PBS Digital Studios have created a series of hand-drawn animations to accompany classic interviews with worthy personages; here is their accompaniment to Janis Joplin's final interview, recorded four days before her death. It is a poignant, bitter and defiant speech on rejection, self-determination, gender and self-worth.
Annalee Newitz's Stop pretending we aren't living in the Space Age is a magnificent rant on the incredibly achievements of modern space programs, and a savage indictment of the lack of imagination underpinning complaints about the failure of humans to return to the moon in force.More importantly, humans have continued the project that our grandparents and great-grandparents started in the 1950s when the Space Age began. Remember how that project got off the ground with remote-controlled satellites? Want to know why? Because that is how smart explorers do it. Believe it or not, we are actually clever enough monkeys that we are carefully doing a little reconnaissance in distant, dangerous places before we send people there. Which is why we have sent probes to Mars, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, and even to several moons and comets.
We currently have two robots on the surface of Mars that we are actually driving around. They are equipped with instruments that can do pretty sophisticated science experiments. We also have a satellite orbiting Mars, the MRO, which can take incredibly granular images of the planet's surface and do climate analysis. Using these robots and the MRO, we have discovered important things like the fact that Mars has underground ice, and once had seas on its surface. This is precisely the kind of information we need to know before we get to the planet ourselves.
In 1964 Malcolm X went to Saudi Arabia and broke with his mentor and guide Elijah Muhammad. In doing so he parted with racism in all its forms; it was the beginning of an entirely new phase in Malcolm X’s political journey. The announcement made headlines all over the world.
On January 5, 1965, Malcolm X appeared on a Canadian news/quiz show called Front Page Challenge, which seems to be a cross between the NPR radio program “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” and the U.S. Sunday morning political shows like Meet the Press. Before submitting to the journalistic interrogation by the panel of experts, as on Meet the Press, the guest, who is a figure relating to some recent news story, has to undergo a What’s My Line-style game of 20 Questions and try to stump the panelists while screened from view:Q: Did the story happen on a continent beginning and ending with the letter ‘A’?And so on. It’s a curious kind of program; I’d love to see Julian Assange appear on something like that today!
A: Yes.
Q: Are you a military figure?
A: [smiling] No.
Q: I don’t know why that’s getting a chuckle, but it is.
Q: Did you get kidnapped or abducted in some way?
A: No.
Tragically, less than two months after this was taped, Malcolm X would be assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.
Cullen Hoback's documentary "Terms and Conditions May Apply" is a scathing look at the abusive, lengthy fine-print that dominates our online lives. If the YouTube trailer and the non-embeddable Guardian trailer are representative, this is an important and timely film. I do quibble with one point -- the movie doesn't distinguish between the stupid license agreements that are a function of a stupid law (for example, requiring LinkedIn users to license the stuff they give to LinkedIn so that LinkedIn can display it) and the ones that are pure greed and venality (AT&T making you agree to extrajudicial wiretapping).
Hoback has an op-ed in today's Guardian where he sets out his thesis with great clarity, and draws the important connection between Patriot Act surveillance and fine-print "agreements." Unfortunately, the video itself seems to be exclusively available through Itunes, which has some pretty dreadful license terms, and mandatory DRM to boot.At our DC premiere of Terms and Conditions May Apply, Congressman Dennis Kucinich made a surprise appearance in the crowd and went a step further, standing up after the screening and saying the “NSA should be abolished", and that Edward Snowden should get a “ticker-tape parade".
While this speech tickled users on Reddit and got a lot of press, open criticism of the surveillance-industrial complex is far from the norm. And supporting Edward Snowden as a public official seems to be politically cancerous.
But I have hope, and here’s why:
While in DC, I was reminded of something that stuck with me: Congressmen are just people too. When 9/11 happened, they were rushed to protected sites in what must have been a terrifying moment for them. They surely felt like the next target. And then they were asked to pass a bill that would protect America from the kind of horror they had just been put through, first-hand - a bill called 'The Patriot Act'.
It wasn’t passed because they got together and said, “Let’s gut the Constitution". It happened partially from fear and partially from a misguided sense of duty.
Our data is our digital identity - and we need to reclaim control [Cullen Hoback/The Guardian]
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Skate Rock may have been one of the defining sounds of Southern California in the late '80 / early '90s, but its origins were in another time and place. It began, in fact, in post-Outlaw Country 1970s Austin, Texas. That's where singer Randy "Biscuit" Turner, guitarist Tim Kerr, bassist Chris Gates and drummer Greg Murray were mixing the prevailing trend of playing hard and fast with playing loose and funky. In March 2013 Light In The Attic's Modern Classics Recordings imprint is set to reissue the band's 1981 debut album, "Where's My Towel / Industry Standard".
The Big Boys came from the same scene that spawned Scratch Acid, The Dicks, and MDC, but stood out with music that ventured far beyond post-punk angularities and hardcore machismo. With features in the earliest issues of Thrasher Magazine and coveted spots on their influential "Skate Rock" tape comps, Big Boys were the first band to be labeled "skate rock."
Originally released on David Bean's (of the Judys) Wasted Talent label, their debut album is a classic of American independent music. Lyrically inspired by the group's growing dissatisfaction with the local hardcore scene and how the release of their "Live at Raul's" split record with the Dicks was handled, musically the album showed a move from the prevailing sound of the time. In this, "Where's My Towel's" sound has roots in funk, rock and avant-garde noise guitar as much as punk.
But the record only tells part of the story. Big Boys shows have gone down in history as theaters of chaos, frequently involving stage invasions, food fights and the sight of occasional cross-dresser Turner wearing a tutu or dress -- or even a string of Christmas lights. Years later, Kerr told an interviewer of a gig where Biscuit performed with bagged sandwiches pinned all over him, which he went on to throw into the crowd. At a gig six months later, a member of one audience threw the by-then-moldy sandwich back at him. The band also frequently extended to include a horn section, The Impromptu Horns, led by Chris Gates' brother, Nathan.
Famously, the Big Boys would end with the foursome shouting, "OK y'all, go start your own band." This DIY attitude continues today in Tim Kerr's art, which instead of being signed with his name is inscribed "Your Name Here". The list of fans who did go out and start their own band includes the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who opened for the Big Boys in Hollywood in their club years. After five short years and three albums, each of the four Big Boys departed too, taking their own advice: each member went on to play in numerous bands like Poison 13, Monkeywrench, Jack O'Fire, Junkyard and many more. They are also featured in the critically-acclaimed documentary "American Hardcore" and appear on its soundtrack. In 2005 Biscuit died of complications from Hepatitis C. Tim Kerr continues to play music and his artwork has been seen all over the world. Chris Gates continues to play music in his band Chris Gates & Gatesville.
"We never really decided to 'break up', it just happened," Kerr said, five years after the split. "We had been on a two month tour and it got to be exactly like being in a station wagon with mom and dad with your brother and sisters... lots of tension and everything." That won't come as any surprise on listening to the album: the tension's what makes it so very vital.
Now y'all, go start your own band...
Produced by Patrick McCarthy & Matt Sullivan
Directed by Patrick McCarthy
Edited by Cameron Rumford
Cinematography by Hanly Banks
Cameras & Sound by Hanly Banks & Patrick McCarthy
Pedro Reyes creates second generation instruments from dismantled guns. With a team of musicians and new media studio, Cocolab, Reyes has made mechanized instruments from these one-time harmful weapons.
So long as the karmic tip jar clouds our perceptions, the insane injustice of an underpaid labor force reimbursed through only the guilty feelings of their coworkers will persist.
When you’re traveling, it’s easy to see the origins of modern tipping. A tipped service in a foreign land is typically performed by someone who is not an employee of an establishment but works either as an adjunct or as a free agent — a shoeshine boy, for instance. In a “third-world” city, a self-styled tour guide might be tipped in return for leading a group of sightseers. In Italy, a Neapolitan street urchin might offer to protect a parked car in return for a gratuity.
In both cases, the inference is clear: if you don’t employ me, I will hurt you. This thinly veiled extortion is the subtext to much tipping: if the propertied individual doesn’t comply with the demands of the semi-employed, something terrible might happen to them or their things. So tipping began essentially as a way to stave off violence by the indigent, forgotten people; it is a social contract adhered to by the privileged class who fear and disdain the less fortunate and are aware of the failure of their own class to create equity.
But tipping in the United States is something more nuanced. The people who are tipped in the US comprise an ever-expanding number of employed professions. Employers recognize the tipped individual as a great boon to the business: someone who needn’t be given benefits, a living wage, or employment security. They are essentially a guest at the company who must comport themselves appropriately for monetary reward, courtesy of the customer. And this reward can be large. The tip, though it is a ghost fee, is actually a fairly strict amount — 15 to 20 percent of a tab, $1 per drink — and is essentially mandatory; a failure to pay will result in public shaming or even fisticuffs. The tipping scale varies wildly and is determined by race and class factors. Cute young white people are often given the desirable, highly visible jobs that tip well at restaurants and bars, while Central American immigrants work for trickle-down tips in the back.
In the United States, one is required to tip one’s waiter, bartender, taxi driver, bellhop, barista, sandwich artist, valet parker, coat-check, hairdresser, barber, driver, masseuse, pedicurist, strip-tease artist, dogwalker, hotel maid, concierge, and so on. A tipped job is typically one that is tied to a very quantifiable service done for a particular person or group. It is often linked to the idea of a “luxury” service as well (an espresso could be made at home, so you must tip if you are buying it while out). In this sense, it is maintained by the consumer as a guilt fee.
Meanwhile, a bus driver on a daily route will not be tipped, for example, though he or she is working hard to serve the public. Policemen are not tipped except in the form of donations by ass-kissers to the “fraternal order” in exchange for a sticker that is supposed to confer preferential treatment by officers. Public servants are not tipped. The tipped individual is providing a personal, private service.
Luxury service is therefore the crux. Tipping is the onus of the purchaser who pays the wage of the worker on top of the cost of whatever service provided, which goes to the business itself.
If one ever tries to discuss tipping in America, one is immediately met with a dismissive and lofty: “Well, I tip really well because I was/am part of the service industry.” Like veterans of the armed forces, the “service people” are bound together in a cult whose members have experienced the true nature of work servitude and the demeaning, harrowing experience it represents. The fellow warrior conspicuously tips well in a great display of homage and respect. Service implies a subservience but also a noble sacrifice. The service industry workers prepare our sandwiches nobly, submitting to our personalized mayonnaise requests. Almost all Americans have worked in the service industry at some point and many will only ever work in it.
Tipping for these service-industry comrades is outside of money. It is an alm or genuflection; a gesture of humility to the tippee designed to recognize and rehabilitate the degrading nature of their work, and also to connect with them spiritually. The camaraderie and smile dispensed by the waitstaff on receiving a generous tip after a suspenseful meal service brings the light of spiritual nourishment to the tipper, who can rest well that night. The Neapolitan street urchin’s implied violence still hovers over the interaction, but now the justice and retribution feels more karmic.
Just as oblations to the poor will puff up one’s sense of self, “tipping well” — 20 percent or more — is a measure of one’s personal decency. People often boast of their tipping. The least attractive thing one could do in the US is tip stingily. That is for old, religious people or clueless foreigners. Conversely, if one leaves a tip at a coffee bar in parts of Europe, the barista looks insulted and confused, as if you were treating him or her as a beggar; are you some kind of playboy show-off who throws his money around? Obviously, these people have never seen the Scorsese film Goodfellas, which portrays mafiosi in the sixties tipping wildly in a display of rampant virility.
People fall over themselves to brag of their tipping prowess and, despite the inherent and obvious injustice of a massive, scarcely-paid workforce scraping and begging for a wage, there has yet to be a true revolt of tipped employees. In a lottery-minded, American Idol culture, workers are loath to give up the chance for a Saudi Sheik to tip them a million dollars as reward for preparing a great smoothie. And there are palpable dividends; tattooed bartenders are bad-boy sex symbols that determine who gets served and when. Their management gives them an allotment of courtesy drinks which they can hand out to high-tipping customers or prospective lovemaking partners. Their favor is therefore highly sought by bar-goers due to their high-handed, undemocratic authority.
Tipping therefore has many purposes besides being an exploitive business model. It either shows affinity for comrades in the service industry, or is a duty done reluctantly by the bourgeoisie to stave off insurrection. It absolves sins and wrongdoing, so it’s religious. It is a guilt fee paid by the ill-conscienced for the immoral act of indulging in luxury. It is an act of dominance as it displays power through capital, and also an act of submission — a paid tribute offered to the service person. All of this is erotic and exciting, which accounts for the huge popularity of tipping.
Tipping makes us into slaves and masters simultaneously in a confused, kinetic, and highly kinky social model. The service industry model carries over into the bedroom with the modern emphasis on oral sex and “servicing” one’s partner. And it is cross-cultural; the service industry accounts for most jobs in the post-industrial West — up to 80 percent in the US, a country that has exported most of its industry to cheaper places and mechanized its farms. In fact, the United States, more than most nations, is almost entirely dualistic; on one hand there is the bourgeoisie or “middle class,” and on the other, the service industry.
But even this binary is blurry. Middle-class is a designation worn by all Americans, except possibly some rappers who claim to be rich. Warren Buffett, for example, likely calls himself middle-class. Politicians pander to a mythic middle class in their stump speeches. In the United States, middle-class has been stripped of its old meaning (owners of capital, wealthy, propertied non-aristocrats) and come to mean someone who is positioned in the middle, between the very richest person and the very poorest person. All but two people in America are middle-class.
Of course, the defining idea of a middle class is not really one’s bank balance but instead a set of values. It is a social group with concern for the results of their actions. “Middle-class” was an insult during a more class-conscious era, grumbled in France with proletarian disdain at those who bartered the present for an imagined future. Middle-class behavior included investing in stocks, buying insurance, having real estate, worshipping work, loving science, and practicing austerity despite having wealth. Irreligious protestantism, in short. Healthy eating, temperance, decorum, and sensible behavior are all bourgeois to a proletariat that revels in the moment, unfettered by concerns about interest rates and the “slow dime.”
To the middle class, both the lower and upper classes (titled aristocrats who have inherited their wealth) are despicable, due to their disdain for work and the Protestant ethic, and for the guiltless joy they derive in sensual pleasures such as drunkenness and fornication. Nations or communities which are poor or never had a bourgeois revolution are marked by orgies of revelry quite unknown in more economically prosperous places. These places are incomprehensible to the American sensibility, which views them as savage, brutal, and insane. The United States’ foreign policy is essentially to make people American through capitalism or kill them. They are better off dead than living any other way.
The American Revolution was, of course, along with the French Revolution and the English Civil War, a Protestant, masonic, capitalist revolution. It was, as much as the American-Israeli-propagated Middle East violence, a clash of socio-religious sensibilities. On one hand, the Calvinist capitalists who worshipped industry, and on the other, the clergy-allied landed gentry who saw work as man’s curse. When the masonic forces prevailed, it meant that a growth-oriented, work ideology would also prevail.
Though American capitalists were slave owners who derived much of their wealth from forced, unpaid labor, they revered the concept of work. They presented themselves as personally industrious, and from Jefferson’s and Washington’s achievements, we can see that some of them were. Their revolution laid the groundwork for a nation which, in many respects, is still a work camp.
Immigrants come to the United States, called the “land of opportunity,” typically for the promise of making money, and not for the enlightened social values or the quality of life. When one goes to Brooklyn, the housing blocks and the trains remind one that, in the industrial era, New York City was essentially a concentration camp of foreign textile workers who, like many of the less visible employees in the service industry, were barely paid.
They, too, were placated by the idea of chance. The chance wages of the tip jar are mystical, undefined, practically psychedelic; therefore they are more attractive than the cold hard reality of the paycheck. The tip jar is therefore a symbol of worker passivity. This modern condition of a giant, impoverished “middle class” of service industry workers conspicuously trading generous tips with one another in a prolonged orgy of self-congratulation and simulated affluence must end. As long as the dream world of nebulous “karma jar” income pollutes the atmosphere, no one can reconcile the insane injustice of an unpaid labor force reimbursed through the guilty feelings of their coworkers.
Can you imagine 1920s’ steelworkers in Pittsburgh, their faces stained with soot and grime, paying each other’s wages while their mill bosses pleaded poverty? That’s essentially what’s happening now in a merry-go-round circle-jerk of dream economics. When the first barista refuses the enforced gesture of happy-go-lucky largesse by their off-work co-worker, then the whole stinking system will collapse in a mound of idiocy and be revealed for the indentured servitude that it is.
- See more at: JACOBIN / a magazine of culture and polemic
PASADENA, Calif. — By today’s standards, the spacecraft’s technology is laughable: it carries an 8-track tape recorder and computers with one-240,000th the memory of a low-end iPhone. When it left Earth 36 years ago, it was designed as a four-year mission to Saturn, and everything after that was gravy.
But Voyager 1 has become — thrillingly — the Little Spacecraft That Could. On Thursday, scientists declared that it had become the first probe to exit the solar system, a breathtaking achievement that NASA could only fantasize about back when Voyager was launched in 1977, the same year “Star Wars” was released.
“I don’t know if it’s in the same league as landing on the moon, but it’s right up there — ‘Star Trek’ stuff, for sure,” said Donald A. Gurnett, a physics professor at the University of Iowa and the co-author of a paper published Thursday in the journal Science about Voyager’s feat. “I mean, consider the distance. It’s hard even for scientists to comprehend.”
Even among planetary scientists, who tend to dream large, the idea that something they built could travel beyond the Sun’s empire and keep grinding away is impressive. Plenty of telescopes gaze at the far parts of the Milky Way, but Voyager 1 can now touch and feel the cold, unexplored region in between the stars and send back detailed dispatches about conditions there. It takes 17 hours and 22 minutes for Voyager’s signals to reach NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory here.
“This is historic stuff, a bit like the first exploration of Earth, and we had to look at the data very, very carefully,” said Edward C. Stone, 77, NASA’s top Voyager expert, who has been working on the project since 1972. He said he was excited about what comes next. “It’s now the start of a whole new mission,” he said.
The lonely probe, which is 11.7 billion miles from Earth and hurtling away at 38,000 miles per hour, has long been on the cusp, treading a boundary between the bubble of hot, energetic particles around the solar system and the dark region beyond. There, in interstellar space, the plasma, or ionized gas, is noticeably denser.
Dr. Gurnett and his team have spent the past few months analyzing their data, trying to nail down whether what they were seeing was solar plasma or the plasma of interstellar space. Now they are certain it was the latter, and have even pinpointed a date for the crossing: Aug. 25, 2012.
At a news conference on Thursday, NASA scientists were a bit vague about what they hope to get from Voyager 1 from now on. The answer, to some extent, depends on what instruments continue to function as the power supply dwindles. Dr. Stone expects Voyager 1 to keep sending back data — with a 23-watt transmitter, about the equivalent of a refrigerator light bulb — until roughly 2025.
One hope is that Voyager 1’s position will allow scientists to more accurately study galactic cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles that originate outside the solar system. They would use the information to make judgments about what interstellar space is like at even greater distances from Earth.
In its heyday, Voyager 1 pumped out never-before-seen images of Jupiter and Saturn. But it stopped sending home pictures in 1990, to conserve energy and because there was no longer much to see. A companion spacecraft, Voyager 2, also launched in 1977, has stopped sending back images as well. Voyager 2 is moving in a different direction but is also expected to exit the solar system.
Eventually, NASA said, the Voyagers will pass other stars, coasting and drifting and being pulled by gravity. The next big encounter for Voyager 1, in around 40,000 years, is expected to be a dwarf star dispassionately known as AC+793888 in the constellation of Camelopardalis.
But already, Voyager 1 has achieved what Dr. Gurnett called “the holy grail of heliosphere research.”
Voyager 1 left the solar system the same month that Curiosity, NASA’s state-of-the-art rover, landed on Mars and started sending home gorgeous snapshots. Curiosity’s exploration team, some 400 strong, promptly dazzled the world by driving the $2.5 billion robot across a patch of Martian terrain, a feat that turned the Red Bull-chugging engineers and scientists of Building 264 of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus into rock stars. By comparison, the Voyager mission looked like a Betamax in the era of Bluetooth.
The 12-person Voyager staff was long ago moved from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus to cramped quarters down the street, next to a McDonald’s. In an interview last month at Voyager’s offices, Suzanne R. Dodd, the Voyager project manager, said that when she attended meetings in Building 264, she kept a low profile in deference to the Mars team.
“I try to stay out of the elevator and take the stairs,” Ms. Dodd said. “They’re doing important work there, and I’ll only slow them down.”
At 52, Ms. Dodd is a relative newcomer to Voyager, first working on the mission in 1984. Now she and her team seem poised to return to the spotlight.
As the solar system’s edge grew tantalizingly close, NASA asked the Voyager scientists to increase the amount of data collection. The problem: the 8-track data recorders from 1977 were not exactly bursting with extra space. Could Ms. Dodd even find anyone who specialized in that piece of technology and could coax it to record more?
“These younger engineers can write a lot of sloppy code, and it doesn’t matter, but here, with very limited capacity, you have to be extremely precise and have a real strategy,” she said.
She was able to find her man: Lawrence J. Zottarelli, 77, a retired NASA engineer. He came up with a solution. But would it work?
Mr. Zottarelli waited at Voyager mission control one afternoon last month to find out. The first of the newly programmed data dumps was set to come down. Ms. Dodd, Dr. Stone and Mr. Zottarelli watched two old Sun Microsystems computers like children watching for a chick to peck through an egg. “Nine, eight, seven,” Dr. Stone counted down.
“Everything’s fine,” said Mr. Zottarelli, flashing a thumbs up. “You’re on your own now.”
The relief was written all over Ms. Dodd’s face. “It’s not easy flying an old spacecraft,” she said.
Her eyes moved to Dr. Stone, who was peering at a computer through his trifocals.
“There are lots of old missions,” he responded with a sly smile. “But not many are doing exciting new things.”
Check out this VIDEO
If I had a chauffeur, I'd want it to be Tom Vanderbilt. I have no idea if Tom is a good driver, but he has a wealth of compelling, curious, and provocative knowledge about the psychology and science of our lives behind the wheel. He's the author of the bestselling book "Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (And What It Says About Us" that has enlightened everyone from transportation policy groups to road safety consortiums to those of us who just insist that no matter what lane we're in, the other one is moving faster. Tom gave a fantastic talk at Boing Boing: Ingenuity, our theatrical experience on August 18, 2013 in San Francisco where he imparted wisdom on late merging, the demographics of honking, and highway hypnosis.
Luck and a Shrewd Strategy Fueled de Blasio’s Ascension
By MICHAEL BARBARO
The commercial that changed the course of the mayor’s race almost never happened.
Bill de Blasio’s campaign team had mused about building an ad around his wife, Chirlane McCray, a telegenic African-American poet, then abandoned the concept.
They then turned to his 15-year-old son, but nothing seemed to go right. The de Blasio family kitchen in Brooklyn was not big enough for the camera crew, so they borrowed a bigger one from a neighbor.
The neighbor’s kitchen turned out to be too fancy, sending the wrong message for a populist candidate. So a long lens was used to blur out the expensive fixtures.
But when the commercial was finally shown to the candidate and his wife, they seemed overcome, instantly recognizing the power of its message: that the aggressive policing of the Bloomberg era was not an abstraction to Mr. de Blasio, it was an urgent personal worry within his biracial household.
“This,” predicted the campaign’s pollster, Anna Greenberg, “will be huge.”
The ad exploded, transforming the fortunes of a fourth-place campaign and confirming the convictions of a long-shot politician who had banked his candidacy on a series of big bets: that a relentless critique of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactic would resonate with white New Yorkers, not scare them off; that in a city of tribal politics an Italian-American could win the hearts of black voters; that a tired-seeming message about a tale of two cities would stir those people still hurting after a traumatic economic recession; and, most of all, that there was far greater unhappiness with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg than polls had registered or Mr. de Blasio’s rivals had realized.
On the outside, Mr. de Blasio’s improbable ascent in the Democratic mayor’s race, from afterthought to front-runner in just four weeks, looked meteoric and spontaneous.
Behind the scenes, though, it required shrewd maneuvers and hardball politics that seemed incongruous with the candidate’s high-minded image: sidelining the Rev. Al Sharpton, who could have ignited the passion of black voters for William. C. Thompson Jr., the sole African-American candidate in the race, and making the case to the city’s powerful health care workers’ union that their longtime ally, John C. Liu, was doomed to fail.
Underlying it all was a message of indignant liberalism, sketched out by Mr. de Blasio at a Manhattan restaurant in 2012, that was simple, sellable and penetrating enough to transcend class, gender and race.
This account of the campaign’s strategy is drawn from interviews with top aides, consultants and friends of Mr. de Blasio as well as his rivals, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity so they could talk candidly without inflaming powerful public officials.
From the start, Mr. de Blasio understood the perils of running an anti-establishment campaign against a capable and generally well-regarded incumbent: In large numbers, Democrats in New York approved of the job that Mr. Bloomberg was doing, and thought the city was on the right track.
But over drinks at Friend of a Farmer cafe in Gramercy Park last summer, Mr. de Blasio told his chief media strategist and ad maker that he saw no alternative, given his history as an activist and record of assailing the mayor.
“It would be phony of me to be anything but a critic,” Mr. de Blasio told the strategist, John Del Cecato.
He assembled an inner circle with a history of electing insurgent-style Democrats. Mr. Del Cecato had worked on the Obama campaign in 2008. The de Blasio campaign manager, Bill Hyers, ran Michael A. Nutter’s come-from-behind bid for mayor of Philadelphia in 2007. And Jonathan Rosen, a communications strategist, shaped the victory of Eric T. Schneiderman in the 2010 race for New York State attorney general.
Together, they embraced a doctrine entirely distinct from those laid out by the candidates Mr. de Blasio was trailing in the polls, who seemed to be tinkering around the edges of Mr. Bloomberg’s approach, not wholly rejecting it. After 12 years of any mayor, they reasoned, the electorate craved something fundamentally different in substance and style. A survey conducted in the fall of 2012 by the de Blasio campaign’s pollster put hard numbers behind the theory: a slight majority of Democrats wanted a change in direction in the mayor’s office.
Even some who approved of Mr. Bloomberg, the pollster found, felt oddly disconnected with him, believing that he had emphasized his own pet issues — soda sizes, bike lanes, pedestrian plazas — rather than the real-life worries that filled their days.
“A vanity mayor,” the de Blasio campaign called him.
The problem was that few Democrats knew much of anything about Mr. de Blasio. His position as the city’s public advocate was low-wattage, his personality could seem professorial and his candidacy was being outshone by the flamboyance of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner.
Inside Mr. de Blasio’s campaign, tensions erupted over how to handle the threat of the former congressman from Queens, considered flawed but formidable. Mr. de Blasio, feeling overlooked and stalled, had concluded he had to attack Mr. Weiner, whom he openly disdained.
But his political team aggressively pushed back, counseling the candidate to remember who his real target was: Mr. Bloomberg.
“Keep your eye on the ball,” the campaign’s manager, Mr. Hyers, told Mr. de Blasio.
The campaign prided itself on its discipline: it did not indulge in any stray attacks and it zealously husbanded its resources.
Mr. Hyers, pudgy and brusque, was determined to plow every available cent into television commercials that could overcome the city’s fractured constituencies and build Mr. de Blasio’s citywide appeal. So he cut corners everywhere else, starting with the campaign’s ninth-floor headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn.
Furniture was not bought, it was salvaged from Craigslist, free. Broken ceiling tiles were not fixed, they were left crumbling on the floor. “Disgusting,” Ms. Greenberg said affectionately of the décor.
The austerity even extended to campaign literature. Traditionally, New York City candidates pour tens of thousands of dollars into glossy, micro-targeted brochures offering customized appeals to lure groups like Caribbeans, Chinese immigrants and observant Jews to the polls. In July, when the campaign staff met, its members rejected that idea, deciding against sending out a single piece of mail and pouring that money into television — a decision even Mr. de Blasio’s director of mail endorsed, at no small cost to his business.
The penny-pinching worked. Mr. de Blasio accomplished something almost unimaginable in a race in which every candidate abided by the same spending cap: he outspent his nearest competitor by about $200,000 on TV ads.
His biggest buy and most talked-about commercial, of course, was the tribute from his son, Dante, known for his towering Afro. It was downloaded 100,000 times before it was even advertised online and was watched well beyond the five boroughs, including by 2,000 people in Texas.
It marked a crucial moment for Mr. de Blasio: he had begun to assert ownership over the volatile issue of the stop-and-frisk tactic, which Mr. de Blasio’s aides knew from focus groups was roiling the city’s African-American neighborhoods.
They expected a fierce battle with Mr. Thompson, a former city comptroller, over who would be the most fervent opponent of the practice and became increasingly puzzled throughout the summer when the fight never materialized. Instead of calling for an end to the tactic, Mr. Thompson refused to support two City Council bills cracking down on the Police Department and scored the endorsement of unions representing law enforcement officers in the process.
“We were floored,” recalled a top adviser to Mr. de Blasio.
Suddenly, the black vote seemed to be up for grabs and the de Blasio campaign moved aggressively to exploit the opening. The political establishment took it for granted that Mr. Sharpton, a friend of Mr. Thompson’s since their youth and a cheerleader for his rise through the city’s black power structure, would endorse his Harlem neighbor.
But Mr. de Blasio, who had long courted Mr. Sharpton, attending his rallies and flattering him by soliciting his advice, now deployed his team to block Mr. Thompson’s path, seeking to snatch the endorsement for himself.
Mr. Sharpton, it turned out, needed little nudging to turn on Mr. Thompson. He was privately furious over Mr. Thompson’s opposition to the two Council bills, asking a friend, “What kind of a campaign is he running?”
Thompson aides reassured themselves that Mr. Sharpton would eventually come around.
Then, days after the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, Mr. Thompson got a call: Mr. Sharpton could not grant his blessing, and would stay out of the race entirely. Mr. Thompson was crestfallen. He asked Mr. Sharpton to reconsider.
“I can’t reconsider what I believe in,” Mr. Sharpton responded.
Mr. de Blasio also got lucky: One by one, his opponents stumbled. Mr. Liu, the city’s current comptroller, was handcuffed by a campaign financing scandal; Mr. Weiner, of course, saw his candidacy collapse amid bizarre new revelations about his online behavior. Christine C. Quinn pursued a message of upbeat continuity, not to end the Bloomberg era but to improve it, never grappling with the still raw feelings toward the mayor and the term limits extension she helped engineer for him.
Gifts came from unexpected sources, including the mayor.
In the final days of the campaign, New York Magazine published an interview with a clearly irritated Mr. Bloomberg, who denounced Mr. de Blasio’s campaign as “racist,” all-but-endorsed Ms. Quinn and wondered aloud how fabulous it would be if New York City attracted every last Russian billionaire.
As they scrolled through the article, Mr. de Blasio’s advisers privately rejoiced. The mayor had unwittingly made the entire case for their campaign in the most public and last-minute way possible.
E-mails buzzed around de Blasio headquarters. “Forty-seven percent,” read one of them, comparing Mr. Bloomberg’s remarks to the near-fatal moment when Mitt Romney suggested that he was not concerned about nearly half the nation’s voters.
As the polls opened on Tuesday morning, Mr. Del Cecato fired off a cheeky message on Twitter: “Annoy Bloomberg. Vote de Blasio today.”
By the end of the day, hundreds of thousands of voters did just that.
I’m a big fan of all of the bands Keith Morris has fronted… Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, and OFF!. My first punk show was the Circle Jerks in 1986 in Summerville, South Carolina. I illustrated this image from one of Glen E. Friedman’s photos of Keith around 1981 0r 1982 playing with the Circle Jerks. Glen also shot the Circle Jerks’ “Golden Shower of Hits” cover which is in the collage in the lower left. Keith was kind enough to write down all of his favorite song titles from all three bands to incorporate into the collage.
-Shepard
I was approached by Glen E. Friedman asking if I’d be interested in collaborating with him and his friend Shepard Fairey on a poster using a photo he had taken a coupla’ dozen yrs. ago. I was familiar with Shepard and his work as we’d hung out at 2 or 3 art exhibits, seen various pieces of his including giant images of Henry Rollins, Ian McKaye, Glen Danzig and others at the KROQ punk gig out in San Bernardino and had been to his art space when he threw a flyer/poster/punk rock art shindig. Shepard and I talked about color schemes and seeing as I’m a fan of Rick Griffin who started off drawing comics for Surfer Magazine, posters for the Fillmore West and John Van Hamersveld who was responsible for the Beatles “Magical Mystery Tour” album cover and some of my favorite handbills for early gigs at the Shrine Auditorium in the late 60′s I wanted to use some of their color examples…………4 days later we were going to print.
-Keith Morris
18 x 24 inch screen prints, signed by Shepard Fairey, Glen E. Friedman and Keith Morris. Three different colorway versions available.
Release date: Tuesday September 10, 2013 at a random time between 10 and 11am PST in the PRINTS page of the store. Limit 1 version of each colorway per person/household.
Further notes: Keith also mentioned his love of “Germs” blue, so I made a color variation inspired by that as well as the psychedelic vibe and my usual color palette.
-Shepard
KEITH MORRIS (4 COLOR)
18 x 24 inch, 4 color screen print. Signed by Shepard Fairey, Glen E. Friedman and Keith Morris. Numbered edition of 200. $75. Limit 1 per person/household.
KEITH MORRIS (BLUE)
18 x 24 inches, 3 color screen print. Signed by Shepard Fairey, Glen E. Friedman and Keith Morris. Numbered edition of 150. $75. Limit 1 per person/household.
KEITH MORRIS (RED)
18 x 24 inches, 3 color screen print. Signed by Shepard Fairey, Glen E. Freidman and Keith Morris. Numbered edition of 150. $75. Limit 1 per person/household.
Release Date: Tuesday September 10, 2013 at a random time between 10 and 11am PST in the PRINTS page of the store.
The folks from Crass have settled in to quieter (though certainly not apolitical) lives, and understandably so. Dedicating so much of yourself to producing and living activist art definitely takes a toll, sometimes quite literally—the fees incurred in defending 1981’s Penis Envy from obscenity charges cost them a pretty penny. On top of money and legal troubles, their elaborate political hoaxes began to render them a more visible target for political enemies, and there were disagreements within the group that started to splinter them, politically (most notably, not every member was committed to pacifism). And of course, they’d always intended to split sometime in 1984, anyway.
At first glance, it appears singer Steve Ignorant retired to a quaint, seaside village. He’s kept busy with new projects, but why move to the country if you’re not going to relax? Apparently Steve’s not much for relaxing. He actually volunteers to drop everything at the sound of a beeper, drive to the shore, take a boat to wherever a potential emergency might be, and if need be, save people from drowning. Ignorant takes his responsibility incredibly seriously, openly admitting to the fear he feels every time he’s called up for duty, and though his colleagues seem to have an inkling of his radical punk rock past, it appears he’s appreciated as a valuable member of the team, first and foremost.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who I personally consider an American hero, has such a common sense worldview that at least something he’s saying here is bound to see you nodding your head in agreement, no matter where along the spectrum your own particular political persuasion falls.
And I don’t even know you.
It doesn’t matter. Whether you think going to war is a bad thing or even if you just want to send that Kenyan-born Muslim back to his homeland of… Hawaii, there’s something for you here. No, really.
It’s telling how the fiercely independent Sanders—he belongs to neither party—relates the same story that we’re hearing over and over again from virtually every teabagger pol as well: Their constituents are NOT happy about the prospects of going to war with a third country in the Middle East. The calls and emails they are receiving are overwhelmingly against attacking Syria (I called my Congresswoman and Senators today, I hope you’ll call your reps, too).
And speaking of the teabaggers, one of them seems to think the proposed Syria attack is a conspiracy to cover up Benghazi, the IRS scandal and distract the public from the implementation of Obamacare. Is hating Obama a legitimate reason not to go to war? Who the fuck cares? Take what we can get! However, it’s this bit from the Bernie Sanders interview comes closest to the reasons why I think this is a bad idea: We have our own troubles at home. Why should Syria’s problems take precedence over America’s own citizens?
“Our Republican friends have made it very clear. They’re not going to ask the wealthy or large corporations to pay more in taxes. They already want to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. What may well be happening is the cost of this war may be paid for by more kids being thrown off Head Start. Senior citizens being thrown off Meals on Wheels programs. Educational programs being cut. The Republicans would go in that way to pay for this war. That’s clear to me.”
I love the irony of seeing Fox News and the GOP’s most obsessed Obama-hating, war-loving hawks put into a bind this way, but if that’s what it takes to slow, if not stop, the march to war, I’m all for that improbable teabagger/progressive alliance. Republican vote counts in Congress are said to be 10 to 1 against authorizing a strike against Syria. House Democrats are said to be 4 to 1 against military action.
Hell, if the orneriest, most racist GOP congress-critters want to vote against “that Obama’s war,” well god bless ‘em, I say.
Bonus clip: Rep. Alan Grayson (who I hope runs for President in 2016) on Democracy Now earlier today. (Sign Grayson’s anti-war petition here). The segment with Grayson starts at 10 minutes in:
from DangerousMinds 
Marshall McLuhan explaining how the “one-liner” is symptomatic of the shortened attention-span of children. It’s all to do with television, which McLuhan claims, has a negative effect on the nervous system.
WASHINGTON -- A U.S.-led attack on Syria without United Nations support would be a war crime regardless of congressional approval, Noam Chomsky, the antiwar activist and author, said in response to President Barack Obama's announcement that he would seek Hill approval.
"As international support for Obama’s decision to attack Syria has collapsed, along with the credibility of government claims, the administration has fallen back on a standard pretext for war crimes when all else fails: the credibility of the threats of the self-designated policeman of the world," Chomsky told HuffPost in an email.
Chomsky recently traveled to the region to learn more about the Syria crisis, and his comments there led some to believe he was open to military intervention if negotiations failed to produce peace. "I believe you should choose the negotiating track first, and should you fail, then moving to the second option" -- backing the rebels -- "becomes more acceptable," he said.
But his comments to HuffPost indicate that he remains opposed to any military action that came without U.N. approval.
"[T]hat aggression without UN authorization would be a war crime, a very serious one, is quite clear, despite tortured efforts to invoke other crimes as precedents," he added.
Liberals more associated with the establishment than Chomsky, who have nevertheless tended to be critical of the president's foreign policy, cheered his decision to involve Congress as a step away from an increasingly imperial presidency and toward more democratic accountability of war making.
Chomsky upended the field of linguistics with a devastating critique of B.F. Skinner in 1959 that changed the way people think about human cognitive development. He has led a parallel career as a leading anarcho-syndicalist author, historian and activist.
As an introduction to a brief but important music movement, or even just a simple nostalgia piece for people who were around at the time, Kerri Koch’s 2006 documentary Don’t Need You: The Herstory of Riot Grrrl makes for interesting and compelling viewing.
For a brief while in the early 90s it seemed Riot Grrrl was everywhere. It was a breath of fresh air in the male-dominated grunge landscape, though some of those grunge bands did their best to promote it and more pro-feminist ideals (the ghost of Kurt looms into view in a flowing, floral-print dress). But Riot Grrrl was met mostly with derision in the mainstream media, what with its core values of fanzines and localised press, not to mention of course feminism, self-expression and the forcing through of female self-determination in a male-oriented world.
Looking back now It’s hard to believe how much of an uproar some female musicians simply being angry could cause, but then as has been mentioned numerous times no-one wants to see women being angry (supposedly). Pretty soon Riot Grrrl was reduced to a simple concept of being merely “angry girls”, and made easy to dismiss. UK Riot Grrrl contingent Huggy Bear famously got ejected from the studios of tacky yoof program The Word (on which they had just performed) for heckling the presenters about their Barbie doll-imitating porn star guests. This got the band into the national media, but also sealed their fate as mere rabble-rousers while ignoring their efforts to create alternative spaces and dialogs. But still, Riot Grrrl was oppositional, it was dramatic, and it was fucking exciting.
Just as quickly as it bubbled up however, Riot Grrrl seemed to fizzle out. I guess my perception of this was skewed hugely by the mainstream UK music press, which was my only port of access to alternative music and culture in those pre-internet days. It was a mutual love/hate thing (more hate/hate I guess) with the performers and the scene itself withdrawing from the mainstream attention and the negative associations it brought. In a very interesting read called Riot Grrrl - the collected interviews on Collpase Board, Everett True (the editor of Melody Maker at the time, and the person chiefly responsible for breaking the scene in the UK music media) explains his own role and that of the press:
Riot Grrrl was basically about female empowerment – females doing stuff on their own terms, separate from men, making up their own rules and systems and cultures. Sure, men were welcome, but they had to understand that for once they weren’t going to be automatically given first place. (One of the reasons my own role in the gestation of Riot Grrrl as a popular cultural movement became so confused was that after a certain period of time I began to listen to those around me – female musicians, activists, artists, human beings – who felt that having such a high-profile male associated with a fledgling female movement was absolutely counter-productive. This is almost the first time I’ve spoken to anyone since then.)Don’t Need You - The Herstory of Riot Grrrl is important because it lets the creators of the movement speak for themselves. The editing may be rough in places, and the story may jump around in chronology a wee bit, but you get to hear first hand from the original Riot Grrrls themselves what informed their third-wave feminist views and what inspired them to start their own scene. Featured interviewees include Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, Alison Wolfe of Bratmobile, Corin Tucker of Heavens To Betsy / Sleatter-Kinney and Fugazi’s Ian McKaye.
Kids, it turns out, are not completely immune to logical explanations or adverse to eating vegetables. Combine these two things, new research indicates, and children are more likely to gamely down their greens. They may not start loving broccoli, but they’ll eat it for nutrition. ScienceDaily dishes:
The researchers assigned some preschool classrooms to read nutrition books during snack time for about 3 months, while other classrooms were assigned to conduct snack time as usual. Later, the preschoolers were asked questions about nutrition.The psychologists conducting the study hypothesized that even preschoolers can grasp the concept of nutrition. Explaining why it’s important to eat vegetables, the researchers reasoned, would play into children’s tendency to “want to understand why and how things work,” they told ScienceDaily.
It worked. The kids assigned to read about nutrition ate twice as many snack time veggies as they had been—all of their own will. They also had gained a theoretical understanding of nutrition—that nutrients in food helped their bodies function. This second accomplishment was pretty unique:
When the conceptual program was pitted against a more conventional teaching strategy focused on the enjoyment of healthy eating and trying new foods, the results showed that both interventions led to increased vegetable consumption. Yet, the children in the conceptual program showed more knowledge about nutrition and a greater overall increase in vegetable consumption.So perhaps the best strategy for convincing picky kids to dig into their lima beans and brussels sprouts is a two-pronged attack: explain to them why those veggies need to get in their stomachs and make sure to demonstrate just how tasty those healthy offerings can be.
