Michio Kaku on Why Immigrants Are America’s Secret Weapon: They Compensate for Our Mediocre STEM Education & Keep Prosperity Going
Americans have often found themselves caught up in panics about immigration, like that now driving the campaign to build a wall between us and our third largest trading partner—when more Mexicans are leaving the U.S. than arriving. Then we have the talk of banning an entire world religion, though, of course, we’ve seen this before, lest we forget that the Klan resurged in large part as an anti-Catholic group. All of this misinformation, mistrust, and outright contempt comes at a high cost, including that of any real understanding of how immigration works, and why it works, no matter how vehemently certain organizations fight against it.
The fact is that the U.S. might be a dynamo for capital but not when it comes to what economists crudely call “human capital.” The point applies not only to immigrant workers who do jobs Americans won’t, but also those who do jobs Americans can’t, because, as physicist Michio Kaku argues above, “the United States has the worst educational system known to science.” Were it solely up to U.S. graduates, the scientific establishment and tech economy would collapse, he says, “forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley. There would be no Silicon Valley.” Instead, U.S. science and tech thrive because of immigrants who come on H‑1B visas, “America’s secret weapon… the genius visa.”
Kaku goes on to press his case with daunting statistics about the number of foreign-born Ph.D. graduates, though he doesn’t say that all of those grads have H‑1Bs. In fact, his position is a highly controversial one. Reliable studies show that many companies abuse the specialized work visa to outsource jobs Americans are fully qualified to do, and to create a class of immigrant workers who earn less than their U.S. counterparts and work under a modified form of indentured servitude. The visa is, after all, “a non-immigrant visa,” points out one critic, “and so has nothing at all to do with staying in the USA, becoming a citizen, or starting a business.” It is, more or less, a guest worker program.
Kaku’s tone can also seem grating, a smarmy reminder of what David H. Freedman calls in The Atlantic “open season on the nonsmart.” Calling American grads “stupid” will not likely endear many of them to his position. Nonetheless, when it comes to science education, it’s hard to argue with his assessments, and with his case for allowing the best minds in the world to come work for American companies (under more equitable conditions). In the Big Think video above, Kaku again presses his argument for the H‑1B as instrumental to a “brain drain” into the United States, feeding its science and tech industries with fresh minds and fresh ideas constantly. His ideas about meritocracy may seem blithe, especially given the material advantages so many guest workers already have before arriving in the States. But in purely descriptive terms, the best U.S. graduates just simply cannot compete with many of their foreign-born colleagues.
Here Kaku’s argument takes a turn in both these videos and shows how the “secret weapon” is one we’ve pointed at ourselves. We can’t continue to depend on “geniuses” from other countries, he says, to prop up our science and technology sectors, especially since the brain drains back out, with H1‑B visa holders frequently leaving, given their temporary status, and establishing companies in their home countries. “In reality,” wrote Mother Jones in 2013, “most of today’s H‑1B workers don’t stick around to become the next Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin.” That year, “the top 10 users of H‑1B visas… were all offshore outsourcing firms… that hired nearly half nearly half of H1‑B workers.” As one expert explained, “The H‑1B worker learns the job and then rotates back to the home country and takes the work with him.”
It’s likely large numbers of those workers feel less and less welcome in the U.S. But it’s also true, as Kaku says, that Americans continue to fall far behind in math and science. There may indeed be few Americans who can fill many of those jobs or continue to push technological innovation forward in the U.S.
Related Content:
Michio Kaku Explains the Physics Behind Absolutely Everything
Colorful Animation Visualizes 200 Years of Immigration to the U.S. (1820-Present)
Portraits of Ellis Island Immigrants Arriving on America’s Welcoming Shores Circa 1907
Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Largest Ever Tribute to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” Choreographed by a Flashmob in Berlin
When I’m feeling depressed or uninspired, I can always count on one of my favorite visionary musicians to remind me just how much wild weirdness and unexpected beauty the world contains. That person is Kate Bush, and for all of her many brilliant songs—too many to name—the touchstone for true fans will always be her first single, “Wuthering Heights,” written when she was only 16, recorded two years later, and turned into two astonishing videos. The first, UK version does Kate’s ethereal strangeness justice, without a doubt, placing her on a dark stage, in flowing white gown, fog machine at her feet, showcasing her idiosyncratic dance moves with several double-exposure versions of herself. All very Kate, but we’d seen this kind of thing before, if only at the meetings of our high school drama club.
It really wasn’t until the second, U.S. video’s release that audiences fully grasped the uniqueness of her genius. In this version, above, the young prodigy—who trained, by the way, with David Bowie’s mime and dance teacher Lindsay Kemp—appears in a flowing, Bohemian red gown, matching tights, and black belt, haunting a “wiley, windy” moor like Catherine Earnshaw, the doomed heroine of Emily Brontë’s novel.
Everything about this: the flowers in her hair, the editing tricks that have her fading in and out of the shot like a ghost, and most especially the fully uninhibited dance moves—not confined this time to the boundaries of a stage (which could never contain her anyway)…. It’s perfect, the very acme of melodramatic theatricality, and simply could not be improved upon in any possible way.
And so when fans seek to pay tribute to Kate Bush, they invariably call back to this video. In 2013, Kate Bush parody troupe Shambush! organized a group dance in Brighton, with 300 eager fans in red dresses and wigs, each one doing their best Kate Bush impression in a synchronized comedy homage. This year, on July 16th, a flashmob gathered in Berlin’s Tempelhof Field for “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever,” breaking the Shambush! record for most Kate Bush-attired dancing fans in one place. See them at the top of the post. Other flashmobs assembled around the world as well, in London, Wellington, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, and elsewhere, reports German site Tonspion. Melbourne, it seems put on a particularly “strong showing of Bush-mania” (watch it above), according to Electronic Beats, who also suggest that next year the organizers “switch it up and find a good forest for a ‘The Sensual World’ flashmob.” That is indeed a stunning video, and it’s very hard to choose a favorite among Bush’s many visual masterpieces, but I’d like to see them try the wartime choreography of “Army Dreamers” next.
Related Content:
300 Kate Bush Impersonators Pay Tribute to Kate Bush’s Iconic “Wuthering Heights” Video
2009 Kate Bush Documentary Dubs Her “Queen of British Pop”
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Hear Electronic Ladyland, a Mixtape Featuring 55 Tracks from 35 Pioneering Women in Electronic Music
Given that we’ve previously featured two documentaries on electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire, an introduction to four other female composers who pioneered electronic music (Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliveros), and seven hours of electronic music made by women between 1938 and 2014, no loyal Open Culture reader could claim ignorance on the theme of this new mixtape, Electronic Ladyland. It comes from the French musical project Arandel, whose members remain anonymous and could therefore be of any gender, but who, in these 45 minutes (made of 55 different tracks by 35 female composers), display a mastery of the field.
“We realized that an unconscious feminine electronic music Internationale has existed throughout the ages and we wondered whether a secret intuition might have gathered around shared research,” says Arandel in a translated interview. “Was their mutual desires achieved differently in different countries, with different tools in different timezones? The idea was to see what would happen if we gathered them in the same fictitious room for 45 minutes, and built a choir from all their productions.”
Arandel’s interviewer describes the musicians in the mix as coming from “very different musical horizons: we find academic learned musicians, research music composers and experimenters who used to do DIY works composed for advertising or television in a pop or easy listening context, some eccentric women like The Space Lady or Ruth White.” We also hear from famous names like Laurie Anderson and Wendy Carlos, and Delia Derbyshire. “What she accomplished is fascinating,” says Arandel of Derbyshire, “as is listening to her talk about her interesting work in documentaries,” and they’ve also included work from Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Eliane Radigue, and Pauline Oliveiros, subjects of the other documentaries we’ve posted here.
Electronic Ladyland drops you right into a retro-futuristic sonic landscape equally danceable and haunting, one with great variety as well as an unexpected consistency. It provides not just a kind of brief overview of what certain generations of female composers discovered with their new and then-strange electronic instruments and other devices, but one you may well want to keep in your library for frequent listening. It will also, according to Arandel, make you think: “There is an almost magic link between women and electronic music, from the 50’s / 60’s. Have you asked yourself the question of social, artistic, maybe magic reasons behind this link?” Hit the play button, and you may start. Find the list of tracks below.
1. Glynis Jones : Magic Bird Song (1976)
2. Doris Norton : Norton Rythm Soft (1986)
3. Colette Magny : « Avec » Poème (1966)
4. Daphne Oram : Just For You (Excerpt 1)
5. Laurie Spiegel : Clockworks (1974)
6. Pauline Oliveiros : Bog Bog (1966)
7. Megan Roberts — I Could Sit Here All Day (1977)
8. Suzanne Ciani : Paris 1971
9. Laurie Anderson : Tape Bow Trio (Say Yes) (1981)
10. Glynis Jones : Schlum Rooli (1975)
11. Ruth White : Mists And Rains (1969)
12. Wendy Carlos : Spring (1972)
13. Ann McMillan : Syrinx (1978)
14. Delia Derbyshire : Restless Relays (1969)
15. Maggi Payne : Flights Of Fancy (1986)
16. Else Marie Pade : Syv Cirkler (1958)
17. Daniela Casa : Ricerca Della Materia (1975)
18. The Space Lady : Domine, Libra Nos (1990)
19. Johanna Beyer : Music Of The Spheres [1938]
20. Maddalena Fagandini : Interval Signal (1960)
21. Eliane Radigue : Chryptus I (1970)
22. Ruth White : Owls (1969)
23. Ursula Bogner : Speichen (1979)
24. Beatriz Ferreyra — Demeures Aquatiques (1967)
25. Doris Norton : War Mania Analysis (1983)
26. Tera De Marez Oyens : Safed (1967)
27. Daphne Oram : Rhythmic Variation II (1962)
28. Mireille Chamass-Kyrou : Etude 1 (1960)
29. Laurie Spiegel : Drums (1983)
30. Teresa Rampazzi : Stomaco 2 (1972)
31. Teresa Rampazzi : Esofago 1 (1972)
32. Suzanne Ciani : Fourth Voice: Sound Of Wetness (1970)
33. Ursula Bogner : Expansion (1979)
34. Alice Shields : Sacrifice (1993)
35. Megan Roberts and Raymond Ghirardo : ATVO II (1987)
36. Laurie Anderson : Drums (1981)
37. Doris Hays : Somersault Beat (1971)
38. Lily Greenham : Tillid (1973)
39. Ruth Anderson : Points (1973–74)
40. Pril Smiley : Kolyosa (1970)
41. Catherine Christer Hennix : The Electric Harpsichord (1976)
42. Joan La Barbara : Solo for Voice 45 (from Songbooks) (1977)
43. Slava Tsukerman, Brenda Hutchinson & Clive Smith : Night Club 1 (1983)
44. Monique Rollin : Motet (Etude Vocale) (1952)
45. Sofia Gubaidulina : Vivente – Non Vivente (1970)
46. Ruth White : Spleen (1967)
47. Doris Hays : Scared Trip (1971)
48. Daphne Oram : Pulse Persephone (Alternate Parts For Mixing)
49. Maggi Payne : Gamelan (1984)
50. Laurie Spiegel : The Unquestioned Answer (1980)
51. Ursula Bogner : Homöostat (1985)
52. Wendy Carlos : Summer (1972)
53. Suzanne Ciani : Princess With Orange Feet
54. Pauline Oliveiros : Poem Of Change (1993)
55. Suzanne Ciani : Thirteenth Voice: And All Dreams Are Not For Sale (1970)
Related Content:
Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938- 2014)
Two Documentaries Introduce Delia Derbyshire, the Pioneer in Electronic Music
The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch “Don’t Be a Sucker!,” the 1947 US Government Anti-Hatred Film That’s Relevant All Over Again
If you aren’t seriously disturbed, even alarmed, that we in the U.S. have a presidential candidate from a major political party who succeeds by whipping up xenophobic fervor and telling us the country must not only reinstitute torture, but must do “the unthinkable”… well…. I don’t really know what to say to you. Perhaps more symptom than cause of a global turn toward tribal hatred, the GOP candidate has lent his name to a phenomenon characterized by cultish devotion to an authoritarian strongman, serial falsehood, and easy, uncritical scapegoating. We needn’t look far back in time to see the historical analogues, whether in the early 20th century, at the end of the 19th, or during any number of historical moments before and after.
We also needn’t look very far back to find a history of resistance to authoritarian bigotry, and not only from Civil Rights campaigners and leftists, but also, as you can see above, from the U.S. War Department. In 1947, the Department released the short propaganda film, “Don’t Be a Sucker!”, aimed at middle-class American Joes. Shot at Warner Studios, the film opens with some typical noirish crime scenarios, complete with convincingly noir lighting and camera angles, to visually set up the character of the “sucker” who gets taken in by sinister but seductive characters—“people who stay up nights trying to figure out how to take away” what the everyman has. What do naïve potential marks in this analogy have to lose? American plenty: “plenty of food, big factories to make things a man can use, big cities to do the business of a big country, and people, lots of people.”
“People,” the narrator says, working the farms and factories, digging the mines and running the businesses: “all kinds of people. People from different countries with different religions, different colored skins. Free people.” Is this disingenuous? You bet. We’re told this aggregate of people is “free to vote”—and we know this to be largely untrue in practice for many, necessitating the Voting Rights Act almost twenty years later. Free to “pick their own jobs”? Employment discrimination, segregation, and sexism effectively prevented that for millions. But the sentiments are noble, even if the facts don’t fully fit. As our average Joe wanders along, contemplating his advantages, he happens upon a reactionary streetcorner demogague haranguing against foreigners, African-Americans, Catholics, and Freemasons (?) on behalf of “real Americans.” Sounds plenty familiar.
The voice of reason comes from a naturalized Hungarian professor who witnessed the rise of Nazism in Berlin and who explains to our everyman the strategy of fanatics and fascists—divide and rule. “We human beings are not born with prejudices,” says the wise professor, “always they are made for us. Made by someone who wants something. Remember that when you hear this kind of talk. Somebody’s going to get something out of it. And it isn’t going to be you.” The remainder of the film mostly consists of the Hungarian professor’s recollections of how the Nazis won over ordinary Germans.
“Don’t Be a Sucker!” uses a clever rhetorical strategy, appealing to the self-interest and vanity of the everyman while couching that appeal in egalitarian values. The very recent historical example of fascist Europe carries significant weight, where too often today that history gets treated like a joke, turned into crude and muddled memes. This film would have had real impact on the viewing audience, who would have seen it before their feature in theaters across the country.
It’s worth noting that this film came out during a period of increasing American prosperity and comparative economic equity. The jobs “Don’t Be a Sucker!” lists with pride have disappeared. Today’s everyman, we might say, has even more reason for susceptibility to the demagogue’s appeals. The Internet Archive notes an irony here “in the light of Cold War anti-Communist politics, which really came into their own in the year this film was made.” The streetcorner populist calls to mind people like Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover (and he looks like George Wallace)—powerful government authorities who cast suspicion on every movement for Civil Rights and social equality.
“Don’t Be a Sucker!” may seem like an outlier, but it’s reminiscent of another piece of patriotic, anti-racist-and-religious-bigotry propaganda—the Superman cartoon above, which first appeared in 1949, distributed to school children as a book cover by something called The Institute for American Democracy. You may have seen versions of a full-color poster, reprinted in subsequent years. Here, Superman expresses the same egalitarian values as “Don’t Be a Sucker!” only instead of calling racism a con-job, he calls it “Un-American,” using the favorite denunciation of HUAC and other anti-Communist groups.
History and the present moment may often prove otherwise—showing us just how very American racism and bigotry can be, but so too are numerous counter-movements on the left and, as these examples show, from more conservative, establishment corners as well.
“Don’t Be a Sucker!” will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Bertolt Brecht Testifies Before the House Un-American Activities Committee (1947)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...An Eye-Popping Collection of 400+ Japanese Matchbox Covers: From 1920 through the 1940s
Phillumeny — the practice of collecting matchboxes — strikes me as a fun and practical hobby. As a child, I was fascinated with the contents of a large glass vase my grandparents had dedicated to this pursuit. Their collection was an ersatz record of all the hotels and nightclubs they had apparently visited before transforming into a dowdy older couple who enjoyed rocking in matching Bicentennial themed chairs, monitoring their bird feeder.
As any serious phillumenist will tell you, one need not have a personal connection to the items one is collecting. Most matchbox enthusiasts are in it for the art, a microcosm of 20th century design. The urge to preserve these disposable items is understandable, given the amount of artistry that went into them. It was good business practice for bars and restaurants to give them to customers at no charge, even if they never planned to strike so much as a single match.
Smoking’s heyday is over, but until someone figures out how to make fire with a smart phone, matchboxes and books are unlikely to disappear. Wherever you go, you’ll be able to find goodies to add to your collection, usually for free.
Or you could stay at home, trawling the Internet for some of the most glorious, and sought after examples of the form — those produced in Japan between the two World Wars. As author Steven Heller, co-chair of the School of Visual Arts’ MFA Design program, writes in Print magazine:
The designers were seriously influenced by imported European styles such as Victorian and Art Nouveau… (and later by Art Deco and the Bauhaus, introduced through Japanese graphic arts trade magazines, and incorporated into the design of matchbox labels during the late 1920s and ’30s). Western graphic mannerisms were harmoniously combined with traditional Japanese styles and geometries from the Meiji period (1868–1912), exemplified by both their simple and complex ornamental compositions. Since matches were a big export industry, and the Japanese dominated the markets in the United States, Australia, England, France, and even India, matchbox design exhibited a hybrid typography that wed Western and Japanese styles into an intricate mélange.
Find something that catches your eye? It shouldn’t cost more than a buck or two to acquire it, though Japanese clutter-control guru, Marie Kondo, would no doubt encourage you to adopt cartoonist Roz Chast’s approach to matchbook appreciation.
Earlier this spring, Chast shared her passion with readers of The New Yorker, collaging some of her favorites into an autobiographical comic wherein she revealed that she doesn’t collect the actual objects, just the digital images. Those familiar with Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant, Chast’s hilariously painful memoir about her difficult, aging parents’ “golden years,” will be unsurprised that she opted not to add to the unwelcome pile of “crap” that gets handed down to the next generation when a collector passes away.
If you’re inspired to start a Chast-style collection, have a rummage through the large album of Japanese vintage matchbox covers that web designer, Jane McDevitt posted to Flickr, from which the images here are drawn.
Those 418 labels, culled from a friend’s grandfather’s collection are just the tip of McDevitt’s matchbox obsession. To date, she’s posted over 2050 covers from all around the world, with the bulk hailing from Eastern Europe in the 50s and 60s. You can visit her collection of 400+ Japanese matchbox covers here. And if you’re into this stuff, check out the Japanese book, Matchbox Label Collection 1920s-40s.
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The Making of Japanese Handmade Paper: A Short Film Documents an 800-Year-Old Tradition
Ayun Halliday, author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine, will be reading from her travel memoir, No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late at Indy Reads Books in downtown Indianapolis, Thursday, July 7. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson’s Three Rules for Living Well: A Short and Succinct Life Philosophy
Regular readers of Open Culture know us to gush over our favorite celebrity couples now and then: John and Yoko, Jean-Paul and Simone, Frida and Diego…. Not your usual tabloid fare, but the juicy details of these amorous partners’ lives also happen to intersect with some of our favorite art, music and literature. One cultural power couple we haven’t covered much, surprisingly, well deserves the “power” adjective: Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, two personalities whose influence on the art and music of the last several decades can hardly be overstated.
Has Reed’s reputation at times been inflated, and Anderson’s underplayed? Maybe. She doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the witty, profound, moving work she’s done, year after year (with one lengthy hiatus) since the 70s. Reed’s career since the 70s consisted of more misses than hits. But put them together (in 1992) and you get a harmonious meeting of Reed’s raw, gut-level assertions and Anderson’s curious, playful concepts.
Witness their personal strength together in the Charlie Rose excerpt at the top of the post. Reed, who was often a difficult interview subject, to put it mildly, and who gained a reputation as a brutally unpleasant, abusive rock and roll diva (immortalized lovingly in Bowie’s “Queen Bitch”), comes off in this sit-down with Anderson as almost warm and fuzzy. Did she make him want to be a better person? I don’t know. But Anderson’s short obituary after his 2013 death remembered Reed as a “prince and fighter,” her longer obit as a “generous” soul who enjoyed butterfly hunting, meditation, and kayaking. No reason he wasn’t all those things too.
When it came to music, Reed could pull his partner into the orbit of his sweet R&B songcraft, as in their duet of “Hang on to Your Emotions,” further up, and she could pull him out of it—like John Cale and Nico had done in the Velvet Underground—and into the avant-garde drone of her experimental scene (as above in the pair’s collaboration with composer and saxophonist John Zorn). Just this past Spring, in one of the most touching musical tributes I’ve ever seen, Anderson recreated Reed’s abrasive screw-you to his record label, Metal Machine Music, as a conceptual art piece called Drones, leaning several of his guitars against several fully-cranked vintage amps, letting the feedback ring out for five days straight.
None of us can be Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson; every couple is happy, or unhappy, in their own way. But what, in the grand tradition of mining celebrity couple’s lives for advice, can we learn from them? I guess the overall message—as Anderson herself suggested in her Rock & Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech for Reed (above, in shaky audience video)—is this: keep it simple. Kansas State English Professor Philip Nel points out Anderson’s “wise… thoughtful” words on the subject of living well, delivered in her speech at the 8:55 mark:
I’m reminded also of the three rules we came up with, rules to live by. And I’m just going to tell you what they are because they come in really handy. Because things happen so fast, it’s always good to have a few, like, watchwords to fall back on.
And the first one is: One. Don’t be afraid of anyone. Now, can you imagine living your life afraid of no one? Two. Get a really good bullshit detector. And three. Three is be really, really tender. And with those three things, you don’t need anything else.
Can you imagine Lou Reed as “really, really tender”? He certainly was in song, if not always in person. In any case, these three rules seem to me to encapsulate a personal philosophy built solidly on fearless integrity and compassion. Difficult to live by, but well worth the effort. And because I’m now feeling super warm and fuzzy about Lou and Laurie, I’ll leave you with the short WNYC interview clip below, in which she reveals her favorite Lou Reed song, which he happened to write about her.
Related Content:
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...R Crumb, the Father of Underground Comix, Takes Down Donald Trump in a NSFW 1989 Cartoon
Nature’s way is to take away from those that have too much and give to those that have too little. Man’s way, on the contrary, is to take away from those who have too little to give more to those who already have too much.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, circa 500 BC
Two and a half thousand years later, the ancient sage’s quote continues to resonate, especially in this election year.
Lest we get too gloomy, there is another quote I would like to submit:
And isn’t this a nutty kinda country where you can draw any irreverent, degrading thing about the most powerful people and nobody cares! You don’t get jailed. You don’t get persecuted. They just ice you out of the marketplace.
- R Crumb, Hup, 1989
Crumb is to underground comix as Lao Tzu was to Taoism, but the fame Crumb achieved in the late 60s and early 70s did not protect him from the 80s, “an awful decade” as he told the Observer. His astonishing creative output never flagged, but he hated the culture and struggled to make ends meet:
…it all gradually fell apart through the 70s, and by the 80s with the rise of the yuppies, Reagan’s election and the real estate boom. In California it was always about real estate ever since the Gold Rush, but the 80’s saw a new explosion of it. They went crazy. Everybody was getting their real estate license. They kept on building these hideous housing developments where we lived. It used to be farmland there when we first arrived, then everything became a fight. Dow Chemical tried to come there, we fought that. Then the Super Collider, we fought that. It was this constant battle against these forces of development and business.
In 1991, he fled America for a small village in Southern France, a prescient move, given “Point the Finger,” a comic published two years earlier in his short-lived Hup series. The semi-fictional five-pager pits Crumb himself against real estate developer Donald Trump, billed as “one of the more visible big time predators who feed on society,” as well as “one of the most evil men alive.”
The then-42-year-old Trump is quick to take Crumb’s bait, piling on some insults of his own. He may not be familiar with the cartoonist’s work, but he knows how to mount an attack, with labels like “crass,” “venal,” “some kind of self-styled terrorist,” “the picture of negativity,” and “filled with hate.” Had Crumb set this smack down on a beach, Trump would be the bully kicking sand in the scrawny nerd’s face, as a couple of hot babes look on, admiringly.
In fact, the comic comes very close to ending on such a note. Two of Crumb’s characteristically powerfully-thighed females are on hand, ostensibly as members of his camp. Their heads are quickly turned, however, by an invitation to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lavish Palm Beach estate. The Donald starts looking pretty good to Tracy and Marny, bedazzled by the promise of banquets, manicures, world-class entertainment, and a hedonistic after-hours romp with Trump and his then-wife Ivana.
The cartoonist, defeated, compares the tycoon to Trimalchio, the vulgar but loaded host of Petronius’ Satyricon, before preparing to take things out with the Lao Tzu quote at the top of this post.
It’s here that things take a turn for the meta, as Stan “the Man” Shnooter, the self-assured fictional producer of Hup, rallies Crumb to assert authorial control.
Crumb rewinds to a pivotal moment. In this redo, Tracy and Marny remain steadfast. The bully is frogmarched to the toilet to be given a taste of his own medicine. The saga draws to a close with the sort of acrobatic, questionably consensual, NSFW sex that has rained feminist ire on Crumb for years, as the unlikely conquerer savors victory in his preferred style.
Is it fantasy? Reality? All just a dream?
(Any way you slice it, I’m pretty sure Tracy and Marny aren’t the winners…)
You can check out Crumb’s 1989 Trump comic in its extremely NSFW entirety here or buy Hup, Issue 3 to read it the old fashioned way. Some of the tamer panels can be sampled here.
Related Content:
R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instantly Discovered His Artistic Style
Noam Chomsky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resembles the Rise of Fascism in 1930s Germany
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...Explore Harvard’s Iconic Spaces with 360° Interactive Videos
For me, nothing captures those occasional feelings of post-graduate yearning like “I Wish I Could Go Back to College,” a N‑quite-SFW track from the Broadway musical, Avenue Q.
With all due respect, it feels like the five members of Harvard University’s just-graduated Class of 2016 sharing their recollections in the interactive 360° video project, Harvard Students Say Farewell, left a few crucial details out. (Note: Youtube 360 videos only work in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera browsers.)
It’s completely safe for prospective parents, not a keg or condom wrapper in sight. (The project is hosted on Harvard’s official Youtube channel.)
Unsurprisingly, Harvard appears to have been the participants’ universal first choice of college. Hasty Pudding performer, Joshuah Campbell, above, a self-described “Black kid from the country,” confides that it was the only place he applied to.
He may have arrived wondering how he would fit in, but four years later, his grubby dorm room is one of the “iconic” Harvard locations viewers can explore digitally as he briefly reflects upon his experience.
That’s about as down and dirty as this series gets. The human subjects seem to have been selected with an eye toward diversity and humility, rather than the clenched Boston Brahmin jaw that once defined the institution.
Meanwhile, the libraries, quads, and theaters through which this new breed of Harvard men and women wander attest to the place’s ongoing exclusivity.
Sreeja Kalapurakkel, above, a member of the Harvard South Asian Dance Company, knew what she was getting into, as a student at a respected Boston secondary school. Shortly after graduation, she sung Harvard’s praises somewhat more frankly on her Facebook page:
Each day of my time at Harvard was filled with everything that makes life beautiful: darkness, struggle, despair, loneliness, friendship, hope, perseverance, light. Every experience, every lesson, every friend transformed me into someone more human and gave me something new to fight for.
Harvard, like every other college in the land, has relaxed its policy on ending a sentence in a preposition.
Ana-Maria Constantin arrived sight unseen from her native Romania to pull us out onto the deck of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
On to the locker room! Hockey captain Kyle Criscuolo joins the Detroit Red Wings, reflecting that Harvard student athletes enjoy no special treatment. In future, the university may want to require them to listen to Will Stephen’s lecture, “How to Sound Smart in a TED Talk.” Criscuolo sounds sincere, but also stiff, as if reading from a sheet of paper, or the digital equivalent thereof.
(Thereof is an adverb, by the way. Not a preposition. I checked.)
Harvard Art Museums Student Board member Rachel Thompson paints herself so meekly, I’m tempted to check with her freshman year roommate. Was she really so filled with self doubt? I’ve always assumed Harvard acceptance letters would puff the recipient up. Good lord, imagine the effect the rejection letters must have!
Use a mouse to explore the immersive environment on your computer, or the YouTube app to navigate on a mobile device. Use a virtual reality headset and the Harvard Crimson staff’s vocabulary list to enhance the experience even more.
The complete playlist is here.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine, and a Northwestern University grad. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...The History of Electronic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Catalogues the Theremin, Fairlight & Other Instruments That Revolutionized Music
Hang around this site long enough and you’ll learn a thing or two about electronic music, whether it’s a very brief history of the Moog synthesizer, or the Theremin, or an enormous, obscure ancient ancestor, the Telharmonium. These mini-lessons are dwarfed, however, by the amount of information you’ll find on the site 120 Years of Electronic Music, wherein you can read about such strange creatures as the Choralcelo, the Staccatone, the Pianorad, Celluphone, Electronde, and Vibroexponator. Such oddities abound in the very long history of electronic musical instruments, which the site defines as “instruments that generate sounds from a purely electronic source rather than electro-mechanically or electro-acoustically.”
Despite these rather strict technical parameters, the site’s author Simon Crab admits that the boundaries “do become blurred with, say, Tone Wheel Generators and tape manipulation of the Musique Concrete era.” Then there are precursor instruments that predate the discovery and harnessing of electricity, such as the Clavecin Magnetique, above, invented by Abbé Bertholon de Saint-Lazare in 1789, a “simple instrument which produced sounds by attracting metal clappers to strike tuned bells by raising and lowering magnets operated by a keyboard.”
Yet the primary focus of 120 Years of Electronic Music is a period of growth and development from the late 1800s to the 1970s, when early digital synthesizers like the Fairlight (top) appeared. Thus, we should not expect here “an exhaustive list of recent commercial synthesizers or software packages”—the stuff of modern dance, pop, hip-hop, etc. Crab’s intent is academic, “encyclopedic, pedagogical,” and pitched to musicologists as well as “Synthesizer Geeks” likely to appreciate the niceties of the 1961 DIMI & Helsinki Electronic Music Studio.
But even non-academics and non-geeks can learn much from the history of such unusual instruments as the Klaviatursphäraphon (above), one of several creations of German composer Jörg Mager in his pursuit of “a new type of utopian ‘free’ music by means of new electronic cathode-ray musical instruments.”
Amidst the weird obscurities and high-concept musical theory, you’ll also find old favorites that revolutionized pop music, like the Hammond Organ (see a making-of promotional video above), the various iterations of Moog synthesizers, and of course the Fairlight CMI (short for Computer Musical Instrument). Invented by Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel in Australia in 1979, the Fairlight is affectionately known as the “mother of all samplers,” and its technology jumpstarted the revolution in computer music from the 80s to today. You can see Vogel demonstrate the first version of his Fairlight in this video, or—for a slightly less geeky intro—see Peter Gabriel demonstrate it below (or watch Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones show you how it’s done in a clip from Sesame Street.)
The Hammond, Moogs, and Fairlight aside, very few of the instruments featured on 120 Years of Electronic Music had any kind of direct impact on popular music. But many of them, like Hugh Le Caine’s 1945 Electronic Sackbut, influenced the influencers, and they all represent some evolutionary step forward, or sideways, in the development of the sounds we hear all around us now in every possible genre.
Additionally, Crab’s historical project explores what he calls “the dichotomy between radical culture and radical social change,” with discussions on the links between Bolshevism and the avant-garde and modernism and fascism—discussions of keen interest to cultural historians and critical theorists. Oh, and the name? “The project,” Crab explains, “was begun in 1996; considering electronic music started around 1880 this was quite an accurate title for the time.” It’s now “a bit out of date but… something of a brand-name.” We’ll forgive him this minor chronological inaccuracy for the tremendous service his open access encyclopedia offers to scholars and enthusiasts alike. Explore it here.
Related Content:
Hear the Greatest Hits of Isao Tomita (RIP), the Father of Japanese Electronic Music
The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)
Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938- 2014)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Filmmaker Ken Burns Urges Stanford Graduates to Defeat Trump & the Retrograde Forces Threatening the U.S.
This time of year, we see graduation speeches popping up all over the web. The commencement address as a genre focuses on the opportunities, challenges, and responsibilities graduates will face post-college, and often espouses timeless life lessons and philosophies. But this year, as you may have seen, esteemed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns took the opportunity of his graduation speech, presented to the 2016 class at Stanford University, to address the timeliest of issues: the upcoming presidential election and the threat of “an incipient proto-fascism.” The graduation just happened to fall on the same day as the deadliest mass-shooting in recent American history.
Voters are angry at the system, we’re told again and again, and frankly the overwhelming majority of us have every reason to be. But anger can be intoxicating, and the segment of the electorate that carried Donald Trump to power seems drunk with rage and hostility. The promise of Trumpism puts me in mind of historian and critic Richard Slotkin’s classic study of U.S. mythology, Regeneration Through Violence, which describes the nation’s compulsion to purge the country of threatening others in order to restore some myth of lost innocence. “I will give you everything, I’m the only one,” the candidate vows, while scapegoating group after group for the country’s problems.
In his Stanford commencement speech on Sunday, Burns decried “the dictatorial tendencies of the candidate with zero experience in the much maligned but subtle art of governance; who is against lots of things, but doesn’t seem to be for anything, offering only bombastic and contradictory promises and terrifying Orwellian statements.” The Republican candidate for president is “a person,” Burns said in his impassioned speech, “who easily lies, creating an environment where truth doesn’t seem to matter.”
As a student of history, I recognize this type. He emerges everywhere and in all eras. We see nurtured in his campaign an incipient proto-fascism, a nativist anti-immigrant Know Nothing-ism, a disrespect for the judiciary, the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African-Americans again asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted, jingoistic saber-rattling, a total lack of historical awareness, a political paranoia that, predictably, points fingers, always making the other wrong. These are all virulent strains that have at times infected us in the past. But they now loom in front of us again — all happening at once. We know from our history books that these are the diseases of ancient and now fallen empires. The sense of commonwealth, of shared sacrifice, of trust, so much a part of American life, is eroding fast, spurred along and amplified by an amoral internet that permits a lie to circle the globe three times before the truth can get started.
We no longer have the luxury of neutrality or “balance,” or even of bemused disdain. Many of our media institutions have largely failed to expose this charlatan, torn between a nagging responsibility to good journalism and the big ratings a media circus always delivers. In fact, they have given him the abundant airtime he so desperately craves, so much so that it has actually worn down our natural human revulsion to this kind of behavior. Hey, he’s rich; he must be doing something right. He is not. Edward R. Murrow would have exposed this naked emperor months ago. He is an insult to our history. Do not be deceived by his momentary “good behavior.” It is only a spoiled, misbehaving child hoping somehow to still have dessert.
And do not think that the tragedy in Orlando underscores his points. It does not. We must “disenthrall ourselves,” as Abraham Lincoln said, from the culture of violence and guns. And then “we shall save our country.”
The words of Lincoln that Burns quotes come from the president’s annual remarks to congress in 1862, in which Lincoln made the case for the Emancipation Proclamation, one month before signing it. (A document, ironically, that Slotkin says “radically expanded the existing powers of the presidency” in its pursuit of a just cause.) In his address, Lincoln makes a forceful moral argument, all the more eloquent for its characteristic brevity.
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.
Likewise, Burns—addressing future leaders at an elite institution—makes his case for heeding the lessons of history, considering posterity, and rejecting Trump, independent of partisan interests: “This is not a liberal or conservative issue, a red state-blue state divide. This is an American issue.” He also implores “those ‘Vichy Republicans’ who have endorsed him to please, please reconsider.” The horrific mass murder in Orlando has further inflamed what Burns calls “the troubling, unfiltered Tourette’s of [Trump’s] tribalism”—with renewed calls for bans on all Muslims, more inflammatory insinuations that the president colludes with terrorists, and bizarre allegations that a Clinton aide is a Saudi agent.
Trump did not invent this rhetoric of bigotry, conspiracy, and paranoia, but he has manipulated and exploited it more effectively than anyone else, to potentially disastrous effect. “The next few months of your ‘commencement,’ ” Burns says, “that is to say, your future, will be critical to the survival of our republic.” He urges the graduating Stanford class to take action: “before you do anything with your well-earned degree, you must do everything you can to defeat the retrograde forces that have invaded our democratic process.” Those processes may already be deeply compromised by moneyed interests, but destroying the edifice on which they’re built, Burns suggests, will hardly restore any supposedly lost “greatness.” Watch Burns’ full commencement speech above.
Related Content:
Ken Burns on the Art of Storytelling: “It’s Lying Twenty-Four Times a Second”
Noam Chomsky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resembles the Rise of Fascism in 1930s Germany
Princeton Historian Sean Wilentz on How Trump May Change (If Not Destroy) the GOP
J.K. Rowling Defends Donald Trump’s Right to Be “Offensive and Bigoted”
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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