Sophianotloren

CHICAGO — It was a broiling Midwestern day, the kind Chicago is famous for. A huge portion of the city was down at the waterfront, taking in the spectacle of the annual Air and Water Show, but on the deep west side of town, another kind of gathering was in progress, on the stretch of Sacramento Street that borders Cook County Jail (CCJ).

This massive facility houses approximately 9,000 inmates on any given day, a population which draws about half its number from the surrounding residential neighborhoods. The 96-acre campus sits directly across the street from single-family homes with reasonably maintained front yards — and views of long stretches of chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire and hemming in the tired, monolithic correctional facility. What, one wonders, does a view like that do to the psychic airspace of a neighborhood?

Designer and activist Landon Brown wondered, too. That’s why he teamed up with local artist, activist, and 96 Acres founder Maria Gaspar to stage the event last weekend on Sacramento Street. “PARK: 96 Acres” crowdsourced dozens of black, brown, and white cars and their drivers, who were invited to park along Sacramento Street facing the jail. Brown, who often works with dynamic forms of data visualization, structured the call for cars to roughly reflect the racial demographics of the incarcerated population at CCJ, making a flattened pie chart along the line of the street — in essence, “amplifying a simple statistic with heavy connotations,” he explained. Gaspar’s organization, which she considers less a nonprofit and more a kind of administrative support system for her social art practice, has worked since 2013 to create art experiences that reflect on and interact with the presence of the jail in the West Chicago and Little Village neighborhoods, where she grew up. Gaspar can recall her first visit to the jail in sixth grade, as part of a “Scared Straight” program. “The guards kept talking to us about cleanliness,” she said. “It was confusing.”

She’s not the only one with personal recollections of CCJ. Over the airwaves of the radio station Vocalo (90.7 FM), interspersed with B.B. King’s 1970 performance Live in Cook County Jail, ”PARK” broadcast residents on the street sharing their stories about the jail in real time. “Hi, I’m Jennifer Gonzales, and my boyfriend has been there since November of 2013,” said one woman. “As a parent, I think it’s not really somewhere you should take children.”

The broadcast was the element that tied the whole project together; audible through the radios of the cars parked along the street, it created a quasi-stereophonic effect that permeated the space. And hearing B.B. King’s inimitable guitar riffs floating in the same airspace where he performed over 40 years ago left one to wonder: what has actually changed in the intervening decades?

“Of course, I recognize the gravity of that conversation,” Brown said, of US incarceration statistics, “and this has been a great opportunity to embed the tools that artists use in that conversation.” This ties closely to his professional practice at VisionArc, a design think tank that attempts to address systemic problems (under Brown’s direction, VisionArc has consulted for the World Economic Forum through the Global Agenda Council on Design). Ultimately, Brown sees the issue as one of scale — the people affected by policy-making on the ground have few mechanisms to comprehend the scope of those policies on a large scale, while the policy-makers have little ability to connect with the consequences on an individual level. Additionally, he thinks a kind of violence is inflicted through what he calls the “hegemony of data” and tries to use projects like “PARK” to make data a participatory and accessible activity. “Why are we representing a piece of data without showing the physical impact?” Brown asked.

Though ultimately “PARK” drew only half the participation it hoped for, the organizational efforts of Brown and Gaspar, as well as their media affiliate, Vocalo, were Herculean — and the event would have been impossible, Brown was quick to point out, without the help of the Cook County Sheriff’s office and the jail itself, under the direction of new warden Nneka Jones Tapia, who was on the street and interviewed by Vocalo. While efforts to organize through social practice art can have mixed results and raise questions about representation — does a black car really stand in for approximately 900 prisoners better than a statistic? — the efforts of 96 Acres have a homegrown authenticity; they are clearly seeking to address a major force that affects many lives in West Chicago. “PARK” was successful both in developing a scalable, elastic framework for social commentary on an institutional issue and in simply creating a different feeling in the air on Sacramento Street that day. As Brown said, the audio component led participants in “passing through intensities.” Indeed, the physical presence of such a facility is effectively a monument to the pain of the surrounding neighborhoods. By contrast, the music and stories shared by “PARK” created a viable contrast. Of these instances of audio resistance, Brown commented, “They are ephemeral, but they are forces to be reckoned with.”

“PARK: 96 Acres” took place at 2600 S Sacramento Ave, Chicago, on August 15, 1–3pm.

Digital archives are essential for sharing information and encouraging its preservation, especially for sound. Unlike photography, text, or visual art, it’s a medium that requires a form of listening interaction, something that a well-designed online resource can facilitate. One of the best is Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library, the largest archive of wildlife sounds, from rare bird calls to hundreds of elephants in the night.

The digitization of the sounds and their online accessibility were announced in 2013, although the project reappeared this month when shared by sites like NPR and Kottke. The library itself dates back to 1929 with a sparrow’s song, and involves both professional recordings and amateur field audio to cover as much of the world’s nature as possible.

Trevor Pinch, a Cornell University sociologist who edited the 2011 Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, explained on NPR Morning Edition’s summer Close Listening: Decoding Nature Through Sound series, that the study of noise really emerged with the stethoscope in the 19th century. It offered a new way to listen in on a body, even when doctors still couldn’t see inside. Pinch added that the “visual field is kind of in front of us — like a kind of screen” and sound is “all around.”

Recently sound artist Matt Parker’s Imitation Archive project at the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park recorded some of the droning, clanking, and clicking sounds of the historic computers, which were added to the British Library Sound and Vision Archive. Technology and its clatter is slowly joining nature in archiving interest, as it often contributes just as much to our aural experiences. Technological obsolescence isn’t only a concern in the loss of those sounds; many of our 20th-century sound archives involve recordings on retrotech, like wax cylinders, records, and reel-to-reel tapes. This January, the British Library launched a $60 million crowdfunding initiative to preserve its archive of over 6 million sound recordings.

The Macaulay Library represents the ephemeral quality of sound that makes it vital to archive, whether to represent the dwindling population of Wyoming’s greater sage-grouse threatened by energy development, or to record the eerie song of the common loon, which is endangered in parts of the United States due to air and water pollution. Many sound archives have high quality audio now online, but the library also geographically pinpoints many of the recordings, situating the animal, bird, insect, fish, or other creature in its habitat. The library maintains a list of “most wanted” audio from elusive species like the masked duck and the Arctic loon to create an ecological sound profile of the world that is as cohesive as possible. A growing component of the library are videos, where you can watch a red warbler sing in Mexico, or 100 white-faced whistling ducks congregate in Venezuela.

Below are a few selections, including a common loon in Ontario, the diverse vocalizations of an Australian lyrebird (known to imitate chainsaws and car alarms), a barred owl in New York, and cicadas in a Costa Rican night. There are also environmental recordings including nearly two hours from a temple in Vrindavan, India, and forest elephants in the Central African Republic.

Audio Producer Bill McQuay on the library’s staff picks page explains the recording was made in a bai, “a large clearing in the center of the Central African rainforest where hundreds of forest elephants gather to commune under the full moon.”

Listen to more from the world’s largest wildlife sound archive at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library.

“Please utilize your smart phones to photograph the homeless lying on our streets, aggressive panhandlers, people urinating in public or engaging in open-air drug activity, and quality of life offenses of every type.”

—Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association

The New York Police Department (NYPD) wants to regain the trust of the New Yorkers it alienated with recent controversies like “Stop-and-Frisk” and the killing of Eric Garner. Its strategy? To profile, shame, and detain the city’s most vulnerable population: the homeless.

The Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA) is the NYPD’s biggest union of officers. Their “Peek-A-Book, We See You Too!” campaign asked New Yorkers to submit photos and locations of homeless people to the NYPD via the SBA’s Flickr account. Quickly, the SBA’s Flickr page amassed over 270 photos of homeless people before Flickr removed the images, reportedly without notifying the SBA. The Instagram account @nypd_homeless, which claims affiliation with SBA, has posted some of the same photos accompanied by crude captions.

In a comment to the Huffington Post, SBA spokesman Jordan Bieber said that the campaign was designed to “generate awareness that the number of homeless people around the city is growing.” But the SBA’s campaign is more nefarious than that because it specifically targets homeless people for loitering and vagrancy crimes that anyone can commit. Oddly enough, it seems as though police officers are encouraging vigilantism, one that spreads across social media, where law and order are more difficult to enforce and maintain.

Law enforcement’s use of social media to track and detain suspects is nothing new. As reported last week, the San Francisco Police Department has an officer whose job is to “patrol” Instagram for suspicious activity. Additionally, the government can subpoena content and deleted posts from social media companies for most criminal cases.

The SBA’s campaign reverses the order of things in terms of social media surveillance. Instead of searching for evidence, police officers are creating evidence. One of the major problems with the SBA’s campaign against the homeless is that it relies on off-duty police officers to do the job of investigators. Mullins’s memo states:

Active members of law enforcement are prohibited from photographing members of the public while on duty. However, photos may be taken while traveling to and from work or any time off duty.

In the hands of the SBA, social media has evolved past surveillance into full-blown panopticism. Even when police officers are off duty, it appears that they are watching us online and offline, with camera phones in tow.

Profiling the homeless harkens back to the practice of Bertillon criminal identification. In the 19th century, Alphonse Bertillon pioneered a method to deduce the biometric makeup of a criminal. He used photography as a supposedly objective source of information. Later on, eugenicists and law enforcement agencies adopted the Bertillon method to analyze the faces of criminals and determine what future criminals would look like in order weed them out of the population. The Nazis also used the Bertillon method to profile Jews, homosexuals, and other groups they deemed undesirable for the Aryan race they sought to create. Largely discredited since the fall of the Third Reich, Bertillon’s most enduring and visible legacy is the mug shot.

It is no coincidence then that police continue to presume they know a criminal before a crime is committed. Police officers who contribute to the SBA’s campaign buy into a notion that the homeless are an identifiable group of people. Yet homelessness is not a precondition, it defies categories of age, gender, race, and even income (many homeless people do work, but still cannot afford housing). And there is a marked difference between homelessness and panhandling, poverty and vagrancy.

Because the SBA’s campaign relies on social media tools to aggregate images of allegedly law-breaking homeless people, it engenders an image of the homeless person as necessarily criminal.

The homeless are perfect targets of political exploitation. In recent years, the homeless population in New York City has mushroomed, with 58,761 homeless people sleeping in shelters, and thousands more sleeping on the street. That’s 72% higher than the homeless population 10 years ago. The homeless are victims of capitalist progress — of rising rent, gentrification, and a lack of affordable housing. The homeless are also victims of domestic violence, mental illness, physical disability, addiction disorders, exploitation, and other serious health problems. In many cases, the homeless are the same people the police have failed to protect. Therefore, the SBA’s Flickr account was not a document of homeless shame; it is an archive of urban grief.

Photos uploaded to the SBA’s Flickr page before they were taken down can be seen here and here.

He refused to get off the bus. Every finger clamped down on the vinyl seat cushion, legs squeezed tight to chest. He knocked his head against his knees, reeling back, smashing into the seat in front of him. The situation bordered on tantrum. Part of me was trying to join with the others to convince him to stand, yet the other distinctly acknowledged he had good reason to protest. I feared what today would ask of us. We would be paddling through Class Three whitewater rapids, thirteen miles, snowmelt cold, high water June on the Arkansas River. The side of the bus read Colorado School for the Blind. They were high schoolers who had recently lost their vision due to genetic disease, accidents. The group leader stroked the crown of the boy’s head, a ring of keys tinkling at her belt. The raft guides plea-bargained with sodas in the office, promising lunchtime swimming opportunities. What we could not guarantee is that it would all be okay.

My boss Chuck had called a meeting of the guides earlier that morning, recommending, “Don’t act like idiots out there.” We sat on bruised white lawn chairs in the cement office. Defunct clock nailed to the wall. The office was located in the back of the Gunsmoke Truck Stop, eighteen-wheeler semis huffed and chugged beyond the smudged glass door. Earlier that week, I’d gone out on a friend’s raft, closing my eyes, trying to imagine what it’d feel like to be in the center of thrashing waves and complete darkness. As soon as the raft took a drop over a boulder, my eyes would pop open, gasping for the clarity of light.

It was my friend Adam who convinced the boy to depart from his gripped posture and ease down the aisle. He swept his cane in front of him, metal tip scraping the grated bus floor. The other students followed behind, carrying Hawaiian-print beach towels. I stepped off the bus, Chuck was chatting with Patty, the group’s leader.

“Oh yes, our buses have seen some wear as well. First the schools have them, then the churches, then the prisons, and then the rafting companies,” he said, shaking her hand. I had a flash of what our company might look like from this woman’s eyes. Here we were in a ramshackle mountain town, behind a back highway travel plaza, orange porta-potty with door ajar in the parking lot, Chuck’s pronounced limp and duct-taped glasses, Adam’s omnipresent Marlboro musk, my hair matted to a solid mass from sleeping in a tent next to the river. We were tanner than anyone should be.

“The kids are excited. They might not tell you, but I think they’re excited,” Patty said. She wore a low, utilitarian ponytail and the not enough hours in the day wince frequented by nonprofit workers. The students were part of a weeklong summer camp designed to help them adjust to vision loss. They would listen to speakers, weave bracelets, put on a theatre production, and hike the back hills of Colorado Springs. A whitewater rafting trip was the culminating experience, a chance to push past fear and build that elusive self-confidence all summer camps proclaim. I would be the only sighted person in my raft.

Chuck held open the office door and the students moved past him in pairs, whispering about the day ahead. I disappeared into the wetsuit room, holding my breath. Towers of used wetsuit booties unfurled a deep, sour smog of foot sweat. Sizes were scratched in black sharpie on the heels. Blue helmets nested into each other in a cardboard box. The students appeared at the doorway, reporting shoe and wetsuit sizes. I wanted to get to know them, establish some common ground before the trip, but I wasn’t sure what to say. I feared being overly helpful to the point of insult, or conversely, neglecting to be clear and amplifying the unknown.

A girl with streaked blonde hair and Minnie Mouse crop top was next, holding a cellphone between her painted nails. A living product of Forever 21, on-beat with the current summer season. Did she ask someone whether her outfit matched each morning? Could she trust the response? A glaze of glittered chapstick smeared across the edges of her lips.

“I’m going to need a different wetsuit. This one smells like piss,” she said, sticking the wetsuit back through the window. At first I nodded, then articulated yes, okay yes, and went to find another. I handed it to her.

“No way. This one smells like piss too.”

Chuck was holding court behind the desk, doling out waivers and punching cash register keys. The guides helped students hold cracked plastic pens to dashed black lines, the ritual pressing down of signatures, legal small print unmentioned. Others hopped and stepped into wetsuits at all corners of the office, steadying their hands on t-shirt racks. Our guide photos, testimony of our general immaturity, were tacked to a corkboard. In Adam’s shot, he waved his paddle overhead, while a rapid raged below. Others had their guide sticks drawn like air guitars. There was one of Chuck ducking as a wave knocks his hat off in a flash flood, the Arkansas River turned the texture of a root beer float. Torn-down trees spun in the muddy rush.

Patty stared up at the olive parachute hanging above the front desk.

“Young, wild years,” Chuck said, motioning up at it with a pencil. He was one of the original pioneers of skydiving, hitchhiking ten-dollar airplane rides at a military base in the sixties.

“Okay, well, as long as they all stay in the raft,” Patty said, scanning over the students.

“You’re in good hands,” Chuck said.

I looked down at my hands. They were shaking.

*

It wasn’t so simple as to load up the raft, students, and set sail. The guides had to make a quarter mile journey down a steep, rocky hill to the river. We hoisted the rafts to our shoulders, heaving lunch coolers tied with figure eight knots, stuttering over loose gravel. Chuck was giving a long, excruciatingly detailed Safety Talk. It was a barrage of “What if” statements: What if you drop your paddle in the river? What if the raft is wedged on a rock? What if you tumble out of the boat into a rapid? What if you are then sucked under the raft and cannot find your way out? What if your guide falls out? What if you are pinned face-first to a log underwater? By the end of the talk, kids had their hands over their mouths. The boy who refused to get out of the bus was tugging on the side of Patty’s cargo shorts. Adam had given up on the talk and chain-smoked, trails of smoke drifting in the purple light. He lived behind the library in a camper called the Raw Dog and had done a few years in the Marines, which meant he was pretty tough and could tie knots better than the rest of us. Chuck proceeded to splay out, belly-down on the ground, clutching one hand up on the raft’s yellow rope, the other waving madly in the air, yelling, “I’m here! I’m here!” as a demonstration of what not to do if the raft flips over.

We broke off into our raft crews and the blonde girl with braces and legitimate reservations about wetsuit scents was assigned to my group. Her name was Emily. She perched on the edge of the raft, holding the hand of a girl with curly red hair. There were six students who would be responsible for paddling the raft. Two pretty girls, wearing gold earrings and bracelets, sat in the back, somehow sequestering themselves from the rest of the group as cool kids can uniquely do, leaning into conversation concerned only with each other. A boy who introduced himself as Matthew had dyed black hair and the pale complexion of the Great Indoors.

“The big thing we need to do today is paddle together. I’ll be steering and calling commands and then you shout back as you paddle forward,” I said.

This call-and-response was a crude system for an entire day of paddling, but it would have to do. I usually told paddlers to watch the person in front of them to stay in sync. It was crucial that we stuck together on our strokes or the raft would veer to one side or end up powerless, smacking against rocks. And I did not want any of these kids to go in the drink. I had no idea if I’d be able to recover them once the river carried them away. We practiced shouting back and forth, “Forward two strokes! Back paddle once!” Our paddles slicing through the breezeless afternoon air. Whatever would happen out there, would happen together, all of us shouting away like an army platoon. I promised the group I’d warn them when big rapids were coming, and they promised me they would keep paddling even if they were scared.

*

People say they go rafting for the thrill, the waves, the escape. I’ve always been in it for the air and space. In the river canyon, the breeze carries hints of Juniper and Pinyon pine, branches waving in the wind on the bank. No competing exhaust fumes or curdled municipal garbage. Dusty orange cliffs rose to vertigo heights, 100 feet, 200 in another section. The river collected sticks and pine needles; armless logs found speed, spreading brief bubbles over the surface. I didn’t point out the Merganzer ducks picking insects from eddy pools. I didn’t point out the silhouette of an old man’s face on the curved canyon wall. We paddled along, shouting our paddle commands, the rhythm of our voices a uniting chant.

Emily kept asking about another raft, carrying a boy named Kyle. “Is it close to us? Can you see him?” Young love. As I listened to the students talk, it sounded like any other summer camp, with the cliques and crushes, leaders and followers. We relaxed in the flat water before the rapids, but I kept reading the river. The main pursuit of being a raft guide is reading the river, which means finding the line, the strongest part of the current. In even the most tumultuous whitewater sections, the kind where water blasts against rocks, spraying a rooster tail high in the air, amidst cyclones, there is a line of passage.

Matthew, from behind a curtain of black bangs, began announcing passing rocks.

“Is that a boulder on the left? And then one maybe twenty feet ahead in the center of the river?” he asked, cupping his hand on his forehead to squint through the sun.

He’d mentioned earlier that he had Congenital Retinal Deficiency, which meant he was losing his vision daily and would eventually go blind, but could still make out shapes. He’d asked to sit in front.

“You’ve got it,” I said, paddling forward. He smiled as if he’d won something.

When we were still a river bend away, the students heard the first rapid approaching in the distance. It’s named Pinball and that’s the perfect description for how it feels to go through it, raft zinging between the unavoidable rock garden. The entrance is guarded by two flipper rocks, each fifteen feet long and fifteen feet high, sticking straight out of the river. The move was to cut between these rocks, plunk the raft into a hydraulic hole, paddle your way out, and then face the rock garden.

“There’s either a waterfall up ahead or a god damn train,” the red-haired girl said, grabbing onto the rope with both hands, abandoning her paddle. And I really, really needed them to paddle.

I watched the backs of the blue helmets, how they rose up and down as the raft flexed over the rushing waves. The river narrowed, water boiled and morphed over the flipper rocks. Prickly pear cactus specked the riverbank with spines like upturned tacks. I looked for the line, that narrow ridge of passage. The students dug in their paddles as we skirted between the flipper rocks, the raft diving into the hydraulic hole.

Thwack, thwack, thwack, something nailed me in the head, dinging my helmet. Thwack.

“Shit, oh my god!” I yelled, struggling to keep turning the raft straight.

The students snapped around asking what what what. The raft turned sideways and hit a rock. I’d forgotten to strap down their canes. Thwack, as another hit me in the head. I called forwards and we righted the boat, snaked between the remaining boulders, and popped out on the other side.

*

Without additional incident, our rafts pulled off to a beach for lunch. It was a spot called The Zoo, named for the boulder formations shaped like hippopotamus, crocodile, and an elephant’s splintered butt. I began pulling the knots from the coolers, hands shaking in the cold water collected on the raft floor. I realized the students were just sitting there, waiting with paddles crossed over laps, and I’d need to help them onto shore. I led each of them to the charred fire circle, where they sunk down into the sand and leaned against logs.

The guides hauled the coolers and collapsible tables from the rafts, eager for picnic mode. A twenty gallon jug of water teetered on a rock, sleeve of plastic cups tied to the handle. Chuck gave a short sermon on dehydration, “the silent killer.” Patty was on a sunscreen tirade, blobbing out dollops to kids, requiring that they hold out cusped hands as she passed. Emily was smearing hers in a circular motion, the white cream streaking her bangs.

The guides set to chopping onions, slicking turkey meat to a tray, opening pickle jars and hearing the manufacturer’s pop. Chuck whistled as he sliced apples. This was when the guides regrouped, analyzing the previous night’s parties and gossiping about our consistently peculiar paddling crews. Last week we had a senior citizen’s social club. The normally three-hour trip took six hours on account of collective arthritis. The week before was a construction crew of entirely Spanish-speaking workers, rafting as a gift from their boss. My raft had been charging straight for a granite wall and in lack of a proper Spanish equivalent for “Major impact coming, giant rock, holy hell”, I’d yelled out “Explocion!” and all the workers leapt to the floor of the raft, covering their heads.

“You guys making it out there?” I asked.

“Had a girl that would not stop crying, knelt on the bottom of the raft and sobbed. Tried to sing to cheer her up. Bad idea,” Adam said, untwisting the coated yellow wire from the bread’s plastic bag.

“They’re better paddlers than most of the crews I’ve had this year,” I said.

“I think that’s what fear does,” Adam said.

I wondered about fear and rafting as a means of confrontation. Patty kept using the word “overcome” to declare the day’s mission. It was as if fear were a runaway criminal that needed to be seized and tackled to the ground. Both the raft guide and the customer faced respective fears: fear of leading and fear of being led. Both were logical. There had been three deaths on the river that season; undercut rocks created caverns that could trap and drown. Some had strokes from immersion in shockingly cold water. Fear turns out to be persistent, and whitewater will always churn with threat. The important part seemed to be getting in the ring with it. The dare, the dice roll. An acknowledgement of danger, and yet, the continuation of the deed.

The students moved through the lunch line, stroking the slices of meat and cheese to discern what each tray held. Adam elbowed me. The guides ate last and our sandwiches shone with fingerprints. Patty flicked back and forth between students, squeezing out mustard and distributing napkins. I took a seat in the sand with my raft crew. Emily was avoiding direct confrontation with the boy she’d been tracking, but kept asking for updates on what he was doing.

“It sounds like he’s talking about some game?” I reported.

“Oh yeah, no surprise. He’s obsessed with video games even though he can’t play them anymore,” she said.

Emily told me that the best part of camp had been getting away from her parents. She described getting Retinis Pigmentosa last year, noticing the blackboard at school getting blurry, and even falling down the stairs one day.

“Now I have to go everywhere with my mom. She even drops me off in front of school in a freaking van,” she said.

“High school is when you want to break away from your parents, so I get that,” I said.

“I’m starting to get better at using my cane. I’ve been going on walks around my neighborhood by myself,” she said. The act of following the cane’s black tip, raking it across the path to find an opening, reminded me of picking a line on the river. Even as rapids crashed on either side, the right line would guide you to safety.

“I want to become more independent, but stepping outside and knowing that if I cross the street at the wrong time I could get hit by a bus, well, that’s intense,” she said.

Emily asked if I’d take her to the bathroom. I stood up and stretched out my hand, she put hers in mind and I helped pull her up. The munch and rustle of lunch rolled on behind us, everyone worshipping the solid ground, a sweet breeze cutting through the canyon. She set down her water bottle, dusted the sand off her wetsuit. She rejoined my hand so easily, trusting me to lead her, over the rotting logs, around the yucca patches, across the roots of cottonwood willows. Emily squatted behind a Pinyon pine tree and I gazed at the river turning past.

*

Three more miles to go. We’d made it through Sidell’s Suckhole, Raft Ripper, Zoom Flume, and were about to approach Graveyard. There had been no major mishaps, except when another company’s raft came by to start a friendly splash war and was confused when the teens didn’t splash back, but winced and drew away. I called forward strokes to make a quick, polite exit.

As we neared Graveyard’s entrance, the students’ vigor had been drained by the day of paddling, morale dragged. They lazily pulled at the water. Matthew was twisting around to take pictures, “I know. It’s weird. My mom wants them.” The raft didn’t have enough horsepower, angling hard to the right. I yelled for more strokes. My crew gave a weak chant, making small dips with their paddle blades. Whiplash shook us on impact, bodies pounding forward. A wave swamped the left side of the raft and Emily was out. Her hands swatting the air, flying backwards, paddle skidding onto the boulder. The river absorbed her, water swept to erasure. The moment held frozen until her blue helmet peaked to the surface, her head lurching as the lifejacket pillow tipped her face skyward.

“Everyone paddle!” I urged my crew, but they kept panicking, “Who went out?” Adam blew his whistle and it made the squeal of a hawk. Emily’s helmet rocked in the waves. She was cruising on her back, making no resistance, sweeping further and further from our raft.

“Flip over and swim to the sound of my voice! You’ve got to flip over!” I shouted as the current pulled her under the waves. I yelled her name and so did the kids as they paddled with sweat and gusto; the whole raft lit up with Emily’s name. She turned her head, then one shoulder dropped down as she flipped to her stomach. Stroke by stroke, we got closer. I reached out and grabbed the lapel of Emily’s lifejacket. I threw down my paddle and bent my knees to the side of the raft, yanking her upward. The river let out a whooshing as she surged up from the water. We landed on the floor of the boat.

“You made it back,” I said, breathing hard.

She was shivering, spitting, coughing out water. Her lips were puffy and purple. I checked her arms and legs for signs of trauma. The red-haired girl was crying, but wiping the tears away quickly with the back of her hand. Matthew was taking pictures.

“I’m back, yeah, I’m back,” Emily said. “It felt like being in a dark room that is completely wind.”

It sounded almost too poetic, too lucid for a high schooler, but when immersed in the throws of an indifferent river with only one’s self and one’s boldness and one’s fear, reflection unfolds. Patty was consoling the students on her raft. Chuck clapped.

The line appeared. We went.

***

Rumpus original art by Elizabeth Schmuhl.

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Sylvia Plath once got blazed with Frida Kahlo. This is the setting of Musas, a Water People Theater production at the New York International Fringe Festival that invites us to be a fly on the wall and listen in on these women’s conversations as they smoke, eat, play, and work.

There is no historical record of this fated meeting. Truth be told, it never actually happened. Born 25 years apart, the pair never met in real life; Kahlo died when Plath was 22. But “fiction” isn’t a dirty word. Playwright Néstor Caballero wields poetic license imaginatively as these two luminaries’ worlds collide.

Frida Kahlo wryly tells Sylvia Plath at one point: “Death is your thing. You are like a Mexican.” The bite in the joke is Plath’s suicide at 30 in 1963, cutting short her career as a poet. Beleaguered by bipolar disorder — which electroshock therapy exacerbated instead of relieved — Plath’s mind could be a dark place. Nevertheless, her poems strike like lightning. Plath became the first author to win the Pulitzer Prize posthumously, in 1982. In Musas, Mónica Steuer masterfully oscillates between manic joy and crushing despair in her monologues and interactions with Frida Kahlo.

“Sadness pisses me off!” Kahlo exclaims in another scene. She was no stranger to pain either. A bus accident at 18 broke her spine, collarbone, ribs, and pelvis, damaging her lower extremities as well. After having had an iron handrail pierce through her abdomen and uterus, she spent three months in a full body cast recovering. Although she miraculously survived and lived on to 47, Kahlo frequently lapsed into episodes of overwhelming and searing pain. She did her utmost to focus her mind on more beautiful things. The twists on Rebeca Aléman’s face artfully capture how physical pain was Kahlo’s constant companion. Aléman’s wide, warm smiles convey Kahlo’s zest for finding sensual and artistic pleasures in spite of the pain.

In Musas, Frida Kahlo tries to palliate Sylvia Plath’s mental turmoil. They smoke a blunt and chat over wine. Plath hits a piñata, set up by Kahlo, to release her rage. Plath returns the favor by offering Kahlo support in her own way, offering Kahlo a cushion for her leg and foot pain, and playing along with some of Kahlo’s outlandish games, like strategically spilling red wine and ground pepper on a place mat to create a gastronomic exquisite corpse. Kahlo is constantly trying to take her mind off of her physical pain by engaging Plath. Plath is constantly trying to take her mind off her mental pain by playing with Kahlo.

In some of the funniest moments in the play, Kahlo expresses bewilderment at Plath’s words, making this “I don’t know what you mean” face at Plath. For instance, Plath expresses admiration for Kahlo, telling her she is like saxophone music or like the moon. Anyone who is friends with a poet knows what it’s like to appreciate the wit but have no idea what the hell it actually means.

Kahlo and Plath’s conversations explore the many binaries and polarities that differentiate the two artists. One scene compares the virtues of painting and poetry. Another dialogue contrasts Plath’s raging disapproval of her husband’s cheating with Kahlo’s resignation to marriage as a comedy of carnal errors. The script carefully avoids essentializing race and gender: without abstractly talking about the deeper meaning of what it means to be a woman, Kahlo and Plath’s anecdotes and witty asides give a glimpse into the challenges these early 20th century luminaries, who happened to be women, encountered. Finally, both women talk about their pain — whether mental or physical — and how their art sublimates that suffering into aesthetic ecstasy.

Some of the tensest moments in the play are when the actresses dramatize this anguish. Frida Kahlo writhes in pain on a bed. At moments, Plath screams loudly and gets delusional with an ouija board, convinced she is communing with the spirit of poet William Butler Yeats.

Chicago theater critics were too harsh on this imaginative play when it premiered in the second city last year. While Joy Campbell and Jack Helbig rightly applauded the acting of Aléman and Steuer, the critics’ contentions that Caballero’s script was cryptic and incoherent are debatable.

It’s not cryptic. Perhaps, sly references — such as when Frida Kahlo gives Sylvia Plath a bell jar (the name of Plath’s only novel) — might fly over the head of some audience members. But armed with 15 minutes of reading the Chicago Poetry Foundation’s webpage on Plath before the play, I took away plenty. Why do critics seldom complain when plays make obscure biographical references to the lives of significant male artists?

The play is not incoherent. While it unfolds non-linearly, Musas holds up as a series of dream sequences. The dreamy vignettes echo Kahlo’s surrealistic painting and Plath’s literary style with its numerous visual sketches. Because surreally discombobulated images are a motif in both artists’ work, this structure does them justice. Some of us — as viewers — are proud of our ability to digest nonlinear dream-like content in performance art and theater. Director Iraida Tapias deserves credit for weaving all of the scenes together so seamlessly.

The real Frida Kahlo once quipped: “I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.” By embracing pain as a theme instead of running away from it, this play’s conversation between Kahlo and Plath leaves you with a decent and good feeling about how your own pain can feed your creativity.

Musas, produced by the Water People Theatre, is playing at the New York International Fringe Festival at the Steve and Marie Sgouros Theatre (115 MacDougal Street, Third Floor, West Village, Manhattan) on Tuesday, August 18 at 4:45pm; Wednesday, August 19 at 7pm; and Thursday, August 20 at 4:45pm. Tickets are available via FringeNYC.  

goddamn if Vancouver doesn't have a thriving Satanic art scene. More »

Unveiling ceremony of Confederate monument, Salisbury, North Carolina, 1909

Sometimes people wonder why the Confederate monuments matter? As if getting rid of them will end racism! No one argued that, but they matter a lot because there is a war over public memory of the Civil War that is central to race. Despite what a lot of people think, the Confederate memorials were not erected immediately after the Civil War. Largely they went up between the 1890s and 1910s and were central public statements of the triumph of white supremacy over both the ex-slaves and the southern whites who had allied with the Republican Party, which was a lot more people than you think. The civil rights historian Timothy Tyson discusses this in the context of his home state of North Carolina, where the wingnut state legislature has passed a bill that the governor signed called the Mandatory Confederate Monuments Act that would require the state legislature to approve the removal of these statues, which of course in full right-wing extremist North Carolina is not going to happen.

Tyson:

White North Carolinians erected the vast majority of our Confederate monuments – 82 out of 98 – after 1898, decades after the Civil War ended. More importantly, they built the monuments after the white supremacy campaigns had seized power by force and taken the vote from black North Carolinians. The monuments reflected that moment of white supremacist ascendency as much as they did the Confederate legacy.

Take the Confederate monument on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill, better known as “Silent Sam.” The speaker at its dedication in 1913, industrialist Julian S. Carr, bragged that he had “horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because … she had publicly insulted … a Southern lady.” Carr’s speech heralded the “Anglo-Saxon race in the South” reunited with white supremacy as the glue.

…

In the 1890s, white Populists and black Republicans forged an interracial “Fusion” alliance in North Carolina that won both houses of the legislature, two U.S. Senate seats and the governorship. These homegrown Fusionists launched the most daring and democratic experiment in Southern political history.

The interracial Fusion coalition never lost at the polls in an honest election. But in the 1898 election, its enemies turned to violence, intimidation and fraud to steal the election outright. Former Confederate Alfred Waddell declared: “If you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks.” White mobs in the streets of Wilmington beat and killed black citizens and overthrew the city government at gunpoint. This coup was the capstone of the 1898 “white supremacy campaign.”

Two years later, the white supremacy campaign again resorted to extralegal measures and elected Gov. Charles B. Aycock. Aycock said afterward, “We have ruled by force, we have ruled by fraud, but we want to rule by law.” They passed a constitutional amendment that took the vote away from black North Carolinians. Afterward they built a one-party, whites-only apartheid regime. This was the Jim Crow social order that persisted for six decades, until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s gave birth to a better South.

Tyson goes onto to discuss his own ancestor who avoided the Confederate draft, yet the Confederate heritage group keep festooning his grave with Confederate flags. I’m sure they just assume that someone of his generation supported the Confederacy, but this man was a unionist. That’s part of the battle. North Carolina conservatives are fighting a quiet race war that has many facets that include finding ways to stop black people from voting, creating myths around white solidarity in the past and present, and preserving monuments erected as symbols of white supremacy. Because these people still believe in that white supremacy, they don’t want them taken down today, no matter how offensive.

Here is Mr. Charles Hanna of West Dundee, letter to the Chicago Tribune Voice of the People August 17, 2015:

It's 2 a.m. You and your family are asleep upstairs. You hear glass breaking and footsteps downstairs. You instruct your wife to dial 911. At the moment, you wouldn't want a gun near your bedside? (Statistically, it doesn't matter, right?)

Well, Statistically it does matter. Because guns in homes are far more often used to murder family members than kill Home Invaders.

So, here's a retort Charles.

Your wife is on the phone with 911. The Police are minutes away. You've got seconds. You pull out your P229.357 Sig Sauer from the nightstand, press check to make sure there's one in the chamber, and head downstairs. You don't turn on the lights because that will alert the Home Invader. You still hear noise downstairs. You spy the figure of a silhouette in the kitchen. You take aim and pull the trigger. And murder your teenage daughter. Because she went out while you were sleeping and when she tried to sneak back in accidentally knocked over a glass vase.

And this isn't even a fictional account.

Gun Cultists are always hyping the Two A.M. Scenario for the same reason Gun Nuts fabricate the claim that guns are used literally millions of times a year to stop crimes. It's also why the Republican Party bars the CDC from collecting data on injuries and deaths due to firearms. Profit.

Because insane Gun-Humping Fanatics, encouraged by deceitful NRA leadership and callous Lobbyists for the Firearms Industry, don't want Americans to know the Truth About Guns; that Guns kill more than 30,000 Americans and wound Thousands more every year, so the blood-soaked Gun Industry can continue to make Millions of Dollars of the Deaths of Americans.

Something stupid this way comes.

Again.

Charles Halloway: I know who you are. You are the autumn people. Where do you come from? The dust. Where do you go to? The grave.

Mr. Dark: Yes. We are the hungry ones. Your torments call us like dogs in the night. And we do feed, and feed well.

Charles Halloway: To stuff yourselves on other people's nightmares.

Mr. Dark: And butter our plain bread with delicious pain. So, you do understand a little.

-- Ray Bradbury, "Something Wicked This Way Comes"

Once again our elite media is looking-with-alarm at the latest beast to lurch out of the GOP monster factory.

Once again they pretend to be appalled by the symptoms of the plague that is ravaging our democracy, and once again they dare not name the causes of a pestilence which they helped to engineer, opting instead to dab daintily at the open, suppurating pustules that cover our body politic with damp, Both Siderist towelettes.

So since no one listens to a fucking word we Liberals say anyway, I thought I would trot something out from the cellar appropriate to the occasion.

From me, four years ago...

Only Nixon can go to Nixonland

Conservatives built this monster.

It didn’t just wander out of the woods one day, or land here from another planet. The Wingnut Base -- whatever teabagger, Colonial Williamsburg camouflage they’re sporting this week, and however hard the media tries to pretend they aren't who we know they are -- was manufactured by the Conservative Movement to win elections. Made right here in the U S of A out of spare parts left over from the Segregationist South, Right-wing fundamentalism, Bircher paranoia and general Archie Bunker pig-ignorance.

Conservatives built the unholy thing, programmed it, wounded it up and sent it out to do their bidding.

And everyone knows it. David Brooks knows it. David Gregory. Tom Friedman. David Frum. The goofs at the "No Labels" freakshow. The entire GOP Brain Caste.

Everybody.

This is the same monster that never gave a shit that Reagan/Bush were running up historic deficits, or sold weapons to terrorists to finance illegal wars. The same monster that hunted and impeached Clinton. The same monster that completely looses its shit over "activist judges"...right up until five of the most malignantly activist judges in modern history put their candidate in the White House and gave corporations the right to buy elections.

The same monster that cheered on George W. Bush's serial, catastrophic betrayals and failures while it called Liberals "traitor".

The same monster that dutifully gets its opinions from Rush Limbaugh, its "news" from Sean Hannity and its Jebus from Pat Robertson.

And everyone knows it.

The title of this post is sadly facetious: Nixon would of course be considered a filthy Commie Liberal by the monster his strategies created and would have to carry Pat Buchanan in front of him like the Ark of the Wingnut Covenant if he wanted to get into CPAC.

And everyone knows it.

Everyone also knows that calling your Conservative member of Congress isn't going to budge them, because your Conservative member of Congress owes his or her job to the monster.

Nothing short of an extinction-level event is going to change the monster's course or ferocity: it is quite mad in exactly the way its designers intended. It has no capacity whatsoever to correct or even recognize its own madness, which means it is never going to recover.

So please stop trying to reason with it.

Instead, focus on what can be done, which is this: Nixon didn't go to China for the pandas and the Great Wall; he went to create a split in the alliances that held the Communist world together.

For 30 years, the staunchest ally of the unhinged Right has been the craven Center: that army of Beltway automatons who profit handsomely from propping up the Right’s every act of depravity with one outrageously false equivalence after another. This is the "But the Democrats" brigade, on well-coiffed display every Sunday at what I have been calling "The Mouse Circus" for the past six years.

Unchecked this state of affairs will continue for another 30 years or until we as a nation are finally burned to the ground and sold off for scrap by the Right, right under the noses of the Center who will be busy sternly lecturing Left on the need for more Compromise and greater Reasonableness, and compulsively masturbating into the pages of the New York Times about how an awesome new Third Party full of Radically Reasonable Compromisers --  

 

-- would solve everything:

Can’t We Do This Right?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

...

Personally, I’ll support anyone with a real plan to cut spending, raise revenues and boost investment in the five pillars of our success — be they Democrats or Republicans. But if neither Republicans nor Democrats can see that we need a hybrid politics today — one that requires cutting, taxing and investing as part of a single nation-building strategy (phased in over time) — then I’ll hope for a third party that does get it and can take us where we need to go.

After which they will drive on back to their vast estates inside their gated communities while mobs in festive tri-corner hats driving Medicare-funded scooters start ripping the wiring and copper pipe out of the walls of the Home of the Brave in the name of Freedom.

In other words, it is long past time for that to change, which is why the Center must be destroyed: must be reduce to an economically uninhabitable no-man's land where it is no longer possible for the "Both Sides Do It" liars to ply their lucrative trade.

It is time for a new Pledge; a beneficent mirror-image of Grover Norquist's odious "Americas for Tax Reform" Party of God loyalty oath. A pledge where the signer promises they will not book guests on their radio or teevee show who are liars. Not link to websites that feature liars except to excoriate them. Will not buy from, advertise on or patronize media that hires and promotes liars. That they will not reference lying Centerists at all except to mete out to them the scorn they deserve.

As much as I like Lawrence O'Donnell, a couple of nights ago when he trundled Marcia Blackburn and Joe Walsh and David Frum out in front of the cameras, I turned his program off. I did it because I am not interested in what liars have to say.

I am not interested in watching a "debate" that isn't a debate at all.

Because, as everyone on the Left learned long, long ago, there are no depths to which the Right will not sink in order to hold power and enrich their paymasters. Treason, economic sabotage, scapegoating, direct appeals to racism, stealing elections, voter suppression, you name it.

But most of all, just plain lying. All the time. About everything.

In order to preserve their privileged positions, there are also no depths to which the "Both Sides Do It" Center will not sink to continue pretending none of the above is happening, and/or that the Left is always equally wrong in equal measure in the opposite direction.

Lastly, and most tragically, time and crisis have demonstrated over and over again that there is absolutely no magical combination of facts, logic or goodwill that can dislodge the Center or the Right from their destructive, co-dependent ideological bunkers.

To his credit, Paul Krugman has now gone all the way there:

The Cult That Is Destroying America

...

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.

What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.

And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.

It’s a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price.

We did not choose this ridiculous fight with these depraved and reckless imbeciles and their cowardly enablers: our nation has more than enough real, serious problems without having to deal with one more manufactured drama pulled out of thin air by the monster the Conservatives created and set loose to win elections long ago.

But once again the war is thrust upon us.

And this nation can no longer survive half-Fox and half-free.

It's the job of a security researcher to figure out how the company they are working for could be compromised. Apparently that now means using a drone sniff out vulnerabilities a few dozen feet off the ground. The Aerial Assault drone houses a rasp...

Back in May, the Internal Revenue Service said thieves nabbed info for 100,000 people through its transcript website. Today the agency increased that number by an additional 200,000 folks, bringing the total number of potential cases to 334,000. Us...

Mr. Burns: This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That’s democracy for you.

Smithers: You are noble and poetic in defeat, sir.

Krugman points out that this is the painful conundrum faced by GOP presidential contenders:

Wealthy individuals have long played a disproportionate role in politics, but we’ve never seen anything like what’s happening now: domination of campaign finance, especially on the Republican side, by a tiny group of immensely wealthy donors. Indeed, more than half the funds raised by Republican candidates through June came from just 130 families.

And while most Americans love Social Security, the wealthy don’t. Two years ago a pioneering study of the policy preferences of the very wealthy found many contrasts with the views of the general public; as you might expect, the rich are politically different from you and me. But nowhere are they as different as they are on the matter of Social Security. By a very wide margin, ordinary Americans want to see Social Security expanded. But by an even wider margin, Americans in the top 1 percent want to see it cut. And guess whose preferences are prevailing among Republican candidates.

You often see political analyses pointing out, rightly, that voting in actual primaries is preceded by an “invisible primary” in which candidates compete for the support of crucial elites. But who are these elites? In the past, it might have been members of the political establishment and other opinion leaders. But what the new attack on Social Security tells us is that the rules have changed. Nowadays, at least on the Republican side, the invisible primary has been reduced to a stark competition for the affections and, of course, the money of a few dozen plutocrats.

What this means, in turn, is that the eventual Republican nominee — assuming that it’s not Mr. Trump —will be committed not just to a renewed attack on Social Security but to a broader plutocratic agenda. Whatever the rhetoric, the GOP is on track to nominate someone who has won over the big money by promising government by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent.

Nothing calls for a quasi-Maoist intervention more than when a soft-handed journalist or bloviating politician opines that it’s no big deal to raise the retirement age to 70, because after all people are living so much longer these days, and work has all sorts of social and even spiritual benefits. Anyone who says things like that should be forced immediately to shingle a roof in San Antonio, preferably in August.

Are a few gender-themed words in your job descriptions signaling women, unconsciously, to not apply?

A scientific study of 4,000 job descriptions revealed that a lack of gender-inclusive wording caused significant implications for recruiting professionals tasked to recruit women to hard-to-fill positions underrepresented by women.

This study addressed questions such as: do job descriptions that lack feminine-gender words repel female applicants? Could the lack of gender-inclusive wording in your job description influence women to opt out and not apply? Are there gender bias characteristics in your job advertisements? Could the lack of gender-inclusive words actually be perpetuating gender inequality in your organization?

Let’s turn to a study published in the American Psychological Association by the authors Gaucher, Friesen, & Kay called, “Evidence That Gendered Wording in Job Advertisements Exists and Sustains Gender Inequality.” Researchers studied gender wording in job advertisements and job descriptions and the effect of gender wording on job seekers. The researchers first established that women’s style of communication is more communal, using more emotional and social words than men’s style of speech. Secondly, the researchers tied women’s perceptions of gendered words to previous research on the nature of subtle wording differences in job advertisements.

The researchers linguistically coded job descriptions found in a U.S. Department of Labor database that were predominately populated for masculine-themed words such as active, ambitious, analytical, competitive, dominate, challenging, confident, decisive, determined, independent, leader, objective, etc., as well as feminine-themed words such as committed, connected, cooperative, dependable, interpersonal, loyal, responsible, supportive, trust, etc. The results confirmed that job descriptions for male-dominated jobs contained more masculine-themed words associated with male stereotypes than job descriptions from female-dominated jobs and vice versa.

What impact could this subtle but systematic wording differences within job advertisements have on job seekers’ perceptions and subsequent behaviors?

The authors hypothesize that to women, masculine-themed words alerts them to the possibility that they will not fit or do not belong. To test this hypothesis, the researchers used 96 randomly selected job seekers to read different job descriptions, each constructed with masculine-themed words or feminine-themed words. For example, the masculinity worded advertisement for a registered nurse stated “We are determined to deliver superior medical treatment tailored to each individual patient,” whereas the femininely worded advertisement for the same registered nurse position stated, “We are committed to providing top quality health care that is sympathetic to the needs of our patients.” After reading each job description, the job seekers rated each on job appeal and sense of belongingness.

Example of feminine and masculine-themed words used in a engineering job description:

Engineer Company Description:

Feminine: We are a community of engineers who have effective relationships with many satisfied clients. We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately.
Masculine: We are a dominant engineering firm that boasts many leading clients. We are determined to stand apart from the competition.
Engineer Qualifications:

Feminine: Proficient oral and written communications skills. Collaborates well in a team environment. Sensitive to clients’ needs, can develop warm client relationships.
Masculine: Strong communication and influencing skills. Ability to perform individually in a competitive environment. Superior ability to satisfy customers and manage company’s association with them.
Engineer Responsibilities:

Feminine: Provide general support to project team in a manner complimentary to the company. Help clients with construction activities.
Masculine: Direct project groups to manage project progress and ensure accurate task control. Determine compliance with client’s objectives.
Not surprisingly, the results showed that women found that jobs with masculinity worded job descriptions less appealing, compared with the same types of jobs which used feminine wording across all job types — whether they were male or female dominated occupations — even though these gender words composed a small fraction of the total words in the job advertisement.

The research results were obvious: women job seekers were more interested in male-dominated jobs when advertisements were unbiased, making reference to both men and women as candidates. In other words, women and men, for example, may equally like and desire an engineering job, but highly masculine wording used in the job posting reduces women’s appeal of the job because it signals that women do not fit or belong in that job. In this way, qualified male and female applicants are opting out of jobs that they could perform well.

Generally, the findings found that gendered-themed words had the greatest effect on women. Perhaps many job descriptions, with their established gender wording, repels female applicants and maintains traditional gender inequality in male-dominated jobs. The results of this research suggest replacing the masculine-themed words with similar feminine-themed words, which would increase women’s interest in those advertisements.

The nuance of gender-themed words makes it a particularly pernicious and powerful contributor to inequality because it was found, surprisingly, that not one participant realized the presence of the gendered language. Instead of attributing their perceptions to the use of gender language, participants attributed their reasons to personal lack of interest in the job or just general lack of appeal.

The implications to recruiting professionals, and especially those who are expending valuable time and resources on attracting skilled women in hard to fill occupations, are many. Are our traditional job postings repelling the same valuable candidates we are trying so hard to attract and recruit? Are we unintentionally contributing to the same gender inequality we oppose?
(Permalink)

Murc, in the Foner thread:

Every important, highly technical endeavor has highly technical jargon that’s pretty impenetrable from the outside, but I’ve noticed for some reason only the humanities seem to get flak for it. Nobody gets pissed off when MD’s or engineers or physicists speak to each other in their private professional language, but a philosopher starts dropping words like “hermeneutic” or “epistemology” and suddenly lips curl and the sneering begins, usually accompanied with the implication that the people using them there made up words and fancy book larnin’ are big old frauds.

So I’m usually prepared to accept and defend “jargon” until specifically proven otherwise.

He’s got a point, and there is a double standard at work. However!

He’s replying to an example–engineers talking shop about trains–that’s an example where jargon has clear intragroup communication advantages, to be weighed against the limitations it imposes on communication with those outside of the group. The community in question has little incentive or need to communicate effectively with those outside the group–they’re just talking shop. Historians obviously have a different calculus here; there are good reasons to wish for better communication with those outside the group. (Individual historians may just want to sell books, but there are also good civic reasons to wish for historians in general to communicate effectively to a broader audience.) But it’s worse, I think, in some humanities-oriented fields, where there’s significant career pressure to come up with something *really profound* to say, and jargon provides a tempting shortcut, as well as a shibboleth for who identifying true insiders who properly belongs in the conservation. (An important part of my own graduate training in political theory involved being told in no uncertain terms to try again, stating my claims and arguments more clearly and directly, with less jargon. On some happy occasions, the result was much clearer thinking and better prose. On less happy occasions, I was forced to abandon the original claim on the grounds that it turned out to not mean much of anything at all.)

The particular example Foner uses here–replacing the specialized, ‘insider’ language of “bourgeois revolution” with the more accessible “capitalist revolution”–turns the claim into a specific one, about the particular consequences of the civil war, rather than one that tied the claim up in the verbiage of Marxist theories of revolution. “Is the Civil War a bourgeois revolution in Marx’s sense?” is perhaps an interesting question for a certain kind of person (of which I am one), but it’s as likely to be a distraction from giving a clear account of the relevant history here, with little added value for most potential readers. Whether that was the intention or not, referring to it as a bourgeois revolution rather than a capitalist one narrows the audience in two ways–first, to those familiar with the specialized terminology, and second, to those inclined to view history in more or less Marxist terms. There’s no notable or obvious analytic advantage to the choice, so the narrowing of the audience is really all it’s accomplishing.

History is different, of course, but I think a crucial part of good work in my own field of political theory involves vigilance against the temptation to lean too heavily on jargon. Some of the best and most sophisticated work in political theory is perfectly accessible to most intelligent and careful readers (the linked article, among the most influential in political theory in the last 20 years, can be taught to college freshmen with little or no background with relative ease.) We can’t always achieve that goal, but much of the time our lack of writing skill, not the sheer complexity or profundity of our ideas, is to blame. This isn’t always the case, of course, and some of the anti-jargonism really is just anti-intellectualism–but by no means all of it, and Foner’s example offers a good example of the kind of situation in which avoiding jargon widens the potential audience at virtually no cost.

TL/DR: Jargon can provide specificity and precision, but it also serves other, less admirable purposes, including gatekeeping, signaling, and obfuscation. Being vigilant about what particular uses of jargon are doing in particular cases is an important part of doing historical and other forms of humanities scholarship well, and shouldn’t be lumped in with general anti-intellectualism.

In some ways, it's a sad waste of time to write about Mike Huckabee, currently running for the GOP nomination for president. He doesn't have a snowball's chance in global warming of winning. His whole campaign reeks of self-promotion to keep Huckabee, Inc. in business for another few years. You can boil down his entire reason for running to a slogan: "Mike Huckabee: Because Who Doesn't Want a Cruel Prick Who Sounds Like a Backwoods Ass Rapist for President?"

Speaking of rape, Huckabee is one of several Republican yahoos running who don't think there should be any exemptions for rape victims when it comes to abortion. Huckabee was asked point blank on CNN about whether or not a 10-year-old rape victim who got pregnant should be able to get an abortion. You gotta give Huckabee credit: When you're a motherfucker, you're a motherfucker all the way:

"I think what we have to do, Dana [Bash], is remember that creating one problem that is horrible -- horrible -- I mean, let nobody be misled. A 10 year-old girl being raped is horrible. But does it solve a problem by taking the life of an innocent child? And that's really the issue."

Putting aside that, while the now-11 year-old girl in Paraguay gave birth by cesarean section, apparently without immediate complications (except for that whole being raped by her stepfather, going through with the pregnancy, and giving birth at 11, for fuck's sake), it was likely that the pre-teen would have extensive issues. Why did her health not matter? Why did her ability to have a life after being raped not matter? Huckabee made a judgment: the fetus was more important than the child who carried it.

Then Huckabee went to the scoundrel's argument about abortion. Hey, you might be aborting a Superman/Mother Theresa hybrid who will cure cancer and save a busload of children from falling off a bridge. "I know people. I worked for a man for several years, James Robison, who was the result of a rape. His mother went to three doctors in Houston, Texas, in 1943, begged doctors to abort the baby. None of them would do it," Huckabee explained. "They all refused. Today, his organization feeds, cares for, and brings living capacity for water to hundreds of thousands of people across the world. That would never have happened, Dana."

The Rude Pundit's said it before and he'll say it again: That's goddamned nonsense. There's also a chance that rape kid could grow up to be Ted Bundy. The possibility that a potentially aborted fetus will grow up to be the world's savior is a fantasy at best, a deliberate, manipulative, bullshit lie at worst. But Huckabee was a TV preacher once, and lying comes easy to a man who looked into poor people's eyes and told them to give him money because he can help them live on a cloud for eternity after they die.

But Huckabee wasn't done. "[L]et's not compound the tragedy by taking yet another life. And I always think we sometimes miss the fact that, when an abortion happens, there are two victims. One is the child. The other is that birth mother, who often will go through extraordinary guilt years later, when she begins to think through the -- what happened with the baby, with her." Except the woman is not a victim. She's a patient who made a choice and is almost guaranteed to live her life satisfied, even happy with that choice. Again and again, Huckabee discounts the agency of women in favor of making them baby-shitting machines.

Finally, Huckabee says the most easily disproved thing: "I just come down on the side that life is precious, every life has worth and value. I don't think we discount the intrinsic worth of any human being. And I don't know where else to go with it, but just to be consistent and say, if life matters and then that's a person, then every life matters." No, every person is not precious. Every life doesn't matter. Everyone doesn't get a trophy for being born, let alone just being conceived. See Ted Bundy remark above for proof.

What we're witnessing is a snake oil salesman talkin' down to the rubes and yokels off the back of his pick-up truck, a charlatan who wants you to know that life is precious as long as men are controlling the lives of women.

eastasianculture:

1900s, Canada. Canada’s exclusion of the Chinese. (source)

As soon as the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed, the Federal Government moved to restrict the immigration of Chinese to Canada. The first federal anti-Chinese bill was passed in 1885. It took the form of a Head tax of $50 imposed, with few exceptions, upon every person of Chinese origin entering the country. No other group was targeted in this way.

The Head Tax was increased to $100 in 1900 and to $500 in 1903. $500 was equivalent to two years wages of a Chinese labour at the time. Meanwhile, Chinese were denied Canadian citizenship. In all, the Federal Government collected $23 million from the Chinese through the Head Tax.

Despite the Head Tax, Chinese immigrants continued to come to Canada. In 1923, the Canadian Parliament passed the Chinese Immigration Act excluding all but a few Chinese immigrants from entering Canada. Between 1923 and 1947 when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed, less than 50 Chinese were allowed to come to Canada. Passed on July 1, 1923, Dominion Day, this law was perceived by the Chinese Canadian community as the ultimate form of humiliation. The Chinese Canadian community called this “Humiliation Day” and refused to celebrate Dominion Day for years to come.

In addition to the Head Tax and Exclusion Act, Chinese immigrants faced other forms of discrimination in their social, economic and political lives. The most devastating impact of the Head Tax and the Exclusion Act, however, was found in the development of Chinese Canadian family. During the exclusion era, early Chinese pioneers were not allowed to bring their family, including their wives, to Canada. As a result, the Chinese Canadian community became a “bachelor society”. The Head Tax and Exclusion Act resulted in long period of separation of families. Many Chinese families did not reunite until years after the initial marriage, and in some cases they were never reunited.

While their husbands were struggling abroad, many Chinese wives in China were left to raise their children by themselves. They experienced starvation and other extreme economic hardships.

Because of years of racist, anti-Chinese immigration legislation, today the Chinese Canadian community exhibits many characteristics of first-generation immigrants despite its history of close to 150 years in Canada.

Artist Shirin Abedinirad (previously) just completed work on her latest sculpture, Mirrored Ziggurat, a pyramid of mirrors resting near a bay in Sydney, Australia as part of the Underbelly Arts Festival. Like her earlier mirror works, the Iranian artist is fascinated by stitching the sky to the ground (or vice versa, depending on your perspective) to create unusual optical illusions from almost every viewing angle. From her statement about the piece:

In this installation I have been inspired by the pyramidal structure of Ziggurat, a common form of temple in ancient Mesopotamia, attempting to connect earth and sky, so humans could be nearer to god. The Mirrored Ziggurat acts as a staircase, which seeks to connect nature with human beings and to create union of ancient history and today’s world. This installation offers a transformative view of the self.

You can see more views of the installation as well as a video on her website.

I decided to try Oakland. There was a house I was willing to consider listed for 850k—which seemed like a lot of money, especially for having to leave the city, but I needed to feel I was exploring all my options.

I rode BART under the bay and when I got to the house I stopped out front with mixed emotions. I was relieved that it was none of the other buildings on the block—the burned out shack or the pile of peeling paint with rotting wood underneath—yet also depressed that even though it was a nice enough looking little home, it was, in the end, all I would get for a million dollars—and that was if I could even come up with a million dollars. Anyway, I thought, at least it has a driveway.

Still, I didn’t go in. I just stayed on the sidewalk. As with every other house I’d seen, hungry buyers were swarming every crevice, acting as if they already owned the place and that everyone else who had come to look was just in their way.

“Why you even want to live in this neighborhood?” A deep, melodic voice said. And I turned to see an older, dark-skinned man with a trim grey beard sidling up next to me. He appeared to be in his late sixties and wore suit pants with clean creases and a tucked in button down shirt. Someone yelled from the porch. “Look out! I think he has a gun.” And the man shook his head and snorted a little. He and I were just standing there on the sidewalk, side by side, our arms crossed, watching the scene. “You can leave your hoodie at home,” he said to me. “But people still want to shoot.”

“I’m just trying to find a place to live,” I said.

“Being pushed out of the city, huh?”

I said yes as we watched a beefy guy with a baby strapped to his chest ‘accidentally’ staple his bank records to the house door.

“What gets me,” the man said, “is how you complain about the landlords forcing you out, then come over here thinking you can just move right in.”

I turned to look at him. He stayed looking at the house. These weren’t easy subjects to broach, economics and race. I was a middle class white guy. Pretty much anything I had to say would be wrong.

Just then a helicopter flew overhead. One of those service birds that the forest service uses to drop water on fires, trailing what looked like an enormous boulder underneath. I was trying to understand how a chopper could even lift something that big let alone keep aloft when suddenly the boulder dropped.

We barely had time to blink before it hit. The wave rippled through the ground as if someone had tossed a cinder block in a still pond. It lifted the man and me and carried us further inland, toward those last stops on the BART line that you see on the map but never visit. I’d fallen on my butt and was struggling not to be thrown completely, but the man was still standing, leaning forward with a hand cupped above his eyes, holding steady like a sea captain heading into a familiar storm.

***

GO HERE to view all the pieces in this series in chronological order.

Related Posts:

• All Over Coffee: The Eviction Series #3
• All Over Coffee, The Eviction Series #6
• All Over Coffee, The Eviction Series #5: Naked City
• All Over Coffee, The Eviction Series #4: It’s Growing
• All Over Coffee, the Eviction Series #2: Mine, Mine, Mine

At 42x the size of a traditional ‘Light-Brite’ toy, the Everbright by San Francisco-based Hero Design is a huge grid of adjustable LEDs for drawing with light. But instead of only a limited selection of individual colors, the Everbright relies on 464 dials that change in hue as you twist them, offering almost unlimited color possibilities when creating designs. When you’re done drawing, the entire board resets to a blank canvas with the press of a single button. While fully interactive, it also comes pre-programmed with several animations that can play when not in use.

You can learn more about Everbright here, and it looks like this has already moved beyond a concept and the devices are now available for sale. (via Designboom, Neatorama)

via http://jennisaarenkyla.com/images/trolls.gif

via http://www.dethjunkie.com/

Adding solar panels to your roof can be frustrating, since it's often difficult to know if your home receives enough light to justify the investment. Google Maps, however, has satellite, navigation and sunlight data for every property in the world,...

India's space agency revealed new photos of a prominent canyon on Mars and showed that it's getting a lot out of a cheap, experimental mission. Images from the nation's Mars Orbital Mission, aka "Mangalyaan," show part of the 62 mile wide and 317 m...

Despite doubts about the effectiveness of US drone airstrikes in war-torn nations, the Pentagon wants to dramatically increase them. An unnamed official told the WSJ that military commanders intend to bump the number of daily flights by 50 percent....

dailycryptodrawings:

232: Fresno Nightcrawlers

Who knew the internet loved ghost pants so much.

Requested by Anonymous

Fitting Music

oldroots:

nickiminajcommission:

the first song or rap you put together, what was the story of that one?

julia-loves-bette-davis:

_{Lil Dagover in Monte Cristo, 1929}

longliveroyalty:

Queen Alexandra of the United Kingdom in her Coronation robes and attendants. August 9, 1902.