Footage of Cities Around the World in the 1890s: London, Tokyo, New York, Venice, Moscow & More
It is called the Belle Époque, a phrase which brings to mind stylish graphic advertising posters, the baroque Art Nouveau style of Alphonse Mucha, the Beaux Arts architectural monuments of Paris, Chicago, and Newport. These images seem static, backward-looking. Despite their popularity on the poster market, they cannot capture (how could they?) the full expression of what cultural historians also call the fin de siècle. The term is French for “end of the century,” but it describes a period of radical change in global culture in ways that will be with us for another hundred years or more..
In other words, there was a lot happening in the 1890s. As one description of the period puts it, “change became the nature of things, and people believed that further improvement was not only possible but inevitable.” So much of this change manifested in the arts. In France, for example, Impressionism began receiving its due in art world circles, leading to two Impressionist works on display at the 1900 World’s Fair, which also saw the opening of the Eiffel Tower. In 1895, Paul Verlaine published Arthur Rimbaud’s complete works, posthumously, and Symbolist poetry broke Victorian literary traditions irrevocably.
In English, popular genre fiction exploded, as the Gothic novel reached its apotheosis in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the rise of detective fiction began with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. These works paralleled a rising interest in the occult and the early stirrings of New Age spirituality. Meanwhile, Russian Modernism took shape in the radical work of Vladimir Mayakovsky; the Argentine Tango began to express its “worldview of conflicting national dislocations”; Meiji era Japan began rapidly industrializing and importing “jazz, cinema… automobiles, airplanes, and avant-gardes, from futurism to surrealism,” writes Christopher Bush, even as the West devoured all things Japanese; African art began to transform the work of painters like Picasso.…
The revolutions of fin de siècle Vienna were so world-changing as to warrant a major study of the period titled Fin-De-Siècle Vienna. Even in the still quite-provincial U.S., where robber barons built Beaux Arts palaces, modernist revolutions gestated in the Arts & Crafts movement. The world was changing too quickly for some, not quickly enough for others. For millions more, life went on more or less as it had a half-century earlier. It would be decades before many people around the world experienced either the material improvements or the radical cultural dislocations of the era.
You can see the faces, smiling, scowling, going about their business, of a few thousand city-dwellers around the world from the period in a montage of film footage above. Most of the passersby captured on film could not have known they lived in a time of unprecedented change — the all-important fin de siècle of cultural history. How could they? But they did live in a time of unprecedented anxiety about change, a time in which many keenly felt “the discrepancy between material advance and spiritual dejection,” notes Harvard University Press. “For most people the period was far from elegant.”
Only time will tell what critical historians of the future make of our era. But even as we experience incredible levels of anxiety about change, perhaps few of us are truly aware of just how radical the changes of our time will turn out to be a century or so from now.
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The Oldest Known Footage of London (1890–1920) Features the City’s Great Landmarks
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Is the Viral “Red Dress” Music Video a Sociological Experiment? Performance Art? Or Something Else?
Before it set itself on fire, HBO’s Game of Thrones resonated deeply with contemporary morality, becoming the most meme-worthy of shows, for good or ill, online. Few scenes in the show’s run — perhaps not even the Red Wedding or the nauseating finale — elicited as much gut-level reaction as Cersei Lannister’s naked walk of shame in the Season 5 finale, a scene all the more resonant as it happened to be based on real events.
In 1483, one of King Edward IV’s many mistresses, Jane Shore, was marched through London’s streets by his brother Richard III, “while crowds of people watched, yelling and shaming her. She wasn’t totally naked,” notes Mental Floss, “but by the standards of the day, she might as well have been,” wearing nothing but a kirtle, a “thin shift of linen meant to be worn only as an undergarment.”
What are the standards of our day? And what is the punishment for violating them? Sarah Brand seemed to be asking these questions when she posted “Red Dress,” a music video showcasing her less than stellar singing talents inside Oxford’s North Gate Church. In less than a month, the video has garnered well over half a million views, “impressive for a musician with hardly any social media footprint or fan base,” Kate Fowler writes at Newsweek.
“It takes only a few seconds,” Fowler generously remarks, “to realize that Brand may not have the voice of an angel.” Or, as one clever commenter put it, “She is actually hitting all the notes… only of other songs. And at random.” Is she ludicrously un-self-aware, an heiress with delusions of grandeur, a sad casualty of celebrity culture, forcing herself into a role that doesn’t fit? Or does she know exactly what she’s doing…
The judgments of medieval mobs have nothing on the internet, Brand suggests. “Red Dress” presents what she calls “a cinematic, holistic portrayal of judgment,” one that includes internet shaming in its calculations. Given the amount of online rancor and ridicule her video provoked, it “did what it set out to do,” she tells the BBC. And given that Brand is currently completing a master’s degree in sociology at Oxford University, many wonder if the project is a sociological experiment for credit. She isn’t saying.
Jane Shore’s walk ended with years locked in prison. Brand offered herself up for the scorn and hatred of the mobs. No one is pointing a pike at her back. She paid for the privilege of having people laugh at her, and she’s especially enjoying “some very, very witty comments” (like those above). She’s also very much aware that she is “no professional singer.”
The style in which I sing the song was important because it reflected the story. The vocals don’t seem to quite fit, they seem out of place and they make people uncomfortable… and the video is this outsider doing things differently and causing discomfort and eliciting all this judgement.
All of this is voluntary performance art, in a sense, though Brand has shown previous aspirations on social media to become a singer, and perhaps faced similar ridicule involuntarily. “Part of what this project deals with,” she says, is judgment “overall as a central theme.” She credits herself as the director, producer, choreographer, and editor and made every creative decision, to the bemusement of the actors, crew, and studio musicians. Yet choosing to endure the gauntlet does not make the gauntlet less real, she suggests.
The shame rained down on Shore was part misogyny, part pent-up rage over injustice directed at a hated better. When anyone can pretend (or pretend to pretend) to be a celebrity with a few hundred bucks for cinematography and audio production, the boundaries between our “betters” and ourselves get fuzzy. When young women are expected to become brands, to live up to celebrity levels of online polish for social recognition, self-expression, or employment, the lines between choice and compulsion blur. With whom do we identify in scenes of public shaming?
Brand is coy in her summation. “Judgmental behavior does hurt the world,” she says, “and that is what I’m trying to bring to light with this project.” Judge for yourself in the video above and the … interesting… lyrics to “Red Dress” below.
Came to church to praise all love
Sitting, coming for someone else
It didn’t stew well for me
But I said it was a lover’s deedDidn’t trust my own feels
Let someone else behind my wheel
Said it was love driving me
But the only one who should steer is meCuz what they saw
They see me in a red dress
Hopping on the devil fest
Thinking of lust
As they judge in disgust
What are you doing here?They see me in a red dress
Hopping on the devil fest
Thinking of lust
As I judge in disgust
What am I doing here?Lettin’ someone else steer
I saw a love, precious and fine
Thought I should do anything for time
Time to change the hearts and minds
Of people not like me in break or strideShouldn’t be me, trying to change
Thought I’d be something if I remained
It just ain’t me singing of sins
Watching exclusion getting its winsCuz what they saw
They see me in a red dress
Hopping on the devil fest
Thinking of lust
As they judge in disgust
What are you doing here?They see me in a red dress
Hopping on the devil fest
Thinking of lust
As I judge in disgust
What am I doing here?Lettin’ someone else steer
Came to church
To praise love
Coming for
Someone elseBut all the eyes
Judging in disguise
They don’t see me
Just the liesThey see me in a red dress
No different from the rest
Starting to trust
As they join in a rush
What are we doing here?They see me in a red dress
No different from the rest
Starting to trust
As I lose my disgust
What am I doing here?Striking the fear
They see me in a red dress
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast — Season One Wrap: What Have We Learned? (#102)
After 101 episodes and a bit over two years, OpenCulture’s first podcast offering is moving into a new phase. Here your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian hirt reflect on what we’ve learned and set a course for the future.
Our overarching concern with this podcast has been how and why we consume. We may not have learned a great deal about this issue in a general sense, but we’ve certainly been shown the appeal of many forms that we might not have considered before, and we’ve theorized about why people like drama or horror, or what makes for compelling sci-fi or gaming, etc.
We’ve stretched over these episodes into some unexpected areas for a pop culture podcast, like the philosophy of photography and why people obsess over conspiracy theories. The current discussion takes this on through a re-consideration of what pop culture is. Of course, the title of the podcast has “pretty much” in it, which allows a certain amount of leeway, but the source of that ambiguity is not just that I want the freedom to bring in any topic that interests me, but because of two points covered in this episode:
- Functionally, individuals entertain themselves with a variety of things; they are our cultural food, and can include many obsessions that have nothing to do with manufactured media at all. If such fascinations are also used by multiple people to bond over, then that’s culture, and insofar as bonding over that object is common, then it’s pop culture.
- There’s a continuum between creation and spectating. Creators are first of all consumers and create largely through imitating and tweaking past works. Though this podcast focuses largely on the consumer side of the equation, some of audience appreciation is a matter of respect for the craft, which increases through understanding and (at least vicarious) participation in the activity. Though it’s not always the case that we get enjoyment through sympathy with the artistic choices a creator makes (sometimes we just marvel uncomprehendingly), this is a significant dynamic in fandom. Viewers who liked Game of Thrones had many ideas about how it should have ended even if they had no opportunity or even talent to really provide an alternative.
It all comes down to the dimensions of mimesis, which means reflection. We enjoy storytelling largely because it reflects us, either how we are, how we might like to be, or how we fear we could be. We get some of our ideas about who we are from these media reflections. Marketers guess at who they think we are (again, in part based on media) and create products to market at us. Artists create works reflected from other works which attempt to reflect us (or distort us based on knowledge of a reflection). Who we are as a culture may be very much storytelling all the way down. So political myths are an essential part of this, as are sexual mores, ideas about what leisure activities (and jobs, for that matter) are respectable, manners taken more generally, how we deal with our legacies of racism and sexism, what we find funny and how that changes over time, and much much more.
Thanks, all, for listening. We’ll be back in a few weeks.
This episode includes bonus discussion you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop.
This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.
Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.
Read More...How West Magazine Created a Southern-California Pop-Culture Aesthetic with the Help of Milton Glaser, Gahan Wilson, and Others (1967–1972)
In the late 1960s, a counterculture-minded media professional could surely have imagined more appealing places to work than the Los Angeles Times. Widely derided as the official organ of the Southern California Babbitt, the paper also put out a bland Sunday supplement called West magazine. But West had the potential to evolve into something more vital — or so seemed to think its editor, Jim Bellows. The creator of “the original New York magazine in the early 1960s,” writes Design Observer’s Steven Heller, Bellows convinced a young adman named Mike Salisbury, “who worked for Carson Roberts Advertising in L.A. (where Ed Ruscha and Terry Gilliam worked), to accept the job as art director.”
Salisbury injected West “with such an abundance of pop culture visual richness that it was more like a miniature museum than weekly gazette.” Its weekly issues “covered a wide range of themes — mostly reflecting Salisbury’s insatiable curiosities — from a feature on basketball that illustrated the tremendous size of center forwards by showing a life-size photograph of Wilt Chamberlin’s Converse sneaker, to a pictorial history of movie star pinups with a bevy of gorgeous silhouettes fanning on the page, to an array of souped-up VW Beetles in all shapes and sizes.”
On any given Sunday, subscribers might find themselves treated to “the history of Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola art (the first time it was published as ‘art’), the visual history of Levis, Hollywood garden apartments, Raymond Chandler locations, and Kustom Kars.”
“I was the writer on the Coca-Cola ‘art’ piece as well as the first ‘programmatic’ architecture article to see print,” says a commenter under the Design Observer retrospective named Larry Dietz. He also claims to have written the feature on Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles; much later, he adds, Chinatown screenwriter “Robert Towne said that he was inspired to learn about L.A. history from that piece, but that the writing was crappy.” But then, the main impact of Salisbury’s West was never meant to be textual. Heller quotes Salisbury as saying that “design was not my sole objective: cinema-graphic information is a better definition.” Of all the covers he designed, he remembers the one just above, promoting an exposé on heroin, as having been the most controversial: “Don’t give me too much reality over Sunday breakfast,” he heard readers grumbling.
Other memorable West covers include the magazine’s tribute to the just-canceled Ed Sullivan show in 1971, as well as contributions by artists and designers like Victor Moscoso, Gahan Wilson, John Van Hamersveld, and Milton Glaser, all figures who did a great deal to craft the American zeitgeist of the 1960s and 70s. The magazine as a whole consolidated the Southern Californian pop-cultural aesthetic of its period, as distinct from what Salisbury calls the “quasi-Victorian” look and feel of San Francisco to the north and the “Rococo or Baroque” New York to the east. Los Angeles, to his mind, was “streamline,” emblematized by the culture and industry of motorcycle customization and its “belief in Futurism.”
West was a product of the Los Angeles Times under Otis Chandler, publisher from 1960 to 1980, who dedicated his career to expanding the scope and ambition of the newspaper his great-grandfather had once run. His labors paid off in retrospect, especially from readers as astute as Joan Didion, who praised Chandler’s Times to the skies. But by 1972, West seemed to have become too much of an extravagance even for him. After the magazine’s cancellation, Salisbury moved on to Rolling Stone, then in the process of converting from a newspaper to a magazine format. No small part of that magazine’s pop-cultural power in the 70s must have owed to his art direction.
Later in the decade, both Salisbury and Glaser would bring their talents to the just-launched New West magazine. It had no direct connection with West or the Los Angeles Times, but was conceived as the sister publication of New York Magazine, which itself had been re-invented by Glaser and publisher Clay Felker in the mid-1960s. Its debut cover, just above, featured Glaser’s artwork; three years later, in 1979, Salisbury designed a cover on California’s water crisis that the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ Steven Brower calls “prescient.” At that same time, he notes, Salisbury “worked with Francis Ford Coppola on the set design for Apocalypse Now; he designed Michael Jackson’s breakthrough album, Off the Wall,” and he even collaborated with George Harrison on his eponymous album.” But when “veteran magazine art directors” get together and “reminisce about the glory years,” writes Heller, it’s West they inevitably talk about.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...How Steven Van Zandt Organized the Sun City Boycott and Helped Catalyze the Anti-Apartheid Movement (1985)
Actor and musician Steven Van Zandt — known to Springsteen fans as E Street Band guitarist Little Steven — played the steady voice of reason Silvio Dante on The Sopranos. Without his guiding hand and sense of style, Tony would not have made it as far as he did. How much of Steven Van Zandt was in Silvio? Maybe a lot. As Van Zandt told Vice in a 2019 interview, he invented the character and gave it to David Chase, who turned his vision of “big bands, chorus girls, Jewish Catskills comics” into the Bada Bing, a “strip club for the family.”
It’s not hard to imagine Silvio in his shiny suits getting onstage with the Boss, but he would never have played Van Zandt’s role as an anti-racist activist. After leaving the E Street Band in 1984, Van Zandt started organizing musicians against apartheid for what would become an unprecedented action against Sun City, “a ritzy, whites only resort in South Africa,” Josh Haskell writes at ABC News, “that Van Zandt and his group Artists United Against Apartheid decided to boycott.”
Van Zandt and legendary hip hop producer Arthur Baker brought together what rock critic Dave Marsh calls “the most diverse line up of popular musicians ever assembled for a single session” to record “Sun City,” a song that “raised awareness about apartheid,” says Haskell, “during a time in the 1980s when many Americans weren’t aware of what was happening.” It wasn’t difficult to bury the news pre-internet. Since the South African government received tacit support from U.S. corporations and the Reagan administration, there was hardly a rush to characterize the country too negatively in the media.
Van Zandt himself remembered being “shocked to find really slavery going on and this very brilliant but evil strategy called apartheid,” he said in 2013. “At the time, it was quite courageous for the artists to be on this record. We crossed a line from social concerns to political concerns.” The list of famous artists involved in the recording sessions and video is too long to reproduce, but it notably included hip-hop and rock royalty like Bruce Springsteen, DJ Kool Herc, Bob Dylan, Pat Benatar, Ringo Starr, Lou Reed, Run D.M.C., Peter Gabriel, Kurtis Blow, Bono, Keith Richards, Bonnie Raitt, Joey Ramone, Gil Scott-Heron, and Bob Geldof.
As with other occasional supergroups assembled at the time (by Geldof) to raise funds and/or awareness for global causes, there’s a too-many-cooks feel to the results, but the music is secondary to the message. Even so, “Sun City” turned out to be a pioneering crossover track: “too black for white radio and too white for black radio,” says Van Zandt. Instead, it hit its stride on television in the early days of MTV and BET: “They really embraced it and played it a lot. Congressmen and senators’ children were coming up to them and telling them about apartheid and what they saw happening in South Africa. That put us over the edge.”
When pop, punk, rock, and hip-hop artists linked arms, it “re-energized the whole anti-apartheid movement, says Van Zandt, which had kind of hit a wall at that point and was not getting much traction.” Unlike other supergroup protest songs, “Sun City” also gave its listeners an incisive political education, summing up the situation in the lyrics. You can see a 1985 documentary on the making of the song just above. “The refrain of ‘I ain’t gonna play Sun City’ is a simple one,” notes the Zinn Education Project, “but the issues raised in the song and film are not.” See the lyrics (along with the artists who sang the lines) here, and learn more about the history of South African apartheid at the Zinn Ed Project.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...What Made Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal Art Famous–and an Inventive Prank
To our way of thinking, the question is not whether Marcel Duchamp conceived of Fountain, history’s most famous urinal, as art or prank.
Nor is it the ongoing controversy as to whether the piece should be attributed to Duchamp or his friend, avant-garde poet and artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
The question is why more civilians don’t head for the men’s room armed with black paint pens (or alternatively, die-cut stickers) to enhance every urinal they encounter with the signature of the non-existent “R. Mutt.”
The art world bias that was being tested in 1917, when the signed urinal was unsuccessfully submitted to an unjuried exhibition at the Society of Independent Artists, has not vanished entirely, but as curator Sarah Urist Green explains in the above episode of The Art Assignment, the past hundred years has witnessed a lot of conceptual art afforded space in even the most staid institutions.
Fountain was a premeditated piece, but sometimes, these artworks, or pranks, if you prefer — Green favors letting each viewer reach their own conclusions — are more spontaneous in nature.
She references the case of two teenaged boys who, underwhelmed by a Mike Kelley stuffed animal installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, positioned a pair of eyeglasses in such a way that other visitors assumed they, too, were part of an exhibit.
One of the boys told The New York Times that “when art is more abstract, it is more difficult to interpret,” causing him to lose interest.
“We had a good laugh about it,” the other added.
And that, for us, gets to the heart of Fountain’s enduring power.
Plenty of art world stunts, whether their intention was to shock, critique, or screw with the gatekeepers have been lost to the ages.
Fountain, at heart, is a particularly memorable kind of funny…
Funny in the same way poet Russell Edson’s “With Sincerest Regrets” is funny:
WITH SINCEREST REGRETS
for Charles Simic
Like a white snail the toilet slides into the living room, demanding to be loved. It is impossible, and we tender our sincerest regrets.In the book of the heart there is no mention made of plumbing.
And though we have spent our intimacy many times with you, you belong to a rather unfortunate reference, which we would rather not embrace…
The toilet slides out of the living room like a white snail, flushing with grief…
More recent art world controversies — Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ — arose from the juxtaposition of serious religious subject matter with bodily fluids.
By contrast, Fountain took the piss out of a secular high church — the established art world.
And it did so with a factory-fresh urinal, no more gross than a porcelain dinner plate.
No wonder people couldn’t stop talking about it!
We still are.
Green recounts how performance artists Cai Yuan and Jian Jun Xi attempted to “celebrate the spirit of modern art” by urinating on the Tate Modern’s Fountain replica in 2000.
That performance, titled “Two artists piss on Duchamp’s Urinal” was “intended to make people re-evaluate what constituted art itself and how an act could be art.”
Their action might have made a more elegant — and funnier — statement had the Fountain replica not been displayed inside a vitrine.
Still, drawing attention to their inability to hit the target might, as Green suggests, highlight how museum culture “fetishizes and protects the objects” it, or history, deems worthy.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Watch Beautiful Footage of the Rarely Seen Glass Octopus
First things first: the plural of octopus is not “octopi,” it’s octopuses.
Now, drop everything and watch the video above. It’s an extremely rare sighting of a glass octopus, “a nearly transparent species, whose only visible features are its optic nerve, eyeballs and digestive tract” notes the Schmidt Ocean Institute. “Before this expedition, there has been limited live footage of the glass octopus, forcing scientists to learn about the animal by studying specimens found in the gut contents of predators.”
Limited sightings did not stop the poet Marianne Moore from seeing something like this wondrous creature in her mind’s eye:
it lies “in grandeur and in mass”
beneath a sea of shifting snow-dunes;
dots of cyclamen-red and maroon on its clearly defined
pseudo-podia
made of glass that will bend‑a much needed invention-
comprising twenty-eight ice-fields from fifty to five hundred
feet thick,
of unimagined delicacy.
Glass octopuses have green dots and do not live under “snow-dunes” but in the warm Pacific waters beneath the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) near Samoa, and elsewhere Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists captured rare footage and “identified new marine organisms,” writes Colossal, while recording “the sought-after whale shark swimming through the Pacific Ocean.”
We must admit, Moore got the sense of awe just right….
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Marine scientists from around the world embarked on the 34-day expedition on the ship Falkor. Using “high-resolution mapping tools,” Ocean Conservancy writes, they surveyed “more than 11,500 square miles of sea floor” and observed “not one but two glass octopuses,” with a remote operated vehicle (ROV) called SuBastian.
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See several views of the glass octopuses — the stars of the show — and dozens more rare and beautiful creatures (such as perennial internet favorite the Dumbo octopus, below, from a 2020 expedition) at the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Instagram. “We’re at the beginning of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development,” remarked chief scientist of the Falkor expedition Dr. Randi Rotjan of Boston University. “[N]ow is the time to think about conservation broadly across all oceanscapes, and the maps, footage, and data we have collected will hopefully help to inform policy and management in decision making around new high seas protected areas.” Learn more at the Schmidt Ocean Institute here.
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via Laughing Squid
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...1960s Schoolchildren Imagine Life in the Year 2000: Overpopulation, Mass Unemployment, Robot Courts, Rising Seas & Beyond
Westerners today entertain nothing but grim, dystopian visions of the future. This in stark contrast to the postwar decades when, as everyone knows, all was optimism. “In the year 2000, I think I’ll probably be in a spaceship to the moon, dictating to robots,” says an English schoolboy in the 1966 footage above. “Or else I may be in charge of a robot court, judging some robots, or I may be at the funeral of a computer. Or if something’s gone wrong with the nuclear bombs, I may be back from hunting, in a cave.” Granted, this was the middle of the Cold War, when humanity felt itself perpetually at the brink of self-destruction. How did other children imagine the turn of the millennium? “I don’t like the idea of getting up and finding you’ve got a cabbage pill to eat for breakfast.”
Interviewed for the BBC television series Tomorrow’s World, these adolescents paint a series of bleak pictures of the year 2000, some more vivid than others. “All these atomic bombs will be dropping around the place,” predicts another boy. One will get near the center, because it will make a huge, great big crater, and the whole world will just melt.”
One girl sounds more resigned: “There’s nothing you can do to stop it. The more people get bombs — somebody’s going to use it one day.” But not all these kids envision a nuclear holocaust: “I don’t think there is going to be atomic warfare,” says one boy, “but I think there is going to be all this automation. People are going to be out of work, and a great population, and I think something has to be done about it.”
The idea that “computers are taking over” now has great currency among pundits, but it seems schoolgirls were making the same point more than half a century ago. “In the year 2000, there just won’t be enough jobs to go around,” says one of them. “The only jobs there will be, will be for people with high IQ who can work computers and such things.” Another contributing factor, as other kids see it, is an overpopulation so extreme that “either everyone will be living in big domes in the Sahara, or they’ll be undersea.” And there’ll be plenty of sea to live under, as one boy figures it, when it rises to cover everything but “the highlands in Scotland, and some of the big hills in England and Wales.” Less dramatically but more chillingly, some of these young students fear a terminal boredom at the end of history: “Everything will be the same. People will be the same; things will be the same.”
Not all of them foresee a wholly dehumanized future. “Black people won’t be separate, they’ll be all mixed in with the white people,” says one girl. “There will be poor and rich, but they won’t look down on each other.” Her prediction may not quite have come to pass even in 2021, but nor have most of her cohort’s more harrowing fantasies. If anything has collapsed since then, it’s standards of adolescent articulacy. As Roger Ebert wrote of Michael Apted’s Up series, which documents the same generation of English children, these clips make one ponder “the inarticulate murkiness, self-help clichés, sports metaphors, and management truisms that clutter American speech,” a condition that now afflicts even the English. But then, not even the most imaginative child could have known that the dystopia to come would be linguistic.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Cramps Legendary Concert at a California Psychiatric Hospital Gets Revisited in the New Documentary, We Were There to Be There: Watch It Online
“Somebody told me you people are crazy, but I’m not so sure about that. You seem to be all right to me.” — Lux Interior
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, “San Francisco was a much more conservative place,” says Columbia University’s Lincoln Mitchell in the documentary above, We Were There to Be There. The new film chronicles the legendary 1978 appearance of psychobilly punks The Cramps and SF-based art-rockers The Mutants at the Napa State Hospital, an historic psychiatric facility in the famous wine-growing area. At the time, California’s former governor Ronald Reagan was contending for the presidency after slashing social services at the state level.
There were few political sympathies in the area for those confined to Napa State, as the new documentary above by Mike Plante and Jason Willis shows. Produced by Field of Vision, the film “explores the events that led to CBGB mainstays the Cramps driving over 3,000 miles to perform,” notes Rolling Stone’s Claire Shaffer. We Were There to Be There begins with this crucial socio-political context, remembering the show as “both a landmark moment for punk rock and for the perception of mental health care within U.S. popular culture.”
The doc also explores how the performances could have made such an impact, when they were “seen by almost no one,” as Phil Barber writes at Vice: “about a dozen devoted punkers who drove up with the bands from San Francisco, and perhaps 100 or 200 patients.” Indeed, the show’s memory only survived thanks to “about 20 minutes of footage of The Cramps’ set shot by a small operation called Target Video,” a collective formed the previous year by video artist Joe Rees and collaborators Jill Hoffman, Jackie Sharp, and Sam Edwards.
The show came about through Howie Klein, a fixture of the San Francisco punk scene who wrote for local zines and booked the club Mabuhay Gardens before becoming president of Reprise Records. Napa State’s new director Bart Swain had been staging concerts for the residents. Klein promised to send an early new wave band but sent The Mutants and The Cramps instead, to Swain’s initial dismay. (He was sure he would be fired after the show.)
Released in 1984, the edited Target release opens with a shot of an atomic blast and doesn’t let up. “Maybe you’ve seen the video. If so, you haven’t forgotten it,” writes Barber: “The black-and-white images are distorted and poorly lit. The audio is rough. It’s a transfixing spectacle. The Cramps make no attempt to pacify their mentally ill admirers. Nor do they wink at some inside joke. They just rip.”
Target Video toured the U.S. and Europe, screening its politically-charged punk concert films for eager young kids in the Reagan/Thatcher era, who saw a very different approach to treating people suffering from mental illness in the footage from Napa State. The documentary includes interviews with the Mutants, whose performance didn’t make it on film, and fixtures of the San Francisco scene like Vicky Vale, publisher of RE/Search, who provide critical commentary on the event.
Despite its reputation as a bizarre novelty gig, the show came off as controlled chaos — just like any other Cramps gig. “It was a beautiful, beautiful thing,” says Jill Hoffman-Kowal of Target Video. “What we did for those people, it was liberating. They had so much fun. They pretended they were singing, they were jumping on stage. It was a couple hours of total freedom. They didn’t judge the band, and the band didn’t judge them.”
We Were There to Be There will be added to our collection of Free Online Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More
via Aeon
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The Cramps Play a Mental Hospital in Napa, California in 1978: The Punkest of Punk Concerts
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Take an Intellectual Odyssey with a Free MIT Course on Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
In 1979, mathematician Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Escher, and composer J.S. Bach walked into a book title, and you may well know the rest. Douglas R. Hofstadter won a Pulitzer Prize for Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, his first book, thenceforth (and henceforth) known as GEB. The extraordinary work is not a treatise on mathematics, art, or music, but an essay on cognition through an exploration of all three — and of formal systems, recursion, self-reference, artificial intelligence, etc. Its publisher settled on the pithy description, “a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.”
GEB attempted to reveal the mind at work; the minds of extraordinary individuals, for sure, but also all human minds, which behave in similarly unfathomable ways. One might also describe the book as operating in the spirit — and the practice — of Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, a novel Hesse wrote in response to the data-driven machinations of fascism and their threat to an intellectual tradition he held particularly dear. An alternate title (and key phrase in the book) Magister Ludi, puns on both “game” and “school,” and alludes to the importance of play and free association in the life of the mind.
Hesse’s esoteric game, writes his biographer Ralph Freedman, consists of “contemplation, the secrets of the Chinese I Ching and Western mathematics and music” and seems similar enough to Hofstadter’s approach and that of the instructors of MIT’s open course, Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey. Offered through the High School Studies Program as a non-credit enrichment course, it promises “an intellectual vacation” through “Zen Buddhism, Logic, Metamathematics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Recursion, Complex Systems, Consciousness, Music and Art.”
Students will not study directly the work of Gödel, Escher, and Bach but rather “find their spirits aboard our mental ship,” the course description notes, through contemplations of canons, fugues, strange loops, and tangled hierarchies. How do meaning and form arise in systems like math and music? What is the relationship of figure to ground in art? “Can recursion explain creativity,” as one of the course notes asks. Hofstadter himself has pursued the question beyond the entrenchment of AI research in big data and brute force machine learning. For all his daunting erudition and challenging syntheses, we must remember that he is playing a highly intellectual game, one that replicates his own experience of thinking.
Hofstadter suggests that before we can understand intelligence, we must first understand creativity. It may reveal its secrets in comparative analyses of the highest forms of intellectual play, where we see the clever formal rules that govern the mind’s operations; the blind alleys that explain its failures and limitations; and the possibility of ever actually reproducing workings in a machine. Watch the lectures above, grab a copy of Hofstadter’s book, and find course notes, readings, and other resources for the fascinating course Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey archived here. The course will be added to our list, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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How a Bach Canon Works. Brilliant.
Mathematics Made Visible: The Extraordinary Mathematical Art of M.C. Escher
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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