No but the history behind this picture is really interesting
The reason that everyone always looked miserable in old photos wasn’t that they took too long to take. Once photography became widespread it took only seconds to take a picture.
It was because getting your photo taken was treated the same as getting your portrait painted. A very serious occasion meant so thst your descendants would know that ypu existed and what you looked like.
But one time some British dudes went to china to go on an anthropological expedition, and they met some rural Chinese farmers and decided to take their pictures. Now, these people weren’t exposed to the weird culture of the time around getting your photo taken, so this guy just flashed a big grin during the photo because he was told to strike a pose and that’s the pose he wanted to strike.
haha you know what I just remembered? In like middle school when all the horse girls had like, leather wristbands with brass plates with the names of their horses
it was a history of girlhood in America, which I took because I was like “that’s history I’m unlikely to have picked up by osmosis”, I was the only guy in the class of 35
I want to say I wasn’t that guy, but I kinda was probably. I was like 20 and the internet was still young, sorry.
She was a pop feminist author more than an academic, it showed through; on the last day she swelled with pride in like, our girlhood and readiness to become women and shared secrets of womanly vulnerability and kind of invited us to cry together and it was fucking excruciating
ANYWAY, she had mentioned that her next project was going to be a book that was basically “Middle School Girls and Horses: What IS Up With That, Anyway”. Sadly seems she never got to it, it’s a question I’d like answered and she seemed well-suited.
Anonymous asked: I remember you mentioning once that in the late 70s big oil starting backing the Republican Party and how it effected election outcomes. You mentioned various other shifts in support among different sections of the bourgeoisie for the two parties too though I can't remember what exactly. Is there a book that you've read that has some kind of comprehensive history of soft money and where its gone in American politics?
This is your job. You turn the lever according to which way the trolley should go. You do this every day, and it’s always very exciting. No problems here!
Made it to Ukiah, the biggest town in Mendocino. Came up through Napa, which is beautiful, and then around Lake Clearwater. I’d heard of it as a hippie town, center of the marijuana growing industry.
Ukiah is the sketchiest fucking place I’ve ever stayed, and that includes several cheap motel districts, South Central among them.
My first thought was “wow, for a hippie town, that’s a lot of signs advertising assault rifles”.
My second thought, driving down the street was “wow, there sure are a lot of institutions that deal with abandoned children”.
Then I checked in at my motel, and walking across the parking lot there was a normal-looking couple in a normal-looking truck, and the woman waved me over and asked, all friendly, “hey, do you happen to know where I could find-” and her voice here dropped like 15 decibels - “some crack?”
I didn’t, but she went knocking on other doors at the motel and I guess someone did, because a while later she was back out in the parking lot very loudly imitating a chicken.
The internet told me the bar one way down the road was a meth den with cheap drinks, I tried the other way and there was a microbrewery with a reggae band playing and young people with dreadlocks dancing. So that was a bit better, but you listen to the conversations and their lives had an absurd amount of violence in them. Not even related to criminal enterprises or feuds or anything, just absolutely pointless violence between friends and lovers. One girl was complaining about how this guy was avoiding her after she beat him up after he threatened to blow her foot off with a shotgun. One of the stories on the front page of the local newspaper was a 27 year old man who was arrested for - while driving! - severely beating his passenger girlfriend in the head and attempting to force a knife sharpener down her throat.
Also I had random people driving by yell at me on the way to and from the bar. One called me “fatass”, one called me “faggot”.
Dude I don’t even know. Apparently it’s still harvest season, when hippies and drifters from all over flood in to trim the marijuana crop for pretty good pay. And judging from cowboys and sailors when a bunch of transients get their pay all at once things get wooly. Maybe it’s different the rest of the year.
Finally, passed by a bunch of tents in a park on the main drag. From experience in Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and San Francisco, I assumed this was #OccupyUkiah. Turns out it was a Boy Scout camping event for the Pumpkin Festival.
Every so often someone from Ukiah finds this post and messages me or reblogs it to say it’s dead-on.
Going through another cycle right now, so thought I’d bring it back for the followers.
From a series by Stan VanDerBeek, with computer scientist Ken Knowlton, using Knowlton’s BEFLIX computer language, which was based on FORTRAN. The films were programmed on a IBM 7094 computer. (1964-1969)
