So as someone who vastly prefers taking in information as text than as audio or video I’d been a little dismayed with the way the internet’s energies turned lately, I never “got into” YouTube and honestly resent untranscribed podcasts

But I did these days have an interesting new experience where the internet made something timebound video into a readable form, and that’s been “watching” the Surviving R. Kelly documentary as, I suppose, Black Twitter livetweets their reactions on the #SurvivingRKelly hashtag

I appreciated it better than last decade’s form of TV “recaps”, either the first-wave amateurs or the later entry-level writers of the magazineblog era. Which, at some level had to be about the recapper’s voice, or focus at least

Whereas these individual tweets in chronological order, in different voice but kind of in conversation with each other, usually a quote – or a labeled reaction, like “his brother tho: [reaction gif]”. It feels somehow less intermediated video-as-text, like I’m getting the narrative and arc and pacing of the underlying material itself, but in a text-novel-form, hitting the high points without the connective tissue.

(Like how people say a book adapted to a movie they cut stuff but no even if there’s less dialogue and plot points can you imagine if they described every single thing in frame in every setting and every action the actors performed? It would be insane. Picture worth a thousand words, you know.)

Anyway one thing I remember from college in a few different classes, it used to be typical to talk to your friends, and talk back to the performance, at the theater, and how training the audience out of that became a real class distinction preserved in the way black audiences related to performances in movie theaters

(I suppose there’s a similar class distinction in the energy in the pews in black and Pentecostal churches, or sporting events)

garbage-empress:

garbage-empress:

tumblr does not want you to see this flier from 1890:

Okay now that Tumblr finally let me post it, I found this amazing thing on Wikipedia. Some college kids in 1890 had to sit around a machine like this probably

and type TURDS in a bunch of different fonts. And it made Indiana University faculty so mad they literally hired the “Strike Worker Killing, Domestic Mercenary” Pinkerton Detective Agency to find who made it. At some point in 1890, Pinkertons were hunting down someone for typing “Here is a TURD! A sheeny TURD!” And this is a real part of American history.

Someone on WordPress transcribed the whole thing if you want to read it.

That’s a hot metal typesetting machine, where like you type T-R-E-E-[ENTER] and it would physically pour molten lead into molds and dump you out a solid slug reading “ǝǝɹʇ” to run on your press

Those were cutting edge in the 1890s, big-city newspapers woulda had them but students for a joke would have set cold type by hand and printed it on a platen jobbing press

The past/future binary of The Flintstones/The Jetsons was so obvious I only just noticed how there’s also a blue collar/white collar versions of the postwar “broad middle class” going on. Flintstones was obviously based on Honeymooners, was there a similar model for Jetsons?

Thinking about how Flintstones opening credits are Fred coming home (like The Simpsons, now that I think) and Jetsons start with George going to work

Thinking about how Fred works in the most primary extraction - stone quarrying in the Neolithic age - and thereby has a full suite of modern conveniences, except the thing is they obviously don’t work cause of any value he added but through subhuman labor operating at a much lower “it’s a living” quality of life. Thinking about how his job or boss aren’t that central compared to social settings and roles like the Water Buffaloes

Thinking about how George works for a company producing a primal intermediate good – sprockets – that are essential to the whole consumer utopia, right down to his live-in mammy. But in such an alienated way that his interactions with boss Mr. Spacely and his identification against rival business Cogswell’s Cogs are central to his identity, but the product itself serves as a totally irrelevant prop for Performing Business Culture

tired: in an Amazon world, independent retail is doomed

wired: independent retail was doomed before Amazon with the rise of mall outlet chains and “big box” stores, both Wal-Mart and “category killers” with nationally optimized supply chains; Amazon’s original debut as a bookseller was in a sector that Barnes & Noble and Borders had already transformed

galaxy brain: independent retail was already under threat from national operations like F.W. Woolworth, A&P, and Sears Roebuck at the turn of the century and in response the politically influential class of local businessmen erected an extensive regulatory apparatus – restrictions on the timing, amount, and advertising of sales and discounts; a heavily regulated shipping sector; vigorous antitrust to prevent suppliers from decisively dominating any sector; requirements for branch offices as a condition of doing business in the state; protections for an intermediary layer of wholesalers and distributors between producers and retailers; all of which mitigated the advantages of size and committed large businesses to supporting a class of local business-types throughout the areas they served rather than concentrating wealth and power in a headquarters city. Much of the heralded “deregulation” and “consumer movement” of the 1970s-80s consisted of dismantling this apparatus in the name of efficiency, lowered consumer prices being one way to increase purchasing power against a backdrop of stagflation.

uss-edsall:

An iconic image of US Army Rangers during Operation: Urgent Fury, the invasion of Grenada in 1983.

It was used as propaganda in leaflets dropped over Grenada.

silverwig:

Fran Lebowitz

The New York Times
September 13, 1987

1. The impact of AIDS on the artistic community is that when a 36-year-old writer is asked on a network news show about the impact of AIDS on the artistic community particularly in regard to the well-known preponderance of homosexuals in the arts she replies that if you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with “Let’s Make a Deal.” The interviewer’s lack of response compels her to conclude that he has no idea what she is talking about and she realizes that soon many of those who do know what she is talking about will be what is generally regarded as dead.

2. The impact of AIDS on the artistic community is that on New Year’s Eve day a 36-year-old writer takes a 31-year-old photographer to get a chest X-ray and listens to him say with what can only be described as a certain guarded hope, “Maybe I just have lung cancer.”

3. The impact of AIDS on the artistic community is that a 36-year-old writer has a telephone conversation with a dying 41-year-old book editor whom even the most practiced verbal assassin has called the last of the Southern gentlemen and hears him say in a hoarse whisper, “I’m sorry but I just hate old people. I look at them and think, ‘Why don’t you die?’”

4. The impact of AIDS on the artistic community is that an aspiring little avant-garde movie director approaches a fairly famous actor in a restaurant and attempts to make social hay out of the fact that they met at Antonio’s and will undoubtedly see each other at Charles’s and Antonio’s and Charles’s are not parties and Antonio’s and Charles’s are not bars and Antonio’s and Charles’s are not summerhouses in chic Tuscan towns – Antonio’s and Charles’s are funerals.

5. The impact of AIDS on the artistic community is that a 36-year-old writer is on the telephone with a 38-year-old art director making arrangements to go together the following morning to the funeral of a 27-year-old architect and the art director says to the writer, “If you get there first sit near the front where we usually sit and save me the seat on the aisle.”

6. The impact of AIDS on the artistic community is that a 24-year-old ballet dancer is in the hospital for 10 days following an emergency appendectomy and nobody goes to visit him because everyone is really busy and after all he’s not dying or anything.

7. The impact of AIDS on the artistic community is that a 36-year-old writer takes time out at a memorial service for the world’s preeminent makeup artist and a man worth any number of interesting new painters to get angry because the makeup artist’s best friend and eulogist uses a story that she has for years been hoarding for her book which she can’t write anymore anyway unless she writes it as a historical novel because it’s about a world that in the last few years has disappeared almost entirely.

8. The impact of AIDS on the artistic community is that a 36-year-old writer runs into a 34-year-old painter at a party and the painter says to the writer that he is just back from Los Angeles and he says with some surprise that he had a really good time there and he asks why does she think that happened and says it’s because New York is so boring now that Los Angeles is fun in comparison and that’s true and it’s one reason but the real reason is that they don’t know the people who are dying there.

9. The impact of AIDS on the artistic community is that a 36-year-old writer has dinner every night for 11 nights in a row with the same 32-year-old musician while he waits for his biopsy to come back because luckily for her she is the only one he trusts enough to tell.

10. The impact of AIDS on the artistic community is that a 36-year-old writer trying to make plans to go out of town flips through her appointment book and hears herself say, “Well, I have a funeral on Tuesday, lunch with my editor on Wednesday, a memorial service on Thursday, so I guess I could come on Friday, unless, of course, Robert dies.”

11. The impact of AIDS on the artistic community is that when the world’s most famous artist dies of complications following surgery at the age of 61 it doesn’t seem like he really died at all – it seems like he got off easy.

12. The impact of AIDS on the artistic community is that at a rather grand dinner held at a venerable New York cultural institution and catered by a company famous for the beauty of its waiters a 39-year-old painter remarks to a 36-year-old writer that the company in question doesn’t seem to employ as many really handsome boys as it used to and the writer replies, “Well, it doesn’t always pay to be popular.”

When Mental-Health Experts, Not Police, Are the First Responders

Reminder that America used to have dedicated professionals with mental health training as frontline “first responders”. Those were the “men in white coats” (the ones coming to take you away, haha).

And I’ve seen this play before, next thing supporters will say “oh, for this program to really work we need the field agents backed by dedicated facilities adequately funded to have open beds for crisis admissions”

And we used to have those, too, that’s what sanitariums and insane asylums were!

(You can read the full article from clicking through at this tweet. idk)

It’s weird that for so long the prestige, “prime time” model of TV was basically character types in disconnected but formulaic vignette plots and “multi-episode plot arcs driven by changing character dynamics as plotted by a coherent creative team” was the degraded, low-status daytime “soap” form

People date the “Golden Age of TV” to The Sopranos but I think the key was reversing this and that started in the decade prior. By the time it debuted in 1999, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess already had a real reputation for that (and for playful writing with self- and genre-awareness, which was impressive when you consider they were both based around fight scenes); the X-Files was famous for balancing monster-of-the-week and broader series mythology.

You can see the progression in the Star Trek serieses - TOS was barely consistent from episode to episode; TNG had the Borg arc and recurring Q episodes but also the entirely abandoned Season 1 arc about corruption and betrayal in Starfleet; by DS9 they kicked off the series by plopping the station next to a blob of long-term plot and introducing elements – Sisko as Emissary of the Prophets – that didn’t resolve for seasons.

Maybe further back to the 80s, when this even became possible as shows staffed up their writers’ rooms enough to produce consistent work in-house rather than just taking freelance pitches and polishing them. Miami Vice was a breakthrough not just for the cinematic style and contemporary pop score but that it had elements of overarching plot – the hunt for Calderone, Sonny’s amnesia (how soapy!) – at all

historicaltimes:

“Homosexuals being punished by wearing dresses and wheeling heavy rocks.”, State Penitentiary, Canon City, Colorado, Between 1900-1910

via reddit

Another trope I fear has passed out of American culture: men buying a box of cigars and passing them out to male friends to celebrate their wife birthing their child

(related to the trope of a man pacing in the hospital waiting room while his wife gives birth, in turn related to both the midcentury practice of hospital births under the god-like professional supervision of [male] doctors with civilians excluded AND the historical human norm of not simply assuming that mother or child would survive any given birthing)

Growing up in the 90s, at one point the local car dealership mistakenly printed up letterhead with our number listed as their fax number and for like 7 years we got two calls a week that were just beeps and shrieks as a machine tried to handshake

Also this was the high era of live telemarketers (usu. from the low-wage “New South”, not yet offshored to India and the Phillipines) who “would always call during dinner” (bcuz they called between when people came home from work and when they went to sleep, bcuz the target market no longer had stay-at-home home economists)

Now that I think of it as the decade went on you picked up more often to dropped calls, as computer programs to minimize downtime optimized more ruthlessly

(The big ‘90s innovation was Wal-Mart with its ruthless procurement optimization, they made your sales staff fly to them in Bentonville and pitch on margins alone and you couldn’t treat them to steak or strippers or prostitutes to make that human connection)

Anyway point is even for all that it was less annoying than robocalls now, I’ve had my phone on DND for like 2 years

You know there’s good precedent for combining rural escapism with touring as a way to wait out a culturally repressive period and then reintroduce the youth to a radical, civilizationally disruptive social movement

And it’s not Milo, it’s the early ‘60s ur-hippies: the Beat poets and American Folk Revival musicians alternating between their upstate NY farm retreats and the college circuit, Timothy Leary at Milbrook and on the Death of the Mind tour, the Merry Pranksters in La Honda/Oregon and on tour in Furthur

(the Kavanaugh hearings are exactly why we used to keep committee meetings private and cameras out of Congress before the Watergate class reforms and C-SPAN, and why we still do at the Supreme Court)

Anti-Trump twitter: Rather than looking to similar American crisis points or reactionary backlashes like the independence movement, the French Revolution-era Alien & Sedition Acts, the Civil War, Reconstruction–

the new black pundits: hey wait

Anti-Trump Twitter: –Red Summer and the First Red Scare, the Second Red Scare, or the Reagan Revolution, what we need is a programmatic understanding of Weimar Germany

also Anti-Trump Twitter: The only way to stop rightist elements from consolidating a regime is to set fire to the federal legislature

Been seeing some nostalgic reminiscence of the Anita Hill hearings leading into the 1992 “Year of the Woman” election cycle

Not too much acknowledgment that all that energy yielded a wet fart of a session that dramatically failed to bring liberalism back to government (Hillarycare!), ending with the 1994 “Angry White Men” election where the Republicans took Congress for the first time since 1955, tried to depose the President, and settled for passing the parts of the Reagan agenda the Gipper hadn’t

(Certainly possible to programmatically overlearn from that tho – the Dems probably did on gun control, they were due to lose those southern and rural seats in campaigns with some headline wedge issue)

Man you’re asking how history will judge us for not signing on to your crusade to Protect Women

like Prohibition, the Mann Act, obscenity laws, the armed suppression of Mormon polygamy, in parentis loco campus parietal rules, the 1980s Moral Majority, the “drinking age” of 21 years

History

Well there’s something about how the black church and preaching as a profession were central to black community organization and uplift programs

AND there’s the way that original-version abolitionism arose through competitive radicalization pressures through the medium of preaching as the idiom of public celebrity charismatic leadership

Like Benjamin Lay was a dwarf SFX preacher (stabbing a Bible filled with fake blood as a climax explosion) who yelled radical things to draw crowds but we consider him serious and not WWF-level entertainment bcuz his side ended up winning

Thing is even if Zephyr Teachout and Cynthia Nixon both win, I’ve read Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, I know what happens when goo-goo “good government” reformers win against a New York machine

the machine operatives buried into the system slow-walk and sabotage your initiatives until your term is up as a failure and they can come back into power (and reward/punish appropriately)

Like the Arab Spring in Egypt, or Trump in DC

apricops:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

America entered World War One in the face of a lot more ferociously opposed pacifist, socialist, anti-imperialist sentiment than our school books emphasized (they emphasized “isolationism”, foolish from the perspective of the Cold War empire)

And after the war there was a hard backlash against American entry, that it had been in the interest of rich Europe- and coastal city-based traders, investors, and transatlantic shippers

(Sub rosa, America had lent to everyone and intervened before anyone’s homeland got too rekt to repay; the flood of repayments inflated the Gatsby-ass Roaring Twenties but also funded the factory build-out that allowed the US to be the WWII Arsenal of Democracy and postwar consumer cornucopia/labor aristocracy)

That’s a big part of why interwar America was so entranced by buisnessman-public intellectuals associated with the new modern industries where domestic producers led the field, figures like aviation superstar Charles Lindbergh, assembly-line innovator Henry Ford, and Hollywood animation maestro Walt Disney!

I see people responding positively without any sense of irony so: anti-semitism. The joke is anti-semitism; that Walt Disney, Charles Lindbergh, and Henry Ford’s political interventions were known for it, and who do you think “Europe and coastal-city based traders, investors, and transatlantic shippers” were

Like anti-semitism was big in early 20th century American business, the only recent depiction I can remember is Herbert Moon from Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games is our new Scorcese, specializing in violent tales set in very specific periods of American history)

A lot of that was related to the rise of scale, related to the anti-chain store thing (A&P pre-super markets were the original WalMart). The concern was Jews had preferential access to Jewish-dominated networks of capital and trade that traces back to the great banking houses and manufacture/trade magnates of Europe

And I mean Jews did dominate the new form of department stores, super-retailers that dominated with their superior access to capital and goods markets

And the classic NYC Jewish housewife slogan, “never pay retail!” didn’t mean “wait for sales” or “clip coupons” but “pump your neighborhood (ethnic) connections for manufacturers/wholesalers who’ll sell to you at cost”, so if the whole “Jews favor other Jews in trade networks” was a made-up calumny, it somehow fooled the Jewish community of America’s major trade port/manufacturing center

How was this resolved? It wasn’t! The Depression->WWII cycle radically limited the role of European capital and manufacturing in the American economy, and later it came back much attenuated with the role and influence of Jews greatly reduced

at this point I’m starting to wonder if there was ever at any point a mainstream American ideology that wasn’t just a fresh coat of paint over “I hate Jews and foreigners”

Well the Anti-Masonic movement is interesting because it was “our urban educated elites are bound together in a Christ-rejecting cabal and use their influence in media, politics, law, and business to corruptly benefit each other at the expense of hearty God-fearing common folk” but not about Jews

Also there’s an important strain of anti-Catholicism that resonates to this day

suntzuanime:

suntzuanime:

mailadreapta:

marauders4evr:

Does it ever just blow your mind that buildings have more rights than living, breathing, people in wheelchairs?

Like there are literally clauses which protect historical buildings and other types of buildings from having to be ADA compliant because it will destroy the aesthetic of said buildings. The aesthetic. People refuse to make things accessible because it will destroy aesthetics. Theaters, front entrances to old buildings, old staircases, etc. all have more rights than the average cripple.

I like a good sweeping staircase as much as the next admirer of architecture but there’s something genuinely awful about the fact that said staircase has more rights than I do. It’s not something that ever really sinks in until 2:00 AM on a random Saturday morning…

Quick, somebody make the utilitarian case that the aesthetic enjoyment of thousands is greater when aggregated than the inconvenience of a tiny minority.

You’re not allowed to demolish living breathing people in wheelchairs either. You don’t even get to argue that they’re not historically important wheelchair people, it’s just a blind blanket ban. Next time someone tries to carve you up to install a wheelchair lift I hope you feel a little more empathy for those buildings.

The law, in its majestic equality, grants disabled people and historic buildings alike the freedom not to have accessibility ramps installed in them.

Oh this is a great example of the limits of the “civil rights” idiom in the American system

Cause when George (“the Elder”, “Thousand Points of Light”) Bush signed the ADA in 1990, he was representing a pre-Reaganite progressive Republican tradition proud to carry through on expanding the constellation of civil rights law

But for a decade already civil rights law had been culturally delegitimated as gimmedats and extortion setups (thru third-party lawsuit enforcement/“community benefit” reqs. for bank licensing etc.) and the Reagan administration (and city/state Dem administrations that were still lunchbox white working class machines) had appointed administrators and judges to back that

And so there was some high-profile pushback, I remember some NYC nuns refused permission to upgrade their walkup tenement hospice unless they gutted it for an elevator, but more than that it was lower-level judge-made and administrative law

Like a few guys made a thing of wheeling up looking for suits, their sob stories all ready for juries, and people who were already a decade and a half tired of this shit heard “this building built before 1991 for bipeds with clutching hands is a trespass against humanity” and went “NOPE NOPE NOPE THAT’S NOT WHAT WE’RE FOR, NOPE NOPE NOPE FUCK RIGHT OUT THAT DOOR”