Barry’s latest in the John Rain series of novels – Rain Storm – is out. He was super smooth at the signing tonight at Kepler’s, Menlo Park. Didn’t you work for the government, Barry? What were you doing? Yes I did, … and no comment … [Link – Barry Eisler] John Rain, Barry’s anti-hero, Asian-American…
media matters
media archaeology – Laurence Olivier recycled
Laurence Olivier has been resurrected for a film role. A new movie – Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – uses old footage of Olivier, with dubbed voice, as the villainous leader of killer robots threatening civilization. The style, judging from the trailer, is wonderfully retro and noir – looks very reminiscent of Fritz…
media archaeology – hearing the past again
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Getting back into the groove News of some more fascinating media archaeology in Berkeley – recovering sound from wax cylinders too delicate to touch. Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale and other characters from history may soon be able to speak again, as scientists perfect techniques to recover…
extreme archaeology
Cornelius has put me on to a new archaeology TV series in the UK –Extreme Archaeology – from Channel 4. It runs 20 June to 8 August – eight programs. These are the people that brought you Time Team – the archaeologists who tackle a site in a weekend. Here they are to tackle sites…
counterfactuals and fakes
– the implications of the question “what if … ?” The ancient historians Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel are two colleagues of mine at Stanford. “Who killed Harry Field?” Ian sees himself as a social scientist of the ancient world – building models of how antiquity worked, models that are general enough to apply beyond…
media archaeologies – Iraq
Jack (Mitchell) in my Classics Department here at Stanford came out with a great point about all the imagery of abuse coming out of Iraq. [Link] The digital image has a material force – the image itself, maybe borrowing its authority from the materiality of analogue photography, affects. The image is pre-discursive – that is,…