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The Interpreter Impostor at the Mandela Memorial

Mandela’s memorial yesterday has ignited a firestorm today out of the Soweto rain.  No, not Obama’s failed message, or the non-Michelle approved Presidential selfie with other heads of State, but rather the fraud of an impostor posing as an interpreter for the Deaf during the ceremony.

The alleged sign language interpreter was so awful, in fact, that he had to have been in on the cruel joke that he knew nothing about even creating rudimentary signs.

Unfortunately, this sort of “faking it” is actually pretty common in the Deaf Community.  There are a lot of “professional” interpreters who are not well-trained but who are given jobs because they are cheap — even though they are incapable of proper signing.  The Deaf suffer and the incompetence gets a paycheck.

While not many working interpreters are as fraudulent on the level of what happened in Soweto — the end effect is still the same: The Deaf person has no idea what’s being said and has to guess about what’s really happening.

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Carrie Underwood’s Wooden Live Performance in the Sound of Music

I wasn’t planning on writing about Carrie Underwood’s painfully wooden live performance last night in NBC’s misbegotten, and ill-fated, “dead” re-enactment of the fabulous Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, “The Sound of Music.”

All the promotional wind leading up to the live event immediately prickled senses in the wrong direction.  The show was being sold as some sort of feel-good, happy children, sparkling story full of singing and wonder and dancing when, in reality, the musical is actually extremely dark and threatening and dreary.

The musical moments in “The Sound of Music” drive the frightening plot forward into a total, creeping, Nazi occupation — and it is in the artful context of that delicate balancing between whistling in the graveyard while staring death straight in the face — that made Rodgers & Hammerstein musical geniuses.

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Keep a Song in Your Heart: Remembering Lawrence Welk

Every time I visited my grandfather in North Loup, Nebraska — there was one unspoken, but wholly enforced rule — on Sunday nights at 7:00pm, you sat down with him and watched the Lawrence Welk Show on ABC television.

It was an hour of a painful persuasion for a young lad to bear — second only to the never-ending reruns of Hee Haw that aired every single weeknight that I was also forced to watch during each visit.

I never learned to like, or even tolerate, the Welk show.  The show was a matter of saccharine moments topped with thick frosting of faux frivolity and façade.  All show and no substance.  Complete spectacle and no plot.

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Breaking Banksy: Painting New York City Red… with a Balloon

The great street artist Banksy is in New York City for the month of October and he is leaving his mark tagging the urban core.  We have celebrated the enigmatic work of Banksy and we have always appreciated his mocking of vulgar American institutions.

The arrival of Banksy in New York City has set expectation of Art and commerce in whole new, confrontational, context that confounds the commonplace understanding of what we want to last in society and what was created to simply disappear or be defaced.

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The Venus Effect and the Artifice of Assumption: Watching the World Watch You Watching Your Screen

“The Venus Effect” is a fascinating concept in painting and film that shatters the illusion of the perceived, the perceiver and the preceptor.  In the example below, the woman is peering into a mirror.

At first glance, we think she is looking at her own reflection, but the angle of the mirror deceives us, because she is really directly looking at us, not herself.  In fact, the artifice of assumption is something of an aesthetic cheat because we fail to realize she is watching us while we watch her.  She is incapable of viewing her own reflection in that particular angle of yaw.

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Mask City: Venice in Retrospect

When it comes to souvenirs the most famous apart from the obligatory Gondola keyring is the Venetian mask. These are sold in their thousands to tourists from stands and hawkers at every opportunity. I can understand the Venetians fascination with the mask because Venice itself is the ultimate mask.

Venice hides in its lagoon, behind its waterways, it hides behind the faded grandeur of the Grand Canal.

Venice hides behind its Baroque facades and Gothic mansions.

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Approaching Venice

We were on a mission — to get the real flavor of Venice in an afternoon. If we liked what we saw, we would come back and spend more time exploring.

Venice has an undeniable reputation for being one of the “must see” cities in Europe — the famous floating city — or the famous sinking city — or should that be stinking? It is a city of water and of gondolas, rich in history and culture and once the trading center of Europe.

Our ferry took us along the north coast of Venice and around to San Marcos, past all the canal outlets and gave us a good view of what Venice was like behind the scenes. Once again we got reasonable seats on the ferry and I was able to take photographs out of the side windows as we motored past. I was surprised to see that there was room for greenery on the main island — this canal looked particularly shady and inviting.

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Murano: Island of Glass

We were up, breakfasted and out of the hotel on schedule. First stop, petrol station to fill up the car before leaving it at the airport. Go to the airport petrol station which is unmanned at that time on a Sunday morning and refusing to take foreign cards of any description — which means cash only. One problem with this — it only takes 20 euro notes — the five euro note slot is blocked — wonder if someone else tried to put their card in it?

We are told of several other petrol stations in the area and make our way to the first, the second, the third — all have the same problem — one petrol groups computers have obviously crashed overnight or are off-line for some reason. There is utter pandemonium as people get more and more frantic trying to fill up their cars — at the end there is a convoy of about 30 cars all trying to do the same thing — all of them with flights to catch.

We fill ours up until it will take no more — pass two and a half Euros credit on the pump to the next guy and make our way to the airport — our valuable time is ticking away. We park the car and run for the ferry terminal. The English woman in a hat is about to take on Venice!

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On Creating a Möbius Strip of Internet Event Boundaries

The University of Notre Dame published an interesting study on “Event Boundaries” that cause the everyday each of us to lose track of who we are and what we were planning to do:

We’ve all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find.

New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.

“Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”

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Jumping on the Apple TV Bandwagon

Yes, I’m late to the Apple TV bandwagon.  I thought I’d wait out my wanderlust temptation to try the “black box” edition of Apple TV and leap on the concept when it was more fully realized as an embedded meme in an actual Apple TV that included the actual TV, but like losing patience for the phantom iPhone 5S to appear, I decided to give in to my purchase envy and shell out the $99.00USD for the shiny cube.

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