Cool artwork made from 3,600 tiles of LCD glass

from BoingBoing:

Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for the newly built Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The artwork, a collaboration between Hypersonic Engineering & Design, Plebian Design, and Sosolimited, celebrates our abstraction of nature's infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process, and through our perceptions. It brings to light the similarity of patterns in our universe, across all scales of space and time.
10 feet wide and 90 feet in length, this sculptural ribbon winds through the five story atrium of the museum and is made of 3,600 tiles of LCD glass. It runs on roughly 75 watts, less power than a laptop computer. Animations are created by independently varying the transparency of each piece of glass.
The content cycles through twenty programs, ranging from clouds to rain drops to colonies of bacteria to flocking birds to geese to cuttlefish skin to pulsating black holes. The animations were created through a combination of algorithmic software modeling of natural phenomena and compositing of actual footage.
An eight channel soundtrack accompanies the animations on the ribbon, giving visitors clues to the identity of the pixelated movements. In addition, two screens show high resolution imagery and text revealing the content on the ribbon at any moment.
Patterned by Nature

Ian MacKaye joins Henry Rollins on the radio airwaves for 2 hours

In honor of my brother Ian's incredible surprise birthday party this past weekend. Here he is picking the tunes on the radio with his long time pal Henry Rollins, hosting on his program at the great LA radio station KCRW.



Setlist:

01. Bikini Kill - “New Radio” / single
02. Scream - “Walking By Myself” / single
03. Lungfish - “Savings” / single
04. Nervous Norvous – “Transfusion” / single
05. Trashmen - “King Of The Surf” / single
06. Cold Cold Hearts - “Broken Teeth” / Cold Cold Hearts
07. The Vibrators – “Petrol” / Pure Mania
08. Viktims - “Television Addict” / single
09. Wire - “Ex Lion Tamer” / Pink Flag
10. Eddy Current Suppression Ring - “Which Way To Go” / single
11. Vernon Walters - “The Truth About You” / single
12. Felt Letters - “600,000 Bands” / single
13. Satan’s Rats – “Louise” / single
14. The Pack - “King Of Kings” / single
15. Skunks - “Good From The Bad” / single
16. The Need - “Let Them Eat Valiums” / single
17. Shine - “Lost Sun Dance” / single
18. Dog Faced Hermans - “Keep Your Laws Off Of My Body” / Those Deep Buds
19. Creation - “Through My Eyes” / single
20. The Arbors - “Hey Joe” / The Arbors

thanks to Tara at DangerousMinds for reminding me this went down, and was now available on-line

Noam Chomsky : Where Does Occupy Go From Here?

This is the transcript of a discussion that took place earlier this year between Noam Chomsky and Occupy supporters Mikal Kamil and Ian Escuela for InterOccupy, an organisation that provides links between supporters of the Occupy movement around the world.

Professor Chomsky, the Occupy movement is in its second phase. Three of our main goals are to: 1) occupy the mainstream and transition from the tents and into the hearts and the minds of the masses; 2) block the repression of the movement by protecting the right of the 99%‘s freedom of assembly and right to speak without being violently attacked; and 3) end corporate personhood. The three goals overlap and are interdependent.

We are interested in learning what your position is on mainstream filtering, the repression of civil liberties, and the role of money and politics as they relate to Occupy and the future of America.

Noam Chomsky: Coverage of Occupy has been mixed. At first it was dismissive, making fun of people involved as if they were just silly kids playing games and so on. But coverage changed. In fact, one of the really remarkable and almost spectacular successes of the Occupy movement is that it has simply changed the entire framework of discussion of many issues. There were things that were sort of known, but in the margins, hidden, which are now right up front – such as the imagery of the 99% and 1%; and the dramatic facts of sharply rising inequality over the past roughly 30 years, with wealth being concentrated in actually a small fraction of 1% of the population.

For the majority, real incomes have pretty much stagnated, sometimes declined. Benefits have also declined and work hours have gone up, and so on. It’s not third world misery, but it’s not what it ought to be in a rich society, the richest in the world, in fact, with plenty of wealth around, which people can see, just not in their pockets.

All of this has now been brought to the fore. You can say that it’s now almost a standard framework of discussion. Even the terminology is accepted. That’s a big shift.

Earlier this month, the Pew foundation released one of its annual polls surveying what people think is the greatest source of tension and conflict in American life. For the first time ever, concern over income inequality was way at the top. It’s not that the poll measured income inequality itself, but the degree to which public recognition, comprehension and understanding of the issue has gone up. That’s a tribute to the Occupy movement, which put this strikingly critical fact of modern life on the agenda so that people who may have known of it from their own personal experience see that they are not alone, that this is all of us. In fact, the US is off the spectrum on this. The inequalities have risen to historically unprecedented heights. In the words of the report: “The Occupy Wall Street movement no longer occupies Wall Street, but the issue of class conflict has captured a growing share of the national consciousness. A new Pew Research Center survey of 2,048 adults finds that about two-thirds of the public (66%) believes there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and the poor – an increase of 19 percentage points since 2009.”

Meanwhile, coverage of the Occupy movement itself has been varied. In some places – for example, parts of the business press – there has been fairly sympathetic coverage occasionally. Of course, the general picture has been: “Why don’t they go home and let us get on with our work?” “Where is their political programme?” “How do they fit into the mainstream structure of how things are supposed to change?” And so on.

And then came the repression, which of course was inevitable. It was pretty clearly coordinated across the country. Some of it was brutal, other places less so, and there has been kind of a stand-off. Some occupations have, in effect, been removed. Others have filtered back in some other form. Some of the things have been covered, like the use of pepper spray, and so on. But a lot of it, again, is just, “Why don’t they go away and leave us alone?” That’s to be anticipated.

The question of how to respond to it – the primary way is one of the points that you made: reaching out to bring into the general Occupation, in a metaphorical sense, to bring in much wider sectors of the population. There is a lot of sympathy for the goals and aims of the Occupy movement. They are quite high in polls, in fact. But that’s a big step short from engaging people in it. It has to become part of their lives, something they think they can do something about. So it’s necessary to get out to where people live. That means not just sending a message, but if possible, and it would be hard, to try to spread and deepen one of the real achievements of the movement that doesn’t get discussed much in the media – at least, I haven’t seen it. One of the main achievements has been to create communities – real functioning communities of mutual support, democratic interchange, care for one another, and so on. This is highly significant, especially in a society like ours in which people tend to be very isolated and neighbourhoods are broken down, community structures have broken down, people are kind of alone.

There’s an ideology that takes a lot of effort to implant: it’s so inhuman that it’s hard to get into people’s heads, the ideology to just take care of yourself and forget about anyone else. An extreme version is the Ayn Rand version. Actually, there has been an effort for 150 years, literally, to try to impose that way of thinking on people.

During the onset of the industrial revolution in eastern Massachusetts, mid-19th century, there happened to be a very lively press run by working people, young women in the factories, artisans in the mills, and so on. They had their own press that was very interesting, very widely read and had a lot of support. And they bitterly condemned the way the industrial system was taking away their freedom and liberty and imposing on them rigid hierarchical structures that they didn’t want. One of their main complaints was what they called “the new spirit of the age: gain wealth forgetting all but self”. For 150 years there have been massive efforts to try to impose “the new spirit of the age” on people. But it’s so inhuman that there’s a lot of resistance, and it continues.

One of the real achievements of the Occupy movement, I think, has been to develop a real manifestation of rejection of this in a very striking way. The people involved are not in it for themselves. They’re in it for one another, for the broader society and for future generations. The bonds and associations being formed, if they can persist and if they can be brought into the wider community, would be the real defence against the inevitable repression with its sometimes violent manifestations.

How best do you think the Occupy movement should go about engaging in these, what methods should be employed, and do you think it would be prudent to actually have space to decentralise bases of operation?

Noam Chomsky: It would certainly make sense to have spaces, whether they should be open public spaces or not. To what extent they should be is a kind of a tactical decision that has to be made on the basis of a close evaluation of circumstances, the degree of support, the degree of opposition. They’re different for different places, and I don’t know of any general statement.

As for methods, people in this country have problems and concerns, and if they can be helped to feel that these problems and concerns are part of a broader movement of people who support them and who they support, well then it can take off. There is no single way of doing it. There is no one answer.

You might go into a neighbourhood and find that their concerns may be as simple as a traffic light on the street where kids cross to go to school. Or maybe their concerns are to prevent people from being tossed out of their homes on foreclosures.

Or maybe it’s to try to develop community-based enterprises, which are not at all inconceivable – enterprises owned and managed by the workforce and the community which can then overcome the choice of some remote multinational and board of directors made out of banks to shift production somewhere else. These are real, very live issues happening all the time. And it can be done. Actually, a lot of it is being done in scattered ways.

A whole range of other things can be done, such as addressing police brutality and civic corruption. The reconstruction of media so that it comes right out of the communities, is perfectly possible. People can have a live media system that’s community-based, ethnic-based, labour-based and [reflecting] other groupings. All of that can be done. It takes work and it can bring people together.

Actually, I’ve seen things done in various places that are models of what could be followed. I’ll give you an example. I happened to be in Brazil a couple of years ago and I was spending some time with Lula, the former president of Brazil, but this was before he was elected president. He was a labour activist. We travelled around together. One day he took me out to a suburb of Rio. The suburbs of Brazil are where most of the poor people live.

They have semi-tropical weather there, and the evening Lula took me out there were a lot of people in the public square. Around 9pm, prime TV time, a small group of media professionals from the town had set up a truck in the middle of the square. Their truck had a TV screen above it that presented skits and plays written and acted by people in the community. Some of them were for fun, but others addressed serious issues such as debt and Aids. As people gathered in the square, the actors walked around with microphones asking people to comment on the material that had been presented. They were filmed commenting and were shown on the screen for other people to see it.

People sitting in a small bar nearby or walking in the streets began reacting, and in no time you had interesting interchanges and discussions among people about quite serious topics, topics that are part of their lives.

Well, if it can be done in a poor Brazilian slum, we can certainly do it in many other places. I’m not suggesting we do just that, but these are the kinds of things that can be done to engage broader sectors and give people a reason to feel that they can be a part of the formation of communities and the development of serious programmes adapted to whatever the serious needs happen to be.

From very simple things up to starting a new socio-economic system with worker- and community-run enterprises, a whole range of things is possible. The more active public support there is the better defence there is against repression and violence.

How do you assess the goals of the Democratic party as far as co-opting the movement, and what should we be vigilant and looking out for?

Noam Chomsky: The Republican party abandoned the pretence of being a political party years ago. They are committed, so uniformly and with such dedication, to tiny sectors of power and profit that they’re hardly a political party any more. They have a catechism they have to repeat like a caricature of the old Communist party. They have to do something to get a voting constituency. Of course, they can’t get it from the 1%, to use the imagery, so they have been mobilising sectors of the population that were always there, but not politically organised very well – religious evangelicals, nativists who are terrified that their rights and country are being taken away, and so on.

The Democrats are a little bit different and have different constituencies, but they are following pretty much the same path as the Republicans. The centrist Democrats of today, the ones who essentially run the party, are pretty much the moderate Republicans of a generation ago and they are now kind of the mainstream of the Democrat party. They are going to try to organise and mobilise – co-opt, if you like – the constituency that’s in their interest. They have pretty much abandoned the white working-class; it’s rather striking to see. So that’s barely part of their constituency at this point, which is a pretty sad development. They will try to mobilise Hispanics, blacks and progressives. They’ll try to reach out to the Occupy movement.

Organised labour is still part of the Democratic constituency and they’ll try to co-opt them; and with Occupy, it’s just the same as all the others. The political leadership will pat them on the head and say: “I’m for you, vote for me.” The people involved will have to understand that maybe they’ll do something for you, that only if you maintain substantial pressure can you get elected leadership to do things – but they are not going to do it on their own, with very rare exceptions.

As far as money and politics are concerned, it’s hard to beat the comment of the great political financier Mark Hanna. About a century ago, he was asked what was important in politics. He answered: “The first is money, the second one is money and I’ve forgotten what the third one is.”

That was a century ago. Today it’s much more extreme. So yes, concentrated wealth will, of course, try to use its wealth and power to take over the political system as much as possible, and to run it and do what it wants, etc. The public has to find ways to struggle against that.

Centuries ago, political theorists such as David Hume, in one of his foundations for government, pointed out correctly that power is in the hands of the governed and not the governors. This is true for a feudal society, a military state or a parliamentary democracy. Power is in the hands of the governed. The only way the rulers can overcome that is by control of opinions and attitudes.

Hume was right in the mid-18th century. What he said remains true today. The power is in the hands of the general population. There are massive efforts to control it by less force today because of the many rights that have been won. Methods now are by propaganda, consumerism, stirring up ethnic hatred, all kinds of ways. Sure, that will always go on but we have to find ways to resist it.

There is nothing wrong with giving tentative support to a particular candidate as long as that person is doing what you want. But it would be a more democratic society if we could also recall them without a huge effort. There are other ways of pressuring candidates. There is a fine line between doing that and being co-opted, mobilised to serve someone else’s interest. But those are just constant decisions and choices that have to be made.

Extracted from Occupy by Noam Chomsky, published by the Zuccotti Park Press and the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series in the US and Canada.

Thanks, DangerousMinds

MAY DAY EVENTS LIVE !!!

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NOW GET THE FUCK OUT IN THE STREETS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#WhileWeWatch (OWS semi-short film)

HAPPY MAY DAY FOLKS!


#whilewewatch - Synopsis
A gripping portrait of the “Occupy Wall Street” media revolution, #whilewewatch is the first definitive film to emerge from Zuccotti Park – with full access and cooperation from masterminds who made #OccupyWallStreet a reality.

 The #OccupyWallStreet media team had no fear of a critical city government, big corporations, hostile police, or a lagging mainstream media to tell their story. Through rain, snow, grueling days, sleeping on concrete; they pump out exhilarating ideas to the world. Fueled with little money, they rely on the power of Twitter, texting, Wi-Fi, posters, Tumblr, live streams, YouTube, Facebook, dramatic marches, drumbeats and chants. As the film unfolds, we witness a new dawn with the power of social media.

May Day Directory: Occupy General Strike In Over 125 Cities

from OccupyWallStreet.org :While American corporate media has focused on yet another stale election between Wall Street-financed candidates, Occupy has been organizing something extraordinary: the first truly nationwide General Strike in U.S. history. Building on the international celebration of May Day, past General Strikes in U.S. cities like Seattle and Oakland, the recent May 1st Day Without An Immigrant demonstrations, the national general strikes in Spain this year, and the on-going student strike in Quebec, the Occupy Movement has called for A Day Without the 99% on May 1st, 2012. This in and of itself is a tremendous victory. For the first time, workers, students, immigrants, and the unemployed from over 125 U.S. cities will stand together for economic justice.

See HERE for what we believe to be the most comprehensive list yet compiled of cities where Occupy May Day events are being planned, as well as other resources. Note: This is a living document. Check back for updates!

Sunday Sermon: Gary Yourofsky

American Obscenity: Corporate CEOs make 380x the wage of the average American worker!

from Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds



The AFL-CIO ‘s Executive Paywatch website has been updated with 2011 data and easy to digest graphics that you can share easily with others.  One stand-out fact: The average CEO of an S&P 500 Index company earned a staggering 380 times the average American worker’s wage. Those same CEOs saw their compensation packages increase 13.9% in 2011.

By comparison, as you can see above, the average corporate CEO made “just” 42 times what American workers made during the “golden years” of the Reagan administration.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure these corporate CEOs, these god-men, are worth every penny they make, but this is getting to be rather untenable, don’t you think? Keep in mind that many (most) of these guys are paid in stock options that are only subject to a 15% capital gains tax when they cash out!

Via Daily Kos Labor:

The highest-paid CEO in the country was Apple’s Timothy Cook, whose total compensation was nearly $378 million. That’s more than 11,000 times the average worker’s income of $34,053. The 100th highest-paid CEO, Heinz’s W.R. Johnson, had total compensation of more than $18 million, 543 times the average worker’s income.

What we can’t know is how much CEOs make compared with the workers in their own companies; however, that’s something the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill will soon require companies to disclose. And it turns out it might well be good for companies if transparency pushed them to bring CEO pay a little more in line with average worker pay.

The cream always rises to the top, right? It might be time to update that saying, but not with metaphorical crème fraiche, more like royal jelly made by the rank and file worker bees who then have the privilege of watching a Mr. Creosote-sized queen bee ravenously devour the fruits of their labor!

It’s always fun to use Huey Long’s famous barbecue example from his Depression-era “Share the Wealth” speech in a situation like this:

Imagine that Timothy Cook was seated at one banquet table, teaming with gourmet food. A feast that would cause Caligula to blush, obviously, and one that would represent his executive pay relative to the 11,000 other people (not Apple’s mistreated Chinese factory workers who make $450 a MONTH, but average Americans making $34k a year) seated beside him at a table that is exactly the same size, but, with, relatively speaking, more meagre portions of food compared to the gentleman from Cupertino.

To be clear, I don’t have anything against Apple’s CEO, but for fuck’s sake, in the abstract, does Timothy Cook himself not see something inherently obscene about the shitty working conditions in their Chinese factories and ONE guy at the top making nearly half a billion a year? Apple Inc. has the highest value of any corporation in the history of man, but the people who are actually making the products receive a pittance for renting their lives out 12 hours a day, seven days a week while he has a take-home pay packet like that?

It goes to show, AGAIN, how absolutely correct Karl Marx was. That $400 million isn’t getting re-invested back into the factories and improving conditions for the workers in any way. It’s going to ONE GUY. ONE GUY!

Imagine how many AMERICAN JOBS Apple Inc. could afford to create—they could open computer factories with great paying jobs all across America—if the fellow at the top of the food chain there was making, oh, say only $10 million a year and the rest of it “trickled down”?

Who reading this would pity him?

The reason the rank and file workers in this country are taking home so little is because the CEOs and the stockholders are taking so much! DUH. The system is rigged. It’s not that fucking difficult to understand!

'Vegan Is Love': Children's Book By Ruby Roth Causes Controversy

from the Huntington Post:

A children's book that will be released next week is stirring up controversy among parents. It's called "Vegan is Love," and according to the publisher, is a young readers' introduction "to veganism as a lifestyle of compassion and action." The details, however, including images of animals behind bars in crowded cages and graphic passages about animal testing are being called unsuitable for children –- the book is intended for kids as young as 6-years-old.

The pro-vegan message of the book isn't in dispute. While there is debate about whether an animal-product-free diet from birth is appropriate, nutritionists (and activists including Alicia Silverstone) agree that a vegan regimen can be healthy for little kids as long as their meals include enough supplemental nutrients and proteins. That said, the tone and wording in "Vegan Is Love" has experts concerned.

Child psychologist Jennifer Hart Steen told Matt Lauer on the "Today" show this morning that, "there’s so much fear presented in the book and if you would just give it to a child as a children's book they don't understand it. So now they're just going to be afraid."

Nicole German, a registered dietitian wrote on her blog that "Vegan is Love" might scare impressionable children into becoming vegan and "without proper guidance, that child could become malnourished."

The author, Ruby Roth, is raising her 7-year-old stepdaughter, Akira, whose favorite food is kale, to be vegan. Roth told "Today" that it is not her intention to instill fear. "If it's too scary to talk about, the reality of where those pieces of meat come from, then it's certainly too scary to eat," she said. Instead, the book is supposed to encourage "compassion and action," Roth told ABC.

The book promotes a no meat, no diary diet, but also suggests that kids should boycott the zoo, the circus and aquariums because "animals belong to this earth just as we do." Hart Steen worries that the title, "Vegan is Love" can send a message to kids that, if you don't follow this lifestyle, you don’t get to feel love or "you're clearly creating hate or bad feelings."

Dr. David Katz, HuffPost blogger and director of the Yale Prevention Center supports Roth's efforts and told ABC that childhood might be "the best time to create awareness and change behavior accordingly."

I ordered it on Amazon more than a month ago, still waiting to get it for my son. We enjoyed her last book (That's Why We Don't Eat Animals: A Book About Vegans, Vegetarians, and All Living Things), although i must admit it was a bit dark for a preschooler, thinking by the title this one will make it's positive points well.

How a culture of fear thrives in attention economies, and what that means for "radical transparency" and the Zuckerberg doctrine

from BoingBoing:

Danah boyd's "The Power of Fear in Networked Publics" is a speech delivered at SXSW and Webstock New Zealand (that's where this video comes from). Danah first defines a culture of fear ("the ways in which fear is employed by marketers, politicians, technology designers [e.g., consider security narratives] and the media to regulate the public"), then shows how "attention economics" can exploit fear to bring in attention ("there is a long history of news media leveraging fear to grab attention") and how this leads fear to dominate many of our debates:

Every day, I wake up to news reports about the plague of cyberbullying. If you didn't know the data, you'd be convinced that cyberbullying is spinning out of control. The funny thing is that we have a lot of data on this topic, data dating back for decades. Bullying is not on the rise and it has not risen dramatically with the onset of the internet. When asked about bullying measures, children and teens continue to report that school is the place where the most serious acts of bullying happen, where bullying happens the most frequently, and where they experience the greatest impact. This is not to say that young people aren't bullied online; they are. But rather, the bulk of the problem actually happens in adult-controlled spaces like schools.... Online, interactions leave traces.... The scale of visibility means that fear is magnified."

And that's where her critique of "radical transparency" starts:

Increasingly, the battles over identity are moving beyond geek culture into political battles. The same technologies that force people into the open are being used to expose people who are engaged in political speech. Consider, for example, how crowdsourcing is being used to identify people in a photograph. It just so happens that these people were engaged in a political protest.

Radical transparency is particularly tricky in light of the attention economy. Not all information is created equal. People are far more likely to pay attention to some kinds of information than others. And, by and large, they're more likely to pay attention to information that causes emotional reactions. Additionally, people are more likely to pay attention to some people. The person with the boring life is going to get far less attention than the person that seems like a trainwreck. Who gets attention – and who suffers the consequences of attention – is not evenly distributed.

And, unfortunately, oppressed and marginalized populations who are already under the microscope tend to suffer far more from the rise of radical transparency than those who already have privilege. The cost of radical transparency for someone who is gay or black or female is different in Western societies than it is for a straight white male. This is undoubtedly a question of privacy, but we should also look at it through the prism of the culture of fear.

The whole paper and the video are both worth your attention. "The Power of Fear in Networked Publics".

favorite graphics of the day

10 Delightful Practical Jokes

if you do any of these let me know how it goes!



thanks, BoingBoing

THE FORTY-YEAR ITCH

from The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik

Is much of our culture really determined by things that happened four decades ago? In Comment this week, Adam Gopnik proposes a Golden Forty Year Rule:

When the new season of “Mad Men” began, just a few weeks ago, it carried with it an argument about whether the spell it casts is largely a product of its beautifully detailed early-sixties setting or whether, as Matthew Weiner, its creator, insisted, it’s not backward-looking at all but a product of character, story line, and theme. So it seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. (And the particular force of nostalgia, one should bear in mind, is not simply that it is a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you.)

To cases. In the nineteen-forties—the first decade in which all the major components of mass culture were up and running, even early television—the beloved focus of nostalgia was the innocent aughts of the early century, a time imagined as one of perky girls in long dresses and shy boys in straw hats. “Meet Me in St. Louis,” a film made in 1944 about a fair held in 1904, was perhaps the most lovable of the many forties entertainments set in the aughts, from “The Magnificent Ambersons” to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a musical made in 1948 about a song written in 1908. The nineteen-fifties saw lots of movies about the First World War—“The Seven Little Foys,” anyone?—and kicked off our Titanic romance, with “A Night to Remember.” The decade also brought the revival of the jazz of the teens, with the essentially serious music of Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton recast by middle-aged white men in straw boaters and striped jackets as something softer, called Dixieland.

Twenties nostalgia ran right through the nineteen-sixties, beginning with the 1960 TV series “The Roaring 20’s.” In 1966, the very year “Mad Men” has now arrived at, the song that won the Grammy Award for best contemporary recording wasn’t “Good Vibrations” or “Paint It, Black” but the New Vaudeville Band’s twenties megaphone number “Winchester* Cathedral.” Each of the four last great Beatles albums included a twenties-pastiche number: “When I’m Sixty Four,” “Honey Pie,” “Your Mother Should Know,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” (Indeed, though Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was supposedly taught to play “twenty years ago today,” its look comes right out of the gazebo-and-brass-band postwar lull.)

The seventies’ affection for the thirties—“The Sting,” “Paper Moon,” and so on—was one of the tonic notes of the decade, while the eighties somehow managed to give the Second World War a golden glow (“Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Empire of the Sun,” “Hope and Glory,” “Biloxi Blues”), helped along by women working on the assembly line (“Swing Shift”). In the nineties, nostalgia for the fifties took a distinctly sumptuary turn: think of the revivalist fad for Hush Puppies and Converse All Stars, or the umpteen variations that the Gap rang on its “Kerouac Wore Khakis” campaign. In “Men in Black,” a perfect piece of nineties entertainment, Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith showed how skinny ties could help defeat even the fiercest extraterrestrials.

Our own aughts arrived with the sixties as their lost Eden, right on schedule. That meant too many sixties-pastiche rock bands to mention (think only of Alex Turner, of Arctic Monkeys, sounding exactly like John Lennon), with the plangent postmodern twist that in some cases the original article was supplying its own nostalgia: there were the Stones and the Beach Boys on long stadium tours, doing their forty-year-old hits as though they were new. With the arrival of “Mad Men,” in 2007 (based on a pilot written earlier in the decade), sixties nostalgia was raised to an appropriately self-conscious and self-adoring forty-year peak.

That takes us to the current day, and, at last, to the reasons behind the rule. What drives the cycle isn’t, in the first instance, the people watching and listening; it’s the producers who help create and nurture the preferred past and then push their work on the audience. Though pop culture is most often performed by the young, the directors and programmers and gatekeepers—the suits who control and create its conditions, who make the calls and choose the players—are, and always have been, largely forty-somethings, and the four-decade interval brings us to a period just before the forty-something was born. Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories. Although the stars of “Meet Me in St. Louis” were young, and its audience old and young both, Vincente Minnelli, its director, was born in 1903, just a year before the World’s Fair he made into a paradise. Matthew Weiner, born in 1965, is the baby in his own series. (The key variable behind the Beatles’ fondness for the twenties was the man they were pleasing and teasing: their great producer and arranger, George Martin, born in 1926.)

The forty-year rule is, of course, not immutable, and its cycle carries epicycles within it: the twenty-year cycle, for instance, by which the forty-somethings recall their teen-age years, producing in the seventies a smaller wave of fifties nostalgia to dance demurely alongside the longing for the thirties. But it is the forty-years-on reproduction of a thing that most often proves more concentrated and powerful than the original. Dixieland gets played more than archival jazz; people think that con men listened to Scott Joplin in Cicero in the nineteen-thirties. In the sixties, nobody quite knew that people were smoking or drinking; they just smoked and drank, often miserably, if the novels of the time are to be believed.

And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were. It will be those stroller children’s return on our investment, and, also, of course, a revenge taken on their time. ♦

Sunday Sermon: EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT FREE MARKET CAPITALISM IS WRONG

from DangerousMinds

One of the big “sacred cows” of libertarian “free market” Capitalism is the supposed “invisible hand” of the marketplace keeping supply and demand in line with the price of a particular commodity or service.

The problem is, it’s just a myth, albeit a persistent one.

Jonathan Schlefer writes at the Harvard Business Review, that there is no evidence for the invisible hand:

One of the best-kept secrets in economics is that there is no case for the invisible hand. After more than a century trying to prove the opposite, economic theorists investigating the matter finally concluded in the 1970s that there is no reason to believe markets are led, as if by an invisible hand, to an optimal equilibrium — or any equilibrium at all. But the message never got through to their supposedly practical colleagues who so eagerly push advice about almost anything. Most never even heard what the theorists said, or else resolutely ignored it.

Of course, the dynamic but turbulent history of capitalism belies any invisible hand. The financial crisis that erupted in 2008 and the debt crises threatening Europe are just the latest evidence. Having lived in Mexico in the wake of its 1994 crisis and studied its politics, I just saw the absence of any invisible hand as a practical fact. What shocked me, when I later delved into economic theory, was to discover that, at least on this matter, theory supports practical evidence.

Adam Smith suggested the invisible hand in an otherwise obscure passage in his Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. He mentioned it only once in the book, while he repeatedly noted situations where “natural liberty” does not work. Let banks charge much more than 5% interest, and they will lend to “prodigals and projectors,” precipitating bubbles and crashes. Let “people of the same trade” meet, and their conversation turns to “some contrivance to raise prices.” Let market competition continue to drive the division of labor, and it produces workers as “stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

That’s Adam Smith talking there, about 75 years before Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto!

Just saying….

The search by classical economists for a concrete and mathematically verifiable theory of economic equilibrium continued throughout the decades, but apparently no one could ever really find much evidence for it:

Leon Walras, of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, thought he had succeeded in 1874 with his Elements of Pure Economics, but economists concluded that he had fallen far short. Finally, in 1954, Kenneth Arrow, at Stanford, and Gerard Debreu, at the Cowles Commission at Yale, developed the canonical “general-equilibrium” model, for which they later won the Nobel Prize. Making assumptions to characterize competitive markets, they proved that there exists some set of prices that would balance supply and demand for all goods. However, no one ever showed that some invisible hand would actually move markets toward that level. It is just a situation that might balance supply and demand if by happenstance it occurred. [Emphasis added].

In 1960 Herbert Scarf of Yale showed that an Arrow-Debreu economy can cycle unstably. The picture steadily darkened. Seminal papers in the 1970s, one authored by Debreu, eliminated “any last forlorn hope,” as the MIT theorist Franklin Fisher says, of proving that markets would move an economy toward equilibrium. Frank Hahn, a prominent Cambridge University theorist, sums up the matter: “We have no good reason to suppose that there are forces which lead the economy to equilibrium.”

Schlefer concludes by accusing the Federal Reserve of assuming market equilibrium would avert something like the subprime mortgage crisis—and being so wrong about it—precisely because their models incorrectly assumed equilibrium. That’s a hell of an overlooked variable! Of course when the economy did implode, the Fed responded with a flood of money and Keynesian tactics aimed at propping up the system.

But the misconceptions about the free market don’t end there. Have you heard of the “Minsky Moment”? Hyman P. Minsky? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Most orthodox economists have never heard of him, either.

Hyman Minsky is the name of a once obscure “contrarian” professor of macroeconomics who died in 1996.  A “red diaper baby” born to socialist parents in Belarus, Minsky spent the 1950s and 60s studying the causes of poverty. Throughout his entire career Minsky’s theories carried almost no weight in the field of economics. When the global economic crisis shook faith in the Capitalist system, his star began to rise. Minsky came to be regarded as “perhaps the most prescient big-picture thinker about what, exactly, we are going through” as the Boston Globe’s Stephen Mihm described him.

Minsky, Mihn wrote in 2009: “[P]redicted, decades ago, almost exactly the kind of meltdown that recently hammered the global economy.”

Minsky drew his own, far darker, lessons from Keynes’s landmark writings, which dealt not only with the problem of unemployment, but with money and banking. Although Keynes had never stated this explicitly, Minsky argued that Keynes’s collective work amounted to a powerful argument that capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. Far from trending toward some magical state of equilibrium, capitalism would inevitably do the opposite. It would lurch over a cliff.

This insight bore the stamp of his advisor Joseph Schumpeter, the noted Austrian economist now famous for documenting capitalism’s ceaseless process of “creative destruction.” But Minsky spent more time thinking about destruction than creation. In doing so, he formulated an intriguing theory: not only was capitalism prone to collapse, he argued, it was precisely its periods of economic stability that would set the stage for monumental crises.

Minsky called his idea the “Financial Instability Hypothesis.” In the wake of a depression, he noted, financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”

As people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers—what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called “Ponzi borrowers,” those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further. As these latter categories grew, the overall economy would shift from a conservative but profitable environment to a much more freewheeling system dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit.

Once that kind of economy had developed, any panic could wreck the market. The failure of a single firm, for example, or the revelation of a staggering fraud could trigger fear and a sudden, economy-wide attempt to shed debt. This watershed moment—what was later dubbed the “Minsky moment”—would create an environment deeply inhospitable to all borrowers. The speculators and Ponzi borrowers would collapse first, as they lost access to the credit they needed to survive. Even the more stable players might find themselves unable to pay their debt without selling off assets; their forced sales would send asset prices spiraling downward, and inevitably, the entire rickety financial edifice would start to collapse. Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the “real” economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system.

Sound in any way familiar?

If the “invisible hand” is just hogwash and if Minsky is right, what’s to stop the economy from imploding again?

The Liver Birds

from DangerousMinds

Originally named The Debutones, England’s The Liverbirds (aka The Liver Birds) moved from Liverpool to Hamburg, Germany in 1963 where they became a popular band on the Star-Club circuit. Although they never became big stars their contribution to rock and roll is historically significant in that they were the first serious all-girl rock band to play their own instruments and do it on the same turf as male rock n’ rollers.

“Girls with guitars? That’ll never work”. John Lennon.

Well, it did work for The Liverbirds who managed to record two albums, achieve a Top 10 hit in Germany with their single, “Diddley Daddy,” and last four years before splitting up in 1967.

Pamela Birch - guitar/vocals, Valerie Gell - guitar/vocals, Mary McGlory - bass guitar/vocals, Sylvia Saunders - drums.

from Psychorizon

Have you ever wondered, how The Beatles would have looked like, if they were women? Well, here you go: The Liverbirds.

They were a female British Rock ‘n’ Roll band from Liverpool. The four band members Pamela Birch (vocals / guitar), Valerie Gell (vocals / guitar), Mary McGlory (vocals / bass guitar) and Sylvia Saunders (drums) have been active between 1962 and 1967. They were one of very few female bands on the Merseybeat scene and one of the first rock band, which consisted only of female members.

Valerie Gell, Sylvia Saunders, singer Irene Green and guitarist Sheila McGlory founded the band in early 1962 under the name “The Debutones“. Irene Green and Sheila McGlory left the band very early on and joined other bands. They were replaced by Mary McGlory – the sister of Sheila McGlory – and Pamela Birch.

The band’s name derived from the fictional figure of the Liver Bird, the Tower of the Liver Building, which is the symbol of their native Liverpool.

The Liverbirds achieved more commercial success in Germany than in their homeland. Early in their career, they followed in the footsteps of colleagues such as The Beatles and Rory Storm & the Hurricanes. In May 1964 the four girls first appeared in Hamburgs legendary “Star Club” as “the female Beatles” from Liverpool. There they were one of the top attractions and released two albums and several singles. One of these singles, a cover of Bo Diddley’s “Diddley Daddy”, climbed to number five on the German charts. In 1967, the band broke up, but still inspired lots of young rock musicians in the world for years to come.

Kitintale skate park, Uganda.

Photography by Yann Gross

thanks for the reminder, Sean Bonner

Dick Clark w/ RunDMC & Jam Master Jay (1985)

Believe it or not, Dick Clark, when we all met him, was incredibly cool.

R.I.P.

The photo above was taken backstage, just after Run-DMC's 1st ever performance (and in fact the 1st Hip-Hop performance ever) on Dick Clark's American Bandstand.

Below is another photo I took, of L.L. Cool J a couple of years later,


And here's a classic shot of Dick Clark, Run DMC, Jam Master Jay, Rick Rubin, Bill Adler and Russell Simmons taken that same 1st time in 1985:



* thanks to Bill Adler (Hip-Hop's O.G. publicist and archivist) for digging these out of his own files quicker than i could find them in mine!

Doing Well for Others

from Vans - Off The Wall TV

"A look into the humanitarian side of today's most celebrated action sport athletes, musicians, artists and foundations. A raw and transparent conversation of today's shocking realities and potential solutions."

In church you pass a basket to collect money to keep the building lights on.
In alcoholics anonymous you pass a can to collect money to keep the coffee fresh.
A musician passes a hat keeping his passion alive.
A homeless man holds a cup hoping for handouts to survive.

All of the containers are filled or empty based on the compassion and generosity of others. Today, more than ever there is a need for people to become aware of the issues at hand and become pro-active in fighting for change. The opportunities to be selfless and contribute are endless and therefore the large bucket is passed.

Directed by Eliot Rausch, an award winning director for Best Documentary on Vimeo.

Here's episode 3 from season 2 as told by our friend Henry:




check out other episodes HERE

Ian MacKaye turned 50 Yesterday!

Proud to say my best friend in the world, Ian MacKaye, joined the club I joined last month. We're fucking 50 years old!

INCREDIBLE!

here's a few of my favorite Ian pix:






Here's a few great videos of Ian over the years:











Here's to 50 more!

GEORGE WASHINGTON SIGNED THE FIRST HEALTH INSURANCE MANDATE!

from Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds:

Medical insurance mandates are nothing new, as Einer Elhauge, a professor at Harvard Law Schoo, explains at The New Republic:

In making the legal case against Obamacare’s individual mandate, challengers have argued that the framers of our Constitution would certainly have found such a measure to be unconstitutional. Nevermind that nothing in the text or history of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause indicates that Congress cannot mandate commercial purchases. The framers, challengers have claimed, thought a constitutional ban on purchase mandates was too “obvious” to mention. Their core basis for this claim is that purchase mandates are unprecedented, which they say would not be the case if it was understood this power existed.

But there’s a major problem with this line of argument: It just isn’t true. The founding fathers, it turns out, passed several mandates of their own. In 1790, the very first Congress—which incidentally included 20 framers—passed a law that included a mandate: namely, a requirement that ship owners buy medical insurance for their seamen. This law was then signed by another framer: President George Washington. That’s right, the father of our country had no difficulty imposing a health insurance mandate.

Elhauge joined an amicus brief supporting the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. You can (and should) read his entire piece at TNR.

This brings to light some extraordinary “lost history” that the Reichwing needs to consider as they hone their threadbare, tissue-thin arguments to deny healthcare to their fellow man…