Sophianotloren

On August 28, 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place in Washington, DC. This famous event is of course most often remembered for Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, or more specifically the 3 lines of it that conservatives have decided justify their own positions. But even among liberals and civil rights activists what is often forgotten or downplayed in the memory of this event is the central role economic issues played in it. Most of the economic agenda of the 1960s civil rights movement in fact is barely remembered. That’s a huge problem because not only were African-Americans fighting for the opportunity for economic advancement as well as to end segregation and for the vote but also because it presents an incomplete history which takes away part of the reason this movement so challenged American life.

First, it’s worth noting that the original idea for the March on Washington came from a union. In 1941, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters president A. Philip Randolph called for a march on Washington to protest hiring discrimination in defense plants as the nation was gearing up for World War II. Like most issues concerning minorities, FDR didn’t really care but he didn’t want the bad publicity so he caved and ordered the end of hiring discrimination on government defense contracts. This opened up a lot of jobs to African-Americans during World War II and helped build the black middle class that would do much to push forward the freedom struggle after the war.

Randolph was still active in the movement in 1963, although more as a senior figure than a major player. But he, Bayard Rustin, and others revived the idea of the march to push John F. Kennedy to do something on civil rights, which he had been frustratingly reluctant to do. Rustin was hired to organize the event. Rustin had been a communist in the past and that greatly worried anti-communists like the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins (who did not even want to make a statement about the death of W.E.B. DuBois at the March because he hated him for his communism but who did when he realized Randolph would do it and it would be favorable), but he had played a role in the planning for the 1941 march and he had Randolph’s trust. Of course Strom Thurmond used Rustin’s role to paint the entire march as a communist front and J. Edgar Hoover rejected a report showing no significant communist infiltration into the civil rights movement, but this was just standard fare from the white supremacist American power structure.

The NAACP and most importantly Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference agreed to the idea while the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were happy to use the opportunity to take on Kennedy publicly and directly for his inaction. The civil rights movement was a diverse movement with a lot of different groups and aims. That meant some careful alliance building was needed. But the different groups did come up with specific goals to fight for which included not only the passage of civil rights legislation, but a $2 minimum wage ($15.60 today), federal employment law banning discrimination in public or private hiring, and the expansion of the Fair Labor Standards Act to include agricultural workers, domestic workers, and the rest of the workers excluded when the law passed in 1938.

During the March itself, Bayard Rustin read all these demands on live television, which may be the only time a list of labor demands has received that kind of coverage. A. Philip Randolph led off the speeches by saying, “We are the advanced guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom” and that “the sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of a human personality” in arguing for housing reform.

Playing a key role in the March on Washington was United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther. Organized labor often has a bad reputation on civil rights during this era, mostly for a good reason. Reuther is an important exception. This doesn’t mean he could instantly turn UAW locals into beacons of racial harmony. Turns out that racial solidarity has a lot more power with a lot more people than class solidarity and UAW officials found that out the hard way when they tried to push civil rights on the shop floor. But that’s an issue for another entry in this series. Reuther provided key labor support for the event. The AFL-CIO paid for a lot of the infrastructure of making this event happen, including the buses to get people to Washington and the UAW paid for the sound system that would blast King’s speech into history. This all happened over the opposition of George Meany, who did not care much about civil rights before this and who opposed an official federation endorsement of the march. But the AFL-CIO did officially support the Kennedy civil rights bill. It is said that Meany however was so moved by Randolph’s speech at the March that he created the A. Philip Randolph Institute to promote African-Americans in the labor movement.

Reuther stated in his speech, “And the job question is crucial because we will not solve education or housing or public accommodations as long as millions of American Negroes are treated as second-class economic citizens and denied jobs.” Reuther knew that he had a friend in King because even as a lot of internationals and locals resisted the civil rights movement, King consistently supported the progressive causes of labor and frequently spoke to labor audiences. And of course as King went on, he became more and more focused on economic justice as a centerpiece of the larger freedom struggle, to the point of dying while supporting the Memphis sanitation workers strike in 1968.

While it’s difficult to measure the precise impact of the march on the political process so soon before Kennedy’s death, we can pretty clearly say it led to the inclusion of the Fair Employment Practices clause into what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Also please notice how little a role Martin Luther King has played in this post. The March on Washington was not all about MLK, although that in no ways diminishes his importance to the movement or the “I Have a Dream” speech. But it was a lot more than one man giving one speech.

This is the 156th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style

Academic paper from Bethge Lab shows method of recreating various artistic styles using neural networks and applying them onto photographs:

In fine art, especially painting, humans have mastered the skill to create unique visual experiences through composing a complex interplay between the content and style of an image. Thus far the algorithmic basis of this process is unknown and there exists no artificial system with similar capabilities. However, in other key areas of visual perception such as object and face recognition near-human performance was recently demonstrated by a class of biologically inspired vision models called Deep Neural Networks. Here we introduce an artificial system based on a Deep Neural Network that creates artistic images of high perceptual quality. The system uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images. Moreover, in light of the striking similarities between performance-optimised artificial neural networks and biological vision, our work offers a path forward to an algorithmic understanding of how humans create and perceive artistic imagery. 

Academic paper can be found here

At Slate, Jacob Brogan responds to the Duke freshman who has made the headlines for speaking out on his refusal to read Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, on the grounds that it is “pornographic”:

Sex becomes pornographic when we detach it from its living, breathing context…He only sees those brief images as pornographic because he refuses to consider the fuller experience of LGBTQ existence that Bechdel maps in Fun Home. In effect, Grasso reduces homosexuality to a few sex acts, and then declares that showing those sex acts is unacceptable.

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phoebe-tonkin:

During the filming of Gone with the Wind, Vivien Leigh was in make-up at seven in the morning and often stayed until midnight. Ann Rutherford, who played Scarlett’s sister Carreen, said of Leigh’s dedication: “She burned herself, she was such a hard worker. We watched her lose weight. In a break she’d take her costume off and the wardrobe girls would put more seams in what once had been a tightly fitted dress.”

foldan-blaed:

River beneath the old abbey ruins 

ars-auro-prior:

Young & old - self-portraits by famous artist at diffrent ages

The best of all- Rembrandt! 

avgustaoktavia:

The eye of a marble statue from Herculaneum, with surviving paint. Roman before 79 AD.

lesfressange89:

                                              Stairways to Heaven

The National Security Law Journal has published a notable contribution to legal thought. The title, “Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict as an Islamist Fifth Column,” does not quite do justice to the nature of the content. The author, West Point professor William C. Bradford, sketches out a theory that will surely make you want to subscribe to his drool-covered mimeographed newsletter:

Part I of this Article develops the claim that CLOACA [“critical law of armed conflict academy,” and yes this is what passes for wit here –ed.] is waging a PSYOP campaign to break American political will by convincing Americans their nation is fighting an illegal and unnecessary war against Islam that it must abandon to reclaim moral legitimacy. Part II offers explanations as to why this is so. Part III examines consequences of suffering this trahison des professeurs to exist. Part IV sketches recommendations to mitigate this ―Fifth Column‖ and defeat Islamism. Part V anticipates and addresses criticisms. Part VI concludes by warning that, without a loyal and intellectually honest law of armed conflict academy, the West is imperiled and faces defeat in the ongoing Fourth Generation War against Islamism.

He proceeds to argue that ISIS’s tactics aren’t so much something to be fought against as a model:

As just desert, Islamists should be anathematized as modern-day outlaws shorn of rights and liable to attack by all means and methods at all places and times and to judicial execution post-interrogation. If law is only legitimate if predicated upon history, values, and survival imperatives and “[n]o society can afford . . . inflexible rules concerning those steps on which its ultimate fate . . . depends,” then outlawry of Islamists is an efficient means to hasten their demise and the sole reciprocal arrangement possible with a foe that already applies this regime to Western “infidels.” The West must shatter Islamists‘ political will and eradicate those who do not renounce Islamism. Commitment to rule of law is not only an end but also a means to an end. Every rule, doctrine, and policy must endure a rigorous justification process whereby its retention in the LOAC canon is predicated upon its contribution to victory.

And, now, the punchline. What should be done with less authoritarian faculty?

A more proactive method to suppress disloyal radicals is to fire them. Islamists are heartened by their scholarly output and regard their presence within the academy as proof of American weakness and of the inevitability of Islamist victory; stripping tenure from LOACA members who express palpable anti-American bias, give aid and comfort to Islamists, or otherwise engage in academic misprision and corruption will deny the CLOACA Fifth Column the most important institutional terrain in the defensive battle. Although the question of how precisely to demarcate the zones of loyalty and permissible dissent remains open, suffering Islamist sympathizers and propagandists to inhabit LOACA and lend their combat power to the enemy is self-defeating.

CLOACA members whose scholarship, teaching, or service substantiates the elements of criminal offenses can be prosecuted In concert with federal and state law enforcement agencies, Congress can investigate linkages between CLOACA and Islamism to determine “the extent, character, and objects of un- American propaganda activities in the U.S. [that] attack the . . . form of government . . . guaranteed by our Constitution.” Because CLOACA output propagandizes for the Islamist cause, CLOACA would arguably be within the jurisdiction of a renewed version of the House Un-American Activities Committee (Committee on Internal Security) charged with investigating propaganda conducive to an Islamist victory and the alteration of the U.S. form of government this victory would necessarily entail.

“Material support” includes “expert advice or assistance” in training Islamist groups to use LOAC in support of advocacy and propaganda campaigns, even where experts providing such services lack intent to further illegal Islamist activity. CLOACA scholarship reflecting aspirations for a reconfigured LOAC regime it knows or should know will redound to Islamists‘ benefit, or painting the United States as engaged in an illegal war, misrepresents LOAC and makes “false claims” and uses “propaganda” in a manner that constitutes support and training prohibited by the material support statute. Culpable CLOACA members can be tried in military courts: Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice provides that “[a]ny person who . . . aids, or attempts to aid, the enemy with arms, ammunition, supplies, money, or other things . . . shall suffer death or . . . other punishments as a court-martial or military commission may direct;” the Rule for Court Martial 201 creates jurisdiction over any individual for an Article 104 offense.

The article is not merely an unintentional parody of Yooism but also an excellent unintentional parody of the contemporary law review. A substantively insane argument — “there are too many liberal professors today. Please send 40 to Gitmo. I am not a crackpot” — with barely enough content to sustain a 500-word blog post at a fourth-tier winger site is distended to 95 pages with countless superfluous footnotes.

The article has been repudiated by the editors, but the fact that it got published in the first place remains remarkable. In conclusion, that letter to the editor of a student newspaper proves that all liberals hate free speech.

Probably the most underreported story in American labor right now is what’s going on steel. There are more unionized steel jobs in the U.S. than you’d think and a lot of those union contracts are expiring on September 1. That means a lot of labor strife, with companies seeking to destroy their unions. One of the most egregious cases of union-busting right now is Allegheny Technologies Inc (ATI), which has locked out its workers in order to force enormous contract concessions for the workers to keep their jobs.*

ATI still wants to run. They just want to bring American labor down to Bangladeshi working levels. No, seriously. ATI is actually advertising on Craig’s List for scabs. What would the working conditions be like?

Must be able to lift up to 50 lbs. and work in a standing position for entire shift (12 hours/day) in a high heat/temperature manufacturing environment. Workweek is 84 hours/week.

Previous experience in a metal manufacturing or processing facility is required. All positions require working for unknown duration and are temporary. THIS IS A LABOR DISPUTE SITUATION – EMPLOYEES WILL BE TRANSPORTED ACROSS A PICKET LINE.

They are paying a lot of money for this, which would last precisely as long as the lockout goes on. But 84 hour work weeks? That’s 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, of hard hard work. And given this is Pittsburgh with its still powerful union culture, I’d guess that if they do get workers, and they probably will given the wages and poor choices for working-class people, they will be coming from outside the region by and large.

There are 2000 USW members out of work right now thanks to a company that wants to repeal decades of union victories. There is going to be a large rally in Pittsburgh to support the workers on September 1 at noon. There will rallies the same day for locked out steelworkers in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. I plan on being in Pittsburgh for this. Hope you can support these workers if you are near one of the four locations.

*Let’s face it–the reason this is so underreported is that while the United Steelworkers is a really good union, their communications strategy with the general public is significantly behind a lot of other large internationals. Get with the social media USW! I should be knowing about this stuff as it is happening. I found out about it on Tuesday and only because I was with labor people in Pittsburgh. Even in the labor media, there’s been very little coverage.

Better, cheaper and easier than solar windows, this newly-patented flexible coating can be applied to existing glass and plastic surfaces, turning any aperture into a source of electricity. With this technology on all of its surfaces, buildings can generate up to 50 times more solar energy per structure.

Developed by SolarWindow Technologies, this inexpensive approach has a payback time of as little as one year (far less than the 5 to 10 years of traditional solar approaches. As the technology evolves and expands, it is only a matter of time until every window draws energy from light.

By adding it to the inside surface of a window, the process protects the tech from exterior sources of damage and simplifies application. The solution is also lightweight and adaptable, making it easier to retrofit existing architecture without cost-intensive shipping or labor-intensive installation processes.

These sensitive photovoltaics can draw power from lunar energy and artificial lights in addition to the sun’s rays. Their relatively low price per unit reinforces the sensibility of simply putting them on all sides of a structure, including those with less natural light.

Effectively invisible wires draw electricity from the exposed surfaces while a uniform and architecturally-neutral color tinting process allows for a variety of of looks and degrees of transparency.

This new substance can be deployed as a sticky film on a surface or potentially even painted on as a liquid. The organic (but secretive) constituent source materials of the core polymer include common elements such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen.

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Ingrid Bergman in ‘The Greatest Love,’ aka ‘Europe ’51’ (1952), Italy, directed by Roberto Rossellini (image courtesy Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica / Photofest, © Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica)

Those who regard film not merely as a diversion or an industry but foremost as an art are likely to identify the primary movers of this art — its artists — as the directors, the so-called auteurs. This veneration of the artists behind the camera doesn’t always suggest an undervaluation of those in front of it; nonetheless, it’s difficult to ignore the judgment passed on acting by many of the very auteurs that this perspective so prizes: Alfred Hitchcock commonly referred to his actors as “meat-puppets”; Robert Bresson shaped his performers into mechanical, impassive “models”; Stanley Kubrick’s unrelenting perfectionism often reduced his actors to punching bags. For a certain kind of director, the best performances occur unbeknownst to the performers themselves, as a result of the directorial suppression of the bread and butter of acting talent: the very instinct “to perform,” in the sense of conveying a bodily pageantry of affect and sentiment, transforming the features on one’s face into little sensitized machines of subtle or extravagant emotion. In a certain version of film history (one among many), the actor’s art is all but ceded to that of the director.

Few actors have given the lie to this narrative better than Ingrid Bergman (whose 100th birthday would have been today). And this is so not merely because her acting style was largely inimical to the melodramatic staginess that repulsed the aforementioned filmmakers. Bergman was a vital, daring force both in the films in which she starred and — through her bold initiative, forging collaborations and instigating projects time and again — in the course of the history of cinema as a whole. Bergman is an actress who strains the familiar vocabulary used to evaluate, analyze, and wax over acting in film. On the occasion of the centenary of her birth, both the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and BAMcinématek are holding retrospectives of her work.

Bergman in ‘The Bells of St. Mary’s’ (1945), USA, directed by Leo McCarry (image courtesy The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive) (click to enlarge)

Early in her American acting career, after leaving Stockholm for New York in 1939, Bergman was cast in several morally upstanding roles of chaste and pure character — a kind of Scandinavian milkmaid. Or a Scandinavian nun, as in Bells of St. Mary (1945), which cast Bergman in the role of a twentysomething matriarch, lightly playing up her austere northern European countenance — her high-arched eyebrows and taught, controlled visage, all framed by her black nun’s habit — while still allowing wrinkles of her naturally playful nature to peek through.

In the early 1940s, Bergman was invariably better than the films in which she starred, often singlehandedly supplying their tonal backbone by dint of her performances — from her rough-hewn, blistering momentum in For Whom The Bells Tolls (1943) to her distracted, vaguely haunted inertia in Gaslight (1944). In the documentary Ingrid Bergman Remembered, Bergman’s daughter Pia Lindstrom shares that her mother considered many of her earlier American roles somewhat limited or unchallenging. The story of Bergman’s career from the end of the Second World War onward can be seen as a restless effort to remedy this, to feel out the boundaries of her craft and also, by extension, of herself.

Bergman in ‘Joan of Arc’ (1948), USA, directed by Victor Fleming. (image courtesy CBS)

It was a coup for Bergman to realize her longtime desire to play Joan of Arc, doing so in Victor Flemming’s epic (1948) after years of lobbying, ultimately even staking her own funds to finance the film. But it was her missive to Italian director Roberto Rossellini, written in 1949, that changed her life — and film — forever. The controversy ignited by this fateful union is well known: her extramarital affair with Rossellini provoked the American public — and, astonishingly, members of the US Senate — to declare Bergman a persona non grata (she would be forced to settle her divorce from her husband in Mexico, rather than stateside). This moral storm is pointedly summed up by film scholar Dina Iordanova: “The outrage of a woman seeking affection, plainly and unequivocally, did not go down well in 1950.”

Lost in all the noise, in any case, was the extreme daring of a glamorous actress (only a couple years removed from topping Hollywood’s star ladder) forsaking respectability and security to work in far homelier conditions (around active volcanoes, city slums, and the sun-bleached ruins of Pompeii) with a director whose rough and ready methods couldn’t be further removed from the micromanaged, superintended studio projects she’d known in Hollywood. Rossellini’s method was stark and minimal, but highly poetically attuned; his technique was loose and improvisatory, manufacturing just the right degree of indeterminateness to seize hold of those singular chance moments that constitute the pinnacle of cinematic art. It was precisely this degree of freedom that allowed Bergman to come into her own. She was the anchoring presence in the five films she made with Rossellini, but above all in Stromboli, Europa ’51, and Voyage to Italy (1950–54), perfectly channeling with her whole being the paroxysms of love, faith, and conscience that constitute the exceptional drama of these three.

Bergman in Stromboli (1950), Italy/USA, directed by Roberto Rossellini (image courtesy The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive)

Watching the films she made with Rossellini, one gets the impression that there is deeply embedded in Bergman something like an inscrutable force, something that compels the films in which she stars to simply be otherwise in a way that is emphatically all her own. Bergman’s presence influences and steers her films like a propulsive motor, without ever overwhelming them or stealing the scene, as virtuoso actors like James Dean and others were wont to do. So many of her peers relied on deploying an empty aroma, a swoon, a swagger, an airy suggestiveness, a brooding or a luxurious éclat, and called this acting. Bergman, on the other hand, both internalized her character’s dramas deeply in her psyche and wore them gently, on the surface of her mien — their desires, fears, hopes, and petty whims. Even their illnesses, as she did memorably in Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949), embodying perfectly the glazed, nervous stupor of a fallen bourgeoisie besieged by alcoholism. There is something about the way her eyes radiate a fierce intelligence that was capable of conveying such a striking restlessness. In these roles, her physiognomy becomes a revelation of the intense traversal of a path — be it philosophical, religious, romantic, or convalescent in nature.

From left, Liv Ullmann (as Eva) and Ingrid Bergman (as Charlotte) in ‘Autumn Sonata’ (1978), Sweden / France / West Germany, written and directed by Ingmar Bergman (image courtesy New World Pictures / Photofest, © New World Pictures) (click to enlarge)

In addition to her unique anchoring presence, this concentrated force of hers, Bergman also possessed an intrinsic foreignness — a versatility that stretched her intensity, allowing it to maneuver and breathe. It was not simply because of her generic European sensibility that she played all kinds of roles and nationalities: German playgirl turned spy (Notorious), Polish countess (Elena and Her Men), Spanish partisan  (For Whom the Bell Tolls), French saint (both Joan of Arc films), Latvian refugee (Stromboli), English domestic (The Inn of the Sixth Happiness), and Jewish politician (A Woman Called Golda). In Elena and Her Men (1956), Bergman exhibited a buoyant, joking side, playing the romantic interest in a magical vaudeville, while still managing to bring the character back to earth owing to the warm earnestness of her brow. In Autumn Sonata (1978) she plays the stark opposite: a wooden, domineering presence, coolly presiding over her onscreen daughter like a tenebrous monument that, for all its hardness, eventually evaporates upon being touched.

In early October the New York Film Festival will screen Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words (2015), a film composed of letters, diary extracts, memories of her children and friends, and moments selected from thousands of feet of Super-8 and 16mm footage that Bergman shot over the years. The film is, in effect, a self-portrait that acts like a personal coda to a lifetime dedicated to performance — but also, behind and beyond her occupation, a life, and an exceptional one.

Bergman in ‘Gaslight’ (1944), USA, directed by George Cukor (image courtesy The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive)

Ingrid Bergman: A Centennial Celebration runs at the Museum of Modern Art (11 W 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan) from August 29 through September 10. Ingrid Bergman at BAM runs at BAM Rose Cinemas (Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn) from September 12–29. Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words will play at the New York Film Festival (Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, Upper West Side, Manhattan) on October 5 and 6.

magnass:

star trek + guide to troubled birds

“My doctor told me to stop climbing mountains so now I just climb the small ones.”

(Tehran, Iran)

The Kenyon Review. Mundo Nuevo. The Paris Review.

Check out whether you’ve been unknowingly colluding with secret agents whilst reading your favorite lit mags. Patrick Iber writes, “The CIA became a major player in intellectual life during the Cold War—the closest thing that the US government had to a Ministry of Culture.” (The Rumpus would like to state that we are miffed to be excluded from this list.)

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loverofbeauty:

Herbert List (1903 - 1975):   Palazzo Orsini, Bomarzo, Italy

Setting aside her pathetic racial resentment, what’s striking about SPD officer Cynthia Whitlatch’s account of her unjustified arrest of William Wingate is that even if we take her self-serving account entirely at face value, it paints a clear picture of an officer unfit for duty:

Murphy noted that Whitlatch admitted she “did not see Mr. Wingate swing his golf club at the police car and hit the stop sign; instead, she admits that she only saw movement out of the corner of her eye and heard a noise, leading her to assume he swung at her car and hit the stop sign… The Named Employee observed Mr. Wingate look at her with a furrowed brow and assumed that he was purposefully directing an ‘angry’ look at her.”

Whitlatch seemed fixated on Wingate’s alleged furrowed brow, which she said she could see through her rearview mirror as she drove away from Pike and 11th. She said she knew he was glaring at her because he was angry.

Her patrol car’s dashcam video shows that when Whitlatch confronts Wingate at an intersection one block away, Wingate appears to have no idea who she was or why she is asking him to drop his golf club, which he was using as a cane.

 

Ku Klux Klan member, Tennessee, 1868

This is a good piece summarizing the one area of U.S. history that the National Park Service has done a terrible job commemorating, which is, not surprisingly, Reconstruction. The NPS does a really commendable job of remembering the American past, especially given its increasingly limited resources spread out over increasing numbers of parks. But Reconstruction is a major gap. The first reason is obvious–that for so long the popular historical interpretation of the period was one most popularly told in Birth of a Nation. But this open white supremacy was always challenged by African-Americans and in recent decades the popular memory has shifted. Except among conservative white people, which still means memory of the period is extremely charged. The NPS is moving toward some new sites that would remember the brief, aborted attempt to create something like a racial democracy in the post-Civil War period. What has to happen now that did not happen in 2003 when the last time an effort to create a Reconstruction site took place is to not allow the Confederate heritage organizations to have a seat at the table. This is the equivalent of allowing Neo-Nazi organizations to have a role in deciding on official historical remembrance of the Holocaust.

I do believe we will see, at the very least, Obama simply name a Reconstruction-era National Monument before he leaves office. A congressional bill would be preferable because it would show that there is a broader understanding of what Reconstruction is really about but given the rise of radical white supremacist Republicanism in the last decade, this feels unlikely to me. Moreover, I am concerned that the NPS is still bringing representatives of the Sons of Confederate Veterans into meetings. Why? They should be excluded entirely. They are never going to agree and don’t have a legitimate viewpoint to begin with.

Installation view of “Les Mauvais Joueurs” (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

In 1924, competitive chess players in Paris founded the World Chess Federation, the first international governing chess organization. Along with imposing a common code on the game to better regulate it, the Federation also adopted the Staunton chess set to use in all competitions, helping to popularize the pieces that we consider standard today. At Endless Editions‘ Chinatown gallery space, the exhibition Les Mauvais Joueurs by Canadian artists Claire Burelli and Pierre Chaumont explores ways to disrupt the standardization of the chess set and questions the consequences of a lost familiar language.

The centerpiece of the show is a chessboard that reinterprets the Staunton set, with Chaumont and Burelli each creating 16 pieces of the opposing black and white teams. Chaumont redesigned the black set: he first lathed, then hand carved the wooden works into unique chess pieces to reference those that proliferated from different cultures before the game’s look was standardized. Mixed into the lot are a Japanese bishop, flat and inscribed like a toppled headstone; a Mongolian pawn in the form of a crouched rabbit; and a tall, slender, Islamic rook. While Chaumont’s set looks towards history, Burelli’s white one instead updates the game with modern technology, with all the pieces 3D-printed into white columns and marked with unicode characters that represent their different roles, as read by a computer.

Pierre Chaumont, “Useless,” (2015) (courtesy the artist)(click to enlarge)

These transformations introduce refreshing visuals — and in the case of Chaumont’s, slip in a slice of history and culture — to a familiar game; but they also reveal how we rely on chess’s appearance, which in turn indicates function. Entering a match without prior comprehension of the meaning behind these new substitutions renders one completely helpless; unless you have a fluent handling of both Chaumont’s cultural pieces and Burelli’s programming language, any faith you have in yourself as a player on the offense and on the defense is shattered. The game, which stands, pre-arranged, in the middle of the gallery, invites play, but those who attempt to do so are also set up to lose. Les Mauvais Joueurs — French for “sore losers” — makes its players accept the fate of the game and face the limits of their knowledge.

As an extension of the chessboard, a series of prints on the surrounding gallery walls further explore and tweak the conventions of chess. The artists, each contributing one-half of the images, play with the viewers’ understanding of codes once more, inverting our familiarity with the show’s language of color: the images are hung so they alternate like the board’s squares — one of the game’s remaining constants — but while Chaumont’s chess pieces claim the color black and Burelli’s, white, his prints are framed in white and hers, black. Again, Chaumont’s work concerns the historic; his images illustrate Roger Caillois’s six characteristics that describe play, as outlined in the introduction of the sociologist’s 1961 book, Man, Play and Games. One such signifier, “Useless,” for example, is a print of three pieces which appear as actual tokens but are actually manufactured from two different ones, stripping them entirely of their assigned functions. For her part, Burelli warps the history of chess with contemporary tools, digitally glitching decades-old photographs she found online of momentous chess matches between supercomputers and humans (who failed to win, like the gallery’s visitors will). One print, “Looser,” a landscape of rainbow-colored, fragmented shapes and lines, hints at its original image of a Vladimir Kramnik vs. Deep Fritz contest only through a section recognizable as Kramnik’s back. Any attempt at recognition is once again thwarted in these images — this time, through the disguise of narratives.

Like a chess game itself, Les Mauvais Joueurs has logic and order guiding both its content as well as its structures of creation and display. For a show that so firmly adheres to self-created regulation, it could have fallen flat from a boxing-in of ideas; but this creation of a specific visual language not only stresses that recognition depends on a shared comprehension but also reveals that room for creativity exists in even the most established of mores.

Installation view of “Les Mauvais Joueurs”

Detail of 3d-printed chess pieces by Claire Burelli

Detail of carved chess pieces by Pierre Chaumont

Pierre Chaumont, “Separated” (2015) (courtesy the artist)

Claire Burelli, “Try Again” (2015) (courtesy the artist)

Claire Burelli, “Total Wreck” (2015) (courtesy the artist)

Claire Burelli, “Looser” (2015) (courtesy the artist)

Claire Burelli, “Failure” (2015) (courtesy the artist)

Les Mauvais Joueurs continues at Endless Editions (191 Henry Street, Chinatown, Manhattan) through September 3.

We like the fans from Dortmund.

krxs10:

Wiz Khalifa Violently Arrested For Legally Riding Hovercraft At LAX

Rapper Wiz Khalifa was slammed to the ground by 7 grown police men and arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport on Saturday after he refused to get off his hoverboard.

“Haven’t been slammed and cuffed in a while. That was fun,” he tweeted, along with a photo and video of the incident. 

He also posted a video to Instagram in which over three officers can be seen holding him to the ground. The officers repeatedly tell Khalifa, whose legal name is Cameron Thomaz, to “stop resisting” as he responds, “I’m not resisting.”

Police say he was resisting arrest but the Video shows differently. Several news stations have tried to reach the airport for comments but have so far been ignored.

Source / Video

#StayWoke

Tattoo Hand 3D Horror motif 

weissesrauschen:

Ohne Titel von katarina šoškić

Start a fire with a water bottle. Use glycerine to make a bottle disappear. Create weird dancing blobs with cornstarch and water. Marvel at water droplets sizzling in a hot pan. Poke pencils through a water-filled ziplock bag without the water leaking. This video has a total of ten cool things you can try at home. It's also one of the rare YouTube videos that doesn't require skipping ahead 20% to get to the interesting part.

The horrible killing of the Virginia TV crew has once again shown that a) gun violence is inherently political, b) that the National Rifle Association is a front organization for murderers, and c) that we need gun control, which of course won’t happen. But it’s also a reminder of how common violence at the workplace. Errol Lewis:

A more fruitful discussion worth having is about the scourge of workplace violence, which the killings of Parker and Ward certainly was. According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a federal agency, while workplace violence has dropped in recent years, it is still startlingly frequent. Nearly a decade ago, according to the agency, 20 workers were murdered every week. A more recent report shows the tide of violence declining, but as of 2009, 521 people were killed on the job and 572,000 non-fatal violent crimes took place, including rape, robbery and assault.

That averages out to more than 10 lives lost every week. Many of the tales are grisly: As CNN pointed out last fall, a fired UPS employee in Alabama shot two former colleagues to death before killing himself; a laid-off worker in Oklahoma went to his old plant and beheaded the first person he saw; and a traffic controller in Illinois set fire to his workplace and slit his throat.

And all those happened in a single week.

But there’s more because a sadly not surprising amount of this workplace violence is directed at women, as was the case this week. Dan Keating:

Many people work at dangerous heights, or with deadly chemicals or crushing equipment. But, as the gruesome killing of reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward reminded us Wednesday, murder happens surprisingly often on the job. Out of nearly 4,600 workplace deaths in 2013, 9 percent were caused by homicides, according to the census of workplace deaths by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’s a pattern that disproportionately affects women. After car accidents, homicide is the most likely way for women to die at work, representing 21 percent of workplace deaths. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to die many other ways. Murders represent 8 percent of workplace deaths for men, preceded by car accidents, falls and contact with objects and equipment.

…

The murder threat for women is different. Both sexes die most often at the hands of robbers, and both also murdered at about the same rate by co-workers. But more than a third of women murdered at work are killed by boyfriends, spouses, exes or other relatives. For men, that category of killer is almost zero.

“When women are at work, their exes always know where to find them, don’t they?” said security expert Chris E. McGoey in a telephone interview Wednesday.

The 2015 AFL-CIO Death on the Job Report has more about these issues as well:

Workplace violence is another way that the national epidemic of gun violence affects all of us and it gives organized labor an entry into pushing for rational gun policies. I don’t doubt of course that advocating for gun control would irritate a good number of union members for which gun identification is more meaningful than class identification, but cutting back on the opportunities for gun violence is the right thing for working Americans.