John Turturro Introduces America to the World Wide Web in 1999: Watch A Beginner’s Guide To The Internet
There are only two kinds of story, holds a quote often attributed to Leo Tolstoy: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. When it set about producing A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet, a “community service video” geared to viewers unfamiliar with the World Wide Web, internet portal company Lycos went with the latter. That stranger, a history teacher and aspiring comedian named Sam Levin, comes to a town named Tick Neck, Pennsylvania, his car having broken down early in a cross-country drive to a gig in Las Vegas. In order to update his manager/sister on the situation, he stops into the rural hamlet’s only diner and orders “coffee, half regular and half decaf — and the telephone book.”
Sam doesn’t make a call; instead he unplugs the diner’s phone, connects the line to his computer, looks up his internet service provider’s local number, and (after the requisite modem sounds) gets on the information superhighway. Today we know few activities as mundane as going online at a coffee shop, but the townspeople, innocent even of e‑mail, are transfixed. Sam shows a couple of kids how to search for information on haunted houses and college scholarships, and soon the students become the teachers, demonstrating online games to friends, chat rooms to a cranky old-timer (“I don’t like this word network at all. Network of what? Spies, probably”) and even state government feedback forms to the mayor of Tick Neck (who describes herself as “not much with a keyboard”).
Though at times it feels like the 1950s, the year was 1999, perhaps the last moment before America’s complete internet saturation — before social media, before streaming video, before blogs, before almost everything popular online today. “The video for Internet ‘newbies’ starring John Turturro was made available for free rental on the community service shelf of over 4,000 Blockbuster Video stores, West Coast Video stores, public school libraries and classrooms across the United States,” says a contemporary article at Newenglandfilm.com. “The production was funded by Lycos who has instituted a campaign to better educate the public about the World Wide Web.”
Those of us on the Web in the 1990s will remember Lycos, which ran one of the popular search engines before the age of Google. Launched in 1994 as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (which might explain A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet’s setting), Lycos was in 1999 the most visited online destination in the world, and the next year Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica acquired it for a cool $12.5 billion. Turturro, not to be outdone, had in 1998 ascended to a high level of the countercultural zeitgeist with his role in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, the purple-clad bowler Jesus Quintana — very much not a stranger anyone would want going online with their kids, but Turturro has always had a formidable range.
History hasn’t recorded how many newbies A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet helped to start surfing the Web, but the video remains a fascinating artifact of attitudes to the internet during its first period of enormous growth. “My family doesn’t own a computer,” the young boy tells Sam, “and my dad doesn’t like ’em. He says facts are facts.” (That last sentence, innocuous at the time, does take on a new resonance today.) The boy’s teenage sister excitedly describes the internet as “like going to the library, department store, and post office, all at the same time.” Entering his credit card number to buy an auto-repair manual for the skeptical mechanic, Sam says (with a strange defensiveness) that “it’s completely private. I’ve done it before and it’s not a problem.” As with any stranger of legend who comes to town, Sam leaves Tick Neck a changed place — though not nearly as much as the Tick Necks of the world have since been changed by the internet itself.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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.
Read More...David Lynch Muses About the Magic of Cinema & Meditation in a New Abstract Short Film
One of the wonderful things about David Lynch is that, despite interviews, several documentaries on his creative process, plenty of behind-the-scenes footage of him directing, and the release of a whole memoir/biography told both subjectively *and* objectively…despite all that, the man is still an enigma. Even when he returned 25 years later to familiar ground with the third season of Twin Peaks, there was no sign of self-parody, and he delivered some of the most brilliant work of his career. How the hell does he do it?
That being said, if you have read his book Catching the Big Fish or have heard him in interviews, this short film directed by his son Austin Lynch and Case Simmons, and presented by Stella McCartney, might not be anything new. If you are just now discovering Lynch, then this is a quick primer on his creative process and his devotion to Transcendental Meditation as a way to dive into that creativity and, eventually, bring peace to the world.
Austin Lynch is one of three Lynch children to work in entertainment. The eldest Jennifer Lynch directed Boxing Helena and wrote the Twin Peaks spin-off book The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Riley Lynch is a musician and appeared in two episodes of the recent Twin Peaks.
Given the pedigree, Lynch and Simmons manage to honor David Lynch without copying his style. The short abstract profile also features very short cameos by Stella McCartney, Børns, Lola Kirk, and several others.
The director appears here and there during the nine minutes, backlit by subtle colored lights in a private screening room, watching a movie. What movie? It doesn’t matter.
“It’s so magical, I don’t know why, to go into a theater and have the lights go down,” Lynch says. “It’s very quiet and then the curtains start to open. And then you go into a world.”
The directors link this to a familiar Lynch tale of the beginning of his film career, when Lynch was painting at the beginning of his art school years and the canvas started to move and make sounds. No matter how many times Lynch tells this story, there’s something so odd about it. Is he talking in metaphor? Did he hallucinate? Did he get visited by a force beyond this reality? Are his greatest Lynchian moments his way of trying to make sense of that one episode?
He also talks about the circle that goes from the film to the audience and back, a feedback loop that musicians also talk about, and is the reason Lynch still loves the cinema as an event space. Performance spaces figure prominently in his works, whether it’s the Club Silencio in Mulholland Dr., the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead, or the various lodges and performance areas in Twin Peaks. (It’s also why he despises watching films on iPhones, apart from the size.)
Lynch explains here how he became a filmmaker through studying meditation, how it saved him from anger and despair, and how these techniques led to landing bigger creative fish from “the ocean of solutions” and expanding artistic intuition.
Is Lynch enlightened? No, but he’s closer than most of us:
“Every day for me gets better and better,” he concludes. “And I believe that enlivening unity in the world will bring peace on earth. So I say peace to all of you.”
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Japanese Musicians Turn Obsolete Machines Into Musical Instruments: Cathode Ray Tube TVs, Overhead Projectors, Reel-to-Reel Tape Machines & More
In the 1940s and 50s, experimental composers like Halim El-Dabh, Pierre Schaeffer, and Pierre Henry began making experimental compositions that Schaeffer would call musique concrete. They used tape recorders, phonographs, microphones and other analog electro-acoustic devices to create music, as Henry put it, from “non-musical sounds.” These techniques became mainstays of more familiar audio art, such as the radio and television sound designs of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop. With the advent of synthesizers, electronic music overtook these sound experiments, just as other new technologies replaced the playback and recording devices used to make them.
A Japanese group called Open Reel Ensemble recalls this legacy of musique concrete, deploying reel-to-reel tape machines, cathode ray tube TVs, overhead projectors, and other analog technology to make 21st century music with “non-musical sounds.” Headed by programmer-turned-composer Ei Wada, the group embraces a very different compositional philosophy than the experimental electro-acoustic composers of the past, who worked in reaction to European classical music, opposing “concrete” sounds to abstract musical ideas. Wada, on the other hand, was first inspired by hearing a gamelan ensemble at a performance in Indonesia as a very small child.
Given a collection of 70s reel-to-reel recorders by a family friend, he attempted to re-create the polyphony of those traditional Javanese gong ensembles. He has, writes Motherboard, “been on a quest to reproduce otherworldly sounds with tech that nobody wants.” But he freely combines these outdated machines with contemporary mixers, amplifiers, light shows, beats, and tempos. Formed with friends Haruka Yoshida and Masaru Yoshida, Wada’s Open Reel Ensemble might be compared to both the avant-garde experiments of composers like John Cage and the popular experiments of hip hop turntablists, both of whom used analog technology in innovative, unconventional ways.
Some of the group’s work is a kind of experimental dance music, as you can see in the live performance further up; some is more ambient sound art, as in Wada’s solo ventilation fan performance above, with implicit commentary on Japan’s economy and the disposable nature of consumer technology. “All these tech objects are a symbol of Japan’s economic growth,” says Wada. “but they also get thrown away in great numbers. It’s good to not just say bye to things that are thrown away but to instill old things with new meaning, and celebrate their unique points.”
The detourning of technology that would otherwise end up as landfill requires some ingenuity, given the increasing rarity of such instruments. In the performance above, we see Wada play with invented devices his group calls in English the “Exhaust Fancillator” and in Japanese a kankisenthizer, a neologism formed from the word for ventilation fan. “We used laser cutters and 3D printers to design the ventilation fans,” he says. This willingness to improvise, invent, and repurpose whatever works makes for some fascinating experiments that are as much performance art as sound composition.
In the Wada performance above from 2010, he uses old tube TVs as drums, hitting the screens to trigger both sound and light effects and bringing to mind not only the sound art of the early 20th century, but also the 1980s video installations of Nam June Paik, fully immersive experiences that foreground their technological artifice even as they produce an inexplicable kind of magic.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...NASA Creates a Visualization That Sets Breathtaking Footage of the Moon to Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” (Moonlight)
From NASA’s Ernie Wright comes “Moonlight (Clair de Lune),” a visualization that takes beautiful images of the lunar terrain and sets them to Claude Debussy’s 1905 composition, Clair de Lune (1905). Here’s how Wright describes the project:
This visualization attempts to capture the mood of Claude Debussy’s best-known composition, Clair de Lune (moonlight in French). The piece was published in 1905 as the third of four movements in the composer’s Suite Bergamasque, and unlike the other parts of this work, Clair is quiet, contemplative, and slightly melancholy, evoking the feeling of a solitary walk through a moonlit garden. The visuals were composed like a nature documentary, with clean cuts and a mostly stationary virtual camera. The viewer follows the Sun throughout a lunar day, seeing sunrises and then sunsets over prominent features on the Moon. The sprawling ray system surrounding Copernicus crater, for example, is revealed beneath receding shadows at sunrise and later slips back into darkness as night encroaches. The visualization was created to accompany a performance of Clair de Lune by the National Symphony Orchestra Pops, led by conductor Emil de Cou, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on June 1 and 2, 2018, as part of a celebration of NASA’s 60th anniversary. The visualization uses a digital 3D model of the Moon built from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter global elevation maps and image mosaics. The lighting is derived from actual Sun angles during lunar days in 2018.
Enjoy…
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Read More...Watch the Original TV Coverage of the Historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Recorded on July 20, 1969
During a recent dinner a few friends and I found ourselves reminiscing about formative moments in our collective youth. The conversation took a decidedly downbeat turn when a nationally televised moment we all remembered all too well came up: the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Like millions of other schoolkids at the time we had been glued to the live broadcast, and became witnesses to horror. “It was NASA’s darkest tragedy,” writes Elizabeth Howell at Space.com, an accident that “changed the space program forever.”
The contrast with our parents’ indelible memories of a televised space broadcast from seventeen years earlier could not be starker. On July 20, 1969, the nation witnessed what could easily be called NASA’s greatest triumph, the Apollo 11 moon landing, which not only really happened, but was broadcast live on CBS, with commentary by Walter Cronkite and former astronaut Wally Schirra and live audio from Mission Control in Houston and Buzz Aldrin himself, “whose job during the landing,” Jason Kottke writes, “was to keep an eye on the LM (lunar module)’s altitude and speed.”
We don’t hear much from Neil Armstrong—“he’s busy flying and furiously searching for a suitable landing site. But it’s Armstrong that says after they land, ‘Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.’” Kottke’s fascinating description of the events points out details that heighten the drama, such as the fact that Armstrong’s heartrate “peaked at 150 beats per minute at landing” (his resting heartrate was 60 bpm). At around 10 minutes to landing, the astronauts link to Mission Control cut out briefly, which must have been terrifying.
“Then there were the intermittent 1201 and 1202 program alarms, which neither the LM crew nor Houston had encountered in any of the training simulations.” These turn out “to be a simple case,” notes NASA, “of the computer trying to do too many things at once.” Given that the Lunar Module’s computer only had 4KB of memory, this is hardly a surprise. What is astonishing is that such a relatively primitive machine could handle the task at all.
The film viewers saw on their screens was not, of course, a live feed—CBS did not have cameras in space or on the moon—but rather an animation.
The CBS animation shows the fake LM landing on the fake Moon before the actual landing — when Buzz says “contact light” and then “engine stop”. The animation was based on the scheduled landing time and evidently couldn’t be adjusted. The scheduled time was overshot because of the crater and boulders situation mentioned above.
There were, however, cameras mounted on the Lunar Module, and that 16mm footage of the landing, which you can see above, was later released. And then there’s that moon walk (which really happened), which you can see below—blurry and indistinct but no less amazing.
Just a little over eight years “since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard,” NASA writes, “followed quickly by President Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out,” it happened. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Michael Collins landed on the moon. Armstrong and Aldrin walked around and collected samples for two hours, then returned safely to Earth. In a post-flight press conference, Armstrong called the successful mission “a beginning of a new age,” and it was, though his optimism would seem almost quaint when a couple decades later, the U.S. turned its sights on weaponizing space.
Read more about this extraordinary event at NASA and Kottke.
via Kottke
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Noam Chomsky Defines The Real Responsibility of Intellectuals: “To Speak the Truth and to Expose Lies” (1967)
Image by Andrew Rusk, via Wikimedia Commons
The novel medium of social media—and the novel use of Twitter as the official PR platform for public figures—allows not only for endless amounts of noise and disinformation to permeate our newsfeeds; it also allows readers the opportunity to refute statements in real time. Whether corrections register or simply get drowned in the sea of information is perhaps a question for a 21st century Marshall McLuhan to ponder.
Another prominent theorist of older forms of media, Noam Chomsky, might also have an opinion on the matter. In his 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, written with Edward Herman, Chomsky details the ways in which governments and media collude to deliberately mislead the public and socially engineer support for wars that kill millions and enrich a handful of profiteers.
Moreover, in mass media communications, those wars, invasions, “police actions,” regime changes, etc. get conveniently erased from historical memory by public intellectuals who serve the interests of state power. In one recent example on the social medium of record, Twitter, Richard N. Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, expressed dismay about the disturbingly cozy state of affairs between the U.S. Administration and Putin’s Russia by claiming that “International order for 4 centuries has been based on non-interference in the international affairs of others and respect for sovereignty.”
One recent critique of foreign policy bodies like CFR would beg to differ, as would the history of hundreds of years of colonialism. In a very Chomsky-like rejoinder to Haas, journalist Nick Turse wrote, “This might be news to Iraqis and Afghans and Libyans and Yemenis and Vietnamese and Cambodians and Laotians and Koreans and Iranians and Guatemalans and Chileans and Nicaraguans and Mexicans and Cubans and Dominicans and Haitians and Filipinos and Congolese and Russians and….”
Genuine concerns about Russian election tampering notwithstanding, the list of U.S. interventions in the “affairs of others” could go on and on. Haas’ initial statement offers an almost perfect example of what Chomsky identified in another essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” as not only a “lack of concern for truth” but also “a real or feigned naiveté about American actions that reaches startling proportions.”
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies,” wrote Chomsky in his 1967 essay. “This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.” Chomsky proceeds from the pro-Nazi statements of Martin Heidegger to the distortions and outright falsehoods issued routinely by such thinkers and shapers of foreign policy as Arthur Schlesinger, economist Walt Rostow, and Henry Kissinger in their defense of the disastrous Vietnam War.
The background for all of these figures’ distortions of fact, Chomsky argues, is the perpetual presumption of innocence on the part of the U.S., a feature of the doctrine of exceptionalism under which “it is an article of faith that American motives are pure, and not subject to analysis.” We have seen this article of faith invoked in hagiographies of past Administrations whose domestic and international crimes are conveniently forgotten in order to turn them into foils, stock figures for an order to which many would like to return. (As one former Presidential candidate put it, “America is great, because America is good.”)
Chomsky would include the rhetorical appeal to a nobler past in the category of “imperialist apologia”—a presumption of innocence that “becomes increasingly distasteful as the power it serves grows more dominant in world affairs, and more capable, therefore, of the unconstrained viciousness that the mass media present to us each day.”
We are hardly the first power in history to combine material interests, great technological capacity, and an utter disregard for the suffering and misery of the lower orders. The long tradition of naiveté and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the third world, if such a warning is needed, as to how our protestations of sincerity and benign intent are to be interpreted.
For those who well recall the events of even fifteen years ago, when the U.S. government, with the aid of a compliant press, lied its way into the second Iraq war, condoning torture and the “extraordinary rendition” of supposed hostiles to black sites in the name of liberating the Iraqi people, Chomsky’s Vietnam-era critiques may sound just as fresh as they did in the mid-sixties. Are we already in danger of misremembering that recent history? “When we consider the responsibility of intellectuals,” Chomsky writes, the issue at hand is not solely individual morality; “our basic concern must be their role in the creation and analysis of ideology.”
What are the ideological features of U.S. self-understanding that allow it to recreate past errors again and again, then deny that history and sink again into complacency, perpetuating crimes against humanity from the Cambodian bombings and My Lai massacre, to the grotesque scenes at Abu Ghraib and the drone bombings of hospitals and weddings, to supporting mass killings in Yemen and murder of unarmed Palestinian protestors, to the kidnapping and caging of children at the Mexican border?
The current ruling party in the U.S. presents an existential threat, Chomsky recently opined, on a world historical scale, displaying “a level of criminality that is almost hard to find words to describe.” It is the responsibility of intellectuals, Chomsky argues in his essay—including journalists, academics, and policy makers and shapers—to tell the truth about events past and present, no matter how inconvenient those truths may be.
Read Chomsky’s full essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” at The New York Review of Books.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch “The Hangman,” a Classic Animated Film That Explores What Happens When No One Dares to Stand Up to Evil
Last Friday, I was downtown at an open air cinema to watch a collection of animated shorts. It was also a beastly hot night with roaring sundowners, a very present danger of being clocked in the head by falling palm fronds, and an existential danger of fire in the hills. The other existential danger was that of the authoritarian turn of this country that, at that moment, seemed so far away from our picnic baskets and wine in a can.
In the middle of the program of well made but light and fluffy shorts came the above animated film, “The Hangman.” The version above is not the restored version we saw, but it’s pretty much the same, give or take a scratch. Les Goldman and Paul Julian’s 1964 short delivers a moral message along the same lines as anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller’s “First they came for the Socialists” statement–currently a meme you’ve probably seen pass through your social feed. And though the narrative, based on the poem by Maurice Ogden, is easy to suss out as it trundled towards its mortal conclusion, it did not stop the fact that the rambunctious Friday night audience fell dead silent upon its conclusion. You may too.
The poem first appeared in a 1954 issue of Masses and Mainstream, a monthly Marxist publication that continued publishing through the worst excesses of the McCarthy hearings to an understandably vanishing readership. The poem has occasionally been taught in the context of the Holocaust, but any kind of creeping fascism will do. Not much is really known about Ogden, who wrote the poem under the pseudonym Jack Denoya in its original publication. (He is possibly the same man who taught at Coast Community College in Costa Mesa, CA, and ministered at Orange Coast Unitarian Universalist Church.)
The animated version, with its modernist look influenced by UPA’s animation studio, came out one year after Masses and Mainstream folded. During that Friday night viewing, I suspected the narrator to be Ken Nordine, who recorded a vocal jazz album around that time. But actually the voice belongs to Herschel Bernardi, a film and theater actor who would have been known to Broadway fans for his starring role in Fiddler on the Roof but to television fans as Charlie Tuna in the Starkist commercials. Before all that, however, he was a victim of the Hollywood blacklist, which made him a perfect choice to narrate “The Hangman.”
Director Paul Julian illustrated much of the background art used in Warner Bros. cartoons, and his claim to pop culture fame is providing the “beep beep” sound for the Road Runner cartoons by the same studio. Producer Les Goldman went on to produce several other influential animated shorts, such as “The Dot and the Line” and “The Phantom Tollbooth.”
However, “The Hangman” is serious food for thought in these fraught times, and it’s good to see it back in circulation, thanks to curator Ron Diamond. Here’s to hoping history doesn’t repeat itself.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...French Bookstore Blends Real People’s Faces with Book Cover Art
You can lead the I‑generation to a bookstore, but can you make them read?
Perhaps, especially if the volume has an eye-catching cover image that bleeds off the edge.
If nothing else, they can be enlisted to provide some stunning free publicity for the titles that appeal to their highly visual sense of creative play. (An author’s dream!)
France’s first indie bookstore, Bordeaux’s Librairie Mollat, is reeling ‘em in with Book Face, an irresistible selfie challenge that harkens back to DJ Carl Morris’ Sleeveface project, in which one or more people are photographed “obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s), causing an illusion.”
The results are proliferating on the store’s Instagram, as fetching young things (and others) apply themselves to finding the best angles and costumes for their lit-based Trompe‑l’œil masterstrokes.
…even the ones that don’t quite pass the forced perspective test have the capacity to charm.
…and not every shot requires intense pre-production and precision placement.
Hopefully, we’ll see more kids getting into the act soon. In fact, if some youngsters of your acquaintance are expressing a bit of boredom with their vacances d’été, try turning them loose in your local bookstore to identify a likely candidate for a Book Face of their own.
(Remember to support the bookseller with a purchase!)
Back stateside, some librarians shared their pro tips for achieving Book Face success in this 2015 New York Times article. The New York Public Library’s Morgan Holzer also cites Sleeveface as the inspiration behind #BookfaceFriday, the hashtag she coined in hopes that other libraries would follow suit.
With over 50,000 tagged posts on Instagram, looks like it’s caught on!
See Librairie Mollat’s patrons’ gallery of Book Faces here.
Readers, if you’ve Book Faced anywhere in the world, please share the link to your efforts in the comments section.
via This is Colossal/Hyperallergic
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. In honor of her son’s 18th birthday, she invites you to Book Face your baby using The Big Rumpus, her first book, for which he served as cover model. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...New Web Site Showcases 700,000 Artifacts Dug Up from the Canals of Amsterdam, Some Dating Back to 4300 BC
Amsterdam has many pleasures to offer, not least boating through its hundred-kilometer network of canals. First laid out in the early 17th century, they constitute a rich history lesson in and of themselves. But Amsterdam is also, of course, a modern city with modern infrastructure, such as a metro system with a new line set to open this month. Amsterdammers have been waiting for that line for fifteen years now, and the reasons for the prolonged construction have to do with the old canals, or rather part of the River Amstel that feeds them.
Boring the tunnels entailed draining the river, and draining the river turned out to offer another history lesson, and a much deeper one than expected. “It is not often that a riverbed, let alone one in the middle of a city, is pumped dry and can be systematically examined,” says the web site Below the Surface. “The excavations in the Amstel yielded a deluge of finds, some 700,000 in all: a vast array of objects, some broken, some whole, all jumbled together.”
The unintended archaeological benefit of draining the river amounts to “a multi-faceted picture of daily life in the city of Amsterdam. Every find is a frozen moment in time, connecting the past and the present. The picture they paint of their era is extremely detailed and yet entirely random due to the chance of objects or remains sinking down into the riverbed and being retrieved from there.” At Below the Surface you can browse the extensive catalog of all these artifacts, the oldest of which date to around 4300 BC, more than five and a half millennia before the founding of Amsterdam itself.
Below the Surface’s collection is organized into ten different categories including “interiors and accessories,” “crafts and industry,” “arms and armor,” “communication and exchange,” and “games and recreation.” On your digitized object-based historical journey there, you’ll encounter objects from all of those realms of human life across time, from 13th-century coins, 15th-century keys, 18th-century tiles, and 20th-century medicine tins. To we humans of the 21st century, in the Netherlands or elsewhere, some of these might look surprisingly contemporary — or at least not nearly as ancient as a mobile phone from the 1990s. Enter Below the Surface here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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.
Read More...Teaching Tolerance to Activists: A Free Course Syllabus & Anthology
The waters of academia have grown choppy of late, and many veteran sailors have found themselves ill-equipped to navigate the brave new world student activists are forging at a breakneck pace.
Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Curricula restructured with an eye toward identity. Swift judgments for those who fail to comply.
Admissions brochures and campus tours make frequent mention of their institution’s commitment to social justice. They have to—many high schoolers share the undergrads’ beliefs.
Those of us whose college years are but a distant memory shouldn’t depend on our school’s alumni mag to paint an accurate picture of the battles that may be raging within. Sustainability, preferred pronouns, and inclusive bathroom facilities may get a mention, but the official organ’s unlikely to peek into the abyss where tolerance goes to die.
Cultural scholar Frances Lee, a queer trans person of color recovering from a forced conversion to evangelical Christianity, took a hard look at the problem of intolerance within activist circles as a second year Masters student in Cultural Studies at the University of Washington.
Published exactly one year ago, their essay, Kin Aesthetics: Excommunicate Me from the Church of Social Justice, was plainspoken about the negative side effects of social progress in activist circles, and by extension, on campus:
Telling people what to do and how to live out their lives is endemic to religious and to dogmatic activism. It’s not that my comrades are the bosses of me, but that dogmatic activism creates an environment that encourages people to tell other people what to do. This is especially prominent on Facebook. Scrolling through my news feed sometimes feels Iike sliding into a pew to be blasted by a fragmented, frenzied sermon. I know that much of the media posted there means to discipline me to be a better activist and community member. But when dictates aren’t followed, a common procedure of punishment ensues. Punishments for saying/doing/believing the wrong thing include shaming, scolding, calling out, isolating, or eviscerating someone’s social standing. Discipline and punishment have been used for all of history to control and destroy people. Why is it being used in movements meant to liberate all of us? We all have made serious mistakes and hurt other people, intentionally or not. We get a chance to learn from them when those around us respond with kindness and patience. Where is our humility when examining the mistakes of others? Why do we position ourselves as morally superior to the lowly un-woke?
The essay’s viral success gives extra oomph to “Woker Than Thou: Leftist Activist Identity Formations,” a community course Lee designed and taught earlier this year.
Intended for community leaders, political activists, and organizers, Lee welcomed anyone with any interest in the subject, provided they were willing “to stay open to dissenting or unpopular ideas for the sake of discussion, instead of foreclosing certain topics or ideas by judging them as not worthy of attention.”
The 10-week syllabus delved into such relevant topics as Call-out Culture, the False Promises of Empathy, and of course “wokeness,” a term Lee takes care to attribute to Black culture.
While not all of the required readings can be found online, Lee provides a wealth of links to those that can.
Titles include University of San Francisco Professor Rhonda Magee’s “Addressing Social Injustice with Compassion,” author Andrea Smith’s “The Problem with Privilege,” Trauma Stewardship Institute founder Laura van Dernoot Lipsky’s TEDx Talk on systematic oppression and liberation theory.
There’s even a Sufjan Stevens song that evolved from cheap shots at skater Tonya Harding’s expense to something that considered the “wholeness of the person… with dignity and grace.”
Following Lee’s course materials seems a much more rational way to confront the current social climate than binging on confessional essays by liberal arts professors who feel hamstrung by not-unfounded fears that their students could cost them their jobs … and the good reputation required to secure another.
For further reading, Lee offers free downloads of Toward An Ethics of Activism: A Community Investigation of Humility, Grace and Compassion in Movements for Justice, an anthology that “seeks to disrupt dogmatic, exclusionary activist culture with kindness and connection.”
Find Frances Lee’s “Woker Than Thou” syllabus here.
Download a PDF of the anthology Toward An Ethics of Activism here. (A screen reader accessible version is also available.)
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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