Rick Steves Tells the Story of Fascism’s Rise & Fall in Germany

in History, Politics, Television, Travel | May 14th, 2021

“Healthy, vig­or­ous, respectable: every­one’s favorite uncle.” How many of us hear these words and think of that most beloved of all Amer­i­can trav­el-tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ties, Rick Steves? Indeed, in the video above they’re spo­ken by Steves, though to describe a fig­ure very dif­fer­ent from him­self: Adolf Hitler, who con­vinced his peo­ple not to tour Europe but to invade it, spark­ing the dead­liest con­flict of all time. How and why this hap­pened has been a his­tor­i­cal ques­tion writ­ten about per­haps more volu­mi­nous­ly than any oth­er. But the Stevesian method of under­stand­ing demands first-hand expe­ri­ence of Ger­many, the land in which the Nazi par­ty came to pow­er.

Hence “Ger­many’s Fas­cist Sto­ry,” a 2020 episode of Rick Steves’ Europe whose itin­er­ary includes such des­ti­na­tions as Nurem­berg, site of the epony­mous Nazi ral­lies; Hitler’s moun­tain retreat in Bercht­es­gaden; the Gestapo and SS head­quar­ters in Berlin. We’re a long way indeed from Steves’ usu­al cir­cuit of cathe­drals, mar­kets, and bed-and-break­fasts.

Enriched with the his­tor­i­cal footage and the reflec­tions of Ger­man inter­vie­wees, this trav­el­ogue explains the rise in the 1930s and fall in the 1940s of a pow­er­ful Euro­pean strain of fas­cism. This man­i­fest­ed in pop­u­lar capit­u­la­tion to race-based, nation­al­is­tic, and ulti­mate­ly total­i­tar­i­an state pow­er, not just in Ger­many but oth­er coun­tries also once regard­ed as the cen­ter of Euro­pean civ­i­liza­tion.

We all know how World War II end­ed, and the blue-jeaned Steves sums up the rel­e­vant chap­ter of the sto­ry while stand­ing atop the under­ground bunker in which Hitler killed him­self. But such a defeat can nev­er tru­ly be con­sid­ered final, an idea that under­lies the con­tin­u­ing encour­age­ment of tourism to places like Berlin’s Memo­r­i­al to the Mur­dered Jews of Europe and the con­cen­tra­tion camp of Auschwitz-Birke­nau, which fig­ures briefly into this episode despite being locat­ed in Poland. As any ded­i­cat­ed “Rick­nick” knows, the pur­suit of any giv­en cul­tur­al or his­tor­i­cal inter­est inevitably leads the trav­el­er through a vari­ety of lands. Hence a project like The Sto­ry of Fas­cism, Steves’ hour­long doc­u­men­tary on that ide­ol­o­gy’s traces as found all through­out his favorite con­ti­nent. As he him­self has put it, trav­el is a polit­i­cal act — and it’s one nec­es­sary to under­stand­ing both the pol­i­tics you like and the pol­i­tics you don’t.

For those inter­est­ed in how Steves built his trav­el empire, we’d rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to Guy Raz’s lengthy inter­view with Steves, one episode in his How I Built This pod­cast.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Rick Steves’ Europe: Binge Watch 9 Sea­sons of America’s Favorite Trav­el­er Free Online

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

How Did Hitler Rise to Pow­er? : New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Pro­vides a Case Study in How Fas­cists Get Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Invisible People: Watch Poignant Mini-Documentaries Where Homeless People Tell Their Stories

in Current Affairs, Life, Politics | April 30th, 2021

Over the past year, the sto­ry of evic­tions dur­ing COVID has often risen above the muck. It’s made head­lines in major news­pa­pers and TIME mag­a­zine, and received seri­ous atten­tion from the gov­ern­ment, with stop-gap evic­tion mora­to­ri­ums put in effect and renewed sev­er­al times, and like­ly due to be renewed again. Stop­ping evic­tions is not enough. “For many land­lords,” notes the Unit­ed Way, “the order cre­at­ed a finan­cial bur­den of hous­ing renters with no pay­ments,” and with­out income, they have no way to pay. But these mea­sures have kept many thou­sands of vul­ner­a­ble adults and chil­dren from expe­ri­enc­ing home­less­ness.

And yet mora­to­ri­ums aside, the num­ber of peo­ple los­ing their homes is on the rise dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, with a dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact on Black, Lat­inx, and Indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties, and shel­ters have been forced to close or low­er capac­i­ty. Fram­ing increas­ing home­lessnes sole­ly as a cri­sis dri­ven by the virus miss­es the fact that it has been grow­ing since 2016, though it is down from pre-2007 lev­els. “Even before the cur­rent health/economic cri­sis,” notes a Home­less­ness Research Insti­tute report, “the old­er adult home­less pop­u­la­tion was pro­ject­ed to trend upwards until 2030.”

Indeed, home­less­ness has seemed like a sad, inevitable fact of Amer­i­can life for decades. Rather than accept the sit­u­a­tion, orga­ni­za­tions like Invis­i­ble Peo­ple have worked to end it. “The first step to solv­ing home­less­ness,” they write, “is acknowl­edg­ing that its vic­tims are peo­ple. Reg­u­lar peo­ple. Fathers. Moth­ers. Vet­er­ans. Whole fam­i­lies. Folks who fell on hard times and lost their core foun­da­tion of being human — their homes.” No one asks to be in the sit­u­a­tion, and the longer a per­son goes unhoused, the hard­er it is for them to rebuild their lives.

Invis­i­ble Peo­ple offers action steps and pub­lish­es well-researched jour­nal­ism on the prob­lems, and solu­tions, for the mil­lions of peo­ple expe­ri­enc­ing home­less­ness at any giv­en time. But as their name sug­gests, their pri­ma­ry aim is to make the lives of unhoused peo­ple vis­i­ble to those of us who tend to walk right by them in our haste. We can feel over­whelmed by the intractable scale of the prob­lem, which tends to turn indi­vid­u­als into sta­tis­tics. Invis­i­ble Peo­ple asks us to “change the sto­ry,” and to start by approach­ing home­less­ness one per­son, or one fam­i­ly, at a time.

Invis­i­ble Peo­ple was found­ed in Los Ange­les by Mark Hor­vath, a for­mer TV exec­u­tive who became home­less after drug and alco­hol addic­tion in 1995. After recov­er­ing, he lost his home again dur­ing the 2008 Reces­sion. Hor­vath began inter­view­ing peo­ple he met on the streets of L.A. and post­ing the videos to YouTube and Twit­ter. Soon, the project became a glob­al one, incor­po­rat­ed as a non-prof­it, and Hor­vath has trav­eled across the U.S. and to Cana­da, Peru, and the UK to inter­view peo­ple liv­ing with­out homes.

The project, says Hor­vath is designed to fos­ter  “a con­ver­sa­tion about solu­tions to end home­less­ness [that] gives home­less peo­ple a chance to tell their own sto­ry.” Those sto­ries are mov­ing, human, unfor­get­table, and usu­al­ly not at all what you might expect. You can see some of them here, and many more at the Invis­i­ble Peo­ple YouTube chan­nel. Con­nect with the orga­ni­za­tion and find out what you can do here.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Design­er Cre­ates Origa­mi Card­board Tents to Shel­ter the Home­less from the Win­ter Cold

How Josephine Bak­er Went From Home­less Street Per­former to Inter­na­tion­al Super­star, French Resis­tance Fight­er & Civ­il Rights Hero

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets Patrons Check Out Ties, Brief­cas­es & Hand­bags for Job Inter­views

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Beautiful, Innovative & Sometimes Dark World of Animated Soviet Propaganda (1925–1984)

in Animation, Film, History, Politics | April 20th, 2021

Grow­ing up, we assem­bled our world­view from sev­er­al dif­fer­ent sources: par­ents, sib­lings, class­mates. But for most of us, wher­ev­er and when­ev­er we passed our for­ma­tive years, noth­ing shaped our ear­ly per­cep­tions of life as vivid­ly, and as thor­ough­ly, as car­toons — and this is just as Lenin knew it would be. “With the estab­lish­ment of the Sovi­et Union in 1922,” writes New York Times film crit­ic Dave Kehr, “Lenin pro­claimed the cin­e­ma the most impor­tant of all the arts, pre­sum­ably for its abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate direct­ly with the oppressed and wide­ly illit­er­ate mass­es.”

Lenin cer­tain­ly did­n’t exclude ani­ma­tion, which assumed its role in the Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da machine right away: Sovi­et Toys, the first U.S.S.R.-made car­toon, pre­miered just two years lat­er. It was direct­ed by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, the inno­v­a­tive film­mak­er best known for 1929’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, a thrilling artic­u­la­tion of the artis­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties of doc­u­men­tary. Ver­tov stands as per­haps the most rep­re­sen­ta­tive fig­ure of Sovi­et cin­e­ma’s ear­ly years, in which tight polit­i­cal con­fines nev­er­the­less per­mit­ted a free­dom of  artis­tic exper­i­men­ta­tion lim­it­ed only by the film­mak­er’s skill and imag­i­na­tion.

This changed with the times: the 1940s saw the ele­va­tion of skilled but West-imi­ta­tive ani­ma­tors like Ivan Ivanov-Vano, whom Kehr calls the “Sovi­et Dis­ney.” That label is suit­able enough, since an Ivanov-Vano short like Some­one Else’s Voice from 1949 “could eas­i­ly pass for a Dis­ney ‘Sil­ly Sym­pho­ny,’ ” if not for its un-Dis­ney­like “threat­en­ing under­tone.” (Not that Dis­ney could­n’t get dark­ly pro­pa­gan­dis­tic them­selves.)

With its mag­pie who “returns from a flight abroad and dares to war­ble some of the jazz music she has heard on her trav­els” only to have “the hearty peas­ant birds of the for­est swoop down and rip her feath­ers out,” Some­one Else’s Voice tells a more alle­gor­i­cal sto­ry than those in most of the shorts gath­ered in this Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da ani­ma­tion playlist.

The playlist’s selec­tions come from the col­lec­tion Ani­mat­ed Sovi­et Pro­pa­gan­da: From the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion to Per­e­stroi­ka; “work­ers are strong-chinned, noble, and gener­ic,” writes the A.V. Club’s Tasha Robin­son. “Cap­i­tal­ists are fat, pig­gish cig­ar-chom­pers, and for­eign­ers are ugly car­i­ca­tures sim­i­lar to those seen in Amer­i­can World War II pro­pa­gan­da.” With their strong “anti-Amer­i­can, anti-Ger­man, anti-British, anti-Japan­ese, anti-Cap­i­tal­ist, anti-Impe­ri­al­ist, and pro-Com­mu­nist slant,” as Kehr puts it, they would require an impres­sion­able audi­ence indeed to do any con­vinc­ing out­side Sovi­et ter­ri­to­ry. But they send an unmis­tak­able mes­sage to view­ers back in the U.S.S.R.: you don’t know how lucky you are.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Watch Inter­plan­e­tary Rev­o­lu­tion (1924): The Most Bizarre Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Pro­pa­gan­da Film You’ll Ever See

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

When Sovi­et Artists Turned Tex­tiles (Scarves, Table­cloths & Cur­tains) into Beau­ti­ful Pro­pa­gan­da in the 1920s & 1930s

Ani­mat­ed Films Made Dur­ing the Cold War Explain Why Amer­i­ca is Excep­tion­al­ly Excep­tion­al

The Red Men­ace: A Strik­ing Gallery of Anti-Com­mu­nist Posters, Ads, Com­ic Books, Mag­a­zines & Films

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

5 Free Online Courses on Marx’s Capital from Prof. David Harvey

in Economics, Online Courses, Politics | April 2nd, 2021

Geo­g­ra­ph­er and Marx­ist schol­ar David Har­vey did not set out to become a Marx­ist. He didn’t even know what a Marx­ist was. He sim­ply start­ed to read Marx one day, at the age of 35, because all of the oth­er social sci­ence meth­ods he had applied in his study of the hous­ing mar­ket and social unrest in US cities “didn’t seem to be work­ing well,” he says in a Jacobin inter­view. “So, I start­ed to read Marx, and I found it more and more rel­e­vant…. After I cit­ed Marx a few times favor­ably, peo­ple pret­ty soon said I was a Marx­ist. I didn’t know what it meant… and I still don’t know what it means. It clear­ly does have a polit­i­cal mes­sage, though, as a cri­tique of cap­i­tal.”

The word “Marx­ist” has been as much a defam­a­to­ry term of moral and polit­i­cal abuse as it has a coher­ent descrip­tion of a posi­tion. But ask Har­vey to explain what Marx means in the Ger­man philosopher’s mas­sive analy­sis of polit­i­cal econ­o­my, Cap­i­tal, and he will glad­ly tell you at length. Har­vey has not only read all three vol­umes of the work many times over, a feat very few can claim, but he has expli­cat­ed them in detail in his cours­es at Johns Hop­kins and the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York since the 1970s. In the age of YouTube, Har­vey post­ed his lec­tures online, and they became so pop­u­lar they inspired a series of equal­ly pop­u­lar writ­ten com­pan­ion books.

Why study a dead 19th-cen­tu­ry social­ist? What could he pos­si­bly have to say about the world of AI, COVID, and cli­mate change? “I think Marx is more rel­e­vant today than ever before,” says Har­vey. “When Marx was writ­ing, cap­i­tal was not dom­i­nant in the world. It was dom­i­nant in Britain and West­ern Europe and the east­ern Unit­ed States, but it wasn’t dom­i­nant in Chi­na or India. Now it’s dom­i­nant every­where. So, I think Marx’s analy­sis of what cap­i­tal is and its con­tra­dic­tions is more rel­e­vant now than ever.”

To illus­trate, and exhaus­tive­ly explain, the point, Har­vey announced by tweet recent­ly that he’s made 5 cours­es freely avail­able online as videos and pod­casts. Find links to all 5 cours­es below. Or find them in our col­lec­tion: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Read­ing Marx’s Cap­i­tal Vol­ume 1 with David Har­vey – 2019 Edi­tion

Read­ing Marx’s Cap­i­tal Vol­ume I with David Har­vey – 2007 Edi­tion

Read­ing Marx’s Cap­i­tal Vol­ume 2 with David Har­vey

Read­ing Marx’s Grun­drisse with David Har­vey

Marx, Cap­i­tal, and the Mad­ness of Eco­nom­ic Rea­son

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Marx­ism by Ray­mond Geuss: A Free Course 

A Short Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Karl Marx

David Harvey’s Course on Marx’s Cap­i­tal: Vol­umes 1 & 2 Now Avail­able Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

A List of 132 Radical, Mind-Expanding Books from Rage Against the Machine

in Books, Music, Politics | March 2nd, 2021

If you like Rage Against the Machine, but don’t like their “polit­i­cal bs,” you haven’t actu­al­ly lis­tened to Rage Against the Machine, whose entire rai­son d’être is con­tained with­in the name. What is “the Machine”? Let’s hear it from the band them­selves. Singer Zack de la Rocha point­ed out that the title of their sec­ond album, 1996’s Evil Empire, came from “Ronald Reagan’s slan­der of the Sovi­et Union in the eight­ies, which the band feels could just as eas­i­ly apply to the Unit­ed States.”

The Machine is cap­i­tal­ism and mil­i­tarism, what Dwight D. Eisen­how­er once famous­ly called the “mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex” but which has fold­ed in oth­er oppres­sive mech­a­nisms since the coin­ing of that phrase, includ­ing the prison-indus­tri­al com­plex and immi­gra­tion-indus­tri­al com­plex. The Machine is a mega-com­plex with a lot of mov­ing parts, and the mem­bers of RATM have done the work to crit­i­cal­ly exam­ine them, inform­ing their music and activism with read­ing and study.

Evil Empire, for exam­ple, fea­tured in its lin­er notes a pho­to of “a pile of rad­i­cal books,” “and the group post­ed a lengthy read­ing list to com­ple­ment it on their site,” declares the site Rad­i­cal Reads. Debates often rage on social media over whether activists should read the­o­ry. One answer to the ques­tion might be the com­mit­ment of RATM, who have stead­fast­ly lived out their con­vic­tions over the decades while also, osten­si­bly, read­ing Marx, Mar­cuse, and Fanon.

There are more acces­si­ble the­o­rists on the list: fierce essay­ists like for­mer death row inmate and Black Pan­ther Mumia Abu-Jamal and Hen­ry David Thore­au, whose Walden and “Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence” both appear. The Anar­chist Cook­book shows up, but so too does Dr. Suess’ The Lorax, biogra­phies of Miles Davis and Bob Mar­ley, Taschen’s Dali: The Paint­ings, James Joyce’s A Por­trait of the Artist of a Young Man, and Hen­ry Miller’s Trop­ic of Can­cer. This is not a list of strict­ly “polit­i­cal” books so much as a list of books that open us up to oth­er ways of see­ing.

These are also, in many cas­es, books we do not encounter unless we seek them out. “I cer­tain­ly didn’t find any of those books at my Uni­ver­si­ty High School library,” de la Rocha told MTV in 1996, “Many of those books may give peo­ple new insight into some of the fear and some of the pain they might be expe­ri­enc­ing as a result of some of the very ugly poli­cies the gov­ern­ment is impos­ing upon us right now.” Doubt­less, he would still endorse the sen­ti­ment. The work­ings of the Machine, after all, don’t seem to change much for the peo­ple on the bot­tom when it gets new man­age­ment at the top.

Read the full list of Evil Empire book rec­om­men­da­tions on Good Reads. And as a bonus, hear a Spo­ti­fy playlist of rad­i­cal music just above, com­piled by RATM gui­tarist Tom Morel­lo. The 241 song list runs

via Rad­i­cal Reads

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tom Morel­lo Responds to Angry Fans Who Sud­den­ly Real­ize That Rage Against the Machine’s Music Is Polit­i­cal: “What Music of Mine DIDN’T Con­tain Polit­i­cal BS?”

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

The Entire Archives of Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Fou­cault, Alain Badiou, Judith But­ler & More (1972–2018)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

RIP Radical Poet and Revolutionary Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021)

in Literature, Poetry, Politics | February 24th, 2021

“Democ­ra­cy is not a spec­ta­tor sport,” Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti pro­claimed on the wall of his City Lights book­store, a San Fran­cis­co fix­ture since the poet, activist, and pub­lish­er found­ed the land­mark with Peter D. Mar­tin in 1953. Fer­linghet­ti, who died on Mon­day at age 101, was him­self a fix­ture, a ven­er­at­ed stew­ard of the coun­ter­cul­ture. (See him read “Last Prayer,” above, in a clip from The Last Waltz). On his 100th birth­day–on which the city insti­tut­ed an annu­al “Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti Day”–Chloe Velt­man inter­viewed him, describ­ing the poet as “frail and near­ly blind… but his mind is still on fire.” It was the same mind that start­ed a pub­lish­ing house in the 50s with the intent to stir an “inter­na­tion­al dis­si­dent fer­ment.”

Fer­linghet­ti and Mar­tin start­ed their book­store with a mis­sion: “to break lit­er­a­ture out of its stuffy, aca­d­e­m­ic cage,” Velt­man writes, out of “its self-cen­tered focus on what he calls ‘the me me me,’ and make it acces­si­ble to all.” City Lights was the first all-paper­back book­store, opened at a time, he says, when “paper­backs weren’t con­sid­ered real books.”

For Fer­linghet­ti, lit­er­a­ture and democ­ra­cy were not sep­a­rate pur­suits. The idea was rad­i­cal, and so were his patrons. “A book­store is a nat­ur­al place for poets to hang out,” Fer­linghet­ti told NPR’s Tom Vitale, “and they start­ed show­ing up there”–“They” being East Coast Beats like Gins­berg, Ker­ouac, and the great, unsung Bob Kauf­man.

Like a North­ern Cal­i­for­nia Shake­speare and Com­pa­ny, Ferlinghetti’s City Lights became the phys­i­cal embod­i­ment of a lit­er­ary move­ment, espe­cial­ly after the infa­mous pub­li­ca­tion of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl and Oth­er Poems, for which Fer­linghet­ti stood tri­al for obscen­i­ty, an event that “pro­pelled the Beat gen­er­a­tion into the inter­na­tion­al spot­light,” writes Evan Karp. “For the first and–arguably–only time, lit­er­a­ture became a pop­u­lar move­ment in the U.S.” Young peo­ple around the coun­try real­ized that poet­ry was rel­e­vant to their pol­i­tics (and lives), and vice ver­sa.

Fer­linghet­ti pub­lished his own first book of poet­ry, Pic­tures of the Gone World, in the same year he pub­lished Ginsberg’s, but he has not received his crit­i­cal due along­side the oth­er Beats, despite the fact that his sec­ond book, 1958’s A Coney Island of the Mind, “sold more than 1 mil­lion copies over the year, rank­ing per­haps sec­ond to Howl as the most pop­u­lar book of mod­ern Amer­i­can poet­ry,” Fred Kaplan notes at Slate. (See him read the book’s first poem, “In Goya’s Great­est Scenes We Seem to See…,” from his City Lights office, above.)

Fer­linghet­ti him­self nev­er want­ed to be iden­ti­fied with the move­ment. In a 2013 doc­u­men­tary, he emphat­i­cal­ly says, “don’t call me a Beat. I was nev­er a Beat poet.” He described his poet­ry as an “insur­gent art”:

If you would be a poet, cre­ate works capa­ble of answer­ing the chal­lenge of

apoc­a­lyp­tic times, even if this mean­ing sounds apoc­a­lyp­tic.

You are Whit­man, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emi­ly Dick­in­son and Edna St. Vin­cent Mil­lay, you are Neru­da and Mayakovsky and Pasoli­ni, you are an Amer­i­can or a non-Amer­i­can, you can con­quer the con­querors with words.…

His pur­pose, he writes, was to pierce a cul­ture he calls “a free­way fifty lanes wide / a con­crete con­ti­nent / spaced with bland bill­boards / illus­trat­ing imbe­cile illu­sions of hap­pi­ness.” From his Navy ser­vice in WWII–in which he saw the after­math of Nagasa­ki weeks after the drop­ping of the atom­ic bombs–to the last days of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, he kept his keen eye on Amer­i­ca’s abus­es. His “poet­ry is noto­ri­ous­ly crit­i­cal of politi­cians and the sta­tus quo,” Karp writes, and he was “unafraid to name names and take stances pub­licly” as a writer and a life­long activist.

“Ger­ald Nicosia, the crit­ic,” Vitale points out, “says Ferlinghetti’s two great­est accom­plish­ments were fight­ing cen­sor­ship, and inau­gu­rat­ing a small press rev­o­lu­tion.” What did Fer­linghet­ti him­self think of his place in the cul­ture? “In Plato’s repub­lic, poets were con­sid­ered sub­ver­sive, a dan­ger to the repub­lic,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “I kind of rel­ish that role.” As for what might final­ly shake the coun­try out of the anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic spir­it that has held its peo­ple hostage to cor­po­ra­tions and a hos­tile gov­ern­ment, he was not san­guine: “It would take a whole new gen­er­a­tion not devot­ed to the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem,” he said. “A gen­er­a­tion not trapped in the me, me, me.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti Turns 100: Hear the Great San Fran­cis­co Poet Read “Trump’s Tro­jan Horse,” “Pity the Nation” & Many Oth­er Poems

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl Man­u­scripts Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online, Reveal­ing the Beat Poet’s Cre­ative Process

2,000+ Cas­settes from the Allen Gins­berg Audio Col­lec­tion Now Stream­ing Online

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl Man­u­scripts Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online, Reveal­ing the Beat Poet’s Cre­ative Process

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Increasing Disabled/Other-Abled Representation in Media — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #83

in Podcasts, Politics, Pretty Much Pop, Television | February 24th, 2021

At least 20% of us have some sort of dis­abil­i­ty, yet such con­di­tions are reflect­ed by only tiny por­tion of TV and film char­ac­ter­i­za­tions, and what char­ac­ters are por­trayed typ­i­cal­ly get played by non-dis­abled actors. Depic­tions often focus on what it’s like to live with the con­di­tion. This can of course be social­ly ben­e­fi­cial, but we don’t want to essen­tial­ize peo­ple as their con­di­tions, so it’s even more use­ful to fea­ture dis­abled actors and char­ac­ters when the plot is not about their dis­abil­i­ty.

Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are joined by play­wright Kay­la Dryesse to talk about hur­dles to rep­re­sen­ta­tion, dis­abil­i­ty cul­ture, whether “dis­abil­i­ty” is even the right word, neg­a­tive stereo­types (no less than five James Bond vil­lains are in wheel­chairs!), and issues in por­tray­ing dis­abil­i­ty relat­ed to the­ater, com­e­dy, hor­ror, and super­heroes. Some shows men­tioned include Speech­less, Atyp­i­cal, Every­thing’s Gonna Be Okay, Break­ing Bad, Glee, The Stand, The Witch­es, and The Great British Bake-Off.

Learn more from these arti­cles:

Also, watch Stel­la Young’s TED talk, called “I’m Not Your Inspi­ra­tion, Thank You Very Much;” the episode of Drunk His­to­ry about 504 acces­si­bil­i­ty; and Ste­vie Won­der’s SNL par­o­dy of a cam­era com­mer­cial.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why Public Transit Sucks in the United States: Four Videos Tell the Story

in History, Politics, Technology | February 12th, 2021

Many dif­fer­ent words could describe the state of pub­lic trans­porta­tion in Amer­i­ca today. In recent decades, more and more of a con­sen­sus seems to have set­tled around one word in par­tic­u­lar: that it “sucks.” Giv­en its “anti­quat­ed tech­nol­o­gy, safe­ty con­cerns, crum­bling infra­struc­ture,” and often “nonex­is­tence,” says the nar­ra­tor of the video above, “it’s not hard to argue that the U.S. pub­lic trans­porta­tion net­work is just not good.” That nar­ra­tor, Sam Den­by, is the cre­ator of Wen­dover Pro­duc­tions, a Youtube chan­nel all about geog­ra­phy, tech­nol­o­gy, eco­nom­ics, and the infra­struc­ture where all three inter­sect. He believes not only that Amer­i­ca’s pub­lic tran­sit sucks, but that the coun­try’s “lack of sol­id pub­lic trans­porta­tion almost defines Amer­i­can cul­ture.”

This would make a cer­tain sense in a poor, small, strug­gling coun­try — but not in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, described not long ago by Anne Apple­baum in the Atlantic as “accus­tomed to think­ing of itself as the best, most effi­cient, and most tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced soci­ety in the world.”

As any­one mak­ing their first vis­it will expe­ri­ence, Amer­i­ca’s still-for­mi­da­ble wealth and pow­er does­n’t square with the expe­ri­ence on the ground, or indeed under it: whether by sub­way, bus, or street­car, the task of nav­i­gat­ing most U.S. cities is char­ac­ter­ized by incon­ve­nience, dis­com­fort, and even impos­si­bil­i­ty. This in a coun­try whose pub­lic trans­porta­tion once real­ly was the envy of the world: at the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry, its cities boast­ed 11,000 miles of street­car track alone.

In the mid-2010s, by Den­by’s reck­on­ing, “the com­bined mileage of every tram, sub­way, light rail, and com­muter rail sys­tem” added up only to 5,416. What hap­pened in the hun­dred or so years between? He cites among oth­er fac­tors the pro­duc­tion of the first wide­ly afford­able auto­mo­biles in the 1920s, and lat­er that of bus­es, with their low­er oper­at­ing costs than street­cars — but as com­mon­ly oper­at­ed today, their low­er-qual­i­ty tran­sit expe­ri­ence as well. (Resent­ment about this large-scale replace­ment of urban street­car sys­tems runs deep enough to make some con­sid­er it a con­spir­a­cy.) The U.S. “grew up as the car grew up, so its cities were built for cars,” espe­cial­ly in its more recent­ly set­tled west. Indi­rect sub­sides low­ered the cost of gas, and from the 1950s the build­ing of the Inter­state High­way Sys­tem made it easy, at least for at time, to com­mute between city and sub­urb.

As point­ed out in the Vox videos “Why Amer­i­can Pub­lic Tran­sit Is So Bad” and “How High­ways Wrecked Amer­i­can Cities,” these mas­sive roads ran not around or under cities (as they do in much of Europe and Asia) but straight through their cen­ters, part of a larg­er process of “urban renew­al” that iron­i­cal­ly destroyed quite a few of what dense urban neigh­bor­hoods the U.S. had. More than half a cen­tu­ry of high­way-build­ing, sub­ur­ban­iza­tion, and strict zon­ing lat­er, most Amer­i­cans find them­selves unable to get where they need to go with­out buy­ing a car and dri­ving them­selves. The sit­u­a­tion is even worse for those trav­el­ing between cities, as exam­ined above in Wen­dover Pro­duc­tions’ “Why Trains Suck in Amer­i­ca.” As an Amer­i­can, I take a cer­tain sat­is­fac­tion in hear­ing these ques­tions addressed — but I take an even greater one in being an Amer­i­can liv­ing abroad.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Sub­way Ride Through New York City: Watch Vin­tage Footage from 1905

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

Archive of 5,000 Images Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of San Fran­cis­co and the Vehi­cles That Put It in Motion

Trips on the World’s Old­est Elec­tric Sus­pen­sion Rail­way in 1902 & 1917 Show How a City Changes Over a Cen­tu­ry

A Brief His­to­ry of the Great Amer­i­can Road Trip

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast