Too Big for Any Museum, AIDS Quilt Goes Digital Thanks to Microsoft

in Art, History, Life, Politics | August 3rd, 2012

Twen­ty-five years ago a group of friends gath­ered in a San Fran­cis­co apart­ment to memo­ri­al­ize com­pan­ions who had died of AIDS. They used one of the old­est tech­niques around to hon­or their loved ones: they made a quilt, the now-famous AIDS Memo­r­i­al Quilt, with unique pan­els for each per­son felled by the dis­ease. Now includ­ing some 48,000 pan­els, the quilt has grown into a mas­sive, pub­lic expres­sion of grief. Its pan­els come from around the world. It was even nom­i­nat­ed for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. (Find more on the his­to­ry of the quilt here.)

Like any good archive—and the quilt is an archive of life and loss—the AIDS Memo­r­i­al Quilt serves as a his­tor­i­cal repos­i­to­ry, a store­house of sen­ti­men­tal infor­ma­tion for scores of peo­ple. But beyond that the quilt is a piece of polit­i­cal folk art. AIDS, after all, is a unique­ly polit­i­cal dis­ease, at least in the Unit­ed States. The idea for the quilt was con­ceived dur­ing a can­dle­light march for assas­si­nat­ed San Fran­cis­co May­or George Moscone and Super­vi­sor Har­vey Milk. Efforts to lift the stig­ma of AIDS are close­ly linked to gay rights activism.

While the quilt is on view in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. this sum­mer, Microsoft offers the world up close and per­son­al access. Even if the Mall is too small to hold the entire quilt, the Inter­net isn’t. All 48,000 pan­els are new­ly dig­i­tized through a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Microsoft and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa, the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia and the Names Quilt Foun­da­tion.

You can fly like a bird over the whole, beau­ti­ful piece. You can zoom in to read the thou­sands of names—some in block let­ters, oth­ers stitched in cur­sive. You can count the rain­bows, too.

You can also search the quilt by name or, if you know it, by the block num­ber of a par­tic­u­lar pan­el through the AIDS Quilt Touch inter­face. The site allows unique search­es for each time the quilt has been dis­played. This is impor­tant because the quilt is so mas­sive that the Mall in Wash­ing­ton can’t hold it all. It’s always dis­played in sec­tions, so if you want to know where a spe­cial pan­el has been on view, recent­ly, it’s now pos­si­ble to find out.

Kate Rix is a free­lance writer based in Oak­land. See more of her work at .

John Lennon’s Appearances in How I Won the War, the Absurdist 1967 Film

in Film | August 3rd, 2012

After see­ing it men­tioned in Mon­day’s post on the “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” demos, any curi­ous afi­ciona­do of Bea­t­les-relat­ed ephemera will want to know more about Richard Lester’s How I Won the War, in which John Lennon made his only non-musi­cal act­ing appear­ance. The trail­er above gives you an idea of the sen­si­bil­i­ty of the film, whose desert shoot in Spain allowed Lennon the time and got him into the head­space to con­ceive of that beloved song. Ever shift­ing between tones, gen­res, and looks, the movie fol­lows the attempt of the British Army’s “3rd Troop, the 4th Mus­ke­teers” to build a crick­et pitch behind ene­my lines in WW II Tunisia. In the small part of Mus­ke­teer Grip­weed, Lester cast the 26-year-old, bespec­ta­cled Lennon. The two had already estab­lished a work­ing rela­tion­ship, with Lester hav­ing direct­ed all of the Fab Four in their musi­cal films A Hard Day’s Night and Help!

An enter­pris­ing fan assem­bled the video just above by string­ing togeth­er all of Lennon’s scenes, which come to just under eight min­utes out of the full film’s 109. Watch­ing all these gags decon­tex­tu­al­ized adds a lay­er of absur­di­ty, and How I Won the War’s humor is pret­ty absurd to begin with. You’d per­haps do best to approach the movie as an absur­dist black com­e­dy that both uses and par­o­dies count­less tra­di­tions in British film.

Not that it worked for a 25-year-old Roger Ebert, who waxed sar­cas­tic at the time about the bal­ly­hoo­ing of Lennon’s eight min­utes: “By now we have seen John Lennon’s bloody pic­ture on the cov­er of Ram­parts, and read the adver­tise­ments in which crit­ics are pound­ed over the head with each oth­er’s reviews, and we know this a film the old fogeys and fas­cist baby-eaters will hate and the young, pure, enlight­ened lib­er­als will find Truth in.” Brave and hilar­i­ous anti-war state­ment fea­tur­ing a colos­sal cul­tur­al fig­ure, or non­sen­si­cal piece of slap­stick that hap­pens to include a Bea­t­le? Copies of How I Won the War can be pur­chased on DVD.

Relat­ed con­tent:

John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the Dick Cavett Show

John Lennon and The Rolling Stones Sing Bud­dy Hol­ly

500 Free Movies Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

19 Quotes on Writing by Gore Vidal. Some Witty, Some Acerbic, Many Spot On

in Books, Literature, Writing | August 3rd, 2012

Image by David Shankbone, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Next to “cel­e­brat­ed” (or “celebri­ty”) the descrip­tion I’ve most seen applied to the late Gore Vidal is “acer­bic,” or some such synonym—“scathing,” “dis­dain­ful”… I’m sure he would rel­ish the com­pli­ment. One of the most fit­ting adjec­tives, per­haps, is “Wilde-like” (as in Oscar Wilde), deployed by Hilton Als in the New York­er. The adjec­tive fits espe­cial­ly well con­sid­er­ing one of Vidal’s most-tweet­ed quotes from his trea­sury of Wilde-like apho­risms: “Write some­thing, even if it’s just a sui­cide note.” It’s clever and mor­bid and naughty and dev­il-may-care, and almost entire­ly fatu­ous. Unlike sev­er­al writ­ers recent­ly fea­tured here—Mar­garet Atwood, Ray Brad­bury, Hen­ry Miller, George Orwell, et al.—who help­ful­ly com­piled num­bered lists of writ­ing advice, Vidal’s pro­nounce­ments on his craft were rather unsys­tem­at­ic. But, like many of those named above, what Vidal did leave in the form of advice was some­times face­tious, and some­times pro­found. Despite his evi­dent con­tempt for neat lit­tle lists, one writer in the UK has help­ful­ly com­piled one any­way. The “sui­cide note” quote above is num­ber 4:

1. Each writer is born with a reper­to­ry com­pa­ny in his head.
2. Write what you know will always be excel­lent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imag­ine, what you sus­pect!
3. I some­times think it is because they are so bad at express­ing them­selves ver­bal­ly that writ­ers take to pen and paper in the first place.
4. Write some­thing, even if it’s just a sui­cide note.
5. How mar­velous books are, cross­ing worlds and cen­turies, defeat­ing igno­rance and, final­ly, cru­el time itself.
6. South­ern­ers make good nov­el­ists: they have so many sto­ries because they have so much fam­i­ly.
7. You can’t real­ly suc­ceed with a nov­el any­way; they’re too big. It’s like city plan­ning. You can’t plan a per­fect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can, how­ev­er, write a per­fect sen­tence now and then. I have.
8. Today’s pub­lic fig­ures can no longer write their own speech­es or books, and there is some evi­dence that they can’t read them either.
9. I sus­pect that one of the rea­sons we cre­ate fic­tion is to make sex excit­ing.

Writer’s Digest gives us ten addi­tion­al quotes of Gore Vidal on writ­ing (unnum­bered this time):

“You can improve your tal­ent, but your tal­ent is a giv­en, a mys­te­ri­ous con­stant. You must make it the best of its kind.”

“I’ve always said, ‘I have noth­ing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addi­tion that the writ­ing gets done. The first draft of any­thing is real­ly just a track.”

“The rea­son my ear­ly books are so bad is because I nev­er had the time or the mon­ey to afford con­stant revi­sions.”

“That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m con­cerned. I think bad writ­ers must have a great dif­fi­cul­ty writ­ing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writ­ers out of rea­sons of ambi­tion. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they real­ly have noth­ing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I cer­tain­ly enjoy mak­ing sen­tences.”

“Con­stant work, con­stant writ­ing and con­stant revi­sion. The real writer learns noth­ing from life. He is more like an oys­ter or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in nor­mal­ly the way any per­son takes in expe­ri­ence. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.”

“I’ll tell you exact­ly what I would do if I were 20 and want­ed to be a good writer. I would study main­te­nance, prefer­ably plumb­ing. … So that I could com­mand my own hours and make a good liv­ing on my own time.”

“If a writer has any sense of what jour­nal­ism is all about he does not get into the minds of the char­ac­ters he is writ­ing about. That is some­thing, shall we say, Capote-esque—who thought he had dis­cov­ered a new art form but, as I point­ed out, all he had dis­cov­ered was lying.”

“A book exists on many dif­fer­ent lev­els. Half the work of a book is done by the reader—the more he can bring to it the bet­ter the book will be for him, the bet­ter it will be in its own terms.”

[When asked which genre he enjoys the most, and which genre comes eas­i­est:]
“Are you hap­pi­er eat­ing a pota­to than a bowl of rice? I don’t know. It’s all the same. … Writ­ing is writ­ing. Writ­ing is order in sen­tences and order in sen­tences is always the same in that it is always dif­fer­ent, which is why it is so inter­est­ing to do it. I nev­er get bored with writ­ing sen­tences, and you nev­er mas­ter it and it is always a surprise—you nev­er know what’s going to come next.”

[When asked how he would like to be remem­bered:]
“I sup­pose as the per­son who wrote the best sen­tences in his time.”

 A series of snip­pets of Gore Vidal’s wit from Esquire pro­vides the bit­ing (for its non-sequitur jab at rival Nor­man Mail­er): “For a writer, mem­o­ry is every­thing. But then you have to test it; how good is it, real­ly? Whether it’s wrong or not, I’m beyond car­ing. It is what it is. As Nor­man Mail­er would say, “It’s exis­ten­tial.” He went to his grave with­out know­ing what that word meant.”

Vidal returns to the theme of mem­o­ry in a 1974 inter­view with The Paris Review, in which he admits to plac­ing the ulti­mate faith in his mem­o­ry: “I am not a cam­era… I don’t con­scious­ly watch any­thing and I don’t take notes, though I briefly kept a diary. What I remem­ber I remember—by no means the same thing as remem­ber­ing what you would like to.”

While Vidal is memo­ri­al­ized this week as a celebri­ty and Wilde-like provo­ca­teur, it’s also worth not­ing that he had quite a lot to say about the work of writ­ing itself, some of it wit­ty but use­less, some of it well worth remem­ber­ing.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

The History of Western Social Theory, by Alan MacFarlane, Cambridge University

in | August 2nd, 2012

These lec­tures were pre­sent­ed by Alan Mac­Far­lane in Novem­ber 2001 in the Depart­ment of Social Anthro­pol­o­gy, Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge. They were part of a course on the­o­ry and meth­ods in anthro­pol­o­gy designed for sec­ond year social anthro­pol­o­gy under­grad­u­ates. Above, watch Lec­ture 1: A Map of Social The­o­ries, 1000–2000. The remain­ing lec­tures fol­low below:

Lec­ture 2: The Baron de Mon­tesquieu (1689–1755)

Lec­ture 3: Adam Smith (1723–1790)

Lec­ture 4: Alex­is de Toc­queville (1805–1859)

Lec­ture 5: Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Lec­ture 6: Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)

Lec­ture 7: Max Weber (1864–1920)

Lec­ture 8: Ernest Gell­ner (1925–1995)

Lec­ture 9: F.W.Maitland (1850–1906)

You will find this course added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Take a Panoramic Tour of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center with Google Street View

in Astronomy, Google, Science | August 2nd, 2012

The Kennedy Space Cen­ter in Flori­da turns 50 this year. To cel­e­brate the occa­sion, NASA and Google Street View have teamed up to give the pub­lic unprece­dent­ed access to this cen­ter of space inno­va­tion. Start­ing today, you can explore 6,000 panoram­ic views of the Space Cen­ter. Some of the high­lights tout­ed by Google include:

• The Space Shut­tle Launch Pad
• The Top of the Gigan­tic Launch Pad
• The Vehi­cle Assem­bly Build­ing 
• Launch Fir­ing Room #4
• The Shut­tle’s Main Engines
• The Sat­urn V Rock­et
• The Atlantis Orbiter
• The Endeav­our Orbiter

You can start your tour here. Oth­er great places to vis­it with Street View include: Pom­peii and oth­er his­tor­i­cal sites, the Ama­zon Basin, Shackleton’s Antarc­tic, Ver­sailles, The White House, and 151 Great Muse­ums Across the Globe.

via Giz­mo­do and Google

Charles Mingus and His Eviction From His New York City Loft, Captured in Moving 1968 Film

in Film, Music | August 2nd, 2012

In Novem­ber of 1966, the great jazz bassist and com­pos­er Charles Min­gus was forcibly evict­ed from his apart­ment in New York City. Thomas Reich­man’s doc­u­men­tary Min­gus (above) cap­tures the sad moment when the musi­cian, with his five-year-old daugh­ter Car­olyn at his side, looks through his scat­tered belong­ings the night before city offi­cials arrive to cart every­thing away.

With the cam­era rolling, Min­gus plays a few notes on a piano and then picks up a rifle and shoots a bul­let into the ceil­ing. He finds a bot­tle of wine and gives a sip to his daugh­ter. He recites his own ver­sion of the Pledge of Alle­giance:

I pledge alle­giance to the flag–the white flag. I pledge alle­giance to the flag of Amer­i­ca. When they say “black” or “negro,” it means you’re not an Amer­i­can. I pledge alle­giance to your flag. Not that I have to, but just for the hell of it I pledge alle­giance. I pledge alle­giance to the flag of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca. The white flag, with no stripes, no stars. It is a pres­tige badge worn by a prof­itable minor­i­ty.

Scenes from the apart­ment are inter­cut with footage of Min­gus and his sex­tet per­form­ing at a lit­tle club in Peabody, Mass­a­chu­setts called Lennie’s-on-the-Turn­pike. The com­bo fea­tures Min­gus on bass, Dan­nie Rich­mond on drums, Charles McPher­son on alto sax­o­phone, John Gilmore on tenor sax­o­phone, Lon­nie Hilly­er on trum­pet and Wal­ter Bish­op, Jr., on piano. The music includes parts of “All the Things You Are,” Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Secret Love.”

But the film is more about the man than the music. It records an espe­cial­ly painful moment in Min­gus’s life. He had hoped to use the loft at 5 Great Jones Street in Green­wich Vil­lage as a music school. In the final sequence, a crowd of reporters and cam­era­men jos­tle for posi­tion to record the humil­i­at­ing scene as Min­gus’s belong­ings, includ­ing his musi­cal instru­ments, are hauled out to the curb and loaded onto a truck. Tears appear in Min­gus’s eyes when the police block him from going back into the build­ing. When the cops find hypo­der­mic nee­dles among his things, Min­gus him­self is loaded into a police car and tak­en away.

Relat­ed con­tent:

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

Thelo­nious Monk: Straight No Chas­er

How to Pot­ty Train Your Cat: A Handy Man­u­al by Charles Min­gus

The Latest, Greatest Cultural Perk of Amazon Prime: Stream Movies and TV Shows to the iPad

in Amazon Kindle, Film, iPad | August 2nd, 2012

When Ama­zon launched Ama­zon Prime in 2005, it did­n’t offer that much in the way of ben­e­fits — just free ship­ping on Ama­zon goods. Now if you pony up $79 per year, you get some good cul­tur­al perks: You can bor­row over 145,000 e‑books and read them on your Kin­dle and devices with Kin­dle apps. What’s more, you can stream thou­sands of movies and TV shows through your com­put­er, select blu-ray play­ers and now … drum roll please .… the iPad. Just yes­ter­day, Ama­zon released its free iPad app, which means that Prime mem­bers can start stream­ing movies on their tablets right away. If you’re not a mem­ber, you can always try out a one month Free Tri­al to Ama­zon Prime. And if that does­n’t move you, you can sim­ply dive into our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Movies Online. Ars Tech­ni­ca has more details on the pros and cons of the app here.

Jerry Garcia Sings a Soulful Peggy‑O (For His Would-Be 70th Birthday)

in Music | August 1st, 2012

Jer­ry Gar­cia — it would have been his 70th birth­day today. But he exit­ed far too soon. At only 53. Here we have him a short year before his death singing a soul­ful ver­sion of Peggy‑O. Lyrics here. More Jer­ry good­ness awaits you at the Free Grate­ful Dead Con­cert Archive. Enjoy…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

UC San­ta Cruz Opens a Deadhead’s Delight: The Grate­ful Dead Archive is Now Online

NASA & Grate­ful Dead Drum­mer Mick­ey Hart Record Cos­mic Sounds of the Uni­verse on New Album

Van Mor­ri­son, Jef­fer­son Air­plane & The Grate­ful Dead: Watch Clas­sic Con­certs from Wolfgang’s Vault

Versailles 3D, Created by Google, Gives You an Impressive Tour of Louis XIV’s Famous Palace

in Architecture, Google, History, Travel | August 1st, 2012

With 3D scale mod­els, music, and video, Google’s Ver­sailles 3D brings the best of 21st cen­tu­ry web arts to 18th cen­tu­ry art his­to­ry. The palace was built by Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” who exem­pli­fied all of the author­i­tar­i­an excess­es of the French monar­chy. For­tu­nate­ly for pos­ter­i­ty, he was also a patron of the arts, to whom we owe much of the work of Moliere, Racine and painters such as Charles Le Brun. And then there is his archi­tec­tur­al lega­cy, the palace of Ver­sailles, which start­ed out as a hum­ble hunt­ing lodge, built by his father Louis XIII in 1624. In the next sev­er­al decades, father, then son, com­mis­sioned the elab­o­rate set of build­ings that con­sti­tute Europe’s largest chateau and the seat of French gov­ern­ment from Louis XIV’s ascen­sion until the Rev­o­lu­tion of 1789. If you’re think­ing of vis­it­ing, the offi­cial chateau de Ver­sailles web­site has slideshows of grounds and gal­leries, a bou­tique, and some worth­while inter­ac­tive fea­tures. But Google, as usu­al, has tried to out­do its com­pe­ti­tion, this time by part­ner­ing with it. In con­nec­tion with the Ver­sailles cura­tors, The Google Cul­tur­al Insti­tute has cre­at­ed a mul­ti­me­dia almost-sub­sti­tute for a real life excur­sion to the gar­gan­tu­an and endur­ing sym­bol of Ancien Regime France.

The next video is a pre­view of a “Google Chrome Exper­i­ment” called “Chaos to Per­fec­tion,” an “inter­ac­tive stroll around the palace,” accom­pa­nied by an orig­i­nal sound­track from French band Phoenix. (The “exper­i­ment” itself is some­what slow load­ing, and requires the Chrome brows­er).

Final­ly, the engi­neers at Google (and part­ners Aloest, Wes­t­im­ages, le Fab­Shop and Les 84) give us a look behind the scenes of Ver­sailles 3D. Won­der how they cre­at­ed the elab­o­rate 3D scale mod­els of the palace grounds and build­ings? Well, the video below pro­vides a bar­rage of back­stage glimpses of the process, along with scenes from the open­ing of the Palace His­to­ry Gallery on June 14^th.

And, of course, there will be mobile apps, Google promis­es, “soon.”

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Stanley Kubrick Never Made

in Film | August 1st, 2012

Think about all the big cin­e­mat­ic ideas Stan­ley Kubrick real­ized — Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clock­work Orange — and then imag­ine the ones he did­n’t. You can do bet­ter than imag­in­ing, actu­al­ly, since, the direc­tor left behind enough evi­dence of abort­ed works for Wikipedia to put togeth­er an entire page called “Stan­ley Kubrick­’s unre­al­ized projects.” He want­ed to adapt Calder Will­ing­ham’s Nat­ur­al Child and Ste­fan Zweig’s The Burn­ing Secret, but the mate­r­i­al proved too con­tro­ver­sial for the con­tent restraints of the Hays Code. He want­ed to make a Holo­caust film with Isaac Bashe­vis Singer, who declined; he want­ed to make anoth­er Holo­caust film with Julia Roberts, but Steven Spiel­berg put out Schindler’s List first. (He ulti­mate­ly deemed the Holo­caust cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly unap­proach­able, as he did The Lord of the Rings when the Bea­t­les pre­sent­ed him that idea.) He want­ed to adapt Umber­to Eco’s Fou­cault’s Pen­du­lum, “toyed” with Patrick Süskind’s Per­fume, con­sid­ered rein­vent­ing pornog­ra­phy… the list goes on.

Napoleon casts a shad­ow over all of these frag­ments. Though Kubrick nev­er made his life of Napoleon Bona­parte, he nev­er seemed to for­get the idea, either; he claimed to have read over 500 books about the man in years of prepa­ra­tion for a shoot that nev­er came. David Hem­mings was to play his Napoleon, Audrey Hep­burn his Josephine. The pro­jec­t’s ever more intim­i­dat­ing bud­get — vast, loca­tion-filmed bat­tle scenes pre­sum­ably hav­ing some­thing to do with that — and the release of Sergei Bon­darchuk’s War and Peace and Water­loo sank the project, but you can still read its screen­play online. Taschen, pub­lish­er of lav­ish, visu­al­ly intense tomes, pro­duced the video above on the process behind Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Nev­er Made, their book — or rather, their enor­mous hol­low book filled with small­er books — that dis­tills the nonex­is­tent film’s remains. Don’t have enough room on your shelf? Then take a look at Vice mag­a­zine’s “Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Napoleon: A Lot of Work, Very Lit­tle Actu­al Movie” instead.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Doc­u­men­taries

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.