Experience the Bob Ross Experience: A New Museum Open in the TV Painter’s Former Studio Home
Bob Ross is as renowned for the gentle encouragement of his voice as for his speedy technique: indeed, these very qualities are synonymous with the name “Bob Ross.” His revival in recent years has as much to do with the de-stressing effects of his permed onscreen persona as with our awe, ironic or otherwise, at his kitschy picture-perfect landscapes in under an hour. He’s become as much a saint of public television as Mr. Rogers and even more of an internet icon.
But unlike most other fandoms, the devoted lovers of Bob Ross have had no place to call their own. They might show up in Bob Ross cosplay at comic con. Yet no Bob Ross Con has made the scene. Leave it to Ross’s original Joy of Painting studio to fill the gap with a museum dedicated to the painting instructor. The Bob Ross Experience is part of a larger campus of buildings called Minnetrista in Muncie, Indiana, founded by the Ball family of Ball mason jars. It’s an “immersive exhibit,” featuring “original paintings and artifacts” and “inspiring visitors with Bob’s message of fearless creativity.”
What more could you want from a Bob Ross museum? Well, maybe a fully-online experience these days. For now, you’ll have to make the trip to Muncie, where locals pay $8 a ticket (kids $6, 3 & under are free) and non-residents shell out $15 ($12 per kid, etc). There may be nowhere else you can see Ross’s happy little trees in person. As Ayun Halliday wrote here recently, “sales of his work hover around zero.” Almost all of his paintings, save a few owned by the Smithsonian and a few private individuals, reside in storage in Northern Virginia, where an exhibit came and went last year.
Ross himself, who honed his method during short breaks in the Air Force, hardly ever exhibited in his lifetime; he was a made-for-TV painter with a small merchandising empire to match. Now, fans can make the pilgrimage to his creative TV home at the Lucius L. Ball house. Swoon over personal relics like his keys and hair pick and, of course, “the artist’s palette knife, easel, and brushes,” writes Colossal. “Many of the artifacts are free to touch.” A current exhibition at the Experience, “Bob Ross at Home” through August 15, 2021, showcases “a few dozen of the artist’s canvases, many on loan from Muncieans who got the works directly from Ross.”
Not only can you hang out on set and view Ross’s paintings and personal effects, but you can also, Artnet reports, “sign up for $70 master classes with certified Bob Ross instructors.” That’s $70 more than it costs to watch the master himself on YouTube, but if you’ve already made the trip…. One only hopes the instructors can channel what George Buss, vice president of the Experience, calls Ross’s best quality, his gentle fearlessness: “He takes what looks like a mistake and turns it into something beautiful.” And that, friends, is the true joy of the Bob Ross experience.
via Colossal
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Plastic Bag Store: A Pop Art Installation with a Whimsical But Deadly Serious Environmental Message
When COVID-19 exploded in New York City last March, it erased everything on the calendar, including:
All live theater…
The city’s freshly implemented ban on single use plastic bags…
And The Plastic Bag Store, a pop-up installation that was preparing to open in Times Square.
The theaters remain dark, but the ban is back on, as of October 19th. The 7‑month pause was hastened by the pandemic, but also by an unsuccessful lawsuit brought by flexible packing manufacturer Poly-Pak Industries.
The Plastic Bag Store was allowed to open, too, albeit in an altered format from the hybrid art installation-adult puppet show creator Robin Frohardt has been working on for several years.
She has long intended for the project’s New York premiere to coincide with the ban.
Not because she hoped to get rich selling bags to citizens accustomed to getting them free with purchase.
There’s nothing to buy in this “store.”
It’s a performance of sorts, but there’s no admission charge.
It’s definitely an education, and a meditation on how history can be doomed to repeat itself, in one way or another.
The Plastic Bag Store just ended its sold out 3‑week run, playing to crowds of ticket holders now capped at 12 audience members per performance. The live elements have morphed into a trio of short films that are projected after ticket holders—customers if you will—have had a chance to look around.
There’s plenty to see.
The Times Square installation space has been kitted out to resemble a roomy bodega stocked with produce, baked goods, sushi rolls on plastic trays, shrink wrapped meat, and other familiar, if slightly skewed items.
Rows of 2 liter soda bottles with iconic red labels are shelved across from the magazine rack. Tubs of Bag & Jerry’s Mint Plastic Chip are in the freezer case.
The original plan allowed for customers to handle the goods as they wanted. Now such interactions are prohibited.
Prior to March, New Yorkers were pretty handsy with produce, unabashedly pressing thumbs into avocados and holding tomatoes and melons to nostrils to determine ripeness.
The pandemic curbed that habit.
No matter. Nothing is ripe in the Plastic Bag Store, where any item not contained in a can or cardboard box has been constructed from the thousands of plastic bags Frohardt has collected over the years.
The facsimiles are shockingly adroit.
“I hunt plastic bags on the streets of New York,” she said in an interview with cultural funder Creative Capital:
I’m a real connoisseur now. There are certain colors I’m really attracted to. Certain bags are harder to find. I definitely look at trash differently than most people. I’m always looking for reds and oranges and greens. Sometimes I find a really interesting color that I haven’t seen before, like salmon or lavender. That’s always exciting.
This diversity of materials helps with visual verisimilitude, most impressive in the produce section.
The product labels been richly fortified with satirical commentary.
A family sized package of Yucky Shards appeals to children with sparkles, a rainbow, and a bright eyed cartoon mascot who doesn’t seem to mind the 6‑pack yoke that’s attached itself to its person.
Everything about the “non-organic, triple-washed Spring Green Mix” from “Earthbag Farm” looks familiar, including the plastic container.
Packages of Sometimes feminine pads promise “super protection” that will “literally last forever.”
The cupcakes on display in the bakery section are topped with such festive embellishments as a “disposable” lighter and flossing pick.
The tone is not scolding but rather comic, as Frohardt uses her spoofs to delight attendees into serious consideration of the “foreverness” of plastic and its environmental impact:
There is great humor to be found in the pitfalls of capitalism, and I find that humor and satire can be powerful tools for social criticism especially with issues that feel too sad and overwhelming to confront directly.
It’s really easy to turn away from images of turtles choking on straws. That stuff comes up in my Instagram feed all the time, and I’m like “Whoa! Swipe on past” because it’s too hard to look at. So what I’m trying to do is to make something that’s fun to look at, and fun to engage with, so you can think about it. Instead of just saying, “That’s fucked up! Ok on to the next thing.”
The Plastic Bag Store’s film segments also wield comedy to get their message across.
From the stiff shadow puppet Ancient Greeks who are seduced by the self-flattering slogan of a new product, Knowledge Water, which comes in single use vessels, to the recipient of a message in a plastic bottle, discovered so far into the future that he can only admire its craftsmanship, having no clue as to its purpose. (Letter carrier is his best guess. Eventually, other letter carriers are discovered in the freezing equatorial ocean, and housed in a museum alongside other hilariously mislabeled relics of a long dead civilization.)
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Neil Young Releases a Never-Before-Heard Version of His 1979 Classic, “Powderfinger”: Stream It Online
If Neil Young proved anything in his feud with Lynyrd Skynyrd (actually “more like a spirited debate between respectful friends,” writes Ultimate Classic Rock), it’s that Canadians could play southern rock just as well as the Southern Man, an argument more or less also won at the same time by The Band’s Music from Big Pink. Young’s songwriting contributions to the tradition are just as well recognized as “The Weight.” Foremost among them, we must place “Powderfinger,” covered by everyone from Band of Horses to Cowboy Junkies (below) to Rusted Root to Phish, and which Young sent to Ronnie Van Zant, who might have recorded it for the next Skynyrd album had he not died in 1977.
Southern rock stalwarts Drive-By Truckers, who’ve covered “Powderfinger” frequently, often sound like the sonic equivalent of the Young-Skynyrd debate (they even wrote a song about it), channeling their Alabama roots and Skynyrd obsessions through the sensitive, sharply observed, character-driven narratives Young wrote so well. “Powderfinger” was penned during the Zuma era, when Young and Crazy Horse redefined psychedelic Americana with barroom weepers like “Don’t Cry No Tears” and “Barstool Blues,” and wandering guitar epics like “Cortez the Killer” and “Danger Bird.”
The combination of beautifully loose, shambling guitars, loping rhythms, and “bizarre and brilliant” twists on Americana themes defined what many consider to be Young’s greatest period. “Between 1969’s Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and 1978’s Rust Never Sleeps Young reached a level of genius that few songwriters have ever topped,” Rolling Stone writes.
“Powderfinger” routinely tops best-of-Neil-Young lists. Though intended for Zuma, the song did not actually appear until four years later, opening the electric side of the live classic Rust Never Sleeps. Now we can celebrate the unreleased version at the top, recorded during the Zuma sessions and just posted to the Neil Young Archives Instagram page.
Not only does “Powderfinger” show Neil Young and Crazy Horse at their dueling guitar best; it is a lyrical masterpiece of literary compression, with a narrative fans have often struggled to piece together, and have seen as representing everything from the Civil War to Vietnam. But the general interpretation of the folk-poetic verses goes something like this, notes Rolling Stone:
It’s about a family of bootleggers (or some other kind of backwoods criminals) somewhere up in the mountains. They’ve been through many tragedies, and now the authorities are moving in on them – explaining why the approaching boat has “numbers on the side.” The 22-year-old son has been forced to deal with the situation because “Daddy’s gone,” “brother’s out hunting in the mountains” and “Big John’s been drinking since the river took Emmy-Lou.” The young man is standing on the dock with a rifle in his hand when the boat begins firing, so he raises the gun to return fire – but it backfires and blows his head off.
It’s a cinematic, darkly comic scene conveyed with haunting pathos and confused urgency. The track will appear on Disc 8, Dume, of the upcoming box set Neil Young Archives Volume II, which covers the prolific period between 1972 and 1976. “This 1975 version of the song was produced by Young and David Briggs,” Brock Theissen writes at Exclaim!, and features all the original members of Crazy Horse. You can also stream the unreleased early “Powderfinger” at the Neil Young Archives site. Further up, see an animated video for an acoustic version of the classic Neil Young track and hear the original live recording from Rust Never Sleeps below.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness
Read More...The Meticulous, Elegant Illustrations of the Nature Observed in England’s Countryside
If you happen to have grown up in the English countryside, you probably retain a certain sensitivity to and affinity for nature. This can express itself in any number of ways, most often by a compulsion to garden, no matter how urban the setting in which you now live. But Jo Brown has shown how to base a career on it: an artist and illustrator — and “birder wildlifer mushroomer,” according to her Twitter bio — she has long kept a “nature journal” documenting the flora and fauna encountered in the countryside around her home in Devon.
“At the end of April 2019, Jo posted a video of her journal so far on Twitter,” says her web site. “It went viral and her followers jumped from 9K followers to 20K followers in two days.” A glance at any given page reveals what so impressed them. “Each page of Brown’s notebook contains a pen and colored pencil drawing that begins at the pages’ edges, appearing to grow from the corner or across the paper,” writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert.
“Sometimes captured through close-ups that mimic scientific illustrations, the delicate renderings depict the detail of a buff-tailed bumblebee’s fuzzy torso and the red tendrils of a round-leaved sundew. Brown notes the common and Latin names for each species and common characteristics, in addition to where and when she spotted it.”
In other words, the nature journal showcases at once its creator’s keen eye, well-trained hand, and formidable knowledge of the natural world. It also stands as a prime example of the art of notebooking.
Using to its fullest advantage her ruled Moleskine notebook (the brand of choice for those invested in doing their jotting and sketching on the go for a couple of decades now), Brown effectively delivers a master class in the vivid, legible, and elegant — dare we say organic? — organization of both visual and textual information in the space of a small page.
You can take a closer look at how she does it on her web site as well as her feeds on both Twitter and Instagram. More recently, her journal has been published in book form as Secrets of a Devon Wood. Few nature-lovers, perhaps, can equal Jo Brown as an artist, but everyone can enjoy the gloriously varied realm of life that surrounds them just as much as she does. “All that’s required,” she says, “is a little patience and quiet observation.”
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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...A Glass Floor in a Dublin Grocery Store Lets Shoppers Look Down & Explore Medieval Ruins
In South Korea, where I live, many recent buildings — the new Seoul City Hall, Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza — have incorporated the century-upon-century old ruins discovered on their sites. This makes literally visible, often through clear glass floors, the “5,000 years of unbroken history” about which one often hears boasts in Korea. But nor is Europe historically impoverished, and there the window-onto-the-past architectural technique has been applied in even less likely places: a new Dublin location, for instance, of German chain discount supermarket Lidl.
“Architects discovered the remains of an 11th-century house during the development of the site on Aungier Street,” says the video from Irish broadcaster RTÉ above. “The sunken-floored structure has been preserved and is displayed beneath the glass.” Archaeological site director Paul Duffy described the discovery as potentially having “functioned as many things, as a house or an extra space for the family. It’s a domestic structure, so you have to imagine that there would have been a suburb here of Hiberno-Norse Dubliners, who were effectively the ancestors of the Vikings.”
We’re a long way indeed from James Joyce’s Dubliners of 900 years later. But the new Lidl has put more than one formerly buried era of the city’s past on display: “A second glass panel near the checkout tills allows shoppers to glimpse an 18th-century ‘pit trap’ from the stage of the old Aungier Street Theatre,” writes Irish Central’s Shane O’Brien, pit traps being devices “used to bring an actor on stage as if by magic. Another working area under the building preserves “the foundations of the medieval parish church of St. Peter, which served parishioners for more than 600 years between 1050 AD and 1650 AD.”
In the RTÉ video, Dublin City Archaeologist Ruth Johnson frames this as a challenge to the speed-oriented construction model — “put up a hoarding, excavate a site, and then put up a development” — prevalent during Ireland’s recent “Celtic Tiger” period of economic growth. That and other factors have made the built environment of Dublin, a city of many charms, less interesting than it could be. In his recent book Trans-Europe Express’ chapter on Dublin, critic Owen Hatherley writes that “contemporary Irish architecture is marked by a striking parsimony, a cheapness and carelessness in construction.” Looking to the past isn’t always the answer, of course, but in this case Lidl has done well to take it literally.
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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Jazz-Zither-Piano-Man Laraaji Discusses His Decades of Meditative Improvisations: A Nakedly Examined Music Podcast Conversation (#134)
Jazz multi-instrumentalist Edward Larry Gordon Jr. became Laraaji around the same time he started releasing meditative zither music in the late 70s and was then discovered by Brian Eno, who produced “The Dance No. 1” from Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980). Laraaji has since had around 40 releases of largely improvised music, and this interview (below) explores his approach toward improvisation on numerous instruments, playing “functional” music intended to aid meditation and reflection, and the evolution of Laraaji’s unique musical vision.
Each episode of Nakedly Examined Music features full-length presentations of four recordings discussed by the artist with your host Mark Linsenmayer. Here we present “Hold on to the Vision” and “Shenandoah” from Laraaji’s latest release, Sun Piano (2020), the single edit of “Introspection” from Bring On the Sun (2017), and “All of a Sudden,” a 1986 vocal tune released on Vision Songs, Vol. 1 (2017). Get more information at laraaji.blogspot.com.
Want more? Hear all of “The Dance No. 1.” Watch the live TV version of “All of a Sudden” we discuss, as well another episode of Celestrana featuring Dr. Love the puppet. Watch a similar, recent isolation stream also featuring Dr. Love and much more. Listen to the full glory of “Introspection” and the trip that is “Sun Gong.” Check out some live gong playing. Here’s a remix of “Introspection” by Dntel.
Find the archive of songwriter interviews at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com or get the ad-free feed at patreon.com/nakedlyexaminedmusic. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.
Nakedly Examined Music is a podcast. Mark Linsenmayer also hosts The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast and Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast, and releases music under the name Mark Lint.
Read More...The 100 Most Influential Photographs: Watch TIME’s Video Essays on Photos That Changed the World
We live in a culture oversaturated with images. Videos of violence and death circulate with disturbing regularity, only rarely rising to the level of mass public outrage. Social media and news feeds bombard us not only with distressing headlines but with photograph after photograph–doctored, memed, repeated, then discarded and forgotten. It’s impossible to do otherwise than to forget: the sheer volume of visual information most of us take in daily overwhelms the brain’s ability to sort and process.
As if insisting that we look and really see, the judges of the Pulitzer Prize have given the award for feature photography almost exclusively to images of tragedy in recent years. In most cases, the conflicts and disasters they depict have not gone away, they have only disappeared from headline news. Whether we can say that photography is losing its power to move and shock us in the overwhelming sea of visual noise is a subject for a much longer meditation. But I can think of few recent images comparable to those in the TIME 100 Photographs series.
Of course the saying “time will tell” isn’t just a pun here: we can only know if a photo will have historic impact in hindsight, but in nearly all of the 100 photos featured—which have been given their own mini-documentaries—the impact was immediate and galvanizing, inspiring action, activism, widespread, sorrow, anger, appreciation, or awe. The emotional resonance, in many cases, has only deepened over the decades.
The image of Emmett Till’s face, battered into unrecognizability, has not lost its power to shock and appall one bit. Although the specific context may now elude us, its details still mysterious, we can still be moved by Jeff Widener’s photograph of a defiant Chinese citizen facing down the tanks in Tiananmen Square. Alberto Korda’s 1960 portrait of Che Guevarra became not only iconic but a literal icon.
What will we see fifty, or 100, years from now, on the other hand, in “Oscars Selfie” (2014), by Bradley Cooper? The photo seems to me an eerily cheerful portent from the point-of-view of 2020, just a handful of years later, with its well-groomed, smiling, mask-less faces and lack of social distancing. It is an image of a genuinely simpler, or at least a profoundly more oblivious, time. And it was also just yesterday in the scale of TIME’s list, whose earliest photo dates to almost 200 years ago and happens to be the “first known permanent photograph.”
TIME itself, once a standard bearer for photojournalism, shows us how much our interaction with photography has changed. The so-called “turn to video” may have been mostly hype—we continue to read, listen to podcasts, and yes, pour over striking photographs obsessively. But hardly anything these days, it seems, can pass by without a mini-YouTube documentary. We may not need them to be emotionally moved by these photographs, yet taken altogether, these short videos offer “an unprecedented exploration,” writes TIME, of how “each spectacular image… changed the course of history.”
Watch all of the 21 short documentary videos currently available at TIME’s YouTube channel, with more, it seems, likely to come.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...What Caused the Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe?: A Brief Investigation into the Poet’s Demise 171 Years Ago Today
Edgar Allan Poe died 171 years ago today, but we still don’t know why. Of course, we all must meet our end sooner or later, as the literary master of the macabre would well have understood. His inclination toward the mysterious would have prepared him to believe as well in the power of questions that can never be answered. And so, perhaps, Poe would have expected that a death like his own — early, unexpected, and of finally undeterminable cause — would draw public fascination. But could even he have imagined it continuing to compel generation after generation of urban-legend and American-lore enthusiasts, whether or not they’ve read “The Raven” or “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
Poe’s end thus makes ideal material for Buzzfeed Unsolved, a video series whose other popular episodes include the death of Vincent van Gogh, the disappearance of D.B. Cooper, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In 25 minutes, “The Macabre Death Of Edgar Allan Poe” summarizes the writer’s remarkably unlucky life and gets into the detail of his equally unlucky death, beginning on September 27th, 1849, when “Poe left Richmond by steamer, stopping the next day in Baltimore. For the next five days, Poe’s whereabouts are unknown.” Then, on October 3rd, he was found “delirious, immobile, and dressed in shabby clothing” in “a gutter outside of a public house that was being used as a polling place.”
“Rapping at death’s chamber’s door, Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital that afternoon.” (The narration works in several such references to his writing.) “Assumed to be drunk, the weak and weary Poe was brought to a special room reserved for patients ill from intoxication.” Alas, “Poe never fully regained consciousness to be able to detail what had happened to him,” and expired on October 7th at the age of 40. The hosts examine several of the theories that attempt to explain what happened (nineteen of which we previously featured here on Open Culture): did a binge trigger his known physical intolerance of alcohol? Did he have a brain tumor? Did he get beaten up by his fiancée’s angry brothers? Was he a victim of “cooping”?
Cooping, a “violent form of voter fraud that was extremely common in Baltimore at that time,” involved roving gangs who “would kidnap a victim and force him to vote multiple times in a variety of disguises.” This jibes with the location and state in which Poe was found — and because “voters were often given some alcohol after voting as a celebration,” it also explains his apparent stupor. But none of the major theories actually contradict each other, and thus more than one could be true: “Edgar Allan Poe may very well have been beaten and kidnapped in a cooping scheme, sent into a stupor with alcohol after voting, and unable to recover due to a brain tumor.” However it happened, his death became a final story as enduring as — and even grimmer than — many of his tales of the grotesque.
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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Dear Facebook, This is How You’re Breaking Democracy: A Former Facebook Insider Explains How the Platform’s Algorithms Polarize Our Society
Is this what we want? A post-truth world where toxicity and tribalism trump bridge building and consensus seeking? —Yaël Eisenstat
It’s an increasingly familiar occurrence.
A friend you’ve enjoyed reconnecting with in the digital realm makes a dramatic announcement on their social media page. They’re deleting their Facebook account within the next 24 hours, so shoot them a PM with your email if you’d like to stay in touch.
Such decisions used to be spurred by the desire to get more done or return to neglected pastimes such as reading, painting, and going for long unconnected nature walks.
These announcements could induce equal parts guilt and anxiety in those of us who depend on social media to get the word out about our low-budget creative projects, though being prone to Internet addiction, we were nearly as likely to be the one making the announcement.
For many, the break was temporary. More of a social media fast, a chance to reevaluate, rest, recharge, and ultimately return.
Legitimate concerns were also raised with regard to privacy. Who’s on the receiving end of all the sensitive information we’re offering up? What are they doing with it? Is someone listening in?
But in this election year, the decision to quit Facebook is apt to be driven by the very real fear that democracy as we know it is at stake.
Former CIA analyst, foreign service officer, and—for six months—Facebook’s Global Head of Elections Integrity Ops for political advertising, Yaël Eisenstat, addresses these preoccupations in her TED Talk, “Dear Facebook, This is How You’re Breaking Democracy,” above.
Eisenstat contrasts the civility of her past face-to-face ”hearts and minds”-based engagements with suspected terrorists and anti-Western clerics to the polarization and culture of hatred that Facebook’s algorithms foment.
As many users have come to suspect, Facebook rewards inflammatory content with amplification. Truth does not factor into the equation, nor does sincerity of message or messenger.
Lies are more engaging online than truth. As long as [social media] algorithms’ goals are to keep us engaged, they will feed us the poison that plays to our worst instincts and human weaknesses.
Eisenstat, who has valued the ease with which Facebook allows her to maintain relationships with far-flung friends, found herself effectively demoted on her second day at the social media giant, her title revised, and her access to high level meetings revoked. Her hiring appears to have been purely ornamental, a palliative ruse in response to mounting public concern.
As she remarked in an interview with The Guardian’s Ian Tucker earlier this summer:
They are making all sorts of reactive changes around the margins of the issues, [to suggest] that they are taking things seriously – such as building an ad library or verifying that political advertisers reside in the country in which they advertising – things they should have been doing already. But they were never going to make the fundamental changes that address the key systemic issues that make Facebook ripe for manipulation, viral misinformation and other ways that the platform can be used to affect democracy.
In the same interview she asserted that Facebook’s recently implemented oversight board is little more than an interesting theory that will never result in the total overhaul of its business model:
First of all, it’s another example of Facebook putting responsibility on someone else. The oversight board does not have any authority to actually address any of the policies that Facebook writes and enforces, or the underlying systemic issues that make the platform absolutely rife for disinformation and all sorts of bad behaviour and manipulation.
The second issue is: it’s basically an appeal process for content that was already taken down. The bigger question is the content that remains up. Third, they are not even going to be operational until late fall and, for a company that claims to move fast and break things, that’s absurd.
Nine minutes into her TED Talk, she offers concrete suggestions for things the Facebook brass could do if it was truly serious about implementing reform:
- Stop amplifying and recommending disinformation and bias-based hatred, no matter who is behind it—from conspiracy theorists to our current president.
- Discontinue personalization techniques that don’t differentiate between targeted political content and targeted ads for athletic footwear.
- Retrain algorithms to focus on a metrics beyond what users click or linger on.
- Implement safety features that would ensure that sensitive content is reviewed before it is allowed to go viral.
Hopefully viewers are not feeling maxed out on contacting their representatives, as government enforcement is Eisenstat’s only prescription for getting Facebook to alter its product and profit model. And that will require sustained civic engagement.
She supplements her TED Talk with recommendations for artificial intelligence engineer Guillaume Chaslot’s insider perspective op-ed “The Toxic Potential of YouTube’s Feedback Loop” and The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think by MoveOn.org’s former Executive Director, Eli Pariser.
Your clued-in Facebook friends have no doubt already pointed you to the documentary The Social Dilemma, which is now available on Netflix. Or perhaps to Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
Read the transcript of Yaël Eisenstat’s TED Talk here.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...A Long, Guided Tour of New York City Captured in Original Color Film (1937)
So much classic black and white footage has been digitally colorized recently, it’s hard to remember that the Eastman Kodak Company’s Kodachrome film debuted way back in 1935.
The above footage of New York City was shot by an unknown enthusiast in and around 1937.
Dick Hoefsloot, the Netherlands-based videographer who posted it to YouTube after tweaking it a bit for motion stabilization and speed-correction, is not averse to artificially coloring historic footage using modern software, but in this case, there was no need.
It was shot in color.
If things have a greenish cast, that’s owing to the film on which it was shot. Three-color film, which added blue to the red-green mix, was more expensive and more commonly used later on.
Hoefsloot’s best guess is that this film was shot by a member of a wealthy family. It’s confidently made, but also seems to be a home movie of sorts, given the presence of an older woman who appears a half dozen times on this self-guided tour of New York sites.
There’s plenty here that remains familiar: the Woolworth Building and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, trussed up Christmas trees propped against makeshift sidewalk stands, the New York Public Library’s lions, Patience and Fortitude.
Other aspects are more a matter of nostalgia.
Over in Times Square, Bulldog Drummond Comes Back starring John Barrymore was playing at the Criterion (now the site of a Gap store), while the Paramount Theater, now a Hard Rock Cafe, played host to True Confession with Barrymore and Carol Lombard.
Oysters were still food for the masses, though records show that locally harvested ones had been deemed too polluted for human consumption for at least a decade.
A bag of peanuts cost 15¢. A new Oldsmobile went for about $914 plus city tax.
Laundry could be seen strung between buildings (still can be on occasion), but people dressed up carefully for shopping trips and other excursions around town. Heaven forbid they step outside without a hat.
Though the Statue of Liberty makes an appearance, the film doesn’t depict the neighborhoods where new and established immigrants were known to congregate. Had the camera traveled uptown to the Apollo—by 1937, the largest employer of black theatrical workers in the country and the sole venue in the city in which they were hired for backstage positions—the overall composition would have proved less white.
The film, which was uploaded a little over a year ago, has recently attracted a fresh volley of attention, leading Hoefsloot to reissue his request for viewers to “refrain from (posting) political, religious or racist-related comments.”
In this fraught election year, we hope you will pardon a New Yorker for pointing out the legion of commenters flouting this polite request, so eager are they to fan the fires of intolerance by expressing a preference for the “way things used to be.”
With all due respect, there aren’t many people left who were present at the time, who can accurately recall and describe New York City in 1937. Our hunch is that those who can are not spending such time as remains rabble-rousing on YouTube.
So enjoy this historic window on the past, then take a deep breath and confront the present that’s revealing itself in the YouTube comments.
A chronological list of New York City sites and citizens appearing in this film circa 1937:
00:00 Lower Manhattan skyline seen from Brooklyn Heights Promenade
00:45 Staten Island steam ferry
01:05 RMS Carinthia
01:10 Old three-stack pass.ship, maybe USS Leviathan
01:28 One-stack pass.ship, name?
01:50 HAL SS Volendam or SS Veendam II
02:18 Westfield II steam ferry to Staten Island, built 1862?
02:30 Floyd Bennett Airfield, North Beach Air Service inc. hangar
02:43 Hoey Air Services hangar at F.B. Airfield
02:55 Ladies board monoplane, Stinson S Junior, NC10883, built 1931
03:15 Flying over New York: Central Park & Rockefeller Center
03:19 Empire State Building (ESB)
03:22 Chrysler building in the distance
03:26 Statue of Liberty island
03:30 Aircraft, Waco ZQC‑6, built 1936
03:47 Reg.no. NC16234 becomes readable
04:00 Arrival of the “Fly Eddie Lyons” aircraft
04:18 Dutch made Fokker 1, packed
04:23 Douglas DC3 “Dakota”, also packed, new
04:28 Green mono- or tri-engine aircraft, type?
04:40 DC3 again. DC3’s flew first on 17 Dec.1935
04:44 Back side of Woolworth Building
05:42 Broadway at Bowling Green
05:12 Brooklyn across East River, view from Pier 11
05:13 Water plane, Grumman G‑21A Goose
05:38 Street with bus, Standard Oil Building ®
05:40 Truck, model?
05:42 Broadway at Bowling Green
05:46 Old truck, “Engels”, model?
05:48 Flag USA with 48 stars!
05:50 Broadway at Bowling Green, DeStoto Sunshine cab 1936
05:52 Truck, “Bier Mard Bros”, model?
05:56 Ford Model AA truck 1930
05:58 Open truck, model?
06:05 Standard Oil Building
06:25 Bus 366 & Ford Model A 1930
06:33 South Street & Coenties Slip
06:45 Cities Service Building at 70 Pine St. right. Left: see 07:12
06:48 Small vessels in the East River
06:50 Owned by Harry F. Reardon
07:05 Shack on Coenties Slip, Pier 5
07:12 City Bank-Farmers Trust Building, 20 Exchange Place
07:15 Oyster bar, near Coenties Slip
07:19 South Street, looking North towards the old Seaman’s Church Institute
07:31 Holland America Line, Volendam‑I, built 1922
07:32 Chrysler Plymouth P2 De Luxe
07:34 Oyster vendor
08:05 Vendor shows oyster in pot
08:16 Wall st.; Many cars, models?
08:30 Looking down Wall st.
08:52 More cars, models?
09:00 Near the Erie Ferry, 1934/35 Ford s.48 De Luxe
09:02 Rows of Christmas tree sales, location?
09:15 Erie Railroad building, location? Quay 21? Taxi, model?
09:23 1934 Dodge DS
09:27 Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad
09:29 Clyde Mallory Lines
09:48 South end of West Side Highway
09:49, 10:08, 10:11, 10:45 Location?
10:25 Henry Hudson Parkway
11:30 George Washington Bridge without the Lower Level
12:07 Presbyterian Hospital, Washington Heights
12:15 Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research
12:49 New York Hospital at 68th St. & East River
13:14 ditto
13:35 ditto
13:42 Metropolitan Museum of Art
14:51 Rockefella Plaza & RCA building
16:33 Saint Patrick’s Cathedral
16:50 Public Library
17:24 Panoramic view, from ESB
17:45 RCA Building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza
18:16 Original Penn Station
19:27 Movie True Confession, rel. 24 Dec.1937
19:30 Sloppy Joes
20:12 Neon lights & Xmas
26:34 Herald Square
29:48 Police Emergency Service (B&W)
31:00 SS Normandie, French Line, Pier 88
32:06 RMS Queen Mary, White Star Line, Pier 92
32:43 Departure Queen Mary
33:45 Italian Line, Pier 84, Terminal, dd.1935
34:00 SS Conte Di Savoia, Italian Line, Pier 84
34:25 Peanut seller, near the piers
34:35 Feeding the pidgeons
34:52 SS Normandie, exterior & on deck
35:30 View from Pier 88
35:59 Interior
37:06 From Pier 88
37:23 Northern, Eastern, Southern or Western Prince, built 1929
37:32 Tug, William C. Gaynor
38:20 Departure
38:38 Blue Riband!
39:15 Tugs push Normandie into fairway
39:50 Under own steam.
40:00 Statue of Liberty
40:15 SS Normandie leaves NYC
View more of Dick Hoefsloot’s historic uploads on his YouTube channel.
Related Content:
The Lost Neighborhood Buried Under New York City’s Central Park
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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