A featured picture on PhotoshopDisasters shows a provocatively posed model in the magazine Maxim. But what’s this? The picture has been retouched? Shocking! The repeating nature of the background of the image clearly reveals where the retoucher tucked in the sides of the model, enlarged her breasts, or both. The glaring hack job is comical on first sight.

…perhaps her bathroom tiles are deliberately crooked.

But, when you think about it, the implications are rather serious. Certainly, consumers become aware of the pervasive, dramatic nature of retouching when they see a screw-up such as this Maxim error, or when they see something like the Dove commercial showing a model before a shoot and after. Indeed, the umpteen layers of professional make-up, perfect lighting, and extreme digital retouching are par for the course. Now, it’s not too hard for a 20-something guy such as myself to see these photographic liberties as media’s latest sally against whatever non-warped ideas of body image society has left. And yet, with the utter inundation of modified images, it’s still difficult to keep a grip on what a normal body looks like: it’s hard to keep sight of the coast when the current keeps pushing you out to sea.

Furthermore, the issue becomes more personal when you try to explain this retouching to, say, a teen/tween daughter. You can show them before and after pictures, side by side, and they understand. That is: they’re smart; logically, they comprehend what you are saying. However, I don’t think young women (and, increasingly, young men) get it. “Sure,” they think “these magazine pictures are fake, but if my friend Chastity is closer to looking like the picture than I am, I still have to relentlessly pursue proportions of an extreme type.” When it comes to retouching, you can take a fang or two out of the beast, but it still bites and holds on — sometimes through the teens, and sometimes forever. Derek K. Miller writes about trying to give his daughter’s some perspective at his blog Penmachine:

Second, I have two daughters approaching adolescence now, and I can see how the relentless repeated messages from these sources could warp their perceptions of what is normal. My wife and I continue to point out the distorted perspectives as part of teaching our kids media awareness, but it’s a fair bit of work.

Third is my experience over the past year, specifically with health and weight. Between the beginning of 2007 when I was diagnosed with cancer, and the end of July, I lost over 50 pounds. It’s taken more than eight months to gain it back, sometimes requiring me to eat more than I actually want to.

Beforehand, I thought that my stable long-term weight of about 200 pounds (91 kg) was a little higher than it should be, but nothing to be too concerned about. Now 200 pounds seems like a lovely, wonderful weight, a healthy place for me to be, even with all my new lumps and bumps and scars from my treatments and surgeries.

So looking at the shows and magazines that are obsessed with the tiniest weight fluctuations and skin changes in celebrities grinds my teeth. These are trivial, pointless concerns—and what annoys me most is that it’s not only obviously what sells, but it also invades my brain when I don’t even want it to. Why is there even room in my memory for whether one or the other stick-thin actress has a pregnancy “bump”?

But here’s the thing: as bad an influence as the magazines are, even doing something like removing the retouched images wouldn’t do much; they are just one source of pressure on young women. The front lines of outlandish body proportioning have moved to cinema — and due to the advancements in technology, the effects in this medium become more believable every single day. Obvious examples are easy to spot, e.g. Angelina Jolie was just a starting point model for her digital avatar in the movie Beowulf.

As educators of young people, though, we have to be ready to expose the more subtle retouching in film. It’s no longer “you can’t believe every body you see” — everyone knows that — it’s “you can’t believe every body you watch.” Sometimes it feels like a piece of a Brave New World.

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Check out a bit of a plot summary for this movie Wanted:

25-year-old Wes (James McAvoy) was the most disaffected, cube-dwelling drone the planet had ever known. His boss chewed him out hourly, his girlfriend ignored him routinely and his life plodded on interminably. Everyone was certain this disengaged slacker would amount to nothing. There was little else for Wes to do but wile away the days and die in his slow, clock-punching rut. Until he met a woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie). After his estranged father is murdered, the deadly sexy Fox recruits Wes into the Fraternity, a secret society that trains Wes to avenge his dad’s death by unlocking his dormant powers. As she teaches him how to develop lightning-quick reflexes and phenomenal agility, Wes discovers this team lives by an ancient, unbreakable code: carry out the death orders given by fate itself.

Nobody hopes this movie is good more than I do. If you watch the linked preview, complete with McAvoy’s tennis-forehand bullet-curving oh-my-god how-awesome is-that scene, you’ll understand why I have such high hopes. Hard to make any more guesses about the movie for now.

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Kasabian’s Club Foot will ROCK YOUR FACE OFF. Heck yes. Happy weekend, everyone.

UPDATE: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Shuffle Your Feet will also rock your face off, possibly more so than the previous song, simply because it features hand-clapping.

Now… continue with your weekend.

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The return of Dean Allen’s blog, Textism, has been heralded by some folks as a big deal. I loved the clean aesthetic on my first visit to his newly reopened site, but it took a little while for the quality of his writing to sink in. Case in point: one of the items from a recent list-styled entry entitled “My father is visiting,” reads:

We got into a fistfight when I was sixteen and he had me down in seconds

This Mr. Allen fellow does a lot with a little, whether the medium is pixels or words. It’s all a bit like a poem, but longer and you need to scroll and have access to an internet connection.

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Sam Rohn has one of the coolest jobs I can possibly imagine:

I am a location scout & location manager for television commercials, music video & still photography, feature films, episodic TV, etc - working primarily in the new york area for the last 14 years or so

Check out his picture of a crazy building in Tel Aviv or how about a frozen pool in New York. More of the same at nylocations.com.

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The International Herald Tribune has an interesting article: Hedge fund managers get billion-dollar paydays. When the market is down in so many places, it has to be up in others. Incidentally, the reported $3.7 billion bonus for one man in one year would give a $100,000+ bonus to all the families in my home town of Woodbury.

I have no problem with people lucky enough to earn these massive bonuses, but it’s hard to wrap your brain around how big that number is.

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Next time you’re in an Apple retail store, take a look at the floor. If you’re in a newer store, you’ll notice that the dark gray stone is incredibly smooth, durable, and flecked with random bits of shiny material. The 30"x30" square tiles are made of stone called Italian Tuscan or Pietra Serena sandstone, and it’s a good material to keep in mind for your next flooring project.

As for me, my next flooring project of this caliber is about 10-15 years from now. As the song says, Don’t stop, believin’…

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DVICE has written a bit about a new software called Direct Note Access — it gives absolutely unprecedented control over musical recordings.

Until now, [correcting pitch] was only possible with single notes — an exaggerated example can be heard in Cher’s 1998 hit, “Believe,” which used the competing Auto-Tune system. For more than a decade, that software has been the recording industry’s dirty little secret, fixing any out-of-tune notes crooned by an individual singer or played on any single-note instrument. But this breakthrough takes that magic manipulation many steps further, allowing engineers to create entirely new music from existing recordings.

With this astonishing software, engineers can dig deep into < a mix. For example, they could change each individual note of a guitar chord, or fix one wrong note played by a musician in a symphony orchestra. It’s like Photoshop for music.

The demo video is the coolest thing I’ve seen all month — and the song they use to demonstrate the software is pretty cool, too. Make sure to watch the part where they start completely shuffling around guitar notes plucked out of individual cords.

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Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser make up the band MGMT. I’m addicted to the grinding bass and counter melodies in their catchy song “Kids”. Give a listen to the full song at Last.fm.

Also: their website will take you back to 1998.

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I just got spammed on Facebook. Thing is, it’s from someone I knew in high school. Ahh… the wonderfully weird world of new social media.

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