Mr. Joel

Something cool from the Natural History Museum that I did not post last time:

This piece of cloth is the only one of its kind in the world. It is woven from the silk collected from one million golden orb spiders on the island of Madagascar. That’s right. Spider silk. The project was begun by Simon Peers after he read about a device Jacob Paul Camboué invented in the nineteenth century for milking spiders. Now, what I wonder is why Camboué felt that spider silk was the way to go in textile creation. He created a set of bed hanging shown at the Paris Exposition in 1898. I remain unsure that the immense effort it took to collect the silk justified the 19th century demand but there you go. Simon Peters and his associate Nicholas Godley created this cloth with dozens of spider handlers as well as volunteers who would collect wild spiders to be milked (the spiders were returned unharmed to the wild after their silk was stolen). While Camboué went into full textile production Peers and Godley created this cloth mostly to prove it cold be done.

Spider silk is an amazing substance that is very hard to create artificially. The silk is produced as a protein liquid that is extruded into a solid by the spider. Which is totally awesome. The silk has a strength similar to steel or kevlar. Which means that this tablecloth is bulletproof. Imagine the golden super suit you could make out of this stuff. (However, the force of the bullet would still deal a deadly impact. All your bits would be in the same place though.) Scientists have been trying to make spider silk artificially for some time now, but inserting the silk making genes into bacteria and cows and goats. But it hasn’t really worked out as of yet. Large scale spider farming is also something of a pipe dream. Unlike silkworms spiders have a tendency to eat each other when they are kept in close captivity. I hope science gets it together though. I want the soldiers and tanks of the future to be outfitted with golden spider armor. Just think of how fantastic they would look.

Now we know what Spiderman will be doing in his old age. Knitting spider armor from his web sacs (if you are in the ‘he produces his own web school’ that is). He could make all kinds of money supplying armor to super secret special ops teams. Even if he doesn’t produce his own, he would be rolling in it if he started producing web commercially.

Apologies for the long silence. I was swallowed up by a depressing level of stress and art. Although I still have some time before it is all over, I found myself with a little time on my hands so I thought I would share something special with you: sex.

Isabella Rossellini (you will know her as either Ingrid Bergman’s daughter or Jack’s first wife on 30 Rock, depending on your level of culture) has made several very short shorts (three minutes tops, with half of the time devoted to the credits) about the sex-life of animals. She has titled her little creation Green Porno. The first season chronicles the sex life of insects and the second has been discussing the procreation of sea creatures. The narration is marvelously dry and sets extremely sparse. The props are all assembled from cut paper, and grow in complexity as the show goes on. I find them wildly entertaining and informative. It turns out that a classy lady in a black leotard is exactly the right person to teach me about limpet copulation. As if we didn’t know that already.

Please watch more videos at the Sundance Channel. They are marvelous.

From Intelligent Life a sister publication of The Economist:

The Age of Mass Intelligence by John Parker, winter 2008

“Russell Southwood is queuing outside his local cinema in south London, listening to his iPod. Hip-hop and jazz, as usual. What is less usual is what he is queuing up for: not a film but a live transmission of this season’s opening night from the Royal Opera House. “I like hip-hop and opera,” he says. “Not a big deal.”

That’s increasingly true. Every other Saturday, Darren Henley is at the Priestfield football ground cheering on his beloved Gillingham. In the evening, he goes to a concert by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic or the London Symphony Orchestra, because he is also the boss of Classic FM, a radio station that sponsors those orchestras.

Cultural incongruities are popping up everywhere. When the Guardian, which sponsors the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, picked ten visitors to interview, one turned out to be a check-out clerk at Tesco who saved all his money during the year so he could go to the festival for his holiday. He was far from the most unlikely visitor who might have been found. High-ranking officers from the SAS (Special Air Service), Britain’s crack covert-operations regiment–who have to remain anonymous–have been known to spend their holidays each year travelling from their base at Hereford to Hay for lectures on Wordsworth and Darwin.

…”

Read the rest here.

The article discusses the “wising up” of the population. It is of a similar mindset to my post on television, but with an eye to ‘high’ culture, more research, and a better vocabulary. While it concentrates on the British consuming public, The Economist being a UK publication, there are several examples from US institutions (of particular interest to me, as US resident). I was especially heartened to read about the growing audience for simulcast Met Opera productions, as well as to read about two of my favorite institutions for smarty pants QI and The School of Life (where I dream of working someday).

It does not surprise me that there seems to be a correlation between education level and capacity for heterogeneous information consumption (that is an enjoyment of HBO’s production of Angels in America as well as NBC’s American Gladiators), as, in my experience, advanced education is as much about teaching the student how to learn as what to learn. And teaching how to learn is much more important than recitation of facts. A capable, inquisitive mind can perpetuate itself and will fills its interests with a diversity of information. It is much like that old adage about giving someone a fish and teaching that person to fish. Also, knowing how to learn is an ever more important skill. With technology changing as fast as it does it is now impossible to sit down and read the whole manual for a new computer before turning the thing on. You can’t understand the totality before you start, you simply have to flip the switch and learn how it works as you go.

I read an article this summer, I cannot say where from  as I stumbled upon it, read it and then stumbled out again so you will just have to trust me on this, about how more audiobooks are being produced than ever before. Without the need to invest in tapes, CDs, or any other kind of physical storage the cost of production has dropped considerably. Producing a work that would have been prohibitively long, the unabridged ‘Ulysses’ comes to mind, or something for a niche market is no longer out of reach. More and more books are being read and listened to every year. On November 20th the EU launched an online library, Europeana, containing images of paintings, photos, maps, manuscripts, and many other things from over 1,000 libraries across Europe. Upon its launch the site received 10 million hits an hour, crashing the site and closing it for a technical refit and a doubling of the number of servers. More cultural information is being made available to more people than ever before and more people are interested. Its not the end of ‘high’ culture after all, just the end of its restriction.

Give me tits and politicians.
Give me death and demolition.
Give me glamour and sedition.
Television.
-okgo

Here at school it’s not so bad, with only the major networks I am limited to 30 Rock, House, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report. At home it’s worse. I have millions of channels at my disposal. I can watch Mad Men, Mythbuster, Dirty Jobs, Generation Kill, Big Love, and Project Runway. And that’s just what’s airing. Let us not forget the shows from abroad that I’m watching on the internet, QI, Mock the Week, Nevermind the Buzzcocks, That Mitchell and Webb Look, and Kingdom, or the shows that I have compiled on DVD for repeat viewing, West Wing, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Jeeves and Wooster, Firefly, and Blackadder.

Now you might say to me, after slogging through that mass of TV titles, “That’s not a bad lot, your taste in televised entertainment it much better than most. Highbrow even.” and I would reply, “That’s very kind, but it’s not really what has been bothering me. It’s the sheer number of them. I don’t even want to go back and count them. No, don’t do it and tell me the answer. No. Don’t I’ll just be sad. And it get worse. It’s how easily I take to TV trivia. It’s not knowing all about Monty Python that bothers me, one should know about such illustrious comedy history, it’s knowing how many shows Janel Moloney and Lisa Edelstein have both appeared in. Knowing how many movies Robert Sean Leonard has appeared in that were adapted from plays, that Rachel Griffiths is from Australia, was in My Best Friends Wedding and now can be seen in Bothers and Sisters. I don’t even watch that show. And don’t get me started on the combined career output of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. That’s where it gets scary. I don’t consider myself obsessed, but I must be. This cannot be a passing fancy. A glancing interest does not get this intense. Surely I must be mad.”

By this point in my response you must be looking just over my head or beyond my shoulder, hoping to see someone you knew who you could run off an great so you could avoid talking to the crazy person any longer. I don’t blame you, it’s what I would be doing if I could somehow get outside of my own mind. I am more than a little embarrassed to admit how much I would rather watch TV than read a book or learn to play the guitar. It saddens me that I am more interested in knowing whose birthday it on the 24th of August, 1957 than brush up on my German. Especially because, and here is my main point, I cannot quite bring myself to believe that television’s output is as important and valid as music or film, both of which solidly inhabit the worlds of art and entertainment. TV does not.

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Remember Chuck Jones?