Why Nobody Smiles in Old Photos: The Technological & Cultural Reasons Behind All those Black-and-White Frowns

in History, Photography | March 26th, 2019

We’ve all heard sto­ries of kids who ask their par­ents if the world was real­ly black-and-white in the 1950s, or maybe even been those kids our­selves. With that mat­ter cleared up, chil­dren who’ve seen even old­er col­or­less pho­tographs — say, from around the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry — may fol­low up with anoth­er ques­tion: had­n’t they invent­ed smil­ing back then? If they ask you (or if you’ve won­dered about it your­self), you can take care of it in just three min­utes by pulling up this Vox explain­er on why peo­ple nev­er smiled in old pho­tos. Why, in the words of Phil Edwards writ­ing on the video’s accom­pa­ny­ing page, “did peo­ple in old pho­tos look like they’d just heard the worst news of their life?”

“We can’t know for sure, but a few the­o­ries help us guess what was behind all that black-and-white frown­ing.” The first, and the one you may already know, has to do with the cam­era tech­nol­o­gy of the day, whose “long expo­sure times — the time a cam­era needs to take a pic­ture — made it impor­tant for the sub­ject of a pic­ture to stay as still as pos­si­ble. That way, the pic­ture would­n’t look blur­ry.” But by the year 1900 that prob­lem was more or less solved “with the intro­duc­tion of the Brown­ie and oth­er cam­eras,” which were “still slow by today’s stan­dards, but not so slow that it was impos­si­ble to smile.”

Oth­er the­o­ries explain­ing the smile-free pho­tographs of old include the lin­ger­ing influ­ence of the paint­ed por­trait on the pho­to­graph­ic por­trait; the dom­i­nant idea of pho­tog­ra­phy as a “pas­sage to immor­tal­i­ty” that “meant the medi­um was pre­dis­posed to seri­ous­ness over the ephemer­al”; and that Vic­to­ri­an and Edwar­dian cul­ture itself took a dim view of smil­ing, sup­port­ed by a sur­vey of smil­ing in por­traits con­duct­ed by Nicholas Jeeves at the Pub­lic Domain Review that “came to the con­clu­sion that there was a cen­turies-long his­to­ry of view­ing smil­ing as some­thing only buf­foons did.” Yet late 19th-cen­tu­ry and ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry pho­tog­ra­phy isn’t a com­plete­ly smile-free zone, as the Flickr group The Smil­ing Vic­to­ri­an proves.

Edwards includes a pic­ture, tak­en cir­ca 1904, of a man smil­ing not just unmis­tak­ably but huge­ly. He does so as he pre­pares to dig into a bowl of rice, that being an impor­tant part of the cui­sine of Chi­na, where Asian-lan­guage schol­ar Berthold Laufer took an expe­di­tion to cap­ture the every­day life of the Chi­nese peo­ple on film. “His rice-lov­ing sub­ject may have been will­ing to grin because he was from a dif­fer­ent cul­ture with its own sen­si­bil­i­ty con­cern­ing pho­tog­ra­phy and pub­lic behav­ior,” Edwards writes. What­ev­er the rea­sons for the smile on that Chi­nese face or the lack of one on all those Vic­to­ri­ans and Edwar­dians, we must pre­pare our­selves to answer an even more dif­fi­cult ques­tion from pos­ter­i­ty: one about why, exact­ly, we’re doing what we’re doing in the bil­lions of pho­tos we now take of our­selves every day.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

See the First Pho­to­graph of a Human Being: A Pho­to Tak­en by Louis Daguerre (1838)

See The First “Self­ie” In His­to­ry Tak­en by Robert Cor­nelius, a Philadel­phia Chemist, in 1839

The First Known Pho­to­graph of Peo­ple Shar­ing a Beer (1843)

The His­to­ry of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes: From Cam­era Obscu­ra to Cam­era Phone

Vis­it a New Dig­i­tal Archive of 2.2 Mil­lion Images from the First Hun­dred Years of Pho­tog­ra­phy

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 or on Face­book.

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William S. Burroughs’ Manifesto for Overthrowing a Corrupt Government with Fake News and Other Prophetic Methods: It’s Now Published for the First Time

in Books, Literature, Politics | March 25th, 2019

The Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca have faced some deserved crit­i­cism, unde­served ridicule, and have been cru­el­ly used as props, but I think it’s safe to say that they still bear a pret­ty whole­some image for a major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans. That was prob­a­bly no less the case and per­haps a good deal more so in 1969, but the end of the six­ties was not by any stretch a sim­pler time. It was a peri­od, writes Scott McLemee, “when the My Lai Mas­sacre, the Man­son Fam­i­ly and the Weath­er Under­ground were all in the news.” The Zodi­ac Killer was on the loose, a gen­er­al air of bleak­ness pre­vailed.

William S. Bur­roughs respond­ed to this mad­ness with a counter-mad­ness of his own in “The Revised Boy Scout Man­u­al,” “an impas­sioned yet some­times inco­her­ent rebuke to ossi­fied polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies,” writes Kirkus. We can pre­sume Bur­roughs meant his instruc­tions for over­throw­ing cor­rupt gov­ern­ments to satir­i­cal­ly com­ment on the out­doorsy sta­tus quo youth cult. But we can also see the man­u­al tak­ing as its start­ing point cer­tain val­ues the Scouts cham­pi­on, at their best: obses­sive atten­tion to detail, Mac­Gyver-like inge­nu­ity, and good old Amer­i­can self-reliance.

Want to bring down the gov­ern­ment? You can do it your­self… with fake news.

Boing Boing quotes a long pas­sage from the book that shows Bur­roughs as a com­pre­hen­sive, if not quite whole­some, Scout advi­sor, describ­ing how one might use mass media’s meth­ods to dis­rupt its mes­sage, and to trans­mit mes­sages of your own. We might think he is fore­see­ing, even rec­om­mend­ing, tech­niques we now see used to a no-longer-shock­ing degree.

You have an advan­tage which your oppos­ing play­er does not have. He must con­ceal his manip­u­la­tions. You are under no such neces­si­ty. In fact you can adver­tise the fact that you are writ­ing news in advance and try­ing to make it hap­pen by tech­niques which any­body can use.

And that makes you NEWS. And a TV per­son­al­i­ty as well, if you play it right. 

You con­struct fake news broad­casts on video cam­era… And you scram­ble your fab­ri­cat­ed news in with actu­al news broad­casts.

We might read in Bur­roughs’ instruc­tions the meth­ods of YouTube pro­pa­gan­dists, social media manip­u­la­tors, and some of the most pow­er­ful peo­ple in the world. Bur­roughs does not rec­om­mend tak­ing over the media appa­ra­tus by seiz­ing its pow­er, but rather using tech­nol­o­gy to make “cut­up video tapes” and ham radio broad­casts fea­tur­ing doc­u­men­tary media spliced togeth­er with fab­ri­ca­tions. These “tech­niques could swamp the mass media with total illu­sion,” he writes. “It will be seen that the fal­si­fi­ca­tions in syl­lab­ic West­ern lan­guages are in point of fact actu­al virus mech­a­nisms.”

Bur­roughs is not sim­ply writ­ing a ref­er­ence for mak­ing fear­mon­ger­ing pro­pa­gan­da. Even when it comes to the sub­ject of fear, he some­times sounds as if he is revis­ing Sergei Eisenstein’s mon­tage the­o­ry for his own sim­i­lar­ly vio­lent times. “Let us say the mes­sage is fear. For this we take all the past fear shots of the sub­ject we can col­lect or evoke. We cut these in with fear words and pic­tures, with threats, etc. This is all act­ed out and would be upset­ting enough in any case. Now let’s try it scram­bled and see if we get an even stronger effect.”

What would this effect be? One “com­pa­ra­ble to post-hyp­not­ic sug­ges­tion”? Who is the audi­ence, and would they be, a la Clock­work Orange, a cap­tive one? Did Bur­roughs see peo­ple on street cor­ners screen­ing their cut-up videos, despite the fact that con­sumer-lev­el video tech­nol­o­gy did not yet exist? Is this a cin­e­mat­ic exper­i­ment, mass media-age occult rit­u­al, com­pendi­um of prac­ti­cal mag­ic for insid­er media adepts?

See what you can make of Bur­roughs’ “The Revised Boy Scout Man­u­al” (sub­ti­tled “an elec­tron­ic rev­o­lu­tion”). The book has been reis­sued by the Ohio State Press, with an after­word (read it here) by V. Vale, pub­lish­er of the leg­endary, rad­i­cal mag­a­zine RE/Search, who excerpt­ed a part of the “Revised Man­u­al” in the ear­ly 1980s and planned to pub­lish it in full before “a per­son­al rela­tion­ship blowup” put an end to the project.

McLemee titles his review of Burrough’s redis­cov­ered man­i­festo “Dis­tant Ear­ly Warn­ing,” and much of it does indeed sound eeri­ly prophet­ic. But we should also bear in mind the book is itself a coun­ter­cul­tur­al pas­tiche, designed to scram­ble minds for rea­sons only Bur­roughs tru­ly knew. He was a “prac­tic­ing Sci­en­tol­o­gist at the time” of the book’s com­po­si­tion, “albeit not for much longer,” and he does pre­scribe use of the e‑meter and makes scat­tered ref­er­ences to L. Ron Hub­bard. But as a prac­ti­tion­er of his own pre­cepts, Bur­roughs would not have writ­ten a mono­graph uncrit­i­cal­ly pro­mot­ing one belief sys­tem or anoth­er. (Well, maybe just the once.) He also quotes Hassan‑I Sab­bah, dis­cuss­es Mayan hiero­glyph­ics, and talks Gen­er­al Seman­tics.

“The Revised Boy Scout Man­u­al” “has ele­ments of lib­er­tar­i­an man­i­festo, para­mil­i­tary hand­book, revenge fan­ta­sy and dark satire,” McLemee writes, “and wher­ev­er the line between fic­tion and non­fic­tion may be, it’s nev­er clear for long.” In this, Bur­roughs only scram­bles ele­ments already in abun­dance at the end of the six­ties and in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, dur­ing which he revised and record­ed the work sev­er­al times as he tran­si­tioned him­self out of an orga­ni­za­tion that main­tained total con­trol through mass media. Like Mar­shall McLuhan, Noam Chom­sky and oth­ers, he was begin­ning to see this phe­nom­e­non every­where he looked. Bur­roughs’ most last­ing influ­ence may be that, like the late-60s Sit­u­a­tion­ists, he devised a cun­ning and effec­tive way to turn mass media in on itself, one with per­haps more sin­is­ter impli­ca­tions.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How William S. Bur­roughs Embraced, Then Reject­ed Sci­en­tol­ogy, Forc­ing L. Ron Hub­bard to Come to Its Defense (1959–1970)

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

When William S. Bur­roughs Appeared on Sat­ur­day Night Live: His First TV Appear­ance (1981)

5 Ani­ma­tions Intro­duce the Media The­o­ry of Noam Chom­sky, Roland Barthes, Mar­shall McLuhan, Edward Said & Stu­art Hall

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

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Does Playing Music for Cheese During the Aging Process Change Its Flavor? Researchers Find That Hip Hop Makes It Smellier, and Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” Makes It Milder

in Food & Drink, Music | March 25th, 2019

Humans began mak­ing cheese sev­en mil­len­nia ago: plen­ty of time to devel­op an enor­mous vari­ety of tex­tures, fla­vors, and smells, and cer­tain­ly more than enough to get cre­ative about the meth­ods of gen­er­at­ing even greater vari­ety. But it seems to have tak­en all that time for us to come around to the poten­tial of music as a fla­vor­ing agent. “Expos­ing cheese to round-the-clock music could give it more fla­vor and hip hop might be bet­ter than Mozart,” report Reuters’ Denis Bal­i­bouse and Cecile Man­to­vani, cit­ing the find­ings of Cheese in Sound, a recent study by Swiss cheese­mak­er Bert Wampfler and researchers at Bern Uni­ver­si­ty of the Arts.

“Nine wheels of Emmen­tal cheese weigh­ing 10 kilos (22 pounds) each were placed in wood­en crates last Sep­tem­ber to test the impact of music on fla­vor and aro­ma,” write Bal­i­bouse and Man­to­vani. The hip hop cheese heard A Tribe Called Quest’s “Jazz (We’ve Got),” the clas­si­cal cheese Mozart’s “Mag­ic Flute,” the rock cheese Led Zep­pelin’s “Stair­way to Heav­en,” and so on.

Three oth­er wheels heard sim­ple low, medi­um, and high son­ic fre­quen­cies, and one con­trol cheese heard noth­ing at all. But per­haps “heard” is the wrong word: each matur­ing cheese received its music not through speak­ers but “mini trans­mit­ters to con­duct the ener­gy of the music into the cheese.”

That may make more plau­si­ble the results that came out when a culi­nary jury per­formed a blind taste test of all the cheeses and found that they real­ly did come out with dif­fer­ent fla­vors. Accord­ing to the pro­jec­t’s press release, a “sen­so­ry con­sen­sus analy­sis car­ried out by food tech­nol­o­gists from the ZHAW Zurich Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences” con­clud­ed that “the cheeses exposed to music had a gen­er­al­ly mild fla­vor com­pared to the con­trol test sam­ple” and that “the cheese exposed to hip hop music dis­played a dis­cernibly stronger smell and stronger, fruiti­er taste than the oth­er sam­ples.”

Or, as Smithsonian.com’s Jason Daley sum­ma­rizes the find­ings, A Tribe Called Quest “gave the cheese an espe­cial­ly funky fla­vor, while cheese that rocked out to Led Zep­pelin or relaxed with Mozart had milder tests.” Cheese-lovers intrigued by the pos­si­bil­i­ties implied here would be for­giv­en for think­ing it all still sounds a bit too much like those CD sets that claimed a baby’s intel­li­gence could be increased by play­ing them Mozart in the womb. But if Cheese in Sound’s results hold up to fur­ther scruti­ny, maybe those par­ents — at least those par­ents hop­ing for a funki­er child — should have been play­ing them hip hop all along.

via Smith­son­ian Mag

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cheese: 10,000 Years in Under Six Min­utes

How to Break Open a Big Wheel of Parme­san Cheese: A Delight­ful, 15-Minute Primer

Music in the Brain: Sci­en­tists Final­ly Reveal the Parts of Our Brain That Are Ded­i­cat­ed to Music

Stephen Fry Hosts “The Sci­ence of Opera,” a Dis­cus­sion of How Music Moves Us Phys­i­cal­ly to Tears

Leo Tolstoy’s Fam­i­ly Recipe for Mac ‘N’ Cheese

Enter the The Cor­nell Hip Hop Archive: A Vast Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion of Hip Hop Pho­tos, Posters & More

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 or on Face­book.

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The Sax Solo on Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” on a 10 Hour, Endless Loop

in Music, Random | March 25th, 2019

Enjoy, but the rule is once you start, you have to lis­ten through to the very, very end. :)

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Journalism Under Siege: A Free Online Course from Stanford Explores the Imperiled Freedom of the Press

in Current Affairs, Media, Online Courses, Stanford | March 25th, 2019

This past fall, Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies and the John S. Knight Jour­nal­ism Fel­low­ships teamed up to offer an impor­tant course on the chal­lenges fac­ing jour­nal­ism and the free­dom of the press. Called Jour­nal­ism Under Siege? Truth and Trust in a Time of Tur­moil, the five-week course fea­tured 28 jour­nal­ists and media experts, all offer­ing insights on the emerg­ing chal­lenges fac­ing the media across the Unit­ed States and the wider world. The lectures/presentations are now all online. Find them below, along with the list of guest speak­ers, which includes Alex Sta­mos who blew the whis­tle on Rus­si­a’s manip­u­la­tion of the Face­book plat­form dur­ing the 2016 elec­tion. Jour­nal­ism Under Siege will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Week­ly Ses­sions:

  • Week 1 –  First Draft of His­to­ry: How a Free Press Pro­tects Free­dom; Part One, Part Two
  • Week 2 –  Pow­er to the Peo­ple: Hold­ing the Pow­er­ful Account­able; Part One, Part Two
  • Week 3 – Pick­ing Sides? How Jour­nal­ists Cov­er Bias, Intol­er­ance and Injus­tice; Part One, Part Two
  • Week 4 – The Last Stand of Local News; Part One, Part Two
  • Week 5 – The Mis­in­for­ma­tion Soci­ety; Part One, Part Two

Guest Speak­ers:

  • Han­nah Allam, nation­al reporter, Buz­zFeed News
  • Roman Anin, inves­ti­ga­tions edi­tor, Novaya Gaze­ta, Moscow
  • Hugo Bal­ta, pres­i­dent, Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of His­pan­ic Jour­nal­ists
  • Sal­ly Buzbee, exec­u­tive edi­tor, Asso­ci­at­ed Press (AP)
  • Neil Chase, exec­u­tive edi­tor, San Jose Mer­cury News
  • Audrey Coop­er, edi­tor-in-chief, San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle
  • Jenée Desmond-Har­ris, staff edi­tor, NYT Opin­ion, New York Times
  • Jiquan­da John­son, founder and pub­lish­er, Flint Beat
  • Joel Konopo, man­ag­ing part­ner, INK Cen­tre for Inves­tiga­tive Jour­nal­ism, Gaborone, Botswana
  • Richard Lui, anchor, MSNBC and NBC News
  • Geral­dine Mori­ba, for­mer vice pres­i­dent for diver­si­ty and inclu­sion, CNN
  • Bryan Pol­lard, pres­i­dent, Native Amer­i­can Jour­nal­ists Asso­ci­a­tion
  • Cecile Prieur, deputy edi­tor, Le Monde, Paris
  • Joel Simon, exec­u­tive direc­tor, Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ists
  • Alex Sta­mos, for­mer Face­book chief secu­ri­ty offi­cer
  • Mari­na Walk­er Gue­vara, win­ner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explana­to­ry Report­ing for coor­di­nat­ing the Pana­ma Papers inves­ti­ga­tion

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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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Watch Seder-Masochism, Nina Paley’s Animated, Feminist Take on the Passover Holiday: The Animated Feature Film Is Free and in the Public Domain

in Animation, Gender, Law, Religion | March 25th, 2019

Seder-Masochism, copy­right abo­li­tion­ist Nina Paley’s lat­est ani­mat­ed release, is guar­an­teed to ruf­fle feath­ers in cer­tain quar­ters, though the last laugh belongs to this trick­ster artist, who shares writ­ing cred­it with ”God, Moses or a series of patri­ar­chal males, depend­ing on who you ask.”

Bypass­ing a com­mer­cial release in favor of the pub­lic domain goes a long way toward inoc­u­lat­ing the film and its cre­ator against expen­sive rights issues that could arise from the star-stud­ded sound­track.

It also lets the air out of any affront­ed par­ties’ cam­paigns for mass box office boy­cotts.

“The crit­i­cism seems equal­ly divid­ed between peo­ple that say I’m a Zion­ist and peo­ple that say I’m an anti-Zion­ist,” Paley says of This Land Is Mine, below, a stun­ning sequence of trib­al and inter-trib­al car­nage, mem­o­rably set to Ernest Gold’s theme for the 1960 epic Paul New­man vehi­cle, Exo­dus.

Released as a stand-alone short, This Land Is Mine has become the most viewed of Paley’s works. She finds the oppos­ing camps’ equal out­cry encour­ag­ing, proof that she’s doing “some­thing right.”

More both­er­some has been Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Gen­der Stud­ies Mimi Thi Nguyen’s social media push to brand the film­mak­er as trans­pho­bic. (Paley, no fan of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics, states that her “crime was, months ear­li­er, shar­ing on Face­book the fol­low­ing lyric: ‘If a per­son has a penis he’s a man.’”) Nguyen’s actions result­ed in the fem­i­nist film’s ouster from sev­er­al venues and fes­ti­vals, includ­ing Ebert­fest in Paley’s home­town and a women’s film fes­ti­val in Bel­gium.

What would the ancient fer­til­i­ty god­dess­es pop­u­lat­ing both art his­to­ry and Seder-Masochism have to say about that devel­op­ment?

In Seder-Masochism, these god­dess fig­ures, whom Paley ear­li­er trans­formed into a series of free down­load­able GIFs, offer a most­ly silent rebuke to those who refuse to acknowl­edge any con­cep­tion of the divine exist­ing out­side patri­ar­chal tra­di­tion.

In the case of Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor Nguyen, per­haps the god­dess­es would err on the side of diplo­ma­cy (and the First Amend­ment), fram­ing the dust-up as just one more rea­son the pub­lic should be glad the pro­jec­t’s lodged in the pub­lic domain. Any­one with access to the Inter­net and a desire to see the film will have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to do so. Called out, maybe. Shut down, nev­er.

The god­dess­es sup­ply a depth of mean­ing to this large­ly com­ic under­tak­ing. Their ample curves inform many of the pat­terns that give motion to the ani­mat­ed cutouts.

Paley also gets a lot of mileage from repli­cat­ing super­nu­mer­ary char­ac­ters until they march with ant-like pur­pose or bedaz­zle in Bus­by Berke­ley-style spec­ta­cles. Not since Paul Mazursky’s Tem­pest have goats loomed so large in cin­e­mat­ic chore­og­ra­phy…

Paley’s use of music is anoth­er source of abid­ing plea­sure. She casts a wide net—punk, dis­co, Bul­gar­i­an folk, the Bea­t­les, Free to Be You and Me—again, fram­ing her choic­es as par­o­dy. “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here” accom­pa­nies the sev­enth plague of Egypt (don’t both­er look­ing it up. It’s hail.) Ringo Starr’s famous “Hel­ter Skel­ter” aside (“I’ve got blis­ters on my fin­gers!”) boils down to an apt choice for plague num­ber six. (If you have to think about it…)

The ele­ments of the Seder plate are list­ed to the strains of “Tijua­na Taxi” because… well, who doesn’t love Herb Alpert and the Tijua­na Brass?

Paley’s own reli­gious back­ground is of obvi­ous inter­est here, and as with her pre­vi­ous fea­ture, Sita Sings the Blues—also in the pub­lic domain—the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal ele­ment is irre­sistible. A 2011 audio record­ing pro­vides the excuse to por­tray her father, Hiram, who died the year after the inter­view was con­duct­ed, as a Mon­ty Python-esque God. The senior Paley was raised in an obser­vant Jew­ish house­hold, but lost faith as a young man. An athe­ist who want­ed his chil­dren to know some­thing of their her­itage, Passover was the one Jew­ish hol­i­day he con­tin­ued to cel­e­brate. (He also for­bade the kids from par­tic­i­pat­ing in any sort of sec­u­lar Christ­mas activ­i­ties.)

A wist­ful God with the com­plex­ion of a dol­lar bill, Hiram is at times sur­round­ed by put­ti, in the form of his par­ents, his con­tentious Uncle Her­schel, and his own sweet younger self.

For these scenes, Paley por­trays her­self as a spir­it­ed “sac­ri­fi­cial goat.” This char­ac­ter finds an echo at film’s end, when “Chad Gadya,” the tra­di­tion­al Passover tune that brings the annu­al seder to a rol­lick­ing con­clu­sion, is brought to life using embroi­der­ma­tion, a form Paley may or may not have invent­ed.

Per­haps Paley’s most sub­ver­sive joke is choos­ing Jesus, as depict­ed in Juan de Juanes’ 1652 paint­ing, The Last Sup­per, to deliv­er an edu­ca­tion­al blow-by-blow of Passover rit­u­al.

Actu­al­ly, much like Audrey Hep­burn in My Fair Lady and Natal­ie Wood in West Side Sto­ry, Jesus was ghost-voiced by anoth­er performer—Barry Gray, nar­ra­tor of the mid­cen­tu­ry edu­ca­tion­al record­ing The Moishe Oysh­er Seder.

As you may have gleaned, Paley, despite the clean ele­gance of her ani­mat­ed line, is a max­i­mal­ist. There’s some­thing for every­one (except­ing, of course, Mimi Thi Nguyen)—a gleam­ing gold­en idol, a ball bounc­ing above hiero­glyph­ic lyrics, actu­al footage of atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted in a state of reli­gious fer­vor, Moses’ broth­er Aaron—a fig­ure who’s often shoved to the side­lines, if not left out­right on the cut­ting room floor.

We leave you with Paley’s prayer to her Muse, found freely shared on her web­site:

Our Idea

Which art in the Ether

That can­not be named;

Thy Vision come

Thy Will be done

On Earth, as it is in Abstrac­tion.

Give us this day our dai­ly Spark

And for­give us our crit­i­cisms

As we for­give those who cri­tique against us;

And lead us not into stag­na­tion

But deliv­er us from Ego;

For Thine is the Vision

And the Pow­er

And the Glo­ry for­ev­er.

Amen.

Watch Seder-Masochism in its entire­ty up top, or down­load it here. Pur­chase the com­pan­ion book here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sita Sings the Blues Now on YouTube

Cel­e­brate the Women’s March with 24 God­dess GIFs Cre­at­ed by Ani­ma­tor Nina Paley: They’re Free to Down­load and Remix

Watch Nina Paley’s “Embroi­der­ma­tion,” a New, Stun­ning­ly Labor-Inten­sive Form of Ani­ma­tion

Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment: A Free Yale Course 

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, this April. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti Turns 100: Hear the Great San Francisco Poet Read “Trump’s Trojan Horse,” “Pity the Nation” & Many Other Poems

in Audio Books, Poetry | March 24th, 2019

It has been a sea­son of mourn­ing for lit­er­a­ture: first the death of Mary Oliv­er and now W.S. Mer­win, two writ­ers who left a con­sid­er­able imprint on over half a cen­tu­ry of Amer­i­can poet­ry. Con­sid­er­ing the fact that found­ing father of the Beats and pro­pri­etor of world-renowned City Lights Book­store, Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti, turns 100 on March 24th, maybe a few more peo­ple have glanced over to check on him. How’s he doing?

He’s grown “frail and near­ly blind,” writes Chloe Velt­man at The Guardian in an inter­view with the poet this month, “but his mind is still on fire.” Fer­linghet­ti “has not mel­lowed,” says Wash­ing­ton Post book crit­ic Ron Charles, “at all.” If you’re look­ing for him at any of the events planned in his hon­or, City Lights announces, he will not be in atten­dance, but he has been busy pro­mot­ing his lat­est book, a thin­ly-veiled auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nov­el about his ear­ly life called Lit­tle Boy.

In the book Fer­linghet­ti describes his child­hood in images right out of Edward Gorey. He was a “Lit­tle Lord Fauntleroy” in a Bronxville man­sion 20 miles out­side New York, an orphan tak­en in and raised by descen­dants of the founders of Sarah Lawrence. “His new guardians spoke to one anoth­er in court­ly tones and dressed in Vic­to­ri­an garb,” notes Charles. “They sent him to pri­vate school, and, more impor­tant, they pos­sessed a fine library, which he was encour­aged to use.”

The poet would lat­er write he was a “social climber climb­ing down­ward,” an iron­ic ref­er­ence to how some peo­ple might have seen the tra­jec­to­ry of his career. After serv­ing in the Navy dur­ing World War II, earn­ing a master’s at Colum­bia, and a Ph.D. at the Sor­bonne, Fer­linghet­ti decamped to San Fran­cis­co, and found­ed the small mag­a­zine City Lights with Peter D. Mar­tin. Then he opened a book­store on the edge of Chi­na­town to fund the pub­lish­ing ven­ture.

The shop became a haunt for writ­ers and poets. Fer­linghet­ti start­ed pub­lish­ing them, start­ing with him­self in 1955. The fol­low­ing year he gained inter­na­tion­al infamy for pub­lish­ing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (hear Gins­berg read the poem in ’56). The book was banned, and Fer­linghet­ti put on tri­al for obscen­i­ty. If any­one thought this would be the end of Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti, they were mis­tak­en.

He has pub­lished some­where around forty books of poet­ry and crit­i­cism, nov­els and plays, been a pro­lif­ic painter for six­ty years, as well as a pub­lish­er, book­seller, and activist. He does not con­sid­er him­self a Beat poet, but from his influ­en­tial first two books—Pic­tures of the Gone World and 1958’s A Coney Island of the Mind—onward, Ferlinghetti’s philo­soph­i­cal out­look has more or less breathed the same air as Gins­berg et al.’s.

Quot­ing from Coney Island, Andrew Shapiro writes, “he coun­seled us to ‘con­found the sys­tem,’ ‘to emp­ty out our pock­ets… miss­ing our appoint­ments’ and to leave ‘our neck­ties behind’ and ‘take up the full beard of walk­ing anar­chy.’” He is still doing this, every way that he can, in pub­lic read­ings, media appear­ances, and a can­ny use of YouTube. His is not a call to flower pow­er but to full immer­sion in the chaos of life, or, as he writes in “Coney Island of the Mind 1” in the “ver­i­ta­ble rage / of adver­si­ty / Heaped up / groan­ing with babies and bay­o­nets / under cement skies / in an abstract land­scape of blast­ed trees.”

Fer­linghet­ti urged poets and writ­ers to “cre­ate works capa­ble of answer­ing the chal­lenge of apoc­a­lyp­tic times, even if this mean­ing sounds apoc­a­lyp­tic… you can con­quer the con­querors with words.” Despite this stri­den­cy, he has nev­er tak­en him­self too seri­ous­ly. Fer­linghet­ti is as relaxed as they come—he hasn’t mel­lowed, but he also hasn’t need­ed to. He’s a loose, nat­ur­al sto­ry­teller and come­di­an and he’s still deliv­er­ing sober, prophet­ic pro­nounce­ments with grav­i­tas.

See and hear Fer­linghet­ti take on con­querors, bul­lies, and xeno­phobes, under­wear, and oth­er sub­jects in the read­ings here from his through­out his career, includ­ing a full, 40-minute read­ing in 2005 at UC Berke­ley, below, an album of Fer­linghet­ti and Ken­neth Rexroth, above, and at the top, a video made last year of the 99-year-old poet, in Lady Lib­er­ty mask, read­ing “Trump’s Tro­jan Horse” under a grin­ning, gray-beard­ed self-por­trait of his younger self. Hap­py 100th to him. “I fig­ure that with anoth­er 100 birth­days,” he says, “that’ll be about enough!”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Mur­ray Reads the Poet­ry of Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti, Wal­lace Stevens, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Bil­ly Collins, Lorine Niedeck­er, Lucille Clifton & More

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl Man­u­scripts Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online, Reveal­ing the Beat Poet’s Cre­ative Process

The First Record­ing of Allen Gins­berg Read­ing “Howl” (1956)

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

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24 Common Cognitive Biases: A Visual List of the Psychological Systems Errors That Keep Us From Thinking Rationally

in Psychology | March 22nd, 2019

There’s been a lot of talk about the Dun­ning-Kruger effect, the cog­ni­tive bias that makes peo­ple wild­ly over­con­fi­dent, unable to know how igno­rant they are because they don’t have the basic skills to grasp what com­pe­tence means. Once pop­u­lar­ized, the effect became weaponized. Peo­ple made arm­chair diag­noses, gloat­ed and point­ed at the obliv­i­ous­ly stu­pid. But if those fin­ger-point­ers could take the beam out of their own eye, they might see four fin­gers point­ing back at them, or what­ev­er folk wis­dom to this effect you care to mash up.

What we now call cog­ni­tive bias­es have been known by many oth­er names over the course of mil­len­nia. Per­haps nev­er have the many vari­eties of self-decep­tion been so spe­cif­ic. Wikipedia lists 185 cog­ni­tive bias­es, 185 dif­fer­ent ways of being irra­tional and delud­ed. Sure­ly, it’s pos­si­ble that every sin­gle time we—maybe accurately—point out some­one else’s delu­sions, we’re hoard­ing a col­lec­tion of our own. Accord­ing to much of the research by psy­chol­o­gists and behav­ioral econ­o­mists, this may be inevitable and almost impos­si­ble to rem­e­dy.


Want to bet­ter under­stand your own cog­ni­tive bias­es and maybe try to move beyond them if you can? See a list of 24 com­mon cog­ni­tive bias­es in an info­graph­ic poster at yourbias.is, the site of the non­prof­it School of Thought. (The two gen­tle­men pop­ping up behind brainy Jeho­vah in the poster, notes Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist, “hap­pen to rep­re­sent Daniel Kah­ne­man and Amos Tver­sky, two of the lead­ing social sci­en­tists known for their con­tri­bu­tions to this field. Not only did they pio­neer work around cog­ni­tive bias­es start­ing in the late 1960s, but their part­ner­ship also result­ed in a Nobel Prize in Eco­nom­ics in 2002.”)

Grant­ed, a Wikipedia list is a crowd-sourced cre­ation with lots of redun­dan­cy and quite a few “dubi­ous or triv­ial” entries, writes Ben Yago­da at The Atlantic. “The IKEA effect, for instance, is defined as ‘the ten­den­cy for peo­ple to place a dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly high val­ue on objects they par­tial­ly assem­bled them­selves.’” Much of the val­ue I’ve per­son­al­ly placed on IKEA fur­ni­ture has to do with nev­er want­i­ng to assem­ble IKEA fur­ni­ture again. “But a sol­id group of 100 or so bias­es has been repeat­ed­ly shown to exist, and can make a hash of our lives.”

These are the tricks of the mind that keep gam­blers gam­bling, even when they’re los­ing every­thing. They include not only the “gambler’s fal­la­cy” but con­fir­ma­tion bias and the fal­la­cy of sunk cost, the ten­den­cy to pur­sue a bad out­come because you’ve already made a sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment and you don’t want it to have been for noth­ing. It may seem iron­ic that the study of cog­ni­tive bias­es devel­oped pri­mar­i­ly in the field of eco­nom­ics, the only social sci­ence, per­haps, that still assumes humans are autonomous indi­vid­u­als who freely make ratio­nal choic­es.

But then, econ­o­mists must con­stant­ly con­tend with the counter-evidence—rationality is not a thing most humans do well. (Evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly speak­ing, this may have been no great dis­ad­van­tage until we got our hands on weapons of mass destruc­tion and the tools of cli­mate col­lapse.) When we act ratio­nal­ly in some areas, we tend to fool our­selves in oth­ers. Is it pos­si­ble to over­come bias? That depends on what we mean. Polit­i­cal and per­son­al prejudices—against eth­nic­i­ties, nation­al­i­ties, gen­ders, and sexualities—are usu­al­ly but­tressed by the sys­tems errors known as cog­ni­tive bias­es, but they are not caused by them. They are learned ideas that can be unlearned.

What researchers and aca­d­e­mics mean when they talk about bias does not relate to spe­cif­ic con­tent of beliefs, but rather to the ways in which our minds warp log­ic to serve some psy­cho­log­i­cal or emo­tion­al need or to help reg­u­late and sta­bi­lize our per­cep­tions in a man­age­able way. “Some of these bias­es are relat­ed to mem­o­ry,” writes Kendra Cher­ry at Very Well Mind, oth­ers “might be relat­ed to prob­lems with atten­tion. Since atten­tion is a lim­it­ed resource, peo­ple have to be selec­tive about what they pay atten­tion to in the world around them.”

We’re con­stant­ly miss­ing what’s right in front of us, in oth­er words, because we’re try­ing to pay atten­tion to oth­er peo­ple too. It’s exhaust­ing, which might be why we need eight hours or so of sleep each night if we want our brains to func­tion half decent­ly. Go to yourbias.is for this list of 24 com­mon cog­ni­tive bias­es, also avail­able on a nifty poster you can order and hang on the wall. You’ll also find there an illus­trat­ed col­lec­tion of log­i­cal fal­lac­i­es and a set of “crit­i­cal think­ing cards” fea­tur­ing both kinds of rea­son­ing errors. Once you’ve iden­ti­fied and defeat­ed all your own cog­ni­tive biases—all 24, or 100, or 185 or so—then you’ll be ready to set out and fix every­one else’s.

via Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Research Finds That Intel­lec­tu­al Humil­i­ty Can Make Us Bet­ter Thinkers & Peo­ple; Good Thing There’s a Free Course on Intel­lec­tu­al Humil­i­ty

Why Incom­pe­tent Peo­ple Think They’re Amaz­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son from David Dun­ning (of the Famous “Dun­ning-Kruger Effect”)

The Pow­er of Empa­thy: A Quick Ani­mat­ed Les­son That Can Make You a Bet­ter Per­son

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

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