Michael Wesch Explains Everything

Michael Wesch, who is the Kansas State professor of anthropology who created the well-known video, "A Vision of Students Today," gave a talk recently at the Library of Congress. It's an anthropologist's take on the phenomenon of YouTube and Web 2.0, and what it means for rethinking, as he says, our conception of copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, and ourselves.

It's long (55 minutes), but excellent. Bless his heart, he has provided an index, so you can cut to the chase, but the entire thing is "the chase," so I suggest you watch the entire thing. Wesch, an academic who would have, in the old days, been happy to reach 200 people with his message, has a world-wide audience. The very idea that a professor of anthropology has become a star via self-publishing on the internet is testimony to what he and his students are studying. 

Enjoy.

The Art of the Car Display

Los Angeles is the original car-centric culture, and we have brought the art of the car display to a highly refined level. Above is an early example, at the house of movie star Frederick March's Bel Air mansion (found on image-archaeology.com, a wonderful repository of post cards, matchbook covers, and other SoCal ephemera). Perhaps it is this convergence of auto culture and Hollywood culture that created the phenomenon. Touring the well-manicured homes of the stars, might Angelinos have longed to create a display of their own?

I still have a small treasure of a book, Charles Jenks's "Daydream Houses of Los Angeles," in which he tours LA residential neighborhoods and waxes acidic with pithy captions like, "Debbie Reynolds Egyptoid with Topiary Petrol Pumps and Car Display." Love it.

Here is a north-of-San-Vicente version. Less is more (less is a bore?).

Not to be confused with cars (in this case, trucks) parked ON the lawn. Every neighborhood has one of these households....

But you don't have to be rich to engage in the art, especially if you can get your neighbor to collaborate by paving over the yard between the houses. Muscle cars like caterpillars in their pupae, waiting (but for ample amounts of money and elbow grease) to be reborn.