Welcome to a special web video edition of Around the Web. Its better than vitamin fortified coffee!
Comics! Games! Anthropology! turned up a treasure trove of cool Flash animations available on the YouTube channel QualiaSoup. I’m envious over the enticing flow of words and pictures in these videos and plan on emailing my Gen Anth class this video on evolution today, though this one bellow which C!G!A! picked out is pretty sweet too.
Have you jumped on the NextMedia bandwagon yet? The CGI generated Taiwanese tabloid was profiled in Wired for what they appropriately label “cartooning the news.” Part of the appeal for an American audience is the cartoony, surreal imagery juxtaposed with what “we” might consider ordinary current events. Whatever your politics you probably didn’t imagine Sarah Palin with a bare midriff standing on top of a moving train shooting a machine gun into the air. Or maybe you did? Keep your eyes peeled for visual puns (choking the chicken, bellow) or in this clip about the WSJ/ NYT feud, post-modern pop culture references to West Side Story.
This next video is brought to you by An Anthropologist Goes Techno. It should be said that the author of this video is hewing much closer to what an anthropologist would consider to be popular culture and mass media, especially as our discipline disposed of the “culture is an organism” and “culture is the collective subconscious” line of thinking several decades ago. But setting that aside I find it absolutely fascinating that a English teacher in Canada is hard at work putting images to words and throwing it up onto to YouTube. I applaud the spirit of wrestling with theoretical issues in public. So an “A for effort” to you, RusticChivalry1985.
My favorite blog of the moment has to be Sociological Images which never disappoints when it comes to turning up observations on the visual field, especially as it relates to gender and sexuality. (Two of my favorites are here and here.) The blog is updated rather frequently so by now this performance of Ben Fold’s subversive cover of Dr.Dre by a Columbia University a capella group qualifies as an older post. Just gotta say it again: I love this blog!
Here’s a little ditty that some of my theater friends found online, Up and Over It: Irish Dance for the Post-pop Generation. They certainly have a bold tagline, “Acclaimed Irish Dancers Suzanne Cleary & Peter Harding blow the brains out of the Irish Dance show genre in a multi-media extravaganza.” Hopefully these guys will blow my brains out live someday. This looks incredible. Enjoy!
People aren’t sending me links this week. Now I must resort to frowny face emoticons : ( Do you want to make my emoticon cry? Share your web finds with the Savage Mind’s community by emailing me at mdthomps AT odu.edu.