Watch “Traffic Stop,” an Emmy-Nominated, Animated Film About a Traffic Stop Gone Horribly Wrong
As the Black Lives Matter movement has come to occupy a greater swath of America’s attention span, a conversation has arisen around the pitfalls of allyship, a term that lends itself to discussions of gender and disability, as well as race.
Simply put, the self-proclaimed allies are members of a more privileged majority, eager to lend support through word and deed.
Unfortunately, their enthusiasm often turns them into microphone hogs in what activist Princess Harmony Rodriguez has referred to as “ally theater.”
A number of would-be allies confuse humility with the seeking of brownie points. If they really got it, those at the center of the movement say, they would not expect members of the minority to rearrange their to-do lists to bring them up to speed on what it’s like to be a person of color (or a transgendered person or a disabled person).
Would-be allies are therefore advised to step out of the spotlight, stuff a sock in it, and educate themselves, by working to find existing essays and narratives, authored by those with whom they would be in solidarity.
Human nature ensures that tempers will flare and hurt feelings will be aired. The horrifying social ill that gave rise to the movement—the shooting of unarmed black men by those charged with protecting the whole of the public—is elbowed offstage, so that a phenomenon such as allyship can be the number one topic of debate on college campuses, websites, and social media.
“Traffic Stop,” above, provides a rare moment of racial accord, stemming from yet another ghastly tale of police brutality.
The short animation was born of a conversation recorded by Alex Landau and Patsy Hathaway in a StoryCorps booth, a massive oral history project designed to attract a wide diversity of participants.
Landau is African-American.
His adoptive mother, Hathaway, is white.
Those who would classify adopting a child of another race as “allyship” must concede that, if so, it is certainly of no casual stripe.
The events of January 15, 2009, when Denver police stopped the 19-year-old Landau and a white friend for making an illegal left turn, caused Hathaway to rethink the colorblind worldview she had espoused while raising her son.
“I thought that love would conquer all and skin color really didn’t matter,” Hathaway tells Landau. “I had to learn the really hard way when they almost killed you.”
Had the attack happened a few years later, Landau’s friend might have managed to document the proceedings with a cell phone, despite the handcuffs that were placed on him after a bag of marijuana was found in his pocket.
Instead, this animation, and the grisly graphic photo that follows of Landau’s face prior to receiving 45 stitches, will have to suffice. His recollection of the laughter and racial epithets directed his way as he lay bleeding on the ground are stomach-churners, too.
Like his mother, Landau’s childhood perception of an all-inclusive, benevolent world was shattered. They mourned it together when they were reunited in the emergency room on the night of the ill-fated traffic stop.
Look and listen.
Then, if you are ready to wade into thornier territory, read the hundreds of comments viewers have posted on youtube.
Ultimately, the City of Denver awarded Landau a $795,000 settlement, while the Denver Police Department, citing a lack of evidence, cleared all three officers of misconduct. Follow up articles from 2011 and 2013 are available here and here.
Traffic Stop was animated by Gina Kamentsky & Julie Zammarchi (read an interview with them here). It was recently nominated for an Emmy award last week.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Watch Carl Sagan’s “A Glorious Dawn” Become the First Vinyl Record Played in Space, Courtesy of Jack White
Third Man Records, the record label created by The White Stripes’ Jack White, announced Saturday that they’ve made history by launching a “space-proof” turntable into space (near space, to be precise), using a high-altitude balloon to reach a peak altitude of 94,413 feet. Their goal was to “send a vinyl record up as high as possible and document it being played there.” And that they did.
According to their press release, for “the entire hour and twenty minutes of ascension, the Icarus turntable faithfully played Carl Sagan’s “A Glorious Dawn” (from “Cosmos” by Symphony of Science composer John Boswell) on repeat, using an impressively sturdy phono cartridge and stylus as well as an onboard flight computer programmed with a few different actions to keep the record playing while it was safe to do so.” Eventually, when the balloon popped (around the 83rd minute), the turntable went into “turbulence mode” and safely survived the descent back down to earth. You can watch the entire historic voyage–all two hours of it–in the video above.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Read More...Hear the 14-Hour “Essential Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist: “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” & Much More
Edgar Allan Poe: anyone with an interest in scary stories—and not just scary, but deeply, whole-other-level scary stories—quickly learns the name. Presumably they also learn the proper spelling of the name: “Allan” with two As, not “Allen” with an E. But despite using the incorrect latter, the good people at Spotify have still managed to craft the most expansive Poeian playlist currently available on the internet, whose fourteen hours constitute “the essential Poe listening experience, from vintage radio versions to contemporary readings.” (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.)
Though he composed his entire body of work in the first half of the nineteenth century, Poe lives on, for those who like their cocktails of mystery and the macabre with a long-lasting (and long-troubling) psychological aftertaste, as the storyteller to beat. As impressive a number of his writings—“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”—have taken a permanent place in not just the American but human consciousness, none have attained as much universality as “The Raven,” the poem of loneliness and the supernatural which justifiably begins the playlist.
Given its sheer length, Spotify’s Essential Edgar Allen Allan Poe doesn’t just play the hits: even avowed Poe appreciators will likely hear a few intriguing literary B‑sides they never have before. They’ll certainly hear more than a few productions and interpretations of their favorite pieces from the Poe canon. The playlist would also make a fine, if intense, introduction for those who have yet settled in with the work of the man who defined modern psychological horror. If you crave more afterward—and getting his readership hooked ranked not least among Poe’s concerns—do delve into the copious amount of Poe material we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, a few selections from which appear below. You’ll find it all enduringly and dreadfully compelling, no matter how you spell its author’s name.
The “Essential Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
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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...Stephen King on the Magic Moment When a Young Writer Reads a Published Book and Says: “This Sucks. I Can Do Better.”
Go to a bookstore.
Tell the clerk you’re an aspiring writer.
You’ll be directed to a shelf—possibly an entire section—brimming with prompts, exercises, formulae, and Jedi mind tricks. Round out your purchase with a journal, a fancy pen, or an inspirational quote in bookmark form.
Few of author Stephen King’s books would be at home in this section, but his 2000 memoir, On Writing, a combination of personal history and practical advice, certainly is. The writing rules listed therein are numerous enough to yield a top 20. He makes no bones about reading being a mandatory activity:
If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Not surprisingly, given his prodigious output, he also believes that writers must write daily. Practice helps shape a writer’s voice. Daily practice keeps him or her on intimate terms with characters and plot.
Got that?
Nose to the grindstone, young writer! Quit looking for fairy godmothers and making excuses! Though you might be able to fast track to the magical moment King revealed in a 2003 speech at Yale, above.
Go back to the bookstore.
Ask the clerk to point you toward the shelves of whatever genre has traditionally made your flesh crawl. Chick lit…vampire erotica…manly airplane reads. Select the most odious seeming title. Buy it. Read it. And heed the words of King:
There’s a magic moment, a really magic moment if you read enough, it will always come to you if you want to be a writer, when you put down some book and say, This really sucks. I can do better than this, and this got published!
(It’s really more of a spontaneously occurring rite of passage than magic moment, but who are we to fault Stephen King for giving it a crowd-pleasing supernatural spin?)
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...The Bizarre Time When Frank Zappa’s Entirely Instrumental Album Received an “Explicit Lyrics” Sticker
In 1958, Link Wray released his bluesy instrumental “Rumble,” known for its pioneering use of reverb and distortion. The gritty, seductive tune became a huge hit with the kids, but grown-ups found the sound threatening, reminiscent of scary gang scenes in West Side Story and growing fears over “Juvenile Delinquency”—a national anxiety marked by the 1955 release of Blackboard Jungle and its introduction of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.”
Just three years later, “Rumble” made middle class citizens so nervous that the song has the distinction of being the only instrumental ever banned from radio play in the U.S. And yet, that honor is somewhat misleading. It’s true many radio stations refused to play the song, or any rock and roll records at all, but it did receive enough exposure—from people like American Bandstand’s Dick Clark, no less—to remain in the top 40 for ten weeks in 1958.
Fast-forward thirty years from Blackboard Jungle panic, and we find the country in the midst of another national freakout about the kids and their music, this one spearheaded by the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), formed by Tipper Gore and three other so-called “Washington Wives” who sought to place warning labels on “explicit” popular albums and otherwise impose moralistic guidelines on music and movies. Congressional hearings in 1985 saw the odd trio of Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, mild-mannered folk star John Denver, and virtuoso prog-weirdo Frank Zappa testifying before the Senate against censorship. The fiercely libertarian Zappa’s opposition to the PMRC became something of a crusade, and the following year he appeared on Crossfire to argue his case.
PMRC backlash from musicians everywhere began to clutter the pop cultural landscape. Glenn Danzig released his anti-PMRC anthem, “Mother”; Ice‑T’s The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech viciously attacked Gore and her organization; NOFX released their E.P. The P.M.R.C. Can Suck on This… just a small sampling of dozens of anti-PMRC songs/albums/messages after those infamous hearings. But we can credit Zappa with founding the musical subgenera in his 1985 Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, which included “Porn Wars,” above, a mashup of distorted samples from the hearings.
All of these records received the requisite “Good Housekeeping Seal of Disapproval,” the now-familiar stark black-and-white parental warning label (top). Zappa’s album cover pre-empted the inevitable stickering with a bright yellow and red box reading “Warning Guarantee,” full of tongue-in-cheek small print like “GUARANTEED NOT TO CAUSE ETERNAL TORMENT IN THE PLACE WHERE THE GUY WITH THE HORNS AND POINTED STICK CONDUCTS HIS BUSINESS.” All this incessant needling of the PMRC must have really got to them, fans figured, when Zappa’s 1986 record Jazz from Hell began appearing, it’s said, in record stores with a parental advisory label—on an album without lyrics of any kind.
But did Zappa’s Grammy-award-winning instrumental record (above) really get the explicit content label? And was such labeling retaliation from the PMRC, as some believed? These claims have circulated for years on message boards, in books like Peter Blecha’s Taboo Tunes: A History of Banned Bands & Censored Songs, and on Wikipedia. And the answer is both yes, and no. Jazz from Hell did not get the familiar “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” label, nor was it specifically targeted by Gore’s organization.
The album was, however, stickered in 1990—notes Dave Thompson’s The Music Lover’s Guide to Record Collecting—by “the Pacific Northwest chain of Fred Meyer department stores,” who gave it “the retailer’s own ‘Explicit Lyrics’ warning, despite the fact that the album was wholly instrumental.” This is likely due to the word “hell” and the title of the song “G‑Spot Tornado.” So it may be fair to say that Zappa’s Jazz from Hell is the only fully instrumental album to receive an “Explicit Lyrics” warning, inspired by, if not directly ordered by, the PMRC. Like the radio censorship of Link Wray’s “Rumble,” this regional seal of disapproval did not in the least prevent the record from receiving due recognition. But it makes for a curious historical example of the absurd lengths people have gone to in their fear of modern pop music.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...A Drone’s Eye View of the Ancient Pyramids of Egypt, Sudan & Mexico
A couple years ago we featured drone footage shot above Los Angeles, New York, London, Bangkok, and Mexico City, the sort of metropolises that rank among the greatest works of modern man. But the pilot-photographers of small, unmanned, camera-bearing aircraft have produced equally fascinating visual revelations of the great works of not-so-modern-man. Just above, for instance, we have a drone flyover of the Nubian pyramids of Meroë, Sudan. You can see more such footage at National Geographic, whose engineer Alan Turchik has taken his own quadcopter out there.
“The part of the site that draws the most attention is the underground burial chamber of a Nubian king who conquered Egypt in 715 B.C.,” writes National Geographic’s Nora Rappaport. She quotes Turchik on the benefits of his chosen photographic technology, which allows him to “fly over and gain this connection between all the other burial sites, between the pyramid and the temple, and get an understanding of what that is from the air.”
That holds just as true for other sites of interest, such as the famous pyramids of Giza, captured just above by a traveler-drone photographer from China. (Flying drones in Egypt, we should note, has recently become a more difficult proposition; an enthusiast called Izzy Drones made a video on the complexities of his own mission to shoot the pyramids last year.)
Just as you’ll visit the pyramids if you take a trip to Cairo, you’ll visit the pyramids if you take a trip to Mexico City — but the pyramids of the still-impressive, still-mysterious ancient city of Teotihuacán. “Helicopters illegally fly over this area for foreign dignitaries, but we were told we might be the first to have filmed the pyramids with a drone,” writes the uploader of the video just above. He and his collaborators shot it early one morning for a Boston University research project on “what the ruins of a pre-Aztec metropolis can teach us about today’s cities.” History and urbanism buffs alike will want to read the accompanying article, but even just a glance at these clips tells you one thing for sure: whether old and long-ruined or relatively new and thriving, every city looks good from above.
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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 the Beautiful Chemical Reactions Captured in Stunning Microphotography
You don’t have to know your Zn(NO3)2 from your CuSO4 to appreciate these absolutely beautiful videos of chemical reactions created for a site called Beautiful Chemistry.
Professor Yan Liang of the University of Science and Technology of China, along with co-creators Xiangang Tao and Wei Huang, and in collaboration with Tsinghua University Press, are all behind the project, which focuses a hi-def microscopic camera on chemical reactions like bubbling, metal displacement, crystallization, smoke and liquids.
It may sound like an effects menu in a computer rendering program, and indeed some of these videos look so beautiful in terms of lighting and color that CGI could be suspected. (Some commenters have added the videos to their VFX/Computer Graphics viewing lists.) But according to the site, this is not the case.
For an example of the beauty, just check out at the six-second mark when Cobalt Chloride and Sodium Silicate meet, resulting in bulbous blue and purple growths:
Or look at the wintry fractal forests that spawn when zinc meets silver nitrate (AgNO3), copper sulfate (CuSO4), and lead nitrate (Pb(NO3)2):
The Beautiful Chemistry site has several other interesting series to check out for the science lover, including an ongoing introduction to the elements in cartoon form and a photo gallery of chemistry instruments from history. They are, as the site says, beautiful. More videos can be found on their Vimeo channel.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Stream 18 Hours of Free Guided Meditations
Image via Wikimedia Commons
This year’s crazed election got you stressed out? Or just life in general? “It’s never too late,” Allen Ginsberg reminds us, “to meditate.” On Monday, we brought you several versions of Ginsberg’s meditation instructions, which he set to song and recorded with Bob Dylan and disco maven/experimental cellist Arthur Russell, among others. Ginsberg’s “sugar-coated dharma,” as he called it, does a great job of drawing attention to meditation and its benefits, personal and global, but it’s hardly the soothing soundtrack one needs to get in the right posture and frame of mind.
For that, you might try Moby’s 4 hours of ambient music, which he released free to the public through his website last month. Traditionally speaking, no music is necessary, but there’s also no need go the way of Zen monks, or to embrace any form of Buddhism or other religion. Wholly secular forms of mindfulness meditation have been shown to reduce stress, depression, and anxiety, help manage physical pain, improve concentration, and promote a host of other benefits.
Still skeptical? Don’t take my word for it. We’ve pointed you toward the vast amount of scientific research on the subject of mindfulness meditation, much of it conducted by skeptical researchers who came to believe in the benefits after seeing the evidence. If you too have come around to the idea that, yes, you should probably meditate, your next thought may be, but how? Well, in addition to Ginsberg’s witty Vipassana how-to, UCLA has a series of short, guided meditations available on iTunesU. And just above, we have an entire playlist of guided meditations—18 hours in total. It was put together by Spotify, whose free software you can download here.
These include more religiously-oriented kinds of meditations like “Guided Chakra Balancing” and the mystical philosophies of Deepak Chopra, but don’t run off yet if all that’s too woo for you. There are also several hours of very practical, non-religious instruction from teachers like Professor Mark Williams of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, who offers meditations for cognitive therapy. See Williams discuss mindfulness research and meditation as an effective means of managing depression in the video above. (Catch a full mindfulness lecture from Professor Williams and hear another guided meditation from him on Youtube).
You’ll also find a 30-minute guided meditation for sleep, sitar music from Ravi Shankar, and many other guided meditations at various points on the spectrum from the mystical to the wholly practical. Something for everyone here, in other words. Go ahead and give it a try. No matter if you can manage ten minutes or an hour a day, it’s never too late.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Test Your Literary Mettle: Take a 50 Question Quiz from The Strand Bookstore
Image by Beyond My Ken via Wikimedia Commons
Think you know literature inside and out? If you’re feeling confident, then we’d suggest taking the literary matching quizzes that the great Strand Bookstore (located in New York City, of course) has given to its prospective employees since the 1970s. Click here, and you can take a series of 5 quizzes (each with 10 questions) where you’re asked to match authors and titles. When you’re done, let us know how you did in the comments section below. Best of luck.
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Read More...Joseph Priestley Visualizes History & Great Historical Figures with Two of the Most Influential Infographics Ever (1769)
Not a day now goes by without the appearance of new infographics, each of them meant to bring its viewers a fuller understanding of a subject or phenomenon (or convince them of an argument) at a glance. Modern technology has made it possible for us to see, as well as create, a wider variety of infographics filled with more data than ever, but their creation as an artistic and intellectual pursuit began longer ago than you might think. Here we have two handmade infographics by the 18th-century English polymath Joseph Priestley, notable not just for their earliness, but for the fact that they remain among the most impressive examples of the form.
Priestley’s 1769 A New Chart of History appears at the top of the post (click for larger version or see this one too). Accompanied by a description and subtitles, “A View of the Principal Revolutions of Empire that have taken place in the World” literally illustrates its creator’s view, unconventional at the time, that to truly understand history requires more than just examining the history of one country or one people. It requires examining the history of all the civilizations of Earth, which he divided into Scandinavia, Poland, Russia, Great Britain, Spain, France, Italy, “Turkey in Europe” and “Turkey in Asia,” Germany, Persia, India, China, Africa, and America.
His earlier A Chart of Biography (1765), a piece of which appears just above, had visualized not the fortunes of empires but the fortunes of individuals, more than 2000 statesmen, warriors, divines, metaphysicians, mathematicians, physicians, poets, artists, orators, critics, historians, and antiquarians who lived between 1200 BC and his own day. “What makes this viz especially amazing,” says a presentation by Tableau Software on the five most influential data visualizations of all time, “is that we can still learn from it at the aggregate level when we combine it with the second part of his two-part visualization” — the New Chart of History.
“Together, they weave an intricate story. They explain and document both the rise and fall of empires, and the unique thinkers that defined those nations,” the leading lights of the Greeks, the Romans, the Enlightenment, and other civilizations and periods besides. They make history, at least as Priestley and his students knew it, quickly graspable at a combination of scales seldom considered before, and one which has influenced thinking ever since about how civilizations grow, collapse, expand, and collide. After their initial publication, the Chart of Biography and New Chart of History met with great acclaim and decades of popular demand, and they still read as not just historical, geographical, and political, but somehow poetic — poetic in the manner, specifically, of Shelly’s Ozymandias.
You can read more about both charts at MIT’s Digital Humanities site.
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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.
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