We were visiting my parent’s house recently and Jasper came into the guest room like ugh, who are these guys? and then went up to the mirror and was like, ugh who is this guy? hes such a lump I bloody love him.
I remember when this video went viral back in 2011. It’s of a young guy giving zero fucks while on a slingshot ride somewhere in Florida. Well, thanks to the Internet—where old memes and viral videos just won’t die—it’s reemerged again with a soundtrack of Simon & Garfunkel’s “...
In 1989, George Bush gave a speech about crack. During the speech he pulled out a bag of crack and said “this bag was seized right across the street from the White House in Lafayette park.”
Turns out, his speech writers had the idea to pull out a prop during his speech and in order to make it believable they had the DEA plant crack on this random 18 year old black kid. They lured him there. He didn’t even know where the White House or Lafayette park was. When he got there, they arrested them.
The plot was discovered by a journalist.
What’s crazy about the crack years is how journalists helped and hurt the situation. There were some journalists working with the DEA and the Reagan administration to dramatize crack. Then there were some who helped like the one who discovered this plot and the one who discovered that the CIA planted crack to fund the Nicaraguan war. The media has such strong influence in both directions.
Since the 1980s, the Pogues have been fusing the tropes and melodies of traditional Irish folk music to the energy of punk rock while posing a serious threat to the continued functioning of their own and their fans’ livers, in the process releasing unspeakably awesome albums like
Real estate developers are suing the city of Oakland over a new law that requires them to set aside funds to commission and install public art in new residential and commercial buildings.
The law — technically an amendment to the city’s Percent for Art Ordinance, which was passed in 1989 but only covered municipal construction projects — was approved in December and put into effect in February. It follows the same principles as older provisions in other Bay Area cities (including San Francisco, Napa, and Emeryville) calling on developers to set aside a small percentage of their construction budgets — .5% for residential projects with more than 20 units, 1% for commercial buildings of more than 2,000 square feet — for the “acquisition and installation of publicly accessible art on the development site.” Developers who do not wish to comply with the ordinance may alternatively pay an equivalent sum to Oakland’s Public Art Project. (They may cover part of that sum by including a public, programmable gallery or community space in their construction projects.) However, the Building Industry Association of the Bay Area (BIA Bay Area) claims in a federal lawsuit filed against the city of Oakland on July 23 that the new public art ordinance violates the First and Fifth amendments.
The group, which represents some 300 builders, contractors, suppliers, and other players in the Bay Area housing industry, claims that the ordinance violates the Fifth Amendment’s protection against “uncompensated takings” by requiring developers to pay a fee or commit to providing public art in order to obtain building permits. According to an announcement from the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing the BIA Bay Area in the case, public art has “no reasonable connection to any impact from their projects,” even though public art’s potent role in cities’ redevelopment and fostering vibrant street life — and thus boosting local property value — is accepted fact. Or, as Eric Arnold of the local nonprofit Community Rejuvenation Projecttold the Contra Costa Times, “Public art is how cities become art cities … You don’t become a world-class city without world-class art.”
The ordinance, according to BIA Bay Area, also violates the terms of First Amendment free speech protections by compelling developers to give voice to “government-mandated public art works by government-designated artists.” However, there is no language in the ordinance about the content of the works commissioned, and the specific artists selected by developers need not be approved by the city, but may also be:
… artists working in conjunction with arts or community organizations, that are verified by the City to either hold a valid Oakland business license or be an Oakland-based 501(c)(3) tax designated organization in good standing. Developers and/or owners installing art created by an artist not verified by the City shall pay a verification fee to the City.
As Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf — a champion of the ordinance last year, when she was still a member of city council — told the Contra Costa Times, “There’s no review of content, none at all, because it’s private money.”
“We as a region need to decide if we are serious about increasing housing opportunities in the Bay Area for working households in a responsible and sustainable way,” Bob Glover, the executive director of BIA Bay Area, said in a statement. “We cannot do that if local governments continue to pile the cost of providing every conceivable social program on new housing development. It is simply irresponsible to bemoan the lack of new housing affordable to working households while refusing to make the tough decision to say ‘no’ to increasing the cost of new housing.”
Glover did not mention the provision of the new public art ordinance that allows for the exemption of “affordable housing development if the developer demonstrates to the satisfaction of the City that said requirements would cause the development project not to be economically feasible.” But then again, providing affordable housing doesn’t seem to be one of BIA Bay Area’s goals. In 2010 the California Building Industry Association (of which BIA Bay Area is a local affiliate) sued the city of San Jose to prevent it from passing an ordinance that would require 15% of all new housing to be affordable. That lawsuit was finally resolved last month, when California’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of San Jose. How long the latest lawsuit — against Oakland’s public art ordinance — will drag on is anybody’s guess.
Correction: A previous version of this article suggested in the photo caption that the sculpture in Oakland’s City Center complex was the work of David Corby and had been photographed by Roslyn Mazzilli. The sculpture, titled “There,” is by Mazzilli, and the photograph is by Corby. Hyperallergic apologizes for the error and any confusion it may have caused.
Both Faulkner and the physicists may be right: the passage of time is an illusion. And yet, for as long as we’ve been keeping score, it’s seemed that history really exists, in increasingly distant forms the further back we look. As Jonathan Crow wrote in a recent post on news service British Pathé’s release of 85,000 pieces of archival film on YouTube, seeing documentary evidence of just the last century “really makes the past feel like a foreign country—the weird hairstyles, the way a city street looked, the breathtakingly casual sexism and racism.” (Of course there’s more than enough reason to think future generations will say the same of us.) British Pathé’s archive seems exhaustive—until you see the latest digitized collection on YouTube from AP and British Movietone, which spans from 1895 to the present and brings us thousands more past tragedies, triumphs, and hairstyles
This release of “more than 1 million minutes” of news, writes Variety, includes archival footage of “major world events such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, exclusive footage of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S.” And so much more, such as the newsreel above, which depicts Berlin in 1945, eventually getting around to documenting the Potsdam Conference (at 3:55), where Churchill, Stalin, and Truman created the 17th parallel in Vietnam, dictated the terms of the German occupation, and planned the coming Japanese surrender. No one at the time could have accurately foreseen the historical reverberations of these actions.
Another strange, even uncanny piece of film shows us the English football team giving the Nazi salute in 1938 at the commencement of a game against Germany. “That’s shocking now,” says Alwyn Lindsay, the director of AP’s international archive, “but it wasn’t at the time.” Films like these have become of much more interest since The Sun published photographs of the royal family—including a young Queen Elizabeth II and her uncle Prince (later King, then Duke) Edward VIII—giving Nazi salutes in 1933. Though it was not particularly controversial, and the children of course had little idea what it signified, it did turn out that Edward (seen here) was a would-be Nazi collaborator and remained an unapologetic sympathizer.
This huge video trove doesn’t just document the grim history of the Second World War, of course. As you can see in the AP’s introductory montage at the top of the post, there is “a world of history at your fingertips”—from triumphant video like Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, above, to the below film of “Crazy 60s Hats in Glorious Colour.” And more or less every other major world event, disaster, discovery, or widespread trend you might name from the last 120 or so years.
Movietone’s one nod to the present takes the form of “The Archivist Presents,” in which a historian offers quirky context on some bit of archival footage, like that above of the Kinks getting their hair curled. The completely unironic lounge music and casually sexist narration will make you both smile and wince, as do Ray Davies and company when they see their new hair. Most of the films in this million minutes of news footage (and counting) tend to elicit either or both of these two emotional reactions—joy (or amusement) or mild to intense horror, and watching them makes the past they show us feel paradoxically more strange and more immediate at once.
