Bbenzon
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. Intellectually, I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
MY BLOGS
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New Savanna
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 6822 )
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What’s Popular, and Why 2
The first time I blogged about this topic, back in April of 2011, “Sex, Power, and Purity in Kawajiri's Ninja Scroll” was the most popular post on the blog, wit... Read more
Posted on 22 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Citizen Science, with Teens, Skype, and Elephants
Reported in the NYTimes:The research, which appeared in April in the journal PLoS One, centered on whether elephants understood hand gestures from humans. Read more
Posted on 22 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Art for Change *
, a set by Sterneck on Flickr."Since the start of the Arab uprisings the Middle East has seen an unparalleled explosion of graffiti. Read more
Posted on 21 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Liberty Marina, Fair Weather and Foul: A Photo Essay
In the late 19th Century a canal was cut from the anthracite region in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania across northern New Jersey to New York Bay: the Morris... Read more
Posted on 20 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Through Duchamp and Beyond: Graffiti in the Promised Land?
Artists have been at odds with the gallery and museum scenes since Impressionism emerged in the late 19th Century. But the aesthetic potshot heard round the... Read more
Posted on 19 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Flexible Hubs and Behavioral Mode
From Medical Xpress:Now, research from Washington University in St. Louis offers new and compelling evidence that a well-connected core brain network based in... Read more
Posted on 16 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Araki and His Models
Almost two months ago I saw the Nobuyoshi Araki exhibit at Mana Contemporary, in the post-industrial hinterlands of Jersey City (and subsequently blogged about... Read more
Posted on 16 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Breaking Bad: Breaking Men from the Inside
By now zillions of atoms have be scattered on the internet to the end of explicating Breaking Bad. I've read some of that, but not much. Breaking Bad's Moral... Read more
Posted on 15 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Can the Chilltown Rebels Defeat the Empire So That They May Live Long and...
The photographs I’ve placed in this essay have two things in common: 1) I was standing in Jersey City when I took each of them, and 2) the Empire State Building... Read more
Posted on 15 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Description as Intellectual Craft in the Study of Literature
Here's another collection of posts, this time on description. You can download the PDF HERE. The abstract and an introduction are below. Read more
Posted on 14 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
“The Cat and the Moon” All up in One Another
This is a graduate school exercise that I once tarted up for a special Yeats issue of Some Journal. It was rejected by Some Journal. After which I too rejected... Read more
Posted on 14 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Humans and Dogs in Wuthering Heights
I first published this note on The Valve for December 30, 2009. It speaks to my recent posts on animals, especially in cartoons (e.g. Where'd the Animals Go?). Read more
Posted on 13 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through “Kubla Khan”
Prefatory NoteI first published this in The Valve on December 7, 2009. This piece tells the story of how, in the early 1970s, I came to abandon "traditional"... Read more
Posted on 13 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Oprah and the Sales Clerk
By now you've probably read three versions of the story. It is, after all, buzzing through the internets. As the story is related by The Independent:The US... Read more
Posted on 13 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Crispin on Pinker-on-Science
Over at Bookslut:Mary Midgley's Science and Poetry argues for a coming together of these two fields, without one trying to dominate the other. From the looks... Read more
Posted on 12 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Kind of Experience Can You Get in a Museum?
"THE quest for an experience has taken over giant portions of our lives."Writing in today's NYTimes, Judith H. Dobrzynski complains that museums are going too... Read more
Posted on 11 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Welcome to Eden: The Bergen Arches
The local name for the phenomenon, the Bergen Arches, is a bit well, odd. Yes, there are arches, five of them; two are bridges and three are short tunnels. Read more
Posted on 10 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bleg: Graffiti Epidemic?
“Are you getting good graffiti?” she asked. “Or bad graffiti?”The New York Times is reporting what sounds like a graffiti epidemic in Greenpoint,... Read more
Posted on 10 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Problematic of Description
We can frame the problematic of description with a remark David Bordwell made while discussing the state of film criticism. Following Monroe Beardsley, he... Read more
Posted on 09 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Epic FAIL
So much for this "striking symbol of hope and prosperity..."The original design obviously included specifications for an elevator big enough for a 20-storey... Read more
Posted on 09 August 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY