Le Nouveau Merdiana ou Manuel scatologique par une société de gens sans gêne. A Paris et en tous lieux [Baillieu], 1870.

Via

'Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale': report

Thu Aug 28, 1:06 AM

People are dying early not only because of health gaps between rich and poor countries but also because of a lack of housing and clean water in wealthy countries like Canada, policy-makers said in a report to the World Health Organization on Thursday.

The 256-page report, Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health, shows how the conditions in which people live and work directly affects the quality of their health.

The "toxic combination of bad policies, economics, and politics is, in large measure, responsible for the fact that a majority of people in the world do not enjoy the good health that is biologically possible," the report's authors wrote.

"Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale."

The report defines social determinants of health are the circumstances in which people are born, grow up, live, work and age, and the systems put in place to deal with illness.

In Canada, nearly 1.5 million people, mostly single mothers and children, lack decent family income, safe and affordable housing, suffer food insecurity and are vulnerable to violence, said the group's Canadian commissioner, Monique Bégin, a former federal health minister and a professor in the school of management at the University of Ottawa.

Canadians may be proud that the United Nations voted the country "the best country in the world in which to live" for seven years in a row, but not everyone shares equally in that high quality of life, Bégin said.

"This report is a wake-up call for action towards truly living up to our reputation."

Food banks in Canadian cities, unacceptable housing, high suicide rates among young Inuit, and the uprooting of Kashechewan Cree community from the James Bay region in 2005 and 2008 because of unsafe water and flooding are examples of areas for improvements, Bégin said.

Health inequities are reflected in the differences in life expectancies between countries, and within countries, the report said.

A child born in Japan or Sweden can expect to live to 80 years, but less than 50 years in several African countries.

Within a rich country like the United Kingdom, the life expectancy at birth for men in the Calton neighbourhood of Glasgow is 54 years, 28 years less than that of men in Lenzie, a few kilometres away, the report said.

The commission's three recommendations to close the gap in a generation are:

- Improve daily living conditions, such as nourishing mothers and expanding education to early child development.

- Tackle the inequitable distribution of power, money and resources, for example between men and women.

- Measure and understand the problem of health inequity and evaluate the impact of changes.

Canada, Brazil, Chile, Iran, Kenya, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Sweden, and the U.K. have committed to improving social determinants of health equity, and are already developing policies across governments to tackle them, the commission said.

Bégin said examples in Canada include the Healthy Cities project that supports health promotion, Saskatoon's plan of action on poverty and the Calgary Committee to End Homelessness.

Art Garbage

Great resource for toilet signs around the world.

Design students. The Competition is part of the communication project run by Oliviero Toscani, together with La Sterpaia for Sebach, the Used to seeing Sebach cabins in our cities, at concerts, events or building sites, and following the peaceful street invasion of the entertaining series dedicated to artists and the great Masters in the history of art, we have reached The Dream Toilet, an International concept Competition open to Architecture, Engineering and Art andleading chemical toilet rental company.

Participants will put together a project and design proposal that identifies and plans a new profile and image for Sebach portable chemical toilet cabins. The project must offer new ideas for future re-styling of the cabins, and it must communicate the innovation of the Sebach brand as well as take into account the aesthetic, hygiene and comfort needs of the various types of customers.

Link

Bat(h)man

Japan’s Royal Thrones
These high-tech toilets will measure your blood pressure, light your nighttime perambulations, and keep you warm and dry

By Kenji Hall and Hiroko Tashiro

What do you get when you combine Japan’s love of gadgetry with its cleanliness obsession? The highest-tech toilets on the planet. The technology that’s packed into commodes these days will make your head spin. Upscale models feature infrared sensors, microprocessors, and light-emitting diodes. And even many common models have seats that warm your backside, blast it with water, and then blow-dry it.

Japan’s push to build a better toilet began in earnest in the late 1970s. Back then, squat-toilets were as common as the Western-style ones. Manufacturers such as Toto and Inax poured billions into research, experimenting with all sorts of zany ideas. Today, the high-tech variety is fast replacing the push-flush in homes, offices, and even public facilities. One factor driving the switch: water conservation efforts. The new low-flow models use just 20% the water that conventional toilets do.

Manufacturers sell roughly 4 million toilets annually in Japan, and nearly two-thirds of those have advanced features, according to industry stats. Yet despite all the technological advancements, Toto, Inax, and Matsushita Electric Industrial have yet to make much headway with consumers overseas. Still, that hasn’t discouraged them from flooding the market with new models every few months. And given the miniaturization of chips and the advances of robotics, these bionic toilets may one day find their way into homes worldwide. Here’s a look at a few of the models now available in Japan.

Via

Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek's simplistic single-lens microscope from the ~1670s in which two screws allowed the distance from the lens and the up-and-down movement of the specimen to be adjusted.

Via

From AFP:

"GENEVA (AFP) — A giant inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a greenhouse window before it landed again, the museum said Monday.

The art work, titled "Complex Shit", is the size of a house. The wind carried it 200 metres (yards) from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne before it fell back to Earth in the grounds of a children's home, said museum director Juri Steiner.

The inflatable turd broke the window at the children's home when it blew away on the night of July 31, Steiner said. The art work has a safety system which normally makes it deflate when there is a storm, but this did not work when it blew away.

Steiner said McCarthy had not yet been contacted and the museum was not sure if the piece would be put back on display."

When nature calls at the beachside Mumin Papa Cafe in the city of Akashi (Hyogo prefecture), patrons have the luxury of using an underwater restroom built into the side of a giant aquarium filled with exotic fish and a sea turtle that likes to watch. According to the cafe owner, the 30-million-yen ($270,000) sub-aquatic restroom is designed to recreate the pleasant sensation of relieving yourself while swimming in the ocean. Unfortunately for male patrons, however, the submerged toilet is for women only. When asked about the voyeuristic turtle, the owner admits it is male and a bit of a letch.

Via

The marketing minds at Fumakilla, a pesticide manufacturer, have launched a gimmicky bug spray promotional campaign that makes use of heat-sensitive, color-changing stickers placed in urinals at public restrooms around Shinjuku station. Under ordinary, dry conditions, the special urinal stickers show a housefly in the crosshairs of a rifle scope, but as men take aim and relieve themselves on the stickers, the fly transforms into an advertising message.

The stickers are printed with a layer of special, heat-sensitive ink developed by Pilot Ink. When the sticker is exposed to a certain amount of heat, this layer of ink becomes transparent, revealing an advertisement printed underneath. Dai Nippon Printing, who manufactured the stickers for Fumakilla, designed them to withstand the rigors of being placed in a public urinal for extended periods of time. Fumakilla says that in addition to serving as a form of advertising, the stickers provide men with a convenient target to aim for when using urinals, which leads to a cleaner restroom environment.

The company has also launched a website featuring a simple Flash game called “Ippatsu Meichu,” which allows players to test their fly-shooting skills in a virtual lavatory. Make sure not to make a mess, though, or you’ll get a visit from the angry toilet lady.

On November 21, a group of small- to medium-sized venture companies based in western Japan unveiled an autonomous ladybug-shaped robot designed to clean public restrooms at highway rest areas.

The 1-meter (39-inch) tall, 1.35-meter (53-inch) long prototype robot — named “Lady Bird” — is equipped with water tanks, brushes and other tools needed for heavy-duty scrubbing. Obstacle detection sensors allow the robot to safely perform its duties without running into people.

In addition to cleaning, Lady Bird can engage in simple conversation with restroom users, thanks to microphones in its “antennae,” speech recognition capabilities and a voice synthesizer. The robot has access to the latest information about traffic conditions on nearby roads, which it can relay to anyone comfortable enough to ask.

The developers, who are building Lady Bird for West Nippon Expressway Company Limited (NEXCO), aim to complete the machine by March 2009, and they hope to one day see it cleaning toilets at hotels and other institutions. Lady Bird robots are expected to sell for about 3.5 million yen ($30,000) each.

When he was a child, Takashi Murakami's mother used to tell him: "Takashi, you are very lucky. If Kokura had not been cloudy, you wouldn't be here today." On August 9, 1945, she'd been a kid herself, living in the city that the U.S. had targeted for its second atomic-bomb attack on Japan. Because of bad weather, she and thousands of others were spared, and Nagasaki, with a small patch of blue in its overcast skies, was incinerated instead.

Fate doesn't get much more capricious than that. Perhaps Murakami, a globe-trotting artist, curator, and theorist, feels he's been living on borrowed time since before he was born, in 1962. This might explain his varied (at times, frenzied) output of paintings, sculptures, animation, and luxury goods, all on view in this Brooklyn Museum retrospective.

Few skies are bluer than the one in 2002's Kawaii! Vacances d'été, a 30-foot-wide canvas (in six panels) arrayed with colorful flowers, some of their perfectly straight stalks towering over the viewer, nearly every one sporting a gaping smile. Kawaii means "cute" in Japanese, and this parade of immaculately painted cartoons is just that; yet, like a famous series of flowers that preceded them, they also signal something darker. In 1964, shortly after Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the presidential election, Andy Warhol exhibited his flower paintings—broad, high-contrast petals in bright hues on grainy black backgrounds. He said at the time that if Goldwater had won, he would have exhibited pictures of the conservative senator from Arizona, because "then everything would go, art would go." This seems a reference to Johnson's famous "Daisy" attack ad, in which a girl plucks flower petals before looking up to behold a mushroom cloud—after which Americans decided in landslide proportions that Goldwater couldn't be trusted with the nuclear button.

In many ways, Andy is the template that Murakami has followed: Just as the godfather of pop wallpapered gallery walls with cows and Maos, Murakami has filled entire rooms with his signature "Jellyfish" eyes—big, round, and long-lashed—and patterns of ghostly, wavering skulls that coalesce into ersatz camouflage. (He has a way to go to best Warhol's deeply strange and absurd movies; Murakami's videos are fun and well-wrought, but even with their South Park levels of scatology, they lack real vigor and revelation.)

Murakami's smiling flowers are everywhere, notably in a large fiberglass-and-iron sculpture that recalls Harold Edgerton's microsecond exposures of atomic blasts, which capture expanding waves of light and heat frozen into mottled spheres of horrific beauty. The exuberant blossoms of Murakami's Flower Matango (b) (2001–6) form a chromatic crust over a huge ball sprouting green tendrils and outrigger blooms, as if their sunny energy could not be contained. Mushrooms and their cloud brethren also colonize much of Murakami's work. Ten feet high and more than 34 feet across, the 1999 painting Super Nova riffs on Oasis's "Champagne Supernova" (sample lyric: "Where were you while we were getting high?"), altered states (the colorful fungi army stares out at the viewer through multiple sets of eyes), and funhouse-mirror-like shifts in scale (one can almost hear a Warner Brothers–style "Boooooinnnngg!" emanating from the spreading caps of the biggest 'shrooms). Even stranger are the skull-shaped mushroom clouds that Murakami cribbed from a popular Japanese cartoon, where each episode ends with the villain being atomized by a nuclear explosion, only to return the following week hale and hearty.

Japan's postwar obsession with all things cute (a retreat from worldly dangers?) both attracts and repulses Murakami. In the huge painting Tan Tan Bo Puking–a.k.a. Gero Tan (2002), he places a phalanx of his idiotically grinning flora in front of another of his cartoon creatures, DOB, a Mickey Mouse parody that first appeared in the early '90s, here grown to Godzilla-like proportions, with toxic effluvia and fecal torrents streaming from between shard-like teeth. Trust me: Murakami's immaculate "Superflat" surfaces do not read as posters or graphics. The garish dollops and swirls of contrasting color may recall the psychedelic tumescence of last year's "Summer of Love" extravaganza, but unlike that era's belief in a new, youthful movement, this work views innocence through fatalistic (if saucer-shaped) eyes, exuding a compelling world-weariness not only for this realm but for those of sci-fi and fantasy as well. The forms are often as gelatinous and crumpled as a human brain; indeed, they can feel like a personification of otaku culture, roughly translated as those obsessed with manga and anime tales. But unlike Lichtenstein's bald comic-panel rip-offs, Murakami evinces an abiding respect for his source materials (Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Disney cartoons, the apocalyptic anime Akira, and myriad other pop-cult touchstones).

Having sold miniature versions of his sculptures as "snack toys," Murakami has bested even Warhol in the ancillary-merch sweepstakes—which brings us to the Louis Vuitton shop, installed as part of the show, blunt as a torpedo amidships. After taking in the chromatic amplitude and rarefied surfaces of the sculptures and paintings, the "Jellyfish Eye"–patterned bags and white-clad salesfolk feel beside the point, but these ostentatious items may actually be the heart of the show. As Scott Rothkopf's fascinating catalog essay points out, Murakami's career is a veritable case study of art-world conflicts of interest, because "his activities as a curator and critic function as a shrewd marketing device. By framing and advancing a new 'movement' of sorts, he has gained for his cohorts significant traction in both foreign intellectual and commercial markets." For example, Murakami curated the hugely successful "Little Boy" show at the Japan Society in 2005, presenting himself and the artists he represents through his company, KaiKai Kiki, as exemplars of a new Japanese avant-garde. He then convinced Yale to publish a catalog laden with his own essays. So peddling exclusive accessories becomes just another tentacle in Murakami's evolving marketing organism. Andy must be bowing his head in admiration.

As with Warhol, the best stuff here is surprising, gorgeously executed, and darkly alluring. The 11-foot-square canvas The World of Sphere (2003) features more chirpy flowers and the usual bulbous creatures, one with hula-hoop halos spinning like centrifuges around its pointy head. A miasma of Louis Vuitton logos rises like swamp gas in the background, a smog of luxury.

Takashi Murakami's Smog of Luxury

Mr. Jellyfish Eyes at the Brooklyn Museum

By R.C. Baker

Tuesday, April 15th 2008

Via

The Women's Room by Cynthia Consentino.