Nursing Home Residents Replace Famous Rock Stars on Iconic Album Covers

in Creativity, Current Affairs, Music | July 14th, 2020

Deserved­ly or not, British care homes have acquired a rep­u­ta­tion as espe­cial­ly drea­ry places, from Vic­to­ri­an nov­els to dystopi­an fic­tion to the flat affect of BBC doc­u­men­taries. Mar­tin Parr gave the world an espe­cial­ly mov­ing exam­ple of the care home doc­u­men­tary in his 1972 pho­to series on Prest­wich Asy­lum, out­side Man­ches­ter. The com­pelling por­traits human­ize peo­ple who were neglect­ed and ignored, yet their lives still look bleak in that aus­tere­ly post-war British insti­tu­tion kind of way.

One can­not say any­thing of the kind of the pho­to series rep­re­sent­ed here, which casts res­i­dents of Syd­mar Lodge Care Home in Edge­ware, Eng­land as rock stars, dig­i­tal­ly recre­at­ing some of the most famous album cov­ers of all time. This is not, obvi­ous­ly, a can­did look at res­i­dents’ day-to-day exis­tence. But it sug­gests a pret­ty cheer­ful place. “The main aim was to show that care homes need not be a sad envi­ron­ment, even dur­ing this pan­dem­ic,” says the pho­tos’ cre­ator Robert Speker, the home’s activ­i­ties man­ag­er.

“Speker tweet­ed side-by-side pho­tos of the orig­i­nal cov­ers and the Syd­mar Lodge res­i­dents’ new takes, and the tweets quick­ly took off,” NPR’s Lau­rel Wams­ley writes. He’s made it clear that the pri­ma­ry audi­ence for the recre­at­ed cov­ers is the res­i­dents them­selves: Iso­lat­ed in lock­down for the past four months; cut off from vis­its and out­ings; suf­fer­ing from an indef­i­nite sus­pen­sion of famil­iar rou­tines.

Speker does not deny the grim real­i­ty behind the inspir­ing images. “Elder­ly peo­ple will remain in lock­down for a long time,” he writes on a GoFundMe page he cre­at­ed to help sup­port the home. “It could be months before the sit­u­a­tion changes for them.”

But he is opti­mistic about his abil­i­ties to “make their time as hap­py and full of enjoy­ment and inter­est as pos­si­ble.” Would that all nurs­ing homes had such a ded­i­cat­ed, award-win­ning coor­di­na­tor. Res­i­dents them­selves, he wrote on Twit­ter, were “enthused and per­haps a bit bemused by the idea, but hap­py to par­tic­i­pate.” When they saw the results—stunning Roma Cohen as Aladdin Sane, defi­ant Sheila Solomons as Elvis and The Clash’s Paul Simenon, casu­al Mar­tin Stein­berg as a “Born in Eng­land” Springsteen—they were delight­ed. Four of the home­’s car­ers got their own cov­er, too, posed as Queen.

Res­i­dents, Speker said, were real­ly “hav­ing a good gig­gle about it.” And we can too, as we bear in mind the many elder­ly peo­ple around us who have been locked in for months, with maybe many more months of iso­la­tion ahead. Not every­one is as tal­ent­ed as Robert Speker, who did the mod­els’ make­up and tat­toos him­self (with hair by a care home man­ag­er), as well as tak­ing all the pho­tographs and edit­ing the images to con­vinc­ing­ly mim­ic the pos­es, com­po­si­tion, light­ing, font, and col­or schemes of the orig­i­nals. But let’s hope his work is a spark that lights up nurs­ing homes and care facil­i­ties with all sorts of cre­ative ideas to keep spir­its up. See sev­er­al more cov­ers below and the rest on Twit­ter.

via the BBC/NPR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peo­ple Pose in Uncan­ny Align­ment with Icon­ic Album Cov­ers: Dis­cov­er The Sleeve­face Project

The His­to­ry of the Fish­eye Pho­to Album Cov­er

Dyson Cre­ates 44 Free Engi­neer­ing & Sci­ence Chal­lenges for Kids Quar­an­tined Dur­ing COVID-19

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

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Cambridge University Professor Cooks 4000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient Mesopotamia, and Lets You See How They Turned Out

in Books, Food & Drink, History, Life, Travel | July 13th, 2020

Those of us who’ve ded­i­cat­ed a por­tion of our iso­la­tion to the art of sour­dough have not suf­fered for a lack of infor­ma­tion on how that par­tic­u­lar sausage should get made.

The Inter­net har­bors hun­dreds, nay, thou­sands of com­pli­cat­ed, con­trary, often con­tra­dic­to­ry, extreme­ly firm opin­ions on the sub­ject. You can lose hours…days…weeks, ago­niz­ing over which method to use.

The course for Bill Suther­land’s recent culi­nary exper­i­ment was much more clear­ly chart­ed.

As doc­u­ment­ed in a series of now-viral Twit­ter posts, the Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor of Con­ser­va­tion Biol­o­gy decid­ed to attempt a Mesopotami­an meal, as inscribed on a 3770-year-old recipe tablet con­tain­ing humankind’s old­est sur­viv­ing recipes.

As Suther­land told Bored Pan­da’s Liu­ci­ja Ado­maite and Ilona Bal­iū­naitė, the trans­lat­ed recipes, found in Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: High­lights of the Yale Baby­lon­ian Col­lec­tion, were “aston­ish­ing­ly terse” and “per­plex­ing,” lead­ing to some guess work with regard to onions and gar­lic.

In addi­tion to 25 recipes, the book has pho­tos and illus­tra­tions of var­i­ous arti­facts and essays that “present the ancient Near East in the light of present-day dis­cus­sion of lived expe­ri­ences, focus­ing on fam­i­ly life and love, edu­ca­tion and schol­ar­ship, iden­ti­ty, crime and trans­gres­sion, demons, and sick­ness.”

Kind of like a cra­dle of civ­i­liza­tion Martha Stew­art Liv­ing, just a bit less user friend­ly with regard to things like mea­sure­ments, tem­per­a­ture, and cook­ing times. Which is not to say the instruc­tions aren’t step-by-step:

Stew of Lamb

Meat is used. 

You pre­pare water. 

You add fat. 

You add fine-grained salt, bar­ley cakes, onion, Per­sian shal­lot, and milk. 

You crush and add leek and gar­lic.

The meal, which required just a cou­ple hours prep in Sutherland’s non-ancient kitchen sounds like some­thing he might have ordered for deliv­ery from one of Cam­bridge’s Near East­ern restau­rants.

The lamb stew was the hit of the night.

Unwind­ing, a casse­role of leeks and spring onion, looked invit­ing but was “a bit bor­ing.”

Elamite Broth was “pecu­liar but deli­cious,” pos­si­bly because Suther­land sub­sti­tut­ed toma­to sauce for sheep’s blood.

It’s an admit­ted­ly meaty propo­si­tion. Only 2 of the 25 recipes in the col­lec­tion are veg­e­tar­i­an (“meat is not used.”)

And even there, to be real­ly authen­tic, you’d have to sauté every­thing in sheep fat.

(Suther­land swapped in but­ter.)

via Bored Pan­da

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

Dic­tio­nary of the Old­est Writ­ten Language–It Took 90 Years to Com­plete, and It’s Now Free Online

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her iso­la­tion projects are sour­dough and an ani­ma­tion with free down­load­able posters, encour­ag­ing the use of face cov­er­ings to stop the spread of COVID-19. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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An Introduction to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Museum, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again

in Architecture, History, Travel | July 13th, 2020

No tour of Istan­bul can fail to include Hagia Sophia. The same is true enough of the British Muse­um in Lon­don or the Lou­vre in Paris, but Hagia Sophia is more than a muse­um: it’s also spent dif­fer­ent stretch­es of its near-mil­len­ni­um-and-a-half of exis­tence as an East­ern Ortho­dox cathe­dral, a Roman Catholic cathe­dral, and a mosque. Stripped of its reli­gious func­tion in the mid-1930s by the admin­is­tra­tion of Pres­i­dent Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, remem­bered for his cre­ation of a sec­u­lar Turk­ish repub­lic, the majes­tic build­ing has spent the past 85 years as not just a muse­um but the coun­try’s top tourist attrac­tion. Now, accord­ing to a decree issued last week by Pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan, Hagia Sophia will become a mosque again.

“Erdo­gan, like his pre­de­ces­sor Ataturk, appears to be using the fate of the Hagia Sophia to make a polit­i­cal state­ment and score some points with his sup­port­ers,” writes Ars Tech­ni­ca’s Kiona N. Smith. But so did Emper­or Jus­tin­ian I of the East­ern Roman Empire, who “ordered the cathedral’s con­struc­tion in the first place for sim­i­lar rea­sons.”

Built on the site where two cathe­drals had pre­vi­ous­ly stood, both burned down in dif­fer­ent revolts, “the Hagia Sophia has always been as much a polit­i­cal land­mark as a reli­gious or cul­tur­al one — so it’s not sur­pris­ing that it has also changed hands, and func­tions, at least four times in its his­to­ry.” Ataturk’s sec­u­lar­iza­tion of Hagia Sophia entailed a restora­tion of its his­toric fea­tures: “Chris­t­ian mosaics that had been plas­tered over in the late 1400s were care­ful­ly uncov­ered, and they shared the domed space with Mus­lim prayer nich­es and pul­pits.”

You can get a clear­er sense of what the build­ing’s archi­tec­ture and dec­o­ra­tion reveal in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son at the top of the post. Edu­ca­tor Kel­ly Wall points to, among oth­er fea­tures, the ancient for­ti­fi­ca­tions that “hint at the strate­gic impor­tance of the sur­round­ing city, found­ed as Byzan­tium by Greek colonists in 657 BCE.”; the foun­da­tion stones that “mur­mur tales from their home­lands of Egypt and Syr­ia, while columns tak­en from the Tem­ple of Artemis recall a more ancient past”; and, beneath the gold­en dome that “appears sus­pend­ed from heav­en,” rein­forc­ing Corinthi­an columns, “brought from Lebanon after the orig­i­nal dome was par­tial­ly destroyed by an earth­quake in 558 CE,” that offer a reminder of “fragili­ty and the engi­neer­ing skills such a mar­vel requires.” The BBC 360-degree vir­tu­al tour just above goes into greater detail on these ele­ments and oth­ers.

Accord­ing to reports cit­ed by Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Hakim Bishara, “tourists will still have access to the site, although it might be closed to vis­i­tors dur­ing prayer time.” Still, “art his­to­ri­ans and con­ser­va­tion­ists wor­ry that the Turk­ish author­i­ties might decide to cov­er up or remove the cen­turies-old Byzan­tine mosaics and Chris­t­ian iconog­ra­phy that adorn the cel­e­brat­ed struc­ture, as was done in oth­er con­vert­ed church­es in Turkey in the past.” Good job, then, that irre­press­ible tele­vi­sion trav­el­er Rick Steves has already shot his episode on Istan­bul, which (from 9:34) nat­u­ral­ly fea­tures a vis­it to Hagia Sophia. But whether as a muse­um, cathe­dral, a mosque, or what­ev­er it becomes next, the build­ing will sure­ly remain what Steves called “the high point of Byzan­tine archi­tec­ture” and “the pin­na­cle of that soci­ety’s sixth-cen­tu­ry glo­ry days.” And no leader of Turkey, no mat­ter what their beliefs about church and state, will want the tourists to stop com­ing.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Hagia Sophia’s Awe-Inspir­ing Acoustics Get Recre­at­ed with Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tions, and Let Your­self Get Trans­port­ed Back to the Mid­dle Ages

Hear the Sound of the Hagia Sophia Recre­at­ed in Authen­tic Byzan­tine Chant

French Illus­tra­tor Revives the Byzan­tine Empire with Mag­nif­i­cent­ly Detailed Draw­ings of Its Mon­u­ments & Build­ings: Hagia Sophia, Great Palace & More

Map­ping the Sounds of Greek Byzan­tine Church­es: How Researchers Are Cre­at­ing “Muse­ums of Lost Sound”

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

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

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Emma Willard, the First Woman Mapmaker in America, Creates Pioneering Maps of Time to Teach Students about Democracy (Circa 1851)

in Art, Education, History | July 13th, 2020

We all know Mar­shall McLuhan’s pithy, end­less­ly quotable line “the medi­um is the mes­sage,” but rarely do we stop to ask which one comes first. The devel­op­ment of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies may gen­uine­ly present us with a chick­en or egg sce­nario. After all, only a cul­ture that already prized con­stant visu­al stim­uli but gross­ly under­val­ued phys­i­cal move­ment would have invent­ed and adopt­ed tele­vi­sion.

In Soci­ety of the Spec­ta­cle, Guy Debord ties the ten­den­cy toward pas­sive visu­al con­sump­tion to “com­mod­i­ty fetishism, the dom­i­na­tion of soci­ety by ‘intan­gi­ble as well as tan­gi­ble things,’ which reach­es its absolute ful­fill­ment in the spec­ta­cle, where the tan­gi­ble world is replaced by a selec­tion of images which exist above it, and which simul­ta­ne­ous­ly impose them­selves as the tan­gi­ble par excel­lence.” It seems an apt descrip­tion of a screen-addict­ed cul­ture.

What can we say, then, of a cul­ture addict­ed to charts and graphs? Ear­li­est exam­ples of the form were often more elab­o­rate than we’re used to see­ing, hand-drawn with care and atten­tion. They were also not coy about their ambi­tions: to con­dense the vast dimen­sions of space and time into a two-dimen­sion­al, col­or-cod­ed for­mat. To tidi­ly sum up all human and nat­ur­al his­to­ry in easy-to-read visu­al metaphors.

This was as much a reli­gious project as it was a philo­soph­i­cal, sci­en­tif­ic, his­tor­i­cal, polit­i­cal, and ped­a­gog­i­cal one. The domains are hope­less­ly entwined in 18th and 19th cen­tu­ry. We should not be sur­prised to see them freely min­gle  the ear­li­est info­graph­ics. The cre­ators of such images were poly­maths, and deeply devout. Joseph Priest­ly, Eng­lish chemist, philoso­pher, the­olo­gian, polit­i­cal the­o­rist and gram­mar­i­an, made sev­er­al visu­al chronolo­gies rep­re­sent­ing “the lives of two thou­sand men between 1200 BC and 1750 AD” (con­vey­ing a clear mes­sage about the sole impor­tance of men).

“After Priest­ly,” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review, “time­lines flour­ished, but they gen­er­al­ly lacked any sense of the dimen­sion­al­i­ty of time, rep­re­sent­ing the past as a uni­form march from left to right.” Emma Willard, “one of the century’s most influ­en­tial edu­ca­tors” set out to update the tech­nol­o­gy, “to invest chronol­o­gy with a sense of per­spec­tive.” In her 1836 Pic­ture of Nations; or Per­spec­tive Sketch of the Course of Empire, above (view and down­load high res­o­lu­tion images here), she presents “the bib­li­cal Cre­ation as the apex of a tri­an­gle that then flowed for­ward in time and space toward the view­er.”

The per­spec­tive is also a forced point of view about ori­gins and his­to­ry. But that was exact­ly the point: these are didac­tic tools meant for text­books and class­rooms. Willard, “America’s first pro­fes­sion­al female map­mak­er,” writes Maria Popo­va, was also a “pio­neer­ing edu­ca­tor,” who found­ed “the first women’s high­er edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tion in the Unit­ed States when she was still in her thir­ties…. In her ear­ly for­ties, she set about com­pos­ing and pub­lish­ing a series of his­to­ry text­books that raised the stan­dards and sen­si­bil­i­ties of schol­ar­ship.”

Willard rec­og­nized that lin­ear graphs of time did not accu­rate­ly do jus­tice to a three-dimen­sion­al expe­ri­ence of the world. Humans are “embod­ied crea­tures who yearn to locate them­selves in space and time.” The illu­sion of space and time on the flat page was an essen­tial fea­ture of Willard’s under­ly­ing pur­pose: “lay­ing out the ground-plan of the intel­lect, so far as the whole range of his­to­ry is con­cerned.” A prop­er under­stand­ing of a Great Man (and at least one Great Woman, Hypa­tia) ver­sion of history—easily con­densed, since there were only around 6,000 years from the cre­ation of the universe—would lead to “enlight­ened and judi­cious sup­port­ers” of democ­ra­cy.

His­to­ry is rep­re­sent­ed lit­er­al­ly as a sacred space in Willard’s 1846 Tem­ple of Time, its prov­i­den­tial begin­nings for­mal­ly bal­anced in equal pro­por­tion to its every mon­u­men­tal stage. Willard’s intent was express­ly patri­ot­ic, her trap­pings self-con­scious­ly clas­si­cal. Her maps of time were ways of sit­u­at­ing the nation as a nat­ur­al suc­ces­sor to the empires of old, which flowed from the divine act of cre­ation. They show a pro­gres­sive widen­ing of the world.

“Half a cen­tu­ry before W.E.B. Du Bois… cre­at­ed his mod­ernist data visu­al­iza­tions for the 1900 World’s Fair,” Popo­va writes, The Tem­ple of Time “won a medal at the 1851 World’s Fair in Lon­don.” Willard accom­pa­nied the info­graph­ic with a state­ment of intent, artic­u­lat­ing a media the­o­ry, over a hun­dred years before McLuhan, that sounds strange­ly antic­i­pa­to­ry of his famous dic­tum.

The poet­ic idea of “the vista of depart­ed years” is made an object of sight; and when the eye is the medi­um, the pic­ture will, by fre­quent inspec­tion, be formed with­in, and for­ev­er remain, wrought into the liv­ing tex­ture of the mind.

Learn more about Emma Willard’s info­graph­ic rev­o­lu­tion at the Pub­lic Domain Review and Brain Pick­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joseph Priest­ley Visu­al­izes His­to­ry & Great His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures with Two of the Most Influ­en­tial Info­graph­ics Ever (1769)

An Archive of 800+ Imag­i­na­tive Pro­pa­gan­da Maps Designed to Shape Opin­ions & Beliefs: Enter Cornell’s Per­sua­sive Maps Col­lec­tion

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

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

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A Bear Shows Off Its Nunchuck Skills

in Random | July 13th, 2020

The world has got­ten tru­ly sur­re­al.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kung Fu & Mar­tial Arts Movies Online

The Poet­ry of Bruce Lee: Dis­cov­er the Artis­tic Life of the Mar­tial Arts Icon

Bruce Lee’s Only Sur­viv­ing TV Inter­view, 1971: Lost and Now Found

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The Muppets Sing the First & Second Acts of Hamilton

in Music, Theatre | July 12th, 2020

Or, at least it’s one fine impres­sion of the Mup­pets.

Here’s the cast and find Act II down below:

Alexan­der Hamil­ton — Ker­mit the Frog
Aaron Burr — The Great Gonzo
Eliza Schuyler — Miss Pig­gy
Mar­quis de LaFozette — Fozzie Bear
George Wash­ing­ton — Sam the Eagle
Angel­i­ca Schuyler — Camil­la the Chick­en
John Lau­rens — Beaker
Her­cules Mul­li­gan — Rowlf the Dog
King George III — Ani­mal
Peg­gy Schuyler — Jan­ice
Samuel Seabury — The Swedish Chef
Charles Lee — Elmo
Con­gres­sion­al Del­e­gates — Floyd and Zoot
Crazy Patri­ot — Crazy Har­ry
Statler and Wal­dorf — Them­selves

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hamil­ton Mania Inspires the Library of Con­gress to Put 12,000 Alexan­der Hamil­ton Doc­u­ments Online

Watch Lin-Manuel Miran­da Per­form the Ear­li­est Ver­sion of Hamil­ton at the White House, Six Years Before the Play Hit the Broad­way Stage (2009)

Lin-Manuel Miran­da & Emi­ly Blunt Take You Through 22 Clas­sic Musi­cals in 12 Min­utes

A Whiskey-Fueled Lin-Manuel Miran­da Reimag­ines Hamil­ton as a Girl on Drunk His­to­ry

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Bill Nye Shows How Face Masks Actually Protect You–and Why You Should Wear Them

in Health, Science | July 10th, 2020

Like many Amer­i­cans of my gen­er­a­tion, I grew up hav­ing things explained to me by Bill Nye. Flight, mag­nets, sim­ple machines, vol­ca­noes: there seemed to be noth­ing he and his team of young lieu­tenants could­n’t break down in a clear, humor­ous, and whol­ly non-bor­ing man­ner. He did­n’t ask us to come to him, but met us where we already were: watch­ing tele­vi­sion. The zenith of the pop­u­lar­i­ty of his PBS series Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy passed a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry ago, and the world has changed a bit since then. But even in the 2020s, when the spread­ing of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge is no less impor­tant than it was in the 90s, Nye knows where to air his mes­sage if he wants the kids to hear it: Tik­Tok.

Huge­ly pop­u­lar among peo­ple not yet born dur­ing Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy’s orig­i­nal run, Tik­Tok is a video-based social media plat­form that accom­mo­dates videos of up to 60 sec­onds — rough­ly half the length of the “Con­sid­er the Fol­low­ing” seg­ments embed­ded with­in the episodes of Nye’s orig­i­nal show.

This week Nye has revived the for­mat on Tik­tok in order to lay out the sci­en­tif­ic prin­ci­ples behind some­thing that had recent­ly become a part of all of our lives: face masks. True to form, he explains not just with words but with objects, in this case a series of res­pi­ra­to­ry sys­tem-pro­tect­ing anti-par­ti­cle devices from a hum­ble scarf to a home­made cloth face mask (employ­ing that stal­wart sci­ence-project com­po­nent, a pipe clean­er) to the med­ical indus­try-stan­dard N95.

“The rea­son we want you to wear a mask is to pro­tect you,” says Nye. “But the main rea­son we want you to wear a mask is to pro­tect me from you, and the par­ti­cles from your res­pi­ra­to­ry sys­tem from get­ting into my res­pi­ra­to­ry sys­tem!” As sim­ple a point as this may sound, it has tend­ed to get lost amid the fear and con­fu­sion of the ongo­ing coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic: the con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion ini­tial­ly pub­lished about the advis­abil­i­ty of face masks for the gen­er­al pub­lic, but also the ensu­ing con­tro­ver­sy over the imple­men­ta­tion and enforce­ment of mask-relat­ed rules. But as Nye reminds us, this is “a mat­ter lit­er­al­ly of life and death — and when I use the word lit­er­al­ly, I mean lit­er­al­ly.” As we shore up our knowl­edge of masks, we Mil­len­ni­als, who through­out our lives have learned so much from Nye, would do well to inter­nal­ize that point of usage while we’re at it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vin­tage Sci­ence Face Masks: Con­quer the Pan­dem­ic with Sci­ence, Cour­tesy of Maria Popova’s Brain­Pick­ings

Japan­ese Design­er Cre­ates Free Tem­plate for an Anti-Virus Face Shield: Down­load, and Then Use a Print­er, Paper & Scis­sors

Bill Nye, The Sci­ence Guy, Says Cre­ation­ism is Bad for Kids and America’s Future

Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy Takes the Air Out of Deflate­gate

Free M.I.T. Course Teach­es You How to Become Bill Nye & Make Great Sci­ence Videos for YouTube

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

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A Free Stanford Course on How to Teach Online: Designed for Middle & High School Teachers (July 13 — 17)

in Education, Online Courses | July 10th, 2020

This fall, many teach­ers (across the coun­try and the world) will be asked to teach online–something most teach­ers have nev­er done before. To assist with that tran­si­tion, the Stan­ford Online High School and Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies have teamed up to offer a free online course called Teach­ing Your Class Online: The Essen­tials. Taught by vet­er­an instruc­tors at Stan­ford Online High School (OHS), this course “will help mid­dle and high school instruc­tors move from gen­er­al con­cepts for teach­ing online to the prac­ti­cal details of adapt­ing your class for your stu­dents.” The course is free and runs from 1–3 pm Cal­i­for­nia time, July 13 — 17. You can sign up here.

For any­one inter­est­ed, Stan­ford will also offer addi­tion­al cours­es that give teach­ers the chance to prac­tice teach­ing their mate­r­i­al online and get feed­back from Stan­ford Online High School instruc­tors. Offered from July 20 — July 24, those cours­es cost $95. Click to this page, and scroll down to enroll.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,500 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

How Schools Can Start Teach­ing Online in a Short Peri­od of Time: Free Tuto­ri­als from the Stan­ford Online High School

“I Will Sur­vive,” the Coro­n­avirus Ver­sion for Teach­ers Going Online

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Bisa Butler’s Beautiful Quilted Portraits of Frederick Douglass, Nina Simone, Jean-Michel Basquiat & More

in Art, Creativity, Fashion, History | July 10th, 2020

Fiber artist Bisa But­ler’s quilt­ed por­traits of Black Amer­i­cans gain extra pow­er from their medi­um.

Each work is com­prised of many scraps, care­ful­ly cut and posi­tioned after hours of research and pre­lim­i­nary sketch­es.

Vel­vet and silk nes­tle against bits of vin­tage flour sacks, West African wax print fab­ric, den­im and, occa­sion­al­ly, hand-me-downs from the sitter’s own col­lec­tion.

In The Warmth of Oth­er Sons, a 12-foot, life-sized por­trait of an African Amer­i­can fam­i­ly who migrat­ed north in search of eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ty, a wary-look­ing young girl clutch­es a purse to her chest. The purse is con­struct­ed from a com­mer­cial wax cot­ton print titled Michelle Obama’s Bag, which com­mem­o­rates one of the for­mer First Lady’s trips to Africa.

As anthro­pol­o­gist Nina Syl­vanus writes in Pat­terns in Cir­cu­la­tion: Cloth, Gen­der, and Mate­ri­al­i­ty in West Africa:

To wear this pattern…is both to hon­or and aspire to be rav­ish­ing­ly beau­ti­ful and pow­er­ful like Michele Oba­ma; It is con­sid­ered a must-have fash­ion piece in the wardrobe of styl­ish women in Abid­jan, Lomé, and Lagos.

The vibrant col­ors of Butler’s mate­ri­als also inform her por­traits, par­tic­u­lar­ly those inspired by his­tor­i­cal fig­ures whose images are most famil­iar in black-and-white.

She is also deeply influ­enced by her under­grad­u­ate years at Howard Uni­ver­si­ty, where many of her pro­fes­sors were part of the AfriCO­BRA artists’ col­lec­tive. They encour­aged stu­dents to think of blank can­vas­es as black, rather than white, and to throw out the Beaux Arts palette in favor of West African fabric’s Kool-Aid colors—“bright orange, bright yel­low, crim­son red, intense blue.”

As she describes in the above video:

The ini­tial start is who’s it gonna be? Then after you choose that per­son, choose your col­or scheme. The col­or scheme is based on what you feel about that per­son. Peo­ple have col­or around them, in them, that is not evi­dent­ly vis­i­ble to the naked eye.

The Storm, the Whirl­wind, and The Earth­quake, her recent­ly com­plet­ed full-length por­trait of a 30-year old Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, reimag­ines the abolitionist’s 19th-cen­tu­ry garb as some­thing akin to a mod­ern day Harlem dandy’s bold embrace of col­or, pat­tern, and style, delib­er­ate­ly chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quo. The rich col­or scheme extends to his skin and the homey back­ground fab­ric.

But­ler, who was raised in an art-filled New Jer­sey home by a Black Amer­i­can moth­er and a Ghan­ian father, also cred­its her grand­moth­er, the sub­ject of her first quilt­ed por­trait, with help­ing her find her aes­thet­ic.

An ear­ly attempt to paint a por­trait of her beloved rel­a­tive (and child­hood sewing instruc­tor) result­ed in dis­ap­point­ment on both sides. The crest­fall­en artist’s aunt tipped her off that the old­er lady’s men­tal self-pic­ture was that of some­one 30 years younger.

Inspired by the col­laged work of Romare Bear­den, But­ler gave it anoth­er go, this time in quilt­ed form, tak­ing care to rep­re­sent her grand­moth­er as an attrac­tive woman in the prime of life. This time her efforts were met with enthu­si­asm. “I could feel an ener­gy in the room that some­thing new was hap­pen­ing,” But­ler recalls.

Whether her sub­jects are liv­ing or dead, But­ler strives to bring the same sense of “dig­ni­ty and regal opu­lence” to unsung cit­i­zens that she does when cre­at­ing por­traits of such famous Amer­i­cans as Nina Simone, Zora Neale Hurston, Jack­ie Robin­son, Lau­ren Hill, Josephine Bak­er, and Jean-Michel Basquiat:

African Amer­i­cans have been quilt­ing since we were brought to this coun­try and need­ed to keep warm. Enslaved peo­ple were not giv­en large pieces of fab­ric and had to make do with the scraps of cloth that were left after cloth­ing wore out. From these scraps the African Amer­i­can quilt aes­thet­ic came into being. Some enslaved peo­ples were so tal­ent­ed that they were tasked for cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful quilts that adorned their enslavers beds. My own pieces are rem­i­nis­cent of this tra­di­tion, but I use African fab­rics from my father’s home­land of Ghana, batiks from Nige­ria, and prints from South Africa. My sub­jects are adorned with and made up of the cloth of our ances­tors. If these vis­ages are to be recre­at­ed and seen for the first time in a cen­tu­ry, I want them to have their African Ances­try back, I want them to take their place in Amer­i­can His­to­ry. I want the view­er to see the sub­jects as I see them. 

Explore the work of Bisa But­ler on the artist’s Insta­gram, or MyMod­ern­met and Colos­sal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Too Big for Any Muse­um, AIDS Quilt Goes Dig­i­tal Thanks to Microsoft

The Solar Sys­tem Quilt: In 1876, a Teacher Cre­ates a Hand­craft­ed Quilt to Use as a Teach­ing Aid in Her Astron­o­my Class

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

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An Introduction to Jean Baudrillard, Who Predicted the Simulation-Like Reality in Which We Live

in Philosophy | July 9th, 2020

Each and every morn­ing, many of us wake up and imme­di­ate­ly check on what’s hap­pen­ing in the world. Some­times these events stir emo­tions with­in us, and occa­sion­al­ly we act on those emo­tions, which raise in us a desire to affect the world our­selves. But does this entire rit­u­al involve any­thing real? While per­form­ing it we don’t expe­ri­ence the world, but only media; when we respond, we respond not with action in the world, but only with action in media. We have direct­ly inter­act­ed, to put it blunt­ly, with noth­ing more than pix­els on a screen. This con­di­tion has piti­less­ly inten­si­fied in our era of smart­phones and social media, and though philoso­pher and soci­ol­o­gist Jean Bau­drillard died three months before the intro­duc­tion of the iPhone, noth­ing about it would sur­prise him.

Assem­bled in an omi­nous, vin­tage stock footage-heavy style rem­i­nis­cent of Adam Cur­tis (he of The Cen­tu­ry of the Self and Hyper­Nor­mal­i­sa­tion), the half-hour Then & Now video essay above pro­vides an intro­duc­tion to Bau­drillard’s ideas, espe­cial­ly those that pre­dict­ed the world in which we live today, a “hyper­re­al post­mod­ern” one filled with signs ref­er­enc­ing lit­tle that actu­al­ly exists. “In the run-up to the 2008 crash,” the nar­ra­tor reminds us, “the real val­ue of mort­gages was hid­den under lay­ers of sign val­ue, under deceit­ful insur­ance poli­cies and finan­cial rat­ings based on noth­ing.” On the news, “it does­n’t mat­ter what’s real. What mat­ters is how it’s said, who says it — the per­spec­tive, whether it will be provoca­tive enough, whether it will enter­tain.” We live, in sum, in a “post­mod­ern car­ni­val” where  “things like real­i­ty TV, Dis­ney­land, and Face­book define our lives.”

Bau­drillard saw this hap­pen­ing near­ly 40 years ago: “Peo­ple no longer look at each oth­er, but there are insti­tutes for that,” he writes in Sim­u­lacra and Sim­u­la­tion. “They no longer touch each oth­er, but there is con­tac­tother­a­py. They no longer walk, but they go jog­ging, etc. Every­where one recy­cles lost fac­ul­ties, or lost bod­ies, or lost social­i­ty, or the lost taste for food.” He cred­it­ed Mar­shall McLuhan, fel­low gnom­ic observ­er of late 20th-cen­tu­ry soci­ety, with “one of the defin­ing axioms of post­mod­ern life.” When McLuhan declared that “the medi­um is the mes­sage,” says the nar­ra­tor, he saw that “what mat­tered in this new world was not what was real and mate­r­i­al, but what was rep­re­sent­ed as signs: in short, tele­vi­sion, and now the com­put­er screen, has come to dom­i­nate social life. Sign pro­duc­tion has replaced mate­r­i­al pro­duc­tion as the orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple of polit­i­cal econ­o­my.”

What would Bau­drillard make of a pro­duc­tion like HBO’s Cher­nobyl, whose painstak­ing recon­struc­tion of his­tor­i­cal events we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture? What made that show a spec­ta­cle, says the nar­ra­tor, was that “the depic­tion was more real than the event itself: cos­tumes, props, spe­cial effects, and the per­fect angle, the Geiger counter mapped onto the score already overde­ter­mined by signs.” And so, “in twen­ty years’ time we think of Cher­nobyl, will we think of the real event, or images con­jured by TV stu­dios?” But we need hard­ly look that far into the future. The very things our screens insist to us are hap­pen­ing in the world right now, far beyond the walls of the homes few­er and few­er of us leave these days — what do we tru­ly know of their exis­tence apart from this dig­i­tal bliz­zard of signs? If Bau­drillard were alive to hear our spec­u­la­tion about the pos­si­bil­i­ty that we live in anoth­er being’s sim­u­la­tion, he’d sure­ly point out that we’ve already cre­at­ed the sim­u­la­tion our­selves.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

French Philoso­pher Jean Bau­drillard Reads His Poet­ry, Backed By All-Star Arts Band (1996)

Hear the Writ­ing of French The­o­rists Jacques Der­ri­da, Jean Bau­drillard & Roland Barthes Sung by Poet Ken­neth Gold­smith

The Sim­u­la­tion The­o­ry Explained In Three Ani­mat­ed Videos

McLuhan Said “The Medi­um Is The Mes­sage”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Roland Barthes’s Mytholo­gies and How He Used Semi­otics to Decode Pop­u­lar Cul­ture

Is Mod­ern Soci­ety Steal­ing What Makes Us Human?: A Glimpse Into Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathus­tra by The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life

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

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

in Current Affairs, History, Politics | July 9th, 2020

When James Bald­win took the stage to debate William F. Buck­ley at Cam­bridge in 1965, it was to have “a debate we shouldn’t need,” writes Gabrielle Bel­lot at Lit­er­ary Hub, and yet it’s one that is still “as impor­tant as ever.” The propo­si­tion before the two men—famed prophet­ic nov­el­ist of the black expe­ri­ence in Amer­i­ca and the con­ser­v­a­tive founder of the Nation­al Review—was this: “The Amer­i­can Dream is at the Expense of the Amer­i­ca Negro.”

The state­ment should not need defend­ing, Bald­win argued, because it is so obvi­ous­ly true. The wealth cre­at­ed by hun­dreds of years of slav­ery has passed down through gen­er­a­tions of fam­i­lies. So too has the pover­ty. These divi­sions have been stren­u­ous­ly main­tained by Jim Crow, redlin­ing, and racist polic­ing. “Prof­its from slav­ery,” write Stephen Smith and Kate Ellis at APM Reports, “helped fund some of the most pres­ti­gious schools in the North­east, includ­ing Har­vard, Colum­bia, Prince­ton and Yale,” which hap­pened to be Buckley’s alma mater and was found­ed by an actu­al slave trad­er.

Slave labor fund­ed, built, and main­tained near­ly every part of the for­ma­tive uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem in the ear­ly U.S., and built the wealth of many oth­er pow­er­ful insti­tu­tions. Bald­win says it is “awk­ward” to have to point out these facts. Rather than recite them, he per­son­al­izes, speak­ing, he says, as “a kind of Jere­mi­ah” in nam­ing crimes gone unre­dressed for too long: “I am stat­ing very seri­ous­ly, and this is not an over­state­ment. I picked the cot­ton, I car­ried it to the mar­ket, and I built the rail­roads under some­one else’s whip for noth­ing. For noth­ing…. The Amer­i­can soil is full of the corpses of my ances­tors. Why is my free­dom or my cit­i­zen­ship, or my right to live there, how is it con­ceiv­ably a ques­tion now?”

Buckley’s response drips with con­de­scen­sion and con­tempt. He begins with a stan­dard con­ser­v­a­tive line: deplor­ing the acts of a few “indi­vid­ual Amer­i­can cit­i­zens” who “per­pet­u­ate dis­crim­i­na­tion,” but deny­ing that his­toric, sys­temic racism still exists. He then cites “the fail­ure of the Negro com­mu­ni­ty itself to make cer­tain exer­tions, which were made by oth­er minor­i­ty groups dur­ing the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence.” He damns an entire group of peo­ple with plat­i­tudes about hard work while also declar­ing loud­ly that race has noth­ing to do with it.

This contradiction—engaging in racist scape­goat­ing while claim­ing not to see race—was part of the strat­e­gy of “col­or­blind” con­ser­vatism the Nation­al Review adopt­ed after the pas­sage the Civ­il Rights Act. Pri­or to the ear­ly six­ties, how­ev­er, Buck­ley had been a stri­dent seg­re­ga­tion­ist who pub­licly defend­ed insti­tu­tion­al­ized white suprema­cy rather than claim­ing it had dis­ap­peared. In 1957, he wrote an edi­to­r­i­al titled “Why the South Must Pre­vail” and argued that white south­ern politi­cians must “take such mea­sures as are nec­es­sary to pre­vail, polit­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly” over black cit­i­zens.

Buck­ley had not fun­da­men­tal­ly changed in 1965, though he posi­tioned him­self as a mod­er­ate mid­dle ground between lib­er­als and seg­re­ga­tion­ists like Strom Thur­mond, whom he con­sid­ered crude. His posi­tion amounts to lit­tle more than a defense of dom­i­na­tion, couched in what his­to­ri­an Joshua Tait calls the “racial inno­cence of intel­lec­tu­al con­ser­vatism” that delib­er­ate­ly ignores or dis­torts his­tor­i­cal truths and present real­i­ties. “Bristling at Baldwin’s claim that the Amer­i­can econ­o­my was built by the unre­mu­ner­at­ed labour of Black peo­ple,” writes Joss Har­ri­son, “Buck­ley cries: ‘My great grand­par­ents worked too!’”

The debate “now stands as one of the arche­typ­al artic­u­la­tions of the divid­ing line between US pro­gres­sives and con­ser­v­a­tives on ques­tions of race, jus­tice and his­to­ry,” writes Aeon, who bring us the full ver­sion above with restored audio by Adam D’Arpino. Buck­ley responds to Baldwin’s pow­er­ful rhetoric with insults, out of con­text “facts and fig­ures – as well as an ad hominem shot at Baldwin’s speak­ing voice.” He pro­pos­es that one road to equal­i­ty lies in dis­en­fran­chis­ing poor South­ern whites as well as black cit­i­zens.

Buck­ley dis­plays a “com­plete igno­rance of the prob­lems faced by black Amer­i­cans in soci­ety,” writes Har­ri­son. Such igno­rance, “allied with pow­er,” Bald­win said else­where, con­sti­tutes “the most fero­cious ene­my jus­tice can have.” For Bald­win, Buck­ley’s atti­tude sim­ply con­firmed the “great shock,” that he mov­ing­ly describes in his debate state­ment, “around the age of five, or six, or sev­en, to dis­cov­er that the flag to which you have pledged alle­giance, along with every­body else, has not pledged alle­giance to you.”

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Great Cul­tur­al Icons Talk Civ­il Rights: James Bald­win, Mar­lon Bran­do, Har­ry Bela­fonte & Sid­ney Poiti­er (1963)

James Bald­win: Wit­ty, Fiery in Berke­ley, 1979

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

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