Wednesday, July 01, 2009 - Posts
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Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, opening today, will likely become the fourth 3-D movie this year to gross over $50 million. The basic technology is old—and for some, including Slate's Daniel Engber, still a headache—but the genre may have finally overcome its boom-and-bust cycle of past decades.
Stereography, or 3-D photography, has had less luck. It was among the most popular photographic formats in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Each stereograph card presents two slightly different images of the same scene, which when viewed properly create an illusion of depth. In stereography's heyday, middle-class families stocked their homes with the stereographic images of lands too distant to visit. Teachers wove stereographs into lessons about history, botany, and geology. The military used the technology for aerial reconnaisance. Stereography's popularity, however, faded quickly with the advent of television and color photography after World War II. Since then, 3-D photography has largely been relegated to the plastic View-Master children's toy, also waning in popularity. Could the box-office bonanza for 3-D movies drive a stereography renaissance?
There's much to admire about the medium. Unlike 3-D movies, you can view stereographs without special glasses. In many cases, the depth enhances otherwise cluttered scenes. In the stereograph above, the woman, her stereograph viewer, her artifacts, and the fireplace get the breathing room that each image of the flat pair lacks. It's also just fun to have the scene "pop" out at you. Curious viewers can find hundreds of thousands of historical stereographs, and a smattering of contemporary albums, online. And it's pretty darn easy to make them yourself, either with a standard camera or by rigging a specialized setup for $15.
Still, it seems more likely that stereography will remain a small-time hobby, if only because there's ostensibly no money in it. Hollywood loves a good cross-promotion, but there have been few if any stereograph tie-ins to the latest 3-D films. But it's not such a far fetched idea—stereographs did begin as a mass consumer product. Pixar could drop stereo pairs promoting its next 3-D film into boxes of sugar-packed cereal or a Happy Meal. Until then, I'm happily consigned to getting my 3-D photography kicks from historical gems like this rare Abe Lincoln hairdo.
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To write about Michael Jackson is to write about so many things at once: race, gender, sex, fame, money, music, dance, childhood, child abuse, aging, the media, the law. America, really. Maybe that’s why his death has prompted such an outburst of good writing. Tomorrow will mark one week since Jackson’s death; by the pitiless clock of the news cycle, we should be done thinking about him already. But a lot of smart people are just getting started.
Some of the best stuff I’ve seen on Jackson has appeared in the most unexpected places. Of course you’re going to turn to Robert Christgau on Michael Jackson, or Ann Powers, or Greg Tate, or Slate’s own Jody Rosen (as well you should; all four have written powerfully on the Jackson enigma). But who would have expected to find James Wolcott recounting his attempts to learn the moonwalk? (“My heel caught on a cat toy […] and I found myself reeling backward like Martin Balsam on the staircase in Psycho.”) Roger Ebert, on his indispensable Chicago Sun-Times blog (it's not just about movies, and the man responds to reader comments with the promptness and energy of a 24-year-old blogger with nothing else to do), relates the experiences of his wife, who as a young dancer once opened for the Jackson 5. Joe Posnanski, a sportswriter for the Kansas City Star, interrupted his vacation to write a fantastic blog post about the inescapability of Jackson’s music in the early 80s. And a guy named Bob Rossney, who maintains a seldom-updated blog called “Koax! Koax! Koax!,” wrote perhaps the best thing I’ve read on the unfathomable sadness of Jackson’s personal life.
David Gates’ remembrance in Newsweek contains one image I can’t shake; recalling the wraithlike backup- dancing zombies in the “Thriller” video, he writes: “When you watch it today, it appears to be a whole stage full of Michael Jacksons, the real one now the least familiar-looking, the most unreal of all.” (Newsweek’s photo spread opens with a shot of the Jeff Koons sculpture of Michael and his pet chimp Bubbles, which now looks like the Pietà of the 1980s.) And (I swear this isn’t just logrolling for a colleague and friend) the first piece of Jackson writing to make me cry was Stephen Metcalf’s trenchant and stunningly written reflection on this blog.
Then there’s the experience of coming across things written long before Jackson’s death that, if they were creepy before, seem positively frightening now. In 1983, a 24-year-old Jackson granted a rare interview to the Guardian (insisting, as he often did, that all questions be filtered through his then-teenage sister, Janet), in which he gushed about his love for children: “I feel I'm Peter Pan as well as Methuselah, and a child. ... Thank God for children. They save me every time!” Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, then writing for Salon, reported on Jackson’s 2005 child-molestation trial in chilling detail. Seth Stevenson’s dispatches from that same trial are a glimpse of the macabre spectacle Jackson’s late life had become. (In ’06, Seth also compiled a video roundup of red-flag moments from early Jackson videos.)
Brow Beat readers, what are your favorite pieces of writing (or tributes in other media) that you’ve seen about MJ? Send links to SlateBrowBeat@gmail.com. (And thanks to the Twitter followers who responded to my call by suggesting some of the great links above.)
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 4: “Propofol.”Developments in Michael Jackson’s death continue to be reflected in almost real time by Google Trends: Today, M.J.’s nutritionist, Cherliyn Lee, told the AP that Jackson “pleaded” for the powerful anesthetic Propofol (brand name: Diprivan), and TMZ reports that the drug was discovered in Michael Jackson’s house. Propofol can cause arrhythmic heartbeats.
No. 12: “Canada Day.” Happy 142nd anniversary of your becoming a semi-autonomous territory of the British Empire, Canada! Today is Canada Day, which celebrates the creation of the Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1867. (The holiday was originally called Dominion Day but changed in 1983 to downplay Canada’s colonial origins.) Canada Day celebrations usually include outdoor barbecues and fireworks, but in Toronto,a municipal workers’ strike has put the kibosh on most of the city’s official celebrations.
No. 16: “DV 2010 results.” The Diversity Visa lottery is one of the only ways many foreign workers can hope to enter the United States legally. Today, lottery results were posted online, so would-be immigrants can see whether they qualified to receive one of the 50,000 Diversity Visas available each year. The odds are only a little better than those for the $113 million Mega Millions lottery jackpot: In 2007, just 99,600 applicants qualified for the 2009 Diversity Visa out of more than 9.1 million entries. (Not all applicants accept the visa.)