What Is “Queering” in Video Game Design? Naomi Clark on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #103

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Video Games | September 2nd, 2021

While LGBTQ+ representation in video games has been improving (as with other media), Naomi Clark (who designed games for LEGO, Gamelab, Fresh Planet, Rebel Monkey, et al) has something more disruptive in mind when arguing for game “queerification.” The prototypical video game includes a more-or-less linear progression through a pre-defined story to a defined win condition, and anything that challenges that tradition to allow more self-expression is a step in the direction of queering. Many popular games now include a sandbox aspect that allows players to make their own decisions, and this gestures at a continuum of freedom in player-game relations, with the extreme being a game that just provides a platform for players to create their own games.

Your host Mark Linsenmayer and guest co-host Tyler Hislop engage Naomi about topics like how games train us, character creation, glitches, speed runs, gamifying tasks, and economic and industry pressures in game design. Some games we touch on include The Sims, The Last of Us, Cyberpunk, and Mass Effect.

Read Naomi’s presentation on “Queering Human-Game Relations.” Get involved with the NYU Gamecenter where Naomi works. You can also play her early game Sissyfight 2000 free online. A couple of her other creations that come up in our discussion include Wonder City and the card game Consentacle. Read her wisdom on Quora and follow her on Twitter @metasynthie.

Some sources reviewed to prepare for this episode include:

“Just Making Things and Being Alive About It: The Queer Games Scene” (2013) by Brendan Keogh
“The 15 Queerest Video Games, Ranked” by Alley Hector (2018)
“How Video Games Can Help LGBTQ+ Players Feel Like Themselves” by Laken Brooks
“Press A, Be Gay: LGBTQ Representation in Video Games” by Jason Villemiz
“15 Games With Non-Binary Friendly Character Creation” by Allison Stalberg
“Can We Do Better Than Zelda? Queer Tropes in Video Games” a video from Feminist Frequency
“The trans narrative in ‘The Last of Us Part II’ is compelling. There’s so much more to be done.” by Julie Muncy
“ ‘Am I Trans?’: One Teen’s Quest and How Gaming Helped” (2015) from Note to Self podcast (which features Naomi)
There are several specifically gay video game podcasts worth checking out, including Gay for Play and The Gayming Podcast.

This episode includes bonus discussion you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

What Makes Rodin’s The Thinker a Great Sculpture: An Introduction to Rodin Life, Craft & Iconic Work

in Art | September 1st, 2021

Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker exists in about 28 full-size bronze casts, each approximately 73 inches high, in museums around the world, as well as several dozen castings of smaller size and plaster models and studies. The Thinker also exists as one of the most copied and parodied artworks in world history, perhaps because of its ubiquity. “Unfortunately,” Joseph Phelan writes at the Artcyclopedia, “there is a side of Rodin’s work that has become kitsch through cheap reproductions and commercial rip-offs.”

In popular interpretations, The Thinker represents philosophical abstraction. But Rodin’s figure doesn’t contemplate Plato’s forms or Kant’s categories. He dreams of hell, and brings a vision of eternal torment into being. He is a representation of the poet Dante (hence his original name, The Poet) in Rodin’s most ambitious masterwork, The Gates of Hell, made on commission from the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. The subject, “bas-reliefs representing The Divine Comedy,” was “surely suggested by Rodin himself, as he was an avid reader of Dante,” the Association for Public Art points out.

Divorced from its original context — a work begun in 1880 and only completed after the artist’s death in 1917 — The Thinker becomes “a universal image,” the National Gallery of Art writes — one that “reveals in physical terms the mental effort and even physical anguish of creativity.” As Rodin himself put it, “what makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.” If we can see his thoughtful posture with fresh eyes, we’ll notice his extreme stress, tension, and pain.

Rodin worked on The Gates of Hell for the final 37 years of his life, and didn’t live to see it cast in full during his lifetime. The massive bronze doors — which also produced such famous Rodin sculptures as The Three Shades and The Kiss — contain around 200 individual figures and groups of sufferers from the Inferno. “For Rodin,” notes the Rodin Museum, “the chaotic population on The Gates of Hell enjoyed only one final freedom — the ability to express their agony with complete abandon … The figures on the doors poignantly and heart-rending evoke universal human emotions and experiences.”

While hell’s denizens writhe and burn below him, The Thinker, perched atop the door, curls in on himself with the strain of imagination. Whatever his original inspiration, he came unglued from the Inferno, his modular nature part of the sculptor’s original design. The Thinker is Dante, but also “in a very real sense,” the Met writes, “The Thinker is Rodin. Brutishly muscled yet engrossed in thought, coiled in tension yet loose in repose.” As a universal symbol for contemplation, he is also an image of bringing art into being through the sheer force of one’s mind.

Rodin, after all, “never produced a work of plaster, bronze, or even marble with his own hands,” says the Great Art Explained video above, preferring “an industrial approach to producing art” that meant a supervisory role over crews of workers, raising questions about “authenticity and originality.” Perhaps Rodin “shows us that an artist should be judged by what’s in his head, not in his hands,” but The Thinker shows us that what’s in the head is also in the hands, the gnarled back, tense sinewy arms, and curled up toes.

A Free Online Course on Dante’s Divine Comedy from Yale University

Watch 1915 Video of Monet, Renoir, Rodin & Degas: The New Motion Picture Camera Captures the Innovative Artists

The Story Behind Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A 94-Year-Old English Teacher and Her Former Students Reunite in Their Old Classroom & Debate the Merits of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

in Education, Life, Literature, Music | September 1st, 2021

In fiction the inspirational high-school English teacher is a cliché, despite (or indeed due to) the fact that so many of us have had at least one of them in real life. For generations of students who passed through San Francisco’s prestigious Lowell High School, that teacher was Flossie Lewis. Long after her retirement, she went surprisingly viral in a 2016 PBS interview clip about her thoughts on aging. It seemed she retained her power to inspire, not just for her more than seven million online viewers, but also for the PBS producers who later reunited her with her former students in the very same classroom where she once taught them.

You can see this reunion take place in the video above, which also includes Flossie telling her own story of having fled Brooklyn spinsterhood on a Greyhound bus headed west. “I could command the attention of a class,” she says of the source of her power as a teacher. “I had a voice. I had that kind of personality that did not seem teacherly, but was provocative.”

Onetime student Daniel Handler, better known as the novelist Lemony Snicket, credits Flossie with an “ability to startle.” Another, now an architect, remembers “gravitas” — and his having been “intimidated by her name. Flossie is a very unusual name.” Or at least it is today, its popularity (driven, it seems, by the Bobbsey Twins books) having peaked in the early 20th century.

Flossie is also representative of her generation in another way: not particularly caring for the music of Bob Dylan. Though she can’t have been thrilled with that guitar-playing (relative) youngster’s 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, she’s willing to hear her students out on the subject. “The trivial task before us is to decide whether Bobby Dylan is worth the laureate,” she declares to the group of Lowell alumni gathered in her old classroom. Now all middle-aged, her former students include Dylan defenders and Dylan deniers alike, but what unites them are their undimmed memories of their teacher’s mixture of rigor, compassion, and sheer eccentricity. As one of them recalls, “You read us a sonnet from Shakespeare and said, ‘It’s no good.’ ” Whatever his generational relevance, the poet from Hibbing may never have stood a chance.

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Modernist Poem The Waste Land

“Tangled Up in Blue”: Deciphering a Bob Dylan Masterpiece

David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious Literature with Lightweight Books

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Albert Camus’ Touching Thank You Letter to His Elementary School Teacher

Comedian Ricky Gervais Tells a Serious Story About How He Learned to Write Creatively

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Chinese Youth Announce That They’re “Lying Flat” and Resisting the Pressures of Modern Life

in Current Affairs, Economics, Politics | September 1st, 2021

The “Lying Flat” movement taking hold among young people in China involves doing exactly what it suggests: working little, resting a lot, and cultivating the most minimalist lifestyle possible. Unlike Timothy Leary’s 1960’s mantra, “turn on, tune in, drop out,” lying flat, or tang ping (躺平), takes no stance on a countercultural ethos or the consumption of mind-altering drugs. But it has caused the authorities alarm, even among English-language observers. Consider the Brookings Institute headline, “The ‘lying flat’ movement standing in the way of China’s innovation drive.” Standing in the way of innovation is a cardinal sin of capitalism, one reason the “niche Chinese Gen Z meme” of tang ping, Jane Li writes, “is ringing alarm bells for Beijing.”

The phenomenon began — where else — on social media, when 31-year-old former factory worker Luo Huazhong “drew the curtains and crawled into bed,” Cassady Rosenblum writes at The New York Times. Luo then “posted a picture of himself [in bed] to the Chinese website Baidu along with a message: ‘Lying Flat is Justice.’”

His manifesto (above) claimed the “right to choose a slow lifestyle” by doing little work to get by, reading, gardening, exercising, and, yes, lying supine as often as he liked. To further elaborate, Luo wrote, “lying flat is my sophistic movement,” with a reference to Diogenes the Cynic, the Greek philosopher “said to have lived inside a barrel to criticize the excesses of Athenian aristocrats.”

Diogenes did more than that. He and his followers rejected everything about Athenian society, from work and marriage to the abstract reasoning of Plato. Luo might have turned to a more traditional source for “lying flat” — the Daoist principle of wu-wei, or non-doing. But lying flat is not so much about living in harmony with nature as it is a state of exhaustion, a full-body admission that the promises of capitalism — work hard now, rest hard later — have not and will not materialize. They are phantoms, mirages, precisely the kind of fictions that made Diogenes bark with laughter. The truth, Rosenblum writes, is that for “essential” workers at the bottom all the way up to the “inner sanctums” of Goldman Sachs, “work has become intolerable. Rest is resistance.”

In a work culture that celebrates “996” — 12-hour days, six days a week– rest may be the only form of resistance. Political repression and lack of upward mobility have fostered “an almost monastic outlook” in China, writes Li, “including not getting married, not having children, not having a job, not owning property, and consuming as little as possible.” Since picking up tens of thousands of followers online, the lying flat movement has become the target of a censorship campaign aimed at stopping young Chinese workers from checking out. One government-backed newspaper called the movement “shameful,” and news agency Xinhua unfavorably compared “lying flattists” to front-line medical workers. The original manifesto, Lying Flat groups, and message boards where users posted photos of seals, cats, and themselves lying flat have been taken down.

Zijia Song writes of tang ping as partly a response to a traditional Chinese culture of competitiveness and overwork, but notes that there are similar movements in Japan, Korea, and the U.S., where “Black activists, writers and thinkers are among the clearest voices articulating this spiritual malaise and its solutions,” writes Rosenblum, “perhaps because they’ve borne the brunt of capitalism more than other groups of Americans.” Whatever their national origin, each of these statements defiantly claims the right to rest, posing a threat not only to the Party but to an ideal of human life as endless overwork for shiny trinkets and empty promises, during a global pandemic and climate crisis that have revealed to us like nothing else the need to slow down, rest, and completely reimagine the way we live.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

An Archaeologist Creates the Definitive Guide to Beer Cans

in Food & Drink, History | August 31st, 2021

Image via Wikimedia Commons

As a beverage of choice and necessity for much of the population in parts of the ancient world, beer has played an important role in archaeology. Beer cans, on the other hand, have not. Unlike millennia-old recipes, beer cans seem like no more than trash, even in a field where trash is highly treasured. This is a mistake, says archeologist Jane Busch. “The historical archaeologist who ignores the beer can at his site is like the prehistoric archeologist who ignores historic pottery.”

David Maxwell, an expert in animal bones who trained as a Mayanist, has recognized the truth of this statement by turning his passion for beer can collecting into beer can archaeology, a tiny niche within the smaller field of “tin can archaeology.” Maxwell became the reigning expert on beer can dating when “in 1993, he published a field-identification guide in Historical Archaeology,” notes Jessica Gingrich at Atlas Obscura, “which has since become an industry standard and his most-read work.”

The first commercial canned beer appeared in 1935, after several unsuccessful experiments starting in 1909. Experiments in beer canning took a hiatus during Prohibition, and canned beer itself went off the market during WWII as supplies of tin plate were rerouted to the war effort. During that interregnum, only the military shipped canned beer, to soldiers overseas in olive and camo-colored cans. When sales resumed after the war, beer cans assumed more routinized design elements. Maxwell himself became fascinated with beer cans from afar. “While canned beer sales exploded in the United States after World War II, Gingrich writes, “the industry failed to take off in Canada until the 1980s.”

As a child in Canada, Maxwell collected bottle caps. “All the beer came in the same shape bottle,” he says. Cans seemed exotic, especially those of an older vintage. “They had punches to open them instead of pull rings, and all I knew was that they predated me.” The value of disposable artifacts less than 100 years old isn’t immediately apparent to most people, says Jim Rock, a pioneer of tin can studies who calls cans “the Rodney Dangerfield of archeology. They just don’t get any respect.” But the fact is “all archeology is garbage,” says Maxwell.

Dating cans gives archeologists a picture of modern consumption patterns — and patterns of ecological destruction — in the refuse tossed on highways and the strata of trash found in construction sites, landfills, and even ancient dig sites, where dating beer cans can tell archeologists when earlier trespassers might have arrived, removed or altered artifacts, and left their trash behind. Maxwell, who has recently downsized his collection from 4500 to 1700 cans to save space, admits that a narrow focus on the beer can takes a special combination of skills.

“Collectors are a fabulous resource for academics,” he says. “These are the guys who do the grunt work” — the endlessly curious citizen scientists of archaeology. “I can’t think of anyone else who would do that except someone who is obsessive about what it is that they are collecting.” In Maxwell, the obsessive collector and rigorous academic just happened to come together to produce the definitive guide. (See Beer Cans: A Guide for the Archaeologist online.) But even he has had to “face the question of what deserves to be archived and kept,” Nicola Jones writes at Sapiens. In discarding 3,000 of his own cans, most of them acquired through collectors online, he had to admit that “though the rusty cans were a part of history, they weren’t worth much to the rest of the world.”

Related Content:

Beer Archaeology: Yes, It’s a Thing

The Science of Beer: A New Free Online Course Promises to Enhance Your Appreciation of the Timeless Beverage

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

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Build Wooden Models of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Building: The Guggenheim, Unity Temple, Johnson Wax Headquarters & More

in Architecture | August 31st, 2021

Frank Lloyd Wright had his eccentricities, in not just his personal and professional conduct but also the very language with which he described the world. Among the enduringly fascinating elements of his idiolect is the word Usonian, which refers to things of or pertaining to the United States of America. Wright didn’t coin the term: its earliest recorded user is the early 20th-century writer James Duff Law, who declared that “We of the United States, in justice to Canadians and Mexicans, have no right to use the title ‘Americans’ when referring to matters pertaining exclusively to ourselves.” The most famous architect in American history took Usonian further, using it to label an American architectural sensibility — of, naturally, his own design.

Though Wright did envision an ideally Usonian city, his clearest expressions of the aesthetic stand today in the form of the Usonian houses. Built between 1934 and 1958, these sixty or so residences take advantage, as Wright saw it, of the range of distinctive settings offered up by the landscapes of the United States.

Designed with features like garden terraces, clerestory windows, flat roofs with wide overhangs, and easy visual and physical passage between the indoors and outdoors, these urban-rural hybrids still today draw the admiration of architects and non-architects alike. But truly to understand a Usonian house, perhaps you must build one yourself: luckily, the Little Building Company offers a model kit that lets you do just that.

Their Wright lineup also includes miniature wooden versions of his 1908 Unity Temple in Oak Park, his 1937 Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, and his 1937 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The differences in scale and complexity between these buildings make for a natural model-building difficulty curve: once you’ve done a Wright house, you’ll be ready for a Wright temple; once you’ve done a Wright temple, you’ll be ready for a Wright corporate headquarters, and so on. Not only will the effort hone your manual dexterity, it will heighten your appreciation for the American architecture-defining innovations Wright pulled off in the early 20th century. But do you have to be from the United States to understand the Usonian? Based in Australia and selling to the world, the Little Building Company suggests not.

via MyModernMet

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketches of Broadacre City (1932)

The Modernist Gas Stations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invented Lincoln Logs, “America’s National Toy” (1916)

That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles – a Free Online Documentary

Omoshiroi Blocks: Japanese Memo Pads Reveal Intricate Buildings As The Pages Get Used

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Lost Studio Footage of Brian Wilson Conducting “Good Vibrations,” The Beach Boys’ Brilliant “Pocket Symphony”

in Music | August 31st, 2021

After Brian Wilson created what Hendrix called the “psychedelic barbershop quartet” sound of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, he moved on to what he promised would be another quantum leap beyond. “Our new album,” Smile, he claimed, “will be as much an improvement over Sounds as that was over Summer Days.” But in his pursuit to almost single-handedly surpass the Beatles in the art of studio perfectionism, Wilson overreached. He famously scrapped the Smile sessions, and instead released the hastily-recorded Smiley Smile to fulfill contract obligations in 1967.

Smiley Smile’s peculiar genius went unrecognized at the time, particularly because its centerpiece, “Good Vibrations,” had set expectations so high. Recorded and released as a single in 1966, the song would be referred to as a “pocket symphony” (a phrase invented either by Wilson himself or publicist Derek Taylor). Even the jaded session players who sat in for the hours of recording — veterans from the famed “Wrecking Crew” — knew they were making something that transcended the usual rut of pop simplicity.

“We were doing two, three record dates a day,” says organ player Mike Melvoin, “and the level of sophistication was, like, not really sophisticated at all.” The “Good Vibrations” sessions were another experience entirely. “All of a sudden, you walk in, and here’s run-on songs. It’s like this section followed by that section followed by this section, and each of them with a completely different character. And you’re going, ‘Whoa.’” Wrecking Crew bassist Carol Kay, who sat in for the sessions but didn’t make the final mix, remembers thinking, “that wasn’t your normal rock ‘n’ roll…. You were part of a symphony.”

Wilson’s pop symphonies were created and arranged not on paper but during the recording sessions themselves, which accounted for the 90 hours of tape and tens of thousands of dollars in expenses, the most money ever spent on a pop single. He made creative decisions according to what he called “feels,” fragments of melody and sound that formed his avant-garde pastiches. “Each feel represented a mood or an emotion I’d felt,” he recalled, “and I planned to fit them together like a mosaic.” Not everyone could see the plan at first.

But when Wilson finally emerged from months of isolation after cutting and mixing hours and hours of tape, the rest of the band was “very blown out,” he says. “They were most blown out. They said, ‘Goddamn, how can you possibly do this, Brian?’ I said, ‘Something got inside of me.’… They go, ‘Well, it’s fantastic.’ And so they sang really good just to show me how much they liked it.” In the edited footage at the top, taken over the six months of recording in four different studios, you can see drummer Hal Blaine, organ player Mick Melvoin, double bass player Lyle Ritz, and the Beach Boys themselves all recording their parts.

To the press, Wilson told one story — “Good Vibrations” was “still sticking pretty close to that same boy-girl thing, you know, but with a difference. And it’s a start, it’s definitely a start.” But the song — which he first wanted to call “Good Vibes” — is very much meant to suggest “the healthy emanations that should result from psychic tranquility and inner peace,” wrote Bruce Golden in The Beach Boys: Southern California Pastoral. In that sense, “Good Vibrations” was aspirational, almost tragically so, for Wilson, who could not fulfill its promises. Yet, in another sense, “Good Vibrations” is itself the fulfillment of Wilson’s creative promise, an eternally brilliant “pocket symphony” — and as Wilson told engineer Chuck Britz during the sessions, his “whole life performance in one track.”

The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson & Beatles Producer George Martin Break Down “God Only Knows,” the “Greatest Song Ever Written”

How the Beach Boys Created Their Pop Masterpieces: “Good Vibrations,” Pet Sounds, and More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Black Film Archive: A New Site Highlights 200+ Noteworthy Black Films Made Between 1915–1979

in Archives, Film | August 30th, 2021

The just launched Black Film Archive is a labor of love for the Criterion Collection, thanks to audience strategist, Maya Cade.

Beginning in June 2020, she began researching films produced between 1915 to 1979 that are available for streaming, and “have something significant to say about the Black experience; speak to Black audiences; and/or have a Black star, writer, producer, or director.”

Thus far, she’s collected over 200 films, spanning the period between 1915’s Black-produced silent slapstick short, Two Knights of Vaudeville and 1978’s starry big budget musical, The Wiz, a commercial flop that “major Hollywood studios used … as a reason to stop investing in Black cinema.”

Cade reasons that the rise of Black independent film in the 80s makes 1979 “feel like a natural stopping point” for the archive. She’s also pushing back against the notion of Black Films as trauma porn:

As debates about Black film’s association with trauma rage on, I hope Black Film Archive can offer a different lens through which to understand Black cinematic history, one that takes into consideration the full weight of the past. Through this lens, it is easy to see that the notion that “Black films are only traumatic” is based on generalizations and impressions of recent times (often pinned to the success of films like 12 Years a Slave) rather than a deeper engagement with history, which reveals that “slave films” constitute only a small percentage of the Black films that have been made. I hope conversations evolve to consider the expansive archive of radical ideas and expression found in Black films’ past.

The collection, which Cade will be updating monthly, has something for everyone — comedy, drama, documentaries, musicals, silent films, foreign films, and yes, Blaxploitation.

Some of the titles — To Sir with Love, A Raisin in the Sun, Shaft — are far from obscure, and you’ll find appearances by many Black performers and documentary subjects whose legacies endure: Paul Robeson, Cicely Tyson, Sidney Poitier, Josephine Baker, Dorothy Dandridge, Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Lightnin’ Hopkins.…

But the archive is also a wonderful opportunity to discover directors, performers, and films with which you may be utterly unfamiliar.

Black Girl, 1966, was the first feature of Ousmane Sembène, the father of African cinema, and the first feature made in Africa by a sub-Saharan African to attract international notice. It follows a Senegalese domestic worker serving a wealthy white family on the Côte d’Azur. Early on Diouana is seen working in the kitchen, naively dreaming of adventures that surely await once she’s finished preparing “a real African dish” for her employer’s dinner guests:

Maybe we’ll go to Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo. We’ll look in all the pretty stores and when the mistress pays me, I’ll buy pretty dresses, shoes, silk undies, and pretty wigs. And I’ll get my picture taken on the beach, and I’ll send it back to Dakar, and they’ll all die of jealousy!

One of several adaptations of Timothy Shay Arthur’s popular 1854 temperance novel, The Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia’s 1926 melodrama, Ten Nights in a Bar Room, features a star turn by the multi-talented Charles Gilpin, the most successful Black stage performer of the early 20th Century.

The Emperor Jones may have provided Paul Robeson with his iconic, breakthrough role, but the part was first played onstage by Gilpin, who was fired by playwright Eugene O’Neill after it was discovered he was repeatedly swapping out the script’s many instances of the N‑word for gentler terms like “Black boy.”

As Indy Week’s Byron Woods notes in a preview of N, Adrienne Earle Pender’s play about O’Neill and Gilpin:

A 1921 review in Negro World concluded, “We imagine if Mr. Gilpin is an intelligent and loyal Negro, his heart must ache and rebel within him as he is forced to belie his race.” When the work was staged in Harlem, Langston Hughes recalled that the audience “howled with laughter.”

The Oscar nominated The Quiet One, from 1948, was the first major American film to position a Black child — 10-year old non-actor Donald Thompson — front and center.

Ostensibly a documentary, it took an unflinching look at the emotionally turbulent existence of a neglected Harlem boy, and offered no easy solutions, even as he begins to come out of his shell at the Wiltwyck School for Boys.

The cast, including a number of students from the Wiltwyck School, is almost entirely Black, with Ulysses Kay’s jazz score providing an urgent pulse to real life scenes of mid-century Harlem.

The white production team featured several high profile, socially conscious names — novelist and film critic James Agee contributed poetic commentary and photographer Helen Levitt was one of two principal camera people.

Currently, the Black Film Archive is organized by decade, though we hope one day this might be expanded to encompass genres, as well as a search option that would allow viewers to discover work by director and performers.

For now, Cade’s curator picks are an excellent place to begin your explorations.

This mammoth undertaking is a self-funded one-woman operation. Donations are welcome, as are paid subscriptions to the Black Film Archive Substack.

Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Honored by the Library of Congress (1898)

Watch the Pioneering Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-American Filmmaker

Watch Lime Kiln Club Field Day, One of the Earliest Surviving Feature Films with an All Black Cast (1913)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Is “Queering” in Video Game Design? Naomi Clark on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #103

What Makes Rodin’s The Thinker a Great Sculpture: An Introduction to Rodin Life, Craft & Iconic Work

A 94-Year-Old English Teacher and Her Former Students Reunite in Their Old Classroom & Debate the Merits of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

Chinese Youth Announce That They’re “Lying Flat” and Resisting the Pressures of Modern Life

An Archaeologist Creates the Definitive Guide to Beer Cans

Build Wooden Models of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Building: The Guggenheim, Unity Temple, Johnson Wax Headquarters & More

Watch Lost Studio Footage of Brian Wilson Conducting “Good Vibrations,” The Beach Boys’ Brilliant “Pocket Symphony”

The Black Film Archive: A New Site Highlights 200+ Noteworthy Black Films Made Between 1915–1979

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