make mincemeat of one another on television, fiberoptically flame one another to a crisp, blog ourselves bloody. No, rudeness, as deplorable as it is, is not the point here, particularly as Webb, judged by any reasonable standard, wasn’t rude at all.
Our president?
Slouka blames America’s “boss culture.” On every office TV program there’s a humorless boss, who “will scowl or humiliate you…because he can, because he’s the boss. And you’ll keep your mouth shut and look contrite, even if you’ve done nothing wrong . . . because, well, because he’s the boss. Because he’s above you. Because he makes more money than you. Because—admit it—he’s more than you.”
Gene Healy’s new book The Cult of the Presidency examines imperial presidency as something that goes against our Constitution. And Jerry Brito, writing about Barack Obama made an interesting point: we don’t have a head of state. While the UK has a Queen to serve as the face of the nation, and the Prime Minister to do the dirty work, our President serves both roles. “I think one reason why some of us who are ideologically opposed to Barak Obama are nevertheless drawn to him is because we’d like to see him in the role of head of state,” he writes.
Slouka concurs. During the Prime Minister’s Questions, every Prime Minister sweats under pressure, answering tough questions from the audience. And think about it, 10 Downing Street is just a row house, not some massive estate. Souka explains, “My wife, whose family hails in part from England, has a theory: unlike us, the Brits don’t confuse their royalty with their civil servants, because they have both, clearly labeled.”
An audience member — Maria Hutchings, a homemaker –once demanded Prime Minister Blair apologize for going to war. She responded to his answer with “That’s rubbish, Tony.” Slouka writes, “Now recall that steel tycoon who, upon accidentally addressing the president as ‘Mr. Truman’ rather than ‘Mr. President,’ was never able to forgive himself for the breach of etiquette. Which one is the citizen, and which the subject?”
Previously: Boris Johnson Isn’t London’s New Bicycle
The Wall Stree Journal reviews Jacob Collins, proclaiming, “Classical Realism: Antidote to Novely Art.’” Clement Greenberg wrote that “the very best painting, the major painting, of our age is almost exclusively abstract.” But we’ve seen a lot of it. Another great example: the MFA’s exquisite Antonio Lopez Garcia show.
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