Open Culture - The Best Free Cultural and Educational Media on the Web. (2024)

in History, Politics, Television | August 4th, 2020

There are many rea­sons, some quite lit­er­al, that it can be painful to talk about racism in the U.S. For one thing, it often seems that writ­ers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, or James Bald­win, have already con­front­ed ques­tions of racial vio­lence with­out hedg­ing or equiv­o­ca­tion. Yet each time racist vio­lence hap­pens, there seems to be a deco­rous need in pol­i­tics and media to pre­tend to be sur­prised by what’s right in front of us, to pre­tend to have dis­cov­ered the place for the first time, and yet to already have a sup­ply of ready­made plat­i­tudes and denun­ci­a­tions at hand.

For exam­ple, just recent­ly, a for­mer white U.S. Pres­i­dent just dis­missed an impor­tant civ­il rights leader at the funer­al of anoth­er civ­il rights leader, while the oppres­sive con­di­tions both lead­ers fought against are ampli­fied to mil­i­tary grade in cities around the coun­try. Sports fans demand that elite Black ath­letes shut up and enter­tain them. The fanswillbe the ones to saywhat ges­tures are accept­able, like stand­ing for the nation­al anthem at a tele­vised for-prof­it sport­ing event that has more to do with gam­bling than patri­o­tism.

Maybe stand­ing and kneel­ing are both spec­ta­cles, but they do not car­ry equal weight. When New Orleans Saints quar­ter­back Drew Brees refused to sup­port his team­mates’ mild protest against mur­der, he tried to make it right by post­ing on social media a stock pho­to of a black hand and a white hand clasped togeth­er. In his N+1 essay “Such Things Have Done Harm,” a wor­thy appli­ca­tion of Baldwin’s furi­ous log­ic to the present, Blair McClen­don writes:

The spec­ta­cle of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion is irre­sistible. There may be a war in the streets, but from time to time there is a Christ­mas truce and we are to take those as visions of a bet­ter, calmer future. Here is the com­ing peace with­out all the gris­ly details that pre­vent us from get­ting there…. Hold­ing up a pic­ture of black and white peo­ple togeth­er inti­mate­ly, in cama­raderie, or even just mutu­al recog­ni­tion and respect, as proof of some­thing “pos­si­ble” implies an oth­er­wise bru­tal vision of the world “as it is”… We should be will­ing to demand more than fel­low feel­ing.

The fore­clo­sure of con­flict, the bypass­ing of real­i­ty with sen­ti­men­tal fan­tasies of har­mo­ny, lies at the heart of the excep­tion­al­ism argu­ment that seems to make so many peo­ple irra­tional­ly angry with Black ath­letes. You are high­ly paid, suc­cess­ful enter­tain­ers, and we con­sid­er that a sign of progress, there­fore we judge this protest ille­git­i­mate. For Bald­win, as Ellen Gutoskey writes at Men­tal Floss, this stan­dard mea­sure­ment of progress “is only progress as defined by white peo­ple of priv­i­lege.”

When Dick Cavett voiced the ques­tion to Bald­win in 1969—citing those who point to the suc­cess of “the ris­ing num­ber of Black Amer­i­cans in sports, pol­i­tics, and entertainment”—Baldwin explained the real prob­lem: No one has asked for this opin­ion, and cer­tain­ly not at that time, as Gutoskey points out, “with the vio­lence of 1968—Mar­tin Luther King Jr.’s and Robert F. Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tions, a riotous Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion, count­less civ­il rights protests, and so on—still very fresh in the pub­lic con­scious­ness.” Bald­win puts is plain­ly:

Inso­far as the Amer­i­can pub­lic wants to think there has been progress, they over­look one very sim­ple thing: I don’t want to be giv­en any­thing by you. I just want you to leave me alone so I can do it myself. And it also over­looks anoth­er very impor­tant thing: Per­haps I don’t think that this repub­lic is the sum­mit of human civ­i­liza­tion. Per­haps I don’t want to become like Ronald Rea­gan or like the pres­i­dent of Gen­er­al Motors. Per­haps I have anoth­er sense of life… Per­haps I don’t want what you think I want.

Repeat­ed­ly, the hal­lowed demo­c­ra­t­ic notion of self-deter­mi­na­tion has been denied Black Americans—perhaps the sin­gle most endur­ing thread that runs through the country’s his­to­ry. The denial of agency is com­pli­cat­ed, how­ev­er, by the neces­si­ty of assign­ing blame to peo­ple deemed not ful­ly human: “I have noth­ing to say about the idea that peo­ple who are the descen­dants of prop­er­ty are bound to respect the prop­er­ty rights of Guc­ci or CVS beyond the desire to point out its obscen­i­ty,” Blair McClen­don writes. “What was called vio­lence and chaos in any oth­er cir­cum­stance would be read as some­thing much sim­pler: self-defense.”

Again and again, those who resist the most bru­tal conditions—including out­right mur­der in the streets, in qui­et homes at night, in cars, at play­grounds, by agents of the state—are called vil­lains and insur­rec­tion­ists. Cavett asks Bald­win to explain rad­i­cal lead­ers like H. Rap Brown and Stoke­ly Carmichael, “who fright­en us the most” (mak­ing the word “us” do a lot of work here). Bald­win responds, “[When] any white man in the world says ‘Give me lib­er­ty, or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a Black man says exact­ly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a crim­i­nal and treat­ed like one….”

I doubt the irony of quot­ing Patrick Hen­ry (also known for say­ing “If this be trea­son, make the most of it!”) was in any way lost on Bald­win. As one recent biog­ra­ph­er puts it, Hen­ry was the first Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tion­ary “to call for inde­pen­dence, for rev­o­lu­tion against Britain, for a bill of rights, and for as much free­dom as pos­si­ble from government—American as well as British.” Patrick Hen­ry was also a slave­own­er, some­thing he con­sid­ered, in his own words, a “lam­en­ta­ble evil.”

Hen­ry wrote, “I will not, I can­not jus­ti­fy [own­ing slaves],” but he was “not con­flict­ed enough to actu­al­ly set any­one free,” writes Michael Schaub at NPR. Dec­la­ra­tions of high moral prin­ci­ples, while one open­ly com­mits, or ignores, what one admits is “evil,” still fea­ture promi­nent­ly in offi­cial sto­ries of the moment. Bald­win, writes McClen­don, “knew what a sto­ry was, he knew what a film was, he knew what a rev­o­lu­tion was and he may have known for­give­ness, too.”

Bald­win did not know will­ful for­get­ting, how­ev­er, except to call it out when he saw it used as a weapon. Raoul Peck­’s excel­lent, apt­ly-titled filmI Am Not Your Negro begins with the Cavett inter­view, then unrav­els a “rad­i­cal, up-to-the-minute exam­i­na­tion of race in Amer­i­ca,” writes YouTube Movies, who offers the film free to screen online, “using Bald­win’s orig­i­nal words and a flood of rich archival mate­r­i­al” to recon­struct his last unfin­ished book, Remem­ber This House.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Famous James Bald­win-William F. Buck­ley Debate in Full, With Restored Audio (1965)

Why James Baldwin’s Writ­ing Stays Pow­er­ful: An Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Author of Notes of a Native Son

W.E.B. Du Bois Dev­as­tates Apol­o­gists for Con­fed­er­ate Mon­u­ments and Robert E. Lee (1931)

Josh Jonesis a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at@jdmagness

Read More...

in Physics, Science | August 3rd, 2020

In our time, few branch­es of sci­ence have tak­en as much pub­lic abuse as quan­tum physics, the study of how things behave at the atom­ic scale. It’s not so much that peo­ple dis­like the sub­ject as they see fit to draft it in sup­port of any giv­en notion: quan­tum physics, one hears, proves that we have free will, or that Bud­dhist wis­dom is true, or that there is an after­life, or that noth­ing real­ly exists. Those claims may or may not be true, but they do not help us at all to under­stand what quan­tum physics actu­al­ly is. For that we’ll want to turn to Dominic Wal­li­man, a Youtu­ber whose chan­nel Domain of Sci­ence fea­tures clear visu­al expla­na­tions of sci­en­tif­ic fields includ­ingphysics, chem­istry, math­e­mat­ics, as well as the whole domain of sci­ence itself — and who also, as luck would have it, is a quan­tum physics PhD.

With his knowl­edge of the field, and his mod­esty as far as what can be defin­i­tive­ly said about it, Wall­man has designeda map of quan­tum physics, avail­able for pur­chase at his web site. In the video above he takes us on a guid­ed tour through the realms into which he has divid­ed up and arranged his sub­ject, begin­ning with the “pre-quan­tum mys­ter­ies,” inquiries into which led to its foun­da­tion.

From there he con­tin­ues on to the foun­da­tions of quan­tum physics, a ter­ri­to­ry that includes such poten­tial­ly famil­iar land­marks as par­ti­cle-wave dual­i­ty, Heisen­berg’s uncer­tain­ty prin­ci­ple, and the Schrödinger equa­tion — though not yet his cat, anoth­er favorite quan­tum-physics ref­er­ence among those who don’t know much about quan­tum physics.

Alas, as c explains in the sub­se­quent “quan­tum phe­nom­e­na” sec­tion, Schrödinger’s cat is “not very help­ful, because it was orig­i­nal­ly designed to show how absurd quan­tum mechan­ics seems, as cats can’t be alive and dead at the same time.” But then, this is a field that pro­ceeds from absur­di­ty, or at least from the fact that its obser­va­tions at first made no sense by the tra­di­tion­al laws of physics. There fol­low for­ays into quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy (lasers, solar pan­els, MRI machines), quan­tum infor­ma­tion (com­put­ing, cryp­tog­ra­phy, the prospect tele­por­ta­tion), and a vari­ety of sub­fields includ­ing con­densed mat­ter physics, quan­tum biol­o­gy, and quan­tum chem­istry. Though detailed enough to require more than one view­ing, Wal­li­man’s map also makes clear how much of quan­tum physics remains unex­plored — and most encour­ag­ing­ly of all, leaves off its sup­posed philo­soph­i­cal, or exis­ten­tial impli­ca­tions. You can watch Wal­li­man’s oth­er intro­duc­tion to Quan­tum Physics below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quan­tum Physics Made Rel­a­tive­ly Sim­ple: A Mini Course from Nobel Prize-Win­ning Physi­cist Hans Bethe

Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to Quan­tum Mechan­ics: From Schrödinger’s Cat to Heisenberg’s Uncer­tain­ty Prin­ci­ple

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Chem­istry: New Ani­ma­tion Sum­ma­rizes the Entire Field of Chem­istry in 12 Min­utes

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

Free Online Physics Cours­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Read More...

in Music | August 3rd, 2020

The sto­ry of pop­u­lar music in the late 20th cen­tu­ry is nev­er com­plete with­out an account of the explo­sive psy­che­del­ic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and oth­er hybrid styles that pro­lif­er­at­ed on the African con­ti­nent and across Latin Amer­i­can and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only late­ly, how­ev­er, that large audi­ences are dis­cov­er­ing how much pio­neer­ing music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nige­ria, and oth­er post­colo­nial coun­tries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Sound­way (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defin­ing the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017).

Germany’s Ana­logue Africa, a label that reis­sues clas­sic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music hap­pened decades ago.” Only most West­ern audi­ences weren’t pay­ing attention—with notable excep­tions, of course: super­star drum­mer Gin­ger Bak­er appren­ticed him­self to Fela Kuti and became an evan­ge­list for African drum­ming; Bri­an Eno and Talk­ing Heads’ David Byrne (who also intro­duced thou­sands to “world music”) import­ed the sound of African rock to New Wave in the 80s, as did post-punk bands like Orange Juice and oth­ers in Britain, where music from Africa gen­er­al­ly had a big­ger impact.

But the fusion of African polyrhythms with rock instru­ments and song struc­tures had been done, and done incred­i­bly well, already by dozens of bands, includ­ing sev­er­al in the East African coun­try of Zam­bia, which had been British-con­trolled North­ern Rhode­sia until its inde­pen­dence in 1964. In the decade after, bands formed around the coun­try to cre­ate a unique form of music known as “Zam­rock,” as it came to be called, “forged by a par­tic­u­lar set of nation­al cir­cum­stances,” writes Calum Mac­Naughton at Music in Africa.

Zam­rock bands were influ­enced by the funk and soul of James Brown and the heavy rock of Hen­drix, Deep Pur­ple, Led Zep­pelin, The Who, and Cream—the same music every­one else was lis­ten­ing to. As Rik­ki Ili­lon­ga from the band Musi-O-Tun­ya says in the Vinyl Me, Please mini-doc­u­men­tary above, says, “the hip­pie time, the flow­ers, love and every­thing, Wood­stock. We were a part of that cul­ture too. If the record was in the Top 10 in the UK, it was in the Top 10 here.” But Zam­bia had its own con­cerns, and its own pow­er­ful musi­cal tra­di­tions.

“As much as we want­ed to play rock from the West­ern world, we are Africans,” says Jagari Chan­da, vocal­ist for a band called WITCH (“we intend to cause hav­oc”), “so the oth­er part is from Africa—Zambia. So it’s Zam­bian type of rock—Zamrock.” The term was coined by Zam­bian DJ Man­asseh Phiri. The music itself “was the sound­track of Ken­neth Kaunda’s social­ist ide­ol­o­gy of Zam­bian Human­ism,” Mac­Naughton notes. “In fact, Zam­rock owed much of its exis­tence to the nation’s first pres­i­dent and found­ing father. A gui­tar-pick­er who took great plea­sure in song” and who pro­mot­ed local music “via a quo­ta sys­tem” imposed on the new­ly-formed Zam­bia Broad­cast­ing Ser­vice (ZBS).

Vinyl Me, Please has col­lab­o­rat­ed with Mac­Naughton and oth­ers from Now-Again Records to release 8 Zam­rock albums, “7 of which have nev­er been reis­sued in their orig­i­nal form.” The video above, “The Sto­ry of Zam­rock,” reflects their decade-long jour­ney to redis­cov­er the 70s scene and its pio­neers. In the video at the top from Band­splain­ing, you can learn more about Zam­rock, which has been gain­ing promi­nence in album reis­sues for the last sev­er­al years, and which “deserves to be a part of the musi­cal his­to­ry of Africa in a much big­ger way than it has been up to now,” Hen­ning Goran­son Sand­berg writes at The Guardian. See all of the music fea­tured in the video at the top in the track­list below.

0:00 WITCH — “Liv­ing In The Past”

0:40 Kei­th Mlevhu — “Love and Free­dom”

1:05 Paul Ngozi — “Bamayo”

3:11 WITCH — “Intro­duc­tion”

4:19 Musi-O-Tun­ya — “Mpon­do­lo”

4:32 Musi-O-Tun­ya — “Dark Sun­rise”

5:28 Rik­ki Ili­lon­ga — “Shee­been Queen”

5:37 WITCH — “Lazy Bones”

6:00 Paul Ngozi — “Ana­soni”

6:16 The Peace — “Black Pow­er”

6:46 Kei­th Mlevhu — “Ubun­tung­wa”

7:06 Amanaz — “Kha­la my Friend”

7:24 WITCH — “Liv­ing In The Past”

8:19 The Black­foot — “When I Need­ed You”

8:39 Salty Dog — “See The Storm”

9:30 Salty Dog — “Fast”

10:42 Rik­ki Ili­lon­ga & Der­ick Mbao — “Madzi A Moyo”

10:54 Paul Ngozi — “Nshaup­wa Bwino”

11:43 Amanaz — “Sun­day Morn­ing”

12:38 The Black­foot — “Lon­ley High­way”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Josh Jonesis a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at@jdmagness

Read More...

in Film, History | July 30th, 2020

When it came out in 1927, Fritz Lang’sMetrop­o­lis showed audi­ences the kind of whol­ly invent­ed real­i­ty, hith­er­to beyond imag­i­na­tion, that could be real­ized in motion pic­tures. Its vision of a soci­ety bisect­ed into colos­sal sky­scrap­ers and under­ground war­rens, an indus­tri­al Art Deco dystopia, con­tin­ues to influ­ence film­mak­ers today. This despite — or per­haps because of — the sim­ple sto­ry it tells, in which Fred­er, the scion of the city of Metrop­o­lis, rebels against his father after fol­low­ing Maria, a good-heart­ed maid­en from the under­class, into the infer­nal low­er depths.

In the role of Maria was a then-unknown 18-year-old actress named Brigitte Helm.“For all the steam and spe­cial effects,” writes Robert McG. Thomas Jr. in Helm’sNew York Times obit­u­ary, “for many who have seen the movie in its var­i­ous incar­na­tions, includ­ing a tint­ed ver­sion and one accom­pa­nied by music, the most com­pelling lin­ger­ing image is nei­ther the tow­ers above nor the hell­ish fac­to­ries below. It is the star­tling trans­for­ma­tion of Ms. Helm from an ide­al­is­tic young woman into a bare­ly clad crea­ture per­form­ing a las­civ­i­ous dance in a broth­el.”

Halfway through the film, Maria gets kid­napped by the vil­lain­ous inven­tor Rot­wang and cloned as a robot. It is this robot, not the real Maria, who takes the stage in the scene in ques­tion, prac­ti­cal­ly nude by the stan­dards of silent-era cin­e­ma. Lang used the sequence to push not just the bounds of pro­pri­ety, but the aes­thet­ic capa­bil­i­ties of his art form: view­ers would nev­er have seen any­thing like the frame-fill­ing field of eye­balls into which the slaver­ing crowd of tuxe­doed men dis­solve. Here we have a medi­um demon­strat­ing deci­sive­ly and pow­er­ful­ly what sets it apart from all oth­ers, injust one of the scenes restored only recent­ly to its orig­i­nal form.

When Thomas allud­ed to the many extant cuts of Metrop­o­lis in his 1996 obit­u­ary for Helm, the now-defin­i­tive ver­sion of the pic­ture that made her a star still lay in the future. 2010’s The Com­plete Metrop­o­lisincludes mate­r­i­al redis­cov­ered just two years before, on a 16-mil­lime­ter reduc­tion neg­a­tive stored atBuenos Aires’ Museo del Cine and long for­got­ten there­after. Now, just as Lang intend­ed us to, we can behold his cin­e­mat­ic vision of rulers employ­ing the high­est tech­nol­o­gy to keep even the elite mes­mer­ized by tit­il­lat­ing spec­ta­cles — a fan­tas­ti­cal sce­nario that has noth­ing at all to do, of course, with the future as it actu­al­ly turned out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Metrop­o­lis: Watch a Restored Ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s Mas­ter­piece (1927)

Read the Orig­i­nal 32-Page Pro­gram for Fritz Lang’sMetrop­o­lis(1927)

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone inMetrop­o­lis(1927)

H.G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Sil­li­est Film”

10 Great Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: FromNos­fer­atutoThe Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

Watch After the Ball, the 1897 “Adult” Film by Pio­neer­ing Direc­tor Georges Méliès (Almost NSFW)

Based in Seoul,Col­in Mar­shallwrites and broad­castson cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture.His projects include the bookThe State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­lesand the video seriesThe City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at@colinmarshall, onFace­book, or onInsta­gram.

Read More...

in History | July 30th, 2020

You may know his name, and you def­i­nite­ly know the icon­ic pho­to of him stand­ing next to Tom­mie Smith and Peter Nor­man on the medals podi­um at the 1968 Olympics in Mex­i­co City, his black-gloved fist raised next to Smith’s in defi­ance of racial injus­tice. But you may know lit­tle more about John Car­los. Many of us learned about him the same way stu­dents at a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia high school, where he worked as a coun­selor after retir­ing from run­ning, did: “Man, we see this pic­ture in the his­to­ry book and they don’t have any sto­ry about it,” he remem­bers some kids telling him. “It’s just a two-lin­er with the people’s names.”

The Vox Dark­room video above packs more than a cap­tion ver­sion of his his­to­ry in just under 10 min­utes. The silent protest, we learn, fol­lowed a threat­ened boy­cott from the ath­letes ear­li­er in the year, sup­port­ed by Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., who appears in a clip. Instead, they went on to win medal after medal. We also learn much more about how all three run­ners on the podi­um, includ­ing Sil­ver-win­ning Aussie Peter Nor­man, par­tic­i­pat­ed by wear­ing but­tons sup­port­ing the Olympic Project for Human Rights. Found­ed by for­mer ath­lete and activist Har­ry Edwards, the orga­ni­za­tion aimed to strate­gi­cal­ly dis­rupt U.S. Olympic suc­cess by “opt­ing out of the games,” refus­ing to give Black ath­letes’ labor to sports that refused to com­bat racism.

Twen­ty years before these actions, Black ath­letes became potent sym­bols of the boot­strap­ping Amer­i­can suc­cess sto­ry for the media, long before the end of legal seg­re­ga­tion. As his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Dex­ter Black­man says in the video, the mes­sage became, “if Jack­ie Robin­son can make it, then why can’t oth­er Blacks make it?” This “myth of racial progress” could not sur­vive the 1960s. By the time of Smith and Car­los’ arrival in Mex­i­co City in Octo­ber of 1968, Mar­tin Luther King had been assas­si­nat­ed. Cities around the coun­try were erupt­ing as frus­tra­tion over failed Civ­il Rights efforts boiled over. Nei­ther Car­los nor Smith wear shoes in their podi­um pho­to, in protest of the pover­ty that per­sist­ed in Black com­mu­ni­ties.

The three paid a price for their state­ment. The protest was called “a delib­er­ate and vio­lent breach of the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of the Olympic spir­it” by the IOC pres­i­dent, who had not object­ed to Nazi salutes when he had been an Olympic offi­cial in 1936. Nor­man, who seems com­plete­ly obliv­i­ous at first glance in the pho­to­graph, “returned home to Aus­tralia a pari­ah,” CNN writes, “suf­fer­ing unof­fi­cial sanc­tion and ridicule as the Black Pow­er salute’s for­got­ten man. He nev­er ran in the Olympics again.” Smith fared bet­ter, though he was sus­pend­ed with Car­los from the Olympic team. He left run­ning, played NFL foot­ball, won sev­er­al awards and com­men­da­tions, and became a track coach and soci­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at Ober­lin.

In an essay at Vox, Car­los describes how “the mood in the sta­di­um went straight to ven­om” after the two raised their fists. “The first 10 years after those Olympics were hell for me. A lot of peo­ple walked away from me…. they were afraid. What they saw hap­pen­ing to me, they didn’t want it to hap­pen to them and theirs.” His kids, he said “were tor­ment­ed,” his mar­riage “crum­bled.” Still, he would do it again. Car­los embod­ies the same uncom­pro­mis­ing atti­tude, one that refus­es to silent­ly accept racism, even while stand­ing (or kneel­ing) in silence. “If you’re famous and you’re black,” he writes, “you have to be an activist. That’s what I’ve tried to do my whole life.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Muham­mad Ali Gives a Dra­mat­ic Read­ing of His Poem on the Atti­ca Prison Upris­ing

How Jazz Helped Fuel the 1960s Civ­il Rights Move­ment

Josh Jonesis a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at@jdmagness

Read More...

in | July 30th, 2020

There are too many com­pet­ing sto­ries to tell about the pan­dem­ic for any one to take the spot­light for long, which makes com­ing to terms with the moment espe­cial­ly chal­leng­ing. Every­thing seems in upheaval—especially in parts of the world where ram­pant cor­rup­tion, inep­ti­tude, and author­i­tar­i­an abuse have wors­ened and pro­longed an already bad sit­u­a­tion. But if there’s a lens that might be wide enough to take it all in, I’d wager it’s the sto­ry of food, from man­u­fac­ture, to sup­ply chains, to the table.

The abil­i­ty to dine out serves as a barom­e­ter of social health. Restau­rants are essen­tial to nor­mal­cy and neigh­bor­hood coher­ence, as well as hubs of local com­merce. They now strug­gle to adapt or close their doors. Food ser­vice staff rep­re­sent some of the most pre­car­i­ous of work­ers. Mean­while, every­one has to eat. “Some of the world’s best restau­rants have gone from fine din­ing to curb­side pick­ups,” writes Rico Tor­res, Chef and Co-own­er of Mixtli. “At home, a renewed sense of self-reliance has led to a resur­gence of the home cook.”

Some, ama­teurs and pro­fes­sion­als both, have returned their skills to the com­mu­ni­ty, cook­ing for pro­tes­tors on the streets, for exam­ple. Oth­ers have turned a new­found pas­sion for cook­ing on their fam­i­lies. What­ev­er the case, they are all doing impor­tant work, not only by feed­ing hun­gry bel­lies but by engag­ing with and trans­form­ing culi­nary tra­di­tions. Despite its essen­tial ephemer­al­i­ty, food pre­serves mem­o­ry, through the most mem­o­ry-inten­sive of our sens­es, and through recipes passed down for gen­er­a­tions.

Recipe col­lec­tions are also sites of cul­tur­al exchange and con­flict. Such has been the case in the long strug­gle to define the essence of authen­tic Mex­i­can food. You can learn more about that argu­ment in our pre­vi­ous post on a col­lec­tion of tra­di­tion­al (and some not-so-tra­di­tion­al) Mex­i­can cook­books which are being dig­i­tized and put online by researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas San Anto­nio (UTSA). Their col­lec­tion of over 2,000 titles dates from 1789 to the present and rep­re­sents a vast repos­i­to­ry of knowl­edge for schol­ars of Mex­i­can cui­sine.

But let’s be hon­est, what most of us want, and need, is a good meal. It just so hap­pens, as chefs now serv­ing curb­side will tell you, that the best cook­ing (and bak­ing) learns from the cook­ing of the past. In obser­vance of the times we live in, the UTSA Libraries Spe­cial Col­lec­tions has curat­ed many of the his­toric Mex­i­can recipes in their col­lec­tion as what they call “a series of mini-cook­books” titled “Rec­etas: Cocin­dan­do en los Tiem­pos del Coro­n­avirus.”

These recipes, now being made avail­able as e‑cookbooks, have been tran­scribed and trans­lat­ed from hand­writ­ten man­u­scripts by archivists who are pas­sion­ate about this food. Per­haps in hon­or of Lau­ra Esquivel’s Like Water for Choco­late—whose nov­el “paints a nar­ra­tive of fam­i­ly and tra­di­tion using Mexico’s deep con­nec­tion to cuisine”—the col­lec­tion has “saved the best for first” and begun with the dessert cook­book. They’ll con­tin­ue the reverse order with Vol­ume 2, main cours­es, and Vol­ume 3, appe­tiz­ers & drinks.

Endorsed by Chef Tor­res, the first mini-cook­book mod­ern­izes and trans­lates the orig­i­nal Span­ish into Eng­lish, and is avail­able in pdf or epub. It does not mod­ern­ize more tra­di­tion­al ways of cook­ing. As the Pref­ace points out, “many of the man­u­script cook­books of the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry assume read­ers to be expe­ri­enced cooks.” (It was not an occu­pa­tion under­tak­en light­ly.) As such, the recipes are “often light on details” like ingre­di­ent lists and step-by-step instruc­tions. As Atlas Obscu­ra notes, the recipe above for “‘Petra’s cook­ies’ calls for “‘one cup not quite full of milk.’”

“We encour­age you to view these instruc­tions as oppor­tu­ni­ties to acquire an intu­itive feel for your food,” the archive writes. It’s good to learn new habits. What­ev­er else it is now—community ser­vice, chore, an exer­cise in self-reliance, self-improve­ment, or stress relief—cooking is also cre­at­ing new ways of remem­ber­ing and con­nect­ing across new dis­tances of time and space, work­ing with the raw mate­ri­als we have at hand. Down­load the first Vol­ume of the UTSA cook­book series, Postres: Guardan­do Lo Mejor Para el Prin­ci­pio, hereand look for more “Cook­ing in the Time of Coro­n­avirus” recipes com­ing soon.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Archive of Hand­writ­ten Tra­di­tion­al Mex­i­can Cook­books Is Now Online

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

82 Vin­tage Cook­books, Free to Down­load, Offer a Fas­ci­nat­ing Illus­trat­ed Look at Culi­nary and Cul­tur­al His­to­ry

Josh Jonesis a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at@jdmagness

Read More...

in Music | July 29th, 2020

In the late 70s and ear­ly 80s, a hand­ful of musi­cal duos emerged who would have tremen­dous impact on post-punk, alter­na­tive, new wave, and exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ic music. Bands like Sui­cide, NEU!, and the Pet Shop Boys made far big­ger sounds than their size would sug­gest. Before them all came Sil­ver Apples, a duo who should right­ly get cred­it as pio­neers of elec­tron­ic exper­i­men­ta­tion in pop song form. Like many a pio­neer, Sil­ver Apples had no idea what they were doing. They also suf­fered from a string of some of the worst luck a band could have, dis­ap­pear­ing after their sec­ond album in 1969 until a mid-90s redis­cov­ery and brief return.

Band­mem­bers Sime­on Coxe and Dan­ny Tay­lor formed the band in 1967 from the ruins of a rock group called The Over­land Stage Elec­tric Band, which fell apart when Coxe began exper­i­ment­ing with old oscil­la­tors onstage. All of the mem­bers quit except Tay­lor, and Coxe set about build­ing his own syn­the­siz­er, “a machine nick­named ‘the Sime­on,’” Daniel Dylan Wray writes at The Guardian, “which grew to con­sist of nine audio oscil­la­tors with 86 man­u­al controls—including tele­graph keys—to con­trol lead, rhythm and bass puls­es with the user’s hands, feet and elbows.”

Coxe was the only per­son who could play the Sime­on, and he sang as he did so, his weird, war­bly voice com­ple­ment­ing his machine, as Tay­lor played pro­to-Krautrock beats behind him. “I had heard the word syn­the­siz­er,” he says, “but I had no idea what it was. We were dirt poor and used what we had, which was often dis­card­ed world war two gear.” They were essen­tial­ly mak­ing up elec­tron­ic pop music as they went along, iso­lat­ed from par­al­lel devel­op­ments hap­pen­ing at the same time. They named the project after a line by William But­ler Yeats (many of their lyrics were writ­ten by poet Stan­ley War­ren). Around the same time, com­pos­er Mor­ton Sub­ot­nick released his ground­break­ing all-elec­tron­ic album, titled—after Yeats—Sil­ver Apples of the Moon.

It was Sil­ver Apples’ fate to be over­shad­owed by oth­er releas­es that came out imme­di­ate­ly after their 1968 self-titled debut, such as Wendy Car­los’ Switched on Bach and Ger­shon Kingsley’s hit “Pop­corn,” both of which pop­u­lar­ized Robert Moog’s mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­ers. Moog him­self became so fas­ci­nat­ed with Coxe’s sin­gu­lar cre­ation that he vis­it­ed the Sil­ver Apples stu­dio to see it for him­self. The band’s man­ag­er scored them their very first gig play­ing for 30,000 peo­ple in Cen­tral Park, “pro­vid­ing a live sound­track to the Apol­lo moon landing—broadcast on enor­mous screens beside them,” writes Cian Traynor at Huck mag­a­zine, “as peo­ple took their clothes off in the rain.”

This mag­i­cal experience—and oth­er brush­es with fame, such as a one-off record­ing ses­sion with Jimi Hendrix—was no indi­ca­tion of a bright future for the band. For their sec­ond album, they were allowed to pho­to­graph them­selves inside the co*ck­pit of a Pan Am jet. The inclu­sion of drug para­pher­na­lia in the pho­to, and of a crashed air­plane on the back, prompt­ed a law­suit from the air­line. The album was pulled from the shelves, the band shut out of the indus­try, and a third album, The Gar­den, remained unre­leased until 1998.

For a look at how musi­cal­ly for­ward-think­ing Sil­ver Apples were, see the short doc­u­men­tary about their rise and fall above. They end­ed up influ­enc­ing neo-psy­che­del­ic elec­tron­ic bands like Stere­o­lab and 90s duo Por­tishead, whose Geoff Bar­row says, “for peo­ple like us, they are the per­fect band…. They should def­i­nite­ly be up there with the pio­neers of elec­tron­ic music.” Tay­lor sad­ly died in 2005, just after Coxe had par­tial­ly recov­ered from a bro­ken neck suf­fered the year of their 90s resur­gence. But Sil­ver Apples music is immor­tal, and immor­tal­ly oth­er­world­ly and strange, even if its cre­ators nev­er quite under­stood why. “To me and Dan­ny,” says Coxe, “it sound­ed per­fect­ly nor­mal and was a nor­mal pro­gres­sion into the areas we were try­ing to go.”

As so much exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ic pop music that emerged around the same time proves, Coxe was more right than he knew. What Sil­ver Apples did turned out to be a “nor­mal” musi­cal devel­op­ment, though they had no idea that it was hap­pen­ing when they made their aston­ish­ing­ly groovy, spaced-out records.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Daphne Oram Cre­at­ed the BBC’s First-Ever Piece of Elec­tron­ic Music (1957)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Josh Jonesis a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at@jdmagness

Read More...

in Architecture, Sports | July 29th, 2020

Would­n’t we enjoy see­ing our cities like an archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an, in com­mand of deep knowl­edge about the tech­nol­o­gy, ide­ol­o­gy, and aes­thet­ics of the build­ings we pass by every day? For most of us, this would huge­ly enrich our expe­ri­ence of the urban envi­ron­ment. But then so, less obvi­ous­ly, would see­ing our cities like a skate­board­er, in com­mand of deep knowl­edge about how to glide, jump, and bounce along the streets, the build­ings, and all the myr­i­ad pieces of infra­struc­ture as a surfer rides the waves. The archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an learns the city with his mind; the skater learns the city, no less painstak­ing­ly, with his body.

The Vox video abovebrings mind and body come togeth­er in the per­sons of Iain Bor­den, author ofSkate­board­ing and the City: A Com­plete His­to­ry, and Tony Hawk, to whom even those whol­ly igno­rant of skate­board­ing need no intro­duc­tion. Their com­ple­men­tary inter­views reveal the his­to­ry of mod­ern skate­board­ing through the sport’s “leg­endary spots”: pub­lic-school cam­pus­es, aban­doned swim­ming pools, dry drainage ditch­es, for­got­ten sec­tions of con­crete pipe. In the main this selec­tion reflects the high­ly sub­ur­ban­ized 1970s in which skate­boards first came to pop­u­lar­i­ty in the Unit­ed States. But at its out­er lim­its, such as the Mt. Baldy pipeline in north­ern Cal­i­for­nia, it also shows how far skaters will go in search of the ide­al place to ride.

Though pur­pose-build skate parks do exist (their num­bers kept low by for­mi­da­ble insur­ance chal­lenges), seri­ous skaters pre­fer spaces not express­ly designed for skat­ing. This is thanks in large part to the inno­va­tions of a skater with less wider-world name recog­ni­tion than Hawk, but no less influ­ence with­in the sport: Natas Kau­pas. Hawk remem­bers the thoughts trig­gered by footage of the young Kau­pas skat­ing mas­ter­ful­ly through his neigh­bor­hood in the 1987 film Wheels of Fire: “Wow, you can skate curbs like that? You can skate bench­es? You can skate fire hydrants? The whole world is a skate park now.” Sud­den­ly, Bor­den adds, “you did­n’t need to be in Cal­i­for­nia, or in the Ari­zona desert, or in Flori­da any­more. You could be any­where.”

Review­ing Bor­den’sSkate­board­ing and the City, Jack Lay­ton in Urban Stud­ies high­lights its his­to­ry of “how the assem­blage of mate­ri­als that makes up cities has been – in count­less ways – re-imag­ined by the skate­board­er to cre­ate accel­er­a­tion, rota­tion, fric­tion and flow.” It’s easy to for­get, Lay­ton writes, that “along with facil­i­tat­ing com­merce, trans­port and habi­ta­tion, cities can be spaces that facil­i­tate play, exhil­a­ra­tion and plea­sure.” Despite often hav­ing been regard­ed as pub­lic nui­sances, skate­board­ers are “a con­stant reminder that our cities are cre­ative and rich places,” says Bor­den. With the excep­tion of the skate parks secret­ly con­struct­ed in hid­den urban spaces across the world, skaters, of course, don’t build the city — but they do show us some of its untapped poten­tial.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ful­ly Flared

3 Icon­ic Paint­ings by Fri­da Kahlo Get Reborn as Vans Skate Shoes

Every­thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About the Beau­ty of Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­ture: An Intro­duc­tion in Six Videos

Based in Seoul,Col­in Mar­shallwrites and broad­castson cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture.His projects include the bookThe State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­lesand the video seriesThe City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at@colinmarshall, onFace­book, or onInsta­gram.

Read More...

in History, Life | July 29th, 2020

Funer­al rites, buri­als, and oth­er rit­u­als are held near-uni­ver­sal­ly sacred, not only due to reli­gious and cul­tur­al beliefs about death: We pre­serve our con­nec­tion to our ances­tors through the records of their births and deaths. For many Black Amer­i­cans in the U.S. south, grief and loss have been com­pound­ed by cen­turies of vio­lence and tragedy, but funer­als have still tend­ed to be “cel­e­bra­tions of life” rather than mourn­ful events, says Derek Mosley,archivist at theAuburn Avenue Research Library on African Amer­i­can Cul­ture and His­to­ry.” African Amer­i­can “funer­al pro­grams tend to reflect that,” and there­fore offer a wealth of infor­ma­tion for his­to­ri­ans and geneal­o­gists as well as fam­i­ly mem­bers.

Mosley is a con­trib­u­tor to a new dig­i­tal archive that “cur­rent­ly boasts more than 11,500 dig­i­tized pages and is expect­ed to grow as more pro­grams are con­tributed.” These his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments date from between 1886 to 2019, though “most of the pro­grams are from ser­vices dur­ing the late twen­ti­eth and ear­ly twen­ty-first cen­turies,” notes the Dig­i­tal Library of Geor­gia, who hous­es the col­lec­tion. “A major­i­ty of the pro­grams are from church­es in the Atlanta, Geor­gia area, with a few pro­grams from oth­er states such as South Car­oli­na, Ten­nessee, Flori­da, Michi­gan, New Jer­sey, and New York, among oth­ers.”

The archive offers an incred­i­ble resource for peo­ple look­ing for infor­ma­tion about rel­a­tives. For researchers “these doc­u­ments also rep­re­sent a gold mine of archival infor­ma­tion,” Nora McGreevy writes at Smith­son­ian, includ­ing “birth and death dates, pho­tos, lists of rel­a­tives, nick­names, maid­en names, res­i­dences, church names, and oth­er clues that can help reveal the sto­ries of the deceased.”

In many cas­es, those sto­ries were lost when Jim Crow, pover­ty, and rede­vel­op­ment dis­placed fam­i­lies and erased bur­ial sites. The col­lec­tion, says Mosley, offers “a pub­lic space for lega­cy.”

It is a way for local his­to­ri­ans to recov­er impor­tant com­mu­ni­ty fig­ures. One pro­gram, for Dr. J.W.E. Lin­der, “who died in 1939,” Atlas Obscu­ra’s Matthew Taub writes, “and whose memo­r­i­al ser­vice was held in 1940” informs us that the deceased was the son of “Con­gress­man George W. Lin­der, of the Geor­gia House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives dur­ing the Recon­struc­tion Peri­od.” In the pro­gram for Judge Austin Thomas Walden, who died in 1965, we learn that he served as the first munic­i­pal judge in Geor­gia since Recon­struc­tion. His bene­dic­tion was deliv­ered by the Rev­erend Mar­tin Luther King Sr. and he received trib­utes from the May­or of Atlanta, the Pres­i­dent of More­house Col­lege, and the office of Pres­i­dent John­son.

Such pil­lars of the com­mu­ni­ty can be found among a host of pro­grams memo­ri­al­iz­ing ordi­nary, every­day peo­ple. The descrip­tions in the funer­al lit­er­a­ture open fas­ci­nat­ing win­dows onto their lives and their extend­ed fam­i­ly con­nec­tions. Mrs. Julia Burton’s pro­gram from 1960, for exam­ple, tells us she was born on the plan­ta­tion where her par­ents were like­ly enslaved. Her obit­u­ary not only describes her many clubs and her char­ac­ter as “a well-informed per­son in many areas,” but also lists the names of her hus­band and son, three grand­daugh­ters, two grand­sons, two sis­ters, and two brothers—invaluable infor­ma­tion for peo­ple search­ing for rel­a­tives.

“The chal­lenge for African Amer­i­can geneal­o­gy and fam­i­ly research con­tin­ues to be the lack of free access to his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion that can enable us to the tell the sto­ries of those who have come before us,” remarks Tam­my Ozi­er, pres­i­dent of the Atlanta Chap­ter of the Afro-Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal and Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety. “This mon­u­men­tal col­lec­tion helps to close the gap.” As it grows, it will like­ly come to rep­re­sent greater geo­graph­i­cal areas around the coun­try. For now, the rough­ly 3300 dig­i­tized funer­al pro­grams, some a sin­gle page, some elab­o­rate, full-col­or pro­duc­tions, focus on an area to which thou­sands of fam­i­lies around the coun­try can trace their lin­eage, and to which many may find their way back through pub­lic archives like this one.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mas­sive New Data­base Will Final­ly Allow Us to Iden­ti­fy Enslaved Peo­ples and Their Descen­dants in the Amer­i­c­as

The Names of 1.8 Mil­lion Eman­ci­pat­ed Slaves Are Now Search­able in the World’s Largest Genealog­i­cal Data­base, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans Find Lost Ances­tors

Take Free Cours­es on African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry from Yale and Stan­ford: From Eman­ci­pa­tion, to the Civ­il Rights Move­ment, and Beyond

Josh Jonesis a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at@jdmagness

Read More...

in Fashion, History | July 28th, 2020

Some fire­men today may com­plain about the bore­dom of all the time spent doing noth­ing at the sta­tion between calls, but when the hour comes to do bat­tle with a seri­ous blaze, no one can say they have it easy. Fire­fight­ing has, of course, nev­er been a par­tic­u­lar­ly relaxed gig, espe­cial­ly back in the days before not just water can­non-equipped heli­copters, and not just fire engines, but fire hoses as we know them today. Putting out urban con­fla­gra­tions with­out much water at hand is one thing, but imag­ine hav­ing to do it every day in a dense­ly packed, high­ly flam­ma­ble city like Tokyo — or rather Edo, as it was known between the ear­ly 17th and mid-19th cen­turies.

“Fires were fre­quent dur­ing this peri­od because of crowd­ed liv­ing con­di­tions and wood­en build­ings, and the fire­fight­ers’ objec­tive was to pre­vent a burn­ing house from spread­ing its flames to the neigh­bor­ing res­i­dences,” writes Antique Trader’s Kris Man­ty. With only weak water pumps at their dis­pos­al, Edo fire­men “did not save the home, but rather tore down the burn­ing struc­ture and extin­guished the fire. They did this by using long poles and oth­er fire imple­ments to demol­ish the blaz­ing house and once the fire was doused, the sur­round­ing homes were once again safe.” In peace­time they “emerged as lat­ter-day samu­rai heroes, with the mot­to, ‘duty, sym­pa­thy and endurance’” — and bedecked in tru­ly glo­ri­ous hand­made coats.

At the top of the post appears an exam­ple of an Edo fire­man’s coat held by the Philadel­phia Muse­um of Art, one embla­zoned with imagery from per­haps the best-known Japan­ese fable of all. “The cen­ter of this coat shows Momo­taro, a leg­endary boy born from a peach, stomp­ing on an ogre,” says the muse­um’s web site. “The smoke bil­low­ing behind him reminds us of the use of this coat, as does the fire­man’s hook pic­tured on the left sleeve. After their duty, fire­men reversed their coats to dis­play the bold and inspir­ing designs.” As with many promi­nent fig­ures of the age, Edo fire­fight­ers were also immor­tal­ized, coats and all, in ukiyo-e wood­block prints.

The noble image is not least thanks to the fact, writes Artelino’s Dieter Wanczu­ra, that “the great mas­ter Hiroshige I was the son of a fire war­den in the ser­vice of the shogu­nate,” and indeed a fire­fight­er him­self, keep­ing the job years into his print­mak­ing career.The prints fea­tured there include one depict­ing an 1805 clash “between sumo wrestlers and fire-fight­ers at Shin­mei shrine,” not an entire­ly unex­pect­ed occur­rence giv­en the row­dy pub­lic image of the kind of men who joined fire brigades. But “the aver­age Japan­ese always cher­ished a lik­ing for what they con­sid­ered to be hon­or­able ban­dits and out­casts” — and who today, any­where in the world, could argue with their style?

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hand-Col­ored Pho­tographs from 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan: 110 Images Cap­ture the Wan­ing Days of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Soci­ety

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Last Days of Samu­rai Japan

1850s Japan Comes to Life in 3D, Col­or Pho­tos: See the Stereo­scop­ic Pho­tog­ra­phy of T. Ena­mi

Female Samu­rai War­riors Immor­tal­ized in 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Pho­tos

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

Hun­dreds of Won­der­ful Japan­ese Fire­work Designs from the Ear­ly-1900s: Dig­i­tized and Free to Down­load

Based in Seoul,Col­in Mar­shallwrites and broad­castson cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture.His projects include the bookThe State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­lesand the video seriesThe City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at@colinmarshall, onFace­book, or onInsta­gram.

Read More...

« Newer Entries | More Search Results »