Sophianotloren

Whether under Dutch, British, or American control, New York’s early development was supported by slavery. The Municipal Slave Market on present-day Wall Street between Water and Pearl streets operated from 1711 to 1762, and over three centuries since it was founded this history is finally recognized on an official city plaque.

The marker at Wall Street and Water Street was dedicated on Saturday, June 27, by Mayor Bill de Blasio. It was initially conceived back in 2011 during the activism of Occupy Wall Street, when Brooklyn-based artist and writer Chris Cobb began to research the site. Reaching out to places like the African Burial Ground National Monument which coordinated tours of Lower Manhattan including sites lacking markers, and Christopher Moore, former director of research at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture, Cobb helped develop the background information and advocate for the marker.

“The slave market was known about, but people really did not know too much about it,” Cobb told Hyperallergic. One gap was a visual of the place. “When I was researching it, I also realized that there must be some image of it somewhere, but it took me several years of hunting to find the only documented eyewitness drawing of it,” he explained. That moment finally came at the New York Public Library, with a 1716 map by William Burgis where he’d drawn every building on Manhattan’s East River shore. When the five-foot wide map is reproduced, the slave market is usually tiny, and as the center point it often gets caught in a book’s spine.

“I made an appointment with the rare books division at the New York Public Library and they brought out the map, and I saw it immediately at the foot of Wall Street with Trinity Church in the background,” Cobb stated. “It was an amazing moment. There it was. The invisible suddenly became visible again. So I photographed it and in Photoshop removed the ship that obstructed the market. That clear view of the market, unobstructed, is what is on the marker.”

The marker is nestled between some slender trees in the canyon of skyscrapers on Wall Street, a street named for a wall that was partly built through slavery. The text alongside the Burgis map image, prepared by Moore of the Schomburg Center and the Parks Department and Landmarks Preservation Commission, states in part: “Slavery was introduced to Manhattan in 1626. By the mid-18th century approximately one in five people living in New York City was enslaved and almost half of Manhattan households included at least one slave.” It adds that although slavery was abolished by New York State in 1827, it wasn’t until 1841 that all enslaved people were freed due to enduring rights for non-resident slave owners.

At the dedication, Parks Commissioner Mitchell J. Silver stated: “Caring for our city means understanding its history — including its darkest periods.” Despite the numerous historic plaques in the city, with over 500 in New York City parks alone, much of this dark history goes overlooked. For example, just down the street from the new slave market marker are scars on the J. P. Morgan building from a 1920 bombing that killed 39, something only touched on in an informational plaque further down the street. The city’s history of slavery, which finally got major recognition with the unearthing of the African Burial Ground in 1990, remains significantly under recognized, such as the Second African Burial Ground which is without any sort of memorial beneath Sara D. Roosevelt Park.

“The market was the most significant to me because it was a metaphor for a lot of what is wrong with modernity in general, that linear narratives always favor the storyteller,” Cobb said.

The marker for the Wall Street Slave Market is located at Wall Street and Water Street in Lower Manhattan. 

Sex workers and people in the sex trade are once again facing the brunt of misguided anti-trafficking efforts. Sex workers and people profiled as such face arrest and incarceration all in the name of “ending trafficking” and now low income people are being denied access to a place where they could advertise. Miss Andrie has written an excellent piece on the situation at Backpage, concluding that, “Like many ostensible anti-trafficking efforts, this will do very little to actually affect human trafficking. It will, however, impact free speech, and serve to make many sex workers’ lives more difficult.” Organizations across the United States, including BPPP, have united to publicize the issues in the following press release.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Derek J. Demeri| Atlantic City, NJ | 973.356.4456 | jdemeri20@gmail.com Lindsay Roth | Philadelphia, PA | 443.370.7626 | lindsay@swopusa.org

SEX WORKERS, TRAFFICKING VICTIMS MORE VULNERABLE AS VISA, MASTERCARD CUT TIES TO BACKPAGE.COM

Sex workers and advocates are denouncing a move by Visa and Mastercard to discontinue processing credit card transactions for Adult Services ads on BackPage.com. “This policy effectively disenfranchises thousands of sex workers across the country who do not have access to any other means of online-advertising,” said Lindsay Roth, Board Chair of the Sex Workers Outreach Project. “Those who may have worked independently prior to the policy change may now have to rely on third parties, including traffickers, in order to meet their needs.” “

Risk to violence is multiplied for workers who belong to other marginalized groups,” Derek Demeri of the New Jersey Red Umbrella Alliance said. “This will especially impact women of color, queer youth, transgender women and immigrants who will no longer have access to web-based safety tools like client screening.” Demeri and other advocates report that multiple communities were deeply affected after last year’s closure of MyRedBook.com, a site where sex workers and their customers met and reviewed each other. Advocates say that like MyRedBook, BackPage.com enables people to work independently, reduces their dependence and vulnerability, and allows them to share harm reduction information online. Pushing these workers even further into the shadows cuts them off from social services and makes them more vulnerable to violence and coercion. “These efforts are misguided and will cause significantly more harm to those in the sex trade, including trafficked individuals,” said Kristen DiAngelo, a trafficking survivor who recently co-authored a study in Sacramento that showed 18% of street-based prostitutes interviewed in the last nine months had returned to the streets after the closure of MyRedBook.com.

Many are concerned about the root of the changes that are occurring in the name of “ending trafficking.” “It’s alarming when bank and credit institutions can decide how money obtained legally can be used based on their ideas of morality,” Monica Jones, a national transgender and sex worker activist in Phoenix remarked. Penelope Saunders, the coordinator of the Best Practices Policy Project, shares Ms Jones’ concern. “The general public has been mislead into believing that cracking down on civil liberties is a way of ‘saving’ women from trafficking,” she said, “but once people look more closely at what these so-called anti-trafficking restrictions actually do, they are appalled by the real consequences to low income people and the rights violations that ensue.”

Viable solutions to address human rights violations are well known in the social service sector, but often receive much less media fanfare than hyped stories of sexual exploitation. “If there is a genuine desire to end human trafficking,” Kate D’Adamo of the Sex Workers Project in New York states, ”Then there needs to be a focus on key factors that increase vulnerability to trafficking: access to public services, youth homelessness, and additional employment opportunities.” Opponents of the decision are circulating a sign-on letter amongst sex workers and supporters, in which they ask Visa and MasterCard to “Appeal to reason…” and reconsider their move to stop allowing transactions for Adult Services on BackPage.com. ###

 

The Fall of Human Labor

The latest numbers are in, and there are now more people not working in the US as a percentage of the total population, than ever in the last 38 years. It's being called the "new normal."

The percentage of Americans in the workforce — defined as those who either have a job or are actively seeking one — dropped to 62.6 percent, a 38-year low, from 62.9 percent. (The figure was 66 percent when the recession began in 2007.) Fewer job holders typically mean weaker growth for the economy. The growth of the labor force slowed to just 0.3 percent in 2014, compared with 1.1 percent in 2007.

"It is highly unlikely that we are going to see our (workforce) participation rate move anywhere near where it was in 2007," O'Keefe says.

This marks a striking reversal. The share of Americans in the workforce had been steadily climbing through early 2000, and a big reason was that more women began working. But that influx plateaued in the late 1990s and has drifted downward since.

The report then goes on to point to retiring seniors and the youth staying in school as major reasons for the dropping labor force participation rate.

I've referred previously to the job market as a game of musical chairs. This game doesn't have enough chairs for everyone to find a seat. Now, if Baby Boomers are getting up out of chairs, and Millennials are opting not to sit down in them, then why aren't there a bunch of empty chairs?

Because hardware and software are both now sitting in those chairs.

"Job creators" were taught an important lesson after the Great Recession: human labor is no longer needed to the degree it once was. Huge numbers of people were fired from their jobs, and those employers only became more profitable. The entire purpose of technology is to allow us to do more with less, and that's exactly what it's doing.

The Rise of Productivity and a Paradox

It should be apparent in looking at productivity, that although growing, it appears to be growing more slowly. How can this be the case if more and more people aren't working and more and more technology is? This question actually has its own name. It's called the "productivity paradox" , and it is perplexing more than a few very smart and knowledgeable people.

I believe the confusion rests in how we measure our productivity. Productivity is commonly calculated as GDP divided by total hours worked. When GDP grows or hours go down, productivity goes up. When GDP falls or hours go up, productivity goes down. So what's going on right now? The answer is something somewhat nonsensical.

Technology has paradoxically begun requiring more hours.

The combined effects of technology and the globalization enabled by it are eating jobs, but for those left working (who are by and large earning less), they actually need to work more. Instead of jobs requiring the 5-6 hours of work a day they actually on average now require, we clock in more than 8 hours as a matter of survival. Instead of working one full-time job 40 hours a week, we work one full-time job 47 hours a week, or multiple part-time jobs even more than 50 hours per week to compensate for the lower pay.

We're actively being forced to work a greater number of hours thanks to the effectiveness of the tools we created to require fewer hours. Does this outcome make any real sense?

Meanwhile, we're increasingly disengaged from all this extra (and sometimes entirely pointless) work we're forced to do, and it's carrying a large productivity cost as well.

According to a report from Gallup 70% of American workers are either not-engaged or actively disengaged, which means they’re disruptive and undermining workplace productivity. And here’s a related stat: “Gallup estimates that actively disengaged employees cost the US $450 billion to $550 billion in lost productivity per year.”

When we feel forced to do work thanks to the inability to decline it, productivity suffers. Just simply having the option to decline a task has been shown to boost productivity by 40%. We also need to consider how much productivity would increase if the people who didn't want their jobs were replaced by those who do. Right now there are people who really want these jobs but can't get them.

At the same time we're creating incredible world-changing value in our free time. Creations like Wikipedia and open-source code are not being counted as part of GDP calculations, meaning productivity is rising invisibly. The numbers aren't showing it because we're not counting it.

Our BIG Choice

We need to step back and look at the big picture. Our technology has reached the point that it is now partially pulling our economy down instead of fully propelling it forward. Jobs being filled by technological labor should be a good thing, freeing us up to pursue the kind of work and the number of hours we wish to pursue. But instead it's currently a bad thing, where we are decreasingly able to earn incomes, and subsequently unable to purchase goods and services as consumers. Remember, our economy is 70% a consumer economy. What we spend is what others earn. So when we can't earn, we can't spend, and the economy contracts. Everyone is worse off. When capital replaces labor, inequality increases, and the economy contracts. Again, everyone is worse off.

Technology is providing an increasing abundance of goods and services, while simultaneously preventing people from being able to purchase them. It's also increasing the number of unemployed while increasing the hours of those left employed. It's kind of a Gordian Knot isn't it?

So what do we do?

We have to fundamentally sever the connection between work and income.

If technology has reached the point where hardware and software are together doing much of our work for us, then we have to pay each other what our technology is not earning as income and not spending into the economy as a consumer. We have to give it to ourselves and spend it ourselves, because it's not going to. This can be thought of as a technological dividend required to upshift our economy instead of letting it slowly grind to a halt, and it's more widely known as the idea of basic income.

We need to make sure everyone starts earning a non-work related income so that everyone can be consumers in an economy increasingly populated by non-human labor. By doing this, we will also be transforming all work into voluntary work, and see all the effects this makes possible from the economic growth of increased engagement to the higher wages of increased individual bargaining power.

If we take that path, the basic income path, then we can automate even more labor away and grow the basic income even further as productivity reaches new heights.

If we don't take that path, and continue along the path we're on, we're going to continue reading increasingly worse news of the "new normal", and be led to believe it's actually normal.

To quote Martin Wolf writing about this collective decision we face in light of advancing technology:

... the ultimate result might be a tiny minority of huge winners and a vast number of losers. But such an outcome would be a choice, not a destiny. Techno-feudalism is unnecessary. Above all, technology itself does not dictate the outcomes. Economic and political institutions do. If the ones we have do not give the results we want, we will need to change them.

Nothing about the way our economy works is "normal" or "natural". It's all a bunch of choices, and we can make different ones. We're the ones making the rules, and it's time for a new rule: basic income.

Instead of all starting the month at zero dollars, we can all start at greater than zero. It's a minor rule change, but a profound improvement to our entire system.

What are we waiting for?

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Want to help? Contact your rep and tell them to support the Healthy Climate and Family Security Act of 2015 which would provide everyone with a Social Security number an equal share of the revenue raised by making polluting the air we all breathe more expensive, aka a 'cap and dividend' partial basic income. You can also sign this petition to the President and Congress for a basic income for all.

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People have short-term sublets, couple of months, in my price range. Nobody does month-to-month anything anymore, it seems. And if you’re moving in with other people, you have to meet an absurd list of contradictory demands: interact and hang out, but do your own thing. Be working or in school full time, but don’t bring work or school home with you. Laid back but not lazy. Tidy but not a perfectionist. Chatty, not a chatterbox. Not using the kitchen but not eating fast food. Don’t eat meat, do white-people-appropriated yoga and subscribe to a particular set of politics and “woo” so that you’ll be welcome. Eat meat, but don’t have THAT set of politics and don’t let your spirituality be seen or heard. Don’t have friends over, but don’t be a homebody. Don’t drink alcohol, smoke pot but not cigarettes. Smoke cigarettes but not weed. Don’t smoke anything at all and don’t wear perfume or cologne or deodorant or use cleaning products or laundry soap.

Don’t, don’t, don’t.

I remember when I had an acquaintance literally laugh in my face when I told her that I had four criteria for looking at a place to live: no men, no pets, no smoking, $500 a month. She told me, through her laughter, that she knew she shouldn’t be laughing but was just so absurd her that I wanted “so much,” that I was being picky. All I need is to be safe. That’s not being picky.

My maximum is up to $575 monthly, though that’s still really stretching things tight, and still almost 70 percent of my monthly income. I don’t know how to do this, and I’m not sure I can keep hoping it will work out somehow…

Filed under: General

Life Lines: Portrait Drawings from Dürer to Picasso at the Morgan Library & Museum may not venture very far beyond canonical European artists, but it uncovers richness and diversity within a circumscribed field, especially in the work of its two anchors, Albrecht Dürer and Pablo Picasso.

Of the 51 drawings on display, only five were made the 20th century, with most dating from the 1600s and 1700s. Criticality, in the modern sense, doesn’t come into play; the social and psychological compact between painter and sitter remains inviolate. Staring at one another, each puts his or her best foot forward, infusing the work with a high degree of objectivity.

The searching, sardonic, sometimes savage tone found in the portraiture of such interwar Germans as Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Otto Dix and Christian Schad — to name just one subset of 20th-century artists — is unimaginable among the selections in this show. Instead we find comportment and equilibrium — a short bandwidth of expression that places these pictures at a far remove from our jittery, distracted existence.

Still, there are variations within that narrow terrain, mostly in terms of medium and sense of touch — the porcelain clarity of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres; the softly graced contours of Gian Lorenzo Bernini; the liquid immediacy of John Singer Sargent — that traverse the passage of time and the ongoing redefinition of the art object.

The exhibition is divided into four parts: self-portraits; family and friends; formal portraits; and images that stretch the limits of portraiture (the last one being a curatorial pivot to include figurative drawings that are other than straight head shots).

The self-portraits feature two of the 20th-century works — a 1917 no-nonsense graphite by Lovis Corinth and a lyrically linear Henry Matisse in graphite crayon dating from 1945. Also of note is a fluid and light-filled self-portrait (ca. 1790), possibly meant as a gift to a friend, in graphite on blue writing paper by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Lebrun.

The family and friends section is the most varied and inventive: a sketchbook (ca. 1880) by Edgar Degas, crowded with freely caricatured heads; the strikingly graphic “Portrait of Jane Morris (née Burden)” (1860) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, dominated by masses of hair and the ballooning sleeves of Morris’s blouse; and Egon Schiele’s exquisitely fine-lined portrait of his sister Gerti (1909) in graphite and pink crayon, which makes you long for the Neue Galerie’s retrospective last fall.

Also in this section is Albrecht Dürer’s charcoal “Portrait of the Artist’s Brother Endres” (ca. 1518). The wall text states that Endres was Dürer’s younger brother and that he was probably over the age of thirty at the time of the sitting (which is inferred from an earlier, inscribed and dated drawing that Dürer made on Endres’ birthday, now at the Albertina in Vienna). It does not mention that he had a thyroid problem, though his bulging eyeballs would seem to indicate that he does.

Whatever his condition, the line tracing the edge of his forehead, eye, nose, lips and chin evokes a sheer, rocky cliff; his sloped cap, its diagonal brim bisecting his head from crown to nape, becomes a counterweight simultaneously pressing downward and spiraling off the top of the sheet. The fur mantle covering Endres’ shoulders is like a dense forest canopy draped across a mountain ridge.

The simplicity, dynamism and abstraction of the composition, the jaggedness of the forms and the robust charcoal strikes, tempered by delicate accents of shadows and reflected light on the nose and underside of the chin, engender a rough-hewn monumentality unrivaled by anything else in the exhibition. Dürer’s drawing, in its current context, looks as compact as a Brancusi sculpture, an audaciously abstract compression of solids and voids.

The other showstopper, found in the formal portraits section (though there’s nothing formal about it) is Pablo Picasso’s “Portrait of Marie Derval” (1901), rendered in pen, brush and black ink over graphite on paper. Barely twenty years old when he made it, this drawing is so early that he signed it “Ruiz,” his father’s name, and affixed a new signature with his mother’s name, Picasso, at a later date.

Marie Derval, as the wall label tells us, was “a popular actress in Paris at the turn of the century,” and Picasso portrays her as every inch the diva that she was. The outlines of her hat and coat are laid down in assertive, fluid brushstrokes, with black blots defining the sweep of her hair and what looks like a fox stole around her neck. Her eyes are rapidly drawn ringlets with two dabs of ink representing the pupils; the nostrils and mouth are quick, sharp marks upon an otherwise empty field. Interestingly, there is a tiny fleck of ink on the right cheek that brings to mind a teardrop tattoo.

The application of the marks is consistent with the loosening-up that Picasso’s style underwent between his academic juvenilia and the sentimentality of the Blue Period, and the air of casual decadence pervading the image is of a piece with the artist’s garishly lit “Le Moulin de la Galette,” painted in 1900, in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

And although we may feel as if we’ve seen it all when it comes to Picasso, “Marie Derval” still startles. The wall text cites the drawing’s resemblance to the expressionism of Edvard Munch, which is a fitting comparison: like much of Munch’s graphic work, its power springs from the fiercely frontal, wide-eyed pose and the slashing, writhing strokes of ink.

As with Jackson Pollock and his pre-drip “She Wolf” (1943), a work like “Marie Derval” suggests that Picasso would have been a formidable artist even if he hadn’t gone on to revolutionize painting. It demonstrates a prodigious mastery of drawing and an ability to synthesize form and expression into a retina-scorching unit — but one that retains (most notably in such details as the swirling graphite-and-ink eyes) the seams of its fevered making.

This early work underscores that, despite his later acclaim as a founder of Cubism, with its formal reconfigurations of volume and space, Picasso’s art is at bottom an expression of pure energy — a volatile combination of precision and recklessness that grabs what it needs from the past as it clears a path for whatever is to come.

Life Lines: Portrait Drawings for Dürer to Picasso continues at the Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan) through September 8.

A-ha Deep Dream

The most amusing implementation of the #deepdream meme yet, put together by Anthony Antonellis:

Link

Photographer Phoo Chan has seen more than his fair share of spectacular moments while photographing birds and other wildlife around his home in California, but perhaps nothing will ever top what he witnessed last spring while shooting near Kitsap, Washington: a crow riding atop a bald eagle. It only lasted for a few seconds, but Chan managed to capture the entire encounter on film. He shares about the image:

Crows are known for aggressively harassing other raptors that are much bigger in size when spotted in their territories and usually these ‘intruders’ simply retreat without much fuss. However, in this frame the crow did not seem to harass the bald eagle at such close proximity and neither did the bald eagle seem to mind the crow’s presence invading its personal space. What made it even more bizarre was that the crow even made a brief stop on the back of the eagle as if it was taking a free scenic ride and the eagle simply obliged.

You can see more of Chan’s bird photography on 500px and Flickr. (via Bored Panda, @pourmecoffee, Stellar)

owlturdcomix:

The ultimate victory.

image | twitter | facebook

plaaastic:

new occupation: goth porn director

Calvin and Hobbes

Burneko saved me a lot of time by writing this:

The New York Times published a recipe for guacamole with green peas in it. Not to insist that all guacamole must contain peas forever; not to say that people who have made guacamole without peas are dirty heathen swine; not to assert that pea-free guacamoles are inadequate. To suggest a fun variation on a tasty foodstuff. Hey, we think if you try adding some peas to your guacamole, you’ll like it. This has occasioned just such a performance, from too many corners of Twitter to call out here. Swooning and fainting and rending garments. Because somebody said that guacamole with peas in it tastes good.

This is dumb. Guacamole is mashed avocado dip. If it tastes good, it is made correctly.

[…]

When guacamole spread to other parts of the world, the familiar ingredients came to be thought of as the right ones because adding them to guacamole made it taste like guacamole made in Mexico. If your favorite guacamole recipe contains those familiar ingredients, that is fine. Make the guacamole that tastes best to you, because its only purpose is to taste good to the people who will be eating it. If it contains peas, that is fine. It is mashed avocado dip; the right way to make it is so it tastes good.

My guacamole is fairly basic—four avocados, a small fistful of finely chopped cilantro leaves, maybe a big tablespoon or so of minced white onion, some minced fresh jalapeño (or good cayenne powder if I’m feeling lazy), a big squeeze of lime juice, sea salt—because I am fanatical about avocados and only want enough accompaniment to flatter (and not compete with) them. But, I have had good-tasting guacamoles that contained: garlic, shallot, mint, basil, yogurt, sour cream, mango, corn, tomato, pineapple, lemon zest, olive oil, queso blanco, chipotle pepper, and more. A Guyanan coworker of mine once brought to an office potluck a bowl of guacamole that contained enough Scotch bonnet peppers to sizzle a fucking tunnel through the bowels of the earth so that we could deliver a serving of it to people on the far side, and it was delicious, even if a single bite of it prevented me from being able to taste anything else for the entire rest of the day. All of these guacamoles were fine, because they tasted good, which is guacamole’s only job, because it is food and not a fucking Republic of Texas flag.

[…]

Here’s what to keep out of your guacamole: the opinions and judgments and performative populism of food-scared internet weenies.

There are many variations of guacamole; Clark’s recipe is well within the family of recipes that can be fairly called “guacamole.” The criteria by which it should be judged are 1)whether it tastes good, and 2)that’s it.

by mzsamantha

Last night, deep into Moby Dick, page 667 of my edition, I was surprised when Ishmael announces, out of nowhere really, that not very long before the Pequod sailed from Nantucket, Ahab was found lying in the street, unconscious. Apparently, the incident occurred late at night. Where was he coming from? Where was he going? Ishmael doesn’t seem to know. All he tells us that while he was walking on the cobblestones Ahab’s ivory leg gave out from under him and buckled. He falls and his shattered leg stabs him in the groin. It must have hurt like hell. You wonder why the man became so maniacal? This is the single glimpse in the entire novel of Ahab on land.

Ishmael also tells us that Ahab was found and assisted by “someone unknown.” Now here’s a character who has since long transcended the book he was written into, who’s known by people who have never opened the novel (in Belgium there’s a Moby Dick whorehouse) sprawled there in the street, helpless. And a stranger helps him, hoists him up—touches him. This strikes me. Someone unknown must have touched Ahab’s body. Imagine Ahab’s humiliation. Ishmael then reveals that this incident so scarred Ahab it is why he’d remained locked in his cabin during the key first few days of the voyage, seen by nobody, nursing his hate. At that time, hundreds of pages earlier in the book, Ishmael had remarked that he was more than a little freaked out by Ahab’s absence from the deck. A sailor likes to have a good luck at his captain before entrusting the man with his life for three watery years. But by that time the Pequod was already underway, so what choice did he have? When we do finally meet Ahab we are told the man looks like he’s just been cut away from a burning stake.

Now here comes Ishmael’s suggestion—pretty damn late in the game if you ask me—that Ahab’s demented state of mind stems as much from this falling in the street as the white whale’s munching his leg off in the first place.

*

This all got me thinking this morning. I was walking the dog on the cliff by the ocean when I stopped to watch the waves play with some logs as if they were chopsticks.

Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific Ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to –

Tell them to what? Ahab never finishes this sentence so we’re left, forever, to wonder where to send Ahab letters if he’s not home in three years. Tell them to what, Ahab?

*

I find that lately I do more reading than writing, and more thinking than either. I read at night until I fall asleep with the light on, book in hand, and in the morning I wander around the house before everybody wakes up thinking about what I read the night before. But isn’t thinking a form of writing without the pressure of needing to communicate with other people? I’m testing out the possibility of writing a book in my head without pen, paper, or computer. I’m okay with this. I’m beginning to think there’s a hell of lot more words, paragraphs, books in the world than we need. I don’t know about you, but lately especially I’m feeling crushed by the weight of all the words that don’t say very much. Anyway, I was walking the dog by the bluff overlooking the ocean and it occurred to me, and I’ll keep this short, that maybe the man was just afraid. Maybe this is all it ever amounted to, just ordinary fear. Ahab was afraid to stay home—afraid to walk his own streets. Afraid—for some reason—to go home to his young wife and young boy.

There’s a moment, just before all that hell breaks loose, when Starbuck implores Ahab to turn the boat eastward, that it’s not too late to change direction, call this voyage quits, and live to see their wives and kids again, home, home, to Nantucket…

…Away! let us away! – this instant let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, Sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.

And holy shit, hilarious, it nearly works:

They have, they have. I have seen them – some summer days in the morning. About this time – yes, it is his noon nap now – the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.

Of course if they’d chalked up the hunt for the white whale then and there we wouldn’t have the book. But did you notice something? Ahab, of all people on earth, knows the precise time of day his kid wakes up from his nap. Daddy Ahab! It lasts less than a quarter page. Ahab never will get back to dance that boy again—and he knows it. Maybe Ahab concocted the whole insane and murderous ordeal to simply avoiding having to go home. Because there, and only there, existed a nameless terror he couldn’t sail onward into the deep and pretend to hunt.

***

Rumpus original art by Eric Orner.

Related Posts:

• The Lonely Voice #29: Feels like the World, On a Story by Richard Bausch
• LONELY VOICE #17: In Love Again and Doomed (Part Two of Five Stray Thoughts on Kafka)
• THE LONELY VOICE #14: Isaac Babel, Every Grief Soaked Word
• Moby Dick: Illustrated and Interpreted
• THE LONELY VOICE #12: Cheever in Albania Or The Lonely Voice Hates Travel Writing

Art Movements is a weekly collection of news, developments, and stirrings in the art world.

Due to the scarcity of bills and coins in Greece amid the country’s ongoing economic crisis, the Acropolis has abandoned its cash-only policy and begun accepting credit cards.

Archaeologists working in the catacombs of Anubis, around Saqqara in Egypt, have discovered some 8 million mummified animals, most of them dogs.

Murals by Thomas Cole have been discovered under layers of wall paint at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York. The Historic Site is seeking some $610,000 in grants to fund the uncovering and restoration of the murals.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service blocked six Byzantine ivory sculptures from being imported. The works had been loaned by the British Museum for an exhibition due to travel to the Museum of Russian Icons and the Chrysler Museum of Art.

As part of Karlsruhe’s The City Is the Star festival, artist Leandro Erlich created a dramatic public installation of a construction crane seemingly uprooting a small house.

Newport Street Gallery, a gallery Damien Hirst is building in London to display works from his personal collection as well as temporary exhibitions, will open to the public on October 8 with an exhibition of John Hoyland paintings.

Sculptures by six contemporary artists will be installed at Embassy Gardens, a residential and commercial development near the new US Embassy in London, including new works by Sarah Lucas, Simon Fujiwara, and Mohammed Qasim Ashfaq.

Three new public art commissions — by Mark Bradford, Pae White, and the Ball-Nogues studio — were unveiled in LAX’s Tom Bradley International Terminal.

A new report by the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport claims creative industries in the UK are growing at twice the rate of the rest of the economy.

An 11th-century Indian statue of Saint Manikkavichavakar valued at $1 million that was allegedly smuggled into the US was handed over to federal agents in New York by a collector who had bought it from disgraced dealer Subhash Kapoor.

Transactions

The Rijksmuseum announced the acquisition of Adriaen de Vries’s dramatic bronze sculpture “Bacchant” (1626).

Marilyn Monroe’s grave marker from Los Angeles’s Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, which had a pre-sale estimate of $2,000–4,000, sold for $212,500 during the “Hollywood Legends” sale at Julien’s Auction.

The North Miami City Council approved $1.85 million in funding for the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami.

The non-profit ArtsWave awarded more than $10 million in grants to Cincinnati-based organizations, including $1,635,000 for the Cincinnati Art Museum and $405,000 for the Contemporary Arts Center.

The Delaware Art Museum retired its construction debts and replenished its endowment by selling Andrew Wyeth’s “Arthur Cleveland” and Winslow Homer’s “Milking Time.” It had previously sold an Alexander Calder mobile and a William Holman Hunt painting in attempts to pay off its $19.8 million debt.

An Israeli court ruled that a prized collection of Franz Kafka’s manuscripts belongs to the National Library of Israel.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired eight works by six artists — Math Bass, Brian Bress, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Brendan Fowler, Gala Porras-Kim, and Channing Hansen — through its Art Here and Now initiative, which aims to support emerging and mid-career artists based in Los Angeles.

Transitions

The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto will move into the Tower Automotive Building when renovations on the 96-year-old factory are completed in late 2016 or early 2017.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive set the opening date of its new building for January 31, 2016.

Retired lawyer Richard Newman has been hired to be the first executive director of Ralph Nader’s Tort Museum, which is on track open in September in Winsted, Connecticut.

Eleven Rivington, a gallery that opened on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 2007, will change its name to 11R and open an expanded exhibition space on Chrystie Street in the fall.

Ellen Hanspach-Bernal has been named as the Detroit Institute of Arts’s new conservator of paintings.

Stephen Glueckert will retire from his position as the senior exhibitions curator at the Missoula Art Museum,. The institution has also hired Brandon Reintjes, a curator at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture.

Josef Helfenstein, the director of the Menil Collection for the past 12 years, will leave Houston to become the director of the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Julie Rodrigues Widholm has been appointed as new director of the DePaul Art Museum.

Architect Nader Tehrani will be the new dean of the Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture — a position that has been vacant since Anthony Vidler’s resignation in 2013.

Colleen Grennan, co-director of the gallery Cleopatra’s in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, was hired by Kayne Griffin Corcoran in Los Angeles to be an associate director and artist liaison.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York hired Yasmil Raymond to be an associate curator in the department of painting and sculpture.

The Whitney Museum’s board of trustees elected Neil G. Bluhm and Laurie M. Tisch as co-chairs, and made Richard M. DeMartini its new president.

Accolades

Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery, which reopened in February after a two-year expansion and renovation, was named the Museum of the Year 2015 by the Art Fund.

Obituaries

Val Doonican (1927–2015), singer and accomplished watercolorist.

Harold Feinstein (1931–2015), photographer.

Donald Wexler (1926–2015), architect.

Me: Hey! Brain! Do we have anything useful to say today?

Brain: Let me check. Hmmm… yeah, nope, we got nothing.

Me: Awesome! Time for pie!

And there you have it.

I pretty much agree with Stern on this:

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling that every state in America must grant marriage licenses to gay couples, at least two clerks tasked with issuing such licenses have resigned—one in Mississippi, one in Arkansas. Both will undoubtedly be chastised by the LGBTQ community for their blatant display of homophobia. But I think these clerks should be praised for their integrity. In other states, clerks are begging for a special right to discriminate against gays. At least these two had the courage to admit that their prejudice prevented them from honoring their oath of office.

I obviously strongly disagree with the underlying reason for the resignations. But I can certainly respect their actions more than the Mr. Plow conservatism that tends to be advanced in these cases — i.e. “I don’t want to do my job but I want to be paid anyway.” And when it comes to public officials, as in this case, treating citizens impartially is a core part of your job.

Senator Henry Wilson knew the score. At an event referred to as a "colored people's celebration," the July 4, 1865 Independence Day rally was the first after the end of the Civil War. It was held on the grounds of the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., and one of the purposes of the gathering was to call for "the immediate, complete, and universal enfranchisement" of all African Americans, as Frederick Douglass put it. Wilson, a Massachusetts Republican, had been an outspoken abolitionist and supporter of the rights of blacks, long-free and just-free. Later a vice-president to Ulysses Grant, he was the featured speaker that day.

Wilson had no patience for for anyone who still supported the "cause" of the Confederacy, mocking the mayor of Washington, D.C. for refusing to attend (and eventually getting mightily pissed at Andrew Johnson). He addressed how the nation should handle the unsteady future, so soon after the end of the nightmarish war and the assassination of Lincoln:

"Pardoned rebels, and rebels yet unpardoned, flippantly tell us that they hold in their hands, yet red with loyal blood, the rights of loyal colored men, of the heroes scarred and maimed beneath the dear old flag. I tell these repentant and unrepentant but conquered and subdued rebels that, while they hold the suffrage of the loyal black men in their hands, we, the loyal men of America, hold in our hands their lost privilege to hold office in the civil service, army, or navy. The Congress of the United States has placed upon the statute-book a law forever prohibiting anyone who has borne arms against the country, or given aid, comfort, and countenance to the Rebellion, from holding any office of honor, profit, or emolument in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States."

That was an in-yer-face proclamation there. Of course, in 1872, the Amnesty Act got rid of those restrictions on almost all former Confederate soldiers, thus ensuring that freed slaves would get dicked over post-Reconstruction.  Still, in 1865, Wilson's stand was clear. The people of the southern United States were disloyal, conquered rebels, and they should be treated as such.

There is something poignantly dumb about the fact that there will be a Confederate Heritage Rally in Tampa, Florida 150 years after the event on the 4th of July 1865. That the focus of the event will be the flag of the conquered rebels is pathetic. "Come join us in preserving and defending our proud Southern heritage. BRING YOUR FLAGS!" the rally-goers are commanded. Someone else informs the group that websites and stores are sold out of Confederate flags, so he doesn't know where he'll get one. Someone else says that they should order cakes with the flag on it for "Lee-Jackson Day, Confederate Memorial Day, Jefferson Davis Birthday, State Day (i.e. Florida Day, etc.), Confederate Flag Day," and that "commemorating an important Confederate battlefield victory would all be our major cultural holidays days."

Everyone who heard Wilson's speech way back when would be appalled to the point of despair to know that, a century and a half later, on Independence Day, the rebels don't believe they lost to the nation whose day they are supposed to be celebrating.

This week, after an informal request from a law enforcement officer, Visa and MasterCard announced that they would no longer let their cards be used to process payments to Backpage.com, the most widely used site for adult advertising in the United States. American Express had already pulled out earlier in the year. This leaves Bitcoin […]

Some keks for the night owls:

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The Road to Fallout 4

The Fallout series has a rich history filled with events and figures that all play a big role in the narratives in each of its games. In order to prepare for Fallout 4's impending release in a little more than a week, we decided to put together a history of the Fallout universe to help briefly immerse you into its expansive post-apocalyptic world. But be weary, plot spoilers for the series will be discussed. Proceed at your own discretion.

In recent news, Bethesda told fans not to expect any information on Fallout 4's post-release content anytime soon. A demo was also confirmed to be unlikely.

If you're curious what achievements will be featured in the game, you can find a full leaked list here. Additionally, details on the game's new abilities and control scheme were also leaked.

To prep for Fallout 4, you can find out all you need to know about the game's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats in their entire video series on it here.

A World Not Unlike Ours

The early historical timeline in Fallout’s world is not very different from our own. Rather, it’s nearly identical to ours up until 1945 where different historical events, such as the U.S. splitting into 13 commonwealths, start to create a history where technology, politics, and culture follow a completely different course. Regardless, what follows is a series of conflicts known as the Resource Wars, and eventually the Great War, the cataclysmic event that created the world of Fallout as we know it.

The Resource Wars

The Resource Wars were a series of conflicts that served as a prelude to the Great War. It first began in 2052 as the result of Middle Eastern nations raising the price of oil. The demand created by this increase greatly affected the United States, Europe, China, and even Canada, causing an energy crisis that resulted in military conflicts driven by the hunger for natural resources. The war came to its climax in January 2077 when the U.S. drove China out from Alaska, which had invaded the state out of desperation to secure its oil supply. With little natural resources left for nations to survive, nuclear war was all but inevitable.

The Great War

The Great War began and ended on October 23, 2077 when every nuclear-capable country in the world launched nuclear weapons at each other. In the Fallout universe, no one knows exactly who fired the first missile. Regardless, the resulting destruction reshaped the Earth’s climate and killed off the majority of its population. Those who remained were accounted for as the last remnants of a world that once was.

The Survivors

Those who survived the initial attack took shelter in a variety of locations. The fortunate ones gathered into vaults, which are underground shelters that were the result of an early U.S. initiative to create shelters that could withstand nuclear war or an epidemic. Others who weren’t so lucky found themselves having to endure the harsh radioactive desert summer left in the wake of the Great War. In the 200 years that followed the Great War, those left alive would go on to make up the different groups and factions that inhabit Fallout's world. Notable mentions include: Vault dwellers, the Brotherhood of Steel, and the Enclave.

Vault dwellers

Vault dwellers are humans who spent their lives in the safety of underground shelters that were made just before the Great War. The group is made up of the minority of people who actually heeded the call of the air sirens that signaled the oncoming wave of nuclear weapons attacking the United States. Vault dwellers are typically characterized by their blue-and-yellow jumpsuits. While not a faction, they are an important group that make up a part of the population in Fallout’s post-apocalyptic world.

The Brotherhood of Steel

The Brotherhood of Steel is a group dedicated to the preservation of pre-war knowledge and technology. They pursue their goals with religious fervor and believe themselves to be the sole heirs to pre-war technology. On the East Coast, they take on a different form and protect the Wasteland against the Super Mutants, an opposing faction who threaten the safety of its inhabitants.

The Enclave

The Enclave is a secretive, political, scientific, and militaristic organization that is comprised of descendants from the pre-War U.S. federal government. The Enclave’s main goal is to wipe out all mutated and irradiated beings in the Wasteland, thus restoring the country back to its former self. Because of this, the Enclave is often the Fallout series' main antagonists.

Super Mutants

Super Mutants are former humans who are the products of infection by the Forced Evolutionary Virus; an experimental mutagenic virus that gifts them with superhuman strength and biological immortality. While most are hostile to humans and vary in cognitive ability, there do exist some super mutants who are peaceful with humans.

Fallout

The events of the first Fallout game take place in Southern California and begin in 2161, 84 years after the Great War. It follows an inhabitant from Vault 13, who is tasked by the Vault's overseer to find a replacement water chip, a computer chip that pumps its machinery and is responsible for the vault’s water recycling. But upon finding a new chip, the Vault Dweller encounters a growing threat by an army of super mutants secretly led by a grotesque man known as the Master. To secure the safety of Vault 13, the Vault Dweller defeats the Master, but is ultimately exiled from the shelter for its greater good in order to preserve the isolation of its people.

Fallout 2

After the events of first Fallout, the Vault Dweller went on to start his/her own tribe of survivors. Fallout 2 takes place many years later in the year 2241 and follows the adventures of a direct descendant of the Vault Dweller. Referred to as "the Chosen One," the descendant is tasked with finding a Garden of Eden Creation Kit (G.E.C.K), a device located in Vault 13 that is capable of revitalizing land.

Fallout 2 (cont.) - The Enclave Attack

After finding the G.E.C.K in a now-abandoned Vault 13, the Chosen One returns home to find his/her tribe kidnapped by the Enclave, who seek to gather test subjects to expose to the FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus). By doing this, the Enclave hope to create an airborne version of FEV that only infects mutated humans so that the Wasteland can be purified of all "impurity." The Chosen One eventually thwarts this plan and saves his/her tribe as well as the missing inhabitants of Vault 13, who were also kidnapped. The two groups then band together and create a prosperous new community using the G.E.C.K.

Fallout 3

Fallout 3 takes place in the year 2277 in a region covering Washington D.C, Northern Virginia, and Maryland. It focuses on an inhabitant of Vault 101 who is forced to flee the vault when its overseer issues their arrest in response to the sudden disappearance of his/her father, James. After a successful escape, the Vault dweller, who is referred to as the Lone Wanderer, searches and eventually finds James in Vault 112. It is then discovered that he fled Vault 101 to seek out information on a G.E.C.K he could use to activate Project Purity, a plan he originally conceived many years ago to purify all the water in the Tidal Basin and the entire Potomac River.

Fallout 3 (cont.) - Continuing James' work

James and the Lone Wanderer lead a team of scientists to the Jefferson Memorial to restart Project Purity. But the plan fails when the Enclave invade the memorial, which results in James dying. Forced to flee, the Lone Wanderer escapes to the home base of the Brotherhood of Steel and makes it a point to continue James’ work by acquiring a G.E.C.K. But upon doing so, he/she is captured by the Enclave. It is then revealed that the Enclave invaded the memorial because they want to use Project Purity to infect the pure water it creates with a strain of FEV that only kills mutated life. The Lone Wanderer is then given a sample of the new FEV and can either choose to self-destruct the Enclave’s base or leave peacefully.

Fallout 3 (cont.) - Activating Project Purity

With the G.E.C.K and the knowledge that the Lone Wanderer possesses, he/she has the means to activate Project Purity. But the control room where the activation code must be entered is flooded with lethal amounts of radiation. The Lone Wanderer must then choose to either enter to code his/herself or send Sara Lyons of the Brotherhood of Steel. Regardless, whoever inputs the code succeeds in activating Project Purity but inevitably dies from a radiation spike.

Fallout: New Vegas

Fallout: New Vegas takes place during the year 2281 and is set in the Mojave Wasteland, an area comprised of parts of Nevada, California, Utah, and Arizona. It focuses on a courier for the Mojave Express, known simply as “the Courier.” While delivering a package containing a simple poker chip, the Courier is ambushed by a mobster named Benny, who steals the chip and leaves him/her for dead. But the Courier survives the attack thanks to the aid of a man named Doc Mitchell, and then embarks on a journey to track Benny down and recover the stolen package.

Fallout: New Vegas (Cont.) - Catching Benny and Finding the Chip

The Courier finds Benny and discovers that the poker chip is a data storage device with a program that can increase the offensive capabilities of the Securitron robots that roam around the city of New Vegas, a reconstructed Wasteland version of Las Vegas. Benny was planning to use this program as a means of taking over the city.

Fallout: New Vegas (Cont.) - Taking Sides

Despite finding Benny, the Courier’s journey gets him/her caught up in a larger conflict involving three different factions in the region: Caesar’s Legion, a totalitarian slaver society; the New California Republic, an expansionist militia; and Mr. House, a pre-Great War human living in a capsule who is the de-facto leader of New Vegas. Each are fighting over control of the Hoover Dam, which is still operational and supplying the Southwest region with power and un-irradiated water. Depending on which faction the Courier chooses to side with, the Courier will either help conqueror the dam, defend it, connect its systems to a network so it can be controlled, or destroy the dam for good to bring an end to the war over it.

The Story of Fallout 4 As We Know It So Far

From what has been revealed, Fallout 4 will mainly be set in Boston, Massachusetts and parts of New England. The game will focus on a character who takes shelter in Vault 111 with their family just as the Great War is beginning only to mysteriously awaken 200 years later unaged as the vault's sole survivor. From what we know, the game takes places during the same time as Fallout 3, and based on information from the Replicated Man side-quest in that game, a community called the Commonwealth is located in that area as well.

What's Coming?

There are certainly a lot of new story angles that Fallout 4 could take. After all, Fallout has always been a series that has used the lore of its previous games to flesh out its narrative. But what we've seen only brings up more questions. Based further on what we know about the Replicated Man side-quest in Fallout 3, there exists a mysterious organization in the Commonwealth called the Institute, which possesses advanced technology, such as the ability to produce androids.

So will we be seeing people apart of this organization or maybe even androids in Fallout 4? Also, despite the pre-Great War gameplay footage being of its protagonist running to the Vault, will the game feature more segments from that time period? The list of questions goes on and on. Regardless, we can't wait to see what happens when the game finally releases November 10.

Oh, the irony. Disgraced former senator Leland Yee has pleaded guilty to charges of taking bribes in exchange for votes, racketeering and promising to smuggle guns into the US from the Philippines. Of course, like so many beautiful twists of fate, Ye...

via http://runwiththegoldenwolf.tumblr.com/post/123114178986/lil-snippet-from-our-latest-spot-for-wawa

“What I would propose then, is that we begin the process of dismantling and replacing those Confederate memorials with memorials to the reality of slavery. That we replace statues celebrating confederate soldiers and generals with statues celebrating union soldiers and generals, and that, at long last, we construct a national memorial that confronts the reality of slavery, so that we can confront our national shame squarely, and be called to account for it. Indeed, I’d suggest a national slavery museum, much like the National Holocaust Museum, where Americans can confront the history of slavery, unvarnished by revisionist, pro-confederate propaganda, and recognize the genuine evil that the South fought on behalf of, and that remains unacknowledged to this day. It would be my hope that, within my lifetime, someone wearing a Confederate flag would be looked on with the same kind of disgust that we would currently reserve for someone wearing a swastika.”

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Slavery, Civil War Memorials, and Confederate Flags (via azspot)

co-signed. that this doesn’t already exist demonstrates the depth to which we are incapable of acknowledging slavery as a savage wrong that we must own and address. a slavery museum is a no-brainer and should exist.

on a separate note, if you have not been to the birmingham museum of civil rights, you’d best get on that. it’s a fantastic museum and worth any amount of sidetrip you may need to do if you’re ever remotely in the area.